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- [00:01]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
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B
Yay.
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A
Kathy Bates. Dolly Parton. Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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B
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst.
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A
No way of knowing which way it's.
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B
Going Hope for the best Expect the.
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A
Worst Hope for the best.
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B
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, January 8, 2026. I'm Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:40]
C
Hi, John.
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B
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:45]
D
Hi, John.
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B
Eliana. Your native town and my mother's native town once again has become the epicenter of American instability, social division, confrontations between law enforcement and individuals, and leftist madness. It's not what I expected from my. The town of my grandparents, which was a boring, slow, small, famously nice place. But that is, the Twin Cities are now something entirely different. And of course, we saw this. We have seen it from 100, not 100 angles. Five or six or seven different angles. This incident yesterday, where Regina Good in a. In a car, was shot to death by an ICE agent or two ICE agents. We don't know who shot where, when, what bullet was responsible for her death, as her car was in motion, apparently aiming at or in the direction of one of the two ICE agents that she was involved, who were there because there was a protest against ICE's presence in Minneapolis. So I've been going insane for the last 12 hours, so I don't know that I can talk about this rationally without getting nuts, simply because of the reaction, which seems to be among people who wish to believe the worst of ice, and I myself have problems with ice, have presumed that this was an illicit, illegal, indictable, convictable use of excessive force, which is not what I see at all. And so I am in that weird world of either they're crazy or I'm crazy or they're insanely biased and I'm. Or I'm insanely biased, but I don't really know that I'm biased because I don't think that my perspective is biased by, you know, ideology here. But then you. One wouldn't think that of oneself, so can anybody. Christine, you're a rational person. You're a calm.
- [04:20]
E
You're a calmer person than I am.
- [04:22]
D
I'm glad you just skipped right over me, John, because.
- [04:24]
C
No, I think Eliana has.
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B
I was just letting that crusade first.
- [04:28]
C
It's Eliana's grenade right now.
- [04:33]
B
I did not mean to suggest that Eliana was not a common reaction incorrectly.
- [04:37]
D
Just skip. Went right to Christine. Correct.
- [04:39]
C
I want to hear Eliana's take and then I'll offer my own.
- [04:42]
B
You have, you have a passionate perspective on certain types of things. And so not that you don't all. But Christine, can you.
- [04:54]
C
So I, I. Okay, so maybe part of the reason I don't feel crazy is that I am notoriously not on social media. So I don't, I don't really. People send me things all the time, which I appreciate and read, but I don't feel I don't have a feed that is serving anything up to me on either side of these debates. I also have several close friends in federal law enforcement who I often turn to and ask when things like this happen for some perspective from that perspective, which I think often doesn't get in the immediate aftermath of an event like this. We don't hear that perspective from officers on the ground because they're not allowed to speak about it, because an investigation, if you fire your weapon, investigation begins immediately. And so you're not allowed to talk to the press. And so we. What you hear from the federal law enforcement perspective is either people like Kristi Noem, who I think should just be quiet because everything she does is make situations like this worse. More reasonable, I think, was Tom Homan's response at first where he said, I really wasn't there. I wasn't on the ground and there's an investigation and we should let that proceed. That's the appropriate response. I think what's the perspective here is valuable because obviously the people, many people in Minneapolis don't want ICE there. But interfering with federal law enforcement at any level is a. Is a criminal offense. And even if, as I agree with you, John, and I think a lot of people who looked at these videos would agree, even if she was panicked and trying to leave after having blocked traffic. She was actually actively blocking traffic at the time. Even if she panicked and floored it and was trying to leave, that itself is still an offense. That's a criminal offense. So even if she had not been shot and killed, she likely would have been placed under arrest for the, that she clearly endangered the life of an officer who was standing in front of her. And she did all of that because she chose to put herself between federal law enforcement officers and their job. And they have been harassed repeatedly. There are death threats against them. They mask in part not to look like thugs, but because if their faces are made available on people's social media feeds, their families get threatened. There's a whole. The fear that some of these officers have to live with and their families have to live with is real. It's genuine. And so I think that also gets overwhelmed, overlooked in some of the mainstream media reports. I think this is a tragedy. That's what this is. This woman clearly believed she was doing something virtuous and patriotic and important. And she got herself in a situation that quickly became real in a way that maybe in her mind and among her protest culture was not real. It was fun, it was, you know, bonding. It was all these things. And now the mother of three children is dead and ICE is now once again, you know, there are protests, there's protests against ice. ICE officers will receive more threats. Again, it's bad, but it's a tragedy. And I don't think that it's. The narratives we've seen come out so far have been at all helpful. I think the investigation should happen. All the rhetoric from people like Governor Waltz and Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis, is harmful. They have no jurisdiction here. These are federal law enforcement officers. They can't prosecute them. So I think that that is meant as a political cudgel and it's detrimental for everyone for these discussions. So it's a tragedy and we should talk about it as a tragedy. But with that being said, clear eyed about the threat to law enforcement, which happens every day and particularly lately in as I know Eliana knows because she was sending us some good reports on this in Minneapolis. This has been a very recent and consistent campaign against ice.
