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Promote your business with podcast ads on Acast. Get started at go.acast.com advertise. I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. I have some questions today, including whatever happened to all those anti government activists, the ones who said that we needed the Second Amendment to fight against a tyrannical government. You know, the same kinds of people who made heroes out of Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashley Babbitt, but were very, very quick to justify the killing of Alex Preddy. And also, whatever happened to the proud boys? Have you noticed how quiet they've gone lately? So I have a lot of questions that we need to dive into today. And joining me today to try to answer some of these questions, we're fortunate to have Garrett Graff, who's a journalist, historian, and author, and his newsletter has the cheery title of the Doomsday Scenario. So welcome to the podcast, Garrett. For people who think that I sometimes am a little bit negative, I feel like I'm this ray of sunshine compared to the Doomsday Scenario. But thanks for joining me.
- [03:31]
C
My pleasure. In my defense, since a lot of my history writing has been about nuclear weapons and nuclear war plans, I had chosen the name three years ago when it was meant to be more tongue in cheek.
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B
I say, well, and now it seems pretty much on the nose.
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C
Exactly.
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B
Okay, so I want to start with the piece that you wrote a couple of days ago because it helps explain something that is otherwise inexplicable. We use the term cognitive dissonance probably too much, but there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on with the anti government, anti tyranny, Second Amendment folks about what's happening in Minneapolis. So I was particularly struck by your piece that Minneapolis proves the far right is not anti tyranny, that they are anti the wrong kind of tyranny. And you start off by asking what, what happened to the whole Don't Tread on Me crowd? So let's just, let's just start right there because it is interesting, the people who used to show up at state houses with, you know, the, you know, the display of the, you know, phallic symbols of democracy, or at least they were claiming, you know, the guns are now pretty quick to go. Well, you know, Alex Preddy shouldn't have brought a gun to the protest. So what did happen to the Don't Tread on Me crowd? Let's talk about that.
- [04:47]
C
Yeah, this was something that has been rattling around in my head all winter as we've watched what's going on in Minneapolis, but then really crystallized in the reaction, particularly on the far right, to the Alex Priddy shooting and the Renee Goode shooting before that, where you've sort of seen the sort of reaction from the far right to Both of those shootings, shouting, well, just obey federal officers when they tell you to do something. Just carry your papers wherever you go. When you step outside of your house and hand them over to any federal agent at the moment, they ask for them. And then in the Alex Prenny shooting, as you said, there was this. What on earth was he thinking carrying a gun into. In, you know, a hostile environment, you know, and, and I remember not that long ago in 2020, when, you know, we were being told by the far right, you know, that, you know, wearing a Covid mask, you know, was following the sheep and, you know, you should, you know, you could ignore government vaccine and mask mandates. And, you know, I remember, you know, armed protesters showing up at state capitols in Idaho and Michigan and, you know, armed resistance movements to government authorities. And that's even before you go back to, you know, an era that I know, you know very well, you know, of sort of the Ruby Ridge and the Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing crowd of the 2000s or of the 1990s and the, the Bundy Ranch and standoffs of the Obama years. And I just sort of feel like we have spent 30 years with these protests of people sort of marching through the streets with Don't Tread on me flags who are now exactly the people who saying on a daily basis, no, no, no, like, just bend over for the government tyranny and, you know, do not do anything to resist the tyrannical government and everything will be fine and you will be safe.
- [07:18]
B
See, this, this is the part the flip is so dramatic and it's so in real time, right? The, the people back during the COVID era who were saying do not comply are now basically saying, comply immediately or die. And that appears to make no sense whatsoever. Particularly because, again, this was the, you know, we've talked about the anti government extremists or the anti tyranny extremists, and you make the point. I think this is interesting. You say, you know, at first the series of rhetorical flip flops may seem nonsensical, as if the world is upside down. Yes, indeed. But all of them are consistent with decades of evolution of white nationalist ideology and the far right movement, which is not against tyranny per se, just tyranny by the wrong people. And I think this was. What's interesting is that maybe it was a misnomer to describe them as anti government activists or anti being anti tyranny. It was just sort of like anti those people being in charge. If we're in charge, the Rules are completely different. That's my takeaway from your piece.
