It Could Happen Here Weekly 247

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Call zone media.
00:00:03
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
00:00:29
Speaker 3: Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Kevin Foster, and for the past few months I've witnessed what I would describe as an egregious billionaire handout going down in the city of Portland and the state of Oregon as a whole. You might feel nauseous thinking about your tax dollars going to some wealthy bastard, and trust me, he is a bastard, but what if I told you it was for basketball? That probably sounds silly to many of you, but that's the question Portlanders have been grappling with. Tom Dundon, a Texas billionaire businessman, bought the NBA's Portland Trailblazers in April of this year. You may or may not have heard of Dundon. He made the rounds not too long ago when the other sports team he owns, the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, won the Stanley Cup. Notably, he engraved his dog's name on it to the distaste of many hockey fans. Since Dundon took over the Blazers, he's fueled constant chatter about the possibility of moving the team out of Portland. He's done so by demanding the city, county, and state hand over approximately $ 600 million in public funds to renovate the Moda Center, the Blazers Stadium, which our wonderful producer Sophie has informed me is already quite nice. Despite Forbes estimating Dundon's net worth at around $ 2. 3 billion, he has no plans of contributing to the renovation himself, leaving it all to the taxpayers. There's a very dedicated Blazers community here in town, So the threats of leaving rang major alarm bells, but what has ensued is a revealing cascade of insights into local corruption, economic desperation, and a deep misunderstanding and or willful ignorance of sports economics. So today we're going to talk about the economics of sports and stadiums, why these investments are awful for your city to make, and what to watch out for as the business lobby and politicians in your town try to line the pockets of billionaires. While they will talk a lot about Portland, I want to be clear, a great deal of this could very easily spread across the country as Dundon sets a new precedent for what executives can scrape from taxpayers. On that note, I'd like to do a mini dive into Tom Dundon and some of his co-owners to give you a sense of the types of people we're dealing with here. A mini behind the bastards, if you will. For one, Dundon is a known penny pincher, in other words, a piece of shit. Some of his cost-cutting measures just since taking over the Blazers include massive layoffs of up to 70 Blazers staff, leaving part-time players at home in Portland in the middle of the playoffs, breaking playoff tradition by not giving fans free t-shirts, ignoring players' coaching requests, and undercutting the pay of the coach he did end up hiring. And it gets worse. Dundon made most of his money in the subprime auto loan industry with the company Santander Consumer USA. According to Boston University finance professor Mark Williams, as referenced in an Oregon Public Broadcasting article, Dundon was, quote, one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many would argue he took it to a new level, unquote. According to the New York Times, part of how Dundon and other Santander executives made millions was by packaging risky loans for low-income people into securities that could be sold, a la the 2008 financial crisis and what Wall Street ghouls did with mortgages. The various malpractices, which Santander never had to admit to in court, resulted in $ 550 million worth of legal settlements, including in Oregon. If you're waiting for some sort of karmic relief, it isn't really coming. Dundon walked away from Santander in 2015 with $ 700 million. He then continued to invest in subprime auto lenders while expanding into professional sports. This man is not well-liked, even by people who are clearly desperate to keep the Blazers here. For example, in a recent city council meeting, one fan who was in support of a public subsidy for the Blazers called Dundon a, quote, grade-A douchebag, unquote. And in order to buy the Blazers, Dundon had to put together an ownership group. One lesser-reported individual in that group is Mark Zahr, the co-president of the shadow bank Blue Owl Capital. On their website, Blue Owl calls themselves a, quote, partner to hyperscalers, unquote, in the AI data center space. And according to Bloomberg, they also sold a warehouse to DHS for an ICE megaprison for $ 120 million. Needless to say, these guys don't really embody the typical Portland energy. To be fair to Dundon and Czar, not that I'd really feel the need to, they're in piss-poor company among NBA owners. Oregon Public Broadcasting described the ownership roster in the league as a, quote, billionaires club whose past and current members or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments, and engaging in sexual misconduct, unquote. Apparently, the former Blazers owner Jody Allen settled lawsuits over alleged sexual harassment, and attempting to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica and Africa. That's pretty much par for the course for billionaires, which is exactly why I think this issue is worth paying attention to. At some point, Dundon is going to end up in a room with all the other owners and talk about this sweet deal he got with just a bit of posturing and lobbying. And you don't have to take it from me. Here's renowned sports economist J.C. Bradbury talking about the dynamics between sports owners. This is from a webinar hosted by a few of the Portland City Councilors who actually pushed back against this deal.
00:06:23
Speaker 4: There's a great quote in Kim Belson's recent book on the NFL in which he interviews Stephen Jones, the son of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And he describes the relationship as this. He said, as a competitive guy, he describes a competitive businessman culture among sports team owners.
00:06:40
Speaker 5: He says, accumulating money is keeping score.
00:06:43
Speaker 4: Jerry may not need more money, but if he doesn't make it, in his mind, he has failed. And I think that's what you're seeing a lot with owners.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: They're trying to one-up it.
00:06:51
Speaker 2: Up each other.
00:06:51
Speaker 3: And I think it's interesting.
00:06:52
Speaker 4: A lot of times you see owners go out and they donate vast amounts of money to charity, but then they go and ask for subsidies. And that seems like a contradiction.
00:06:59
Speaker 1: And I think what people need to.
00:07:00
Speaker 4: Understand is that these owners, they're not even necessarily interested in making money for themselves.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: They have billions of dollars.
00:07:08
Speaker 1: They're very wealthy.
00:07:11
Speaker 4: What they want to do is invite all the owners in and say, look at what I got these suckers to buy me. And they all high five each other. And they laugh at politicians who back them when they leave the room.
00:07:21
Speaker 3: The funny thing about all this for me is I don't really care for basketball. I like to think this helps me approach the issue from a relatively objective standpoint, which is why I'm all the more confident in the experts on this saying you'd have to be a fool to support these investments. But you know what else would be a good investment? Maybe some of the products and services that support this podcast.
00:07:53
Speaker 6: And we're back.
00:07:54
Speaker 3: Now that we have a sense of the demons we're dealing with, let's talk about sports economics. If I learned anything from my degree in economics, other than how pretentious most econ majors are, it's that the answer to many questions is just, it depends, and there's rarely consensus on any given issue. Sports economics, though, is one of those rare cases where most people actually agree. Politicians, business leaders, and sports team representatives will boast about the economic boon a team is to your city. They'll talk about the jobs, people going out to bars and restaurants, and supposed economic growth. In reality, sports teams suffer from something called the substitution effect. In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist explain this in detail. The vast majority of consumers has a relatively inflexible leisure budget. If a sports team moves to town, the money one spends taking a family to a game typically is money that is not spent at a local bowling alley, golf course, restaurant, or theater. The net effect on spending in the metropolitan area, then, is zero or very close to zero. While sports teams may rearrange the spending and economic activity in an urban area, they are not likely to add much to it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for defunding golf courses, but with sports stadiums, we're really just moving money around rather than growing. And funny enough, this can actually have a negative effect on surrounding businesses because people spend more at the game, putting money into Tom Dundon's pocket instead of the local community. The counter-argument to this is that sports teams bring in tourists from out of region or out of state, leading to greater profits, but this also doesn't necessarily ring true. Here's Victor Matheson, another leading sports economist, in that same webinar with the Portland City Councilors.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: I've actually studied this extensively.
00:09:52
Speaker 4: There is exactly zero impact on hotel room stays.
00:09:56
Speaker 1: And by zero, I mean literally zero.
00:09:58
Speaker 7: Literally no.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: Hotel rooms anywhere in the country get sold because people decide to come to a city to go see the NBA.
00:10:07
Speaker 3: I'm not certain exactly which studies Matheson is referencing, but he says they've looked into at least a dozen major cities and hundreds of game nights, finding no effect on hotel stays from the NBA. One example backing this up is a 2018 study by Craig E. Depkin and E. Frank Stevenson of Charlotte, North Carolina, which found that NBA regular season games were not associated with a net increase in hotel registrations or hotel revenues the day before, the day of, or the day after a game. They did find some increases for multi-day events, but the overall conclusion of the study is that hotel tax receipts fall short of the debt service incurred from stadium investments. On a larger scale, things like the Olympics and World Cup are a similar story, even with such a specific focus on international travel. A February 2026 article from the Council on Foreign Relations indicates multiple Olympic host cities in recent decades lost billions and that the economic benefits are dubious at best. Matheson suggested in a 2006 paper that these mega events can potentially lead to a profit for a city if they use existing infrastructure, such as the case of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but this isn't always the case. And to give a sense of the broader economic consensus, a 2005 random sample survey of the American Economic Association members found that 86% agreed or strongly agreed with the elimination of state and local subsidies for sports franchises, versus just 5% in opposition. A 2008 paper by Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys states, quote, the large and growing peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas, sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial evidence of increased jobs, incomes or tax revenues for a community associated with any of these things, unquote. Matheson himself examined the other side of the argument on stadium subsidies in a 2018 paper published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He points out that there may be rare cases where public subsidies make sense, but at nowhere near the level that American taxpayers are contributing. Basically, the percent of funding that should come from public contribution may be simply greater than zero, but not very significant. At the end of the day, what this really amounts to is another massive handout for the wealthy, while the poor and working class pay the price in taxes or cut services. It's big business fucking over the little guy who often can't afford to go to the game, or is making a dogshit part-time wage working concessions at the stadium. And to bring it back to Portland, the mayor has talked about financing this deal with climate funds, which are already allocated to different projects. There's a real opportunity cost to using public funding for sports rather than on city needs, and that absolutely needs to be factored into the equation. One of the most basic sort of capitalist econ 101 lessons is that there's just no such thing as a free lunch. This money has to come from somewhere, and that means other programs get the short end of the stick. Over the past few weeks, I've noticed there's this perception that Portland is somehow unique, that losing the Blazers would send the city into financial ruin. Apparently, this is quite common, as J.C. Bradbury's new book is literally titled This One Will Be Different, False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums. In just a bit, I'm going to dive into the tactics owners use to shake down cities, but one way they've done so in Portland is by broadening the conversation to our entire economy. I've watched city councilors play directly into this, claiming the city's economy is heavily based on perception while they make decisions that arguably worsen that perception. It's a paradoxical position. We're struggling, so we need to spend a bunch of money on something that won't make us that money back. That's the level of cognitive dissonance we're dealing with here, and it's all backed up by the business lobby. Our previous city council system penned a deal buying the Moda Center for one dollar. Very clearly, they took on a liability, not an asset, and left us on the hook. There's this fear of the Moda Center becoming a derelict mass and a stain on the city if it's not renovated. People generally seem to agree that it needs renovations, whether for basketball or for concerts, but looking at other cities who lost their sports teams, a rotting concrete corpse is just simply not an inevitability. An article in Blazer's Edge, a Blazers news blog and community site owned by sports media conglomerate SB Nation, pointed out how multiple other arenas across the U.S. have seen record profits after losing their anchor tenant. The Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona lost the NHL's Arizona Coyotes in 2022 and In the year after, according to Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps, the arena broke its revenue record by nearly $ 10 million. After the Golden State Warriors left the Oakland Arena in 2019, it had its best fiscal year ever in 2023 and reduced its operating deficit by 97% over the four years. And Key Arena, once hosting the Seattle Supersonics, a team referenced heavily by supporters of a Blazers subsidy, operated at a loss under the NBA team, according to Blazer's Edge, but it turned a bigger profit than ever after they left by, quote, freeing up the stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves, unquote. I have to emphasize, even with mountains of evidence, reporting on this deal in Portland has felt like a truly Sisyphusian task, with the sheer volume of misinformation being thrown out by our own elected officials and at times the media. Surprisingly, some of the broadcast outlets have had some solid articles on this in the past few months, though I still would have liked better at times. I have a lot of respect for Dave Deckard, the author of the Blazers Edge piece, because his job seems to rely on the Blazers staying here, which he openly points out in his own article. I have a lot less respect for legacy outlets like the Oregonian, especially Bill Orem and the editorial board who repeatedly chastise people for pushing back against this deal. Some of what I've seen from the media has been more akin to stenography than journalism. The journalist's resource and organization aiming to bridge the gap between reporters and academic research says in these sports deals journalists, quote, often report figures from press releases and economic impact statements without questioning the assumptions of those analyses, unquote. The worst part of all this has been watching people fall for the propaganda in public comment. Some individuals even brought their children to speak at Portland City Council. It's painful to feel like I couldn't keep up as a reporter, so for the last quarter of this episode, I want to dive into all of the just head-spinning madness that has gone down in recent months in hopes of providing context that can help constituents in other cities fight off these terrible investments. But before we do that, here's Samantha. And we're back. Many of Oregon and Portland's leaders like to wear the badge of fiscal responsibility, yet they've done the exact opposite of what economists suggest. Unfortunately, it just so happens that this may be one of the worst arena deals of all time. According to data compiled by J.C. Bradbury for that webinar... $ 600 million is in the realm of a 60-70% increase over the median public contribution for a stadium renovation from 2025 onward. Stadiums like the Delta Center in Salt Lake City have lower projected renovation costs than Moda, despite needing a complete conversion from a basketball arena into an arena that can accommodate both basketball and hockey. That is a very expensive renovation, and yet they also negotiated a 30-year contract instead of the 20-year contract we have in Portland. Here, we're on track for a fully publicly funded renovation because, as I highlighted earlier, Tom Dundon said he didn't want to put any money in. The Oregon State Legislature capitulated almost immediately, along with our extremely unpopular governor, shelling out about $ 365 million dollars not including interest, and the county followed suit with approximately another $ 100 million. In this process, the Blazers have not actually shared what they want to use the $ 600 million for. We're riding blind because they've effectively stonewalled us while simultaneously making threats that they'll leave if we don't meet their every demand. They've justified this by claiming they're worried we'll sue them if they leave, leveraging language in the previous lease, which states the primary tenant is required to maintain the arena in, quote, first-class condition. Let me put that another way. Rip City Management, the operator of the Moda Center, asked for essentially a blind contribution of $ 600 million while simultaneously maintaining that the stadium is already in first-class condition because they're afraid of a lawsuit due to the contract they signed a few years ago. The math does not add up. it kind of sounds like the stadium is not actually in first-class condition, or they're scraping taxpayers for unnecessary renovations. And all they really had to do to enforce their agenda was dump a couple hundred thousand dollars into lobbying, then refuse to participate in good faith negotiations. It really should go without saying, your city, state, and county should not throw out hundreds of millions of dollars— technically more than a billion when you consider debt and other payments— without seeing the actual details of the renovation. It's like a fucking loot box, except we might literally get nothing of substance back. Beyond stonewalling and lobbying, the other tactics I'll call creative math and finding a fool. Finding a fool is simply grabbing business shills who will publicly support your propaganda campaign. In Oregon, we're spoiled for choice, and creative math is the coal that fuels the flames. For example, The Portland mayor, city councilors, and county commissioners have thrown around that the region containing the Moda Center produces $ 670 million in annual economic activity. According to the website RipCityNotRipOff, a community effort opposing the billionaire handout, about $ 290 million of this is just from players' salaries. A lot of this money likely does not stay within Portland. This concept is called leakages in that paper by Siegfried and Simbalist. When this creative math doesn't do the trick, sports teams apparently will often seek out impact analyses from consulting firms. And here's a particularly animated clip of Bradbury talking about this.
00:21:50
Speaker 4: I want to jump here. I want to talk about these economic impact studies. We would tell you they don't exist. Economists don't do analyses like that. These things are totally made up garbage. And I'm not even going to be nice anymore because I'm tired of having to deal with this from city to city. That's not how economists do studies. They simply just throw numbers in a barrel and roll out bigger numbers. And I'll tell you how you know this is true because most people don't know. They hear me say that's not true. Someone else says, oh, no, but the other side says it is true.
00:22:20
Speaker 1: And the way you know it is you say, could you.
00:22:22
Speaker 4: Show me some examples where you predicted a number and that it came true? And they will never, ever respond because they have never once predicted it right. And I've been asking for years, can you show me one example? And every time I meet with these consultants, I say, can you show me an example where you predicted correctly? They say, I'll get back to you. And I never hear from them ever again. These people are just, they're shills. They make a living doing this. And we need to start calling them out for doing that.
00:22:49
Speaker 3: In Portland's case, one of the DSA city councilors, Mitch Green, said he asked to see the data for the impact analysis put together by consulting firm Echo Northwest. According to Green, the person who conducted the analysis wanted to give him the data, but the Blazers said it was under an NDA. So we've kind of gone full circle back to stonewalling. If all else fails, teams may rely on astroturfing and boldface corruption to get a deal through. In Portland, a group known as We Are Rip City started up, claiming to be an independent community effort, but they have the telltale signs of a corporate astroturfing campaign. They list hundreds of coalition supporters on their website, from real estate groups to local businesses to unions. But their leadership is made up of business executives, and they work with the political consulting firm March Strategies, who previously contracted with the Blazers and is made up of former high-level Oregon government staffers. The head of We Are Rip City is Jim Etzel, the CEO of Sport Oregon, a non-profit promoting sports in the region. But Sport Oregon is funded in part by the city of Portland. In effect, the city has paid to lobby itself, and it somehow gets even worse. Portland is located in Multnomah County, which is currently set up to contribute around $ 100 million to the arena themselves. The chair of the Multnomah County Commission, Jessica Vega-Peterson, who is not running for reelection this fall, hired the county's negotiator for the deal. Guess who she hired? The fucking board president of Sport Oregon, who also used to work for the Blazers. Here's a clip from the county commission meeting when this came out. Speaking is Commissioner Megan Moyer.
00:24:33
Speaker 1: Did I miss here?
00:24:34
Speaker 8: He is on the board of Sports Oregon that is currently lobbying us on how much we should contribute to this deal?
00:24:44
Speaker 1: We hired a negotiator that's on the board of.
00:24:49
Speaker 8: An organization that is lobbying us on this issue?
00:24:54
Speaker 6: How is that not a wild conflict of interest?
00:24:59
Speaker 3: Oh, Megan, I feel you. Even after this revelation, Moyer was the only one of five on the commission who voted against their $ 101 million term sheet proposal. And trust me, I haven't even touched on all of the craziness surrounding this, but the underlying goal of the team seems to be total control over the conversation. Dundon has pulled off a masterclass in this. In reality, it would likely cost him millions, if not billions more to relocate the Blazers than to just fund the entire renovation himself. There's also debate over whether there's even a location for them to move to since the NBA has already floated an expansion of teams, which rakes in huge amounts of cash for the NBA owners versus relocation, an estimated $ 10 billion per new franchise, according to industry executives and league experts consulted by The Athletic. All of our government's negotiating leverage was thrown out like a bag of dog shit when the Blazers stepped in front of Oregon politicians. I've spent a lot of time dunking on Portland City Council, but to be fair to them, the state kind of screwed us from the outset. And I guess that's kind of my message with all this. You've really got to try to catch it early. They will absolutely try to shove it down your throat, and these owners know how to wage a strong propaganda campaign. What I've really tried to emphasize in all of my reporting is that supporting an arena subsidy, especially of this scale, is just out and out choosing the upper class in a sport over the people struggling on the streets. We have record heat waves, wildfire smoke, people starving, and yet we are giving money to a billionaire. The sickening irony is not lost on me watching a Boys and Girls Club representative testify in favor of a public subsidy and Yet when I drive by the Blazer-sponsored Boys and Girls Club in North Portland, I see the same woman sleeping outside on the sidewalk, her bones starting to protrude from her skin. It's not lost on me when the supposed liberals on Portland City Council vote to give Tom Dundon stronger rent control protections than everyday people in the city. Certainly there are things that are worse than another billionaire handout. but I don't know that I've ever been more personally disgusted by the people who claim to represent me, at least at the local level. The worst part is that they pretend to care. They might even think that they do actually care, but people have literally been yelling this in their faces. It was impossible for them not to hear. There truly is no excuse. They've sold us out, and we'll get a sense of the full damage in December when all the negotiations come to an end. I don't expect these deals will become any less common across the country. As the national economy worsens, I would not be surprised if cultivating local economic desperation becomes a center point in any NBA owner's playbook. Either way, it happened here. I hope it doesn't happen to you. Thanks for listening.
00:28:17
Speaker 7: Hi, James. You know, talking with you goes by really quickly. It's almost like no time has passed since we last recorded, but it's actually been a whole week. Crazy how time flies.
00:28:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the magic of podcasts.
00:28:32
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:28:33
Speaker 7: In the last episode, we left off by talking about how the U.S. took over the Guano Islands and how it established U.S. expansion as a mission of resource extraction. The Guano Islands were uninhabited, but this episode is all about how the U.S. overseas expansion took over people as well as land. So to talk about the five inhabited U.S. colonies, we need to talk about the Spanish Empire. Throughout the 19th century, Spain's expansive empire shrunk considerably. Several of their colonies were either overtaken by the U.S., as in the case of Florida or or became independent, as in the case of Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and others. By the end of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was on its last legs, but it did have a few remaining colonies, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba, the Philippines, and to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico had been fighting insurrectionary wars against Spain for years by the time that 1898 rolled around. in a final bid to keep some type of control over them, Spain gave Cuba and Puerto Rico autonomy, meaning that they could form a local government. Meanwhile, Spain entered into a truce with the Philippines with promises of future reforms. However, their insurgencies essentially continued. This wouldn't last long. because the U.S. government invaded the Spanish colonies a few months later as part of the Spanish-American War. As I've talked about, the end of the 19th century was marked by the wish to expand America's influence beyond its continental borders. It had partially done this with the purchase of Alaska as well as the coming annexation of Hawaii, which would happen in great part because the U.S. needed a military outpost in the mid-Pacific to support operations in the Philippines and Guam. However, it still wanted more, and Spain's weakness presented the perfect opportunity. So throughout the years before 1898, the government had been talking about intervening in Cuba's struggle for independence. This was done through yellow journalism, which we talked about a little bit in the last episode, but essentially the newspapers were talking kind of directly to the United States government and being like, we need to spread liberty to them and freedom we need to teach them uh how it goes and this was of course mixed with manifest destiny and the monroe doctrine where they wanted to quote unquote protect american hegemony uh in the new world yeah.
00:31:08
Speaker 9: I'm trying to remember who said this uplive civilize and christianize our little brown brothers.
00:31:15
Speaker 7: Um was it mckinley it.
00:31:17
Speaker 9: Seems like it would be but when i when i search that specific thing in quotation marks i don't.
00:31:23
Speaker 7: Oh wait so William Howard Taft, the first American governor general of the Philippines and later U.S. president, used the phrase, quote, little brown brother in cables to McKinley. So maybe it was there. Okay.
00:31:36
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think I may have like combined two quotations. The paternalist racism there is fantastic. I'll drop it in later when we're talking about something else. I wasn't sure if it was Cuba or which country they were referring to.
00:31:49
Speaker 7: I mean, based on how Puck drew them, we could all be the Little Brown Brothers.
00:31:53
Speaker 3: Right, yeah. That is the stereotype they're getting, cool.
00:31:56
Speaker 7: Absolutely. So, speaking of protecting U.S. business interests overseas, in January 1898, the United States sent a warship, the USS Maine, to Havana Harbor to safeguard American business interests there as well as U.S. citizens. However, the USS Maine sank about a month later. And while the cause was likely an internal fire, according to recent experts, the contemporary opinion in the United States blamed it all on Spain.
00:32:28
Speaker 6: Right.
00:32:28
Speaker 7: There was this smattering of yellow journalism that was like, you know, they did it. Oh, yeah. The Spain did it to us, even though they didn't really have a way to prove that. Right. Especially not in 1898. Yeah.
00:32:38
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:32:39
Speaker 9: And like the whole like going to the bottom of the ocean to look at the USS Maine was It's a thing. There have been a series of, I guess, underwater archaeology is what it is, but expeditions to ascertain exactly which direction it blew out. Various ones have had various conclusions. I think you rightly phrase it here. It doesn't matter what caused the explosion. It became a fact for the yellow press that the Spanish did.