- [08:29]
F
So what gets me is.
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B
I get.
- [08:33]
F
Sickened when, and we've had a lot of these over the past few years, when the country's politics come down to some hostile encounter somewhere. In this case, fatal. It's not always fatal. Sometimes it's fatal, sometimes it's captured on film or whatever on by A phone by a camera, Sometimes it's not. And everyone immediately sort of decides what happened. And we've seen so many times, excuse me, that it's never that clear at first blush. This goes from everything from the Covington Catholic kids to, frankly, the George Floyd event to Kyle Rittenhouse to like, whatever, you know. And it's an immediate hardened dividing line that makes. That ensures that no one sees or tries to continue to see, to get to what's actually happening, except, of course, the legal system.
- [09:41]
B
So let's flip this ideologically from, you know, anti maga, anti, you know, leftist, to write everybody, unfortunately, I wish I hadn't seen it, saw Ashley Babbitt shot and killed on January 6, 2021. The fact that that was a Rorschach test, when it was clear that the officer in question who shot Ashley Babbitt was in fear for her life, that doesn't matter. We have the White House issuing this potted counter history of January 6th on Monday, or whatever it was, calling her a martyr or something like that. I saw the footage repeatedly with my own eyes. You saw the expression on the law enforcement officer's face as the riot was going on. And people start saying things about what goes on in the head of a law enforcement officer in the middle of these situations that I wouldn't even say are just irresponsible, but come from a body of fantasy about what law enforcement is like, a lot of which is created by our Media experiences over 100 years of the depiction of what it is that we good cops and bad cops do. So I will tell you just a little bit about what I know about policing that I learned when I was the editorial page editor of the New York Post during the Giuliani years. And I had extensive briefings and experience with the nypd, including its where it teaches people how to shoot near City island in the Bronx and comstat and all of that. And it goes like this. An officer who is in reasonable fear that violence is going to be inflicted upon him has a right to use lethal force to prevent injury against himself. We grant law enforcement officers alone among the people in this country are given the right to use force against another. We. You are allowed, you are obviously allowed to defend yourself. If you're a private citizen in the middle of, you know, a robbery or, you know, someone comes and attacks you, you can attack back. The monopoly on the use of force is one of the features of a civilized society. We empower people. We train them, we license them. They have badges and they are Subject to regulatory oversight and criminal oversight and stuff like that. And here is what they are told, because this matters in relation to how this officer may have discharged his gun. They are told to shoot at the head or at the torso of the person who is threatening them. They are not told to go 100 meters and shoot somebody in the leg like a sniper. They're not told that they can figure out how to disable somebody by shooting them in the hand. Because people are not magical figures who have unbelievable control over their weapons. They are told to shoot at the largest part of the body in order to prevent innocent bystanders from getting hit by stray bullets. In other words, since they are in a position where they have to make split second decisions, they go through months of training to learn how to behave in the moment of crisis. And what they are told to do is to dispatch the threat as effectively as possible while limiting the possible exogenous damage to anybody else present. So that when you see in these videos that this one bullet hole in the windowsill. Excuse me, in the windowsill, in the, in the. What do you call it now? I'm losing control windshield. When you see that, you're like the officer literally is acting in nanoseconds, takes out his gun, aims it and fires it directly at the target that he believes is threatening his life as possible. Not he jumps out of the way to prevent her from doing him damage. Not he can let her go and then they'll copy his license, her license plate number and arrest her later. These are also second decisions.
- [14:34]
C
Okay, can I add that their training isn't just what you've described, which is completely accurate. I had the opportunity to do some weapons disarm training with part of our group was federal law and current federal law enforcement. They spend a huge amount of time training how to disarm people with lethal weapons so that they don't have to actually ever draw their own. And that is an extensively. It's really complicated, dangerous way of disarming. But that is also in this case. I think that's where we need to talk about the fact that it's a car, not. And so you do not have the option of disarming your opponent or in any way trying to de escalate the situation. They spend a huge amount of time on de escalation. They do not want to draw their weapons. And I do think we should note that a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the anti ice, you know, Democratic left right now wants to bring up statistics of when regular police officers have drawn their weapons on people in cars and oh, there have been these terrible shootings. And that's true. There's a whole discussion about that. There is a real distinction in a line we must keep drawing about federal law enforcement operations versus local police. Federal law enforcement training is much more intense in most cases, and these agents go through much, many different training regimens that a local police officer might not have had. So I think that's. It's really important to add that, like, they are trained not to ever have to draw their weapons unless it's literally life and death for them or others.