- [08:24]
C
Absolutely. And I think, and by the way, you saw this up to and including Donald Trump himself, who's sort of excuse for the Renee Nicole good shooting was, quote, she was very disrespectful to law enforcement, as if disrespecting law enforcement is a capital death penalty crime in the United States that.
- [08:46]
B
Well, also. January 6th.
- [08:48]
C
Well, yes, very much. And I'll come to January 6th in a minute here, which is, I think one of the things that sort of journalists and pundits and, you know, sort of even political professionals have done a bad job sort of understanding and verbalizing over the last 30 years is the extent to which the far right fringe extremes are driven by white nationalism, white supremacy and Christian nationalism. And that we sort of have talked about this as like anti government extremism when it's really this much more focused and narrow ideology at the core of white nationalism and Christian nationalism.
- [09:44]
B
Well, now people are going to think that, okay, that's a broad generalization. And you know, not everybody who's on the right is a white nationalist. But you point the finger very specifically at the role of Stephen Miller, who you describe as the acting president. And Stephen Miller's rhetoric is almost incomprehensible if you think of it in terms of the mainstream conservatism of the last 20 years, I think. But Stephen Miller is really at the center of this in your thesis, correct?
- [10:14]
C
Absolutely. There has always been sort of post civil rights movement, a sort of wing of the conservative movement that has been sort of more of the, you know, sort of fringy white nationalist Birch Society folks. And you know, when you look at Nixon, when you look at Reagan, even when you look at George W. Bush to a certain extent, there was like a little bit of accommodation, you know, some winking or nodding that you would see in the rhetoric around that, you know, sort of the old dog whistles, you know, the Willie Horton ad kind of.
- [10:56]
B
But they were sort of a recessive gene. They were there, but they, I describe them as a recessive gene on the right. And now they've become dominant.
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C
Yeah, that's a great analogy. And there was sort of, I think for a long time on the right a sense that you sort of, you had to accommodate these weirdos because they were sort of reliable voters and they're sort of, you needed, you know, that whatever it was 7% or 11% of the electorate, the Republican electorate to like get through your primary, etc. Etc. But like, you didn't have to mainstream the white nationalism. And I think what we have seen in Donald Trump is the just absolute mainstreaming of that white nationalist ideology. You know, Donald, you know, Donald Trump, from that first golden escalator speech, you know, about, you know, Mexicans are rapists. You know, there has been this very strong foregrounding of the othering of, you know, Democrats, Republican or Democrats, minorities, women, and that this is really, you know, what's, this is why Stephen Miller is in politics. Like this is his animating desire and he surrounded himself.
- [12:27]
B
Now, you know, I think that a lot of people would think that what you just said is or would have been regarded as over the top, except it begins to explain, you know, how blatantly the social media of the Trump administration. You point this out, including explicitly ICE recruiting, recruiting videos mimic and echo both white supremacist and even Nazi era propaganda, including using a line from a popular neo Nazi song celebrating a race war. So there's like data there. Now one of the things you're pointing out is that amid such an environment, we've actually seen a decrease of right wing violence though. Right? I mean, for the first time in a long time there are the numbers. And, and right now right wing violence seems to be in abeyance. How do you explain that?
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C
Yeah, and again, I think that this is worth drawing a comparison to the first Trump administration because we actually saw very meaningful and worrisome right wing violence in the first Trump administration. Yeah, both the Charlottesville raid or the Charlottesville march and riots by actual neo Nazis up to and including the January 6th riot and insurrection at the Capitol, which again, I think is worth talking about in a minute. And that's just been almost entirely absent from this second term. And it has really startled terrorism researchers, you know, extremism researchers. Last year, for the first time since I think it was in the last 30 years, actually, there has been, there was more recorded left wing violence than right wing violence.
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B
Yes. And this is the, this is the, this is the study by the center for Strategic and International Studies through last July. And again, you're right, for the first time in 30 years.
- [14:37]
C
Exactly. Not exactly a bastion of libtard thinking there at csis. And that you saw these militias that existed in the first term, the Oath Keepers, the proud boys, which by the way, during the Biden administration were tried and convicted of seditious conspiracy only to be pardoned, you know, in Donald Trump's first day. But they've just disappeared from the map. And the reason for that, as we sort of keep seeing them remind us themselves. Is that basically, like, there's no need for our extra legal militia now? Because CBP and ICE are doing the exact violence to the exact communities that we wish to do violence to, and they're doing it under the color of law, with government authority. So, like, there's sort of no need for your paramilitary militia when you have a government militia working on your behalf.