00:33:09
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And I think it's really interesting that there's still... And I understand that why you want to like have a genuine conclusion, but the fact that it's still being litigated more than, what is it, like 128, 140 years after? Yeah. A little bit more, a little bit less, a little bit more.
00:33:26
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:33:27
Speaker 7: Is still, you know, kind of this conception of American nation building where it couldn't be that the press got it wrong, that the government got it wrong, and that it became a fact in the media. And that's why the U.S. invaded. Cuba and other Spanish colonies, right? The U.S. kind of has to prove itself innocent in this regard. So per How to Hide an Empire, the U.S. government and the U.S. media wanted to intervene, but anti-imperialists in Congress, imagine that, didn't want Cuba to be annexed to the United States. So to ostensibly show that they didn't have colonial ambitions, Congress passed the Teller Amendment that stated that they would not annex Cuba. However, Congress said nothing of Spain's other colonies. I should also say that before the U.S. officially entered the war that year, Teddy Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had sent ships to essentially surround all of the colonies, not just Cuba. So they were kind of pretty clearly preparing for something, you know?
00:34:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
00:34:34
Speaker 7: So the U.S. went to war in 1898, and it won pretty handily. in large part, and this is the stuff that a lot of American history books won't tell you, because of the help of the independence movements that had already been fighting in these colonies for decades. However, the U.S. did as the U.S. does and essentially discarded these independence movements' ambitions once they had helped the U.S. win the war, showing once again that allies are not necessarily friends. I feel like this is a lesson that has to be taught and learned Throughout American history, right? You know? Yeah, yeah.
00:35:11
Speaker 3: Many, many, many such cases.
00:35:13
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:35:14
Speaker 7: In my opinion, nowhere is this more evident than in the Philippines, where the liberation movement declared independence from Spain in June of 1898, yet it went unrecognized by the U.S. Instead, the U.S. choreographed a mock battle with Spain that eventually led to them handing over their colony to the U.S., per How to Hide an Empire. The Americans' lack of recognition for the Filipino independence movement would eventually lead to the Philippine-American War, where the U.S. trampled and devastated the Filipino insurgency that wanted independence from one conqueror, Spain originally, and their newest conqueror, the United States. You know, ostensibly, they came in to help these people and then essentially massacred them.
00:36:01
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:36:02
Speaker 3: Little vexillogical aside.
00:36:04
Speaker 9: The star and triangle device that you see on lots of flags has its birth in this period. I believe it begins with José Martí and the Cuban independence movement. Obviously, it characterizes many of these states and their independence movement. But for a while there, that flag was the symbol of fighting against imperial conquest. That's why they incorporated it into the Catalan flag. the independent Senella has the triangle and then the Catalonia just as a thing without any particular political ambition doesn't have the triangle and the star. And then you have the red triangle for like socialist independentist, but like this blue triangle in flags, like it just shows how these actions like reverberated around the world, right? Like Spain had been the empire.
00:36:56
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker 9: And like I had this in, in Spanish this week, we call it the Anus Horribilis of 1898, right? Like the complete collapse of Spain's external possessions. And like for a while there, people were like, huh?
00:37:09
Speaker 3: Yeah. Empires can fall.
00:37:11
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: We can defeat them. Unfortunately, a new one took its place. Yeah, exactly.
00:37:17
Speaker 9: Empires can fall if a new empire slides in there and like, yes, helps with the fighting and what doesn't do all like, like you said, like these people have been fighting, like, Marty was dead by the time Roosevelt arrived, but he had already begun the independence movement.
00:37:32
Speaker 7: Uh, and actually now that you, you mentioned that about the triangle, I didn't include it in this, uh, script, right. But the Puerto Rican flag is actually directly based on the Cuban flag as well. It was made in 1895, I believe by, uh, Puerto Rican exiles in New York who were fighting for independence from Spain. And so they essentially adopted this Cuban design, but inverted the colors to show kind of Caribbean solidarity and brotherhood. Yeah. And, you know, it's been our flag ever since.
00:38:02
Speaker 5: Right.
00:38:03
Speaker 7: And there's a thing about the Puerto Rican flag that I'm not going to get into too much, but like. based on the kind of color of the blue in the flag, uh, is the political status that you support, right? That's kind of a, a myth, kind of a myth that has essentially become the fact, right?
00:38:23
Speaker 6: Right.
00:38:24
Speaker 9: No, I love a little hidden flag shit, like the, uh, The Flandrians with their flag, like if the lion has claws or not, it denotes their status on independence. I think, yeah, it doesn't matter if that's what it was designed for. Again, it becomes true because everyone knows it to be true and they're using it to signal that.
00:38:40
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in Puerto Rico, the light blue is kind of the independence flag. The medium blue, which is kind of the one that most often is used depending on the place, is kind of the status quo, sometimes independence flag. And then the darker blue, similar to the dark blue used in the U.S. flag, is the one that stands for statehood. That's cool. You shouldn't necessarily take this as fact because, you know, sometimes it's hard for people to get their hands on a specific color blue Puerto Rican flag. But you can usually tell based on the flag that they're waving around what they support.
00:39:14
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:39:15
Speaker 7: Also, actually, speaking of flags, the flag of the Northern Mariana Islands, it goes hard. Have you seen it?
00:39:21
Speaker 3: No, I haven't.
00:39:22
Speaker 7: Oh, let me see.
00:39:22
Speaker 9: The Marshall Islands flag's fucking thick. Yes, I'm actually looking at it right now.
00:39:26
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:39:27
Speaker 3: A Marshallese football shirt.
00:39:29
Speaker 7: Let me send a pic real quick.
00:39:30
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, that's a sick one.
00:39:31
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:39:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, wow.
00:39:32
Speaker 7: There's a lot of very cool flag designs that I witnessed while writing this script.
00:39:37
Speaker 9: Oh, wow.
00:39:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, that one's great.
00:39:39
Speaker 7: So speaking about the Philippine-American War and the American occupation of the Philippines post-1898, quoting from Colonial Crucible, The four years of counter-guerrilla warfare that followed would make accurate intelligence an imperative, forcing a marked expansion of the military's limited capacities, particularly in the area of operational field intelligence. During the campaign in Manila, the U.S. Army, quote, created a modern metropolitan police force that applied military intelligence and data management to the problem of political espionage. developing covert techniques of surveillance and penetration to fight a dirty war in the city's slums and back alleys, end quote. And according to How to Hide an Empire, American GIs tortured Filipino guerrillas by administering the quote-unquote water cure, a torture method similar to the waterboarding which has happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, right?
00:40:39
Speaker 3: And in Cuba, in the little US base that we have there.
00:40:42
Speaker 7: As well, right. And you kind of see this as part of the imperial feedback or the imperial boomerang that colonization of the U.S. 's colonies has sent back into the United States and how it's reverberated in future imperialist or colonialist conquest, right? This one torture method, which is very similar actually to waterboarding, has reverberated throughout American counterinsurgency history. So here you can see how the management of empire has instructed the U.S. 's military apparatus in quelling nationalist movements the world over. And this is obviously something that's come back towards the American metropole, particularly the kind of counterinsurgency used in policing American military occupations, right? This is very common because, quoting from Colonial Crucible, colonial regimes only had finite resources for costly social controls and generally chose to apply them to policing, prisons, and law enforcement. And kind of the colonial policing apparatus has reverberated throughout every single empire's history, right? I'm thinking of Smedley Butler taking the policing techniques he learned in Haiti back to Philadelphia with him. The filipino police kind of setting the scene for some of the policing that would happen in the united states this is like very much a thing that happens the world over or um god why am i blanking george orwell in uh india the the policing that he did in burma sorry.
00:42:19
Speaker 9: Yeah which was part of india at the time in the british conception.
00:42:23
Speaker 7: So orwell being a policeman there and kind of seeing how it impacted back home and we see this the world over, right? In terms of militarization, the military exports that the U.S. has taken to many, many, many countries, the world over is now reverberating back into U.S. streets. And actually, in terms of ICE and the kind of paramilitary campaign of terror that they're doing, we're seeing the people that the U.S. displaced in other places kind of fleeing there, trying to get a safe haven in the U.S. and The paramilitary tactics that were used against their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents now being used on them, right? So the cycle of abuse and violence doesn't really end, sadly.
00:43:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:43:12
Speaker 7: So you know what won't invest resources in policing, prisons, and law enforcement? These advertisers.
00:43:19
Speaker 3: We can't say that for sure.
00:43:21
Speaker 5: Right.
00:43:22
Speaker 3: Might be the Washington State Highway Patrol again.
00:43:35
Speaker 7: And we're back. Meanwhile, in Cuba, as I mentioned previously, anti-imperialists in Congress passed a law that meant the U.S. couldn't annex it. However, that didn't mean there couldn't be a military occupation, which lasted until 1902 when Cuba declared independence. However, the Platt Amendment stipulated that the U.S. could intervene in Cuban affairs, even invade if they wanted to. It also meant that the U.S. could establish a permanent naval base there, which is now and then called Guantanamo Bay. Actually, that might be the one piece of American overseas empire that I think is very present in the American consciousness. It's much more so than Puerto Rico or Guam or whatever.
00:44:21
Speaker 9: Yeah, the fact that it's like a cutout from Cuba, this country, that the whole thing of this half of the Trump administration is hating Cuba.
00:44:30
Speaker 3: And be like, oh, psych, we also own a little bit of that island.
00:44:33
Speaker 7: Right, exactly. And own it for more than a century at this point as kind of a bastion of continued control on it, right? Because they couldn't annex it completely. But if you just take a little small piece of it and then use it for a lot of evil things, you know.
00:44:51
Speaker 9: Yeah, to your point about it affecting the metropole, like so much of the worst parts of US history run through that little naval enclave there.
00:45:00
Speaker 7: Absolutely.
00:45:01
Speaker 9: Like the worst parts of the war on terror. We're now using it for a deportation camp, right? Like it's where we do our deniable crimes.
00:45:10
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely. And that actually ties very much into a thing that I'll give a little preview on, which is why the U.S. Constitution doesn't really apply in the colonies. So the U.S. would go on to occupy Cuba two more times, from 1906 to 1909, and once more from 1917 to 1922. Even after the U.S. occupation ended, the U.S. would go on to have a very good relationship with the Batista dictatorship because of American business interests in the Cuban archipelago. However, the Cuban Revolution of 1953 would eventually mark the end of this relationship with the U.S. oscillating between wanting to outright take over or destroy Cuba again, as the current Trump administration wants to do, or to just being kind of very critically wary of the government, right? There was a point in recent American history where tensions between the two countries, and I say tensions, but it's really an extremely lopsided situation. kind of hate from the U.S. 's part. There was a time in recent memory where tensions were kind of mellowing out. Then you could visit Cuba without there being a major international incident under Obama. And similar to the Philippines, Cuba became an important part of how the U.S. would portray itself overseas. There were several things that happened in Cuba and have happened in Cuba that have defined the colonial empire, right? Like Guantanamo Bay, But this time, I don't want it to be something so dark. So, per Colonial Crucible, American forces occupying Cuba worked ceaselessly to control the dreaded yellow fever in Havana and the rest of the island. But like the public health campaigns of other colonial powers, these efforts were not an expression of medical beneficence. As elsewhere, public health in Cuba served the needs of the colonizer rather than the colonized. to protect commerce, maintain the labor force, safeguard troops, and colonial administrations, and justify colonial rule. The eradication of yellow fever in Cuba, an unprecedented success of colonial public health, achieved for the United States nearly all of these goals. American public health efforts in Cuba were a colonial enterprise that provided economic and political benefits to important supporters of the American imperial state, demonstrated that American imperialism could succeed where European powers had failed and so inspired further American colonial expansion in the region. So here you can kind of see how even if the U.S. is doing something like patently good, like eliminating yellow fever in the Cuban archipelago, it's still because they want to further control Cuba and its neighboring islands. So a similar hookworm eradication campaign took place in Puerto Rico, which remains a U.S. colony to this day. this hookworm eradication campaign would go on to inform a similar campaign throughout the American South. However, as noted by How to Hide an Empire, the Southern campaign largely succeeded, in part because of a million-dollar philanthropic donation from John D. Rockefeller. Meanwhile, a victim of colonial neglect, the Puerto Rico Project received only $ 5, 000, and no matter how many hookworm pills Puerto Ricans took, they became reinfected again and again, because the government did not care to uplift them from poverty, would have significantly reduced hookworm rates. In comparison, the US South essentially received this mega donation, which helped them uplift them, as well as investing in school and several other programs that made it so this hookworm infection wasn't so disastrous for the region. However, Puerto Rico being a colony, they were like, you know, we don't need to do as much So here we see how colonial health campaigns can be used to benefit the metropole at the expense of the colonies. Yes, Cubans and Puerto Ricans got help for their illnesses. But in one case, it was used to justify further colonization. And in the other, they were used essentially as guinea pigs to help white people of the American South. Puerto Rico was under military rule from 1898 to 1900, and was eventually placed under civil administration in 1900 under the Foraker Act. Puerto Ricans would become American citizens 17 years later, just as the U.S. was entering World War I. It's commonly stated as a myth that we were made citizens exclusively to become soldiers. And this is like half right. The thinking by the U.S. government was that citizenship would convince Puerto Ricans to fight any foreign aggressors that could possibly attack the archipelago, as well as help the U.S. military project a military force into the Caribbean. I should say that this is according to the book Soldiers of the Nation by Harry Frankie Rivera. And actually, Puerto Rico is called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean in World War II because of its coastal defenses. Got it.
00:50:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:50:12
Speaker 7: However, it wouldn't be until 1949 that we were able to choose our own governor and we became, quote, Estado Libre Asociado or Commonwealth in 1952. I'm going to spare the political conjecture. Truthfully, Estado Libre Asociado is kind of a nonsense statement. It's essentially just colony with a fancier name, right? There's not really any difference between Puerto Rico and Guam in this sense, right? Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, same as the Northern Mariana Islands, actually. But there's really no difference legally from other colonies by being called an Estado Libre Asociado. And speaking of political repression by the U.S. government, the Puerto Rican independence movement has waxed and waned over the years. All the while, the movement has faced pretty brutal political repression throughout all that time, including being bombed by the Air Force during the 1950 Hayuya uprising, one of the few times that the U.S. has bombed its own citizens, as well as the longest domestic surveillance program in U.S. history that spanned roughly six decades and tracked somewhere over 100,000 people, according to the book Las Carpetas by Ramón Bosque Pérez and José Javier Colón Morera. Here, like the Philippines, we see how the U.S. 's imperial quelling of nationalist movements would go on to boomerang back to the metropole. Las Carpetas, as the program is colloquially known, preceded COINTELPRO, and its DNA can be found throughout the domestic surveillance programs that we know of, and surely those that we don't. And I want to stop here to speak a little of the Puerto Rican status debate, because I've seen a lot of people who don't know anything about it acting like experts on twitter.com over the years. Shocking. Puerto Rico has performed several referendums over the decades where you vote on the status. And over the last decade, a state has won three of them. Truth be told, these referendums don't actually mean that much in terms of measuring public support because they've been boycotted and many people view them in the same way that they would a public poll. Also, it's non-binding, which means even if whatever option wins, nothing's going to happen. Congress is the only one that could approve statehood for Puerto Rico, no matter how much Puerto Ricans asked for it. Even so, in the last referendum during the 2024 election, some form of independence, meaning either full independence or compact or free association, received 41% support, while statehood received 59%. So, while statehood is ostensibly the majority choice, it's not as clear-cut as many people would want you to believe.
00:52:54
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:54
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:53:12
Speaker 7: And now I'm sorry to say that I'm going to summarize a lot of the history of Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands to get to how the Constitution doesn't fully apply there. But I still want people to know some of the basic facts about the other colonies. Guam was under military rule for 47 years, first by the U.S., then Japan for four years during World War II, and again by the U.S. until 1950, when Truman signed the Organic Act of Guam, giving them a civilian administration and a civilian court. Meanwhile, the U.S. annexed American Samoa in 1900 when local chiefs ceded Tutuila, the largest island to the U.S. This was followed by Manoa in 1904 and Swains Island in 1905, although it's also claimed by Tokelau, a colony of New Zealand. As I said during the last episode, American Samoans are non-citizen nationals, and they have to naturalize if they want to become American citizens. Per the ACLU, being a non-citizen national means that they can't be firefighters, paramedics, and public school teachers. The U.S. Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark for $ 25 million in 1917. The U.S. had been negotiating this in one way or another since 1865, and like Puerto Rico, USVI is an important strategic foothold in the Caribbean for military purposes. Finally, the Northern Mariana Islands have oscillated rulers between several empires. However, after World War II, they became United Nations Trust Territories under American administration. It became a colony of the U.S. in 1986. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau were also part of this trust, but they chose to enter into compacts of free association instead of becoming colonies. There is a common trait among all of these colonies that I've mentioned throughout, which is being key to military force projection by the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Bases in each of these colonies are crucial to the U.S. military's logistical ability to deploy throughout the world. Recently, a long dormant naval base in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Roads, was brought back to life as part of the Trump administration's attacks on Venezuela and the boat strikes throughout the Caribbean, as well as including the Pacific. The planes that are doing the boat strikes aren't leaving from Puerto Rico to do in the Pacific, obviously. Another common trait that all of these colonies share is that stuff is super expensive. in part because of the Jones Act, a 1920 shipping law that mandates that any goods traveling between two U.S. ports has to move on a U.S.-flagged, owned, and crewed ship. People might be most familiar with this law based on the amount of times a sitting U.S. president has put it on pause. In fact, Trump extended the Jones Act waiver for another 90 days just a few days ago to assuage pressures from oil price increases. A 2024 working paper by two Purdue University economists with backing of the World Bank found that the Jones Act imposes an annual welfare burden on Puerto Rico of $ 1. 4 billion. Because foreign-flagged commerce ships can't stop in Puerto Rico then go on to Florida, for example, they have to go to Florida first, have all their stuff moved onto a U.S.-flagged ship, then it comes here. And all of this cost is passed on to the consumers. The Jones Act also affects Hawaii and Alaska.
00:56:36
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think people who have not experienced this will not realize the profound nature to which this, and just being so far from the colonial core, impacts everyday life. The way you eat is fundamentally determined. by the fact that this shit is so expensive. I know this gets particularly the case in interior Alaska, where just getting there is in and of itself expensive, but this has a big role to play.
00:57:05
Speaker 7: Absolutely. Actually, this isn't the script, but in terms of Puerto Rico, part of the American industrialization of the archipelago, as well as the way that it was backed up by the local government, meant that we switched from a kind of agricultural society to an industrial one. And we went from growing a ton of our own food to only growing about between 10% to 20% of it, which back then was very good because there was a boom time for the Puerto Rican economy. But kind of now, it means that everything is incredibly expensive because it has to come from all over the world, get moved onto a US flagship in the contiguous 48 states, then come back here. Right.
00:57:48
Speaker 9: It places you not only at a place where you're already paying more, but also at the whim of shipping costs, oil prices, these things that we're all seeing go up right now.
00:58:01
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And part of those costs have been assuaged recently because of the waivers. But there is a very big contingent of people in Puerto Rico who are really dreading the moment those waivers stop because things are going to get really expensive again. And I mean, they're still expensive, but they're going to get even more expensive, right?
00:58:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:58:22
Speaker 7: Yeah. So at this point, if you've been listening closely, you'll notice that there's a pretty glaring omission in what I've covered so far. Alaska and Hawaii, the only overseas U.S. territories to become states, have gone almost completely unmentioned. I purposefully left them out because they overcomplicated the whole history and it was easier to put them at the end than in the middle. So Alaska was bought from Imperial Russia in 1856 for $ 7. 2 million, and Hawaii was annexed in 1898 after U.S. businessmen and Marines did a bloodless coup against the Kingdom of Hawaii and its then-queen. They eventually became the 49th and 50th state in the middle of the 20th century, and the kind of annexation of Alaska and Hawaii is the thread that's been running throughout these two podcast episodes.
00:59:10
Speaker 5: Right?
00:59:11
Speaker 7: In terms of Alaska, it's resource extraction. By buying Alaska, they got access to miles and miles of pristine nature that had in it gold, fur, and oil. In Hawaii, they received a strategic foothold in the Pacific, which has become extremely important over the years, particularly at the time that it was annexed during the Spanish-American War, where the U.S. military had to use it as a launchpad, essentially, for its war in the Philippines and Guam. According to How to Hide an Empire and an article in The Conversation titled Why Russia Gave Up Alaska, America's Gateway to the Arctic by William L. Igiagruk Hensley, The purchase of Alaska brought with it a cornucopia of natural resources, including gold, fur, and oil, that could be mined from this new territory as well as nearly 400 million pristine acres of new land with a comparably small addition to the U.S. 's majority white racial calculus. And this is a very important thing. The United States has never really added territories at this point that would significantly throw off the amount of white Anglo-Saxon people that inherit it, right? And I'm thinking of choosing to incorporate Oklahoma instead of the indigenous state of Sequoia because of how it would affect the amount of white people in the United States.
01:00:37
Speaker 9: Yeah, and the way that it would affect the representation in Congress too, right? Like specifically partitioning states off in such a way that they don't tend to give people who are not white representation.
01:00:48
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely. Meanwhile, Hawaii, with a much more multicultural population, was a four-year issue. But the U.S. decided to make them a state anyway because it helped them reach Pacific markets and because it provided an important geopolitical strategic interest during the Cold War. Hawaii was made into a state because of the Spanish-American War, but it was annexed, not made into a state. A declaratory note there. Right, yeah. I'm severely flattening history here, but that's the gist of how they became states. And, dear listener, you might be asking, what makes them different from Puerto Rico and the rest of the colonies? The key difference is that Alaska and Hawaii were both, quote-unquote, incorporated territories. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa are quote-unquote unincorporated territories. If that distinction means nothing to you and it sounds kind of racist, welcome to the club. This distinction was created in 1901 by a series of racist Supreme Court decisions called the Insular Cases. A critical part of the Insular Cases created the doctrine of incorporation that governs non-contiguous territories, as well as created the idea of incorporation versus unincorporation, creating the legal framework saying that the Constitution does not fully apply to the unincorporated territories. Downs v. Bidwell was the most important case here because it created the term unincorporated territory to describe Puerto Rico's legal status shortly after it had been acquired. The case created the distinction that some territories were unincorporated and others were incorporated, like Alaska and Hawaii, which were integral parts of the U.S. and thus bound for statehood. However, unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not on that path to statehood, and they were a pertinent to the United States, the same word the US used for the islands it claimed under the Guano Islands Act. We were, and this is a quote, foreign in a domestic sense.
01:03:06
Speaker 3: What an amazing legal fucking term to come up with.
01:03:09
Speaker 7: Right?
01:03:10
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:03:11
Speaker 6: Great.
01:03:11
Speaker 7: I don't know. It's like very incredible because all of this is like a legal fiction applied.
01:03:17
Speaker 5: Right.
01:03:18
Speaker 7: Like, Literally, right?
01:03:20
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a bunch of people dancing around saying long words to be like, totally not a colony, dude.
01:03:24
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not. No way. Totally different, bro. I don't know what you're talking about.
