It Could Happen Here Weekly 218

Summary

It Could Happen Here Weekly 218

Date: February 7, 2026
Podcast: It Could Happen Here – Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Hosts: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Sophie Lichterman
Episode Theme:
This episode compiles several discussions from the past week, focusing on the collapse and authoritarian turn in the U.S., the pitfalls of online anti-fascism, the history of U.S. intervention in Panama, and the ongoing institutional responses to protests and state violence. The team examines the dangerous normalization of fascist policies and strategies for resistance, contextualized by both historical parallels and present-day news.

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Table of Contents

1. Main Theme Overview
2. Segment 1: The Misapplication of Dog Whistles & Online Anti-Fascism
3. Segment 2: History of U.S. Intervention in Panama & Parallels with Venezuela
4. Segment 3: Robert Evans' Keynote—Resistance, Authoritarianism, and Moral Risk
5. Segment 4: Weekly News—ICE Protests, Election Interference, and State Repression

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Main Theme Overview

The episode interrogates America's accelerating collapse towards overt fascism and the responses—from both the population and authorities—shaping this moment. Starting with a sharp critique of online ‘anti-fascist code-hunting’ and performative resistance, the hosts pivot to a deep-dive history lesson on U.S. imperial projects in Panama, then present a sobering live keynote about what meaningful resistance against authoritarianism in the U.S. might entail. The episode closes with a current-events news brief documenting ongoing ICE raids, civil rights cases, and government overreach.

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Segment 1: The Misapplication of Dog Whistles & Online Anti-Fascism

Key Points

• Dogpspotting & Numerology: Garrison Davis and Mia Wong lampoon the obsessive hunt for Nazi symbolism in government communications, mockingly decoding supposed secret codes in a DHS tweet ("14 words," "1488"), to highlight how such focus misses the point.
• The Real Problem: Fascist rhetoric and policies are being enacted overtly. The government does not need dog whistles when its policies and messaging are explicitly fascistic.
• Dangers of Paranoia: The "paranoid style" described by Richard Hofstadter (13:47) is now ubiquitous across the political spectrum, with leftists and liberals adopting a conspiracy-hunting mindset once relegated to the right.
• Critique of Tactics: Garrison and Mia argue that this paranoid style is psychologically understandable but practically useless. Real anti-fascism should focus on actual material opposition and solidarity, not armchair code-breaking.
• Aesthetic Resistance: The fixation on surface-level signals over systemic violence is part of capitalist spectacle. Quoting Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher, they warn that aesthetics have supplanted political substance, entrenching both reaction and resistance in a feedback loop of symbol over action (34:54).
• Normalization Is Complete: Once fascistic power is institutionalized, critique must move from media literacy to active collective resistance. Dog whistle-hunting is powerless once violent policies are enacted openly.

Notable Quotes

• Garrison Davis [08:16]: “We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters to get a 1488. It's literally German. ... Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post, you can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality.”
• Mia Wong [10:46]: “Dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and doing things, what purpose does a dog whistle have?”
• Garrison Davis [16:47]: “Everyone in America wants to have access to secret information... having that informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation. ... it's such a romantic idea that, that I alone have the info or the clue that to piece this together.”
• Mia Wong [24:19]: “It's already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique, it's to like, actually oppose them.”

Timestamp Highlights

• [02:23] — Segment opens with Garrison’s comedic Nazi-code breakdown.
• [13:47] — Richard Hofstadter's “paranoid style,” implications for American political culture.
• [24:19] — Elaboration on normalization and limits of rhetorical resistance.
• [34:54] — Deep dive into aestheticization of politics, referencing Benjamin and Fisher.

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Segment 2: History of U.S. Intervention in Panama & Parallels with Venezuela

Key Points

• Panama as Imperial Test Site: Hans Charles and James Stout narrate the long arc of U.S. interventions in Panama, from the canal’s genesis, through coups, failed treaties, military invasions, and the rise and fall of Noriega (47:27—94:50).
• White Supremacy & the Canal: The construction of both railroad and canal is contextualized in settler-colonial logics—intentional racial hierarchies and labor stratification (69:07).
• CIA and Dictators: The U.S. embraced dictators when convenient—first Torrijos, then Noriega—until their usefulness wore out. The "war on drugs" and “restoring democracy” narratives veiled imperial motives.
• 1989 Invasion Parallels 2026 Venezuela: The logic used for Panama's 1989 invasion (protecting 'American lives', rooting out drugs, democracy) is almost verbatim to contemporary justifications for intervention in Venezuela, including recent U.S. kidnapping of Venezuela's president (110:31).
• Aftermath & Selective Outrage: The U.S. often moves on after regime change. Drug trafficking and corruption rarely improve; the Panamanian or Venezuelan people are left to pick up the pieces.

Notable Quotes

• Hans Charles [67:58]: “Civilisation, as Roosevelt argued, was the urgent mandate for all these actions toward building the canal.”
• James Stout [110:40]: “You don't need to go carry water for the guy they deposed. ... It is wild that we look to what happened in Panama and we're like, you know what? We can do better than that. We don't even have to declare a war.”
• Hans Charles [119:58]: “American interests supersede all else. American laws somehow apply to the entire world, while the world’s laws never apply to America. And the actual people on the ground in both cases don't matter at all.”

Timestamp Highlights

• [47:27] — U.S. involvement in Panama—colonial beginnings to the 20th century.
• [69:07] — Racial hierarchy in canal construction.
• [94:50] — Dictators Torrijos and Noriega; U.S. complicity and eventual fallout.
• [110:31] — Drawing direct historical line from Panama 1989 to Venezuela 2026.

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Segment 3: Robert Evans' Keynote—Resistance, Authoritarianism, and Moral Risk

Key Points

• Liberal Paralysis: Robert Evans’s speech at the Japanese American National Museum (124:29—148:44) is a passionate call to recognize that traditional forms of legal/crisis-averse resistance (voting, nonconfrontational protest) are insufficient in the face of state violence and fascist escalation.
• The Bait & The Trap: Any resistance, no matter how mild, is used by authorities as pretext for greater crackdown. The regime perceives all dissent as 'violent' (127:10).
• Learning from History: Evans uses the story from Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free” to illustrate how incremental personal choices not to resist can accumulate into national complicity in atrocity.
• What Real Resistance Demands: Real moral resistance is risky, uncomfortable, and may involve breaking old conventions, including tolerated forms of action (153:30).
• General Strike as Leverage: The general strike is posited as the core nonviolent tactic that could upend authoritarian dominance, but it must be ready for state retaliation.
• The Need for Accountability: Evans ends with a call for real, far-reaching justice—not just superficial “reconciliation commissions,” but legal accountability for political criminals and media elites facilitating atrocity (160:22).

Notable Quotes

• Robert Evans [127:10]: “Any act of resistance, big or small, is all the justification federal agents need to deploy more of the violence they were already using.”
• Evans citing Milton Mayer [137:25]: “The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how... I had to commit a positive evil there and then in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact.”
• Robert Evans [153:30]: “If the question is what does fighting back look like in terms of what is an escalation ... that is still within the bounds of what most people ... would call ... peaceful and morally justified ... the only thing that comes to mind is a general strike. It's almost the only leverage that we have.”
• Robert Evans [160:22]: “We need something along the lines of a Nuremberg ... That sort of thing should be seen as just as illegal as ... busting into somebody’s house with guns.”

Timestamp Highlights

• [124:29] — Keynote address begins.
• [127:10] — The liberal trap of “taking the bait.”
• [137:25] — The Mayer anecdote; incremental complicity.
• [153:30] — The case for a general strike.
• [160:22] — On accountability after the regime falls.

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Segment 4: Weekly News—ICE Protests, Election Interference, and State Repression

Key Points

• ICE & Protest Repression: Detailed report on large-scale, multigenerational ICE protests in Portland, Oregon, escalated by indiscriminate use of tear gas, including on children and elderly (171:06).
• Health Effects & State Response: Sophie Lichterman explains the severe reproductive health risks posed by tear gas, the inadequacy of existing medical studies, and the government’s unwillingness to recognize the harm (177:26).
• Federal Crackdowns: Ongoing ICE operations in Minneapolis, withdrawal of some federal agents, political efforts to ‘normalize’ mass deportation through rhetoric and legislation (183:21).
• Judiciary & Journalism: Activists and journalists (notably Don Lemon and others) are facing criminal charges for protest coverage, raising First Amendment alarm bells (186:47).
• State Funding and Surveillance Expansion: Congressional battles over DHS funding, purported “reforms” like body cameras and mask bans, and evidence of actual reductions to oversight despite public posturing (188:06, 191:14).
• Election Security Pretexts: FBI raids on Georgia election offices, Speaker Mike Johnson's unsubstantiated allegations of 2020 voter fraud to justify intrusive federal intervention (201:25—205:51).
• Visa Revocation for Dissent: The case of Ramesa Ozturk, whose visa was revoked for writing an op-ed, revealing the administration's willingness to punish protected speech under the guise of terrorism (211:12).

Notable Quotes

• Sophie Lichterman [177:33]: “There’s evidence from Gaza it can cause miscarriages. ... Wear a respirator if you go to protest.”
• James Stout [184:23]: “The Border Patrol agents clearly love this... They call it going on safari.”
• Robert Evans [191:48]: “Obviously, having a camera on the agent is not going to prevent them from killing someone because they think it's good what they're doing. They don't think it's bad.”
• James Stout [213:13]: “Pretty bleak.”

Timestamp Highlights

• [171:06] — Portland ICE protests and mass gassing.
• [183:21] — Details on ICE/Border Patrol troop deployments in Minneapolis.
• [191:14] — Realities and failures of body camera policies.
• [201:25] — FBI raids and Trump’s intervention in Georgia elections.
• [211:12] — Visa crackdown on dissent and hollow legal justifications.
• [213:21] — Brief, sobering Syria crisis update.

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Conclusion

This episode of It Could Happen Here is a searing overview of late-stage American crisis, both philosophically and practically: the rise of overt authoritarianism; the failure of liberal and left tactics stuck in old paradigms; the importance of real material resistance; the global context and imperial echoes; and the urgent need for new forms of courage and solidarity. With analysis rooted in theory, history, and lived news, the hosts challenge listeners to abandon the illusions of safe protest and code-breaking in favor of real, risky collective action.

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Notable, Memorable Moments

• Garrison’s “Nazi code” bit: [02:23 – 08:16] — A masterclass in sarcasm to puncture conspiratorial anti-fascism.
• Robert Evans’ Keynote: [124:29 – 160:22] — A rare, extended plea for real risk and moral clarity.
• Panama-Venezuela Parallel: [110:40 – 119:58] — Essential history for understanding today’s headlines.
• Health Warnings on Tear Gas: [177:26 – 178:14] — Crucial practical advice for protesters.

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[For source citations and further reading, refer to the episode show notes or the direct transcript provided.]

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Guaranteed Human.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called the red weather. In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru.

[Ryder Strong]

Back then I lied to everybody.

[Robert Evans]

They have had this case for 30 years.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the Red weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

Saturday, May 2, country's biggest stars will.

[Robert Evans]

Be in Austin, Texas at our 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One.

[James Stout]

Tickets are on sale now. Get yours before they sell [e-mail] that's.

[Robert Evans]

Ticketmaster.com people who didn't do what Jon.

[Garrison Davis]

Of God wanted them to do, they usually disapp.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

John of God was once Brazil's most famous spiritual healer. But in this limited series podcast we.

[Robert Evans]

Uncover the darker truth behind his global.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Empire of faith and fear. From exactly right and adonde Media. This is Two Faced John of God.

[Garrison Davis]

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryder Strong]

You know Roald Dahl, he thought of Willy Wonka and the bfg. But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast the Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more. What you probably won't believe it either.

[Garrison Davis]

Was this before you wrote his stories.

[Robert Evans]

It must have been okay, I don't think that's true.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here.

[Robert Evans]

And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

[Sophie Lichterman]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Stretch if you want.

[Sophie Lichterman]

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to.

[Robert Evans]

Be nothing new here for you.

[Sophie Lichterman]

But you can make your own decisions.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. A show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode I'm joined by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news.

[Mia Wong]

Oh no, I.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is frankly one of the best ways to start this episode and one of the best ways to start this show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called let's see L Hitler and I think he's posting some things that is a Little bit fascist. Oh, wow. I have decoded some of At Hell Hitler's communiques and I have uncovered a secret. A secret Nazi code. Wow.

[Mia Wong]

This is, this is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hail Hitler.

[Garrison Davis]

He has posted some pictures in like what I would assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like, I don't know, it's some kind of like, like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there are some runes on this uniform. Oh wow. That look very similar to the odor. So I'm thinking because of the rune, this guy might be a Nazi.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have determined this.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right. I. You can find me at OSINT Defender online.

[Mia Wong]

No, don't send people that O Defender.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that does it for us today and it could happen here now. So this episode, we're going to talk about something that' been slowly frustrating me the past few weeks and that is the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the DHS Gov online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends outside of of X the Everything app. This extends outside of Blue sky, the Internet in general. This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti fascist like education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So bear with me. This is going to be kind of a, an odd episode, but I think, I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same traps that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's, let's, let's start by talking about some communications posted on the Internet by HSgov. A picture of a painting titled American Progress by John Gast, captioned a heritage to be proud of, comma, a homeland worth defending. So on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people specifically with like a white supremacist outlook with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak bringing forth the, the tide of quote unquote, progress as indigenous people are, are forced to, to flee from the edge of the painting.

[Mia Wong]

It's, it's fun because this is a painting we literally when they had to explain manifest destiny like colonialism. Good. This is the painting that was in my textbook in high school history Class like it is like the. The Ur. Colonialism. Good. Genocide. Good. Painting.

[Garrison Davis]

Genocide. Good. That. That's what the painting is.

[Hans Charles]

Mm.

[Garrison Davis]

But what I have found through some hashtag research, there might be a hidden code in this. In this communication from the dhs. Already an agency that only has the best interests and of. Of. Of really all people who strive for human rights. The dhs. So if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet? Mia.

[Mia Wong]

15.

[Garrison Davis]

No. So close. So close.

[James Stout]

14.

[Garrison Davis]

14 words in this tweet which might remind you of the 14 words. The.

[Robert Evans]

The.

[Garrison Davis]

The Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on. On fascist rhetoric. But the 14 words. We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past, I would say 10, 15 years, usually by implanting 14s and usually 1488s, with 88 meaning Heil Hitler. Because H is the eighth letter of the Alphabet, this became a common Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti. You see this embedded into posts, see this in, like, Nazi artwork. And going Back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet. This is actually a 1488, because two of the H's in this. In this post are capitalized unusually, and that means Hal Hitler. Wow. Because H is the eighth letter. Oh, but wait. Actually, looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized. But don't worry. Don't worry. This is still a dog whistle, because those other words that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers, are 1 in 4. So it's actually another 14.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, wow.

[Mia Wong]

We're doing. We're doing numerology. We're doing Gematria, where we've become QAnon.

[Garrison Davis]

We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my. My. My thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing? What are we doing here? We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters to get a 1488. It's literally German. And then also counting the total words in the whole suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words. For another 14. What are we doing? How is this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump administration and finally proves that they're fascist? You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets. People are thinking, hahahaha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with a h h d 18814. Nice try, Groipers. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post, you can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide, of Manifest Destiny. While the administration, the dhs, is currently furthering ethno nationalist policies, they are doing this.

[Mia Wong]

This is Homeland Security. Right. I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland Security.

[Garrison Davis]

But, like, this is the agency that.

[Mia Wong]

Is literally rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have camps in multiple countries now. When I say they're being round up and sent to camps, it's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.

[Garrison Davis]

See? Caught in El Salvador.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I, I think, I think.

[Mia Wong]

People have now escaped. So I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp, but like, again, they're sending people to South Sudan. They're like, they're just doing this.

[James Stout]

Like, what are we doing here?

[Garrison Davis]

So this episode, I want to focus on how people are misusing anti fascist education, or I would argue they're misusing antifascist education and kind of missing the forest for a cardboard cutout of trees. Yeah, not even trees. Kind of something that could be a tree if you look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a real tree. And you don't need to sound like a Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious. Like, dog whistles don't matter.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

If the regular whistle is already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and.

[Mia Wong]

They'Re just doing it.

[Garrison Davis]

Doing things. What purpose does a dog whistle have?

[James Stout]

What are we doing here?

[Garrison Davis]

And this is something that we're going to discuss. I'm not just saying this and closing the episode. We are, we are going to get into these. Yeah. And I think part of what's happening here, everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has a total victory. QANON does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018, that the QAnon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more. But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on maga. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which. Which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet. And this is what. What like everything is. And like the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 election in like a massive fracture from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading up to that which, which contributed to this.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump with people creating whole new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because that door was opened, now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blue and on conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across. And I'm going to do a whole piece on blue and on very soon. I've been collecting blue and on conspiracy theories for a while, but I wanted to do something specifically about this 1488 and like, secret codes thing because it's. It's so evocative of like, you know, Q drops and it's evocative of, you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing for generations. And we're going to talk about that more and read a little bit of. Of an essay on that topic after this ad break. And I will let you know. There's going to be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode. So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the cod. Okay, we are back. Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I, I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here. This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard.

[Mia Wong]

Hofstadter.

[Garrison Davis]

Hofstadter. Richard Hofstadter. One of the first, like, modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna. I have three paragraphs here that I, That I selected as, as being relevant to the current. The current topic at hand. Quote, there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call it the paranoid style Simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. Unquote. And I like that section specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle. We can, we can see this used to be. There's aspects of people who are, who are trying to search for this and trying to search for, for patterns in the communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I, I find like, sympathetic, like I can unders. I can understand because yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote. Quote. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenarianists. He expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days. And he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as of yet unaroused public. The paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals. And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration, unquote. Hofstadter is talking about something that, that me and Robert specifically have, have, have discussed a lot on this show before. How everyone in America wants to have access to secret information. Everyone, everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything. And like having, having that like informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, right, of a vortex of like meaningless noise. It's, it's such a romantic idea that, that I alone have the info or the clue that to, to piece this together and it's my duty to inform the masses. It's, it's a very romantic notion and.

[Mia Wong]

It'S also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just a moment where everything that is happening is just.

[Garrison Davis]

So clear, stunningly literal, like it's all out of the open.

[Mia Wong]

Like what is happening with the Trump administration, okay. In 2020 there is a massive uprising to attempt, to attempt to fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world.

[Hans Charles]

Right?

[Mia Wong]

And they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward. Like if this is, this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because it's just there, there's no subtlety to it. They're just saying it. They just want to do it and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy in it. It's like. No, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, you can argue that we have a groiper occupied government not because of counting words in posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS as of today, which I'm recording this on on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night, are copying like Patriot front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U Haul style rentable trucks to, to hunt down people to assault and kidnap. Like they're, they're just copying the Patriot front playbook here. The ICE director said that he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote Amazon Prime. But with human beings they're saying this, you can, you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the paranoid style of American politics essay. A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates quote, unquote evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it, unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this, this Nazi code hunting. It's actually a, a form of like self coping. Looking at the horrific state of the federal government looking at the. The brazenness in which ICE is operating. And this is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Bluesky that I was talking to about this was like arguing like, ICE doesn't need to dog whistle. They have no reason to, like, dog whistling is for trying to like, sneakily get racists or fascists into power while signaling to a, a nationalistic base that they are like one of them. Right. But these guys are already in power.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And the base already knows that they're in power. There's no point in dog whistling. They're just using ICE to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit ethnostate rhetoric. In a post from this morning which has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 words, not 14, 10 words.