- [15:49]
B
Yeah. This is what you wrote. Amid such an environment, when ICE and Border Patrol officers are running terror campaigns in major cities against immigrants and minorities out in public, there's less need for the kind of outside terrorism commonly associated with the far right. Now, there was a rumor at one point that the leader of the Proud Boys had actually been hired by ice. That turned out not to be true. But as you point out, his reaction was awfully interesting.
- [16:13]
C
Yeah, his reaction was, I fucking wish I'd been hired by ice. And by the way, I'm not going to put it past ICE over the next couple of months that we might end up seeing known Proud Boys appearing as ICE agents and ICE officers out there.
- [16:32]
B
Yeah, we're talking about Enrique Terrio, who actually did write I fucking wish I worked for ICE and edit hire the fucking Proud Boys. So there are the right kinds of protesters and the wrong kind of protesters. Right. For people who are wondering how the people who have celebrated the January 6th protesters, Donald Trump famously pardoned them all, described them as patriots versus the bad protesters in Minneapolis. And I think this is kind of the exposure that it's not about pro government or anti government. It's not about pro tyranny or anti tyranny. It's about kind of like, are you one of us or one of them? Right. I mean, that's the world. And, you know, we are the good guys and you are the bad guys. We now control the government. So resistance to the government is now a bad thing after, you know, which is a complete reversal when we were on the outside and the government were the bad guys. Right. I mean, so this is. This binary world they live in has nothing to do with being anti government or being anti tyranny. It's us using our power against you.
- [17:33]
C
Absolutely. And I think, to me, it helps explain what was sort of one of the craziest moments in modern American politics, which was sitting there on January 6th watching a crowd that was flying blue Lives Matter flags, beating and assaulting and torturing police officers. And it makes a lot more sense. Sorry, that moment makes a lot more sense if you first grasp that the protesters on January 6 didn't see the lines of Capitol Police and D.C. police as legitimate police. The officers were instead the guardians of a corrupt regime. And when you get into those far right circles, like, there are sort of like the good police and the bad police, and the good police are people like the constitutional sheriffs that Jessica Pischko has done such a good job warning about for so many years that sort of see their first and highest duty not to the law as it's actually written, but to sort of their own interpretation of the Constitution. It's sort of like the originalist movement of policing.
- [18:58]
B
So tell me about the Turner Diaries. This is a major theme in your piece. Now, some people may be familiar with this is a dystopian 1978 novel that it was a hugely influential book on the far right. And so just talk to me a little bit about that book and the kind of influence it's had, including. And I want to get to. Just people know that I want to get to the Day of the Rope, which feels very timely these days. So.
- [19:34]
C
The Turtle Diaries were sort of much more a topic of press coverage and news coverage in the 1990s. Against that backdrop, Ruby Ridge and Waco and Oklahoma City, it was this 1978 sort of white supremacist fan fiction sort of dystopian novel. Makes it sound, I think, a little too coherent. It's sort of more fan fiction for white supremacists.
- [20:05]
B
Well, neo Nazi. I mean, the guy who wrote it, William Pierce, was. Was a neo Nazi.
- [20:09]
C
Yes, was the sort of, you know, main neo Nazi leader in the United States. And he wrote it under a pseudony. And the book contains really wild story of basically how a government crackdown on guns leads to a civil war and a rebellion and, you know, bombing of the FBI building and a, you know, small nuclear war and yada, yada, yada, and culminates with the white supremacist forces. Who are the good guys in the book? That's an important point. They're the good guys basically taking over California and then having this orgy of violence that is called in the book, the Day of the Rope. And the Day of the Rope is the moment where they're able to sort of finally carry out reprisals against who they see as the, quote, unquote, race traitors. The list in the book is the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the civic leaders, the bureaucrats and the preachers who have betrayed the white cause. And, you know, there are mass Executions and hangings.
- [21:33]
B
And cops, too.
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C
Right, and cops, yes.
- [21:36]
B
And the cops were on the wrong side.
- [21:38]
C
Anyone who is on the wrong side of this. Cause this was a big book in the 1990s. It's a huge influence on Tim McVeigh, by the way.