01:03:27
Speaker 7: The US would never have colonies. They're just foreign in a domestic sense. Another case, the Lima v. Bidwell, was decided on the exact same day. It explained that Puerto Rico belonged to the US. I'm simplifying the explanation here, but when you mix it with Downs and other cases over the years, you get the phrase that we know all too well. Owned, but not part of. To drive the point home, I want to paraphrase from Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire. The insular cases put Puerto Rico and other colonies in a liminal space, both inside and outside of the boundaries of the Constitution, relegating the people who live there to a permanent state of limbo, neither fully citizens nor completely foreign. The insular cases cemented the imperial mode of governance so thoroughly that many Americans would not even consider their home country to be an empire. These colonies remain in limbo to this day, likely never going to be made states, yet equally as likely to never become independent. This ideological and legal framework has extended past the colonies, the most salient example being Guantanamo Bay, a colonial holdover from U.S. occupation in Cuba. Per Kaplan in her essay, Where is Guantanamo Bay?, court decisions built on top of the insular cases recognize the base as domestic for some purposes and foreign for others, thus facilitating the, quote, global reach of U.S. power by creating a shadowy hybrid legal system coextensive with the changing needs of empire. There have been several attempts to overturn the insular cases, but they remain case law. These cases that describe the people of Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies as, quote, alien races and savage tribes remain the way that the United States views its overseas possessions. The last challenge to the insular cases came in 2018, In a case titled Fitisamanu versus United States, where free non-citizen nationals from American Samoa challenged the U.S. government's denial to extend to them birthright citizenship. A Utah federal district court, right? Not an American Samoan court. A Utah federal district court declared that American Samoans were citizens of the United States and deserve birthright citizenship. But the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision citing the Insular cases. And in this process, there is kind of a very specific othering of people of the colonies, right? You don't get to go to your local court and show them, hey, I want to be a part of this nation, which is what they wanted, right? You have to go to Utah, to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and be like, hey, I want you to recognize my constitutional rights.
01:06:13
Speaker 9: That has now got me wondering, like, what circuit they're in. Like, do they fall into a federal circuit? No, it doesn't have a federal court, apparently.
01:06:22
Speaker 7: No, because part of the reason that American Samoa is so different from the rest of the colonies, right, is that the indigenous population there has kind of wanted to keep them separately. And, right, there's varying opinions on this, right, which is why we saw that challenge to the insular cases. During that challenge, the... country or the government of american samoa they were pro-insular cases being like hey we want to continue for this to be case law because it wouldn't challenge certain laws that they have in the books that people with certain amounts of american samoan ancestry can buy land and those without it can't buy land there yeah.
01:07:03
Speaker 9: Okay so they didn't want to get equal protection or something under the equal protection clause of the constitution they felt like it was a net positive for them.
01:07:12
Speaker 7: Yeah, but obviously this has changed through time, I should say, right?
01:07:17
Speaker 3: Right, yeah.
01:07:18
Speaker 7: For some, it means that they can stop gentrification and further colonization of their island, but it also means that their people face significant challenges if they choose to travel outside of American Samoa. which, based on how the U.S. economy works, usually means that a significant portion of that population has to leave in order to find employment, right?
01:07:45
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think of, like, how, like, Marshallese people, they're not U.S. citizens, but they can travel to the U.S. without a visa and reside and.
01:07:55
Speaker 3: Work in the U.S. without a visa.
01:07:56
Speaker 9: But, like, if they join the military, they can join the U.S. military, but then if they want to access their VA benefits, they have to go to Hawaii, like, across like a it's a several hour flight like it's several days on a boat right so and like obviously not all of the uh you know the services that they might need medically available on marjora so like they they have to they have to take that journey just to access the benefits that like in theory are owed to them.
01:08:29
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's not exactly the same situation here in Puerto Rico, but the VA benefits system here is not that great compared to the contiguous United States, which in and of itself is also not that great from what I've read and people have told me.
01:08:45
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah.
01:08:46
Speaker 7: But there's only one hospital here in several clinics. So if you live far away from the hospital, you have to travel to that to get VA care. And that's like, one of the many, many things where the U.S. colonies are forgotten and left by the wayside in terms of these things that the U.S. government should ostensibly provide for its citizens and the people under its dominion, right?
01:09:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:09:13
Speaker 7: So the insular cases essentially said that people in the U.S. colonies were owned but not part of the United States. That meant that we had to be given American citizenship if we got it, not the case of American Samoa, through federal statute. This is different than people born in the contiguous United States or Alaska and Hawaii, where they get birthright citizenship through the Constitution. Because the Constitution doesn't fully apply to us, we had to get it through federal statute. This means that it would be pretty easy to take away birthright citizenship in the colonies compared to taking away birthright citizenship throughout the entire U.S. This is something that Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith wants to do. Griffith presented a law to eliminate birthright citizenship in the U.S. colonies, saying that it was the only thing that the U.S. could do to protect American citizenship. And because our American citizenship is through statute, several laws throughout history in Puerto Rico, as it was in 1917, then codified by the American Nationality Act. He could do it if the law passed Congress and Congress chose to eliminate birthright citizenship here. His press release specifically cited the Insular cases as giving Congress the power to take it away. However, to be clear, It's very unlikely that this bill will even make it to a vote, much less become law. But through this kind of threat to take away birthright citizenship, we see how the U.S. still has kind of extremely direct control over its colonies.
01:10:52
Speaker 6: Yeah.
01:10:53
Speaker 7: You know, as I hope I have evidence throughout this episode, the American colonies, the current American colonies, not the 14 colonies, right, have always been laboratories for the American experiment. in terms of surveillance, in terms of military occupation. And here, with this bill that, again, probably won't even make it to a vote, we are seeing the Republican administration trying to experiment with how they can take away birthright citizenship, which they failed to do through Trump's executive order. But they are trying to see how they can ram it through to take it away from people. And recently... we saw Trump sign an executive order to do a similar thing to ostensibly address, quote unquote, birth tourism, a thing that doesn't really matter. Yeah.
01:11:45
Speaker 3: In the grand scheme of things, it's an infinitesimally small number of people.
01:11:48
Speaker 7: Exactly. The thing that I want to express is that the U.S. colonies have always been laboratories of empire. What happens here doesn't stay here. And contrary to the way that many people think, the U.S. and other empires, to be clear, doesn't just exert power, ideology, and movements outwards. Instead, it is in a continuous feedback loop with its colonies that have shaped what happens in the imperial core the same way that it has shaped what happens in the imperial periphery. And I want to end this episode by talking about how Trump has signaled several times towards U.S. territorial expansion. He has made moves or said that he wants to annex Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, the Gaza Strip, Mexico, and Greenland, among others. And as I mentioned in the last episode, he's been obsessed with Greenland for a hot minute, even reportedly saying that he wanted to trade it for Puerto Rico, which was then ravaged by Hurricane Maria, according to NBC. His most recent signal was posting a picture of Venezuela with the American flag on it, essentially saying that he wants to make it the 51st state. To be clear, there are several other places that he could do that in, but he is projecting this idea of the 51st state as a way of kind of colonial capture. Right.
01:13:14
Speaker 2: Right.
01:13:14
Speaker 7: By promising to bring liberty and freedom to Venezuelans. He is saying, we will make you equal. even though he has forgotten a bunch of equal rights for 4 million people in the US colonies. And while a lot of Trump's rhetoric about territorial expansion of the United States has been brushed off as the mad ramblings of a despot without any real power to do so, he did genuinely kidnap Nicolas Maduro and has kind of made the country into a vassal state of the US, right?
01:13:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:13:42
Speaker 7: And I learned that this is called a sucerain.
01:13:45
Speaker 3: Okay.
01:13:45
Speaker 7: A sucerain is a political leader that expresses power Over a separate sovereign entity.
01:13:52
Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. In like an informal fashion like this?
01:13:57
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:13:58
Speaker 1: Okay.
01:13:58
Speaker 7: While the lines aren't quite clear enough right now, it's become increasingly evident that the U.S. is exerting more than simple influence in Venezuela, making it into a U.S. protectorate in all but name. And to be honest with you, in my opinion, the U.S. would never add another state to the union, particularly one that would add 28.6 million Latinx people to the nation's demographics. However, as I hope I have evidence throughout the episode, the American empire has various forms of exerting its colonial influence throughout the region and the world, right? It doesn't necessarily have to become a state to become owned by the United States, as Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other colonies. Within its treatment of its colonies and the insular cases, the U.S. has established a separate ideological and legal framework to treat those people and pieces of land that it wants to own and occupy but not incorporate. Carlos from the future here. A couple days after we recorded this episode, Trump announced that he already considered the Strait of Hormuz quote-unquote American territory. This was reported by several news outlets, including The Guardian, which is where I read it originally. While it seems pretty obvious that the U.S. government has no way of actually establishing control over the Strait because it's on the losing side of the war, the overture towards taking it over is an attempt to establish a new sphere of U.S. hegemony in the region. Imperialism is a business enterprise, and much like the conquest of the Guano Islands and the inhabited colonies meant access to new resources and military footholds, U.S. control of the Strait, which again, very unlikely, would be an incredible boon for the U.S. economy. The most comparable thing here would be the Panama Canal. Control of the canal helped the U.S. become a major global power because it controlled shipping in the region. The U.S. government likely wants to do something similar with the Strait of Hormuz, a major maritime passage for all types of things that make the economy move. While the threat against the Strait is the newest in a long line of threats to annex new territory to the U.S., we should normalize them. Through its colonies and the insular cases, as well as decades of colonialism and imperialism, The U.S. has built the apparatus to expand its empire to people and places beyond its borders. While it's unlikely, we shouldn't write it off completely, especially as the Trump administration continues to signal that it wants to regain domination over the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world.
01:16:19
Speaker 3: If they'd like to read more of your work, where can they find you?
01:16:23
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm at Vaquero2XL on social media. It's V-A-Q-U-X-L. E-R-O-2-X-L. I'm a freelancer, so I've written for a bunch of places. My most recent work has been a series of short documentaries about different immigrant populations in Puerto Rico, the Dominican population, the Chinese population, and the Palestinian population. The Palestinian one came out a little less than a month ago. And that's pretty much where you can find me. Thanks for accompanying me on this colonial journey, James.
01:16:57
Speaker 3: That's what I do. But yeah, thank you for explaining that.
01:17:01
Speaker 9: I feel like it's really good to have these things all wrapped up in a way people can understand like that.
01:17:06
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:17:21
Speaker 6: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, seemingly the only podcast bold enough to do what the mainstream media is too cowardly to do and let trans people talk about ourselves, I guess, or the unhinged issues that a bunch of reactionary cis people have foisted upon us. And here to talk with me today about a truly baffling and very weird and shitty... anti-trans panic that has been launched in the WNBA is Frankie de la Cruz, who's a sports writer who writes at the intersection of sports and gender and does a very good job of it in a way that I was going to say few others do. And then I was like, who am I thinking about who also does this and does it this well?
01:18:09
Speaker 5: And like, I'm not sure I have anyone.
01:18:12
Speaker 6: So incredible work.
01:18:14
Speaker 8: I appreciate that.
01:18:16
Speaker 6: The other guest I have on today is Bugs Matrix, who, if you have like been on the internet and been anywhere near trans people, you are aware of bugs. What I think people are less aware of is a, that if you ever heard a trans person say, yeah, that's, that's bugs. B B bugs was also a trans college athlete. So both of you two, welcome to the show. And I'm excited to get to actually talk about this WNBA, Sophie Cunningham bullshit with, The trees. of former trans college athlete, trans journalist, and whatever the hell I am, transgender.
01:18:57
Speaker 1: It's truly the meeting of irons.
01:18:59
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm excited too. I spend most of my time talking to cis people about this, so it's nice to have different conversation partners.
01:19:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's so nice to be able to talk with people who intrinsically know Ball.
01:19:15
Speaker 5: That too.
01:19:17
Speaker 6: Oh, God. So, OK, speaking of knowing Ball. So the specific controversy, I don't even know what to call this media frenzy.
01:19:29
Speaker 1: Witch hunt.
01:19:30
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:19:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:19:32
Speaker 6: Yeah. centered around a WNBA player named Sophie Cunningham, which I guess people have heard of her now. My first experience of this was... Seeing everyone talking about Sophie Cunningham and being absolutely baffled because I was like, wait, isn't she that bench player from The Fever? Why is everyone talking about her?
01:19:56
Speaker 7: I don't know.
01:19:56
Speaker 6: In, like, football terms, the only thing I can think of is, like, somehow everyone in the world knows who, like, the Broncos' long snapper is. It's like, what?
01:20:06
Speaker 5: Like, why does anyone know this? Like, what's happening?
01:20:10
Speaker 1: It's like, she's the drop chap. What's going on, dog?
01:20:14
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think The ball knowers have kind of always known, because she's a rage baiter, she's kind of been a professional bench warmer and rage baiter, but the rage baiting has really come to the forefront over the last season or two. I think she's personally preparing for a exit of the basketball career to right-wing grifter kind of trajectory.
01:20:37
Speaker 7: Oh, absolutely.
01:20:38
Speaker 8: And this worked out perfectly, didn't it?
01:20:41
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:20:41
Speaker 9: Yeah.
01:20:42
Speaker 1: I can't believe this is still a looper than grift.
01:20:44
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:20:45
Speaker 5: I mean.
01:20:47
Speaker 8: I feel like there's so many places that we can start to talk about it, but it's so, I think, for me as a journalist, the most frustrating part of the entire thing is how it started, which was with irresponsible journalism and irresponsible ESPN profile with this dropped-in quote from her. And it has, I mean, we're on what week of this? Three of this?
01:21:12
Speaker 1: I think we're somewhere in week three, yeah.
01:21:14
Speaker 8: Yeah, it seems sort of like it's never ending. I wish it would end.
01:21:20
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're going to get more into this in a second. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a player who comes off of the bench on this team, which means she's not a starter. And she comes off the bench to like brick a couple of threes and then goes back.
01:21:33
Speaker 8: And start fights.
01:21:34
Speaker 6: This is like not a.
01:21:35
Speaker 8: Excuse me, excuse me.
01:21:37
Speaker 1: I'm being racist.
01:21:40
Speaker 7: That's true.
01:21:41
Speaker 6: But like, this is not like a star. And the team that she's on, the Indiana Fever, has like several legitimate superstars on it. And ESPN is like cutting their highlights where the first highlight will be like her making a basket. And it's like, well, okay, that's the only basket she's made in like two weeks.
01:21:57
Speaker 5: But it's like, why?
01:21:58
Speaker 9: Why?
01:21:59
Speaker 6: God, I don't know. I'm frustrated about this, but we should tell the actual story. And I think to tell the story, I think we need to go back and talk about Caitlin Clark's entrance to the league because I think that, to some extent, is the beginning of all of this and the beginning of kind of this bunch of weird fascists who are now, I guess, quote-unquote WNBA fans.
01:22:25
Speaker 8: No, I think that's true because... You know, I think the WNBA has this reputation as like a very progressive league. And for the most part, that's the players that have been progressive. The league is a corporation that has benefited from the players, you know, actions. But there's always going to be conservative, you know, players or people in kind of any atmosphere. And Sophie Cunningham, if you've followed her since her college career, has always been that. She, you know, was known for being racist when she was at Mizzou, like, There was the meme of her and Kalia Copper when they were both on different teams. They really did not get along. This is a reputation that Sophie has had for a long time and on its own just would have been, I think, you know, again, a random bench player that most people didn't know. But Kaitlyn Clark coming to the WNBA and being as high profile as she was and the way she was framed as the next great white straight cis hope for this league really brought a particular kind of culture and fan with her and so i think without caitlyn clark coming into the league and you know maga people and right wing people seeing her as a way to kind of gain a foothold with this league i don't think sophie blows up in the way that she does especially when you consider that right She's been brought to the Fever as essentially Caitlin Clark's enforcer because Caitlin Clark can't play defense or hold her own on the court at all.
01:23:54
Speaker 6: I swear to God. It's like this team, I keep doing cross-sports comparisons, but it's like the Fever are this weird team where it's like they're like last year's Cowboys where it's like a.
01:24:10
Speaker 6: Weird white fan base that also pulls in a bunch of random, like, I just kind of know about football fans. B, elite offense. Literally cannot play defense at all.
01:24:20
Speaker 8: Yeah, and, like, this isn't hockey. We don't have enforcers in women's volleyball in the same way.
01:24:25
Speaker 1: Right, it's not full contact like this, dog.
01:24:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:24:30
Speaker 6: I think it's worth kind of talking about the racial dynamics of this because a lot of the initial hype around.
01:24:39
Speaker 6: Caitlin Clark was this weird sort of like, yeah, like what you're saying, Frankie, like this great white hope stuff. And like her rival was like, she was like set up against Angel Reese, who's a black player who is very weird and interesting basketball player. But unfortunately, nobody really cares about that because everyone, there's just this like racist sort of panic around this whole thing to, to the extent where like, there's like congressmen, who are talking about starting investigations into Caitlin Clark's fouls.
01:25:11
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think it's important to point out whether you want to be super generous and put none of this onto Caitlin and say she's an avatar for whatever culture war the right is waging, or you want to say she really should have been shouting this down a long time ago, and whether she believes this or not, she's in part responsible because she's complicit in her silence. Whichever kind of route you want to take with that what you can't deny is that every time she flops or is you know takes a hard foul against a player who is black queer masculine it gets blown up the player on the other end of that is getting you know death threats they're dealing with harassment and abuse and racial slurs and this has been a pattern that goes back to her rookie season And so there is very much a gender component, right? A racial component to how Caitlin Clark is being received by this fan base and how her opponents in a predominantly Black, overwhelmingly queer league are also being received.
01:26:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:26:16
Speaker 6: And circling back to what you were saying about whether or not Caitlin Clark is, you know, either you think either she's complicit or not in this, like that is the base of people who have surrounded her. And that's been the basis of the way that sports media also has, has interacted with her because if you're sports media, you know, there's an enormous incentive to just sort of drive out this like racist drivel and like, you know, make clips of like every single time she gets knocked down or something, or every time she just like flops when someone like is like even vaguely in her proximity.
01:26:53
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:26:54
Speaker 6: It creates this sort of feedback loop of it where you have, on the one hand, you have these white supremacists, right, who feed off of this stuff and want to use this as an avenue to push their racism, but then also that develops this symbiotic relationship with the sports media who are like, yeah, we can make money off of this and we're sort of like this a lot of the time anyways.
01:27:18
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I've been covering the WNBA for about a decade since it was Just lesbians and old people in the stands. And those were the best days, I will say. And as someone who has covered the league for that long and been to as many games as I have, I will obviously say not all Fever fans feel a particular way or believe a certain thing. Of course, that's the case. I've also seen the shift in the three years that Caitlin Clark has been in the league of who shows up to the Fever games. And as we will continue to talk about, I think as we talk about Sophie and now that kind of Sophie has become the actual mouthpiece that Caitlin has failed to be for these people, the people who are showing up to their road games as well in support of Sophie and her viewpoints. And so, of course, right, probably the majority of Fever fans are great. And it's also true that there really has been an influx of people who never... I can curse here, right? Never fucked with the WNBA, right? They didn't care about women's sports. And they have shown up and brought a lot of the toxic mainstream culture and things about men's sports culture that probably most of us watch women's sports to get away from has shown up here.
01:28:39
Speaker 1: Right.
01:28:39
Speaker 5: Yes.
01:28:40
Speaker 6: It coincides with, with Caitlin Clark, you know, coming to the league. So I guess we should start actually talking about Sophie Cunningham.
01:28:49
Speaker 1: Unfortunately.
01:28:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:28:52
Speaker 6: Like for better or for worse, Caitlin Clark, does want to play basketball.
01:28:59
Speaker 1: Yeah like she she's here to literally play ball like like definitely her not speaking up against like being portrayed as this avatar is shitty and frustrating but like at the end of the day she's here to play with the nice little orange sphere and Sophie not so.
01:29:18
Speaker 6: Much Yeah, this is one of these things where it's kind of vibes based, but I feel like the way that it was portrayed in the media and then this also fed into sort of like the fascist base was that Caitlin Clark was going to come into the WNBA and she was immediately going to be the best player and everyone was going to have to deal with it. And that like didn't happen because she's like, a pretty good player, but, like... She's fine. A, even if she was that good, it's like, okay, unfortunately for every other great basketball player in the WNBA, you exist at the same time as Prime Major Wilson, so, like, good luck ever winning any award.
01:29:53
Speaker 7: Like, I don't know.
01:29:55
Speaker 6: This is, like, maybe the greatest basketball player who's, like, walked the earth in this generation.
01:29:59
Speaker 5: Like, good luck.
01:30:01
Speaker 8: It's true. And even when Caitlyn drops 30 points, she's often giving up 30 on turnovers, so she kind of ends up being a net neutral.
01:30:10
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:30:11
Speaker 6: And Angel Wilson, by the way, was, like, Defensive Player of the Year and MVP. And, like, you know, it's like... She's, like, you know, just this, like, transcendent player.
01:30:20
Speaker 9: But....
01:30:22
Speaker 6: I think there's this moment where like it becomes clear after like a couple of years of this that like, you know, like there's still a bunch of people who are in the trenches being like Caitlin Clark is the best player in the league. But like, no, it's not clear to me if she's better than like rookie Olivia Biles.
01:30:40
Speaker 3: She's not.
01:30:41
Speaker 2: I don't think she is.
01:30:43
Speaker 8: She's not. Olivia Miles has a has an MVP case like as a rookie that I mean, yeah, doesn't in my opinion.
01:30:52
Speaker 7: I love her.
01:30:52
Speaker 6: I want to talk about her at the end because I want to end up like a little bit of just like ball good. But I think there's this moment of like Caitlin, like I guess she like kind of denounced it like the end of her first season.
01:31:04
Speaker 1: But like she felt like without going like hard in the paint to it, like you're still leaving room.
01:31:10
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:31:11
Speaker 6: But it's like like she won't go hard in the paint against it. But she also, you know, as you're saying, like before the break, it's like, yeah, she wants to play basketball.
01:31:18
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:31:19
Speaker 6: And so she's not willing to go on camera and say the things and do the things that these people want. And I guess that's where Sophie Cunningham came in because she will do that.
01:31:31
Speaker 5: She will.
01:31:32
Speaker 8: And I mean, I think it's also related that she started a podcast this year, right? Like she has decided to, she's basically using her profile as a fever bench player, AKA, you know, Caitlin Clark's enforcer. And the exposure that has come with that, which is more than she's ever had in her, you know, however many seven or so seasons in the WNBA. But to me, what's clear is that she is setting herself up for an exit. And the podcast is kind of the first step in that. And maybe people didn't care what she had to say before. But now that more people know who she is because of who she's playing with, She is kind of starting to step into this other— and it's very, very— we can talk more about this, too, but it's very insidious the way she talks about sharing her views because she's basically co-opting social justice language when she'll say things like, people tell you to use a platform, and then when you use it, right, they criticize you for it or whatever it is. And so she's kind of doing this thing where she's starting a podcast. She's already, also, she keeps getting fined for saying shit on her podcast about the refs and stuff. She really just, like, mouths off. Yeah.
01:32:49
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, maybe her being on a podcast is a good thing.
01:32:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, right?
01:32:53
Speaker 8: So she has this podcast, but then at the same time, she's projecting the, I'm using my platform for, you know, my beliefs, right?
01:33:02
Speaker 6: Which is something that, like, I've heard even sort of, like, left-wing people, like, in the space doing this, like, well, it's just an interesting thing because the WNBA has always been a league where, like, players do use their platforms to do activism. And, like, and that is absolutely true. Like, the actual first in professional sports, actually, I could be wrong about about that because maybe there was another women's league that did it first that I just missed, but I'm pretty sure they were the first professional sports league that was actually doing like anti-police brutality protests.
01:33:28
Speaker 8: Yes, they were. They also, they were doing that before Colin Kaepernick took a knee.
01:33:34
Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
01:33:34
Speaker 8: And then once he did kneel, actually that's how I started following the WNBA was I was writing about player protests and somebody told me entire WNBA teams were kneeling on the court and it had gotten no coverage. And I was like, oh, and that's when I actually started. So Yeah, they were doing media blackouts to talk about police brutality before Colin Kaepernick knelt.
01:33:55
Speaker 6: Yeah.
01:33:56
Speaker 1: That's fucking awesome.
01:33:58
Speaker 5: Yeah, they fucking rock. Like, it's good as hell.
01:34:00
Speaker 1: That's sick.
01:34:03
Speaker 6: But then you get media people being like, well, this has always been a league where people use their platform for activism.
01:34:10
Speaker 1: That's such a mealy-mouthed bullshit. Like, okay, sure, technically, but like.
01:34:16
Speaker 8: I.