[James Stout]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

DHS said, quote, serve your country, defend your culture. No undergraduate degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants. It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. It's. They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest.

[Mia Wong]

No. And I want to return to something else that the Hofstedter said in that, in that second paragraph that you read about how like, one of the central conceits is that, like, you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American public doesn't know anything about it. And like, yeah, you can. You know, it is distressing to a large extent the extent to which people just don't know what the government is doing. But also, like, if you look at any polling at all about anything these people are doing, everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're. That all these people are Nazis, because, like, that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone hates them already. Like, trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, hi, I'm your neighbor. You also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking, like, do the shit people are doing in L. A and like, follow these fucking ICE fans around.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like, instant emotional gratification and register of, yeah, trying to like, accumulate hordes of secret knowledge so people do it less, even though it's less effective.

[Garrison Davis]

In my discussion of this, like, online on various cursed social media sites, I. I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics and what I What I see as a sort of like, abuse of, of anti fascist education. Right. Because people like, you know, Robert Evans myself, you know, Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually, you know, educate people about like, Nazi rhetoric, like in like Nazi signals and dog whistles. Right. And as an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things that we've, you know, argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense. That it's, it's kind of like trying to tame a, tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was, was lightly arguing about this online was, was saying like, this is not numerology and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like, codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes. And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric. What they're actually like saying which, which has like proto fascist or fascistic aspects. That is the rhetoric. And they're, they're doing it. Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalized letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message? Is there one person who's going to become convinced of this? No, that's not the purpose. So trying to conceptualize this as like, we have to, we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And also, like, I think, you know, like, I, I, I think we've sort of, kind of just to some extent we've just failed on, on the normalization front because again, like, it's the President of the United States.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security. It has already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique, it's to like, actually oppose them.

[Garrison Davis]

But that's scary.

[Mia Wong]

That's scary, right?

[Garrison Davis]

But it's like, that's scary. Mia, do you know it's easy posting on X, the Everything app.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. This is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

This is why it can stage things. This is why it can rig elections. This is why it can like, I don't know, like, it can just like magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone. It can stage any protest movement it wants to.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And you, I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where like I see people who are like genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, you're falling victim to the Panopticon.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right. And can hurt you, it's very, very easy to accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day. Right. Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump out and grab people? It's because when they tried to fucking mass, we stomped them.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through.

[Mia Wong]

The window, everyone follows them.

[Garrison Davis]

People can follow them around and alert their community members on where ICE is.

[Mia Wong]

Like again, motherfuckers in fucking Lululemon shit are like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people. Like, yeah, that that's the actual condition we're in.

[Garrison Davis]

And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self described as like anti fascists or self described as leftists almost falling into this trap, like more so than others. And it's, it's a little bit evident of something that like I've described as like the forever 2016, how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016, 2017, 2018 era. And we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This is a different situation. This is 2025. And one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote, nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. And another person Saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote. And like, first of all, this is not a game. This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And. And I think that view of, like, anti fascist, like, education risks repeating, like, the okay symbol debacle, right? Where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of, like, Easter egg. Anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barbra Streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have, have that, like, frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think, as ratlimit put it, one of one of my favorite posters. And, like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap, the okay symbol thing that was invented as, like, a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing, like, the media and then having the media try to convince regular people that anyone who uses, like, the okay hand symbol is secretly a fascist. And this scheme worked, and eventually the okay symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was, like, invented as, like, a joke online. And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the 14 words dog whistle, with an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS Gov account and their heritage to be proud of homeland worth defending American progress like ethno nationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside. I can't. I can't tell you that. And the point I'm trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want. But you know what I do want right now?

[Mia Wong]

Is it the products and services that.

[Garrison Davis]

Support this podcast another ad break that's Right, Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads. All right, we are back to briefly.

[Mia Wong]

Take a small tangent here. I think there is something very important about like the fact that we're all stuck in 2016, which was sort of like the peak of irony. Right. As a social affect has left us really unprepared for now where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're just doing it and saying it, right?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's not this sort of like irony pill deniability shit. They just do it and people are just not prepared for that.

[Garrison Davis]

They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts. And I think they are still pushing this. I'm going to quote from, from Friend of the Pod Rat Limit, one of my favorite mutes, quote prediction, the Nazi salute will become common within two years. Right wingers will half asset for plausible deniability meme ify the backlash and then start fully doing it, quote unquote as a joke. To quote unquote, troll the libs for being hysterical enough to think that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact its cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what ret limit predicted. There's this current trend on X the everything applies where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying to memify the backlash with several posts going, going viral of these, of these like, like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having your arm and a Elon Musk. My heart goes out to you. Nazi salute style fashion.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense. Right? He's like an actual person affiliated with the government but making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls. Maybe not so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value. If a random, like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their instapot.

[Mia Wong]

I, I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Nazi salute and about the ways that everyone, you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is that everyone has been trained to experience the world and, and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah, yeah, let's do this. Let's do this.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, go for it. Go for it.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I think part of this focus on, on, on, like, these hidden codes and even just like, these, like, messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with, like, neoliberal governing. And that's, I think, what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film, like, gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes. Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important. And they're, they're bad. Right. It's, I'm not saying these things are good. Yeah, those things are still bad.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this, like, capitalist realism. Being trapped in this, like, like this neoliberal.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, the society, the spectacle.

[Garrison Davis]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's, like In June, ICE arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations. In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations. Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations a month. The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013 under Obama, averaging 36,000amonth. The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000 when the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US Military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Colombia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later caved as Trump threatened punitive tariffs. And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this, like, image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher, and that's kind of all I have left.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I mean, it is very fitting of our styles of politics that you're going to Fisher here and I'm going to Benjamin.

[Garrison Davis]

Benjamin is, is quoted in these sections that Fisher is, is pulling from as well.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep. I, I, I'm, I'm going to the source. I'm not, I'm not going through the fucking CRU bullshit like Bob Marxist bourgeois.

[Robert Evans]

But.

[Mia Wong]

No, but like, you know, like one of the things that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read, he's one of the great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died trying to flee the Nazis and One of his arguments was that, you know, one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics, right? That aesthetics would allow you to, you know, feel like, feel representation instead of do the action. And this is, this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through a whole bunch of different analyses of how capitalism functions, right? This is, this is one of the through lines of the society, a spectacle. And it's this real issue that we're dealing with now because again, kind of in a sense what has happened to everything, right? And you can argue to some extent that like our channel being called Cool Zone Media is sort of, this is that all politics from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows like, allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of, through this sort of collection of images in this emotional aesthetic.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it also is doing the same thing to us. But the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't, right? And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic, of sort of like, of fucking living in images, right? And you know, go do the actual shit that the board is talking about in the society of spectacle where you and all your friends form workers councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of the people who were taking it from you, you're just going to live in the fascist nightmare forever.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, you could look at the union resistance to ICE deportations, specifically in LA with restaurant workers, that's literally doing that. And like I, I would argue like now it's not, it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics, but especially now it is an asceticized politics. And you can even see that insofar as its focuses on, you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving out the indigenous people with the Aryan white lady, carrying the torch of progress. It is an aestheticized politics on like a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, the anti goat quote Mark Fisher in capitalist realism, quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible. Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence have celebrated the destruction of public space. But contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core. The military and police functions unquote this is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected, in terms of the state becoming more removed, but hostile.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, Although, although, I, I see.

[Garrison Davis]

I.

[Mia Wong]

Again, I. I disagree with Fischer here, because the neoliberals understood what they were doing to begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away. That was just the lies that they told the fucking Basses, like.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, that's what. Contrary to their official host.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, quote, Such.

[Garrison Davis]

A blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless. Only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate, unquote. This is part of what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting is almost a form of this hopeless superstition. To continue, quote. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows? Its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being, a negative miracle, a validation which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism, unquote. And, yeah, that's what MI is talking about with Guy Deborah and society of the spectacle. That's the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still doesn't mean it's, like, good, right? That's not. That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alain Badu to justify their conservatism. The partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal, like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of aids, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, no, because we're doing this shit now.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, but this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions of people die, Right. One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through aesthetics of racist nationalistic declaration, which the Trump administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure, actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane that we should not allow at all.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I see the logic of this all the fucking time, talking to people where, like, we'll be like, okay, like, no deportations. And then you get a whole bunch of people being like, well, but what about criminals?

[Garrison Davis]

It's like some. Some deportations.

[Robert Evans]

What are you.

[Mia Wong]

This is the structural logic of the original, like, deportation blitz from Trump, creating.

[Garrison Davis]

A class of undesirables that you can then always add to and press the border on, like, what Carl Schmitt talks about.

[Mia Wong]

This is the structural logic of fascism.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, but.

[Mia Wong]

But everyone. Everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But, you know, until people actually break through this sort of pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start, you know, having. Having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here.

[Garrison Davis]

And this is, I think, one of the limits of using anti fascism as this, like, aesthetic code hunting is because a few days ago, the THS posted a Woody Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful with the DHS posting. The promise of America is worth protecting. The future of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this video is all white people, which. This sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Except it has 15 words. So therefore, not a Nazi dog whistle. Yeah, we're safe, guys. We're good. I counted the words. There's 15 of them. So you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is. Is the. Is like the prime. The prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the. The aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you have any. Any final, wise. Wise notes?

[Mia Wong]

The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed. It is now time to end the Episode right here.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right, it is. We're late for a meeting. Oh, and if you were able to decode the hidden message in the ad break, send the contents of of the message via email to your local congressman to redeem your prize. Bye.

[Hans Charles]

Bye. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm inelik Lumumba.

[Robert Evans]

It's 1969.

[Ryder Strong]

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

[Hans Charles]

Have both been assassinated and black America.

[Ryder Strong]

Was out of breaking point.

[Garrison Davis]

Rioting and protest broke out on an.

[Robert Evans]

Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King senior and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.

[Ryder Strong]

To be in what we really thought was a revolution.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, people were dying.

[Robert Evans]

1968, the murder of Dr. King King, which traumatized everyone.

[Ryder Strong]

The FBI had a role in the murder of a black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should and it will blow your mind.

[Hans Charles]

Listen to the a Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called the Red Weather.

[Robert Evans]

It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

[Ryder Strong]

In 1995, my neighbor Anna Traynor disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was hard to wrap your head around.

[Ryder Strong]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

[Robert Evans]

So, no, I am not your guru.

[Ryder Strong]

And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody.

[Garrison Davis]

There were years, Ryder, where I could not say your name.

[Ryder Strong]

I've decided to go back to my hometown in northern California, Interview, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened.

[Hans Charles]

Isn't it a little bit weird that.

[Ryder Strong]

They obsess over hippies in the woods.

[Hans Charles]

And not the obvious boyfriend?

[Garrison Davis]

They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of come around.

[James Stout]

Here in my wife.

[Hans Charles]

Boom, boom.

[Ryder Strong]

This is the red weather. Listen to the red weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Robert Evans]

Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.

[Ryder Strong]

Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hans Charles]

Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back Bijan Robinson.

[Ryder Strong]

When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath.

[James Stout]

When I'm just breathing and seeing what's.

[Ryder Strong]

In front of me, everything just slows down.

[James Stout]

It just makes me feel great before.

[Ryder Strong]

I run the play.

[Hans Charles]

Just like. Like Bijan. We all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health at loveyourmindplaybook.org Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family foundation, and the AD Council. So in case you've been living under a rock to ring in the new year, the United States regime decided to invade Venezuela and kidnap President Maduro and his wife Celia Flores to put them on trial in the United States. Thus far, at the time of recording, there are a hundred reported killed by America's invasion. And Maduro's vice president, Delsey Rodriguez, is now acting president of Venezuela. While Maduro has been arraigned in New York. There's not a lot yet known about how things played out. Precisely. So I don't plan on delving too deeply into my speculations, but many have been drawn attention to the similarities between this recent historical moment and another notorious US Invasion of a nearby Latin American country, Panama, back in 1989. Hello and welcome to get happen here. I'm Andrew Sage and I'm here with.

[James Stout]

Speak James Person, who's been to Panama. I'm excited about this one. I saw some good museums when I was in Panama.

[Hans Charles]

As have I, though I haven't been to any museums. I did visit Panama at one point.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Nice.

[Hans Charles]

Many years ago.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

This is before I was politically conscious.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was even more politically conscious after spending some time in Panama.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, I could imagine after Reading about what happened. Yeah, I could see why you would be.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. Like I, obviously, what people. We will inform people. They're not aware of the history of the US and Panama over two episodes. But having just come from watching people who across the Darien Gap being detained, imprisoned and deported from Panama with US funding, and then going and seeing the museum with, with all this history, the idea that they come back to full circle to like the US effectively using Panama as a, as an externalization of its own border, like the US sent its Homeland Security Secretary to the inauguration of the current Panamanian president. It was really just, I know, not great. It didn't make me happy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, there's a long history of that kind of collaboration between those governments, for better and for worse. And so that's really what we're going to look into today. You know, the history of U.S. intervention in Panama so that we can hopefully understand why comparisons are being drawn to the US invasion of Venezuela here in 2026.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

So in case you didn't know just some basic facts about Panama, it's a country on the isthmus connecting Central America to South America, bordering Costa Rica and Colombia. It has a population of just over 4 million people. And it is best known, of course, for its canal, which is a real feat of human engineering with an unfortunate tragedy behind it that links the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean via the Caribbean Sea. This canal is one of the principal reasons why the US has so long been invested in the fate of this little Spanish speaking country. So you see, we have to go all the way back to 1821, where as a member of the newly minted Republic of Gran Colombia, the country gained independence from the crumbling Spanish Empire. But after that Republic of Gran Colombia dissolved in 1831, Panama remained part of Colombia until, with US backing, it seceded in 1903. Now, Panama had actually tried to gain its independence from Colombia before then in 1830, 1831 and 1840. But among many other reasons, despite being part of Colombia, it didn't have any roads connecting it to the rest of Colombia due to the Darien Gap. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit more about that part of the world? Because I know you have a lot of intimate knowledge of it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, absolutely. There's still no roads go through the Darien. Actually, it's extremely mountainous and extremely jungly. It has some very large and powerful rivers. Right. You know, I spent time in the Darien myself. When you talk to indigenous people who live in the Darien now, I remember speaking to A guy, Senor Bonillo was his name. And he said to me, like, how could we be unkind to immigrants? Many of us are migrants, too. We go to Panama for education. I mean, Senna Front, the Panamanian Border Patrol military are there in small numbers, but essentially you are outside of the state in this area. Certainly in terms of provision of services, there's very little. And that's because largely it is geographically very difficult to access, to get there, just to sort of paint people a picture. I took a plane, then I drove all the way to the paved road till that ended, and then I hitched a ride on a truck, all the way on the unpaved road until that ended, and then I hitched a ride in a dugout canoe that was literally a log that someone hollowed out. And I took that for about five hours, and then I walked for a while, and that was how I got to where I stayed. It's still extremely difficult for people to cross. And I guess I like to read James Scott. I think about the way he thought about the art of not being governed. And it's still one of those areas that it's hard for the state to extract tribute from.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, it's impressive to me that despite these challenges, thousands of people manage to traverse through the Darien Gap every year.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I mean, people wouldn't do it if they didn't think that what they were going to leave behind was worse. But it is one of the most harrowing journeys, one of the most difficult journeys a person can make. Like, you're shimming along cliff edges on, you know, a few inches of rock, and if you fall, you will die. You're crossing a river, a river that was chest high for me. I'm 6 foot 3 and people are carrying toddlers, babies. Someone gave birth in the jungle while I was there. It's unimaginable. And, like, people die every day. I, I, I, I, I saw that myself. Like, it's an incredibly dangerous and difficult journey, but. But people take it because they want a better chance at life, right?

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah. And so you could imagine if it's so difficult to traverse even now, how much more difficult it would have been back then, with even less infrastructure between the regions of Panama and Colombia.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

So at that point in time, Panama was mainly conducting trade, which was a state at the time, was mainly conducting trade with its Caribbean neighbors rather than Colombia's capital. You know, they were very geographically isolated from the rest of Colombia. But despite that fact, Panama only succeeded in gaining its independence with the help of the US as American ambitions and local elite ambitions aligned for the development of the canal. Now, all of this and what follows was recounted in Emperors in the the Hidden History of the US in Panama by John Lindsay Pouland, which I picked up from my library. And it was really a fantastic book that served as my main resource for this research. In Nancy Poland's words, Panama was a long standing laboratory of US imperial power. And some of the things I found out about in this book I never heard of anywhere. And it really shook me that these kinds of things were happening, you know, at this crossroads of continents.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

So I've been saying. The US involvement in the country even preceded its independence with 11American interventions taking place in just the pre independent state of Panama between 1856 and 1902. And their rationale for bringing in their military usually involved, you know, claims of protecting American interests, particularly during insurrectionary or revolutionary activity in the country. And of course, because it's America, they always had a heavily racialized approach to the region. You know, they saw the Colombian army as ignorant mongrels and they saw the Panama isthmus civilians as savage and animal like.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Especially as Americans and American capital were involved in the construction of the Panama Canal Railway, which was built between 1850 and 1855 to facilitate the Californian gold rush. You see, America was eyeing Panama for a long time because they saw it as an appealing site for a Trans Isthmus Canal, the next big project in international trade. And aside from their direct interventions, they were signing treaties concerning Panama even before Panama was independent. While it was expanding its territory through the conquest of Mexico, the US signed the Bidlak Treaty with Colombia in 1846 to guarantee Colombian control over Panama in exchange for free access to any future canal. As we all know, America always keeps its promises. So only four years later, in 1850, the US and England signed the Clayton Bulwer Treaty, which ensured their joint cooperation in any future canal. You'll notice I said the US and England signed that treaty because Colombia was not involved at all.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Are you familiar with the Scottish attempt to colonize the Dalian?

[Hans Charles]

No, that didn't come up. I may have missed that.

[James Stout]

I think it's previous to the dates you're covering, but Scotland attempted to colonise the Dalian in a thing called the Darien Scheme. Basically, much of the Scottish bourgeoisie pooled their capital to do this. Right. The idea that it would be a Scottish colony. Obviously, at that time, colonialism was seen as the route to national Security and independence.

[Hans Charles]

Prestige.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they wanted to keep up with the English who were busy colonizing and pillaging much of the world. So they attempted to set up a colony in one of the least hospitable places on the planet, unsuccessfully. People got malaria. When I was there, I was told that every type of malaria is present in the gap. Just because you have such a global population of people that the mosquitoes are biting someone from East Africa, then they're biting you, then they're biting someone from West Africa, South America, Nepal. You know, the mosquitoes are getting a global buffet. So back then, obviously, still malaria.