- [21:47]
B
It's a shitty book. I mean, we ought to make it very, very clear, as you point out, great literature, it is not. You once had a scholar tell you, were you to go and read it, you would very quickly discover it is a very bad novel. It is just a very bad novel. But that doesn't mean that it was not influential as kind of a handbook for the far right. And as you point out, Timothy McVeigh was very influenced by it.
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A
Yes.
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C
And the right, really, the sort of far. Far right of the 80s and 90s, begins to see it as a how to guide. Because. And this is again, where it's important to sort of think about how this all intersects with this sort of overarching, don't tread on me anti government tyranny, which is the white supremacist movement in the 80s and 90s. You know, you couldn't imagine taking on the US government. You know, they have, you know, they have everything. You know, they've got the law, they've got the courts, they've got the world's most powerful military. Like, how could you ever overthrow this government? And so what the Turner Diaries did was. It's partly a novel, it's partly dystopian fan fiction, but it's also a how to guide for overthrowing the government sort of long term. And it plants these seeds of sort of what the milestones need to be for white supremacists and white nationalists to take over the United States. Tim McVeigh is hugely influenced by this book in the 1990s. You know, he sort of hopes that blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building will sort of help launch the Civil War that leads to the day of the rope. And you see this ideology really come to the fore again at January 6th, where you have a crowd at the Capitol erecting gallows and nooses.
- [23:55]
B
Hang Mike Pence.
- [23:57]
C
Enchanting. Hang Mike Pence. And that sort of, you know, there's all of this talk on Reddit forums and Internet bulletin boards that day of like, oh, my God, like, this is the start of the day of the rope. Like, this is. We're living through the day of the rope. And then I think that's also useful for looking at and understanding how the far right is viewing things like the immigration assault and occupation of Minneapolis, which is this isn't government tyranny. This is the day of the rope. This is the people who are on the right side of the race war carrying out the mass reprisals on the people who are on the wrong side. And that's minorities and that's liberals, and it's women like Renee Nicole Goode. I mean, you can sort of see that in the misogynist rhetoric around her killing.
- [25:09]
B
Okay, but there is kind of a split on the right, isn't there, on the issue of guns? So in the Turner Diaries, the war is kicked off when the Jewish Cabal Running Washington D.C. tries to ban guns. Right. Is it the Cohen act or something like that?
- [25:24]
C
Exactly.
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B
There's no subtlety here. So they want to take away the people's people's guns. And then the pro gun movement rebels. Well, here we're in a moment where you have the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. jeanine Pirro, saying, if you come to D.C. with a gun, you're going to be arrested. Cash Patel says no one should be able to bring a gun to a protest. So you are seeing some pushback from the pro gun Second Amendment folks. Even Kyle Rittenhouse is speaking out about this. Like, guys, we're not making the total flip. So is there a political danger that MAGA is going to fracture or that there will be cracks over this rather egregious flip flop on whether or not guns are a good thing, whether or not we take the Second Amendment seriously? Because I think a lot of people on the right were kind of shocked at the rhetoric that came out of the Trump administration, which was supposed to be the defender of guns. If Barack Obama or the Obama administration officials said the kinds of things the Trump administration officials were saying about guns right now, we're. We would have a Turner Diary scenario, wouldn't we? So how does that play out?
- [26:28]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is. You've talked about this a lot over the last couple of years. I think it gets at the weird sui generous, singular force that Donald Trump is in the MAGA movement that, you know, if you had. If you had a Democratic president saying, you know, federal agents will execute you in the streets if you disrespect them. You know, you can imagine exactly the types of protests that would occur and that it has a lot to do with, I think, just sort of how uncomfortable the MAGA coalition actually is. As it's being held together by Donald Trump. And that sort of. My hypothesis is that this sort of the internal contradictions necessary to hold together Trumpism under Donald Trump fracture the moment Donald Trump disappears as the MAGA figurehead. That you know, that this, that this power doesn't automatically transfer to J.D. vance or Don Jr. Or Marco Rubio. And I think you've started to see that with, you know, the defections of Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of these other sort of weird defections up to and including as you're talking about, you know, the NRA coming out and saying, you know, actually guys like we do believe that you can carry guns in American society. Like that's the whole point of what we've been trying to do for 40 years. Yep.