01:34:16
Speaker 6: Guess you could call a clan rally activism. If you really want to do that, I will be angry at you. But like, this is like not the same thing at all.
01:34:28
Speaker 1: There is no difference between the Unite the Right rally and going to help out at Food Not Bombs. If you're stupid. If you're fucking stupid.
01:34:39
Speaker 5: That must be such.
01:34:40
Speaker 6: An amazing world to live in psychologically. Everything must be so easy for you if you just don't understand anything.
01:34:46
Speaker 1: You gotta be so great to be a moron.
01:34:49
Speaker 8: I mean, the Turning Point USA flyer to support Sophie Cunningham spelled her name wrong, so honestly.
01:34:56
Speaker 5: Of course.
01:34:58
Speaker 6: This is coming back to one of the things about being on the right versus being on the left, which is like, you know, In order to be on the left, you do have to have standards. Like, you can't be, like, an abuser, right? Like, you will eventually get run out for that.
01:35:11
Speaker 8: Maybe.
01:35:12
Speaker 6: Whereas on the right, you can just do it and it's fine. But, comma, if you get arrested, only one of these two groups is going to be there for you. And it sure as fuck not the people who are going to spell your name wrong on the promotional flyer.
01:35:25
Speaker 1: It's so beastline. okay, but like, what has Sophie been saying and doing? Let's just get into the meat of it.
01:35:43
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's talk about that.
01:35:44
Speaker 9: Yeah.
01:35:45
Speaker 8: And I think this is where, as I kind of said at the beginning, I think it's important to look at where it started because I think this was a failure of media from the beginning. And the reason that it has snowballed in the way that it is is with an incredible headline. It was basically like, love her or hate her, like Sophie won't be ignored. And I kind of was like, well, she was, I was ignoring her until you Decided to run a profile.
01:36:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've decided she won't be ignored.
01:36:11
Speaker 6: On a baseline, like, this is such a baffling player to run a profile of.
01:36:17
Speaker 8: Right, well, so the profile itself, too, is, like, such, to me, an example of, like, shoddy journalism. Because they spend, like, most of it where her parents are kind of bragging about how she was a childhood bully. Then they go on to say how she used to play on teams with boys and beat them and that was like a source of pride for them. And then after those things, they kind of casually drop in Sophie saying, people think I hate trans, end of sentence. Trans what?
01:36:48
Speaker 5: We don't know.
01:36:51
Speaker 8: But I don't. I don't. I just essentially, I believe in love, but I think biological males should not be in sport with girls. So again, we also have adult men being playing, somehow playing sport with young girls. So there was just so many places as a reporter, if I were writing this profile, that I kind of would have been like, huh, okay, well, can you give any examples of, you know, grown men playing sports against girls? Could you talk to me about why you're so proud of having played against boys, but you think, like, there were so many places you could have gone here, and none of it happened.
01:37:29
Speaker 6: It just not there in the middle of this profile. To be fair to ESPN, they did fire most of their actual journalists in order to give more money to a fucking Pat McAfee, a guy who used to be a hunter, I think, and who now spends all of his time having fucking Aaron Rodgers on his show to scream about why vaccines are bad and why trans women shouldn't be able to compete in sports. So, like, you know, this is truly not ESPN's fault. They simply fired everyone who could normally do journalism, and now we're left with whatever this shit is.
01:38:02
Speaker 8: Another person whose opinion on trans women in sports we should really be listening to, Aaron Rodgers.
01:38:07
Speaker 6: Yeah, Aaron Rodgers.
01:38:10
Speaker 7: I will listen.
01:38:10
Speaker 6: I will not agree with Aaron Rodgers' position on sports, but if he can stay in the pocket for longer than 2.3 seconds on two consecutive plays, I will listen to him talk about women's sports. And he can't.
01:38:22
Speaker 7: He can't do it. He won't.
01:38:24
Speaker 6: Okay me being pissed at aaron rogers for hitting me aside why did they write this that's the part i don't understand i.
01:38:34
Speaker 1: Mean because there is like a larger media ecosystem that's going to feed on just that one little nugget of like anti-trans hate. Like it is so easy. The left is going to get mad. The right is going to embrace this and it's going to just fuel this culture war. Like it's, that's going to generate so many clicks.
01:38:52
Speaker 3: It is.
01:38:52
Speaker 8: And I think, I don't know how long this profile was in the works. Sometimes it can be, you know, for profiles like this, it can be in the works a very long time. Other times it's not, but I think it's also worth mentioning that just before this profile dropped, Sophie got into a high-profile skirmish during a game against the Phoenix Mercury. Many people, most people, have probably seen the kind of viral meme of her pointing, and she's pointing at Dawana Bonner, who they're former teammates, actually, and Alyssa Thomas. And basically, I mean, it was almost like a full-team brawl, but there were a lot of kind of racial undertones to the way that that went down.
01:39:33
Speaker 6: Racial overtones, the way it was talked about, they were just racist shit.
01:39:38
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, yes.
01:39:40
Speaker 8: And the way that meme has shown up, I think, is really important because there's not really a way to deny that it was racist when it's actually being used in very, like, I've seen it at least, in very racist or offensive or problematic ways since it happened. But that profile drops on the heels of that really big fight that was all over the televisions. It was being played up and people were taking sides and saying how great and how cool Sophie was. It was appalling, actually, to watch. But these two things, this profile drops right on the heels of that. And I think that that really put more eyes on it than might have happened otherwise as well.
01:40:23
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
01:40:25
Speaker 1: So I did just pull up the profile and the framing of this is so fucking annoying. there's a whole section is, is she hero or heel? And then there's just anecdotes where she's a hero here. She's a heel here. It's like, it's, oh my God.
01:40:41
Speaker 6: It's written very clickbaity.
01:40:43
Speaker 7: It is.
01:40:43
Speaker 1: I was going to say, this is incredibly clickbait. This is incredibly like, it's supposed to be like, she's divisive for some reason, but we're telling you that she's divisive.
01:40:54
Speaker 8: And I don't think there was any reason to have asked her about her stance on trans women in sports because she, before this profile, we could have maybe guessed where she stood based on some likes and retweets of things about protecting women and girls, but nothing was overt. She had not been overt enough that it actually, to me, again, as the journalist writing this story, I wouldn't have asked her about it because to me, it wasn't significant enough in what she had said. It isn't a thing I would have even wanted to try to have her clarify. So it seems to me either she brought it up or she was deliberately asked about it and given the opportunity to make these comments.
01:41:32
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I guess this is an important part of the pivot because kind of before this story, she was just a racist. Like, that was her lane, was just.
01:41:40
Speaker 5: Being a racist.
01:41:43
Speaker 6: Let's get into her doing the transphobia pivot, which was kind of arc two. Well, okay, I'm saying pivot here. It's not like she's not still doing, like, racist stuff, but.
01:41:54
Speaker 1: The transphobia, yes, they are.
01:41:56
Speaker 8: It's yes and, and I think actually, if we talk about transphobia as being rooted in white supremacy, they're really two sides of the same coin here, because at the end of the day, what's actually happening is conversations around who is an acceptable definition of a woman, whether it's the black masculine women she's playing against and bullying, or the trans women and girls that she's speaking out against. So I'd say, eh, two sides of the same coin.
01:42:22
Speaker 1: I think that's a fair way to sum it up.
01:42:24
Speaker 6: I'm realizing now we probably should have mentioned this at the beginning for people who have not seen her, but like Sophie Cunningham looks like the kind of person you would have seen on like, I don't actually know who did the like positive propaganda for the Nazis, but like what, like, I don't know, like, like if you're doing, if you're doing like a dare story, like, yeah.
01:42:42
Speaker 1: Lenny Riefenstahl would have loved her.
01:42:45
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:42:45
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:42:45
Speaker 6: Like Lenny Riefenstahl, like recruitment ad thing. Like she is like the person you would put on that.
01:42:50
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, she's now had more gender-affirming care than most dolls could ever dream of having, so.
01:42:56
Speaker 1: Oh, also that, also that. They want to be quacky so bad, it's crazy. Like, there's something psychosexual rooted in, like, Mar-a-Lago face, I swear to God.
01:43:10
Speaker 6: Yeah, so let's talk about, kind of, the arc of Sophie Cunningham as anti-transmedia. person because she initially leans like all the way the fuck into it.
01:43:23
Speaker 8: Yeah, Sophie leans into it. But what happens pretty quickly is that right wing media picks it up, it kind of gets news aggregated everywhere. And then she doubles down in press conferences and starts to kind of say, I said what I said, essentially.
01:43:39
Speaker 6: And I.
01:43:43
Speaker 8: Should have the ability to, you know, say what I believe. And once she doubles down in the press conference, that's when you start to see the rallies happening, anti-trans rallies outside because the fever is on a road trip now. And so, and every city they visit, anti-trans groups start showing up, whether it's, you know, to promote their bill for, you know, children having general exams to play sports or whatever else they're there to do. But some of the more high-profile anti-trans groups starts to show up, and that's, I think, when it devolves.
01:44:20
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:44:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:44:21
Speaker 6: I guess we have ahead of us the branching path of, should we talk about the devolution, or should we talk about her brief attempt to pivot back to basketball?
01:44:30
Speaker 8: Well, I guess what I think is really notable is that the group that really shows up, and I think where there starts to be some controversy is a group called XXXY Athletics that was started by a woman named Jennifer Say. And I think that mainstream people do not know who this group is. And basically their whole thing is that they pay cis girls to protest sporting events where they might have to compete against a trans girl. And then that protest creates media and controversy. So they literally are like paying people to create these controversies. And they showed up and they paid two girls to sit in the front row at the game against the storm with signs thanking Sophie and a storm owner got upset and cursed them out. And the storm owner got suspended and the transphobes got an apology. And so this I think is also where the WNBA now had an opportunity to do something and they took the wrong side. And so The thing to me that is really notable is that the specific group and then Riley Gaines, you know, noted fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines shows up.
01:45:44
Speaker 1: Oh my God.
01:45:44
Speaker 8: And once that happens, it's kind of, it's out of control. But I think what sucks as someone who's been covering this for so long is there are certain names that when I see them, I know the playbook. I know what's happening. I know what's coming and I'm prepared for it. And no one in media was prepared for it. And they have failed to identify anyone. people in XXXY shirts in the front row of, you know, a basketball game as wearing hate symbols. They have failed to state that, like, trans people are being genocided by the government, and it has turned this entire thing into, like, a we can agree to disagree. And so I feel like that's kind of the missing piece here, right?
01:46:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it is just, like, an abject failure to do, like, an iota of research on, like, who these folks are. So following the event with the storm, Coach getting penalized for being a normal person, the WNBA's statement pissed me off so hard because it's like, we're having hard conversations, thinking about a lot of things. And there has never been a trans woman competing in the WNBA. There are no trans athletes who are likely to be competing in the WNBA anytime soon. This is such a hypothetical non-issue. This shouldn't be a hard conversation to have. Just take us stance. Even if you fuck up, take us stance. I swear to God.
01:47:16
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:47:17
Speaker 8: And not only is it a non-issue at this point, we have people saying, well, we can have hard conversations and agree to disagree. And I'm like, who gave a bunch of cis people permission to disagree about a group that they are not part of and policies that actively do not affect them? And the other piece that the media doesn't do is like, okay, we can agree to disagree or we have two different opinions. What are those opinions? Like, one group wants human rights, basic human rights, and to be included in society. And the other group wants, at best, for a group of people to, like, not exist, and at worst, to die.
01:47:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:47:52
Speaker 8: The fact that we're in a genocide, like, by our government, and nobody will name that. And this is, that's so frustrating. These are the stakes here, right?
01:48:01
Speaker 5: Yeah. Right.
01:48:02
Speaker 1: This is a microcosm for all of it. And it's just like you're saying, agree to disagree on what? What are you disagreeing with? Let's say that the WNBA takes the radical stance of implementing the former standards that the International Olympic Committee, had up until fairly recently regarding trans athletes, which necessitated like two years of hormone therapy. before a trans woman could compete. And just on a personal stance, I'm like, I don't like setting hard boundaries for when trans people can exist. But that aside, having just a baseline policy that will not impact a single player currently involved in the WNBA, that's so bare bones. That is the easiest thing to do because it functionally changes nothing on the day to day.
01:48:52
Speaker 8: I do think the WNBA needs to be careful because we've seen like the policy you're talking about wouldn't impact anybody. And whether I agree that they should have a policy, I mean, you know, I don't really think anyone should have these policies.
01:49:07
Speaker 10: No, no, no.
01:49:08
Speaker 1: I agree. I agree with that.
01:49:09
Speaker 8: But I see your point. I think my concern becomes we've seen how chromosome testing and some of these other forms of sex testing are happening above the WNBA and often in the, you know, the International Olympic Committee and everything.
01:49:23
Speaker 7: Oh my God.
01:49:24
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:49:25
Speaker 8: And often, right, that trickles down. And I think something the WNBA needs to be very careful about and cognizant of, the people who are most directly impacted by these sex testing policies, there's no trans women in the WNBA and they won't be impacted. But, you know, Black women in particular are so often that directly impacted the population like the league the WNBA is actually full of people who are directly impacted by a lot of the policies that we're talking around even though they're not trans and so it's a very slippery slope that I like I hope they get right in this moment because if they go too far in the other direction it will be a mess in like.
01:50:02
Speaker 1: 12 ways Oh yeah, no, and I'm not actually advocating for them to implement a policy like that. I'm just like, for me, having any policy, just to shut up like the couple of former NBA yahoos who are like, I'm going to go be a woman now. And I'm like, well, you can go shut up.
01:50:20
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:50:21
Speaker 8: Oh no, I didn't think you were advocating for that. I think just because we can see how sex testing is going elsewhere, I think sometimes people forget.
01:50:31
Speaker 1: No, I remember Caster Semenya. Like, don't worry. I, like, absolutely do not want to see that shit happen.
01:50:40
Speaker 8: Yeah, and but mainstream, like, whether mainstream people or, like, mainstream media or just, like, cis people in general, they don't, like, there's so many nuances here, too.
01:50:49
Speaker 1: Yes.
01:50:49
Speaker 8: They get completely missed and everything gets flattened and then it becomes more well, we'll just put this policy in place and then, you know, people don't think about that it's a whole different, you know, can of worms.
01:50:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. The fact that they had no policy before any of this came into being, it's kind of what I think led this to be the perfect storm.
01:51:07
Speaker 9: Yeah.
01:51:08
Speaker 1: Because, like, with it being such a blank slate for grifters, bad actors, and even just super misinformed folks who don't really know what's going on, like, to kind of project and or manipulate the situation, there is not a clean, quick answer.
01:51:29
Speaker 8: There's not. And I will say a lot of leagues, I think, are trying not to put policies in place right now if they don't already have one, because if there's no policy, there's nothing to violate. And I think they hoped they could fly under the radar. I know that a lot of trans advocates in this space are actually you know, behind the scenes kind of suggesting that as well, kind of wait, wait it out a little bit because without a policy, you hope you don't end up on the radar of the Trump administration or whoever else. Obviously that has not been what happened here at all. Unfortunately.
01:51:59
Speaker 6: I want to talk a little bit about the weird shit where like Ennis Cantor freedom, who's like a former sort of NBA washout turds, like right wing, culture war guy him and like Royce White and apparently some other just absolute fail sons of the MNBA they're like oh we're going to declare for the for the 2027 draft and I think that that in some ways I think is actually a really clarifying thing for what the question of can trans women play women's sports is actually about. And I think this is the thing that the media has really not understood because, you know, some of it, I think, is just transmisogyny, right? Like, they don't actually really think that trans women are women. But, like, the argument over can trans women play women's sports, if you listen to how people like Sophie Cunningham frame it, and this has spread everywhere, throughout even parts of the Democratic Party, where you get people talking about, like, well, should young girls be playing against men? And that's the actual argument here. The stakes of this argument is not about sports. It's, are trans women women, or are we not? And if we're not, then it becomes sort of de facto legitimate to impose, you know, all of the segregation policies that they've been putting in place, all of the, you know, and when I say they've been putting in place, I'm not talking about even sports leagues, I'm talking about, like, the federal government.
01:53:34
Speaker 7: Right?
01:53:34
Speaker 1: Right.
01:53:35
Speaker 6: And a bunch of state governments, the Catholic Church... you know, in terms of gender affirming care bans, that's the actual stakes of this is like, are we women or not? And the moment you go, no, you're not, you're like some other kind of thing where like, maybe we'll let you do this eventually at some point, you start getting people making, you know, we listen to these people being like, well, the leagues can decide individually, like league by league, who they think is like legitimately qualified to play. And it's like, okay, this is an argument for segregation.
01:54:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:54:07
Speaker 6: Right? This is explicitly an argument that is, leagues should be allowed to segregate players. And that's also the whole, like, oh, why don't trans people go start their own league? It's like, we had this.
01:54:17
Speaker 5: It was segregation.
01:54:18
Speaker 6: It's this thing that's, like, infuriating. It just doesn't click. That's what the goal is here.
01:54:24
Speaker 4: Right?
01:54:24
Speaker 1: I think what makes, like, trans women in sports such a potent, like, rallying point, it's preying on so many axes of Not just like putting young girls in danger, but also like I can like there's an economic component to because like so many people get involved in sports as kids so that they're able to get college scholarships.
01:54:48
Speaker 7: Right.
01:54:49
Speaker 1: And so like it's just it becomes this thing all the way down.
01:54:52
Speaker 6: Yeah.
01:54:53
Speaker 1: But, like, it's this situation where by saying that this boy could be on the girls' team, that is implicitly signaling this notion that this boy is going to get all of the college scholarships. Or this trans woman who we're framing as a boy on the girls' team because, God forbid, they be normal for 10 seconds. And aside from everything else, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how much money there isn't in like women's college sports programs or even like women's professional sports. There is not a single trans athlete who was transitioning for that good, good money.
01:55:32
Speaker 8: No, it's never, never happened. Yeah.
01:55:34
Speaker 1: That is literally never happened.
01:55:37
Speaker 6: Like, even if you were to transition to play in the WNBA, it's like, great, you're making you're making as much money as like, I don't know, if you're the best player in the league, you might be making as much money as like a practice team guy on like an NFL team.
01:55:51
Speaker 1: Well, like.
01:55:52
Speaker 8: If you're transitioning so that you can play women's sports, something tells me you just needed an excuse and you wanted to transition anyway.
01:55:59
Speaker 1: Also that, like, if you start, okay, actually, actually, if you start transitioning as a bit so you can dominate women's sports, call me. I want to have you on my podcast.
01:56:13
Speaker 8: Truly commitment to the bit.
01:56:14
Speaker 6: It's like, obviously, like, none of the people who are doing this are ever going to like do any kind of even vaguely transitioning thing.
01:56:20
Speaker 5: No.
01:56:21
Speaker 6: The closest thing I've seen to this, the actress who did She's the Man.
01:56:25
Speaker 8: Amanda Bynes.
01:56:27
Speaker 6: Yeah, like talked about it in an interview one time that like having to like pretend to be a guy gave her, like she didn't have the words gender dysphoria, but if you read her describing it, it's like, oh no, she got gender dysphoria.
01:56:37
Speaker 1: No, she totally talked about having gender dysphoria. Yeah.
01:56:40
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:56:41
Speaker 7: Yeah.
01:56:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, it's very genuinely, again, like, if this is the push that you need to start playing with your gender, because for some reason you just really want to play on the women's teams. Like, baby girl.
01:56:54
Speaker 6: DIY HRT.
01:56:56
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:56:57
Speaker 5: Yeah.
01:56:58
Speaker 6: It's just this, like, right-wing protect-the-children fantasy that they're using as the justification for, you know, like, this is the wedge issue that they use to push all of the rest of their stuff. And if you go back to, like, the Daily Wire people who were instrumental in getting a bunch of the anti-trans bills passed under the Biden administration, before they kind of blew up their company trying to make Pendragon.
01:57:21
Speaker 1: They're thankfully in their flop era right now. Yeah.
01:57:24
Speaker 6: But back when they were doing this, you would listen to them talk about how we need to eradicate transgenderism, because that was the actual goal. It was never about sports. It was about eradicating us yeah the second.
01:57:37
Speaker 1: They're allowed to speak yes that's when the mask comes off and yeah.
01:57:42
Speaker 8: And I think the piece about the trans misogyny that I think sometimes gets missed too is we can look at somebody like Jennifer Say who you know runs the XXXY athletics and she in addition to someone like Nancy Hogshead who was an Olympic swimmer who started the women's sports policy working group with Martina Navratilova similar kind of group trying to not allow trans women and girls to play sports with girls. These are people who actually made their post-athletic kind of names as advocates against sexual abuse in sport. They'd both been victims of adult male coaches. This is where that really insidious, turfy kind of when you paint trans women as men. Again, the problem is still men, right? And so these are people who were known as feminist advocates in the space before making the anti-trans pivot. And I think that sometimes that piece gets missed too in the very insidious way that framing trans women as men is. actually can make some of these target points of making them seem like threats appealing or make sense to maybe feminists, quote-unquote, like Jennifer Say or Nancy Hong said.
01:58:59
Speaker 6: You know, this has been a thing that's been happening back down to, like, the original TERFs, right? Like, the original, like, transphobic wing of the radical feminists, where, like, if you look at how this played out during the porn wars, too, one of the fundamental... issues with organizing as any kind of marginalized group is that, you know, there's always going to be people inside of your marginalized group who you don't agree with. And there can become a point where the incentive to, instead of trying to like fight or directly like have conflict with the actual group that is oppressing you, right? Where it's like, yeah, if you're doing women's sports, the group that is oppressing you is like the men who are abusing you, right? You can look at this in sort of the class context, right? Where you know, like, yeah, if you were a worker, like you were being oppressed by the actual ruling class, which is the capitalist class that owns the means of production. But there becomes a point where it's easier to try to police the behavior of your own than it is to fight the dominant group. And this is, you know, I'm taking this on a little bit of a tangent here, but like, if you've ever heard the term like the lumpenproletariat, it's just this term that I know there are going to be some people in the audience who are very attached to that term as like a self-referential thing. But it's supposed to be this, like, part of the working class that's, like, drifters and vagrants and, like, Marx goes on this, like, really sort of, like, blood-curdling rants about, like, organ grinders and, like, pimps and, like, runaway soldiers and, like, all of the, like, boot shiners on the street and, like, all of these groups of people who have nothing to do with each other from, like, a sociological class sense. Like, there is, like, absolutely nothing in common that, like, someone who polishes boots on the street has in common with, like, someone who's, like, run away from being a soldier. But this is, like, Marx's, you know, there's this thing in the journal Endnotes about this. This is, like, Marx's disgust, specifically at, like, the Victorian disgust about, like, this part of the class that he thinks is, like, lowly or whatever. And Marx just, like, goes off on these people. And this has been a thing for a really long time of, like, the working class movement trying to, like, purify itself of these, like, lumpen elements who are supposed to be, like, anarchists and, like, unpure. And you get this in the feminist movement where, like, in the feminist movement, like, that was us. That was trans women. We were, like, the elements that was, like, the easiest to, you know, you could be, like, well, all these trans women are actually men and they're trying to, like, infiltrate our spaces. And you can spend all of your energy trying to purify your own movement against this other group of people who are inside of your movement instead of actually like fighting the outside and also you'll be rewarded for it you're.
02:01:33
Speaker 8: Doing the patriarchy's work for them.
02:01:36
Speaker 6: Yeah and they'll pay you for it instead of fighting you.
02:01:39
Speaker 8: Right by pitting cis women and trans women against each other they fight each other instead of realizing that their struggles are tied up together and you know fight the patriarchy together Yeah, right?
02:01:51
Speaker 1: Like, literally, like, trans access to healthcare is going to help everyone else, too. It's that simple. Yeah.
02:01:59
Speaker 6: There's, like, an unbelievable number of, like, reproductive healthcare organizing, like, are trans people.