[Hans Charles]

It's like a mosquito convention.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's like a mosquito vector disease gold mine. The Scottish bourgeoisie significantly lost to such an extent that, like, we can point to this scheme of one of the reasons that Scotland continues to be colonized by England.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's wild. I think you will probably learn about it now if you're going to high school, if you're going to school in Scotland or you've been to school in Scotland, you learned about it. I'd love to hear from you, but. Yeah. The Darien scheme was this kind of idea of a Scottish empire that ended up completely backfiring.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. I just looked it up as the late 1690s.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

To set up a colony called New Caledonia. Yeah. I mean. And that was their first attempt at setting up a colony. I mean, we. We had to pick them.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Right. Like throw a dart at the map. And you couldn't land at a place that is less like Scotland. It does rain a lot. Other than that.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. I mean, that's like trying to set up your first colony in like Antarctica or something.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't know how. Whether they just felt like, it looks like no one else is hanging around there. And obviously at that point in time, they weren't concerned with indigenous people. Right. Like.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

They felt like there was no other state projecting its force there. Or like what. I don't understand how they. Or because they. I think I read somewhere that there have been several attempts to build a canal through the Dalian. I think it's.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

It's actually slightly narrower there. So whether that they were early on in that and just thought, well, we'll establish ourselves here and then as we'll build a canal a bit later.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. And of course, it didn't quite work out.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It didn't go that way for them, sadly.

[Hans Charles]

So the US and England, they signed this treaty to ensure joint cooperation in A future canal. And then during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln advanced a proposal to establish a colony of emancipated and deported black Americans in southwestern Panama because, you know, he didn't believe black and white people could live together.

[James Stout]

Right, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

This proposal was scrapped due to Colombian Central American and black American opposition. But it's interesting to think about there being almost a Liberia in the Western hemisphere, you know, because the Liberian project was an attempt at doing similarly.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that is wild to think about.

[Hans Charles]

And so after quite a few of their pre Panamanian independence military interventions, it's quite a mouthful. Thank you, Pastor Andrew. The US was itching to build the canal that they always wanted. They were feening for a gateway to the Pacific. And they did not like that when France tried to build their own canal through Panama from 1879 to 1889, that they didn't have, you know, enough of us saying it because why the hell is France in America's backyard as far as they're concerned?

[James Stout]

Yeah, right.

[Hans Charles]

The Monroe Doctrine was established in 1823, so it had to be activated then and there. And of course, they didn't just want a canal for mercantile or geopolitical reasons. Remember, they had just conquered several states in Mexico and reached the Pacific sea to shine and sea, as they like to say. Unluckily for them, there were still quite a lot of Native Americans and Mexicans still living in the western plains and west coast. Plus you had a lot of Asian immigration to the west coast as well. And the leaders of the Americas didn't exactly appreciate that. You know, they wanted northern European stock to populate the western coast unpolluted by having to share a railroad with black and brown Panamanians. So you have to get a canal so the whites don't have to step foot off their boats and mingle with the locals, you know, because then they could stay on their boats, they could go through. They never have to breathe the same air as the local inhabitants of Panama.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And so after wrapping up their war with Spain, having newly minted colonies in the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, they really, really wanted a maritime shortcut to continue their great empire building ambition. Because you see, having to spend 67 days to reach from San Francisco to Cuba, they didn't like that. You know, going all the way around the Patagonia and Horn and all that, that's not fun. So the US created an opportunity for itself after Columbia's civil war between the liberals and the conservatives that, you know, raged between 1899 to 1902, here's what happened. In Panama City. Most of the white elites tried to stay out of the conflict. But in the rural interior, there was a different story. As the Liberals found support among the mestizo peasants in Panama, the civil war was less focused on parties. Whether you're Liberal or conservative, it started off like that, but became a mass uprising against the distant conservative government in Bogota. So after several major battles, Liberal forces had taken control of almost all of Panama's interior. And that's when the US Decided to step in. They used the Bidlak Treaty of 1846 as justification to bring in their military to protect transit across Panama, in particular the railway. Thus, the Liberals were unable to finish their victory and had to sign a peace agreement. And in the following months, Liberal forces regrouped and once again took control of nearly all of Panama except Colon and Panama City. And once again, the US Got involved and blocked Liberal entry into those cities. The US Made it impossible for the Liberals to win, so they surrendered and signed one last peace Treaty in November 1902, ending the civil war. And all that for what? Because more than 60% of Panama's cattle was wiped out. Agriculture had collapsed. The armies on both sides committed atrocities. You know, thousands of civilians fled into the mountains. Entire towns were emptied as people were escaping conscription and violence. Have you ever read the book 100 Years of Solitude?

[James Stout]

When I was, like, in or just out of high school? I did, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Okay. I read it last year, so when I was doing this research, it was, like, top of my mind.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. Because, you know, part of that book covers that Colombian civil war.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I should read it again.

[Hans Charles]

It was pretty good. Had some very weird stuff. It was pretty good, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's good to. I'm trying to read more fiction right now. It helps me.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. Even though it was fiction, I think it paints a really grim picture of that civil war.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And so I could have. In reading this, I could have pictured what was taking place because the book was overfit.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

You know, rural Panama was absolutely devastated, and yet the transit zone was, of course, untouched. The railroad and the ports, the commerce kept on going. And with the liberal peasantry defeated by the conservatives in the U.S. the conservative elites in Panama City were best positioned to negotiate for their own ambitions. With the war over, President Roosevelt was looking to finally negotiate for Panama Canal rights. And if he couldn't get a deal with the French Canal Company that was ready to sell or the government of Colombia, he had permission from Congress to pursue a canal in Nicaragua instead.

[James Stout]

Interesting.

[Hans Charles]

The French company was definitely ready to offload their investment because, you know, there were multiple attempts to set up a canal. The French had their attempt and they were ready to get it off of their hands, right? But the Colombian government rejected America's Hey Heran Treaty, which offered what they considered an inadequate $10 million in exchange for sweeping canal rights. So America made them an offer they couldn't refuse. What happened next was that Roosevelt and a French shareholder named Philippe Punao Varia struck up a little side deal of their own. And the US Navy got orders to prevent Colombia from crushing any uprising on the isthmus. And with the circumstances being what, they were on the ground in Panama without Colombian intervention due to the US blockade, it didn't take long for Panamanian forces to declare independence. Finally, in 1903, the Bidlak Treaty the US had signed with Colombia was supposed to protect Colombia's control over Panama and ensure free transit throughout the isthmus. And the US did basically the complete opposite. You know, that's what makes them such an excellent partner on the global stage. You can always count on them to uphold the highest standards of moral and diplomatic decency. So before you know it, America was recognizing a newly independent Panama and drafting up a treaty with Bunau Varilla, who the new Panama government had given permission to negotiate a deal. But I'm thinking that they may not have known that Punau Varilla had already practically sign them away. They didn't like the fact that they would beholden to a treaty that no Panamanian had signed. But the US made sure that the Panamanian government understood that if they didn't like the treaty, the Navy could always just let the Colombian army come in to nip their independence in the bud. You know, it's like, oh, you don't, you don't like working with us? Well, you know, it'd be a real shame if the Columbia Navy came back in to the picture. So the new Canal Treaty gave the US far more than they had even expected to get from the deal. They claimed permanent control over a 10 mile wide canal zone, inherited the French canal works and the railroad, and secured the right to seize land anywhere in Panama if they deemed it necessary for the Canal's defence operation or sanitation and trust, and believe they would use that privilege to seize land 19 different times between 1908 and 1931. Cumulatively, hundreds of square miles, thousands of acres, often without notice or compensation and always justified as necessary for canal defence. The Canal Zone was removed from Panamanian courts altogether and the US was authorized to police Panama City and Colon and build military garrisons. Panama's new constitution made it an effective US protectorate. Article 136 explicitly allowed the United States to intervene militarily anywhere in Panama to restore public peace and constitutional order. Civilisation, as Roosevelt argued, was the urgent mandate for all these actions toward building the canal.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Hans Charles]

Construction officially began in 1904 in a Panama exhausted by civil war, haunted by the French failure and politically dependent on Washington. So you said you had been to the Canal Zone and the museums and stuff?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Can you tell me a bit about what you know about the canal's construction?

[James Stout]

They were very good at this part. I remember this part very well. They had accounts from the workers, you know, the people who was in some cases, like essentially forced labor.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They had accounts of what their lives were like. They had like sort of the ephemera of their lives, which is always in, like, you know, like in museums. It helps to create a picture. Right. They're like the sort of the things that they were fed, the shitty shoes that they got given pictures of the, like, sleeping situations and the accounts from doctors. Right. Because a lot of people became unwell because they were exposed to all these conditions and diseases that they hadn't been exposed to before. So they did a good job. I felt of, like, painting how horrendous life was for people who were digging out the Panama Canal.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I think they had a two tier system. Right. I think it was the gold ticket.

[Hans Charles]

Yes, yep.

[James Stout]

They were explaining how life was so much more difficult the lower down that system you found yourself.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah. The whole construction of this feat of engineering was, you know, rife with suffering.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And that suffering often came, like, in a very racialized way.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Hans Charles]

As you mentioned, there was a Gold Rule and a Silver Rule.

[James Stout]

That's it, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

So even prior to canal construction, Panama was already a very racially divided society. You had the white elites in the capital, you had the mestizo peasants, you had poor black and mulatto communities, and you also had the indigenous peoples who were not even counted in official census counts.

[James Stout]

Oh, wow.

[Hans Charles]

And among the canal workforce in particular, it was quite a lot of black labourers who were either descendants of people emancipated from slavery in 1852, or or migrants from the British Caribbean who were drawn to Panama during the railroad construction project and the French canal construction project. And so the US took this social landscape and made it worse by introducing racial hierarchy with the Gold Rule and the silver row that determined your pay, your housing, your medical care and even how you were buried, you know, the American workers, the white American workers in the canal's construction occupied the gold role and the Caribbean labourers were pushed onto the silver role. They had to perform the most dangerous work under the worst conditions. And so during the US construction phase alone, roughly 5,600 workers died from disease and accidents, and the overwhelming majority were the Caribbean labourers. Sadly, their deaths were treated as expendable losses in an engineering project framed as a triumph of civilisation. The canal construction finally concluded in 1914. And so, after its independence, during the canal construction and afterwards, Panama faced eight further US military interventions, including the famous 1989 invasion, which we'll get to in the next episode. But take a guess as to what their rationale was for these interventions.

[James Stout]

Are they protecting business interests, US capital?

[Hans Charles]

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Protecting US citizens and property, maintaining control and stability, preserving US strategic and political interests? All that usual stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Particularly whenever Panamanians were struggling for their rights against the elites, the US would get involved.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

The US advised elections, they oversaw the police force, they vetoed public spending whenever it wanted. And the US bases lined the canal with thousands of troops explicitly for the purpose of maintaining quiet and protecting property in Panama. Panama's whole political history in the 20th century was basically shaped and dictated by US interests. In 1904, when General Esteban Huertas threatened revolt, US officials pressured Panama's president to fire him and dissolve the army entirely. In 1910, when Vice President Carlos Mendoza, a liberal mulatto married to a black woman, seemed likely to win the presidency, the US Chief of Mission Richard Marsh threatened occupation if he were elected. So Mendoza withdrew his candidacy. During World War I, the garrison commander used occupation to impose moral reforms by shutting down saloons and prostitution and publicly denouncing Panamanian cities as dens of vice. And in the countryside, ostensibly to protect American landowners, U.S. troops drunkenly abused, stole and burned homes for two whole years until they finally withdrew. And in 1925, the U.S. came into Panama City to crush a renter strike. Panama also became a regional launchpad for the U.S. empire. The Marines that were stationed there were repeatedly deployed in Nicaragua, Mexico and beyond. For the US empire, the costs could always be externalized to Panama. Panama was an imperial laboratory for the US to test ideas and weapons they felt were risky to test at home. During World War II, they tested various chemical weapons in Panama on nature and people with minimal disclosure and almost no regard for long term environmental and human consequences.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Hans Charles]

They also left behind unexploded munitions.

[James Stout]

That is horrible.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, it gets Worse.

[James Stout]

Okay, great.

[Hans Charles]

In the 1950s and 60s, US officials seriously proposed using nuclear explosions.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

To carve a new sea level canal through Panama. So you've heard about this.

[James Stout]

Yeah. New king, the Darien was there. One of, one of their little strategies that they thought about. I think they thought about again when the bicentennial of the United states, that'd be 1976. One of the things they wanted to do is complete the, the Pan American highway, have it run all the way up from the northern tip of Alaska, I guess, or I think goes from Canada, actually, and all the way down to Argentina again. They were like, yeah, can we, can we just nuke the Darien and we'll just join them up and they'll be fine.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah. They were really gung ho about nukes.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

At that point in time in history, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

The Panama Canal, in case you don't know those of you listeners at home, the Panama Canal is not a sea level canal. Actually. It climbs a mountain, Loki. You know, so it has several steps where it's like the water is released and there's like a floating mechanism and it's, it's kind of inconvenient because usually there's traffic backed up of boats waiting for their chance to get into the canal. And so the idea of a sea level canal is, you know, it'd be so much more convenient if you didn't have to wait for all those mechanisms to, you know, drain and fill and all those different things.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

But nuking the canal to create a new sea level canal is probably not the best idea.

[James Stout]

No. Yeah. It's wild to think of it back then, I guess they got nuked relatively recently. They were like, okay, what can we do with these? Like, yeah, yeah, what else can we. Now you'll see when you're in Panama City, you see boats like, sort of hanging out around the canal. Yeah. Just waiting to enter those locks.

[Hans Charles]

And I mean, obviously the consequences of a nuclear irrigator can now be disastrous. Entire regions would have been irradiated, populations would have been displaced, ecosystems permanently altered. And yet they seriously, with a straight face, considered this plan because, you know, who cares about the people outside the Imperial Center.

[James Stout]

Sure. Yeah. Like, what are the embarrass people and the Guna people who live down there? Like, what do they matter to them? Right.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And this is after they've dropped a nuke. It's not like they're like postulating here.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. It's not like they don't know what nukes do.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They've seen this happen in Japan. Right. Where like a decade since they know that it's still killing people.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. There are places and canals and structures that have been irrigated, caves dug and stuff, using dynamite, you know, tnt, you know, basic munitions and explosive devices, and that's one thing. Right. I don't know. It's like more of that. It's like, let's just go as big as we can go.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

It's not understanding the fundamental difference. Right. Like a nuclear blast is of an entirely different nature to. Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, it could have very easily ended up affecting the US as well.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

You know, the air currents could have carried the fallout into the southern us, into the west coast, you know.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Into other countries in the region as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I visited one of the places that the United States nuked after World War II, right. In the Republic of the Marshall Islands. And yeah. They completely failed to account for even prevailing winds. Right. Like the fallout directly engulfed small Japanese fishing vessel. That was just happened to be. Because they didn't tell anyone. Right. And then they just dropped a nuclear. Or they told some people, obviously they evacuated people who are living on the island, but they dropped a nuclear bomb. And then we're just like, oh, wow, it's blown off over there. Did the result in people being severely irradiated?

[Hans Charles]

You know, it's like bunch of scientists, you know, bend their necks and furiously scribble on some notes. Fascinating.

[James Stout]

People have attempted to go back to their island because at one point they were told that they could, and they absolutely, like, it wasn't safe for them. But like the, the coconuts and the crabs and the fish and the reefs are still irradiated. They're still not safe for them. People still have one of the highest rates of stillbirth in the world.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The stories they tell about miscarrying pregnancies are heartbreaking.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Because they didn't know what was going on. Right.

[Hans Charles]

The human environmental impact is just awful.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's terrible.

[Hans Charles]

And so it took resistance from Panamanians, from scientists, and from a growing global environmental movement to put an end to this proposal. Now, as is the nature of interventions, after a certain point they start to weigh in because, you know, the intervening power has created the setup that they find preferential, you know, so while they're setting up, they may have to intervene on repeated occasions, but once they get to a certain point where their control over that area is crystallized, they don't have to intervene as explicitly as often. So direct US Interventions waned as time went on. But the tensions continued to build in Panama for independence from the US and these tensions flared in January 1964, which would get the ball rolling for a new treaty between the countries that would replace the previous He Banau Varia treaty. So since that 1903 treaty, Panamanians wanted it revisited and revised. Remember, they didn't want to agree to it in the first place. They were kind of coerced into its terms. But with the U.S. s proposal to create a new sea level canal, with or without nukes, which would require cooperation with the Panamanians, they would be forced to take those Panamanian demands into consideration. And so, as a concession to Panamanian nationalism, US President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson developed a policy that would fly the Panamanian flag alongside the American flag. Ooh la la. In certain parts of the Canal zone. And then JFK was assassinated in November 1963. And then in January of the following year, Balboa High School, which was an American school in the Canal Zone, refused to fly either flag. So on January 9, 1964, American students decided to raise the American flag for freedom or whatever. And Panamanian students from Panama's National Institute march to the school to raise their own flag. And then there's a scuffle, and then the Panamanian flag is torn. And then that scuffle becomes a riot where 24 Panamanian civilians and four US soldiers were killed in the fighting.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And hundreds of Panamanian civilians were injured by the American crackdown.

[James Stout]

That Panamanian flag is in the museum, the Panama Canal Museum.

[Hans Charles]

The one that got torn.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Oh, that's impressive. I have to go and see that then.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, it's really. It's a good museum.

[Hans Charles]

So that's a real big piece of history because that whole riot led to everything else.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

No, that is, like, it's a pivotal, like, artifact of their national history.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. It's like, for want of a nail, the horse was lost. It's like, for want of a ripped flag.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Panaman independence was lost.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Obviously, there's no boil down to that, but it's such a unique artifact of history.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I know. It's cool to be like, this pivotal moment, like, this thing was present.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Sometimes when I'm in Spain, I'll kick around antiques markets and find like. Like a newspaper to see that this newspaper was on the street the same day that the Spanish military was defeated in Barcelona. You can see sometimes people sheltering behind newspaper stands. Right. As they exchange fire with the soldiers. And think like, oh, this thing was present at this pivotal moment.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah, it was there for a piece of history, that moment in time.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I like to acquire those things when I can.

[Hans Charles]

Something I would like to acquire though, is a bit of rubble or something from one of their other actions that day. The protesters also burned several American buildings, including tire plants, airlines and the U.S. information Agency. I'm wondering if that piece of history is also in the museums.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think those buildings are still around, like, or some of those canals, some of the canal company buildings are still around. Cause you can see them once you're driving around.

[Hans Charles]

And so, in response to that whole riot situation, the Panamanian president, Roberto Chiari, cut diplomatic relations with the US and demanded a renegotiation of the treaty. A few Months later, in April 1964, diplomatic ties were re established in an effort to resolve the conflict between the countries. These negotiations would be ongoing for years afterwards. In fact, one of the reasons the idea of the nuclear excavation was considered in the first place was that it didn't require as much Panamanian labour cooperation as a typical canal project would. And because tensions were so tense with Panama, they were like, let's circumvent them and just open it up ourselves. But when the nuclear canal project collapsed, and with mounting pressure from the Panamanians, the stage was set for the US to pull back its more direct and open meddling in the country, at least for a while. JFK's Vice President Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in November 1964. And as the anniversary of the riots approached, he resolved to figure out that new treaty, explore sea level canal preparations and settle things with the contingency of Americans in office who sought to preserve America's perpetual ownership of the Canal Zone, including the famous white supremacist arch conservative Strom Thurmond. If you know anything about Strom Thurmond, you know that like, fork found in kitchen, you know, the fact that this guy was against Panamanians having control over the canal is not surprising. This is the guy who set a country record for filibustering against the Civil Rights Act.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, I think it was beaten recently by Cory Booker, who set a world record for filibustering about not very much.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, I think I heard about that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he talked about Donald Trump for a while and then he finished up and went and voted for a bunch of Trump appointees.