- [15:55]
D
Before we get there. I mean, in terms of the details of this, I agree with Abe. And you know, we, all of us, I think, were trying to watch this video and there were several different versions and we're analyzing the different angles. And my takeaway, you know, we were talking on text last night, was that it's really hard to have a full view of this just from analyzing the video. And Tom Homan spoke to that when he said there's going to be investigate an investigation and we will learn more. It's hard to know what the. The woman who was shot, which. What her intention was, and it's hard to know what the officer himself was thinking when he did this. It does seem right now that we do know that the woman was using her vehicle to obstruct the ICE operations, which is a crime. She then ice. The ICE officers approached her vehicle on foot and asked her to get out of her car, and she defied their orders and she then tried to flee them in her car. And my takeaway from those things were that she created these tragic circumstances where something like this could happen. It's clear those are a bad set of facts. And I also blame the local officials in Minnesota, the governor and Tim Walls, and the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Fry, whose response to this yesterday was say we'll wait for the investigation, but this was obviously totally unjustified. And f. ICE and Walls, who said, I'm considering deploying the National Guard against them for ratcheting up the temperature so much such that he encouraged citizens to go out and essentially thwart. To commit crimes against. Against law enforcement and to thwart them. So I blame them for contributing to this. And in fact, before we got on the podcast, we were talking about the fact that something exactly like this happened on Monday. But it was. It was not an American citizen. It was an illegal immigrant who rammed an ICE agent with his car. So there is an atmosphere in Minneapolis where people are assaulting ICE agents And it's not dissimilar from, you know, the Ashley Babbitt thing, John, where she defied the orders of a federal, Federal law enforcement and created a tragic set of conditions.
- [18:36]
B
Now, listen, last night when we were discussing this on our group chat, I was far less, I was far more, and I felt far more ambiguously about this than I came to feel as the evening progressed and Abe and I had a little disagreement at which I said, ICE does not have jurisdiction, if you will, in terms of interdiction of. They're not conventional law enforcement officers. Their enforcement power is over non citizens like the Cuban that you mentioned. And they, they are not, for example, in a place where if you walk down the block and an ICE agent says, you halt and you're an American citizen, you don't really have to halt, if you see what I'm saying. Like, they do not have jurisdiction over you. A New York City, a police officer does. A local. It's like if a soldier, if you're walking down the street and there was a, someone in military uniform who said halt to you, you are not under their jurisdiction on a New York City or any, any street in America. They do not have law enforcement powers or, you know, or authority over you in a circumstance unless they've been given.
- [19:55]
C
Legal power, cover for that. Right, Like National Guard.
- [19:58]
B
Okay. But I'd bring that up to say that my bias when I first saw this was, you know, this, this, this is in a different realm of how we're going to discuss this, because ICE is a weird amalgam. It's a law enforcement agency whose officers have the right to use lethal force in the monopoly of violence sense that we use under, you know, common law with our, with the people that we empower to arrest and detain people and to protect, keep themselves safe and others safe as they, as they do so. But that as I watched the clip over and over and over again, she was aiming at him with her. Or he had a reasonable, he had a, he had a reasonable person standard for thinking that she was going to try to run him over with her car. And whether he is an ICE agent or he is a guy standing on a street with a car aiming at him and happens to have a gun, a legally obtained and licensed gun, right. He would be allowed to shoot her because he had a reasonable, per the law, mens rea says if you have a reasonable expectation of injury being done to you, you are allowed to defend yourself. In this case, it doesn't matter whether, in that way, whether he was Ice or not. The only thing.
- [21:32]
D
There's also no world in which any American citizen has the right to use their car to impede ice's ability to try to do its job.
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B
You know, colder days, New year, It's.
- [21:49]
E
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- [22:20]
B
Isn't that an amazing thing?
- [22:21]
E
Isn't that an endorsement? That's what I call an endorsement. So, look, I've had the sweaters. I now have the puffer jacket.
- [22:28]
B
Get them.
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E
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- [25:00]
B
You're not allowed to use your car as a weapon or as a threat like but this.
- [25:08]
D
Tried to stop ICE from carrying out what it was doing and she then used it as it to try to flee the scene. And even if I think in trying to flee the scene she at least wasn't trying to avoid hitting the officer as she left.
- [25:23]
B
Right. But I think this is important because.
