Also media, 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.

Yet ready for anarchy in Atlanta?

It should be clear to all Americans that we have a very serious left wing terror threat in our country.

State of the art, organized and well funded activists in criminals.

On April twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, after almost exactly four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the construction of a state of the art police training facility dubbed copp City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially opened atop of the South River Forest Intocabb County, Georgia.

Why two three cuts.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open?

A handshake between Governor Brian Kemp and are relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Getting here has not been an easy journey.

The opening of the one hundred and eighteen million dollar complex for police fire and E nine to one one personnel, which includes academic leadership and simulation centers, came after not months, but years of public pushback.

This is it could happen here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

I've been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop City movement on this show since twenty twenty one.

I first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from inside of the protest encampments in spring of twenty twenty two, and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story more in depth in twenty twenty three.

My coverage has tracked the trajectory of the movement as well as my ability as a reporter.

But this will be my last piece on the Stop Cop City movement.

Every other reporter mini series I've done on Stop Cup City was written while the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome had yet to be fully determined.

Something that set the movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty aspirations of other anti police anarchists or leftist struggles.

I believe that we will win and COP City will never be built.

Where common turns of phrase and not just repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed.

But now, six months after the grand opening of COP City, I want to use this distance to offer a look at the whole movement based on interviews and conversations I've had with organizers, anarchists, and forest defenders, analyzing the movements rise and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge between the twenty twenty protests during Trump's first term and the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity and increased state repression against quote unquote radical left terrorists.

We don't have enough time to retread a complete, in depth play by play of the movement's history, most of which I've already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to break down the movement into a series of discrete phases.

After organizers learn about the plans to build COP City in April of twenty twenty one, the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest first took form with an opening attack phase.

Throughout the entire summer of twenty twenty one, with tree spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to develop at the time in partnership with local government.

To quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, early stages of the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage and unapologetic militancy.

Just absolute, this is what we're doing.

This is what we're about.

This is the goal.

If you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be a part of this.

That was just what we were doing.

Unquote.

In September twenty twenty one, the Atlantic City Council voted to approve the Land Lease Ordinance, authorizing the Atlanta Police Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city owned land in the South River Forest to build copp City.

After this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eshewed, and soon after the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the physical occupation of the forest and the start of the pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project.

To again quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment occupation, lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and the cops just not knowing what to do at all.

Small incursions would get made, but they just had not figured out what to do about it yet.

There was just kind of like free reign unquote.

For the first half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and de Cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis, not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent equipment sabotage.

Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics of the animal rights group Shack, showed early promise in getting some contractors like Reeves Young construction and material suppliers to drop out of the cop City project.

But after this stream of steady success from Fall of twenty twenty one to May of twenty twenty two, the police were forced to up the ante and started conducting large scale raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage encampment infrastructure.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, May of twenty twenty two is the end of the paralysis phase for the cops.

We had our first grid sweep raids where the paralysis phase is broken.

You're getting your multi agency large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in a lot of work.

That really leads up to January of twenty twenty three, so where Torte got killed unquote.

Prior to the police killing of Torti Guita during a forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three, the occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction, but the killing and Tortiguita essentially marked the end of the continuous occupation phase.

What followed was a period of high octane intensity.

Let's call this the revenge phase.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March fifth, during the South River Music Festival.

On March fifth, a few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched to the nearby Cop City construction site.

The crowd repelled police and construction equipment was set on fire.

The cops retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units.

In Atlanta, kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty three people, charging them with domestic terrorism.

After the events of March fifth, the movement entered an odd limbo phase, with heightened tensions among the stop Coop City coalition on the role of direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions.

During this period, police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest.

Entry became heavily restricted.

Following this denial of operating space, the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.

But a month later, the bail fund and legal defense nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud.

Just a few days after the raid, the city Council approved a sixty seven million dollar cop City funding package.

The next day, organizers announced referendum campaign to gather petition signatures to put the cop City land lease ordinance on the upcoming November ballot.

Despite setbacks, there was still energy going towards stopping cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways that it hadn't really before there was no clear consensus on the direction to take the movement.

Previous periods of shift in the movement were often marked by an organized Week of Action, which was a convergence of people from all around the country or even the world, who traveled to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions, and protests against cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and contractors hired to build the facility.

The summer of twenty twenty three saw the sixth organized Week of Action, but it too was caught in this limbo phase and without the forest as an operating zone, the Week of Action struggled to find its purpose, despite the surge in movement participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier that June.