[Hans Charles]

It's like the Democratic Party response is like, you stop that, you meanie. And then they just do whatever. Yeah, whatever Trump wants anyway.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you're not allowed to do. You know, you're not allowed to do that.

[Robert Evans]

You're breaking the rules.

[Hans Charles]

That's against the rules.

[James Stout]

Yeah. They summoned the Reddit moderators is the Democratic response. But, yeah, if there was a cause during the time he was in office and it would have made the world better, you can probably count on Strom being against it.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And so the Americans, they managed to scrape together a treaty in 1967, but the Panamanians didn't ratify it. And in the following year, 1968, Panama was overtaken by a military coup. Dun, dun, dun. So if you want to know what will happen with the treaty, with Panama's political future and how all of this does or does not relate to current conditions in Venezuela, because I know I have that thread still dangling.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Stay tuned for the next episode. This has been it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage. I'm here with James Stout. And as always, all power to all the people. Peace. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm in Lumumba.

[Robert Evans]

It's 1969.

[Ryder Strong]

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

[Hans Charles]

Have both been assassinated. And black America was at a breaking point.

[Garrison Davis]

Rioting and protest broke out on an.

[Robert Evans]

Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.

[Hans Charles]

It featured two prominent figures in black.

[Robert Evans]

History, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.

[Ryder Strong]

To be in what we really thought was a revolution.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, people were dying.

[Robert Evans]

1970, 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.

[Ryder Strong]

The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

[Hans Charles]

Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called the Red Weather.

[Robert Evans]

It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

[Ryder Strong]

In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainer disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was hard to wrap your head around.

[Ryder Strong]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

[Robert Evans]

No, I am not your guru.

[Ryder Strong]

And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody.

[Garrison Davis]

There were years, right, where I could not say your name.

[Ryder Strong]

I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends.

[Mia Wong]

Family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I.

[Ryder Strong]

Can to try to find out what actually happened.

[Hans Charles]

Isn't it a little bit weird that they Obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend.

[Garrison Davis]

They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of come around.

[James Stout]

Here in my wife.

[Hans Charles]

Boom. Boom.

[Ryder Strong]

This is the red weather. Listen to the red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Robert Evans]

Was this before he wrote his stories?

[Garrison Davis]

It must have been.

[Ryder Strong]

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

[James Stout]

What?

[Ryder Strong]

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

All right, son, time to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school.

[Ryder Strong]

Oh, did you now?

[Hans Charles]

Okay, what's first?

[James Stout]

Smokey Bear said to first drown it.

[Hans Charles]

With a bucket of water, then stir it with a shovel.

[Robert Evans]

Wow, you sound just like him.

[Hans Charles]

Then he said, if it's still warm, then do it again.

[James Stout]

Where can I learn all this?

[Hans Charles]

It's all on smokeybear.com with other wildfire prevention tips, because only you can prevent wildfires.

[Ryder Strong]

Brought to you by the USDA Forest.

[Robert Evans]

Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.

[Hans Charles]

The year was 1968, and a military coup had just rocked the Isthmian country of Panama. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, joined again by.

[James Stout]

James. It's me again. I'm excited to talk about Panama.

[Hans Charles]

Nearly missed your Q. Yeah, I did.

[James Stout]

I was forgotten who I was for a second.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, and this is the follow up to last episode on the history of US Involvement in Panama. So you can go back and give that one a lesson, if you haven't already. But in these times of Trump Row doctrine, I wanted to take us back to this particular moment in our hemisphere's history, to highlight the parallels with today. In short, what we talked about last time was how Panama became a testing ground for US empire. Long before, during and after the construction of the Panama Canal, the US had repeated military interventions justified as protecting transit or American interests. And Washington ultimately backed Panama's break from Colombia in 1903 to secure canal rights on Washington's terms. This independence came with a cost, a caveat, a lopsided treaty that turned Panama into a US protectorate and granted the US permanent control over the Canal Zone and the rest of the country. Effectively, the canal's construction itself was an engineering feat built on racial hierarchy. And throughout the rest of the 20th century, the US continued to demonstrate its control over Panama's politics, the attempts of its people to exercise their autonomy, to exercise their rights. The US, of course, engaged in the testing of chemical weapons, in the seizing of land and the use of the country as a regional military launchpad. And yet Panamanians continued to resist, continued to challenge US control, and continued to demand treaty reform. And so, following the 1964 riots, there was an opportunity to negotiate a new treaty. But after the first attempt was rejected By Panama in 1967, a military coup would rock the country in 1968. I've pieced together this timeline thanks to my main resource for these episodes. Emperors in the Jungle, the Hidden History of the US in Panama by John Lindsay, Poland. But he doesn't go into too much depth on the military coup. Specifically for that, I had to look to an EBSCO Knowledge Advantage article by Carl Henry Marco titled Omar Torrijos Ousts Areas in Panama. What I learned from that was there was a coalition of National Guard officers that ousted President Arnulfo Arias, who was himself trying to consolidate control over the military so they would support his future elections by removing those officers he thought he could control. So there were apparently racial tensions mixed into this coup, as officers in the National Guard had increasingly come from mestizo backgrounds, as opposed to white backgrounds, which had traditionally supported the civilian predominantly white oligarchy. So a coalition of officers tried to change this. At first, they were led by a guy named Major Boris Martinez, who seized power and ousted areas before anyone thought for a moment that things were finally going to radically change in the country. Within months, student protests were crushed by the National Guard, with arrests and beatings, making it clear that military rule, and not democracy, was there to stay. Not long after Martinez took control, he was himself ousted by a lieutenant colonel. And the junta's chief of staff in 1969. That man was Omar Torrijos Herrera, a mestizo officer with middle class roots who sought to challenge the oligarchy. Somewhat fun fact, though. Lindsay Poland mentions that Torrijos served as a spy for the US Military Intelligence from 1955 to 1969, informing the Americans about everything from labour unrest and student activities to political issues and Soviet Chinese penetration. Torrijos was one of the soldiers who helped suppress the unrest in 1964, in fact.

[James Stout]

Oh, wow.

[Hans Charles]

But in power publicly, he styled his military rule as reformist. He pushed through land reforms that opened up estates long monopolized by elites and promised change for rural Panama. But although these reforms were popular, very few poor Panamanians actually benefited. Meanwhile, he overhauled the banking laws in the country, such that Panama quickly became a hub for offshore banking and money laundering. But it can't be said that he didn't do anything positive for the country because he was the one who managed to establish a new treaty with the us. The US was facing international pressure at this point for their continued ownership of the canal, especially thanks to a 1973 United Nations Security Council session hosted by Torrijos in Panama City. In 1977, Torrijos negotiated with Jimmy Carter and secured the treaties that promised the Canal's return to Panamanian control. The Torrijos Carta Treaties, which agreed to transfer the Canal from the United States to Panama on December 31, 1999, with the surrounding territory of the Canal Zone, returned first in 1979 and the US military being allowed to remain in the country until 1999. But despite this major win, Torrijos knew his rule was under pressure. So he announced a controlled return to civilian government. He created a political party dominated by the National Guard. He stepped back from the presidency. He installed a civilian figurehead named Aristides Rollo, and he promised elections by 1984. But then his private plane crashed in 1981. It's just funny how frequently that happened back in those days.

[James Stout]

Yeah, small aircraft, just randomly.

[Hans Charles]

These political leaders are constantly dying in plane crashes.

[James Stout]

Yeah, very sad.

[Hans Charles]

And so the democratic reforms didn't happen. Instead, Torrijos, intelligence chief, emerged as the new military dictator of Panama. His name was Manuel Noriega. Now, as Lindsay Poland talks about in the book, Noriega was another informant for the US in the mid-1950s. But his career in the military wasn't going anywhere because he had a history of alcoholism and beating women. Until Torrijos hand picked him as his intelligence chief. Manuel Noriega came up inside a Panamanian National Guard that had been shaped, trained, and closely supervised by the US during the Cold War. He was educated at Peru's National Military Academy, trained at the School of the Americas, took courses in intelligence and counterintelligence in 1967, and trained in psychological warfare at Fort Benning. By the late 1960s, he had also become a regular informant for US intelligence. You know, he took more than just a few courses. He was very much embedded with the Americans. And so with Torrijos dead, Noriega seized the opportunity to take power. Initially, the US was pretty much okay with this. Noriega had previously been a CIA asset, providing intelligence on governments and militaries across the region, including Cuba. He had helped suppress leftist movements, facilitated US regional operations, and maintained stability around the canal. And for that, he was well compensated. More than $1 million from the CIA.

[Ryder Strong]

Wow.

[Hans Charles]

Plus at least another $162,000 from the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. By the early 1970s, US agencies already knew that Noriega was deeply involved in drug trafficking. In 1972, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs even considered assassinating him. But he was just too useful for him to go so soon. So throughout the Carter years, evidence of his criminal activity was building up and was also suppressed because Washington needed Panamanian corporation to secure ratification of the Canal Treaty. But under Reagan, the evidence became impossible to ignore, as intelligence reports from 1983 and 1985 documented meetings between Noriega and cartel figures, permissions to manufacture cocaine in Panama, and offers to mediate disputes between the traffickers.

[James Stout]

I left the mediation part the best.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, yeah. He was like, hey guys, this isn't you.

[James Stout]

Let's not resort to violence. This isn't you.

[Hans Charles]

Come on, let's, let's have a sit down and talk about.

[James Stout]

He was committed to like a non carceral solution, you know, it's great to see.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. And, and, and they continue to protect him, even with that smoking gun. They were like, yeah, Noriega is still our guy. They had hoped that he would cooperate with Contra operations against Nicaragua's Sandinista government, though. But in what was, I suppose, his first strike, he refused to cooperate with them on that operation. He also maintained relations with both Nicaragua and Cuba. And meanwhile, under his leadership, the Panamanian Defence Forces expanded their role in both arms and drug smuggling networks, much of it feeding directly into the US drug market. So Noriega and the US had to break up in the mid to late 80s. And this was also thanks to US domestic politics. You see, in 1986, the Iran Contra scandal saw key figures who had shielded Norieka previously be removed from their positions. At the same time, the crack cocaine panic took over US politics again. A very racialized situation.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Congress had passed sweeping anti drug laws with mandatory minimum sentences and the media was framing this whole drug problem as a foreign racial, black threat.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Noriega being a Panamanian dictator, ended up being a very useful prop villain of sorts for the burgeoning war on drugs. So in February 1988, US grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega for drug trafficking linked to activities from 1982 to 1984. Sanctions followed within weeks, supposedly to force him out, but they didn't. The sanctions caused shortages, economic collapse and suffering among ordinary Panamanians. Yet Noriega stayed in power. He used the crisis to justify emergency measures and nationalist rhetoric, as is usually the response. I realise with US inflicted sanctions, they end up creating almost a. A support base.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Hans Charles]

For the administration in power because, you know, you're trying to make the people suffer and instead people end up standing with their government, even if they have critiques of that government.

[James Stout]

Yeah, right. Because they don't want to become another, like, vassal state. And especially in Panama. Right. Like, they've, they've already been that once. Or like, look at what's happening right now in Iran. Right. Like.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

How many is literally, like, he's literally tweeting that the people protesting are Donald Trump supporters.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

The thing is, there are always going to be all types of people in any protest, and I wish more people realize that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

You know, people tend to take like one or two figures or one or two pictures in any particular protest and say, oh, look, they are doing this. That means the entire protest is like this.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It's like.

[Hans Charles]

No. Protests tend to, I think, invite a variety of positions, perspectives, actors into the free.

[James Stout]

Yeah. By their nature, they're large gatherings of people. Right. Like they're not going to be a monolith. People will always seek to either represent protests in one way or represent themselves as controlling a protest when they have not done so. But for the most part, they're very heterogeneous.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. The monolithizing of protests, including in this case with Iran, I think it's a very clear example of how useful that is for every side of a conflict.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Hans Charles]

Because, you know, the protest can be treated as a monolith by Khomeini and by the Iranian government, you know, to serve their end, to say these are enemies from within, you know, these are These are Zionists backed and they think. And of course the Israelis could also try and stake a claim on this and say, yeah, this is our people. And you know, I'm sure they're probably Mossad agents on the ground, as they are in most protest situations. Not necessarily Mossad agents, but intelligence service agents in general from agencies around the world.

[James Stout]

Sure, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

But you know, you could always pick and choose and create your own Freeman based on which aspects of the truth you want to focus on. But that's why I think our solidarity has to remain with people and not with states.

[James Stout]

Yes, yeah, that seems to be the fundamental issue affecting much of the Internet left in the United States. Said their solidarity appears to only be to states and not to people. Right. We see that in Iran or Venezuela or Russia or anywhere else, really, that like this sort of, I know, Internet tanky leftism likes to talk about.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. So we saw a kind of upswing of nationalistic FERVOR following those U.S. sanctions. And the political situation in Panama was deteriorating rapidly. Noriega annulled the results of the May 1989 elections after his chosen candidates were decisively defeated. Protests followed. The Panamanian Defence Forces crushed them. And the images of his opposition figures being beaten by his military saturated US televisions to reinforce the racialized image of the savage Panamania. Because many of the soldiers that were doing the beating were black and brown and the opposition figure in question was white. So they were able to clip that and, you know, create a whole narrative around it that served their interests. Now, In October of 1989, a coup attempt by Panamanian officers failed and the officers were executed. In the US meanwhile, a criticism of President George H.W. bush had intensified with editorials and senators accusing him of weakness for his failure to act decisively against Noriega. And oh boy, call a man weak, he has to go and prove his. Prove his manhood, you know. So further motivation for what came next was Noriega's nomination of Tomas Duque as the first Panamanian administrator of the Panama Canal Commission. Bush did not like that pick. And if the US invaded, then they could pick who they preferred. So there was another motivation. The invasion was also motivated by a desire to showcase the Pentagon's post Cold War mission. You know, the Cold War was waning at that point, particularly with the fall of the Berlin Wall a mere months before. And so a new threat, a new bogeyman was needed to justify US military action in Latin America, this time in the form of the drug war story. And then on December 16, a US Marine intelligence unit ran a roadblock near Panamanian military headquarters. Panamanian soldiers opened fire, killing Lt. Robert Paz, another U.S. soldier and his wife were detained. And while the soldier was beaten, the wife was threatened with rape. Within 24 hours, Bush ordered a full scale invasion. On December 20, 1989, the United States launched its 20th military intervention in Panama since 1856, and by far the most violent. It was the worst destruction Panama had seen since Colombia's thousand days war. 18,000 people lost their homes. At least 516 Panamanians were killed by official Pentagon counts. Internal army estimates, however, put civilian Deaths closer to 1000.

[James Stout]

Jeez.

[Hans Charles]

And many believed that the true number was even higher. Entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. El Torillo, a poor, mostly black and mestizo community built originally for canal workers, was bombed and burned to the ground. San Miguelito was also hit, and across the country thousands were detained in prison camps. Damage exceeded $1 billion. On top of losses from nearly two years of sanctions, the US used overwhelming force, including Stealth bombers, airborne assaults and heavy firepower in densely populated areas against a Panamanian force of only about 3,000 trained soldiers. Noriega was captured, flown into the United States, tried and imprisoned. And as Lindsay Poland writes, the names of the 25 US soldiers killed during the invasion rolled across TV screens around the world. Yet a register of Panamanians killed during the invasion has never been published, even in Latin America. End quote.

[James Stout]

Geez. When Noriega, like, sought refuge in the Vatican Embassy for a while, I understand that they, they played like u2 music non stop to force him to capitulate.

[Hans Charles]

They paid. What?

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they, they used U2. There may have been some other stuff too, but.

[Hans Charles]

I'm pretty sure my age here, this is before my time. This was the band that was forced onto all the ipods and stuff, right?

[James Stout]

Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, this was. Yeah. And perhaps a parallel operation. Maybe again they would. Maybe that was a CIA op.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Bono, the guy who talks a big game and then never pays his taxes in Ireland, also part of the invasion of Panama.

[Hans Charles]

He had a critical role in U.S. intervention.

[James Stout]

Yeah, wait until I find. I bet there was some band I like as well, but YouTube is the one that sticks in my mind.

[Hans Charles]

Oh, the humanity. That has to be a war crime, right?

[James Stout]

War crime, yeah.

[Hans Charles]

So in all seriousness, though, Noriega was not a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't know why people feel this, this compulsion to try and rehabilitate figures that have been targeted by US imperialist aggression, you know, you can condemn US Imperialist aggression without carrying water for their image, right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

Now, Noriega was not a good guy, but he was not unusual. I think, if anything, you can point out the hypocrisy of the United States in this, you know, selective outrage. Yeah, because at the very same moment, far worse atrocities were being inflicted by leaders across the region, carried out by regimes firmly integrated in Washington's good graces. In Guatemala, for example, security forces kidnapped, tortured, and raped Diana Ortiz, an American nun, before she managed to escape. Yeah, but there's no evidence that this triggered outrage in Washington or calls for military intervention. And then in El Salvador, guerrilla forces launched an offensive on San Salvador, and the army responded by murdering six Jesuit priests. The same forces went on to arrest, torture, and intimidate international aid workers and church personnel. But none of this was treated as grounds for invasion, regime change, or emergency action. The US Only removed Noriega because he wasn't convenient to their ends anymore. And the aftermath of that invasion was utter devastation. Panama was left without a functioning government until the US Military stepped in to fill the vacuum. After two or three days, American forces formally took over the administration of the country. Under the Pentagon plan called operation blind logic, US officers were assigned to supervise 22 Panamanian ministries and state agencies, effectively running the country for months. At the same time, the military crippled what remained of Panama's civilian administration by seizing roughly 15,000 boxes of government documents. The invasion permanently reshaped Panama's political reality, dividing it between those absorbed into Noriega's nationalist rhetoric and those who had welcomed foreign intervention. It also sends a clear message to every political actor that Panama's sovereignty was conditional on their cooperation with the U.S. meanwhile, in the U.S. there was barely a murmur against the government's claimed right to invade Panama, remove its government, dismantle its military, and inflict costs on Panama's poor, black and mestizo communities. The US Kind of moved on from Panama after the invasion. I mean, they continued to meddle and intervene, but they had basically gotten what they wanted at that point, which was the removal of someone who was not gonna cooperate with them anymore.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And lest you believe that they disrupted the drug trade with the arrest of Doriega, Panama continued to function as a transit point for cocaine and a center for money laundering at basically the same scale as before. So, finally, what exactly is the connection with Venezuela, if any? James, you want to go first?

[James Stout]

Yeah. I mean, there's a very obvious parallel in that they have deposed a leader that you don't need to Go carry water for the guy they deposed. You can say something is bad without, like, the person who happened to does not therefore become a perfect angel. Things cannot be binary. That's okay. But, like, it is wild that we look to what happened in Panama and we're like, you know what? We can do better than that. We don't even have to declare a war. We don't even have to do an invasion. Right. We can just. Just kidnap a guy.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, they did do an invasion. They kind of bombed a bunch of people and stuff, too.