- [25:26]
C
There'S been a culture. One of the things that might have motivated her to think this wasn't a big deal to show up and use her car to block ICE agents is what Eliana was pointing to, which is a culture of encouragement. But also there's been for a long time now, and particularly since George Floyd, there's been a culture of tolerance for people making I mean this happened in D.C. and many other cities, human chains blocking major intersections and major streets and major highways. Whether it's for climate change or for anti racism or whatever it is. And those people are rarely ever prosecuted and they're often never removed by law enforcement. Law enforcement shows up and just kind of stands around and you know, normal citizens citizens lives are impeded, people can't get to the hospital and all these other issues come up. But there's been too much tolerance of that form of civil disorder which is not legal. It is not legal to block highways because you think climate change is a threat. You're not allowed to do that. But we are not enforcing our own rules here. And so that's been going on among the protest community for a very long time. They think they can get away with this and they have.
- [26:29]
B
Well, we have the governor of Minnesota who obviously has political difficulties at the present moment that caused him to stand down from running for reelection for a third term, who is clearly weaponizing this moment to get himself out of trouble and get himself into the good graces of people who might otherwise run the hell away from him in the other direction. What did he say yesterday that is beyond imagining? He said that he was consider effectively considering deploying the Minnesota National Guard to protect Minnesotans against ice, a federal law enforcement agency. This let's go back to 1957. What if Lester Maddox had deployed the. Alabama was Alabama, right? Lester Maddox. Do I have the state right? I can't remember. Anyway, George Wallace or Lester Maddox or whoever. Deploying the National Guard to defend the segregationists against the federal law enforcement officers who are, I believe, actually National Guardsmen activated by the President United States to escort kids into schools that had been ordered desegregated. I mean, everyone can pull out an example from the past. He wants a confrontation between the National Guard under his command and the federal government's law enforcement officers. And this is the guy who was going to be vice President of the United States. And only, you know, was not because of the loss of whatever it was. The thing. Several hundred thousand votes in three states.
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F
The thing I've noticed and like, forgive me because my connection's bad if this was sort of touched on and I'm just repeating things, but the culture of protest has suddenly jumped.
- [28:44]
B
The.
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F
We are now in the culture because of Trump of obstruction. The message changed to stop these ICE agents, get in their way. Don't let them come into our community. Don't let federal agents of any type come in. Don't let them do their jobs. Which is a very, very different message than come out. Show your support, bring your placards, you know, bring your chants. This is something different. And this began the second Trump took office.
- [29:25]
B
It began before Trump took office. This was Noor Rothman's point in article he wrote for commentary in 2016 that the idea was that protest against the rising threat of Trump during the election campaign of 2016 merited and justified acts of violence against Trump supporters, particularly in San Jose, California. That's actually sort of one of the inciting moments, aside from, you know, previous ones like Ferguson, Missouri and others, where the idea was it's, you know, the mostly peaceful protests of Ferguson led then to the mostly peaceful protests in the Twin Cities that involved burning buildings down and having reporters from CNN saying, standing in front of a burning Dollar Store saying, this is burning police station violence. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- [30:19]
C
Can I also.
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B
Dollar Store, some Dollar Store burned down also.
- [30:22]
C
Somewhere was that, well, and someone did die. I don't know about that.
- [30:27]
D
Literally a burning police precinct and them standing in front of it saying, right, Mostly peaceful process.
- [30:33]
B
Remember I said we need Nombinsman point.
- [30:36]
C
About the difference between the escalation not just in rhetoric but in behavior. We need to talk about the radicalization of liberal, largely white women. Because there is this, you know, I was remembering the pussy Hat marchers and you know, that, yeah, look, whatever People made fun of them, but they turned out and they had a peaceful march. And that is completely their right as Americans. After, after Trump's first, first election. And now we have people on, particularly on social media and being radicalized in these, in these groups that form online that are goading them into encouraging them to get in their cars and right before school drop off to block ICE agents. That is a huge escalation in terms of what people, the kind of incentives that people are responding to. And you do see them hailed as heroes. And she's going to be a martyr to the left in the same way that Ashley Babbitt has become a martyr to the right. But that escalatory rhetoric is actually encouraging some people to behave in a way that 20, 30 years ago was behavior of extreme radical sex breakaway groups from either the left or the right. And it's been normalized. And I go back to what Eliana said. We absolutely should hold our elected officials accountable on both sides of the aisle for the kind of rhetoric that feeds into whatever mindset is being bred online in these groups that encourage someone like this woman to show up and block federal law enforcement.
- [32:06]
B
I've silent, no, no, I want to get back to this sort of the.
- [32:13]
F
No, no.
- [32:13]
D
It's like it is worth a beat on like the Trump administration to calling, yeah, we should domestic terrorism. I mean that's Christine, rhetoric on both sides is like that was, I think ill advised too. And the most like judicious comment on this came from Homan and he actually was pressed by Tony Dokapil at CBS about a statement from the Department of Homeland Security describing this as domestic terrorism. And he said, I have to refer you to DHS on that. And, and Homan, by the way, is not somebody who's known for his level headed rhetoric. Like he speaks, you know, he speaks harshly about these matters about illegal immigration and he was totally judicious in talking about this.