The next phase was the first to be positively determined by the police, the repression phase, which really sets in around August of twenty twenty three with the Rico indictment charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism.

State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to the current trial phase.

Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term prisoner support, and also not letting the state be the one to close the book by doing this, because you don't want to let them define the near of this forever by getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement gets stuck in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying, stop cop City is this thing that's happening when it's it's built, It's built, it's right there, right like.

It doesn't mean that we all just go home, but it means that you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's new shit to do, new stuff to work.

One.

Even in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame to a specific factor in why the fight to stop cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal, But we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the state to gain the upper hand.

For nearly three years, state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against the Cop City project.

Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges made little impact.

The use of terrorism charges as a repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two, following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged with domestic terrorism.

This was the first time that charge has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.

Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed, Tortuguhito was killed by police in another forest raid, but this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the movement to fight cop City, which then only grew.

Similarly, the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to demoralize the people in Atlanta.

Rather, the hesitation to build on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement was stuck in limbo.

Throughout this limbo phase, the movement was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects to March fifth, But as the energy tapered down, the state jumped on that dip in momentum then delta pretty significant blow with the Rico indictment.

The Rico charges in August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series of house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were a pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum to almost a complete standstill.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, a lot of people will argue their opinions about what was the stifling thing.

I think some of the more electorally or mass movement, big tent minded people would argue that, like March fifth takes a lot of the wind out of the sails.

I think a lot of people would disagree with that, just because like you can build on the momentum of a March fifth, you can build on like a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to build on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting their doors kicked in really early in the morning.

It's hard to build on that.

Despite the Rico charges, acts of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough to propel the movement.

After the referendum campaign was effectively nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three, there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials, something multiple activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies and adapt after the forest occupation became impossible to maintain, especially considering just how much weight people had put into that strategy, but then did not come up with a clear next step after the police were able to suppress that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their own strateg The ODA loop is a four step military decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields, including policing.

Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible, then orient, synthesize an information with background knowledge, decide on the next course of action using that newly synthesized information, and finally act and the results of your actions should then send you back to step one.

Failure to act at all or too slowly often ends in defeat.

To quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote.

You need contingency lines, right, either things that you're willing to escalate in the current line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable, or a complete change in strategy.

It could be changed in tactics to something new and exciting.

Either of those are valid options.

Doing both of them at the same time can be extremely effective.

But at the end of the day, you have to when the cops start to break out of paralysis.

An example from any eco defense or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have to escalate in some way.

The occupation, the defense of it, has to escalate in some way to prevent them from feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical space of action has to change because now they need to recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the occupation less assailable than we thought because there's been a change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and shit going on everywhere else and that significantly impedes their ability to have an ODA loop to do battle with.

You can even look at the ice pickups that got a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts.

They were not expecting that many people just to show up.

You can see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical mass of rage and getting really close to those guys that they fucking panic.

They freak out like it.

It's very clear, even just in the small amount of their faces and their movements that you can see that they were panicking unquote.

Similar scenes have since taken place in Chicago and Portland, and I've seen this before with Bortec during the twenty twenty protests in Portland.

I think anyone who has watched the cops retreat has seen this before.

But the more the same thing happens, the more you get used to it, the more you experiment and find ways to adapt and overcome.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, cops panic, and you can see it in the way they walk like they weren't ready for that, and next time they might be, which means you have to add something new, a new spice has to get thrown in, a new flavor profile.

They'll get used to pushing through crowds like that until someone hits them at the end of the day, and whether you're like confronting them on the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead of time to knock people's doors to get them out.

Eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy, but eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the tools you are using to orient back to Atlanta.

All these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of March fifth, the seeming impossibility of continued forest encampments, or of the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of the referendum.

In these moments, the police and the state were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and quite literally so during the quote unquote block Cop City protest in October twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled a protest march from even reaching the road to the Cop City construction site, and the state continued to push their lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist houses in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the movement and was coupled with months to year year long persistent surveillance and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance and hidden cameras placed in front of activist homes and a local community center.

One of the more frightening incidents came in May of twenty twenty four, where a resident of one of the homes rated that February woke up in the middle of the night to a bright light outside of the bedroom window, only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden railing of their porch steps on fire.

One of the things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the way people talked about fear as a tool.

Frank Herbert's Litany against Fear was a common refrain to overcome the fear that this state used as a weapon.

But the first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure wasn't in reference to this state using fear.