[James Stout]

Yes, they did. Yeah, they did an air. Yeah, they did. Like a. The airborne invasion, I guess, would be the way to describe it. Like, and in a sense. Right. Like, I'm happy that they didn't sort of go through the streets of Caracas with bombs and artillery and mortars.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. They didn't do scorched earth.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

This time.

[James Stout]

But at the same time, like, we have now, like, I've literally have spoken to several people in Venezuela in the last 24 hours. Right. And they are in that situation now of not knowing. Right. Like, who is the relevant authority. The US in this case doesn't seem to have replaced the regime. They've just in. Again, a parallel to what we saw in Panama just installed another person. Right.

[Hans Charles]

Not even necessarily install another person because.

[James Stout]

I mean, let it trickle down and see how it rides.

[Hans Charles]

Rodriguez was already in power.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, I guess maybe they looked at Rodriguez and were like. Because she's previously worked with, like. I guess the analogy would be the Chamber of Commerce, maybe something like that. Like Venezuelan business interests. Maybe they were just like, yeah, well, maybe we can force her to be compliant with. With what we want. Like, the only shit getting liberated is the oil in Venezuela. Right. And it's actually not very good oil.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The same happened in Panama. Right. The US didn't go to liberate people. It went to liberate the canal. It's so disappointing to see people still look at foreign policy in binary terms. And like you said before, I think one of the things that the Venezuelan people I'm speaking to express deep, deep frustration with is that when they take a risk.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Right.

[James Stout]

And go online and share their frustrations with both Chavismo and with the United States invading their country, they are told by Western leftists that they must be either CIA agents or pretend Venezuelans. Like Americans posing as Venezuelans.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah. Or like Cusanos or whatever.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, there is this. I mean, in the case of Venezuela, right. If you thought it was great, you could have gone. You had two decades to go. I went when I was in undergraduate.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Right.

[James Stout]

To see it, to study it, to understand, was formative in the way that my politics are now, which is politics that doesn't see human liberation coming from the state.

[Hans Charles]

It's not to say that there's nothing positive happening in Venezuela in terms of experiments with, you know, communal initiatives and you know, cooperative economic projects. Despite the US sanctions, despite what they are enduring, Venezuelan people have, you know, managed to innovate and manage to create, you know, these kinds of projects where they can exercise their autonomy, exercise their voice and their self determination.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

I think, of course, that there is a level of, I think co optation or attempts by the government of Venezuela to use those projects, to integrate those projects into their apparatus or to gain legitimacy through those projects.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

But as always, the situation on the ground is very complex and people are going to have different perspectives and feelings on the levels of government involvement in their communes and whatnot. I think the best outcome for Venezuelans would have been, of course, primarily the lifting of US sanctions and you know, secondarily their own self directed liberation from the imposition of the government on their projects. But you know, they are those who have those projects who support the government involvement, who get received funding and that kind of thing.

[James Stout]

So it's complex, like you say, right, that these things aren't binaries. It's not like always good, always bad. But as you said, right, like I. Solidarity with, should be with the Venezuelan people. They should be the ones who get to decide who rules Venezuela.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

I mean, even if I disagree with that, Yeah. I still think it's ultimately up to them.

[James Stout]

We should want a world in which they can choose, even if they don't choose what we want. Otherwise it's just another kind of colonial project. Right. And I think that colonial impulse, and let's also be honest, there is a racialized component to the way that the American left talks to people in the global South.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And I think, like, we should not overlook that, that they think that people aren't capable of either. They don't know what's best for them and they need to be told by someone else or that they're not capable of, of understanding. Like people in Venezuela are extremely aware of the consequences of US intervention. I lived with people who were tortured in Chile. When I, when I lived in Venezuela, many people came from fleeing Pinochet right, to Venezuela. It was a place that previously accepted migrants. Before migrants ended up leaving in large numbers as they have now. People are extremely aware of What US Intervention means. They're much better educated than most Americans on affairs in south and Central America. They know the game that is being played here. And I would just like to see people afford them the same humanity that they afford people in this country. It shouldn't be that difficult, but it genuinely seems to be.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah, I think too, there's an element where you know them with their knowledge, may make calculations, may make decisions that you with that same knowledge wouldn't make, you know, because there's internal disagreement too, the people who have the same knowledge and then they come to different conclusions about that, about the best course of action, about the best trade offs that they should be making, about how they navigate the conditions they've been placed in.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Hans Charles]

And I think there's, there's room for those conversations to be had without, you know, erasing that diversity of perspectives in favor of that simple binary that keep coming back to.

[James Stout]

Yeah, definitely. Like, there's no need for that condescension. Like, if we can give criticisms from a place of solidarity. One of the things that I learned when I was in Rojava, like, not everything that happens there is something that I think is perfect or good. Right. And there are a lot of people there, including internationalists. Right. Like there's an anarchist group, Tekoshin Anarchist, who are an anarchist group within the revolution. And like the revolution itself is not purely anarchist.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

But they exist to give criticism from a place of solidarity. And both groups wanting the other group to get better.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

To. To. To have what they want to succeed, which is how our relations with these other, like, I guess liberation struggles in Venezuela would be a reasonable term to use. Right. Like our relations with them should be that, like, we care about you and we hopefully both care about these things. Right. About human liberation, about. About people being able to live with dignity and respect. And we could disagree, but we're ultimately disagreeing from a place of solidarity and support, not of condescension, which is what I see far too much, I think, when I'm on the Internet.

[Hans Charles]

Exactly, exactly. So Noriega and Maduro are not interchangeable. Panama in 1989 is not Venezuela in 2026. The political systems, regional dynamics and global context are different. But the stories told to justify US intervention are pretty familiar. In Panama, the invasion was framed as a moral necessity to stop drugs, restore democracy, and defend American lives. And this is in spite of the fact the US collaborated with that very same regime for years beforehand. Interestingly, in Venezuela's case, the justifications were also pretty similar at first, stopping drugs, restoring democracy, defending American lives. And just like with Panama, they faced sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and economic pressure. But after the invasion of Venezuela, Trump just dropped the pretense entirely. He just came out and said it, yeah, we want their oil. So what? What is the international community going to do about it? The laws do not apply to us. In fact, we are going to withdraw from all of those international agreements that, you know, threaten our interest. You could look this up. The US Literally put this into. What was it?

[James Stout]

It's an executive order, Right, like an.

[Hans Charles]

Executive order, right, yeah. They're withdrawing from all of these international agreements that don't align with what they want. And so in both the case of Panama and the case of Venezuela, American interests supersede all else. American laws somehow apply to the entire world, while the world's laws never apply to America.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Hans Charles]

And the actual people on the ground in both cases don't matter at all. And also, another parallel, the domestic American narrative of racialized fear and drug war hysteria can be found in both invasions. And just like Panama left the media consciousness after the invasion as though the problems were solved, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar situation play out. After they get what they want out of Venezuela, suddenly all the issues that Venezuela have would no longer be in the picture because America got what they wanted.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, of course.

[Hans Charles]

It's a development story, so it remains to be seen. That's all I have for today. History does not repeat, but it's good to know because I find it often rhymes. All power to all the people. Peace. Welcome to the A building.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm Hans Charles Armenalek Lumumba.

[Robert Evans]

It's 1969.

[Ryder Strong]

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

[Hans Charles]

Have both been assassinated, and black America.

[Ryder Strong]

Was at a breaking point.

[Garrison Davis]

Rioting and protest broke out on an.

[Robert Evans]

Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.

[Hans Charles]

To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying.

[Robert Evans]

1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.

[Ryder Strong]

The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

[Hans Charles]

Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called the Red Weather.

[Robert Evans]

It was many and many a Year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

[Ryder Strong]

In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was hard to wrap your head around.

[Ryder Strong]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

[Robert Evans]

So, no, I am not your guru.

[Ryder Strong]

And back then, I lied to my parents.

[James Stout]

I lied to people, police. I lied to everybody.

[Robert Evans]

There were years, Ryder, where I could.

[Garrison Davis]

Not say your name.

[Ryder Strong]

I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends.

[Mia Wong]

Family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I.

[Ryder Strong]

Can to try to find out what actually happened.

[Hans Charles]

Isn't it a little bit weird that.

[Ryder Strong]

They obsess over hippies in the woods.

[Hans Charles]

And not the obvious boyfriend?

[Garrison Davis]

They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of.

[James Stout]

Come around here with my wife.

[Hans Charles]

Boom. Boom.

[Ryder Strong]

This. This is the red weather. Listen to the red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Garrison Davis]

Was this before he wrote his stories?

[Robert Evans]

It must have been.

[Ryder Strong]

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

[James Stout]

What?

[Ryder Strong]

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Babes.

[Hans Charles]

What are you doing?

[Sophie Lichterman]

What?

[Hans Charles]

I'm just mowing the lawn.

[James Stout]

No, it's blazing hot and dry out here.

[Hans Charles]

Don't you remember? Member Smokey Bear says avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on smokeybear.com with many other wildfire prevention tips.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Right.

[Hans Charles]

Thanks, honey bear. Cause remember, only you can prevent wildfires.

[James Stout]

Brought to you by the USDA Forest.

[Hans Charles]

Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, everyone.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Robert here.

[Robert Evans]

The Episode you're about to listen to is is a keynote speech I gave.

[Sophie Lichterman]

At a symposium on combating authoritarianism and preserving democracy for the Japanese American National.

[Robert Evans]

Museum in Los Angeles, California. So you'll get to hear the speech.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That I gave them about what's necessary.

[Robert Evans]

In order to deal with this new authoritarian way of overtaking the country. And then there's a Q and A with me afterwards, where I sit down with Ann Burroughs, who's the president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum.

[Sophie Lichterman]

She's also an internationally recognized leader in.

[Robert Evans]

Human rights and social justice. She's a chair on the board of.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Directors for Amnesty International.

[Robert Evans]

She was jailed as a political prisoner.

[Sophie Lichterman]

For fighting apartheid in her native South Africa.

[Robert Evans]

She's a pretty cool person.

[Sophie Lichterman]

So that is the episode you're about to listen to.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Our next keynote is going to ask us some difficult questions.

[James Stout]

Truths.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Authoritarianism, as has so often been said, rarely announces itself all at once. It takes root quietly in policies that silence dissent, in narratives that divide, and in systems that normalize repression until it feels ordinary. And when we get to that ordinary point, it's complicity. So I know that our next keynote is going to challenge us. We can trust that he will be provocative. We can trust that he will say some very strong things and it will be fantastic. So, without blabbering anymore, I am going to welcome Robert Evans, who is a journalist and author and the host of the enormously popular and influential podcasts behind the Bastards and It Couldn't Happen Here. He's also the author of A Brief History of Vice and after the Revolution. He has that rare ability to connect history, power, and lived experience. And he will certainly talk to you about his lived experience in the trenches of Portland. And he'll do it in a way that's unsettling. As I've said, he's going to challenge us. He's going to be provocative. But that's why we've asked him to provide this keynote. So, Robert, please come on up. It's your moment.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you so much for that and thank you all for being here. I'm gonna try to follow that up as best I can once the teleprompter's ready here. So a couple of days before I sat down to write the speech that I'm delivering now, a friend came to me and asked if I had advice on which kind of gas mask she should purchase for her four year old daughter. As was noted earlier, we live in Portland, Oregon. And while my friend wasn't planning to attend any protests, certainly not with her daughter in tow, she was keeping up with developments in Minnesota, where ICE officers had just shot a man they described as Venezuelan in the leg and then tear gassed a neighborhood. One resident tried to get his family, which included small children and a newborn, out of the area, but they were gassed in their car. And then, for good measure, ICE officers hurled flashbangs into the vehicle. His six month old infant stopped breathing and he had to beg repeatedly before officers would let an ambulance in to resuscitate his baby. The child was fine now. So my friend was right to fear that her little girl might get gassed for nothing more than existing in the wrong neighborhood. Questions like this aren't theoretical to thousands of American parents right now, and they aren't theoretical to me. I was tear gassed more than a hundred times in 2020, and I spent a fair amount of time pulling children and other civilians out of cars that had the bad luck to exist on the same city block as a man with a badge and a grenade launcher. And so it bugs me just a little when I see Governor Walz tell protesters to stay peaceful and not take the bait. In fact, I'm left asking, what do we think the bait is here? As best as I can figure it, armed and armored police officers, blind firing chemical weapons at civilians is bait, while any response from those civilians beyond packing up and going home is taking said bait. Throwing back tear gas containers or anything else is somehow an escalation. So is standing against a riot line with a gas mask and a homemade shield to stop your neighbor from getting deported. Any act of resistance, big or small, is all the justification federal agents need to deploy more of the violence they were already using. It's a neat little rhetorical game that liberals have let themselves become trapped inside. Playing that game lets them avoid answering one supremely ugly question. If your enemy controls the police and the military and they've promised to destroy you, what does fighting back even mean? Up until the present moment, the answer given by prominent liberals has generally been you fight by voting or by making your voice heard, or something similar. I have a good friend who tried to make her voice heard in 2020. She is now in early menopause, in her 20s, after being rendered sterile by chronic tear gas exposure. None of the officers who poisoned her or thousands of other Portlanders ever saw a day behind bars. That would be wrong. They enjoy qualified immunity. They're doing an important job, one every person can agree needs to be done. The year my friend was gassed repeatedly, the highest paid Portland police officer was a man who had been caught and briefly punished for maintaining a shrine to the dead men of the Waffen SS on city property. The Portland police union, the first police union in the country, sued for him to be reinstated and to ensure that he faced no punishment for this and was brought back with full pay and benefits. So when you hear stories of Homeland Security hiding Nazi songs and their recruiting ads for ice, remember it's not just an ICE problem. And yet some liberals and progressives will tell me state and local police aren't the enemy. ICE is just an aberrant agency, and surely there's some democratic cheat code we can use to get the good guys in blue to help us take them down. So much of the unchecked authoritarian nightmare currently rampaging through our streets is the product of a system that views policing as sacred, officers as infallible and protest as inherently suspicious and dangerous. This is the standard line even within the halls of power in the Democratic Party, and it is part of why regular young people in this country country hate elected Democrats. The people out thank you. The people out in Minneapolis battling riot lines in sub zero weather know there's no help coming. The cavalry does not exist. And so they've had to build their own architecture of resistance off and on the fly. Since immigrants and other people being targeted by ICE can't safely shop, local businesses like Rectangle spelled like wreck as in a car wreck pizza, have raised tens of thousands of dollars to buy and distribute food and other necessities. Gathering and handing out donated groceries feel safe, peaceful and legal. But that's not how ICE treats it. Rectangle's fundraising campaign earned them a visit from armed ICE agents who, per the account of co owner Brianna Evans, no relation, stormed up on our door to try to get in. Thankfully, members of the neighborhood had been standing guard. They were able to raise a significant force of locals to swarm and chase off ICE who tried to gas the neighborhood as they were leaving, only to have their munitions kicked back at them. This is one small example of the kind of networks of aid and resistance that are evolving on the ground right now as I speak. Another example that arose in the wake of Renee Goode's murder is ICE Watch, an informally organized network that activates members of the community when ICE shows up in their area. The logic behind ICE Watch is that these federal agents will be less likely to engage in extreme acts of violence while surrounded by crowds of citizens following them and trying to wear them down with shame. This is a good tactic and we here might rightly consider it a nonviolent tactic. But the federal government does not remember Renee Goode was shot and killed for participating in exactly this kind of activism. Through mouthpieces like Stephen Miller, the Trump administration has made their stance very clear. Anyone impeding the actions of law enforcement is a terrorist. Waving a sign or filming an ICE agent makes you just as much a terrorist as someone who breaks a window or throws a rock. You cannot be so well behaved and appropriate in your resistance that this government will not consider you a valid target. And yet again and again, I see no spine or backbone from the men setting themselves up as the future of resistance to Trump. Gavin Newsom can't even stick to his own guns. In his own podcast on whether or not ICE is terrorizing Americans, Senator Cory Booker's big recent suggestion was more training for ICE agents. As if the men brutalizing our neighbors aren't doing exactly what they trained to do. About a year after Joe Biden's inauguration, I found myself up in the woods of rural Washington, an hour or so outside of Seattle doing firearm training with a group of leftists I'd met during the 2020 protest. And I know that kind of thing makes a lot of people here uncomfortable, and I'm afraid a number of things about our shared future might make you uncomfortable. During a break in the activity, I sat down for a smoke with a guy who'd spent the last several years teaching himself to be an armorer. Someone who repairs and maintains firearms. As he'd gained skill with this, he'd started to take his grade school aged daughter out shooting. He didn't like that. He felt like he had to do this, but as he informed me, I don't know that she won't have to fight for her right to be treated like a human being. Hearing that, I thought back to a woman I'd met a few years earlier in the badlands of rural Syria. She'd been held as a slave by ISIS militants for two years. Forced into the kind of life that I hope is unimaginable to anyone sitting in this room one night, as the Kurdish dominated militias of the SDF advanced on ice's positions, she managed to escape. After a harrowing journey on foot, she found her way to the SDF's lines where the first person she saw was a fighter from an all female unit holding an AK47. She made the decision to join up herself that very moment. She wanted training and a gun of her own, because then, she informed me, no man could ever own her again. Now, politics isn't supposed to Work that way in the United States. People should not need to use weapons to defend their most basic civil rights. But can you look at the mobs of armed men breaking into homes and businesses in Minneapolis and elsewhere, many sporting Nazi tattoos to go along with their badges, and tell me definitively that we're going to get through this without a fight? At the end of the Second World War, as the dead were counted to cries of never again, an attempt was made to create a rules based international order built around the bones of the last failed attempt to do so at the end of the First World War. And as we stand here in 2026 potentially looking at a US invasion of Greenland, watching military helicopters circle American cities while secret police snatch victims from their families and haul them off to camps and deportation facilities, we must admit that this second attempt to create a rules based international order is failing as well. We and our predecessors failed at building and maintaining a system that would stop all of this from happening again. There are many answers to the question of how this happened. The fact that the United States, from the jump, refused to be bound by the same rules we hoped lesser nations would follow was certainly part of the reason why our insistence that no foreign court ever judge American politicians or American soldiers was as narcissistic as it was insane. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the ongoing militarization of the border and Border Patrol, the granting of qualified immunity to police across the country, these were all further steps on our national road to perdition. Citizens United, our refusal to punish Facebook executives over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and our failure to charge the people responsible for January 6th with treason are all further steps on that road. I could talk about what led us here for hours, but all that matters is we, the United States, are not special. Our long Democratic traditions, great wealth and high opinion of ourselves have not protected us. The enemy is at the gates. Now, I don't mean to act as if all is lost or as if the only path forward is bloody internecine war, because I don't believe that the cause of rationality, of basic human decency still has a lot going for it. The vast majority of Americans hate this president, just as they despise the Republican Party and the vicious, cruel and soulless monster the conservative project has proved to be. Poll after poll shows this, but we also see it in videos of grandfathers kicking tear gas cans back at ICE agents in Minneapolis. The bad guys are outnumbered. We can't forget this, and they certainly won't. But the bad guys also have guns, and the legal right to use them however they want, whenever they want, on whoever they want. Just because they might lose an election doesn't mean they're handing in their badges or their weapons. So how do you plan to make them? One thing that gives me a sense of hope as I look around the country is that increasing numbers of liberals and progressives seem to be waking up to the idea that this is an existential fight. Perhaps the most hopeful thing I've seen recently is that in Minneapolis, a coalition of labor unions and community organizations have come together to call for a limited general strike. That just so happens to be today, January 23, 2026. That's right. For a single day, there will be no work, no school, no shopping. Now, this is a demonstrative act, one you might compare to the flexing of a muscle. No one involved thinks that one day of striking is going to be enough. But nothing less than a general strike has the potential to force concessions, even capitulation from the regime. And you have to start somewhere. This is another example of an act of peaceful protest that will be considered anything but peaceful as soon as the regime feels threatened. And people on the ground in Minneapolis know this. Whenever I talk to activists, whether they live in Los Angeles, in Portland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, I see the same thing I saw in people in 2020, a grim but very accurate assessment of what this fight is going to cost them. They are going to lose eyes and maybe limbs to riot munitions. They and their friends will be arrested, beaten, possibly tortured and imprisoned. All of these things are happening right now to regular people who have done nothing more than speak up and lend aid and comfort to their afflicted neighbors. They are willing to risk their lives because they know the hour is late. I have not seen anything that approaches this level of commitment from the liberal intelligentsia, from most elected Democratic officials, or from the party itself. JB Pritzker calls out, accurately our present situation as being like the early years of the Third Reich. And yet, like every Democrat in power, he falls short of elucidating a solution beyond peaceful protest. And if I can get only one point across to you, let it be. As far as the regime is concerned, there is no such thing. All dissent is violent. You attending the symposium is an act of terrorism, and they will punish you for it once they get through, the people they see as more immediate threats. There's a book I come back to again and again when trying to puzzle out my own path forward in these unsettling times. It's titled they Thought They Were Free and The author was a Jewish American progressive journalist and educator named Milton Meyer. Not long after World War II, in the early 1950s, he moved to a small German village to get to know and interview a number of ordinary citizens about their involvement with the Nazi Party. Meyer called these men and women the little Nazis, to contrast them from the big Nazis like Himmler and Heydrich and Goering. These were not people who had been movers and shakers in the party, nor had most of them been particularly active or early members. They were regular people who had latched onto Nazism late, but supported it enthusiastically because of the benefits it gave them. They thought they were free. Is a chilling read for a number of reasons, but there's no competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. For Meyer didn't only interview little Nazis, he sat down with people we might call little anti fascists. These were Germans who never bought into Nazism. They hated it from the jump. They even fought it for a time. But they were never central organizers or members of the resistance. And when it became clear that the Third Reich had taken power, they faded into the woodwork to try and stay alive. Meyer sat down with one of these people, a friend of his who worked as a chemical engineer, and asked him one day, tell me now, how was the world lost? Here's how his response started. The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of total conscription. Under the law, I was required to take an oath of fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given 24 hours to think it over. In those 24 hours, I lost the world. Now this man, this friend of Myers, knew that refusing to give the oath wouldn't cost him his freedom, but it would cost him his job and make it impossible for him to get another. No one would hire a Bolshevik. And although he'd never been a Bolshevik, once the fascists take over, everyone who isn't a fascist becomes the worst thing they ever called their enemies. Today I guess it would be far left extremists or antifa terrorists. Anyway, Meyer's friend explained that he thought he couldn't risk being tarred with that brush. Not because he wanted to escape with his family and get a job elsewhere, but because he genuinely wanted to stay in Germany and fight the good fight. He had many German Jewish colleagues and other dissident friends. He wanted to be able to help. And he if I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow. As things went on, if I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if I remained in the country, I myself would be in their situation. And so he decided to take the pledge, making a decision I think many of us would have made, telling himself simply that by saying the words I swear to God, he was ensuring no human being or government could override his conscience. And he was as good as his word. Through the war years, Meyer's friend helped save many lives, using his apartment as a safe house for people fleeing the Third Reich. That's incredibly admirable, I think we can all agree. But Meyer's friend felt nothing but shame for his actions. He said later of the day he took the oath. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. Now. Meyer was confused by this, saying what I'd imagine most of us would say in his position. Well, by taking the oath, you were able to save many lives. You were just one man, and the Third Reich was already in power. What more could you have done? Here was his friend's response. Of course, I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil there and then in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact. He went on to insist that if he had refused to take the oath of fidelity, he could have saved the people later killed by the Nazi regime. And Meyer responded logically. You don't truly believe that your lone refusal could have overthrown the Reich in 1935. And his friend said, no, of course not, but then went on to elaborate. There I was in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth and education and in position, rules, or might easily rule in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me all over Germany were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown or indeed would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935 meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany, were also unprepared. Each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus, the world was lost. Now Meyer still doesn't believe his friend because he's bogged down in the historical details, the nitty gritty of the rise of fascism. His friend who lived through that is instead focused on the greater moral and historic truths behind it. These hundred lives I saved, he told Meyer, or a thousand or ten, as you will. What do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil. When, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil. Now, the faith he's expressing isn't a religious belief per se, but rather faith that right and wrong exist and that when people step into our communities hell bent on harming others, they should be stopped by any means necessary. So Meyer asks him, can you imagine anything your society might have done to sustain your faith to ensure you and other Germans like you would have been prepared to resist? Meyer's friend realizes he's speaking about education, the very American idea that ideologies like fascism thrive in ignorance and can be banished by the light. He insisted Meyer was barking up the wrong tree. My education did not help me, he said, and I had a broader and better education than most men have or ever will have. All it did in the end was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally in that time in Germany, their resistance was no greater than other men's. And that's my challenge today to everyone at this symposium, and, in fact, to myself. We all have the benefit of an education. We're all the kind of people who sit down in nice rooms to discuss, discuss the issues. It is incumbent on us to look out at the people struggling in Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Portland and Philadelphia and everywhere else and ask ourselves, how can I support them? And how can I go further? The answer to that question is going to be a little different for everyone here. But none of us can afford to hold on to our old ideas of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable protest. We're all going to have to become more comfortable with taking on risks, because the boundaries between what is legal and illegal are going to change on a daily basis as we prepare for what comes next. We could all do a lot worse than to take the advice of New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who, during a vigil for Renee Goode, told his clergy, get your affairs in order. Make sure you have your wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Thank you, Robert, for that amazing speech. Inspiring, sobering, challenging, confronting all of those things, it sort of almost feels. I don't want to describe it because in describing it, I feel that it may reduce it to anecdote. It was so powerful. But, you know, I was so struck by your reference to Milton Mayer's account of the man who took the oath and who later said, that day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. And I think that when liberals today, all of us, you know, we tell ourselves that we're choosing a lesser evil, we're staying quiet, or we're sort of staying within the bounds of, you know, a particular reaction. I often ask myself the question, you know, what are we giving away in the process? You know, what compels people to cross from accommodation into moral risk? And is there a moment ahead where mass refusal could alter that trajectory? Or has that window already begun to close? You know, I think of my own experience. You know, some people in the room know that I was a political prisoner in South Africa. And, you know, I made a very conscious decision at a certain point, and it was a moral decision to get involved in the anti apartheid struggle, knowing what the costs were. But I would love to hear from you about what it is you think that compels people, as I said earlier on, to cross from accommodation into moral risk.