- [33:00]
B
I'm really glad you brought that up because it reminds me of another aspect of my life in New York in the 1990s. Much less successful efforts to interpose leftist protest between a police, between law enforcement in New York City and the people that they were enforcing the law against because the city had fallen into such chaos and because people really, really, really did like the results, right of the Giuliani, the, the sort of, the enhanced enforcement, the cleverer enforcement, the more sustained enforcement using, you know, using the broken windows theory, misdemeanor arrest, seeing if somebody had a, had a felony when they had a misdemeanor arrest and could, therefore were therefore maybe out on parole and had a standing warrant against them. And then you could, you could throw the book at them and get them off the street and put them in jail and you had this massive crime drop. But every time there was an incident involving police and somebody where police had to use lethal force or felt that they needed to use lethal force, this mob of Sharpton led people with criminology, people from John Jay College and the New York Times editorial page, and all of this would say, you know, this is evil, racist. The NYPD has been empowered to, you know, act like the Gestapo and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This happened time and time again. And what did Rudy Giuliani do? This is the. This is not the Rudy Giuliani of the Four Seasons, you know, landscaping company. This was the old Rudy Giuliani would say, I back the police department. They work for me. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt. They are trained. They are extensively trained. This is the best police department in the world. And if they, if an officer felt the need to, you know, unsheathe his weapon and use it, I'm going to assume that he did so for merited reasons. We'll investigate it, we'll examine it, and we'll see what happens. Whereas the previous mayor, David Dinkins, had supported, had attacked a policeman who had shot a drug dealer who had basically had a rifle in Washington Heights, was going to kill him, he had the city pay for the funeral of the drug dealer, Kiko Garcia, and basically, you know, trashed the reputation of the police officer who had been in justified fear of his life. So you had their one example, and then you had the example of what you do otherwise. And I'm afraid that Kristi Noem Holman behaves responsibly. Kristi Noemi does the opposite, which is that rather than saying, this is a federal law enforcement agency, it's ice. I trust them. I believe I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But obviously there will be an investigation. She says the person they killed was a domestic terrorist. To me, that's a firing offense. Trump is obviously not going to fire her. She doesn't know what was going on. She doesn't know whether that. Whether the. Whether the wheel, you know, whether the car slipped on the ICE and therefore started aiming at the cop. And that this was really a horrible tragedy of errors. We don't know anything about the incident yet in that way. And that for her to defame Regina good without a proper body of knowledge is not appropriate. It's really bad.
- [36:53]
C
There's. There's.
- [36:54]
B
Sorry. Like, you know, she also deserves a kind of benefit. She. A, she's dead, and B, the incident was incredibly confused and took place in a matter of like 14 seconds. How did she know? It was in Regina Good's head there.
- [37:11]
C
But they also, as a, As a federal. As the head of a federal agency, a federal law enforcement agency, she should be especially cautious because there is this issue of federal versus local, you know, federalism, we call it. And I'm recalling that it used to be the right that was very suspicious of any federal boots on the ground in their jurisdiction. Remember Waco? Remember all of these incidents, by the way.
- [37:36]
B
Can I interrupt? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just want to interrupt. I've been calling her Regina Good and her name is Renee Good. I apologize. That's. That. That's not right.
- [37:50]
E
Okay.
- [37:50]
B
I'm sorry.
- [37:51]
C
No, no, that's fine. I just.
- [37:53]
B
Go ahead.
- [37:54]
C
This administration is very comfortable using federal power on, in domestic context. And all of these cases before the courts about the use of the National Guard and whatnot are background to this. So I think we, if you're conservative as we are, we also should take into consideration being thoughtful about that federal versus local jurisdiction issue when it comes to law enforcement. And that's where I think there's not an ability on the right right now, if you're a totally 100% pro MAGA person, to think about the sensitivity of that issue of having any sort of federal law enforcement in your local community that does create tension. And acknowledging that doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to do their jobs, or it certainly doesn't mean they should be impeded from doing their jobs. But I've seen a lack of. In the rhetoric, particularly of Noam, a complete lack of disregard for that fact that this is not a country that welcomes federal law enforcement against American citizens without a. Without a debate. And I think that's. That's also something to consider when we, when we move ahead into whether or not Waltz's rhetoric. I mean, Eliana mentioned this with regard to Noam, but we shouldn't be calling her a domestic terrorist without any evidence of terrorism.
- [39:10]
F
Well, I mean, this is.
- [39:11]
D
I mean, it's not accurate. Just like, you know, Walls and Jacob Fry Frey with the Minneapolis mayor, they're out there calling ICE agents Gestapo. It's the same kind of hyperbolic, you know, statement that is damaging to the country. It's not accurate.