02:02:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
02:02:05
Speaker 6: Like, it's a bunch of trans fans. And also trans fans, too. Like, it's like, you know, these are struggles that are intimately bound up. From an external perspective, if you can pit these two groups against each other, and then from an internal perspective, if you can, you know... convince one of these groups that the reason they're being oppressed is the other one and channel them into this path of least resistance where you can nominally be doing what you think is like radicalism to like free your people but is actually just like fucking over another group of people in service of the ruling class you can do genocides and here we are yep yeah and here we are So there's a couple more things I wanted to touch on. One of which, and I think Bugs, you have an interesting perspective on this, is that like, it didn't used to be like this for trans athletes.
02:03:01
Speaker 1: It literally didn't used to be like this. So yeah, like, I mean, I'm the very funny camp of having been a college athlete, having competed on both the men's and women's teams for track, albeit this would have been like, you know, small potatoes, D3, everything. But it was such a non-issue for me to this. So this would have been like end terms. I'm not going to give like firm dates, but like, you know, end of the Obama era, beginning of the Trump era, roundabouts, like mid tens. And I never faced any pushback to myself from either like my teammates or anyone that I competed against. I ran track and it I mean, it was kind of like eye opening because I was expecting it to be like much shittier. But like, no, like it was just people were just normal. And I mean, I think this is also just kind of thinking about the ways in which like transphobia writ large has become so many people's like pet little bigotry situation because they want to. They want to oppress someone. And it's so, so, so easy to go after the trans. But yeah, like I managed to compete at a fairly high level within D3 as a trans woman. And I like genuinely was terrified for like, I competed in nationals and for like a week after I was like, and then someone's going to show up and people are going to like, I'm like, someone's going to write.
02:04:39
Speaker 7: An article about this.
02:04:41
Speaker 1: And no one did because I mean, I really don't want to bring like the politics of passing into this, but like that could have also played a factor at least when dealing with like betters. Like obviously everyone on my team was very aware because like, Even though I was, I was like very baby Tran running on the men's team because it was just like, well, I want to compete at the airbug rules. No one cares that the trans woman is smoking the men's team because she hadn't started hormones yet. But like, even within the context of that, like, and again, just getting back to what we said earlier, I do not think there is a simple or one size fits all policy for any sort of like hormonal requirement, because as we discussed, that is so right for abuse. But I can speak from personal experience in saying that after being on hormones for a period of time, the fastest 400 I ever ran as a woman was was slower than the slowest 400 I had ever run competitively in track dating back to my freshman year of high school. And so, like, if a trans woman's competing in sports, it's probably going to be fine. We have seen this over and over in the few instances where trans women have been allowed to compete. Like... Leah Thomas took fifth. Even in the moment, like I think before Riley Gaines became Riley Gaines, like that was still a nothing moment. Yeah.
02:06:26
Speaker 8: And I think it's funny because we can argue about this on a basis of like a human rights issue, which I think it fundamentally is and that should be enough. But then if you like people want to argue about the science, The science is also on our side. Like there's literally no evidence that there's an advantage. You talk to any trans woman who has been an athlete before and after transition, and she will tell you, I lost muscle mass. I lost bone density. I lost like lung capacity. Like I watched my times go down or my weight go down.
02:06:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it happens pretty fast or it happened fast for me. Like your mileage may vary, but.
02:07:05
Speaker 8: Well, my mileage is I started taking low dose tea. So I'm going to make the Olympics next year. Watch out.
02:07:11
Speaker 5: Oh, well done.
02:07:12
Speaker 9: Alright, alright, alright.
02:07:13
Speaker 8: I'm on testosterone now, so watch out.
02:07:17
Speaker 6: Well, and it's one of these things where, like, you can look at the extent to which this isn't really.
02:07:24
Speaker 3: Like, about.
02:07:26
Speaker 6: It's literally not about this. You can tell it's not about ability because, like, I can't play women's chess.
02:07:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
02:07:32
Speaker 5: It's like, what the f * * * are we doing here?
02:07:35
Speaker 1: Like, the second Magic the Gathering bans trans women from the pro tour....
02:07:41
Speaker 8: Are they going to have a Pro Tour anymore?
02:07:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, the Pro Tour actually just came back. As of this year, thank God.
02:07:49
Speaker 8: Yeah, but ability-wise, too, I'm like, so what? Let trans people win things? That's also okay?
02:07:56
Speaker 6: Yeah, it comes down to this. Again, the fundamental question is... is a trans woman a woman or not? And if you're a woman, then you have all of the rights that a woman does. And if you're not, then you don't. That's just fundamentally what it is.
02:08:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
02:08:13
Speaker 6: And it's so frustrating that this has turned into this sort of like, Oh, we can agree to disagree about whether you should exist or not.
02:08:24
Speaker 1: That's like, well, can I agree to disagree whether you should exist or not? Is this a two-way street? I'm just using my platform to advocate for my beliefs.
02:08:33
Speaker 6: I think journalists should be banned from having health care. I think it's actually dangerous for me as a trans woman to exist in the same space as a journalist, because journalists have a long tradition of... and history of harming my people, so I think we should talk about restricting their access to healthcare because giving journalists healthcare allows them to reproduce transphobia.
02:08:52
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it got me convinced.
02:08:56
Speaker 7: God.
02:08:57
Speaker 6: Well, okay, before we wrap up, I do want to get a little bit of joy out of this episode, which, so, the kind of, one of the kind of concluding points of this story, I don't know, given the fact that, like, we now live in an administration where the richest man on Earth gave two Nazi salutes at the inauguration, like, Who knows, like, by the time this episode comes out, Sophie Cunningham might have, like, fucking born a swastika or some shit. But, like, there's a kind of capstone to this story, which is Sophie Cunningham doing this, oh, why are all the journalists talking about the culture wars instead of focusing on basketball? So I want to take a second to talk about Sophie Cunningham as a fucking basketball player. Because I have been so angry about having to fucking hear about this motherfucker that Like, you know what?
02:09:46
Speaker 7: Fuck it.
02:09:46
Speaker 6: I'm going to do the Julius Caesar bit. The whole of Gaul, Julius Caesar once remarked, is divided into three parts. Likewise, analysis of athletics is also divided into three parts, one of which the tape grinders inhabit, the analytics nerds another, and the old school coaches the third. The life of the tape grinder consists of endlessly digesting and watching like fucking 17 second clips of some athlete doing something and trying to figure out whether or not they're good. The analytics nerd lives in statistical annexes of unimaginable tedium from which they emerge to tell you that this player is either good or bad based on a bunch of unbelievably convoluted mathematical formulas they are not capable of explaining. And the old school coach largely consists of like old white guys on the internet going that boy nice after they've been fired for saying slurs in a locker room. Now, very rarely, all three of these factions will come to a consensus on a player. You have heard their names. This is Aja Wilson. This is Michael Jordan. This is, like, Peek LeBron. All three factions will unite to be like, this player is good.
02:10:54
Speaker 9: Occasionally!
02:10:55
Speaker 6: Once in a blue moon, you will get all three factions agreeing that a player fucking sucks.
02:11:03
Speaker 5: And that is Sophie Cunningham.
02:11:04
Speaker 6: She is statistically one of the worst players I have ever seen. Like the regular statistics, the game before she did her big, she did her big, we're pivoting back to sports. She shot 0% from the field. 0%. Can you explain what that means for a player to shoot 0% from the field?
02:11:28
Speaker 8: It means they didn't make a single basket. I mean, I love this pivot for her. It seems like being transphobic is somehow making an already bad basketball player worse. And, like, again, couldn't have happened to a better person, in my opinion.
02:11:42
Speaker 1: I was about to say I could do better than that, but then I'm pretty good at points, so.
02:11:45
Speaker 3: Oh, no.
02:11:48
Speaker 6: Okay, speaking of I Could Do Better, can we talk about the game that she played after she did her We Need to Pivot Back to Basketball thing?
02:11:54
Speaker 10: Because.
02:11:55
Speaker 6: Like, this is not a good WNBA player, even when she's not embroiled in controversy. Like, there's, oh God, who was it?
02:12:02
Speaker 7: The Stephen A.
02:12:03
Speaker 6: Smith joke about someone getting a single single. Like, if she averages a single single over the course of a week, that is her doing good. This is someone who comes off the bench, misses a bunch of three-pointers, gets somewhere between like eight and twelve points, and then fights people.
02:12:18
Speaker 8: I think her career average is about eight points a game, but She played like 28 minutes last week and scored two points, three points, something like that.
02:12:26
Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
02:12:27
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, really productive time on the floor.
02:12:31
Speaker 1: Go for her. You could put a horse on the fucking court and it would do more.
02:12:35
Speaker 8: Truly, I do feel like maybe I could also at some point throw a basket and it might go in.
02:12:42
Speaker 5: Statistically, it should happen.
02:12:46
Speaker 3: Statistically.
02:12:47
Speaker 5: That two-point game, she scored two points on free throws.
02:12:50
Speaker 1: She didn't throw a basket.
02:12:51
Speaker 5: She just got free throws. Oh my god.
02:12:54
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
02:12:55
Speaker 6: And then she had another game, which was statistically... This isn't really an advanced statistic. There's a basketball statistic called plus minus, which, Frankie, you correct me if I'm explaining this incorrectly, but it is when you are on the court, either how many more points does your team score or does the opponent's team score? So if you're, for example, like a plus 10, that means when you were on the court, your team scored plus 10 more points than when you were off the court.
02:13:20
Speaker 9: Yes.
02:13:21
Speaker 6: She played a game where she was on the court for 17 minutes and she had a plus minus of negative 28.
02:13:28
Speaker 8: Incredible.
02:13:30
Speaker 5: How is it even possible to be on a court?
02:13:32
Speaker 8: Is it the worst game in WNBA history? It's close.
02:13:36
Speaker 6: It's the worst game on a win.
02:13:37
Speaker 1: Okay.
02:13:37
Speaker 2: Okay.
02:13:38
Speaker 8: Yes. There's a great Instagram account. I think has to talk to WNBA stats or WNBA data. That's what it's called.
02:13:45
Speaker 3: Maddie.
02:13:46
Speaker 8: And Maddie looked at this game and it was definitely, if not the worst game in WNBA history, very close.
02:13:53
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it was like the worst ever in a win. And I kind of emphasized enough, right? The WNBA games are shorter than NBA games. So you have less time to build scoring volume, right? So you kind of have to be more efficient. To have the other team score 28 more points when you were on the court for 17 minutes is astronomical.
02:14:15
Speaker 8: They might as well be down a player. Like, why are you even there?
02:14:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
02:14:18
Speaker 6: No, if you were literally playing four out of five, I think you would do better. Like, that's like, it's astonishing. This is a slightly dishonest way of putting it, but it gets into like how colossal of a fuck up this is.
02:14:33
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, she's never won a championship at any level. I mean, unless you're counting high school.
02:14:38
Speaker 6: No, of course not.
02:14:39
Speaker 5: Yeah, because she's bad.
02:14:41
Speaker 6: And like, to put it in perspective, how bad being minus 28 is. So Aja Wilson is by a pretty big margin, like the highest points per game score in the WNBA this season. She's scoring 26 points a game. That's the best player in the league. The like, a kind of like, I don't know, like perennial MVP, like generally, like literally a generational player is dropping on average 26 points a game.
02:15:03
Speaker 5: You were minus 28.
02:15:05
Speaker 6: Having you on the court was like having Aja Wilson, but better on the other team.
02:15:12
Speaker 2: Like....
02:15:15
Speaker 6: Like, and this is the f * * * ing basketball players.
02:15:20
Speaker 3: I just like.
02:15:21
Speaker 6: This is the basketball player who's, like, maybe, like, the second or third most famous person in the WNBA now because of all of this bullshit?
02:15:28
Speaker 8: No, truly, I was at the Sun game last weekend, and they were not playing the Fever, and there was two people in Fever Cunningham jerseys, which is obviously now the new MAGA hat, and I kind of just wanted to go up and be like, why are you wearing the jersey of, like, the worst player in the league? Like, at least the Caitlin Clark jersey, I kind of get it, but, like, Sophie Cunningham, really?
02:15:47
Speaker 1: Yeah is everything okay at home like yeah like you need someone to check in on you babes.
02:15:53
Speaker 6: Like oh god as just like a source of joy i want to close this by talking about olivia miles who is maybe my favorite basketball player ever now who is so cool i love her she's great she's my height So she's like a 5'10 point guard, but like she scores at the rim. Nothing about the way that she plays basketball makes any sense to me. It's like this shouldn't work and it does and it's beautiful and I love it. And she's like, she was the best player on the best team in the league as a rookie.
02:16:28
Speaker 8: She's amazing to watch. You know, I knew she would be great in W. I think I was shocked at how quickly her game translated. And I think it really highlighted not to like shit on Caitlyn again, but I think it highlighted what people kind of thought Caitlyn Clark would look like because, you know, she's also a point guard and they have similar, you know, great passing ability, great court vision. Those are things that both players share. And you're like, oh, well, there's always a transition period. You know, you're playing against grown women. Like, you got, you know, you're going to get your butt kicked your first season. That's just kind of how it goes. And then Olivia Miles steps in and it was like seamless, like no time had passed. Courtney Williams was like happy to be like, I'm going back to being a shooting guard. You're leading our team as a rookie. Like you got us. She is, I don't know how to describe what she looks like when she plays because nothing she does seems like it should be possible. And yet it's also just like graceful and powerful and like smooth and just kind of everything all at once. And She's got really great style off the court, and I love that. Also, did you see the nickname? Because she wears glasses off the court. She wears, like, goggles on the court. And the nickname, The Spectacle, which I'm now obsessed with.
02:17:43
Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
02:17:44
Speaker 6: Oh, that's so good.
02:17:45
Speaker 1: That's so good. No, because, I've only recently learned who she is. It's literally a couple days before we recorded this, and I'm like, holy fuck.
02:17:55
Speaker 8: Yeah, she's breaking ankles everywhere. And she could be an MVP candidate. I think the only time we've seen a Rookie of the Year and MVP was Candice Parker in the same year. She could do it.
02:18:08
Speaker 7: I support it.
02:18:09
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is really truly one of those, like, I feel so bad for her for having to be in an MVP race with Aja Wilson. But, like, the other thing about her that I love is, like, she also plays defense.
02:18:20
Speaker 1: She does.
02:18:21
Speaker 6: And she, like, seems to really enjoy it. And, like, I have this, like, indelible image of her like in this game where she's trying to defend someone. I can't remember who she's playing. She's trying to defend someone who's like four inches taller than her. And she like bites on a fake.
02:18:37
Speaker 5: So she's like in the air.
02:18:40
Speaker 6: But somehow she has like, she's like, she's like in the air jumping and she has like her back to the shooter. But somehow she has managed to angle this such that even though she's, she like bit on a fake and is jumping, she's still blocking the shot by being in the air in front of them.
02:18:56
Speaker 5: And I was like, how is that even possible? Like, How do you do that? I don't know.
02:19:05
Speaker 6: You owe it to yourself to go watch some of her highlights. Go watch Olivia Miles' highlights. It was what I was using as eye bleach after I was trying to watch Sophie Cunningham tape, which was one of the most miserable experiences of my life.
02:19:19
Speaker 8: Yeah, Olivia Miles is kind of a walking highlight reel. She's really something to watch. I'm excited that it's just her rookie season, too. I get a lot more of her Yeah. Yeah.
02:19:31
Speaker 6: And she's on a really good team. She's in a great environment. Like, everyone seems to love her. And I just, I'm so happy for her.
02:19:38
Speaker 1: I'm still hooked on to this spectacle. That's so fucking good.
02:19:42
Speaker 8: It's so good. So good.
02:19:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.
02:19:48
Speaker 6: So this has been, this has been a good happen here. And thank you both for coming on and also for letting me gush about one of my favorite players because I love her.
02:19:55
Speaker 7: She's so great.
02:19:56
Speaker 8: Thanks for having me.
02:19:57
Speaker 7: Oh my God.
02:19:57
Speaker 1: Literally anytime. Thanks for having me.
02:20:00
Speaker 6: If you would like to be found and have people find your work, where can people find your work?
02:20:04
Speaker 8: I am on social media on Instagram and blue sky at the Frankie DLC. And the, probably the best place to follow my work is my newsletter called out of your league where I write stuff, but I also link out to the stuff that I write elsewhere.
02:20:20
Speaker 3: Really good. And we have a.
02:20:22
Speaker 8: Great queer women's sports discord community. Um, And yeah, it's pretty dope.
02:20:27
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
02:20:28
Speaker 5: Yeah.
02:20:28
Speaker 1: You can find me on blue sky. Yeah. But about stuff and, or if you've enjoyed hearing my dulcet cackles, I got a podcast called everything is wrestling, but I do with my friend Ella Taylor, where we basically just invite cool people on to info dump about their special interests. And we try to relate it to professional wrestling. I think at the time, this drops the most recent episode was, will either have been the law is wrestling or Muppets is wrestling.
02:21:01
Speaker 8: I'm proud of mom.
02:21:03
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, hell yeah.
02:21:04
Speaker 6: Thank you two again so much for coming on and talking about this. And may we all live long enough to see trans women actually in the WNBA.
02:21:13
Speaker 3: Honestly, yeah. That'd be sick as hell.
02:21:15
Speaker 1: Yeah.
02:21:28
Speaker 5: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. A few months ago, the Department of Justice indicted 15 anti-ICE protesters who participated in the community response to Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this year. Here's U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announcing the charges in a press conference dated June 16th, 2026.
02:21:54
Speaker 11: Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directed the Department of Justice to prioritize politically motivated violence. To accomplish that mission, the Deputy Attorney General stood up Joint Task Force Vanguard to enforce a national security strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation. Today, a federal indictment was unsealed, charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state.
02:22:42
Speaker 3: As U.S.
02:22:43
Speaker 5: Attorney Daniel Rosen said, all 15 quote-unquote Antifa defendants were charged with conspiracy to impede or injure an officer. According to the DOJ, the conspiracy to impede amounted to plans to temporarily block roadways around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where ICE operations in the Twin Cities were and still are based out of. The start of the 95-page indictment reads, quote, The defendants were members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action, which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota, or DAM, an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal law and immigration enforcement. Direct action refers to disruptive and obstructive tactics used by participants to forcibly challenge, block, or stop immigration raids, detentions, and deportations. DAM describes itself as A decentralized coalition of working class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current federal occupation happening within the wider metro area and against state and far-right violence more broadly, unquote. Here's attorney Daniel Rosen again at that press conference.
02:24:02
Speaker 11: The organization trains its members in the aggressive use of shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.
02:24:15
Speaker 5: The first piece of evidence presented by Rosen in this press conference is a Facebook post by one of the defendants reading, it's going to get so much worse and a nonviolent ideology and our politicians aren't going to save us. We need to become ungovernable. We need to actively resist any way we can to materially stop the Nazi occupation forces. I do think it's worth noting that When President Trump spoke at the Libertarian Convention in 2024, the wall behind him featured giant text reading, Become Ungovernable. Now, most of this 95-page indictment is spent detailing random conversations on Signal and various group chats discussing First Amendment activity, planning protests, discussing how to go about fundraising... making flyers, participating in ICE rapid response, writing articles on Crimethink, and an anarchist speaking tour, all of which the indictment lists as, quote, overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. And that's how conspiracy charges work. Not all the overt acts themselves have to be illegal. In fact, they usually are not. They just have to be actions taken involving multiple people to advance some other criminal goal. In this case, quote unquote, impeding law enforcement. And what makes this case particularly weak is that the impeding in this case amounts to extremely ordinary First Amendment protests. So, not only are the majority, if not all, of the overt acts listed completely legal actions, they were actions taken in furtherance of legally protected First Amendment activity. Now, the indictment does list a few other charges against specific individuals. One person is charged with allegedly making threats based on statements made in Facebook and Instagram videos. Two people are charged with interstate stalking based on following vehicles leaving the Whipple building across state lines into Wisconsin. One person is charged with allegedly assaulting a federal officer by knocking notes out of their hand and destruction of government property for kicking a vehicle. And lastly, another defendant is charged with assaulting a federal officer for allegedly brake-checking and side-swiping the officer's vehicle, causing a collision. No evidence for these alleged assaults has been presented thus far. But the conspiracy charge, tying the 15 defendants together, is the most oh-so-it's-illegal-to-make-plans-with-friends-now case I've ever seen. If it wasn't clear from the moment this indictment dropped that It only gets more and more clear over time that this case is not based on the strength of the evidence or threat to public safety, but rather political targeting based on the beliefs held by the defendants and the DOJ's ability to paint the defendants as Antifa lunatics. separate from the majority of peaceful, liberal anti-ice protesters, all while building a precedent to criminalize ordinary First Amendment protest activity, including ICE rapid response. To make it so that any protest against ICE is qualifies as interfering or impeding ICE from carrying out its immigration enforcement duties. And to create this precedent, the feds located a small group of Antifa, some outside agitators, that they believe a jury might be more likely to convict than the dozens and dozens of cases that have failed to move forward. In absence of any evidence of illegal violent acts, the DOJ must rely on radical-sounding statements made by the defendants discussing their politics to turn a jury against them. And that's most of what the indictment contains. It's not detailing alleged acts of violence. It's detailing conversations about protesting. This indictment contains a lot of signal chat logs, as well as conversations from in-person meetings, which leads one to wonder... How exactly did DHS obtain that information? Well, a few weeks ago, about 30 documents were released as a part of a discovery motion filed by one of the defendants. And these documents provide maybe the closest look at how federal law enforcement under Trump, and specifically how DHS and Homeland Security Investigations are investigating and surveilling not just, quote unquote, Antifa, but anti-ICE protesters more broadly, community activist groups, left-wing organizations and non-profits, and even labor unions. The lawyer for the defendant in this case called this a, quote, unprecedented campaign by DHS to spy on Minnesotans. Before I get into some of these specific details, I want to read the opening overview by the defense lawyer, Kevin Ryok, discussing what Discovery has so far revealed. Quote, Undercover agents posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls. These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE's lawless rampage in our state. The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide. Homeland Security Investigations' abuses did not stop there. HSI secretly obtained financial records for several national labor unions and social justice non-profits, all with zero criminal predicate to do so. The government's presentation to the grand jury reflected this broad and irrational investigation. With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that the conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarcha, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit Bicycle Repair Shop, among others. These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump administration. President Trump and senior administration officials routinely speak of the political left in dehumanizing terms, as deformed, scarred, and filled with ugliness, for example. The administration has crystallized those sentiments into policies that encourage and authorize political prosecutions like this one, most notably, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, unquote. I'm not exaggerating that this motion filed by the defense is maybe the greatest motion I've ever read. The understanding by the lawyer in this case of how the Trump administration is carrying out state repression against protesters is incredibly politically fluent. That last bit at the end discussing administration officials referring to the political left as deformed, scarred, or filled with ugliness relates to Stephen Miller's comments at Mark Rubio's left-wing terrorism summit last month that we discussed on executive disorder. And what he said during that conference was legitimately crazy. I didn't get to much of what he said in our previous episode because we were running short on time. But there's one quote I highlighted back then when I was doing research that I want to read now. Quote, the leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at the perfect family with the perfect life and the perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy and they covet. And they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering. It's not a coincidence that when you look at any of these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled, to be blunt, Not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. They're all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms. Why is that? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
02:33:26
Speaker 3: Unquote.
02:33:27
Speaker 5: Super fascist stuff, like incredibly fascist. And the point by Kevin Ryok, the lawyer for one of the defendants, that the Trump administration has turned these fascistic sentiments into enforcement policy like MSPM 7 is a really crucial point because these are not just personal sentiments held by Stephen Miller. These sentiments have been distilled into mandates to investigate and prosecute the political enemies of the Trump administration. Just four days after Border Patrol murdered Alex Preddy, Homeland Security Investigations opened a new investigation into anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities called Operation Puppet Master. As in looking for the alleged puppet master orchestrating the spontaneous and community-led protests. Or, I guess, as in, HSI is the puppet master, infiltrating the protests with undercover agents puppeteered by DHS? Either way, DHS produced a report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master, and that report states, quote, this case is opened to document the integration of HSI undercover agents into groups, organizations, or other gatherings. identified by intelligence information and other sources as potentially threatening to law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties. The report by HSI Special Agent Jacob Marquise continues, quote, Since November 28, 2026, I assume he means 2025.