- [28:36]
A
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- [29:57]
B
With endless scroll algorithms and AI flooding feeds, podcasting stands out. They're sought, not served. Audiences actively choose to hear trusted voices on topics they care about. In fact, 72% of listeners say podcasts shape cultural conversations. For marketers, that means podcasts shift brand perception like no other channel. Acast's Podcast Pulse 2025 report has the proof. Get all the insights@podcastpulse2025.com yeah, okay, so let me talk about something else that you did along the same lines. You testified in front of Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker's accountability commission, which is this body set up after the Trump administration's OPER Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago. And I was reading your piece the other day and you totaled up you Know, kind of the record of, of, of ICE and the, and the Border Patrol. And what I, I thought was kind of eye opening that this, you know, the problems with the Border Patrol and ICE are not just, they're not just recent. There's a long track record and really, you know, we're kind of horrific track record of criminal activity. Just, I mean, you said criminality is so rampant inside the Border Patrol that it has seen one of its own agents or Officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP's misconduct scandal is so long running today that it would be old enough to drink. So this has been going on for some. So talk to me about your testimony in front of this Illinois Commission and how deep the rot goes in these two agencies.
- [31:43]
C
So this was the Illinois Accountability Commission is the state government body that J.B. pritzker set up as governor in Illinois to document the abuses and misconduct of ICE and CBP and immigration forces in Chicago last fall during that so called Operation Midway Blitz, which was really the precursor to the operations that are ongoing now in Minneapolis, sort of a slightly earlier stage of the Trump administration's terror campaign on major American cities. And the commission's goal is both to sort of understand, you know, what happened in Chicago, make recommendations for the future, collect evidence and make prosecutorial referrals for documented documentable crimes and abuses of use of force and civil liberties and civil rights by federal officers. And so I last Friday was called as the expert witness to explain basically what has gone wrong with ICE and cbp. And, and this is a story that as a journalist I've covered going back to 2014 with, with CBP and ICE sort of just as long. And it's a story that I think too many Americans and too many policies Holder policymakers still don't really understand, which is, as I said in my testimony, ICE and CBP since 911 have been a fascist secret police in waiting for an ambitious would be authoritarian. And that CBP in particular underwent this disastrous hiring surge in the 2000s after 911 that saw the Border Patrol jump from 9,000 agents to 18,000 agents in just a matter of years, which is roughly the number of agents that that ICE is looking to bring on now with all of this new flood of funding. So I see sort of everything that I'm saying as a warning sign of what we should expect to see coming out of ICE in the near future. And law enforcement agencies just can't grow that fast. You know, any time any law enforcement agency in history has tried to do that, the Miami police, the Washington D.C. police elsewhere, it leads to these massive misconduct scandals because what you see are hiring standards slip, training standards slip, management and oversight slip. And that's exactly what ended up happening with cbp. And that they hired thousands of agents and officers who should have never been given a badge and gun. And that it has taken two decades. And we are still feeling the effects of this in a very real way. So let me give you sort of a couple of, of bullet points here. Which is from 2005 to 2024, which is the last year that statistics are available, 4,913 CBP agents and officers have been arrested themselves, some of them multiple times. In 2018. Actually, there was one CBP employee who was arrested five times in a single year, which. Charlie, I know you're not a law enforcement leader, but let me give you this pro tip. As a law enforcement leader, you want your officers arrested fewer than five times per year. That's sort of one of the baseline goals you set for your workforce.
- [35:48]
B
Fair. Fair point.
- [35:50]
C
So if you just took the population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested since 2005, it would be the nation's fourth largest police department. It would be as large as the entire Philadelphia police. And what that also means is, and this is, this is sort of like all you really need to know. Like, if you remember one single fact out of the entire podcast today, before, for much of the 2000 and tens and likely before and after, the crime rate per capita of CBP agents and officers was higher than the per capita crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States. That, like, that's just a stunning level of misconduct for a federal law enforcement agency. And it's something that CBP still struggles with today. And I think it's incredibly important to understand that when we look at the Alex Preddy and Renee Nicole Goode shootings.
- [37:02]
B
All of which were done, it explains a lot.