[Robert Evans]

I think that's a fascinating and an incredibly important question, and it's one I don't have a perfect answer to because there's a degree of mystery. I've been a number of times with a crowd who you've seen, it kind of come across their eyes in, like, confrontations with local police or with federal agents that we have them outnumbered. And sometimes we have them outnumbered and their ammo just ran dry. And you see everybody in the crowd make a decision in that moment to kind of stay where they are, to not see what could come next, right? To not take a step forward, because they all have lives, because we have a functional enough society, because people have kids to get back to and jobs to get back to, and nobody wants to play act at an October revolution in between the middle of their work week. And one of the things that is a potential moment of change is when that the Certainty of, well, I have a life, right, and my friends have lives, and we all have something to get back to. When you have a large enough chunk of the populace who doesn't feel that way, who feels like, well, they've taken what I would go back to. They've taken any sense of security I have, there's no longer a point in me holding back because the state is not holding back, and I don't have anything to go back to. That's one of the things that causes mass and sudden flips. And you asked a little earlier, do I think the window is closing? And I think kind of somewhat paradoxically, the window starts closing as soon as it opens, but it can never close all the way because there's not a lot of them. This is true in every country with every state police force, compared to the size of the populace. And so there's always a potential when enough people get angry and enough people get radicalized, that a system, even with the amount of violence behind it that ours has, can be toppled. That said, the longer we let this go on, the more they have wrapped their fingers around every aspect of policing injustice in this country, the more ability they have given their officers to utilize violence, to utilize advanced weaponry, to utilize drones and things like stingrays and whatnot against protesters. And so in that way, the window within which people can react and feel like they have a decent chance of getting away or of succeeding closes because the force deployed against them gets larger, which makes it a lot scarier and makes people less likely to take those risks.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

So what does fighting back actually mean? I mean, that's really, you know, that's a really, I think that that's a really important question because, you know, as you spoke about in your, you know, in your remarks, and we know so well that, you know, when the government or whatever controls the police, they control the military, you know, and if that has identified you as being, you know, quote unquote, a terrorist, regardless of, you know, what the circumst might be, what does fighting back actually mean? What does that resistance encompass? And we know that it can take many, many forms. So I sort of want to push you a little bit more. What does fighting back actually mean? But what, for you, feels morally defensible and what genuinely troubles you?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I guess to start with, if the question is what does fighting back look like in terms of what is an escalation from the ways in which we're currently fighting back, that is still within the bounds of what most people on our side of the aisle would call, like, peaceful and morally justified, even if it's not legal. Right. Well, one thing that comes to mind is a general strike. And in fact, the only thing that comes to mind that I think actually has serious weight. The weight to uproot a security state as powerful and established as ours is, the weight to uproot a regime that is entrenched as ours is, is a general strike. It's almost the only leverage that we have, which is why I'm happy to see them starting to explore doing it as a real thing. In Minneapolis, you get this thing online and Twitter on Blue sky, whatever, where people will periodically be like, we're doing a general strike next week. Nobody go to work or shop. It's like, that's not how it works. You have to have the backing of unions. You have to have a lot of infrastructure set up to try and figure out how are we going to feed people, how are we going to keep people's lights on as much as possible, how are we going to provide people with the necessities during what will probably be an extended period of time out of work and a time in which, if you're talking about a real general strike, a lot of the pillars that uphold daily life and our daily comforts will start to fail if it's an actual functional general strike. And so you have to have systems built up for that. And it's one of the things people don't often think about when they're hearing these kind of big pitch ideas for resistance campaigns. One of my favorite examples of this, just in terms of, like, the difference between here's the idea and here's the things we have to do to execute it. In Liberia, kind of at the end of the last really big period, they had of, like, these kind of warring warlords, there was a massive protest campaign by women in Liberia that was. I mean, it was basically pulled right out of Lysistrada. It was, we are not going to have sex with our husbands. Like, we're not going to do it. And it was a mass resistance campaign. This has been written about. I know it sounds like Liz Estrada, but it's a real thing that happened. And when they were considering, how are we going to actually do this, they had to consider some really ugly realities, including the reality of rape. And so a factor behind the scenes in figuring out how to organize this was, how are we going to create networks to smuggle women out of dangerous homes and keep them safe for the length of this protest campaign? Right. And when you're talking about what's going to be necessary for a general strike. It's a ton of illegalism, right? You know, everything from people shoplifting food to stop people from starving, but to the very fact that carrying out and participating in a general strike, if one gains any momentum, will be declared illegal by the regime. They will try to crack down, they will arrest ringleaders, they will put people in black sites. These are realities that have to be accounted for in the underlying planning. And I'm hopeful about the potential for something like that in 2028. Now, when it comes to the stuff that really scares me, one of the things that scares me is what happens if we cross the point into which there is no longer any hope or talk of peaceful resistance, Right? And you have to consider this when you have a large number of armed men saying, we just need to kill all of the people who are on the other side of this thing, which we have in this country right now. There's a lot of them. They have weapons. Many of them are in the police, some of them are in the military. These are realities of our present situation. And that's scary to me, because when you cross that line, there's no longer any question of right or wrong. It's just a matter of what can survive the onslaught. And that's, I think, the thing to try to avoid at all costs, because any sort of mass internecine conflict in the United States among the Americans it'll kill is many people outside of the country because global food systems and global medicines supply systems will collapse, right? So now we're talking about having governors call out the national Guard against federal police forces. When I think about both the necessity of that, because you have to try to resist and you have to try to make it clear. Is there anyone backing up the people from this federal agency? Is there anyone at a state level? Is there any kind of resistance that the state is going to respect? You have to ask that question. But some of the answers to it can take us to really terrifying places. And I don't think we can avoid asking the question anymore. I don't think we're going to avoid a point at which some governor tries something like that. Because ICE is going to continue grabbing, right? They're going to continue pushing what they can do in blue cities. They're not going to. This is not the extent of the shit they're gonna try.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Sorry.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

No. You know, and I think it's also particularly terrifying when we think of what the budgets are behind, you know, that enables this. And, you know, the budgets that are now about to be voted. I mean, we're not just. We're talking about billions and billions, and it's just extraordinary. So, you know, I mean, again, going back to my experience in South Africa and, you know, this idea of a general strike, you know, what was ultimately the most effective weapon against the apartheid regime was mass mobilizing, mass organizing across the country, mass marches that actually, that quite literally made. It was a specific campaign to make the country ungovernable. And it was on every level. It was consumer boycotts, it was mass marches. It was, you know, marches specifically targeted at the apartheid laws that broke the back of the apartheid laws. And it was that aided by incredible pressure from outside, from outside sanctions. Of course, things are very different now. But, you know, this does take me to another question, something that I've thought a lot about is, you know, after this whole crisis, after this is over, you know, what are the consequences? What about accountability? You know, when we get to the other side of this, which we will, we will get to the other side of this, you know, what should that accountability look like? Is it an American Truth and Reconciliation campaign? You know, we had a truth and reconciliation campaign in South Africa, and it was extraordinarily healing, but there was no restitution, and at the end of the day, there was no justice. So what was the sort of transformational, societal transformational aspect of that? Should we think about an American Truth and reconciliation campaign? Is it something closer to Nuremberg? Who going to be seen as the architects of this authoritarian movement? Who going to be seen as the architects of this anti authoritarian movement? How do we, as a democratic country or democratic society, how willing are we to go to pursue those consequences? I mean, we've just seen how hollow that can be after January 6, how Trump has pardoned the insurrectionists. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And I know we've only got three minutes left before I get hauled off the stage.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I guess I have two answers to that. The first would be, what do I think is likely to happen? And then what should happen in terms of what's likely to happen? I guess the likeliest thing is that if we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it's something that we kind of half assess and it falls way too short. And there's not any kind of criminal restitution for the people who are breaking laws and hurting and killing people right now. I would say that's a likely possibility, just given the way in which this country has handled similar things in the past. And the ways in which other countries have handled similar things in the past. Let's not forget that Nuremberg, for all of the things about it that were good, was also a failure in a lot of ways. Right. The vast majority of the Nazis who participated directly, physically in the Holocaust did not see any kind of criminal consequences. So when it comes to what I think we should have, I think we do need something along the lines of a Nuremberg. And I think that if you want to talk about the people politically who are committing crimes right now and who should be on trial, I think we can all come up with a lot of very similar names. And I'm very supportive of trying and bringing this regime to justice for its current illegal behavior and past illegal behavior. That said, but I think it's going to be also a failure if we do not extend any attempt at criminal consequences, at retribution, at justice, I guess would be the better term, to a group of people who have underlined all of the negative societal changes that are happening right now, which is the people who run all of the major social media corporations in the world, all of whom are deeply complicit in not just our authoritarian slide, but in direct violence. Facebook knew for a fact that the military of Myanmar was using their website to spread propaganda to help further an ethnic cleansing. And they made the choice basically to sit with that because it made them money, you know, and that sort of thing should be seen as just as illegal as a bunch of ICE agents without a warrant busting into somebody's house with guns. You know, so that's where I stand. I'm on a we didn't go nearly far enough after the civil war either kind of kick right now. But we don't need to go into that.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

We've come to the end of our time, unfortunately. You know, I could continue. I've got, you know, seven. Seven questions that I would have loved to have asked you, but we don't have time. But, you know, Robert, I can't thank you enough for coming, for being with us, for. For sharing your thoughts and, you know, traveling all the way from Portland and, you know, I'm so sorry about the hundred times that you've been tear gassed. You know, I've been tear gassed many, many times in my life, but it's definitely not 100.

[Sophie Lichterman]

There's a lot of people who got.

[Robert Evans]

To your gas more than me in Portland. Well, and elsewhere.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you all for bearing with us.

[Hans Charles]

Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm inalec Lumumba.

[Robert Evans]

It's 1969.

[Ryder Strong]

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

[Hans Charles]

Have both been assassinated, and black America.

[Ryder Strong]

Was at a breaking point.

[Garrison Davis]

Rioting and protest broke out on an.

[Robert Evans]

Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.

[Hans Charles]

It featured two prominent figures in black.

[Robert Evans]

History, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.

[Ryder Strong]

To be in what we really thought was a revolution.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, people were dying.

[Robert Evans]

1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.

[Ryder Strong]

The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

[Hans Charles]

Listen to the a building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called the Red Weather.

[Robert Evans]

It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

[Ryder Strong]

In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was hard to wrap your head around.

[Ryder Strong]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.

[Robert Evans]

So, no, I am not your guru.

[Ryder Strong]

And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody.

[Robert Evans]

There were years, Ryder, where I could.

[Garrison Davis]

Not say your name.

[Ryder Strong]

I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened.

[Hans Charles]

Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend?

[Garrison Davis]

They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of come around.

[James Stout]

Here and my wife, boom, boom, boom.

[Ryder Strong]

This is the red weather. Listen to the red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

[Robert Evans]

Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.

[Ryder Strong]

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

[Garrison Davis]

What?

[Ryder Strong]

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay, I don't think that's true.

[Ryder Strong]

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hans Charles]

Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back Bijan Robinson.

[Ryder Strong]

When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath.

[James Stout]

When I'm just breathing and seeing what's.

[Ryder Strong]

In front of me, everything just slows down.

[James Stout]

It just makes me feel great before.

[Ryder Strong]

I run the play.

[Hans Charles]

Just like Bijan, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental [e-mail] Love, you're mine. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family foundation, and the AD Council.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen. Here at Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening, 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, Robert Evans, and maybe Sophie Lichterman.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

This episode we are covering the week of January 28th to February 4th. Very exciting events happening this weekend, as we know, the super bowl and even more importantly, the Turning Point USA halftime show streaming on Daily Wire. Plus America's Real Voice, national news desk, and tbn. I don't know what that is.

[Robert Evans]

Wait, pause, pause.

[Garrison Davis]

It's behind a payroll, you know, unclear. Well, probably not, because it's going to be also. It's also going to be on YouTube x everything app and Rumble.

[James Stout]

But I was going to ask. It was on Rumble.