- [39:32]
C
And.
- [39:33]
F
But it's not Just on the terrorist thing. It's not just Nome. It's. This is a administration problem. And it really starts with Trump. You can't call every problem a terrorism problem. Not all illegal immigration represents terrorism. Not all drug trafficking is terrorism. Because there are actual terrorists. Believe me, like we're like in the either poised for or like somewhere at the start of, I fear a wave of actual terrorism and terrorists. And we need to be very clear and specific about what is and is not terrorism. And the administration is not doing a good job there.
- [40:18]
B
I mean, to put it mildly because of course then it cheapens. The definition of actual terrorism is a. Terrorism is a unimaginably serious offense. It's one of the few, it's one of the few things that triggers the federal death penalty actually being a terrorist. There are very few things that the federal law code has as things that can have you put to sentenced to death. And terrorism is one. I mean it doesn't matter what they are. But so yeah, you use it. You cheapen the general meaning of it and you, you, you know, it's like saying that somebody who throws a, a gum wrapper, you know, on, on the street or you know, puts out a cigarette butt on the, on the street and litters, you know, should go to, you know, should be sent to jail for the rest of his life. Like, that's not how we look at things. I think Christine is right aesthetically. And it's an important thing that it is weird. Not FBI. Right. FBI is a federal law enforcement agency and they go in and they investigate crimes at the federal level that happen in localities. Right? That's a thing. But they're in plain clothes. They're not uniformed. That's not who they are. It is weird to live in a city where there is a uniformed non police, non local police presence or state police, you know, whatever, highway patrol. It is weird. I mean, I can say in New York it have having happened multiple times since 9 11, obviously. You know, we basically had downtown Manhattan was occupied and very happily, like I don't think anybody was at all upset about the level of federal uniformed people trying to sort of protect Ground Zero and keep, keep New York safe in those horrible months after 9 11. But you know, convention in 2004, various other things that happened. It's weird and I'm sure it's weird for people in Minneapolis and it was weird for people in D.C. when you have these federal, this federalized presence patrolling the streets. It's not a normal sight that people in this country over the age, you know, of 30 have really ever witnessed before, except maybe during segregation, you know, in the late 50s and in the 60s in the South. And it is one of the reasons it doesn't happen, and that Trump's very cavalier deployment of these forces into cities is not something that should be dis. You know, should be dismissed by conservatives or by people who like Trump as nothing new or nothing special, or it's just liberals who don't like this. Like, I don't like it. I don't. I think it's. It's. It is. It also creates a false impression that the country is awash in carnage and chaos, when, in fact, we remain at incredibly low rates, historically low levels of really dangerous, violent crime. And we are giving people the wrong impression about the nature of social decay and disorder in the United States, which compared to where it was in 1977, is nothing, you know. So these are questions that need to be raised. But we're now talking here about a specific ICE agent and his partner and a specific woman in a car, and a moment that happened in the course of 15 to 20 seconds in which somebody acted in a certain way in response to how somebody else acted in a certain way, and taking that very specific moment and turning it into a moral pageant in which you slow everything down to the millisecond and say, well, he could have jumped out of the way or, well, you know, he did this. But there was the guy at the window. Why was the. Why was the other agent at the window grabbing onto her door handle?
- [44:51]
C
It's like the Zapruder film already.
- [44:55]
B
I mean, the weird thing is the Zapruder film, like, was shot from, you know, 10,000 miles away. You know, like, it was infinitely analyzable because it was so unclear. These videos are unclear except in this, which is that everybody always wants to do this with a crime when they want to convict somebody of the crime, which is they want to slow everything down. They want to take it and say, ah, you see right here, that second, two and a half. He could have made a decision at this second, at this millisecond, to jump out of the way, but he didn't, and therefore, he is culpable because he was behaving unreasonably. Count seven seconds. You know, just sit and count seven seconds and imagine you're standing on a cold street where it's icy and there's a car coming at you. Seven seconds is not a. I mean, I'll do it right now. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi. Five Mississippi, six Mississippi, seven Mississippi. And you're standing there and there's people screaming and, and there's. And. And you're someone yelling at the woman in the car, and you don't know what's going on inside the car. And then the car is coming at you, even if it's coming at you with two miles an hour, even if it's not, even if it's slipping on the. How do you know that it's slipping on the ice? That officer's life, having taken the measure that he took, for which, for all we know, he feels horribly guilty. People, police officers who discharge their weapons and end up killing the person that they discharged, they go through. They can go through months of trauma, you know, sort of, you know, I don't know, I was calling it training, but, you know, like, they are immediately at psychological and psychological risk.