- [37:06]
C
All of which were done by CBP officers. The ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Goode is a former CBP officer who had been hired and worked for CBP for years. So we see the same sort of corrupt and callous culture inside cbp, sort of influencing both of those shootings. And this sort of. The other part of my testimony was about the sort of culture of racism, misogyny and abuse of deadly force that has plagued CBP also for the last 20 years, that the Border Patrol has this very strong sense of sort of frontier style justice. Like the Border Patrol is not a police department in the way that we think of a police department. I describe it as sort of part occupying army, part frontier cavalry, and part police, and that it has sort of long approached protecting the border more as a military force than a law enforcement agency. And it has a huge number of wildly suspicious fatal shootings along the border. Everyone who has looked at the shootings over the years from outside groups, including CBP's own internal investigations, has shown that CBP's use of deadly force is far outside the norm of a law enforcement agency in the United modern law enforcement agency in the United States. And that actually its discipline system is so broken that a CBP advisory board headed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton determined that CBP's internal discipline system is less rigorous for its armed officers than TSA's Security and Discipline system is for its unarmed airport screeners. So, like your tsa, your average TSA worker is held to a higher standard than someone that we are given that we give a gun to and turn loose on the streets. And so I think one way to think about the violence that we are seeing on America's streets right now is CBP is reacting in exactly the way that they are used to reacting to policing brown people out of sight along the border. And the only thing that has changed is that they are now doing this violence to white people in American cities.
- [40:15]
B
On camera so this explains so much that they were pre fucked up. This was a preexisting condition. But I want to get to where we're at right now. But how could this possibly have happened? The way, if I'm hearing you correctly, you know, this dysfunction goes back into the Bush presidency, but also into the era when Obama was in office. I mean, how did it get so bad that they would do that? Is it because they were recruiting a certain kind of person? Because one of my big fears is who's signing up for ICE and the Border Patrol. Now, who is answering these Stephen Miller themed recruitment ads? But give me just a short version. How, under multiple administrations, did these agencies become so toxic and so deeply fucked up?
- [41:06]
C
Yeah, it's a great question. And in some ways, it is the story of the most classic way that scandals take place in Washington. And, you know, you've sort of covered and been around Washington a lot, and so you understand this as well. There just has never been a triggering front page moment to force reform. That the, the wave of misconduct inside CBP has been 4,913 small stories buried inside, you know, local newspapers and sort of, you know, page A, 17 and A21 of, you know, the front section of newspapers nationally, and that there's just never been a moment until now, until Midway Blitz, until the Minneapolis occupation, until the shooting of Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Preddy, where this was a front page story in America.
- [42:20]
B
And people are asking, who are these guys? Where did they come from? Why are they. Why are they behaving this way? Because it's like most law enforcement agencies have tried to be, at least go through the motions of observing rights and being polite would be too strong a word. But just the overt thuggery and the brute squad nature of this, I think, has come as a shock. And what you're pointing out is that, you know, there's a long tail here, which is terrifying because for a lot of reasons that you've talked about, it's going to get worse because they are hiring thousands of agents. And the people who are signing up now are the people who are watching these videos going, I want to be part of that. Which is like, oh, my God, if you're. If you're pre fucked up, imagine how bad it's going to be when you get a flood of people who actually see the worst of the worst and go, I want to be that guy or I want to be part of that.
- [43:18]
C
Exactly. And in some ways, I think it's actually far more corrosive than what we saw with the Border Patrol because the Border Patrol's recruiting for this hiring surge in the 2000s played on all of that post 911 patriotism, which you remember so well of the come be the elite counterterrorism force on the border, keeping Al Qaeda from coming into the United States from Mexico. And the ICE Recruiting in this moment is going back to what we were talking about earlier, entirely playing on sort of brutality, white nationalist tropes, and this sort of sense of, are you watching these videos in your social media feed and would like to dress up like you are invading Fallujah to storm a Home Depot parking lot and rough up some guys who were trying to be day laborers? Like, this is the job for you. And by the way, Charlie, there's one.
- [44:22]
B
Thing, and you get to wear a mask. And you get to wear a mask.
- [44:27]
C
And there's one more part of this that I've started to think a lot more about, which is the financial incentives that we're throwing at these agents that are, you know, 50,000, 60,000 bucks, notably paid out only after several years of service.
- [44:45]
B
Okay?