It was in early twenty twenty two when I first visited the forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam's style booby traps demonstrated that the cups are not impervious super soldiers.

Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training.

They are susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote.

But while we understand our own fear, I think people often fall into the trap of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them, because the state feels like this monolithic machine, like this unassailable entity, that it is not.

It's made up of people with flaws and emotions who have the same corrozol response to being threatened that you or I do.

A big part of the lessons learned from an has to be a willingness to engage with them in a way that is personally endangering.

That is the single way out.

They're human and they get scared.

The fear that I think had them so tight until May of twenty twenty two was a fear that manifested itself in a lot of paralysis.

Fear is a normal human emotion to danger.

So whether you're the most hardened swat team guy going up against the craziest to eco freak in the world, fear is a normal reaction to that.

But what really had them so tight was fear as a matter of them being paralyzed by it that they cannot find out how to move.

And once they did find out around May of twenty twenty two, we really start to see things change and like they were scared enough in the woods to shoot someone to death, like they were still afraid.

We were able to instill an immense amount of fear in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if you're going to be on the very nimble, small green team insurgency side of things, you have to make your enemy afraid of the dark, but also you have your defensive strategy against fear.

You would hear all the time in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you and through you mantra.

That was a thing that people talked about and said constantly, because you have to find a way to move through that paralysis.

Eventually, and with the help of a multi agency task force, the cops in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and continue their actions.

They were not totally paralyzed by it.

In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only set in very late into the movement.

As a cumulative result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics.

As the movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support.

Something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the urge to keep stop Cop City in this sort of un alive zombie state where you're still kind of acting like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local result is pretty clearly finished.

But in keeping this kind of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and using that for whatever comes next, which is at this point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.

Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in terms of like lessons learned and things that you need to learn from and skill up on to keep that honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting on a larger scope than just Atlanta.

As the cops took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot of the way that ICE operations are currently happening.

That necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and also go to a larger scale with them.

Also, if you never close the book yourself on this battle that you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just remain like an open wound on you forever if you let it.

And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.

Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need to move on to other things.

We need to move on to other things that are larger than Atlanta.

There's still a police state to engage with here.

You don't need the container of this struggle to justify going out and taking action against the police.

And there are other things happening in Atlanta.

There's ice rates happening in Atlanta in the north suburbs of the city.

Cop City is actively being in and if people want to continue stopping it, they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which are now happening on a nationwide scale.

An early irony of the movement was that though cop City was conceived as a training ground for police first, it became a training ground for anarchists as topcop City became the first mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests.

Whatever happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what future movements against police expansion might look like.

Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training Center grand opening.

Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to rally here in this spot and on Peachtree Street from across the nation and literally the globe, we were up against a playbook we had never seen.

At the Atlanta Police Department, we ourselves put out the call for help, and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no.

The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste by side of this department, as did the FBI and the ATF because we all knew that that playbook was successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across this country and public safety would be stymied wherever we go.

While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response, the state also used the movement to test out strategies for the next generation of counter insurgency tactics, well before the cop City facility was finished being built.

Now, with this specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the state are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power, deploys National Guard, increases ice operations, and continues repression against organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide.

To quote in Atlanta anarchist quote, I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that you're a part of, insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.

And if you were part of this thing here, you are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.

This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the Atlanta force stop cop City, is something to be learned from and valued and also moved on from, and to move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion.

Such that the state has as well.

They have taken lessons learned from here and followed them through to their nationwide logical conclusions.

We are necessitated to do that as well.

That doesn't mean you have given up.

It just means that there's new shit happening.

It's helpful to re imagine yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state unquote.

This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop Cop City.

One of the movement's key slogans was cop City is Everywhere.

Organizers did speaking tours around the country to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta to participate in weeks of action.

The physical fight Top cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies.

This nationwide drift also happened on the side of the state, with similar police training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities, and the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been copied on a national level.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, Now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and the strategies of repression both militantly on the ground and legally, and even their propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards from here, and so too, then must our lessons learned both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta, but also how we make connections to the rest of the country.

People who came here are now back home and will make connections to the people around them.

The cops in different cities, they have big conferences, They talk to each other, they learn from each other.

There's no reason that we shouldn't be, you know, doing so with caution and security culture.

Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on, but we have things to learn from each other.

And if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially teach people, even if that was just like here's how we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like four hundred people in a day, or here's how we sneak around in the middle of the night.

This is a representative of the Fire and Movement defense at a cop City trial press conference from September twenty twenty five.

The horrors we predicted have come to pass.