[Garrison Davis]

It is going to be. Oh, don't worry, James. They're one step ahead of you. And we can. We can see all of our favorite acts. We have Kid Rock, Bradley Gilbert, Lee Bryce, and Gabby Barrett. All of my favorite performers.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Garrett, I haven't seen Kid Rock since you and I watched Kid Rock together at the rnc.

[Garrison Davis]

It's been too long. It's been too long.

[James Stout]

It's been way too long.

[Garrison Davis]

It's been too long. I'm, I'm, I'm excited for Lee Bryce, obviously, as a. As the biggest Bryce head on the pod. Bryce is going to be huge. Gabby Barrett will be a nice, you know, a nice little spice on top.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And this guy's name is. It's Not Bradley. It's. It's Brantley.

[Garrison Davis]

Sorry. Brantley Gilbert. My. My apologies. My apologies to all. All the big Brantley fans out there. My bad.

[James Stout]

Hell of a name.

[Garrison Davis]

Obviously the most. The most famous.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That's not a real name. That's just not a real name.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it isn't spelled with the L, E, I, G, H. So we do have to give him that.

[Sophie Lichterman]

If it was Brant Lay, I would be doing some terrorism right now. I'd be right gun in my hand.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I would be unable to stop myself.

[Garrison Davis]

You guys, I just googled Lee Bryce and the first picture that pops up is incredible.

[Robert Evans]

And I'm gonna put it in the chat.

[James Stout]

Please do. Is it in the work chat or the zoom in?

[Garrison Davis]

No, it's in the zoom chat. That's the first picture that pops up. It's incredible. Oh, he looks tough.

[James Stout]

Wow. Is he in Band of Brothers?

[Garrison Davis]

His jaw is fantastic. Oh, my God. It's an incredible first photo.

[James Stout]

Yeah. His expression isn't though. He's really letting himself down with the face.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, his face says I really am racist.

[James Stout]

Just doesn't look happy to be there.

[Garrison Davis]

So obviously, after about six months of planning, Turning Point was able to put together just the finest. The finest acts in all the show business for their. For their all American show. All the big names, really. Whatever. Everyone's itching, itching to listen. They could not even get Nicki Minaj, which is like so humiliating. Like, come on, guys.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah. Didn't she do a dance with the.

[James Stout]

Treasury secretary yesterday or something? Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Who was that guy? Or those two people that were at the RNC that they kept showing doing that rap video? I like kind of blocked it out. Yeah. There's those conservative rap guys. Yeah.

[James Stout]

For Gatio Blow is it for Gacho.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Blow is one of the conservative rap guys.

[James Stout]

Yes. Yeah, I will admit I don't have a deep knowledge in this area.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I saw him at the rnc. I was walking behind him on my.

[Robert Evans]

Way to the beer store.

[Sophie Lichterman]

He's my point credible. He's an amazing looking man.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's a unique dude. That's your risky Google of the day.

[Sophie Lichterman]

God really broke the mold with him.

[Garrison Davis]

So we will report on how the Turning Point halftime show went next week for the next ed. Because you know that I'm going to be turned into Rumble to watch this.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, it's going to be. We're going to need a minute by minute breakdown of this bad boy.

[Garrison Davis]

I'll be taking extensive notes.

[James Stout]

Hopefully I'll be able to record it and watch it Again, later for posterity. I feel like this is going to go down like Live Aid, you know, it's a greatest moment in live music.

[Garrison Davis]

It is interesting that they are showing it on national news desk. Fox News did not. Did not decide to air. Air the All American halftime show. So instead you have to tune into tbn, whatever that is, and national news desk. So let's get to some actual news, though.

[Hans Charles]

Sure.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Real news. Okay, so Portland, Oregon has been the site of some recent noteworthy ICE protests. On Saturday, 31 January, there was a large union march on the ICE building on McAdam street in Portland, Oregon. This was like basically every union in Portland. It was the largest union march that we've had here in light 20 years. Somewhere along those lines, about 5 to 10,000 people showed up.

[James Stout]

Oh, wow.

[Sophie Lichterman]

When I heard it was 10k, because I wound up there. I hadn't even been planning to go, but I showed up with a friend. And as we were kind of watching the crowd pass, a buddy of ours came up who knows one of the people who organized the march and was like, yeah, they're expecting like 10,000 people. And I was like, there's no way they're gonna get 10,000 fucking people out here. And then as the crowd went past me for like 20 straight minutes, and I was like, yeah, that might be 10,000 people. That really is quite a lot of motherfucking people. It was an extremely diverse crowd, which, I mean, in the age sense primarily, it's Portland, so not in the. Yeah, in any other sense of the word.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, those. Those protests tend to have, you know, older folks, teenagers, families, teachers.

[Sophie Lichterman]

A lot of older folks, a lot of little kids. Kids who were like 8 to 12 years old. Because it was just supposed people were like. The basic route of march was doing a circle around the ICE facility and then there was like sound equipment and music set up on a nearby park. So I think. I don't believe the plan was an extended confrontation with ice, which is what made what came next so surprising, which is that we start walking towards where the route of march is heading. We're kind of in like the middle of the crowd probably, and we see a cloud. And it's like 3:30 in the afternoon. So the people I'm with who have all been through their share of Portland protests are like, that can't be tear gas. It's not even 4pm and this is the liberal march. There's no way they've gassed it already. Like, I saw the front of the march. It was a bunch of people in their 50s. Like, they're not forcing the issue with ice, I don't think. But apparently, per the claims made by ice, when the crowd reached the ICE building, people began throwing water bottles. So obviously that's a situation that can't be allowed to contain you. So they gas the absolute fuck out of the. The march. And they gassed it so much that the cloud of gas spread to cover pretty much the entire march, including the people who were nowhere near the front of the bar yet. So as we're walking towards it, we become aware about halfway towards getting to it that, like, okay, that's not smoke. That is, in fact, gas. Some of us had masks. I did not. So I'm like, well, I'm going to have a bad time. This is straight up not going to be fun. And the problem with it was because of where they gassed us, there were kind of two streets of buildings on either side. So you basically got. You're in like a valley almost. You've got steep canyon walls kind of on either side of you. And there was no wind that day. So you've just got this thick cloud of gas smoke and 10,000 people crammed in between two pillars of buildings. So it was a very bad time. A lot of kids got gassed. I saw a number of children in some significant distress, like little kids. A lot of old people wound up in significant distress. It was straight up a bad time. And it continued for the next day. There was another march the next day that started at City Hall. This kind of galvanized people in Portland to specifically take up the charge of protesting for the city to basically not renew or cancel ICE's contract to use the building that they're based out of. So there was a large march on Sunday. I showed up as the march reached the ICE area because I didn't want to walk across town. And sure enough, we get there, and maybe an hour or so after the crowd arrives, there's like a thousand or so people, and it's still a very young crowd. This is not mostly people who have been doing the. The protest thing in Portland for a long time. Like, I saw a lot of. A lot of girls who couldn't have been older than 16 or 17 out on Sunday, and they gassed again. And I couldn't tell you, they were letting people, like, right up to the front of the ICE building, which they had gassed folks for throwing water bottles kind of near the day before. So there's never any consistency with these sort of things. And eventually they just Decided to gas the shit out of everybody again to come and snatch people. And that's. That's kind of the story is people in Portland are really pissed again because they gassed the Big Lib March. All of the unions are really angry. All of the nurses are really angry. The city government's angry. The mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson, made a. That all of the ICE agents should quit their jobs, should resign. I don't know that I think that they're actually going to kick ICE out of its building now, to be fair, I don't think that ICE is really getting much done in that building because it's locked down completely. They are using facilities up in Washington for the actual immigration stuff for the most part. So it's become. I think it's largely a symbol. Yeah. A symbolic kind of deal. So we'll see. I don't know what's going to happen next, but. Yeah, that's. That's the update from here.

[Garrison Davis]

The tear gas air is spicy and bad for our health.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I mean, it always bums me out to see really young people, like kids get tear gassed, especially like teenage girls, because, yeah, there's data and it not nearly as much as there should be because the government really doesn't like studying this on how tear gas affects particularly, like, reproductive health. And it's bad. There's evidence from places like Gaza that it can cause miscarriages. There's documentation of miscarriages in at least three different countries as a result of tear gas use. Although, again, it's not the kind of documentation you'd want for a medical thing because you can't really isolate out other factors that may have been happening at the same time, because you're trying to figure out what this and other things are doing to people's bodies in a place like Gaza where you have no kind of like clinical control. But outside of that, there's evidence of missed periods, that it can, like, delay or cause unusually painful periods.

[Garrison Davis]

Send people into early menopause.

[James Stout]

Jeez.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, there's some evidence for that. It's kind of a. When I brought this up online, someone got very angry at me because they're like, well, it's not proven. I think there's enough data to tell people, especially if you've got a uterus, wear a mask when you go protest.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I think also like, how are we going to approach. Obtain proof in this scenario? Right.

[Sophie Lichterman]

What are they going to do?

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's not very easy for us to do. We can't really do a Sort of double blind trial, right?

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah. Somebody brought up like if it was bad for reproductive health, then all of the women in the military because you get tear gassed as part of military training, then that would have shown up before and it hasn't. And I immediately found in about three seconds the largest study done so far on the effect of tear gas that specifically noted. Yeah, they did some studies on hair. Tear gas affects people in the 60s. They didn't look at women, weren't interested, didn't care. Not at all a priority.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Completely ignored it.

[James Stout]

Shocked, shocked to hear this.

[Sophie Lichterman]

So anyway, just like wear a respirator. A half face respirator, you know, is cheaper. I would recommend a full face because tear gas sucks on your eyes. They're not crazy expensive. You don't have to get a nice gas mask, just get a respirator. It's better than nothing.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I, I like my respirator.

[Garrison Davis]

Yep.

[James Stout]

So firstly, just a couple of small things that we wanted to note that we might come back to covering later. First, the US has now admitted that it has a small contingent of troops on the ground in Nigeria. I wrote on my newsletter about U.S. drone strikes in Nigeria, what they're doing there and who, who they're targeting with those drone strikes alongside the it the long running issues with civilian casualties with like airborne raids in Nigeria on my newsletter. So people want to read that they can. And secondly, I wanted to mention that Judge Anna Reyes has stated Secretary Noem's decision that would have rendered 350,000 Haitians without legal status when she was going to let their temporary protected status expire. I have explained TPS several times on ED and in my first Darien series, so I'm not going to go into detail about it here, but if you'd like to listen to those, you can find out more about it to.

[Garrison Davis]

Last thing before our first ad break. Bill and Hillary Clinton have agreed to testify before Congress as a part of the Epstein investigation. A vote to hold the Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress was scheduled for this week before they finally agreed to be deposed at two hearings in late February. And the Clintons have now called for these hearings to be public. This follows a slew of new Epstein documents that were released by the DOJ last week, which. Robert, you'll be, you'll be covering on behind the Basterds soon.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yes, yes, we will be talking about the things revealed in the new Epstein file releases, the 3 million or so documents that just came out. Yes, we'll be talking about that on behind the Bastards.

[Garrison Davis]

Not next week, but the week after.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, probably like the week after. Something like that. There's a lot of good stuff in there. A lot of Brock Pierce in this set of releases. If you've been curious as to what the guy who invented Tether, the cryptocurrency tether, was up to with Jeffrey Epstein, as a spoiler, it was molesting people.

[Garrison Davis]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Oh, dear.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Well, allegedly. We don't know that it was molesting. They were described as girls, repeatedly described as girls in the emails between Brock Pierce, the Mighty Ducks guy, and Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, but that could mean anything, you know, that could mean anything.

[Garrison Davis]

You want to be talking about the Elon Musk emails in there?

[Sophie Lichterman]

There's some Elon stuff in there. It's nothing definitive. The downside of it is Elon has a leg to stand on when he's like, I never went to the island. That said, you can interpret the emails one of two ways, because I saw an Elon Musk fan site be like, see, he was clearly just trying to blow him off. That's not how I interpret Elon's emails to Epstein. I think he really wanted to go to that fuck island.

[James Stout]

What night will the wildest party be? Or something.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, he was like, I wanna know where the. But he was also talking about, like, the whole island area, right? Like, where the wildest parties are that he wanted. Okay, so he does have some plausible deniability, but he was lying about not being in touch with Epstein. And also J.K. rowling in touch with Epstein.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, shit.

[James Stout]

I didn't know that.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Saved him. Yes, saved him. Seats for the opening of her play of the Harry Potter play on Broadway. Got Jeffrey Epstein a seat.

[James Stout]

God, just when you thought she couldn't be a worse fucking person.

[Garrison Davis]

Incredible.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

What a turd. What a disgrace to our national. Yeah, I mean, we have lots of those, I guess, but yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I can't believe this. One person has ruined the reputation of Britain.

[James Stout]

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, previously unblemished in centuries of history.

[Garrison Davis]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Till the turf wizard lady came along.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, the first bad English person.

[Garrison Davis]

Anyway, so, yeah, on February 26th, Hillary will be testifying, and on the 27th, Bill will be testifying in hearings that should be televised live to the public. Interesting. Okay, let's go on break. All right, we're back, and I have fantastic news. Look what. Look what I found. Look what I found, you guys, deep in my archives of misery. Luckily, podcasting is a visual medium. Oh, no, it's audio.

[James Stout]

Okay. What are we about?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, God. All right, I think. I think we get.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I think that's enough for Gotcha.

[James Stout]

Wow.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Do we need any more?

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[James Stout]

I know. Whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

No, we don't.

[James Stout]

Okay. All right. Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Sorry.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, God.

[James Stout]

The fact that video's playing on the background of a large police badge. Really?

[Garrison Davis]

We're voting Donald Trump, baby. So bad. So bad. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that I will not be hearing them perform on Super Bowl Sunday. You can see just the disappointment in my face right now. This Wednesday morning, February 4th, Tom Homan announced that they're pulling 700 federal agents out of Minneapolis, though 2,000 will remain in this city. That's so many agents.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, that's so. That much of the.

[Garrison Davis]

Even 700 sounded like there's still a lot of ICE and Border Patrol on the ground. Wow.

[James Stout]

2000 was a surge that they did earlier this year, like that. That was when they really kind of flooded it with ice agents. So in 2000 is still. In 2000 is still a massive amount of ICE's overall capacity. These aren't all ICE agents. Right. Like, they deputize ATF and Marshalls and.

[Garrison Davis]

Other things, but a lot of Border Patrol guys here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I don't know if that's who the 700, who they're withdrawing are.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a mix. It's not. I don't think they're from just one agency.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah, there are a lot of Border Patrol. You see that a lot. Right? Like, the Border Patrol agents clearly love this. Right. Like, they're getting per dm, they're getting travel pay. They. They make more money than they do on the border, and they. They don't have to, like. Like, drive around in the middle of nowhere. They call it going on safari. Herman has cited an increase in cooperation by Minnesota authorities. He was talking about handing over detained people who would be deportable, I think. But I have not seen a similar statement from state authorities in Minnesota, at least at a time. So, like, take that with a pinch of salt.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Right.

[James Stout]

A lot of what we see coming out of the Trump DHS just straight up isn't true.

[Garrison Davis]

They have been talking about trying to, like, increase the cooperation with ICE detainers in the local, like, prisons and jails.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I think that would be what this cooperation would be. It would be like, either cooperating with ICE detainers or even alerting ICE if they thought someone was deportable.

[Garrison Davis]

An interesting thing of note as well is earlier this week, the military troops that were placed on, like, standby have been unplaced on standby. So not looking like those guys in Alaska or North Carolina will be deploying to Minneapolis. In some other Minneapolis related news, Don Lemon, friend of the pod, was arrested Thursday, January 29, and now faces civil rights charges for allegedly violating the FACE act, which prohibits interfering with reproductive health services or people exercising religious freedom at a place of worship. On January 18, Lemon reported on a protest at City's Church in St. Paul, where one of the pastors is also the head of the local ICE field office. A magistrate judge and an appeals court previously dismissed the charges against Lemon before the case was brought before a grand jury. In Minnesota, six activists and one other journalist are also facing charges. We reported on this protest after it happened and yeah, the DOJ has been trying to pin. Pin Lemon on this for, for the past few weeks.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Probably not a great sign just for, you know, general, general First Amendment activity.

[James Stout]

No, no, that's a pretty, pretty bleak side, actually.

[Garrison Davis]

As frustrating as it is to start waving the Jimmy Kimmel Don Lemon flag, you know, that's, that's, that is the situation we're in.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's not good. The journalist they arrested was the head of the national association of Black Journalists, wasn't she? Georgia Fort is her name. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[James Stout]

I do want to say actually that like when we talk about protections for journalists, like journalists. Yes. Can often be the people who are first targeted for, like, things that violate freedom of speech. Right. Like when governments are going to violate freedom of speech, they can go after journalists first. But like when someone is recording ICE operations, they are doing citizen journalism, they are protected by exactly the same rights that we have as journalists who are doing this as our full time job. There isn't a special first amendment for us. And so when the border patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, they killed someone who was at that time engaged in journalism too. And like, I'm happy to see journalistic bodies standing up not just for people who are employed as full time journalists, but all of our rights to document and record.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And all of the legal observers who are filming ICE as well that are being targeted with intimidation, being pulled over.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Having guns pointed at them, etc.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Do you want to talk about the Senate funding for ice?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, do I. So the, the partial government shutdown which did start last week, was ended on Tuesday after the DHS bill was stripped out of the now 1.2 trillion dollar annual funding package. DHS's funding will lapse on Friday the 13th. And negotiate.

[James Stout]

Why not?

[Garrison Davis]

While negotiations continue on a DHS funding bill Congressional Democrats are pushing for agency reforms like judicial warrants and no masked agents while Republicans are signaling minor concessions like having border patrol and I swear, body cameras.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Should we talk a little bit more about body cameras?

[Garrison Davis]

You know what my favorite topic, let's talk about body cameras again.

[James Stout]

I love to talk about a body worn camera.

[Garrison Davis]

Time is a flat circle.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Okay. So Kristy Noem this week announced that ICE agents in Minnesota were going to wear body worn cameras going forward. And I've been kind of disappointed a lot of the reporting on this. What is I think missing is that like there was a 2022 executive order, right, signed by Biden that ordered federal law enforcement to use body worn cameras. Funding for them was included in the 2021 fiscal year appropriations bill. GNOME has said they will grow the program as funds become available. But those funds have been available for some time. Right. In 2024 document ICE document that talked about their pilot program study. They said quote, full implementation is expected by September 30, 2025. Eagle Eared listeners will notice that it's in the past. However in 2025 ice began rolling this back. They issued a directive which which continued only implementing the body worn camera program in the certain pilot program cities. The Trump administration its second term has called Congress to cut funding for body worn cameras by 75% and reduce the staffing of the body worn camera program from 22 people to just three. They have also cut oversight offices within DHS like OIDO. OIDO is like the niches level of DHS understander when you know of OIDO. I think Biden created it. I've actually I've seen them once. It's the office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. They came to the outdoor detention sites in Hakumba which seems to be something of a concession that the Biden administration at the time denied. People were detained in those sites. It had 100 plus employees at start of the Trump administration. It also has three now. According to Reuters, this most recent bill as Garrison said, does include funding and a mandate for their use. A federal judge in Chicago had already ordered agents there to wear cameras in November of last year. I should note that I also looked up the ICE body worn camera policy and it theoretically now insofar as any of these policies are being followed right. It prohibits them for using body worn cameras for the quote sole purpose of recording people engaged in first amendment protected activities. So they can just use their phones for that. I guess that's, that's what they've been doing.