- [44:46]
C
Like, this isn't like you show up on day one and you get your 50,000 bucks, like a lot of these bonuses, are really backdated. And so one of the things I'm sort of starting to think about and worry about is what happens on election day in 2028 when you have 20,000 ICE agents and officers across the country and CBP agents and officers who understand they're only going to get their 50,000 bucks if the right guy wins the election that day. And that if a Democrat wins and sort of abolishes ICE on at noon on January 20 and fires them all, all of that money is gone for them. Like, imagine the incentives and the sort of mental thought processes that will unfold in the fall of 28 if at that point we have this giant fascist secret police still operating in the heart of American democracy who suddenly have, you know, a 25,000 or $50,000 incentive to make sure that the Democrat doesn't win.
- [46:10]
B
Well, that may be the case in this, this year, in the midterm elections. I know I've been citing David French's piece in the New York Times where he walks through all the ways in which the administration might seek to shidify the election. They don't have to actually mess with the counter. You just flood heavily Democratic minority areas with agents whose job is to intimidate, to spread a culture of fear, to dissuade people from showing up at the polls. And given what's happened in places like Chicago and Minneapolis, that's just no longer implausible or far fetched that they could do these things. So let me get your sense of where we're at right here. I mean, first of all, where do you come down on the abolish ICE versus reforming ICE thing? Because the Democrats seem to like, you know, be toggling back and forth between what they're, what the base is saying and, and the, and the fear that it will sound like defund police. I have to say, listening to your story, I, it is, is, is are ICE and the. And the Border Patrol, are they reformable or do they need to be scrapped and rebuilt in some way? Where do you, what is your.
- [47:19]
C
Yeah, so let me sort of give a caveat here, Charlie, and then answer your question because I think you probably start at about the same place that I do, which is. I'm actually a very strong believer in federal law enforcement. I've dedicated a huge portion of my reporting life to covering the FBI, covering other federal law enforcement agencies. I know how dedicated and hardworking and not just law abiding, but sort of Constitution abiding to A fault most federal law enforcement officers and agents are. And so I, I, I do not start from a natural political place as a police abolitionist. And you know, I, I have seen some incredibly good law enforcement leadership at CBP and at ice. John Morton in the Obama administration, Gil Kurlikowski in the Obama administration at cbp. I mean, tremendous thoughtful leaders. There are a lot of good Border Patrol agents and ICE officers. ICE has a whole division known as hsi, Homeland Security Investigations, which are sort of the special agent investigators of ICE who do tremendous work. I mean, these guys are, you know, the, the national leaders in fighting, you know, child sex abuse material and child sex trafficking. You know, they do incredible work on like nuclear non proliferation, I mean, helping to keep nuclear weapons away from, you know, bad regimes around the world. You know, I live in Vermont. There was a Border Patrol agent who was killed in a shootout here last January. Who, David Chris Malland, who was a tremendous agent, you know, had, you know, been in it for all of the right reasons, done all of the right work, you know, and I sort of went and stood at his memorial procession here in my hometown, you know, from the first vehicle to the last, last year. So this is the, there, you know, this is not me as some radical leftist, you know, saying, you know, let's just turn it all over to mutual aid societies and you know, we don't need any police in America. But I don't see at this point how CBP and ICE are reformable. And we're going to spend the next two weeks here in America having a really important conversation where I hope that there are meaningful reforms and, you know, body cameras and uniform standards and administrative warrants and, you know, all of this stuff that I think is meaningful and is important. And I'm writing a column about this today of like, what I hope the ICE and CBP reform agenda is that passes over the next couple of, you know, the next week or two. But at the end of the day, all of those reforms are tinkering around the margins of the two issues of culture and leadership. And there is nothing that Congress could do. There is nothing, there is no piece of legislation that AOC herself could write today and pass with unanimous consent in both houses, leaving that aside as a sort of fan fiction idea. But like, just to give the most extreme example, there is nothing that she could write into legislation that fundamentally addresses and changes the issues of culture and leadership. And you know, this isn't. Well, if the agents were wearing body cams, they'd be slightly slower to execute civilians in the streets. You know, this isn't as long as these are agencies taking orders from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, everything that we are doing is rearranging the deck chairs of a ocean liner sized secret police crashing into our democracy.