02:35:08
Speaker 7: Great work, guys.
02:35:10
Speaker 5: Ongoing protests and incidents of civil unrest have occurred in public areas throughout Minneapolis, Minnesota. During these events, violent opportunists, or VOs, have exploited the protests as cover to attempt breaches of federal properties and perpetuated multiple assaults against federal officers tasked with protecting these facilities. Homeland Security Investigations of St. Paul has identified an organized network of conspirators operating through online and in-person who are providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators and involved in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers. Unquote. This sentiment was also shared by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen in that press conference.
02:36:01
Speaker 11: During Operation Metro Surge, Direct Action Minnesota infiltrated and exploited lawful protests to more efficiently carry out its unlawful direct actions.
02:36:12
Speaker 5: Despite the claims made by Rosen and in this HSI report of violent opportunists exploiting protests to perpetuate multiple assaults, in the defense's overview of these reports and documents, the defense lawyer notes that HSI does not actually identify any specific violent opportunists in this report, nor does it flag any specific incidents of rioting, destruction of property, or assaults on federal agents or officers. To quote the lawyer for the defense, the undercover surveillance initiated by Operation Puppet Master did not actually investigate or unearth any such instances, but instead encompassed all manner of privacy and constitutional violations against organizations and individuals who opposed ICE's activities in Minnesota, unquote. And in his press conference announcing the conspiracy charges, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen was asked multiple times whether any officer's actually got hurt, and Rosen could not identify any instance of officer injury.
02:37:17
Speaker 6: We talked about coordinated attacks. What kind of injuries did officers sustain as part of these campaigns?
02:37:24
Speaker 3: Can you elaborate on that?
02:37:26
Speaker 11: I can't elaborate on that today, and I don't believe I used the word attacks.
02:37:29
Speaker 7: But if I did, I stand by it.
02:37:34
Speaker 5: That really sums up this whole case for me. No, I can't provide any evidence to support the wild claims I'm making, and I don't think I used that word, but if I did, I stand by it. Incredible stuff. We will look into more of the Homeland Security Investigation case files after this at a break. Welcome back. The HSI report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master concludes by stating, quote, HSI St. Paul is actively conducting a thorough financial investigation to uncover the funding sources used by these groups and to detect any illicit transactions enabling further criminal acts. HSI St. Paul will use the results of this financial investigation to identify those responsible, disrupt ongoing and future unlawful activities, and pursue prosecution of the individuals involved. And two weeks after the launching of Operation Puppet Master, HSI opened another investigation called Project Whipple Shield, specifically focusing on the identification of potential funding sources, the organizational structure, and the, quote, predicate actions behind these campaigns. To quote that HSI report, quote, this investigation is focused on identifying and disrupting sophisticated, organized campaigns supporting and engaging in this behavior and to prevent such unlawful activities. Regarding this investigation, lawyer for the defense Kevin Ryok wrote, As with Operation Puppet Master, HSI's investigation in Project Whipple Shield extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded, with no evidence but obvious political animus, that numerous Twin Cities unions and non-profit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. And it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations, despite the lack of any clear connection between those organizations and criminal conduct, unquote. At that press conference announcing the indictment, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said that Direct Action Minnesota is actually, quote, comprised of members of subgroups like the Black Cat Workers Collective, unquote. But the alleged quote-unquote subgroups extend far beyond just Black Cat Workers Collective, as evidenced by a little diagram that was presented to grand jurors for this indictment. This diagram is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. In the middle is the logo for Direct Action Minnesota, the organization that the DOJ alleges is connected to the 15 defendants. But surrounding the DAM logo is logos for 15 other organizations, all with arrows pointing towards Direct Action Minnesota and text reading council member, as if all of these organizations are sending council members to Direct Action Minnesota to plan or orchestrate the direct action's in response to Operation Metro Surge. This diagram that was presented as a slide to grand jurors is titled The Conspiracy, and the conspiring organizations are listed as Monarcha Rapid Response Line, which is one of the rapid response networks in the Twin Cities. The other organizations in this diagram, going clockwise, include Minnesota 5150, the organizers of the No Kings protests, Minnesota Ice Watch, Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, a labor union, Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59, Left Jab, a self-defense group, The Grease Pit, a bike shop, Democratic Socialists of America, Black Cat Workers Collective, AFL-CIO, Workers' Solidarity Circle, Whipple Watch, Veterans for Peace, Socialist Alternative, Showing Up for Racial Justice, SCIU 26, Red Pine Revolutionary Collective, and Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club. HSI agent Desmond Garcia testified to the grand jury regarding this slide, quote, This is kind of a breakdown, like I mentioned earlier, with members of DAM being associated with other organizations. Through the course of the investigation, this is just a snapshot of some of the other organizations that members are affiliated with. that kind of comprise and make up Direct Action Minnesota, unquote. This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen and provides really, really useful insight into how HSI is imagining the organizational structure of these protests, that all these organizations are sending, quote-unquote, council members to this more secretive group, Direct Action Minnesota, that orchestrates the most radical parts of the anti-ICE protests. Regarding this diagram slide, the lawyer for the defense wrote, If any individual was connected to both DAM and any of these entities, the government considers the entities to be conspiring. Fueled by visions of this vast and irrational conspiracy, HSI surreptitiously obtained financial records of labor unions and non-profit organizations as a part of a quote-unquote, financial investigation into, quote, domestic terrorist financing, unquote. And let's go over the financial probe aspect of this investigation. One of the reports uncovered through Discovery revealed that HSI secretly subpoenaed three years' worth of financial records from SEIU, one of the biggest labor unions in the country, largely focused on organizing the healthcare, public service, and service work sectors. Last March, HSI agents served an administrative summons, or an administrative subpoena, to Fedwire to obtain wire transfers involving SCIU. The wire transfers that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York gave over to DHS range from January 1, 2023 to March 19, 2026. To quote the HSI report, quote, Beginning in December, HSI St. Paul began a multifaceted approach to identify and investigate individuals engaged in acts of violence, destruction of federal property, intimidation of federal officers and employees, and attempts to impede federal operations. Through this investigation, HSI St. Paul has identified a network of individuals operating online and in person who are engaged in this behavior by either directly participating or by providing support through fundraising, planning, and organization. The following report of investigation provides preliminary cursory details related to wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from Service Employees International Union, main financial institution, the U.S. Bank of Minneapolis, Minnesota, unquote. And what did this investigation find?
02:45:03
Speaker 7: Well.
02:45:04
Speaker 5: a quote-unquote preliminary analysis of the wire transfers, quote, revealed that the SEIU National Union has numerous wire transactions to and from SEIU local unions for various types of debits and credits to include annuity payments, strike payments, strike supplies, investments, union member dues, retiree dues, medical expenses, and pension fund expenses, unquote. So they found nothing. They just looked through three years of financial records from SCIU and only found regular transactions that a union would have. They found absolutely nothing. And this report ends with this incredible sentence, quote, this financial investigation involving protest domestic terrorist financing continues.
02:45:55
Speaker 7: Sure, dude.
02:45:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm sure it's going to continue. I'm sure it's going to continue to find nothing. Because in the 95-page indictment against these 15 defendants, one of the frequently recurring topics in the overt acts and furtherance of the conspiracy is discussing how they don't have any money, how they're constantly trying to fundraise to help continue the anti-ICE protests. The indictment outlines them consistently struggling to to pull together $ 5, 000. But yeah, sure, let me make a few calls to the SEIU real quick. I'm sure they'll just wire transfer over the money. And the other thing is that this three-year time span of the financial probe stretches way longer than Operation Metro Surge and the protests surrounding ICE activists in the Twin Cities. Because what's actually going on here, and to the Fed's own admission, is that they're just enacting NSPM-7. using whatever pretext they can concoct to dig through the finances of entities and organizations that they view as political enemies. And it wasn't just SCIU. HSI also obtained three years' worth of bank records for the Communication Workers of America, including donations and PAC spending. The CWA union represents thousands of journalists and print and broadcast news workers in the U.S. and Canada. And as a part of this financial probe, HSI obtained records for one of the Canadian branches of this union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, with the administrative summons requesting information from the Bank of Montreal. This very same summons also demanded three years worth of financial records from the environmental activist organization Sunrise Movement and the Sunrise Movement Educational Fund. And as we will discuss, HSI was also actively surveilling Sunrise meetings in Minnesota. Now, HSI also subpoenaed financial records from at least one other entity that we know of, a local Minneapolis activist organization called Voices for Racial Justice. But rather than bank records and wire transfers, HSI went after PayPal and Venmo transactions. Voices for Racial Justice was founded in 1993 and describes itself as the longest-running racial justice organizing training organization in the state of Minnesota. The DHS investigative report regarding the subpoena into the organization says that the website for Voices of Racial Justice, quote, boasts several articles on Ice Out and or Truth, Freedom, and Ice Out of Minnesota. Their website also provides links to Defend the 612, Minneapolis St. Paul Whistles, and Monarcho Rapid Response for upcoming trainings.
02:48:38
Speaker 3: Unquote.
02:48:39
Speaker 5: That's basically the entire justification DHS gives for probing into the donations and Venmo and PayPal records for this racial justice organization. That their website, hosts links to other anti-ICE organizations. Defense attorney Kevin Ryok wrote, quote, this broad coalition of financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations done in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate violates both the First Amendment and these organizations' right to financial privacy. It also reflects a sinister turn in our democracy and when the party in power feels no compunction about peering into the private finances of its political opponents, collecting that information, and storing it away for further use. The lawyer also notes, quote, among other problems, the use of the administrative summons seems to violate the Right to Financial Privacy Act, which requires law enforcement to provide notice to the account holder if they are trying to obtain bank records via administrative subpoena. Here, not only did DHS hide these inquiries from the account holders, it told responding financial institutions, quote, you are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time. Any such disclosure will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law, unquote. Though the federal government would likely argue that HSI's use of the administrative subpoenas without notice would fall under some of the exceptions within the Right to Financial Privacy Act. Most reporting I've seen on this batch of discovery has focused on the financial probing of unions and activist organizations. And yeah, that is a big deal. That is very serious and deserves a lot of focus. But most of the investigative reports released as a part of discovery pertain to HSI undercover operations, surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE organizing in the Twin Cities. And there is a lot of interesting information in there. that explains why the 90-something page indictment is like that, why it has transcriptions of so many regular in-person conversations and text logs from Signal. To quote defense lawyer Kevin Ryok, undercover HSI agents posing as protesters or activists surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, union halls, schools, and restaurants. Undercover agents secretly made audio and video recordings of those meetings, unquote. And now I want to quote from one of the HSI reports regarding their use of undercovers. Quote, prior to the initiation of Operation Puppet Master, HSI deployed an undercover agent to participate in both virtual and in-person meetings within the Twin Cities area. The objective of these activities was to gather intelligence regarding any organized networks of conspirators or operating online and in person, who may be providing material support to violent opportunists and individuals engaged in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers, unquote. So before Operation Puppet Master even started in January, the month prior, HSI already had an undercover digging into the anti-ICE protests. In reports, this undercover is identified as 9843, And he started out by attending a virtual ice watch training on December 3rd, put on by a group called States at the Core and a Chicago-based org called Protect Rogers Park. A few days later, the agent, quote unquote, acting in an undercover capacity, attended a publicly advertised in-person legal observer training in Richfield, Minnesota. During the training, the agent joined a rapid response network sponsored by a Minneapolis-based community defense group called Monarcha via a QR code. On December 13th, The Undercover attended a Sunrise Movement action training called How to Stop Ice and Build the Revolution at a Universalist church in Minneapolis. After this meeting, The Undercover was added to the group's announcement chat and started messaging one of the organizers, about how people are verifying which hotels ICE agents were staying at. A few days later, the undercover reviewed a website with info, toolkits, and signal links for ICE rapid response called Defend612. com. 612 is the Minneapolis area code. On December 22nd, the undercover participated in a Sunrise Zoom meeting about a then-upcoming protest in front of the Hampton Inn housing ICE agents. Per the investigative report detailing undercover operations prior to the creation of Operation Puppet Master, during this Sunrise Zoom meeting, the undercover agent learned that there were, quote, multiple signal chats dedicated to the hotel scouting and license plate gathering. The gathering is a collaborative effort with, quote-unquote, Whipple Watch, the known agitator group stationed outside the Whipple building. HSI undercover agent 9843 was added by the team leader for the quote-unquote action team to this signal chat group, unquote. So beyond joining public signal chats, it appears the main way this undercover was able to worm his way into more private chats regarding Whipple Watch was through attending Sunrise Movement meetings. In the motion outlining this batch of discovery, the lawyer for the defense noted, quote, undercover agents actively participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes, unquote. The main example of this in these documents is another Sunrise Movement meeting from late January titled Resistance Skills Training, held at the Minneapolis Public Library. Two undercovers attended this training, and the investigative report details about 25 people in quote-unquote breakout sessions focused on recruiting, action, and de-escalation. The report notes that Sunrise recommends using quote, police liaisons and protest safety marshals. The quote-unquote action section discussed sit-ins and the protests outside hotels, with HSI noting in the report quote, it was made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on quote-unquote peaceful protests. Regardless of that, one of the undercovers at this meeting quote-unquote privately informed someone that he works in construction and could quote, build items that might assist other groups with more quote-unquote direct action protests, unquote. And the undercover also told this person at the meeting that that going to jail quote-unquote did not bother him. So two undercovers attended this Sunrise Movement meeting discussing peaceful protests and noted that in the report, but still tried to talk to attendees about quote-unquote building items to assist in direct action protests and that they're okay with going to jail because of it. We'll talk more about how undercover HSI agents began their infiltration after this ad break. Welcome back. The main undercover HSI agent who started to infiltrate the protests in December of 2025, who's identified in reports as undercover 9843, also operated a signal account with the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly. And according to the defense, this undercover, quote, routinely exchanged signal messages with people regarding purely First Amendment protected conduct. messaging participants in the Art Money Comms Club signal chat and stating, quote, also the interested in the financial world. organizing piece. I like numbers and data. And marrying that together with propaganda. So would love to work on both sides of these groups. Unquote. Yeah, I am sure you're interested in the financial organizing piece. Yeah, I bet. I like numbers and data.
02:57:28
Speaker 7: Incredible.
02:57:29
Speaker 5: The interested in the financial organizing piece. Also, as a part of Discovery, we've learned that the undercover discussed fundraising messaging strategies and offered to draft fundraising language for Twin Cities Direct Action and design a protest flyer. One message with the undercover using the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly reads, I'm sure you're swamped with the speaking tour, but do you have a suggestion for a donation platform? I believe open collective and the idea of asking our own banks was discussed, unquote. According to the defense, these new discovery documents also detail how Undercover's, quote, routinely surveilled individuals engaged solely in First Amendment protected activity, including the Whipple watch group that engaged in peaceful observation of ICE vehicle activity in and out of the Whipple building. conduct that both Judge Mendez and Chief Judge Schiltz have confirmed is not unlawful, unquote. One of the DHS investigative reports details how agents captured the license plate information of anti-ice protesters attending a Twin Cities Direct Action quote-unquote art club meeting at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church. In the report, the undercover who infiltrated this meeting, quote, described the meeting as democratic in nature in the sense that everyone talked over each other, unquote. The undercover also noted how most of the meeting discussed fundraising and how to make social media agitprop. But while he was attending this meeting, other HSI agents documented the license plates of attendees. According to the defense, quote, Agents then used this information to obtain the names of the attendees, searched social media for pictures of these individuals, and compiled an intel workup that included names, photos, addresses, personal information, including family and employment information, and vehicle registration information for each meeting attendee. None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room. Yet, now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier, unquote. The best idea why HSI decided to zero in on the group of individuals allegedly associated with Direct Action Minnesota, or formerly called Twin Cities Direct Action, relates to a meeting held in early January. If you recall, HSI undercover 9843 was added to the Whipple Watch signal chat after attending a few Sunrise Movement meetings. And according to investigative reports, on January 10th, an undercover agent received a flyer in the Whipple Watch chat for an upcoming emergency meeting on the 11th. Remember, this was three days after the killing of Renee Good. The undercover got permission to attend this emergency meeting and was quote-unquote vouched by one of the defendants, Isaac Sant, identified in chats as Ike. This emergency meeting was to share plans of an upcoming protest on July 23rd. And the HSI report claims that this meeting is where Twin Cities Direct Action emerged from, as that was the name of the signal chat created at the end of this meeting, and the Twin Cities Direct Action logo was first used on a flyer for this upcoming protest. On January 19th, the undercover surveilled and attended a follow-up meeting at a local restaurant in North Minneapolis, hosted by SEIU 26 and Socialist Alternative, to plan this action on the 23rd, which was then identified as a general strike. The HSI report describes this meeting as a, quote, general discussion on the upcoming Walk Out on Ice event being held on January 23rd.
03:01:41
Speaker 3: And as usual, this.
03:01:43
Speaker 5: Report doesn't actually allude to anything illegal being discussed in this meeting. And this strike and march action later took place on January 23rd and was attended by tens of thousands of people. Planning such an action is an ordinary protected First Amendment act. Around this point, and especially following the killing of Alex Preddy, DHS started really ramping up the surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities. They started using multiple undercover agents, not just 9843, and began surveilling and trying to infiltrate many more types of protest beyond what was organized by Twin Cities Direct Action. Two HSI reports detail surveillance of individuals and groups attending protests the No Kings protests, and an anti-war protest last March. The report on the Stop the War in Iran protest held on March 7th specifically mentions 5150, Veterans for Peace, Sunrise, and PSL. To quote the report, Undercover 5022 and Undercover 137 did not have extended interactions with any members of the crowd. Many people were also not identifiable slash recognizable due to wearing face coverings. Undercover 5022 observed that during the event, several people appeared to be conducting event overwatch or quote-unquote marshalling. They were wearing reflective vests, were wearing red hats, and carried radios. They were located at the edges of the crowd. Investigative note. While testifying to the grand jury, Agent Garcia claimed that every single individual being investigated has criminal predicate. Quote, One of the things that is abundantly clear, not only in guidance, but it's just principles as far as this investigation is, no one is ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for First Amendment protected activities. Every single individual that we have investigated, there is criminal predicate to why we are investigating them. Either statements that they have made that are criminal to their actual participation in overt criminal acts, unquote. Now, to quote the lawyer for the defense, of course, as the above examples demonstrate, HSI was obtaining wide swaths of financial data from labor unions and non-profits with zero quote-unquote criminal predicate. Undercover agents captured dozens of First Amendment-protected conversations on surreptitious recordings, many of which did not involve any of the defendants or unindicted co-conspirators in this case. Agent Garcia's statement is simply not true, unquote. And yeah, I don't know how you can think after considering all the examples I've just read that HSI had criminal predicate for every single organization or person that was under investigation or surveillance. That's just a lie. Because if they had criminal predicate, they would be charged. there would be charges against more people. There could be charges against some of those other 15 conspiring organizations in that diagram shown to the grand jury. Oh, and by the way, the DOJ lawyer who convened this grand jury, Deputy Attorney General Brian Lynch, was also a January 6th insurrectionist who entered a restricted zone alongside other rioters. And as this indictment was being put together, the government forced the court to vacate the convictions against Oath Keepers involved in January 6th. This grand jury was literally put together by a January 6th insurrectionist to indict protesters for conspiracy to impede. At the exact same time, the federal government was vacating convictions of other January 6th insurrectionists. The last thing I want to note about this batch of discovery is how it also details instances of counter-surveillance. In one report, a self-described community member walks up to a government vehicle containing HSI agents conducting surveillance, also staged to support an undercover infiltrating an event, and the community member asks the agents inside if they are ICE. They say no and point to a safety vest and a helmet in the vehicle. The community member then responds by saying, okay, and then tells them that he'll have to run the vehicle's plates to check. DHS investigative reports also detail people at meetings warning that ICE could be trying to infiltrate those very meetings and telling all the attendees to not say anything that they wouldn't say directly to an ICE agent, which is really good advice when that meeting is being attended by an ICE agent and one of the funnier investigative notes in this batch of discovery relates to an undercover's infiltration of a self-defense workshop. Quote, Due to the physicality of the event, undercover 5022's concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the end of the training. The undercover briefly left the gymnasium, realized she no longer had the device, and returned to the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor. During these approximately three minutes, the undercover was not present in the gymnasium. So... While this batch of discovery has given us a closer look at the extent of the surveillance of anti-ice protests and HSI's method of investigation, the government did not hand over everything. It was supposed to as a part of discovery. And the lawyers are requesting more documents. This batch of discovery is missing, among other things, quote, special reports of investigation that the government has admitted withholding, claiming that they're unrelated to this investigation, even though they were created and filed within it. The disclosures admit to any investigative reports that document HSI's domestic surveillance, but were placed in other case files. They admit documents and communications related to the initiation and supervision of HSI's undercover operations, and they admit downloads of the undercover phones and undercover laptops used by undercover agents in this case to communicate with the defendants and others, unquote. And those documents are useful not just to us, so we know how these investigations are being carried out, but also for the defense, because reports of government surveillance of protesters and activists during Metro's surge are relevant to the defendant's motion for, quote, selective prosecution and outrageous government conduct, as they constitute additional evidence of DHS targeting individuals based on their political beliefs and First Amendment-protected conduct, unquote. So yeah, that is my not-so-brief overview of this batch of discovery reports. I'll have links to the court documents below if you want to take a look yourself. And hopefully we'll get even more discovery in these next few months. See you on the other side. This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House. The Crumbling World and What This Means for You. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and special correspondent Carlos Berrios-Pilanco, who we have had on a few times for regular episodes. This episode, we are covering the week of August 19th through August 26th. Robert, do you want to start us off with our tribute?
03:09:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, so before we get going today, as I'm sure everyone listening is at least broadly aware, Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean passed away the day before we recorded this on August 25th, 2026. Dolly Parton was more widely beloved than pretty much anyone that was still alive in the United States. Her death was met by immediate mourning from every side of society. And I do mean every side. President Donald Trump ordered all flags to fly at half staff and issued at least as genuine a statement of respect as he's ever put out about anyone saying this is a true loss for millions of people. There has never been anyone like her and never will. It's hard to argue with that. The DSA also sent out an official in memoriam praising Parton as a hero to the working class. And you would find anyone hard pressed to genuinely disagree with that statement, too. Dolly was born in a one room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of a dirt poor and illiterate sharecropper. She wrote more than 3000 songs in her life and had 44 career top 10 country albums, which is nuts. But I wouldn't be talking about Dolly on this show, which does not do obituaries as a rule, if she'd just been a rags-to-riches entertainment industry success story. Dolly had the good luck to become rich and famous, and she would always emphasize that luck had a lot to do with it, even though she worked very hard. And she grew up poor enough that she never, ever forgot that had things been a little different, she would have stayed dirt poor. So she dedicated her life and her fortune to helping the least fortunate in our society. Parton established the Dollywood Foundation to improve education in Sevier County, Tennessee, and in participating classes, the dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%. She founded the Imagination Library, her best-known charity, and donated her 100 millionth free book to children in 2018. She helped build hospitals and universities and was the single highest dollar donor to research that created the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When getting vaccinated became a political hot-button issue, Dolly posted a video of herself taking the vaccine and performed a cover of her own song, Jolene, themed after getting vaccinated. She was also a longtime and vocal advocate for queer people. In 1990, The Sun, a British magazine, found out that her Hollywood chauffeur was a trans man named Jason Pirro. They interviewed him, and he told the magazine, Dolly has been good to me. I'm not real comfortable talking about myself. Dolly knows all about me and is a very nice lady. Even back in the 90s, Dolly Parton was comfortable openly supporting trans people and the rest of the queer community. Her song Family, released in 1991, is probably the first country music song to use the word gay, certainly the first to use it in like a positive sense of the word. And she had queer and trans employees as far back as the early 90s and talked openly about that. In 2016, she was interviewed by Chris as a party for Pride Source and said, I have many gays and lesbians in my own family, she revealed to me, and then she used a word that stuck with me for a decade now.