[Garrison Davis]

I Mean, yeah, this is like part of the frustration around this bill is you do have Schumer pushing for certain things like, like not wearing masks and not doing the roving raids will also emphasize, you know, we want the masks off and the cameras on, as if that's going to affect the behavior of agents on the ground. Meanwhile, during the killing of Renee Good, the officer that that shot and killed her was filming the whole thing on his phone like he was filming on his own cell phone. So obvious. Obviously, having a camera on the agent is not going to prevent them from.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Killing someone because they think it's good what they're doing. They don't think it's bad. You have to understand that both the.

[James Stout]

Agents who shot Alex Pretty actually had body worn cameras. I know. They're actually CBP agents. So a CBP or bp, I should say. Right? Customs of Border Protection.

[Garrison Davis]

One. One of them is cpb, one of them is bp.

[James Stout]

That's correct. Yeah, that's. They're both CBP agents. But within CBP you have BP and ofo. Okay. They get really mad if you get this wrong. They will send me an email. Okay. Literally, I got an email once for the subject line. Come on, man. So they were both Customs and Border Protection agents. Generally. Border Patrol. Border Patrol is part of Customs of Border Protection. Right. The other part of the Office of Field Operations. Border Patrol ceased using their cameras early in the Trump administration, citing an issue with the Bluetooth used by the cameras that could make them detectable. This is a thing that can happen, like it is possible. There's a GitHub script for this. Whether that justifies stopping using them is an entirely different question. Both the agents in the Pretty shooting were wearing body cams, but we have not seen that footage. The two agents have been identified by ProPublica as Border Patrol agent Jesus Jesse Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Field Operations Officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Ochoa joined 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014. Gutierrez is part of the Office of Field Operations Special Response Team. That is generally a team with training and weapons and tactics who would serve high risk warrants, do raids like a SWAT style. Yeah, it's another word for swat, I think because SWAT became somewhat, you know, they decided they wanted a different word for it.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[James Stout]

ProPublica got an interview with the CHOA's ex wife who said, quote, by the time the couple split in 2021, he had become a gun enthusiast with about 25 rifles, pistols and shotguns. In so much as that matters, I guess that was the only interview they could get about them. Both of the men are from South Texas.

[Garrison Davis]

To circle back to the funding bill for DHS and these potential reforms being pushed for at, you know, multiple levels of the Democratic establishment. You know, with Schumer being a little bit lighter and obviously people like AOC and Talib pushing for more extreme measures like abolishing the agency of ice, which is unlikely to happen in this funding bill as the Republicans control Congress. But still there is a spectrum of beliefs among the party at the moment. And to get a look at what average regular registered Democrats believe, there's a new poll from YouGov that came out this week based on data from late January, early February that have 79% of Democrats saying they support abolishing ICE. Abolishing ICE is also up 8 points with independence and more people overall support abolishing ICE at 46% to 44% opposing.

[James Stout]

So just to finish up on our immigration coverage for the week, we also saw Judge COBB in the D.C. district Court grant a tentative restraining order that prevents DHS from denying Congress people the right to inspect immigration detention facilities without notice. Previously DHS had been asserting that they had a seven day period of notice that they had to give before they could inspect detention facilities. The judge has found that like that's not justified. Another eight attorneys have left or announced intentions to leave the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota. They are now operating at less than half the capacity of assistant USA attorneys that they had in the early Biden administration. They've also lost several non attorney staff and the Star Tribune reports that this is due to concerns about selective prosecution and the exclusion of state and local investigators from the good and pretty cases in court yesterday one federal prosecutor said, and I'm quoting from the transcript here, this system sucks. This job sucks. Another quotation. I'm here just trying to make sure that the agency understand how important it is to comply with all the court orders which they have not done in the past or currently. I am here as a bridge and a liaison between the one that in jail because if I walk out sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I could have a full 24 hours of sleep. Yikes. This is a person on the ragged edge. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That is someone who is breaking.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you can look up her caseload and it is legitimately insane and has only got bigger since the start of the year. You can see why people are quitting this job even if they don't have a moral issue with it because an inhumane amount of work yet again.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Like, I'm not. I'm not coming at this from a point of a lot of sympathy, but it's funny.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. It's just funny. It's funny to see them so obviously frustrated that their agencies are just not complying with what they ask them to. Actually, I was reading the transcript today. I was judging the case, was like, look, you can tell me the agencies are not complying, but, like, if I have a problem in the restaurant, I don't walk in there and try and find the exact person who's baking the bread. I talk to the restaurant, and the restaurant sorted out, you are part of the executive branch. This is on you. Like, it was a good little, Little court exchange. And then finally, NBC has obtained a leaked email from Greg Bevino showing tensions between himself and Todd Lyons. Lyons is the acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Lyons attempted to prevent Bavino from engaging in widespread sweeps in which agents kind of roam around, check papers on anyone they think might not be a citizen and encourage him to do targeted operations instead. And then Mr. Bovino said in the email, quote, Mr. Lyon said he was in charge. And I corrected him, saying, I report to Corey Lewandowski. Garrison's just made a face for those.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And if you want to hear more about our dear buddy Greg, Robert and I recorded an episode with Jack o' Brien for Behind the Bastards that's dropping next Thursday.

[James Stout]

Oh, sick.

[Garrison Davis]

All about Greg Bevino. Yeah, Greg's been on a bit of a. A tour on his way back to California.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, he's been.

[James Stout]

He went to Mount Rushmore to record, like, a moto video, and then he was spotted drinking a glass of red wine in Las Vegas. Yeah, it seems like they made him.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Road trip like a weirdo. Who's drinking? You're drinking the house wine at a casino in Vegas. Come the fuck on, Greg.

[Garrison Davis]

Grow up, Greg.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, have a fucking cocktail. Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

I think he's back in Imperial now, but whatever. It seems that they made him take a road trip home. They didn't fly him back, wouldn't spring.

[Sophie Lichterman]

For the plane trip.

[James Stout]

Yeah, he's quite remarkable.

[Garrison Davis]

Incredible. Gestapo. Unbelievable. All right, we are back. Last Wednesday, January 28th, the FBI executed a raid on the Fulton county election office outside of Atlanta, Georgia, as a part of an investigation into Trump's claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. The Special Agent in charge of the FBI Atlanta field office resigned a week before the warrant was served. This search warrant was signed by a United States Magistrate judge and it instructed investigators to seize, quote, all records relating to violations of Title 52, U.S. code 20701 and 20511, with these violations occurring, quote, after October 12, 2020, unquote. The former statute here, 20701, relates to retaining and preserving election records for 22 months after an election, and the latter, 20511, relates to voter fraud or threats, intimidation and coercion against voters. The records that were to be seized are listed on the warrant as, quote, all physical ballots from the 2020 general election in Fulton county, all tabulator tapes for every voting machine, all ballot images produced during the original ballot count, all voter rolls from the 2020 general election in Fulton county from absentee, early and in person voting and any electronically stored information relevant to those items above. The Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory, said that Federal officials took 700 boxes of ballots and curiously, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared at the site of the search and had a phone call with Trump after the raid concluded. Gabbard sent a letter to Congress on Monday claiming, quote, my presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence relating to election security, including counterintelligence, foreign and other malign influences and cybersecurity, unquote. She also wrote on X the Everything app, quote, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has and will continue to take action under my statutory authorities to secure our nation and ensure the integrity of our elections. I will include here that four days before January 6, 2021, Trump told Georgia's top election official to, quote, unquote, find enough votes to overturn the election. Here's a recording of that phone call.

[Robert Evans]

All I want to do is this. I just want to find.

[James Stout]

11,780 votes.

[Garrison Davis]

The Trump administration has made multiple unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the 2020 Georgia ballots through civil suits. Now they have just turned to executing search Warrant through the FBI. On February 1st, Mike Johnson was asked about potential election meddling in Georgia. Here is this exchange from NBC News.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

What do you say to that allegation.

[Garrison Davis]

That President Trump is going to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections?

[Sophie Lichterman]

That that's what he's doing in Georgia?

[Robert Evans]

I find it comical that one of the senators from Georgia is talking about schemes in elections. Remember, Georgia was example a of that in the 2020 election there were two.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Statewide recounts in Georgia.

[Robert Evans]

In this state, mail out ballots to everyone. Everyone knows all of the problems that occurred in Georgia. It was very controversial and remains so to this day, because of all the things that happened there, again, we're not going to relitigate that. But what we have to focus on is going forward to ensure that there are not questions about the elections. And that's why Republicans are working at the, at the federal and the state levels to clean those things up, to clean up voter rolls, to make sure illegals are not voting, for example. That's what the SAVE act is about. And we have to continue that. And the president is keeping a proper focus on it. This investigation is to ensure that all the questions about the election in Fulton county are investigated properly so that people have confidence in the system. Again, that's very important.

[Garrison Davis]

But there are really no questions about.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Election integrity from 2020 that have not been asked and answered. Even the Republican.

[Robert Evans]

Nope, Nope.

[Garrison Davis]

The Republican led governor has pointed out.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It'S been years and no one has.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Ever come forward under oath with evidence of fraud in Georgia. But let me ask you.

[Garrison Davis]

Pretty absurd stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We're not going to relitigate it as we relitigate it.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

And just giving no evidence, just being like, oh, it's very controversial.

[Garrison Davis]

Everyone knows, like such a weaselly answer.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Republican Governor Brian Kemp has been very clear that there was absolutely no fraud happening in Georgia during 2020. And if there was any attempt to meddle with the election, it is this phone call that Trump made to the Georgia Secretary of State.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Asking to find a certain number of votes that itself should have resulted in Trump going to prison. Like South Korea style. Like, you're done, you're finished. You can't, can't do that.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That is like the most transparent election interference.

[Garrison Davis]

The way that Trump's court case in Fulton county related to his attempts to meddle in the 2020 election is just a complete disaster due to corruption within the Fulton county court system itself. One of the worst things to happen during this, like, Biden era is the mishandling of the court cases around Trump's attempts to over overturn the election. Y and especially like looking at what, what South Korea did after their president tried to take over the country a year or two ago is like, oh, yeah, that's very clearly what we should have done with this guy.

[James Stout]

Yeah. People, people could have done better.

[Garrison Davis]

And Mike Johnson just keeps making really concerning statements on the news about, about quote, unquote, nationalizing elections. Follow up on elections.

[Robert Evans]

The president says that he wants Republicans to nationalize elections. Do you agree with him and do.

[Garrison Davis]

You have questions, confidence in how elections are conducted right now?

[Robert Evans]

Heading into the midterm. We have thoughtful debate about our election system every election cycle and sometimes in between. We know it's in our system the states have been in charge of administering their elections. What you're hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things.

[Garrison Davis]

Mike Johnson goes on to discuss possible fraud in California specifically, though admits that he has no evidence of said fraud. One more clip.

[Robert Evans]

In some of the states, like in California, for example, I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after election day. That's just one thing that bothers so many people. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after election day. Were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just, it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream. But we need more confidence in the American people in the election system.

[Garrison Davis]

Absurd.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Completely bonkers.

[Garrison Davis]

Sir. I fear that more ballots have been counted and results have changed.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's what elections are.

[Garrison Davis]

You cannot place a vote in California after election day. No. But they do count mail in ballots that have been postmarked on or before election day, which is what he's referencing. But he's. Yeah, miss, he's, he's purposely misconstruing it to make it sound way more, way more nefarious than what it actually is. If you've placed a mail in vote on or before election day in California, that vote will be counted. Yeah, that is, that is how the elections in California work. Not this magically keeping keeping the election open for, for weeks afterwards. People can continue to vote. That's, that's not, that's not true. It's giving, like, a very specific sports reference where the announcers like, like, and.

[Robert Evans]

The team with the most points won the game.

[Garrison Davis]

That's literally what he's doing. He's like, as, as the votes were counted, the results changed, they changed and someone won. Who is not what I wanted to happen.

[James Stout]

Yeah, Shock horror.

[Garrison Davis]

Can I prove there's fraud?

[Mia Wong]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

But will I continue to say there's fraud? Yes.

[James Stout]

Mike Johnson, it had been reported that they were trying to leverage the ICE raids in Minnesota against getting electoral roll information from Minnesota as well.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[James Stout]

So, like, this is, this is not just his fascination with, with Georgia. Like, this is all deeply concerning as we go into, like, midterm year, but.

[Robert Evans]

We will find out soon.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh yeah, especially as Congress is the entity that is is supposed to be there to help to ensure that states run the elections fairly and that we do not have a nationalized voting system.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And the fact that the speaker of the House seems to be unaware siding siding with the Executive branch with this idea of it of nationalizing elections or at least trying to like manufacture consent for Trump's Trump's claim there Very, very worrying. I now want to update a story we talked about almost a year ago. Based on some new information that has come out in January, a judge has unsealed a State department memo from March 2025 that confirms that Ramesa Ozturk's visa was revoked and the government sought to deport her on the basis of Ozturk co authoring an op ed in the student newspaper at Tufts University. This memo admits that DHS could not provide any evidence that USTURK ever engaged in any anti Semitic activity, was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine, or has ever expressed support for terrorism as claimed by government officials. Last year, Trisha McLaughlin told CNN at the time of Usturk's arrest that DHS and ICE investigations had found that USTURK had, quote, engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Unquote. On the contrary, this newly unsealed memo from the State Department reads, quote, while USTURK has been involved with actions protesting Tufts relationship with Israel, dhs, ICE or Homeland Security Investigations has not, however, provided any evidence showing that Ozturk has engaged in any anti Semitic activity or made any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or anti Semitism generally, unquote. The memo goes on to state that though a previous DHS report, quote, implies a connection between AUSTURK and the now banned Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, the report presents no evidence other than austerk's membership in Graduate Students for Palestine, which supported proposals to Tufts which were also supported by Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine. Nor has dhs, ICE or HSI shown any evidence that ASTURK was involved in any of the activities which resulted in Students for Justice in Palestine being suspended from Tufts, unquote. The Bureau of Consular Affairs Visa Office identified no reporting specific to AustURC on US government interagency databases, according to this memo, and Interagency Vetting Partners did not provide any response to Austerk's 2024 visa application, quote, indicating the existence of derogatory terrorism related information. I'll read the final Quote here from this memo, quote. DHS did not identify any alternative grounds for removability that would be applicable to austurk, including the ground for removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity, and has not indicated whether it plans to consider termination of U.S. turk's SEVIS registration. Although information provided by DHS, Homeland Security Investigations and ICE does not establish any potential ineligibility for US Turk, you may, in your discretion and in accordance with department policy in 9 FAM 40311 5B, approve revocation of her F1 visa, effect immediately based on the totality of the circumstances presented, indicating that revocation may be warranted, unquote. The only evidence held against her in the memo is that she wrote an op ed. You still can revoke her visa if you want to.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. And that is pretty much the. The wave. Student visas especially work. Right. Like you're just here at the pleasure of US politics. Essentially.

[Garrison Davis]

The fact that this memo openly says they do not have evidence to support the claims that she's involved in anti Semitic activity on campus, supports Hamas in any way. The fact that we have. You have the government saying that in these internal documents, while externally people like Trish McLaughlin and Rubio say otherwise, is such a naked display of the sort of rhetoric that these people are using. Secretary Rubio claimed at a press conference on March 27, 2025, quote, we revoked her visa. It's an F1 visa. I believe we revoked it. And here's why. If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we're not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we're going to take away your visa, unquote.

[James Stout]

I mean, she didn't tell them that she was engaged in that kind of activity. She was engaged.

[Garrison Davis]

That's just not what happened.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And DHS admits itself that she was not involved in the activity, the protest activity that resulted in Students for Justice in Palestine being banned from campus, which included vandalism. But DHS says that they do not have evidence that she was involved in that in any way, nor had any direct association with that group. In December, a federal judge allowed US Turk to continue her research and teaching at Tufts University on the basis that she is likely to succeed on the claim that her visa termination was, quote, arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and in violation of the First Amendment. The court case related to her removal proceedings will still continue.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Pretty bleak.

[Garrison Davis]

That was. That was.

[Hans Charles]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Wow.

[James Stout]

I guess. Talking of bleak, should I finish up with a summary of the situation in Syria?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, give us a Syria update.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Okay. So the AANES has reached a settlement with the stg. The aanes, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, AKA Rojava, and the STG being the Syrian Transitional Government that will result in the withdrawal of troops from the points of contact as well as the withdrawal of SDF troops from Kamishlo and Hesaka and the entry of the Syrian Ministry of the Interior. There are about 90 Ministry of Interior people going into Qamishlo and 100 in Hezekiah. These are essentially like Syrian feds, I guess. Right. Integration of the SDF will occur as brigades of the Syrian army deployed in Derrick. If you're looking at a map, it's probably going to say Al Malikaya, Delhi being the Kurdish name. Kamishlo, Heseka and Kobani. These forces will be largely Kurdish, but they will also include Assyrian and an Arab element, as the SDF always has. I imagine they'll probably be Armenians as well. They nearly always are, certainly in the sdf. Since the beginning, there have been. The agreement also included the integration of the Ashaish into the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, the government takeover of oil fields and borders, and a recognition of Kurdish education credentials across the country. The AANES will appoint a governor in Hessika and the security chief will be appointed by Damascus. The SDF will also appoint a deputy defense minister in Damascus. The SDG appointed Marwan Al Ali to oversee security. He previously did this for HTS in Idlib. Turiya Al Sham. Right, that's the. The group that was formerly listed as a foreign terrorist organization in the US has gone on to take over Syria and become the government in Damascus. And he sort of oversaw their purge of Huras Al Din, which is like an Al Qaeda associated group group in Idlib. Shortly after the deal was signed, the Syrian traditional government began accusing journalists who entered via Samalka, as I have done, and Robber has done, of having entered Syria illegally, which great, I guess Turkey has continued to prevent aid coming to Kobani where water and power remain cut off. Pretty bleak situation in Rojava. I'm glad that there is no more killing and no more dying, but also sad to see some of the things that so many people fought and died for being lost. Especially this idea of brotherhood of peoples which I think was integral to the Rojava revolution and the women's revolution, which like it will be very hard to sustain in the context of a state led by hts. Pretty upsetting stuff. I know that they can still use your support, so I will put a fundraising link for Haversour at the bottom of this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Good time to be alive.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah. Great, great stuff happening in the world.

[James Stout]

Yeah. If you would like to email us, you can email us using a Proton mail address to email our Proton mail address which is coolzonetips. Proton me.

[Garrison Davis]

Mia's not here but she would say put a trans girl on your couch. So I'll say it for put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news.

[Sophie Lichterman]

The news.

[James Stout]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

Hey.

[Sophie Lichterman]

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

[Garrison Davis]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

[Garrison Davis]

Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

[Robert Evans]

Thanks for listening.

[Ryder Strong]

This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called the red weather. In 1995 my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune.

[Robert Evans]

It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your and.

[Ryder Strong]

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[Garrison Davis]

They have had this case for 30 years.

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[Garrison Davis]

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