- [46:54]
C
Well, they're put on desk. They're usually put on reliving the incident over and over again to undergo extensive psychological evaluation before they're allowed to carry a weapon again. And that's for exactly that reason. And a car is a deadly weapon in certain contexts. That's the important thing. She. If she'd had a gun or a knife, this would not have been a debate and she moved advance towards the officer. But in this context, the car has to be considered a potential deadly weapon. And that is what they are trained to see. A car in movement. And to Eliana's earlier point, they have been rammed by cars both while they're in their vehicles and outside of them.
- [47:32]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
- [47:58]
B
Yay.
- [47:59]
A
Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [48:30]
B
Right. Megan Basham of. I think, is it either the Daily Caller or the Daily Wire, I can't remember which says, and I don't have any independent verification of this that there have been since the ICE deployments on the streets. From a couple of months into the Trump administration, there have been at least 100 incidents in which cars have been involved in aggressive actions relating to ICE agents. Again, I'm citing her because I don't have independent verification of this. But even if that number is exaggerated by two thirds, the people in ice, the officers in ICE nationwide, know about every single case when that happens and have been led to be on guard for precisely the kind of thing that happened yesterday.
- [49:23]
D
It literally happened in Minneapolis on Monday.
- [49:28]
B
Can you describe that?
- [49:31]
D
There is a. I mean, there was an arrest of a Cuban illegal immigrant that ICE agents were pursuing, who was arrested by, ultimately arrested by federal authorities, who tried to flee them, rammed ICE agents with his car, and I believe bit them. So that happened on January 5th. Three days later, on January or two, two days later, on the 7th, this woman was shot. So there's clearly a culture of resistance to ICE in the Twin Cities that is fostered by the elected officials there encouraging people to defy ICE authorities and a precedent for using vehicles. And the officers, by the way, in this case on Monday were on foot. They were not in their car. So it was a suspect in his car who attacked the agents who were on foot, and he was arrested Monday.
- [50:37]
B
Right. As ever, I can only recommend, if you want to understand the legal underpinnings of this case and not be swayed by court, you know, by. By people who watch a lot of true crime podcasts and, you know, have read three novels by John Grisham or Scott Turow about what the legalities are in this case by reading The Blessed Andy McCarthy in National Review, who wrote a piece last night that goes through systematically and with, you know, his usual unbelievable authority, the story of where things are in relation to the.
- [51:23]
E
Law.
- [51:23]
B
And as he says, first of all, anybody who thinks that this officer will be arrested and put on trial does not understand the first thing about what's going on. This is a federal matter. ICE is under federal jurisdiction. The depart. The Trump Department of Justice would have to pursue the indictment of this officer, which clearly it will not do. And local Minnesota, Minneapolis police or Tim Walls or, or Jacob Fry or any body they may, you know, they may try to convene, including a grand jury, has no jurisdiction over this ICE officer because of the principle of federal supremacy, number one. And number two, the fact is that, again, they're not. They're not under his. Under their jurisdiction. And even if they were, years and reams of Supreme Court precedent say that this, is this the reasonable man standard here would very much apply in this case that I keep citing, which is, does the. Can the canon officer, if he were to be indicted, if he were to be convicted, if this were to rise to the Supreme Court level, could he claim that he had a reasonable fear of fatal injury or even bodily injury from this incident, and that if there is any possibility that that claim is reasonable, the act is justified, and what's more, not only justified to interdict, but as justice alito said in a 9, 0 decision that that fear being justified, the officer is permitted to continue to act in his own defense until the threat has been eliminated. Meaning he could shoot 50 times if he. If you know, if necessary, you once, once the line of self defense has been crossed, the thing to do is to eliminate the threat. And so the Supreme Court has ruled on this and ruled on it unanimously. Moreover, and that was 11 years ago, I believe.
- [53:49]
D
John, let me just read from this Justice Department press release. So this was issued January 5th.
- [53:56]
B
Oh, this is the one about the Cuban.
- [53:57]
D
Yes, this was issued January 5th. And the Justice Department put out a press release about the arrest of Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero in St. Paul. Rodriguez Romero is a citizen of Cuba and subject to removal. Uniform ICE agents initiated a traffic stop of Rodriguez Rodriguez refused to obey commands and attempted to flee in his car. While fleeing, Rodriguez accelerated his car towards ICE officers who were on foot. Rodriguez sped away, but soon hit two parked cars and lost control of his vehicle. ICE officers attempted to apprehend Rodriguez Romero a second time. Rodriguez Romero again accelerated his car towards officers, one of whom fired his weapon towards Rodriguez Romero. Rodriguez Romero struck one officer while trying to flee during his second attempt. When ICE officers apprehended Rodriguez Romero, he bit one of the officers, drawing blood. Two ICE officers were transported to the hospital suffering from bruised ribs, a dislocated finger and a bite wound.