- [52:02]
B
This is what is puzzling to me is how we're going to avoid another government shutdown. I'm just looking at one of these reports that the Democrats are looking for some of these minor reforms, as you point out, barring federal agents from wearing masks, requiring judicial warrants to detain undocumented immigrants, which seems kind of like basel at this point. I'm trying to imagine being a Democrat in the Senate and thinking that I'm going to cast a vote to continue to fund the status quo, to continue to fund it with just these reforms. Because if there's, I'm not a fan of government shutdowns. I think most of them are kabuki dances and they don't go anywhere. But if Congress is not going to exert its power of the purse over this, then win. If not now, then when? If not this, then what abuse would justify saying no, we're just not going to continue to shovel money in. Now the problem is that the big beautiful bill gave ICE all of this money. So they're going to continue to get, they're going to continue to get the money. So even if there is a government shutdown, my gut sense listening to you is that the trajectory is going to get worse and worse and worse. And as you point out, the incentives are all, well, they're rather frightening in their implications.
- [53:27]
C
Yeah. And I think, you know, this is also where the way that Donald Trump has behaved over the last year in terms of sort of rearranging federal funding as he desires and you know, destroying entire agencies and cabinet departments with his own presidential fiat. I've argued since the fall. I don't know how any Democrat signs on to any budget deal in any area with this administration. They passed a law saying that USAID had to exist.
- [54:13]
B
Right.
- [54:14]
C
And USAID was destroyed by Elon Musk in a weekend never to reappear itself. And I don't know. So sure, we can pass a bunch of paper that sets a bunch of new rules on ice and cbp. And it's totally unclear to me what the enforcement mechanism is for any of that. You know, one of the things that I've been suggesting and talking about in terms of reform is to me one of the most important things is we've got to change this. Arrest first and ask questions later. Desire by CBP and ICE in the streets. You know, we've seen hundreds of US Citizens, you know, pulled up in these dragnets and, you know, kidnapped off the streets. And then, like, once we deter, you know, once ICE and CBP determine that they're actually U.S. citizens, you know, sometimes like, pushed out of moving vans or, like, you know, dropped, you know, outside a detention center, you know, miles away without their. Their things. So one of the ideas that. That I've been pushing is I think we should try to make officers civilly and personally liable for the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens. That. That one thing that would really slow down kidnapping people off the streets, which is an insane thing for me to even have to say out loud, would be making officers think twice about whether they actually have immunity to abuse our civil rights and civil liberties.
- [56:12]
B
This seems to go to the heart of it, though, because right now, they're being told from the White House, you have absolute immunity. You have absolute impunity. You can wear masks. You are able to get away with stuff that no normal cop would be able to get away with. And this has created this culture that you're talking about where they think they can do anything to anyone without any consequences. I mean, that's the world we're living in right now.
- [56:36]
C
And by the way, all of the statistics back them up. One of the things that I pulled together in my Testimony is through the 2010s, 97% of all complaints filed against the Border Patrol that warranted investigation. So this is not sort of like the things that just get, like, tossed out the moment they come in. These are the things that the Border Patrol actually investigated. About 3,000 total complaints in this period against the Border Patrol that they looked into. An average of 3 agents per year were formally reprimanded, which is just like an astounding.
- [57:33]
B
Yes.
- [57:33]
C
Like, you know, tell it. That's sort of all you need to know. So if ICE and CBP agents are acting on the streets like they can get away with every. With anything and everything, all of their lived experience and all of the statistics back that up. You know, remember that DHS did not even put the Alex Preddy shooters on leave immediately.
- [58:01]
B
Right.
- [58:02]
C
Like, it. Like. Which is like, the most basic thing any law enforcement agency in the rest of the United States would do is if you're involved in a shooting, you go on administrative leave immediately. Like, at the scene, you go on administrative leave.
- [58:18]
B
Amazing. Garrett's stuff can be found at Doomsday Scenario. And we will have links to both of the pieces that we've talked about today on my website. To the contrary, accountability for ICE and cbp and this rather extraordinary look at whatever happened to the don't tread on me folks. Minneapolis proves the far right is not anti tyranny. Garrett Graff, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it very, very much.
- [58:45]
C
It is always a pleasure, sir.
- [58:47]
B
Although it didn't necessarily cheer me up.
- [58:49]
C
Exactly.
- [58:50]
B
I'm Charlie Sykes. We do this because we need to remind ourselves, well, you are not the crazy ones. Thank you. Your new home is now ready. Dr. Horton, America's builder, has new homes that are ready today with new construction communities in Ellensburg and throughout the Greater Seattle area.
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