03:12:50
Speaker 6: Ours.
03:12:50
Speaker 2: They're ours, and they're who they are, and we know they're wonderful and they're like us. Some relatives back in the mountains, she admitted, still weren't quite sure what to make of it. She also told me casually, like it was nothing, which is exactly how she wanted it treated. that she had transgender employees on salary in her own company, years before most corporations would say that sentence out loud, let alone mean it. People came to her the way they used to come to her mama, she said, to be told it was safe to be honest. You need to let people know who you are, and you need to come on out, she'd tell them. You don't need to live your life in darkness. Parton strenuously avoided direct political punditry when she could, but after the right-wing moral panic over trans rights ignited in the 2020s, she spoke out, stating her explicit and direct support for trans people. I know how important this is to them. That's who they are, she said. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me. If there's something to be judged, that is God's business, but we are all God's children, and how we are is who we are. There's so much more to who Dolly was and what she did, from reinvesting royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of I Will Always Love You into the black community, after refusing to license the song to Elvis, to starring in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, arguably the best film about either Texas or whorehouses. She did it all in her life. I think the loss of Parton hurts so keenly because of the very thing I started with, though. The fact that her loss has been mourned across the aisle almost regardless of political stance. Dolly Parton was the closest thing our culture had to a secular saint, a Joshua Norton-like figure who could have waded into the middle of a deadly partisan riot and parted the fighting with her presence like that baby at the end of Children of Men. I might be going a little bit far with that last one, but in my research for this, I came across a recollection of Dolly by Roger Ebert that I feel I need to share. Roger Ebert, if you're on the younger side, was a very famous Pulitzer-winning film critic, and this is him talking about meetings that he and his partner Gene Siskel had with Dolly Parton. In Dallas for the premiere of 9 to 5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the plane home to Chicago, I confessed it to Siskel. I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton, And as we spoke, I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing and comforting. Jean listened and said, Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.
03:15:02
Speaker 3: We looked at each other.
03:15:03
Speaker 2: What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer to it in wonder. And to close off, I think I should give us all some advice courtesy of Dolly Parton. Find out who you are and do it on purpose and do it with purpose. You got to know who you are because so many people try to emulate or copy somebody else. And that's what I got to say about Dolly.
03:15:26
Speaker 5: Thank you, Robert. For some less good, I mean, how do I say this? Um, Some people who are less good than Dolly Parton. There are billions of them. Let's start with some small things regarding people who are not as good as Dolly Parton. Darlene Graham just won the runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina. Graham won with 52.5% of the vote, dominating in the eastern part of the state where Trump campaigned for her last Friday in Myrtle Beach. On Wednesday morning, the Department of State in partnership with the Department of Treasury, has announced the Italy-based autonomous anti-capitalist digital service provider Autistici Inventati, or the IA Collective, is now a specially designated global terrorist organization. To quote from Treasury, quote, Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control took action to counter the growing threat posed by violent far-left terrorist groups, by sanctioning the IA Collective, an Italy-based entity that supplies specialized digital architecture tools and services for Antifa cells and other violent far-left extremists, including the foreign terrorist organization Palestine Action. The IA Collective also operates the web platform NoBlogs, which hosts many Antifa and anarchist communiques. Though notably, the State Department has repeatedly asserted that Rose City Antifa used the NoBlogs platform online, And that is simply not true. What they are referring to is Rose City Counter Info, a separate website that is not affiliated with Rose City Antifa, which is used by local anarchists to make community bulletin board style updates. I cannot emphasize enough that these are totally separate groups with often very different politics. But on both social media and official State Department press releases, These two groups have been conflated, asserting that Rose City Antifa used the AI collective tools to organize and incite violent and criminal acts. Something else I want to emphasize is that Palestine Action, the UK-based organization, is described as a foreign terrorist organization in the Treasury Department's announcement about sanctions regarding the AI collective. And in that same announcement, sanctions were also imposed on Palestine Action, which the Treasury Department accused of supporting, quote, numerous acts of terrorism. But as of recording, Palestine Action has not been officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
03:18:20
Speaker 9: And then one thing from me, the Trump administration moved ahead this week with its plans to rescind the 2001 roadless rule. which blocks road building in inventory roadless areas of national forests, not in wilderness areas or national parks, as some people have been reporting. The new rule was proposed on August 18th with a public comment period beginning that day. The justification that they're going for with this is it will prevent wildfires. And I believe they're going for like it will allow fuel mitigation to prevent wildfires. It's worth noting that there were already provisions in the roadless rule to allow for like thinning of small diameter timber. What they didn't do is add budget to do that.
03:19:07
Speaker 1: Right.
03:19:07
Speaker 9: So like if they were making a serious attempt to do fire mitigation in so much as that is something we can prevent, which I don't think it is, then they would have added budget, but they haven't done that. It's just worth pointing out that the construction of roads will allow people to get into areas that were harder for them to get into before. And the thing that tends to start wildfires is people. So people being in these areas will allow people to start fires in these areas. I'm going to cover this more in depth on natural causes in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to flag it because the comment period will probably end soon after I do my episode. So if you want to comment and so much that matters anymore, I'll include a link.
03:19:48
Speaker 6: So in other news that has thus far wound up not really being news, President Trump has declared, quote, economic D-Day? in his attempt to end the war in Iran, win the war in Iran. So in theory, economic D-Day is supposed to be a bunch of what are called secondary sanctions. Secondary sanctions are not just sanctions on a country, but are sanctions on any country that does trade with the first country, in this case, Iran. The specific focuses here are supposed to be, quote, cryptocurrency, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Now, the issue here is that if you are going to do secondary sanctions against countries that trade with Iran, the actual largest target here would be China. Now, reporters repeatedly asked Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who is nominally the person supposed to be running these sanctions, if he was going to name which countries there were going to be secondary sanctions against. Besant refused repeatedly. So these sanctions were supposed to begin later this week, but the administration has been... I don't know if slow-walking them is the term, but they have refused to actually impose any. They are claiming that they are not imposing any because they are giving countries time to comply voluntarily. But as of Wednesday, August 26th, there have been no actual sanctions imposed. Every conceivable joke comparing this to D-Day has already been made. Then he actually, by the press corps, in an unexpected bit of bravery, there were several members of the press corps in various press conferences asked, hey, so D-Day was a surprise and you're announcing this. Can you explain this conflict? And he got a bunch of non-answers.
03:21:44
Speaker 1: So.
03:21:45
Speaker 9: Maybe this is the giant inflatable set of sanctions that they are using to draw attention from the actual set of sanctions.
03:21:54
Speaker 6: James, you unfortunately know significantly more about D-Day than every single person in this administration combined.
03:22:00
Speaker 8: Oh my God.
03:22:02
Speaker 9: It's a thing that they make you do when you're a British man in your 30s.
03:22:08
Speaker 6: But if any sanctions actually come down, from this, we will let you know.
03:22:14
Speaker 7: But as.
03:22:16
Speaker 6: Of Wednesday, August 26th, this is another failed attempt to win the war in Iran that seems to have been called off before it began. Speaking of tariffs... So the other big piece of big tariff news is something that we talked about a few weeks ago, which is the U.S. 's attempt to impose 50% tariffs on a broad swath of Canadian goods. Ever since then, the U.S. and Canada have been in trade negotiations over these tariffs, and these negotiations have completely fallen apart as Canada has walked away from the table. Now, there are a bunch of reasons why these specific negotiations broke down completely. I'm going to go through some of them. One of the big ones is that one of the biggest sources of cross-border trade between the US and Canada is the fact that in a similar way to the US and Mexico, there is a lot of cross-border trade revolving around US auto manufacturing, right? And Canadian auto manufacturing, a lot of Ford, General Motors, stuff like that. A lot of trucks are produced in Canada. The US was negotiating reducing the tariffs on Canadian automobiles to 15%, but they were only doing this for cars and not trucks. And so they wanted to leave the truck rate at 50%. And there were a whole bunch of very, very fancy trucks that American consumers buy and that Canada makes that would still have 50% tariffs.
03:24:01
Speaker 1: Sure.
03:24:02
Speaker 7: Yeah.
03:24:04
Speaker 6: This is one of the things that normally when these kind of Trade battles have happened before. Automotive stuff has been written out of them almost immediately because it's terrible for a bunch of American companies. But the administration was refusing to back down on this. And, you know, the Canadians walked out. They have wooden alcohol tariffs that are already in effect. There are going to be more tariffs coming on September 8th. More bafflingly, one of the big things that Trump has been on is trying to restart the Keystone XL pipeline.
03:24:37
Speaker 3: Yeah.
03:24:39
Speaker 6: Which Carty is like, no, we're not doing this pipeline unless we get a better trade deal. But then in a truly startling set of proposals, the U.S. wanted to be able to set Canadian steel tariff rates?
03:24:54
Speaker 7: Sure.
03:24:55
Speaker 6: The nominal argument here is that the U.S. is trying to like, quote unquote, stop the import of the flood of cheap steel from countries like China and And they could only do this if the Canadian steel tariff rate matched the American steel tariff rate.
03:25:10
Speaker 5: But the goal for this.
03:25:11
Speaker 7: Was for the U.S.
03:25:12
Speaker 6: To be able to review and set Canadian tariff rates and make sure that they match American tariff rates on other countries. Which, this is the kind of stuff you do to a colony?
03:25:24
Speaker 5: 51st state.
03:25:26
Speaker 7: Yeah. Can confirm. Very colonial thing to do.
03:25:31
Speaker 3: Shocking from America.
03:25:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
03:25:33
Speaker 2: I've never seen a country do this, try to do this to another sovereign country like Canada.
03:25:38
Speaker 6: Yes.
03:25:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
03:25:39
Speaker 7: Yeah.
03:25:40
Speaker 6: I don't think we did this to Iraq. I've never I've never seen anything like this.
03:25:44
Speaker 7: It's it's bizarre.
03:25:46
Speaker 2: The insistence that like, yeah, we have any sort of say in their international policy is de facto making Canada trying to make Canada agree that they're a colony.
03:25:54
Speaker 5: Right.
03:25:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
03:25:56
Speaker 6: Yeah. It's very weird the way this is being written about in the American press, where they're like, oh, well, this is Canadian autonomy and sovereignty has become a political issue. And yes, obviously, there's no country on earth that would agree to this.
03:26:11
Speaker 2: No.
03:26:11
Speaker 6: Even the staunchest American, like Saudi Arabia, would not agree to let the U.S. dictate its tariff policy.
03:26:18
Speaker 5: No.
03:26:19
Speaker 3: It's absurd.
03:26:19
Speaker 6: And this has managed to accomplish the absolutely staggering feat of uniting... Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with Doug Ford, the right-wing premier of Ontario.
03:26:32
Speaker 5: Jesus Christ.
03:26:33
Speaker 6: And also, because these people just hate winning, I don't have another explanation for this other than racism. Canadian negotiators claimed that the U.S. was trying to intervene in Canadian policy about the digital promotion of French films. which is a direct attack on Quebec.
03:26:53
Speaker 3: On the Quebecois.
03:26:55
Speaker 6: Yeah, and a bunch of very, very important legal protections in Quebec about the French language. So they have somehow managed to unite a political coalition of Doug Ford, the Quebec separatist, And the ruling.
03:27:15
Speaker 5: Liberals, all of whom- It's pretty insane. It's unbelievable.
03:27:19
Speaker 6: They're just going systematically through every single conceivable political bloc in Canada and pissing them off. So these negotiations obviously collapsed. Obviously, the Canadians walked away. Obviously, there was almost total support in Canadian society for doing this.
03:27:36
Speaker 7: Yeah.
03:27:37
Speaker 5: Canadian nationalism is at an all-time high. This is really just carrying over the sort of trends that we saw in the last Canadian election where Carney saved the Liberals from total and utter demise by feeding into this sense of nationalism based on being under threat from Trump. And the guy who was running for the Conservative Prime Minister was too associated with Trump and so that really hurt them. And it built this really big coalition in Canada to push back against the conservatives as a way of pushing back against Trump and really put forward the Liberal Party as this counterforce to Trump's America and the attempted incursions into Canadian sovereignty, which Trump is still trying to do. And it's impressive how much Carney's been able to hold on to that coalition while ruling. It's been over a year now. and stuff like this shows that it's, if anything, only gotten stronger in recent weeks during these negotiations. Pulling together Doug Ford, the Liberal Party, and the Kebukwa into one united bloc is like an unprecedented... a piece of like national unity.
03:28:55
Speaker 2: The fact that other Canadians are backing up the Quebecois after fucking Trump tried to make restrictions that like the French language and can't like that.
03:29:03
Speaker 3: That's nuts.
03:29:04
Speaker 5: The fact that I'm going to be on the side of the Quebecois as like a Midwest Canadian.
03:29:09
Speaker 3: It's nuts.
03:29:10
Speaker 5: Very impressive by Trump.
03:29:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
03:29:13
Speaker 6: And I think what's interesting about this, right, is that like, you know, throughout Canadian history, there's been a bipartisan series of debates that have cut across the You know, like as cut across every political party, there have been factions in both about whether the extent to which Canada was going to be sort of a branch plant economy of of the United States. And that's just over. Everyone at this point has has, you know, sort of unified and saying, no, we're not going to continue doing this, you know, to sort of cap this off. One of the demands from the Trump negotiators were that Canada would end this program. It's been doing of this sort of this sort of by Canadian program. where they've been doing something that the U.S. also has been doing for ages of encouraging people and encouraging government contracts to go to Canadian companies, which has been intensified in response to sort of what I think inaccurately. And I can't believe I'm saying this in regards to Canada as American imperial aggression. And Canadians have refused to do this. And instead, this has been intensifying attempts to sort of do whatever is possible to try to decouple the US and Canadian economies. Obviously, that's not something that's particularly possible in a macro sense, just because of the reliance on both, you know, oil exports and also the way that the auto sector is intertwined. But this has become economic policy in a way that would have been unthinkable even like five years ago.
03:30:40
Speaker 5: In specific, like the Buy Canada campaign to push for consumers just to buy products made either by Canadian companies or made in Canada has been a massive success.
03:30:51
Speaker 7: Yeah.
03:30:51
Speaker 5: Talking with my family in Canada about this, like this is penetrated into all parts of the country, including like the conservative Alberta province where my family lives, where, yeah, this is like a big thing. It's hard to understate how much of an impact that has had in the country's consuming habits in the past year and a half.
03:31:12
Speaker 9: Yeah, Trump has the ability to do this in an incredible number of countries, actually. He has created some fantastic alliances. He's been great for the maple syrup business.
03:31:24
Speaker 5: Let's go on ad break and then return for more news.
03:31:27
Speaker 3: Ads for poutine and maple syrup coming up.
03:31:30
Speaker 5: From your mouth to Katya's.
03:31:32
Speaker 3: Not at the same time. Maybe at the same time now. Maybe that's all they have.
03:31:48
Speaker 5: Carlos, welcome.
03:31:50
Speaker 7: Hello.
03:31:51
Speaker 5: What is your special segment for us this week on executive disorder?
03:31:54
Speaker 3: There was an American colony segue that was hanging right there. You know what?
03:32:02
Speaker 5: My bad.
03:32:03
Speaker 7: From the soon-to-be colony of the U.S., Canada, to the current colony, Puerto Rico, on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared that 26 out of the 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico were undergoing a drought disaster. Per the AP, more than 33% of the archipelago is under extreme drought, and another 30% is experiencing severe drought. So I should say that this emergency declaration has been a long time coming, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets extended to other municipalities. Puerto Rico has been experiencing pretty bad water problems since forever, but they became particularly acute last year when more than half a million people lost water because of a broken pipe. Earlier this year, another break caused about 300,000 people to lose water, more or less. In my area, which is kind of outside of the metro where it's been most affecting, we lost water for about 10 days early in the summer. And now, because of a mixture of aging infrastructure that hasn't been fixed and a continuing drought, it looks like that might be the case again soon. At least we're stockpiling as much water as we can. So to talk about the infrastructure problems real quick, part of it is really due to how bad the system is. We lose about 60% of the water produced by the local water utility before it gets to people's homes, which is... It's become normal to us, but it's kind of crazy to say to other people, at least in my experience when I've talked about it with others. And quite a few of the reservoirs that feed us water have not been dredged in years. Yeah, and part of the reason the drought is going on is because of the super El Nino, which has been causing temperatures across pretty much the whole world to go up.
03:33:40
Speaker 1: Yeah.
03:33:41
Speaker 7: So I also want to talk about two pretty big investigations published by Aura Bogalo of Injustice Watch, one in collaboration with Wired and the other in collaboration with The Intercept. To kind of set the scene, Illinois has this thing called the Trust Act, which generally prohibits law enforcement in Illinois from participating in immigration enforcement. This includes not detaining or not continuing to detain any person based solely on whether they have an immigration detainer. They are not supposed to, quote, assist in any capacity with an immigration agent's enforcement operation unless required to by a judge's warrant or a federal law. Several other states have laws like this, essentially making them sanctuary states. However, as Bogada writes, this hasn't really stopped local officials from collaborating with immigration enforcement. In one case, a Riverton police officer ran the name of a 31-year-old immigrant for a law enforcement database due to a traffic infraction only to get a phone call from the FBI almost immediately. The FBI agent was trying to see how he could help ICE detain the guy, the man who was stopped. The solution came from an outstanding state warrant the man had out for him. The police officer technically was not detaining him on an immigration base, but the outcome was the same. Per Borgato's reporting, since Trump came into office, officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois... have collaborated with immigration officials by feeding them information. This has led to at least 150 people being put into the immigration system throughout Illinois, even though as a sanctuary state, it's ostensibly not supposed to do that. In another exchange reported by Injustice Watch, a Tinley Park officer was asked by an ICE agent for quote-unquote lead data on a person the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer responded with a bunch of information about the guy, including his address and phone number. and also told the ICE agent that, quote, his crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently. There are several examples of this kind of wink and nod collaboration by local officials with immigration enforcement for a variety of different ways, including emails or housing detained migrants at the request of the U.S. Marshals, then releasing them into ICE's hands. The second story published by Bogalo is much the same, but focused on county prosecutors' role in enforcing immigration law. Per her story, quote, state's attorney's office in one out of every six Illinois counties acted as valuable assets of federal immigration enforcement, sharing sensitive personal data about the people they were prosecuting without criminal warrants, public disclosure, or legislative oversight, and with no accounting of how often it happened or who was affected, end quote. Some of this came from simply answering when DHS agents came calling, while some prosecutors volunteered information of their own volition. In Marion County, one assistant state's attorney emailed the information of a man in a case he was prosecuting only for ICE to respond, quote, The same prosecutor, per Injustice Watch, emailed the same ICE agent within 20 minutes after flagging the first person, saying, quote, It's worth noting that per Bogado, more than half of Illinois state attorney's offices said they had no record of contacts with ICE. However, what I wanted to highlight here was that even in states people would consider, quote unquote, safe because they're sanctuary states or sanctuary cities, the mechanism of the state continues to collaborate with immigration enforcement under the table. We've seen this in a bunch of places already, mainly for state, local, and municipal police officers doing this exact same type of thing across the country.
03:37:13
Speaker 9: Yeah.
03:37:13
Speaker 7: But the prosecutor's thing, as far as I know, is pretty new, especially at this scale that Pogado reported on. Right. So this kind of wink and nod collaboration is likely happening across the board in the United States. And we'll be hearing stories like this probably for years to come.
03:37:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think like.
03:37:33
Speaker 9: People should be aware, I guess, I just want to say really briefly that like sanctuary jurisdiction laws are not necessarily doing what people think they are doing.
03:37:42
Speaker 5: Yeah.
03:37:42
Speaker 3: Like cops are going to cop.
03:37:43
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely.
03:37:44
Speaker 9: And you see this all the time with like when they put into the queries they put into flock, when people look at their flock hot list and they just put like investigation or crime as the reason why. Like that is what's happening there, right? When your jurisdiction tells you that these flock cameras aren't going to be used for immigration. When the cop just puts in investigation, you have no idea what it's being used for, right?
03:38:07
Speaker 5: Yeah.
03:38:07
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And I should also flag that a bunch of sanctuary cities have specific ways in which they'll collaborate with immigration enforcement. So, for example, a big thing is Operation Stone Garden, where they... use municipal, state, and local cops to patrol the border. And sometimes, ostensibly, it's not supposed to be for immigration enforcement, but I'm pretty sure that it's happened across the U.S. where it's being used to enforce immigration.
03:38:33
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, like look at NDAs, right? Like that's in theory a trespass thing. Top of it being, I guess it's a federal trespass in that instance because it's a military installation. For a citizen, that would be like a trespass thing.
03:38:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are a bunch of these ways.
03:38:50
Speaker 9: The California Values Act has all these carve-outs in addition to, as far as I'm aware, never having led to a prosecution. These sanctuary city laws of a cop or a prosecutor or sanctuary jurisdiction laws, they don't have teeth.
03:39:04
Speaker 6: Yeah, and insofar as sanctuary city laws did anything under the first Trump administration, it wasn't because of the laws themselves. It was because of the mass resistance to it.
03:39:12
Speaker 9: Yeah, we don't fix this with sanctuary laws. And I think anyone who's telling you that that is the case is either lying to you or unaware.
03:39:20
Speaker 7: Exactly.
03:39:21
Speaker 9: I want to talk a little bit about some documents that the Deportation Data Project has obtained by Freedom of Information Act request. And they show us some data about ICE detentions. One of the things they show is that ICE is focusing more and more on people with no criminal record rather than as a claim focusing on people with convictions. As of July, the majority of ICE arrests were people with no convictions and no pending charges. This comes in the same week as the Fourth Circuit. Post-Chevron ruled that if a person's criminal conviction is vacated for any reason, that eliminates immigration consequences coming from that conviction. That would only be in the Fourth Circuit right now, right?
03:40:03
Speaker 5: It was reported today in a few outlets that that July had the highest number of ICE arrests, almost 50,000. That's correct.
03:40:14
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
03:40:14
Speaker 9: And it's very interesting. June saw the previous record, right? And then July saw an even higher record. Specifically, I'm looking at detention bookings there.
03:40:25
Speaker 5: Okay.
03:40:25
Speaker 9: So it is possible that someone could be booked in having previously been detained once, right? Like we can't sum all of these months together. It's unlikely, but like Flores, the Flores settlement governs detention of minors. But I don't think there's a prohibition on re-detention under Flores, as I understand it. So yeah, as you said, these are the highest numbers that we've seen in this Trump administration. The data set I was looking at goes back to 2022, but I would be shocked if there were pre-2022 numbers that were higher than this. So I think it's probably pretty safe to say these are the highest numbers ever. It's interesting to break it down by state, which I did. A lot of that increase came in Texas and Florida. If you graph the number of bookings by state by month, you see huge spikes in Texas and Florida. Texas has always been the highest rate. It's a vast state. It has a large migrant population. You have support from local law enforcement. But the Florida peak was particularly notable, as were Arizona and Georgia. California, by contrast, didn't go up as much. And I want to get in a little bit. I'm going to go through some more data and tell us more about what this tells us about how ICE is going about things now. The number of people in detention is lower than its peak of January this year. This is probably due to the all-time high number of book outs from detention in July. The vast majority of those were removals. Some of them, people who bonded out, the vast bulk of those are going to be removals. We can also see certain detention facilities growing in population, notably Camp East Montana a few months ago. I reported on the GAO report, Government Accountability Office report, which highlighted how terrible conditions were there. As far as I know, it's still called Montana, not Montagna. I don't know if that's just they don't have the capacity to add accents or if maybe they're going for something else there. Overall, this data shows that the ice surge in July was really huge. And it shows us a little bit about this home and era approach, right? They're not doing what Bovino did, which was gratuitously using violence and crowd control and a highly visible militarized presence in blue states. They are doing this in red states as well. And they're doing it in a less sort of confrontational way. Not that it's not confrontational to grab someone and tear their family apart.