- [55:00]
B
Can I talk about the bite wound for a minute? My experience. And again, this goes back almost 30 years, but police officers told me that one of the things that freaks them out the most is something like a bite wound. There are two things. Bite wound or that they are searching somebody's pockets and get stuck by a hypodermic needle in the pocket. Obviously this goes back to sort of AIDS in the 80s and the idea that a shared needle, an addict needle in the pocket, maybe this will, you know, you get stuck by the needle, you get aids, you die. Because there was no treatment for AIDS at the time. Not what I'm talking about, but 15 years earlier. But a bite wound is. You got somebody, you don't know who they are. They could have hepatitis, they could have any number of diseases coursing through their system. They bite you. It gets into your bloodstream. And this is a, this is like a visceral concern for law enforcement. And if you've ever seen the way law enforcement apprehends people, one of the reasons that they take them and pull them and pull their arms behind them and come up, up behind them to take them and, and, and, and subdue them is to keep their bodies away from the mouths of the people that they are arresting. Because this is a, almost an, A weird, natural, primal mammalian instinct to bite. You know, if you have, no, if your arms are not free or you can't kick somebody or something, you'll use your mouth if you have to. And so even that suggests a kind of level of anxiety that the ICE agents themselves might have been feeling in the wake of that arrest on Monday, where it's like, this city is insane. These people are crazy. I don't know what the hell is going on. You know, you, you, they flee, you shoot, they smash into cars. You pull them out and not only do they kick you into it, but they, like, they bite you. Then you're going to get their diseases. Like, this is a visceral thing. They are. You are not obliged, if you work in law enforcement to allow yourself to be injured by people you are apprehending who are, who are, who are fleeing your arrest or not obeying your dictates. You're not. It's like elementary civilization, civilizational fact.
- [57:43]
C
Well, and they have already been bitten to their, to the point about their training. Both local police and federal law enforcement are incredibly hemmed in in terms of the kinds of holds and grips and restraint techniques that they are legally allowed to do after decades and decades of basically court cases where they were found to have used excessive force. Now, some of those, I think the evolution of some of those techniques have been helpful. They're more effective with less harm caused to any perpetrator. But they are constantly aware of the likelihood of. And the paperwork every time they stop and have to put hands on a perpetrator. So they are already ideally acting with all of that in mind because of their training. Does that mean there aren't rogue officers who abuse their power? Of course not. We've seen it. But the training is designed to keep, actually to keep the perp, keep them safe from the perp, but also, you know, the perp safe from the use of excessive force. And again, I think for most people whose understanding of law enforcement and these techniques comes from the movies or comes from social media platforms that are telling them that anyone in federal law enforcement is a fascist or gestapo. They have no understanding of all of those sorts of restrictions that are placed on, on these law enforcement officers.
- [59:07]
B
Okay, well I want to silencing everyone.
- [59:08]
C
When I speak so I clearly I have some like bad like casting a bad spell on podcast things that we.
- [59:14]
B
Don'T have any that you know, that are so unimpeachable that there's no. Nothing really more to follow up with. I'd like to move from the horrible to the sublime if I could in a recommendation of a book that I have been reading. I'm not that far into it, but is so wonderful thus far that I can't recommend it highly enough. And I assume it will go on in the spirit in which it has begun. And that is Charles King's every the Desperate lives and troubled times that Made Handel's Messiah. King is a. Is a sort of popular historian and he has written this amazing account of Handel who of course moved to Britain in the 18th century into a very, very crazy London and how he came to write the greatest, probably the greatest of all oratorios as a commercial venture, one of the first commercial ventures in the world of classical music. A sort of for profit venture. But his description of life in London in the 18th century, of Handel's journey into London in the. In the 18th century and everything that is going on there. The only, the only work that I can think of contemporarily that offers such a vivid portrait of this city in its most singular, in this most singular moment is Neal Stephenson's novel. The collection of novels called the Baroque Quartet, which really about the origin of modern science in the world around Isaac Newton and others, which is an astounding literary achievement. Stevenson's series of novels about this. But that's a very formidable 4000 pages ages of fiction. This is like a 300 page portrait of the, you know, that focuses on this one, the creation of this one remarkable and you know, deathless and enduring work of genius. And it's so beautifully written and I'm so impressed by it. So that is Every Valley by Charles King. And if you need to, you know, wash, wash yourself clear of the horrors that are going to be inflicted upon us in the coming days as America devolves into our camps in talking about this terrible, tragic, awful event that we all have had now to become a participant and witness in this would be a good cleansing way to keep your mind on the high as opposed to the low. Every valley but Charles King. So we'll be back tomorrow for Abe, Eliana and Christine. I'm John. Pod. Horace, keep the candle bar.