03:42:45
Speaker 3: Of course it is, right?
03:42:46
Speaker 9: But Bovino was trying to manufacture media moments. Yeah, less of a public spectacle, I guess. Yeah, Bovino has been about the spectacle for years, right? Like he had, in the Biden administration, he had social media people on his payroll in the El Centro sector and video content creators. So like, Homan is going about this differently, but clearly he is very effective at what he is trying to do. And it has been harder for people to oppose, said Pavino's like flood a city with Border Patrol guys in plague carriers approach.
03:43:16
Speaker 3: DHS OIG, that's the.
03:43:18
Speaker 9: Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, has also released a report this month detailing how the focus on deportation, so all costs, has impacted the fentanyl market. So the report, which looked at how HSI, that's Homeland Security Investigations, has used expensive technologies, spoiler, it hasn't, concluded that, quote, As ICE shifted priorities towards immigration enforcement, HSI's level of effort on fentanyl declined from fiscal year 2024 to 2025. Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24%, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl decreased by approximately 30%, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39%. Indeed, there are fewer HSI agents doing fentanyl investigations now than there were in some years under Biden. which is remarkable when you look at how massive the budget for DHS is, right? And how aggressively they've been recruiting people.
03:44:14
Speaker 5: Well, no, James, they have to infiltrate the Sunrise Movement meetings. That's more important for national security.
03:44:21
Speaker 9: They're sitting in cars outside memorials to Alex Peretti taking pictures. The report also looked at a school called Raven. The N is lowercase, the rest is not. You could ask me why and I wouldn't be able to tell you. It's a group of analytical tools It stated that, quote, from fiscal years 2022 to 2025, HSI spent more than $ 150 million developing the Raven platform.
03:44:43
Speaker 3: It was not widely used.
03:44:44
Speaker 9: Most of the offices surveyed abandoned using it altogether and complained that it, quote, did not work and.
03:44:50
Speaker 3: Quote, crashed. Hell yeah.
03:44:53
Speaker 7: We love to see it.
03:44:54
Speaker 9: Yeah, it goes into like, I think this is probably something that we can, we're going to see more, right, as we continue like massively inflating the budgets of these agencies that they will just do things that end up being like a bridge to nowhere. But their attempt at some like highly sophisticated analytical tool platform that would generate leads seems to have completely, well, it's failed.
03:45:15
Speaker 3: They're not using it anymore. That's interesting.
03:45:18
Speaker 5: Something I did not mention in yesterday's episode about the ICE surveillance, in Minnesota, is DHS's use of Clearview AI to do some analysis of suspects, which identified people with similar names but are different human beings in the Clearview AI reports when they were looking into anti-ice protesters.
03:45:38
Speaker 9: Yeah, maybe this is what led to the famous case of Olivia Rodrigo getting detained at the border a few years ago.
03:45:45
Speaker 6: It used to be humans detaining a second guy named John Smith on the Do Not Fly list. Now it's automated. Yeah, those people have lost their jobs and it's very sad. But yeah, they love to use AI, right? They use AI in their surveillance towers at the border. I'm sure we'll see a bunch of money thrown at AI shit that will end up going nowhere in the next two years.
03:46:07
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would not be surprised if some of the budget increases that they have received might go to some of the things that I will discuss in the next segment after this ad break. Alright, we are back. Let's return to our show's namesake. because there's a big update on Trump's March executive order to restrict mail-in voting. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court lifted one injunction blocking parts of this executive order. But as of recording, there is another injunction in a separate case that still remains in place. However, these injunctions relate to different parts of the same executive order. So the entirety of the order is not blocked by courts, and parts of it may now be able to go into effect possibly before the midterms. Let's start by talking about the injunction that the Supreme Court just lifted. A group of 23 states sued the government over Trump's executive order on mail-in voting for infringing on the state's authority to administer elections. a district court agreed and blocked the executive order. But on Monday, the conservative majority ruled 6-3 in a shadow docket, unsigned ruling, finding that the states and the lower court lacked the legal authority to block the executive order because no harms have yet come as a result of the executive order. What? Basically, it was too soon to file a challenge because the order hadn't yet gone into effect.
03:47:59
Speaker 8: Jesus Christ.
03:48:00
Speaker 5: And the plaintiffs had yet to suffer any injury.
03:48:03
Speaker 9: Yeah.
03:48:05
Speaker 5: And like, that's the whole fucking point of the shadow docket. It's based on the idea that the applicant faces serious, irreparable harm if the emergency order is not granted. Like the main example of this is like if someone's facing execution on death row, but under the logic of the conservative justices in this court ruling, such an inmate wouldn't have the grounds to stay their execution because they haven't died yet. It's completely batshit. This is not how these rulings usually work. And having this ruling on the shadow docket itself is just like insults to injury. The majority wrote that the state's supposed concrete injury was in fact only a, quote, unduly long chain of inferences. So this ruling from the Supreme Court will now allow DHS to create and send, quote unquote, state citizenship lists to each state 60 days ahead of upcoming federal elections, cataloging each person in every state who DHS believes is eligible to vote. Now, the Supreme Court does note that, quote, states are not required to use the lists, unquote. But just the existence of these lists and the creation of them could be incredibly troubling. Of course, they could be used in the future. But as James has discussed, we do not have a single list of U.S.
03:49:36
Speaker 8: Citizens.
03:49:38
Speaker 5: And the idea that DHS might be trying to, and in fact is now allowed to make such a list, for a specific purpose, could have a lot of far-reaching ramifications, even beyond elections.
03:49:50
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah.
03:49:51
Speaker 5: It's also important to know that as of the Supreme Court's new ruling, the Attorney General will now, quote, prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and local officials or any others who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters. So even if states are not required to use these citizenship lists from DHS, Trump is still effectively compelling states to follow these lists or else they could face prosecution.
03:50:19
Speaker 7: Yep.
03:50:20
Speaker 5: In the ruling, the conservative majority wrote that the lower court concluded states did suffer a present injury because it required them to, quote, begin planning now how to comply with the order, unquote. But the Supreme Court stated that states, quote, cannot manufacture a standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is certainly not impending this is wild this is a wild thing to say that states are only suffering harm because they're trying to figure out how to comply with the order as written and they're just doing that to themselves as opposed to that being imposed from the president Right.
03:51:06
Speaker 9: So the suggestion is that they would just be like, we'll not comply, see you in court when this comes in, I guess.
03:51:13
Speaker 3: That would be how they should approach this.
03:51:16
Speaker 5: And that is maybe what they are going to do going forward, because there is now a new lawsuit, which I will discuss in a second, regarding some of these issues. Okay. And again, the whole argument from the conservative court is that basically no harm has yet been done, so they can't file a challenge. However, because this is a shadow docket ruling, the court did find that this injunction would cause the government to likely suffer irreparable harm if the stay isn't granted.
03:51:48
Speaker 6: I love our just like cartoon Calvin Ball ruling legal body.
03:51:52
Speaker 5: Yeah. It's one of the most cartoon rulings I've looked at. And we've looked at a lot of cartoon rulings this year.
03:51:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's almost the only rulings we get anymore.
03:52:01
Speaker 7: Oh man, yeah.
03:52:04
Speaker 5: Now, the court does note, quote, the court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell. But the order itself does not harm the state's So the district court lacks justification to bar the government from trying to implement it, unquote. So they admit that in the implementation of this executive order, it might violate the constitution, right? The government, the federal government might violate laws, but just the order as written can't do anything because it's just text. It can't actually do anything. So you can't challenge it. So that's all bad, but let's talk about kind of the other half of this. So this ruling did not address the part of the executive order requiring the post office to review the eligibility of voters before sending them an absentee ballot. And there's a separate injunction by the same lower court judge blocking the Postal Service from implementing their proposed rule change in accordance with Trump's executive order. This executive order directed the Postal Service to, quote, initiate a proposed rulemaking that includes several, quote unquote, proposed provisions, including a new requirement that outbound absentee ballots feature a unique barcode to facilitate tracking. And Trump told the Postal Service to not mail any ballots to people who are not on a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters. Now, in the Supreme Court's ruling on that other injunction, the conservative majority wrote, quote, If the Postal Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule. And, well, well, well, last Friday, the Postal Service outlined and published their new final rule. Quote, The rule introduces new mail piece preparations requirements and data reporting standards for federal ballot mail that must be satisfied prior to presenting outbound federal ballot mail for acceptance into the mail stream. Unquote. So the new rule... requires states to use standardized mail-in ballot envelope designs to be compatible with automated processing to display a consistent election mail logo and an intelligent mail barcode. State and local election officials will also have to use a new federal ballot mail portal to administer absentee ballots. And this portal will be used for two things. This is like a digital portal. State officials will use the portal to certify the design of of their new envelopes in accordance with the new requirements and must provide the name and address of the voter as found on the outbound federal mail ballot envelope, the issuing state and the barcode on the outbound and return federal ballot mail envelopes prior to presenting an outbound federal ballot mailing for acceptance. So that's the data. states have to submit to the postal service. It is a name, address, the barcode, and the state. That does not go as far as what Trump's executive order wanted the postal service to go, but this is going to be a new step or at least a new process to do some of the same steps that have already been kind of been done in like an ad hoc manner. And rather than this following a 60-day deadline as set in Trump's executive order, the postal service's final rule contains an optional 90-day notice for for states to tell the Postal Service that they'll be using mail-in ballots, and a recommended 30-day soft deadline to upload voter data into this new portal before the Postal Service will accept any mail-in ballots. And importantly, if states do not follow the new proposed rulemaking, the Post Office just will not accept mail-in ballots. Quote, the Postal Service will generally not accept outbound federal ballot mailings unless compliance with the rule's new standards has been verified. meaning they have to up that data into the portal and have these new envelopes. Now, the rule does note, quote, the Postal Service will not play any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots, unquote. So they're not directly, as of how this rule is written, they're not going to be directly reviewing citizenship lists when they receive those ballots, but they will have the name and the address and the state and the barcode. And even if the Postal Service themselves will not be verifying eligibility, that doesn't mean Trump officials won't ever use this new centralized mail-in ballot portal database for other purposes in the future. The published final rule says that the after the government obtains timely relief from the lower court injunction in preparation for the 2026 election, which has yet to happen as of recording. But on Wednesday morning, a few hours ago, 23 states have sued over the final rule, over this new rule, as the Supreme Court told them they could once this rule was published. So again, this rule does not go as far as what Trump wanted, but it does open the door for certain things. And combined with the DHS citizenship lists and the Attorney General being able to prosecute people who do not essentially follow those lists at the state level, this could be combined with aspects of Trump's executive order to make mail-in voting more difficult and introduce very, very, very severe penalties for states that don't follow what the executive order is outlining.
03:57:52
Speaker 9: Yeah this is great this has been part of the project for a while right like yeah attacking elections has been the thing that has been like the cost of entry into the Republican Party yeah since 2020.
03:58:04
Speaker 2: They hate the idea of people voting yeah.
03:58:06
Speaker 3: Like a free and fair election is something you have to be opposed to.
03:58:09
Speaker 2: Like that's the most disgusting thing that a conservative can imagine.
03:58:12
Speaker 9: Today yeah I'm sure like If I had to guess, we will see a lot more visible ice stuff again, give it a couple months, you know, right before the election.
03:58:21
Speaker 3: That wouldn't shock me at all. Yeah.
03:58:23
Speaker 5: Quick update here. After recording, a federal judge lifted that final injunction blocking parts of Trump's executive order. So now the administration is fully cleared to implement aspects of that order ahead of the midterms. That new 23-state lawsuit.
03:58:44
Speaker 5: Will target the Postal Service's final rule, which can now be implemented following the lifting of the injunction. For our last section, let's turn to the U.S. military. Let's start with Carlos.
03:58:59
Speaker 7: The oceans around the U.S. have once again become killing fields because the U.S. military carried out two strikes against vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean that it alleges, without publishing any proof, were trafficking drugs. The first strike was in the Pacific on Sunday, and it was the first one of these strikes in roughly two months. Meanwhile, the second was in the Caribbean on Tuesday. Per The Guardian, this brings a total to 68 strikes with an overall death toll of at least 227 people since the strikes began in September of last year. These strikes come at the same time as the U.S. announced that Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras agreed to allow joint military operations against criminal groups on their soil. It's worth noting that, per The Guardian, Guatemala denied reaching such a deal. Ecuador launched these operations earlier in March, and right before we started recording, the Ecuadorian police announced that it had dealt a, quote, strong blow against organized crime through operations Factoría and Jericho with international cooperation of the DEA and Southcom that led to the arrest of 43 people.
04:00:03
Speaker 5: Robert, do you want to close this out?
04:00:05
Speaker 6: Yeah.
04:00:06
Speaker 2: So as I'm going to guess everybody remembers, about six months ago, Iranian strikes crippled a U.S. base in Bahrain and damaged a major logistics hub. This is part of why the Abraham Lincoln has been running short of supplies and has been just out of a bunch of stuff because they had to redirect and move supply. We talked about this last week to the base in Diego Garcia. One of the other things that happened after that base in Bahrain was struck is that the U.S. Navy found themselves planning a hasty evacuation for roughly 1,300 family members of servicemen and women, as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense that worked at the base. If you aren't super familiar with how the U.S. military's overseas footprint works, we've got a shitload of bases all over the world, and those bases all fall into two broad groups. You've got ones that are large and safe enough for soldiers to bring their families and to host large numbers of full-time live-in civilian employees, and you've got bases that are considered too close to the action for all of that to be safe. These DOD communities of civilians are like little chunks of suburban America transplanted to locations across the globe. They have their own schools, bars, clubs, and grocery stores. Most of my family grew up around the air bases that we have on Okinawa, and even during the Vietnam War, there was never any chance that people living there would come into direct danger, unless, like, there was a nuclear war, but then who gives a fuck? Iran, however, has the ballistic missile capacity in order to strike these bases, and this has been the case for years, for a long time. They've been able to hit these bases in Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East that they've been hitting lately, but they've restrained themselves historically because in previous iterations of this conflict, Both sides abided by certain lines and rules. Trump threw the whole playbook out, and it turns out that none of our facilities within missile range of Iran were hardened and ready to be shot at by missiles. There had not been, and it would have been extremely expensive to do that for all these bases, and nobody really thought it was necessary. And even when we started a war with Iran and knew that there was a chance they were going to start retaliating, There was so much arrogance within the administration about both our missile defenses and about Iran's lack of capability that I don't think they thought it was possible that we would get struck in any meaningful way. So the evacuation from Bahrain was chaotic and poorly executed.
04:02:14
Speaker 3: Laura Corte reported.
04:02:15
Speaker 2: On this in an August 21st article for Stars and Stripes, which is a newspaper owned by the Department of Defense that is, at least on paper, editorially independent. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But from that article, quote, Early in the war, a mass text message went out to evacuees directing them to contact the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society, a nonprofit that aims to assist military families during emergencies. However, when one spouse called the phone number listed in the announcement, they were connected with the National Bank of Canada.
04:02:44
Speaker 7: The spouse said.
04:02:45
Speaker 2: That gives you an idea of just how piss poor the planning was. Like no one checked. I'm guessing they probably had some AI like throw shit together for people, but nobody was like prepared to evacuate these people. And even once they knew they had to, Nobody took the care to make sure that these folks got correct information.
04:03:02
Speaker 6: Right.
04:03:03
Speaker 2: And I'm not asking you, the listener, to sympathize with a bunch of families of servicemen and women who are, again, participating in an illegal war against Iran. What I am asking you to do is look at what this says about the lack of planning and understanding of what we were getting into when Trump and his cronies started this war.
04:03:21
Speaker 3: Right.
04:03:22
Speaker 6: Right.
04:03:22
Speaker 2: Here's another quote from that article. Some evacuees say they have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors of temporary housing while their cars and furniture are stranded in Bahrain or aboard ships unable to leave the region. Many say the prolonged displacement has taken an emotional toll and worry about its long term effect on their family's financial and emotional well-being. We literally have been making this up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on for this length of time. Vice Admiral Kurt Renshaw, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said on Wednesday at a virtual town meeting, when you've got the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command being like, well, we're making up the evac plan and how to take care of these people as we go because we never thought that we would have to care about this. That's a bad fucking sign, right?
04:04:06
Speaker 7: So U.S.
04:04:06
Speaker 2: Naval Forces Central Command are an absent. was based in Bahrain, right? That's where their headquarters were. And we've had to move the HQ. I think it's floating right now. But none of the civilian staff who are critical to keeping it going are working wherever they've got it right now. And it's unclear where they're going to relocate to because, again, nobody knows fucking anything because they didn't plan for any of this. Furthering the confusion, the Washington Post recently reported that top Pentagon officials are currently considering a massive drawdown of U.S. military presence in the After the war ends. Now, I find this interesting because this reporting came out the exact same time Trump started threatening slash promising to make the Strait of Hormuz a US territory and charge tolls, which would obviously necessitate an expanded US presence in the region. This report was put together by people within the Pentagon who were kind of acting on their own recognizance. They were not ordered to do this. So this is basically a result of people who are somewhat smart in the Pentagon going, We cannot maintain all these bases with the increased level of hostility and knowing that Iran now can and will strike them. We need to reduce our capacity because we cannot defend all of these bases or keep them safely operational. Whereas Trump is just blasting off and we're going to take the straight and hold it. So you have inside the Pentagon people saying we absolutely cannot hold on to all of our current possessions in the Persian Gulf. And Trump just sort of making whatever fucking statements he wants to make. Per the Washington Post, one of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America's large overseas military bases have been battered for months by Iranian strikes. And the damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild bases as they were before the conflict. Now, again, this review was not ordered by Pete Hegseth. This is the thinking of sober and prudent people who remain at the Pentagon, and they have to do it on their own because they know that none of their bosses are going to order this, right? If it becomes immediately obvious that, oh, we actually have to do a drawdown, they'll get the order like they did with the evacuation of Bahrain, and they'll just be told to figure it out suddenly. So people are trying within the Pentagon to make sure they have a fucking plan together, knowing that no one in charge is going to plan things out properly. And there's a lot of funny quotes from that article. I'm going to read another here. Before the start of the war in February, U.S. Central Command evacuated many of its bases, judging them too vulnerable to Iranian missiles and drone attacks to maintain normal staffing levels. Some of the shifts away from the major Gulf facilities might last after the war, a person familiar with the posture adjustment said. Iran thinks we are in the traditional places, the person said, declining to specify the changes so as to not put U.S. service members at risk. And we are not. And then the article immediately goes on to.
04:06:45
Speaker 3: Say, six U.S.
04:06:46
Speaker 2: Service members were killed in a March strike on Port Shuaiba, a military facility in Kuwait, and more than 200 U.S. facilities have been damaged or destroyed during the conflict. I just find that clash between, well, we moved our stuff before the war, so Iran doesn't know where our stuff is. They think that we're in one place and we're in the other, and it's like, well, then they hit and killed and wounded a bunch of guys, because actually they had a pretty good idea of where we were.
04:07:06
Speaker 9: I was just thinking, as you mentioned those bases, Rob, I don't know if you saw this article Tweet, Zeet, maybe we're supposed to call it, by Barry McCaffrey, who was like... Was a US general, commanded US forces, I think, in the first war in the Persian Gulf, right?
04:07:21
Speaker 7: Right, right.
04:07:23
Speaker 9: In my judgment, the US armed forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access to the Gulf states. US will have to negotiate new access into Western Saudi Arabia, Israel, Southern Europe.
04:07:36
Speaker 3: God, that's bad. It's sometimes just so revelatory to pull out and be like.
04:07:41
Speaker 7: Oh, fuck.
04:07:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, like a change in the global order of things.
04:07:45
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly.
04:07:47
Speaker 6: The age of uncontested US hegemony is over, and it was ended for absolutely no reason other than a bunch of people hate Iran and thought they could just instantly win a war.
04:07:57
Speaker 9: Yeah, like we wound up to take a haymaker and ended up missing and falling over and hitting our head. It's like a fighting analogy.
04:08:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is kind of funny to think that like... The British Empire lost its largely uncontested power and wealth in a lot of areas because there was like a nightmarish war that cost millions and millions of people their lives. And Britain burnt a shitload of its treasure and young men fighting it. And there was another war not that long later in just the day. And whereas the U.S. was just like, I don't know, what if we just shoot ourselves in the dick for no reason?
04:08:27
Speaker 5: Let's see if that works.
04:08:29
Speaker 7: Swing and a miss. It's great. The patterns of empire change.
04:08:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that Stripes article is just there's I'll read one last quote from it just for an idea of like what this is doing to the families of these people. One spouse of an active duty sailor who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal said the repeated displacement has traumatized her children. The family first fled to a U.S. base in Germany where donations from the local military community helped them set up a temporary household. They were later told they had to relocate again, this time to the United States. She said her kids are developing serious behavior issues as a result of the move and that the youngest now barely recognizes her husband during video calls. This is all really bad. There's a lot of ugly quotes in that article. And again, this is a Defense Department-owned newspaper. Within hours of that Stripes article being published, the Pentagon went after the supposed editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They basically wound up firing the editor in chief, the publisher and the reporter who wrote that article, Laura Corte. The editor who stood by Laura is Eric Slavin. And I think that's why he lost his job because he refused to throw her under the bus. And I do applaud them both for doing the right thing. But that is also noteworthy that Stripes has always had a degree of independence. They have reported on things that the Pentagon, the DOD didn't want them to because they're reporting on like actual issues that like troops and their families are facing, you know, and that's an important thing for that community to have. And one thing this signals is that that does not exist anymore, nor no degree of independence can be allowed when it threatens the propaganda.
04:09:56
Speaker 3: Anyway, that's what I got. Good stuff.
04:09:59
Speaker 5: Carlos, where can people find more of your journalism online?
04:10:03
Speaker 7: You can find me pretty much on every social media platform. My at is vaquero2xl. It's V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L.
04:10:13
Speaker 5: And on It Could Happen Here.
04:10:14
Speaker 7: Yeah. As well as it could happen here. That is true. I forget that. But yes, I just spoke with James about U.S. colonialism.
04:10:21
Speaker 3: Yeah.
04:10:22
Speaker 7: How it started. And now it looks like it might be ending. We'll see.
04:10:26
Speaker 3: We're pivoting in a different direction.
04:10:28
Speaker 7: Yeah, there we go.
04:10:29
Speaker 5: What a heartwarming story. I guess there is hope for the future.
04:10:34
Speaker 3: That's what we do here at CoolZone Media.
04:10:37
Speaker 2: That's what we do.
04:10:38
Speaker 6: Yeah.
04:10:38
Speaker 9: If you want to email us, you can do it. CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. Should I list the categories of emails I will not be responding to? Because they grow every fucking... Just don't be weird in there. It's for tips about news.
04:10:51
Speaker 7: Don't be weird.
04:10:52
Speaker 3: Don't be weird.
04:10:54
Speaker 5: Don't be weird in there. I think that's enough said.
04:10:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
04:10:56
Speaker 2: This is not the place to flirt with people or... It might be the place to tell us your conspiracy theories. Tell us your conspiracy theories. All right, episode's done. No, don't tell us your conspiracy theories. That's going to be horrible.
04:11:09
Speaker 5: Send all your conspiracy theories to at James Stout.
04:11:14
Speaker 9: Do you know how much I fucking work already?
04:11:16
Speaker 6: Anyways, put a trans girl on your couch.
04:11:19
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
04:11:21
Speaker 7: We reported the news.
04:11:29
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
04:11:35
Speaker 10: It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.
04:11:52
Speaker 8: Thanks for listening.