Federal agents now stock communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches.

Who can argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now that they are his police.

The very people who helped lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders, his camps, his federal troop deployments.

But they built the logistics, they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance.

Liberal governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent of our country into autocracy.

As Merlincrats of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote, what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.

This is a test run of a represses playbook that authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover what they can get away with.

Let's look at some examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and these strategies for counter insertaency that are spreading in the era of Trump two point zero.

In January of this year, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged with domestic terrorism.

The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety, gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the slated Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which protesters repeatedly toppled.

Flock has grown massively the past four years, with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in forty nine states.

These cameras complete over twenty billion scans per month.

Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread all around the country and are used by all manners of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women seeking abortions.

Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local Flock camera network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches from January to November twenty twenty five.

In April twenty twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.

This order calls to quote unleash high impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge resources to officers in need unquote.

It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal events to police officers who quote unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.

This tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm.

The order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against LA enforcement officers, promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions.

The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.

And then finally, quote the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.

And shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

As the police become further militarized, the military prepares to do more policing.

One of the executive orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that quote a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained, and available for a rapid nationwide deployment unquote.

Later, in October of twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each state have their own Quick Reaction Forces operational by January first, twenty twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to each unit.

The units contain, on average, five hundred troops per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within eight to twenty four hours.

The initial portion of the Bureau training courses cover how to quote form squad sized riot control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a riot control formation, how to supervise a riot slash, crowd control operation, crowd management techniques, and de domestic civil disturbance training.

Quote.

On September twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Three days later, Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.

The memo orders local joint Terrorism task forces to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and dad and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are quote responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid in a bet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct unquote.

As previously described, the Treasury Secretary will work with the Atorney General to quote identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence, and shall deploy investigative tools to examine financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams.

The memo also instructs the IRS to quote take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

Quoting the memo one final time, quote, investigations shall prioritize crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations ACT RICO, and major fraud against the United States.

At Trump's White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner, the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA, and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City.

There was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop City.

Over sixty rioters were charged with domestic terrorism.

These groups received money for that from both the billionaire class as well as tax payer money.

So On May one, twenty twenty five, Homeland Security Investigations Secret Service and the acting ICE Director rated a home in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone numbers of ICE agents with text in Spanish reading careful with these faces.

In April of twenty twenty three, three activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police officer connected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty miles from Atlanta.

The activists were charged with felony intimidation and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.

To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands as a weapon.

That's why they did the reco charges, That's why they do the house raids, that's why they do overt surveillance where you're getting followed around by police.

But they are susceptible to fear as well.

Through their actions, ICE demonstrates a high level of fear.

They are taking massive steps to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents.

They're complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo.

They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times in the past six months.

They are scared and as evil and super soldiery as they may seem they are indeed afraid, to quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless you do something to keep them afraid, Eventually it will stop.

Unless you change your stread, change course, escalate in some way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free of their paralysis and they will find a way through their fear.

So when that starts to happen, it's time to do something new and insane, because you have to keep them afraid, because like by every moral right, they should be.

They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes.

And if they are too afraid to leave their homes, then they can't go out and do their jobs at the end of the day.

That's their ODA loop right there.

The scale of fear as a tool of repression is always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.

It punches well above its weight.

You can look at Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can even look at some of the arrests made in response to Palestinian liberation protests.

It takes black bagging six people to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary, like it's fucked up.

That's a bad thing to have happened to you, And like, of course, people are afraid.

Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't.

Fear can also keep you safe, but we are necessitated by the political moment we are in to find a way to take extensive action in spite of that.

Unquote.

Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with mass protest, and some of the people then carry those experiences into Copcity.

But then for other people, Stop cop City was their first experience.

And now you have an even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.

But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five, the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.

As the Copsity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people to carry on what's been learned in the contents of their struggle onto whatever the next volume is.

Because cop City itself is in a sequence of events that have happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved in Copsity has been alive by generations.

Cop City is not Volume one.

Cop City is volume like thirty two, but at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit in the middle of the night than anything else.

We've had exactly one arrest made over the years, and arrest that's not gone to trial.

This is an alleged crime of one midnight sabotage action of the dozens and dozens and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest happened very late into the movement, out of the dozens and dozens of attacks that have happened.

Only one arrest has been made after the fact.

Another lesson learned is the difficulty of daily counter surveillance and how much that requires militancy as a daily practice to again, quote from an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta, quote, militant anarchism as a daily practice understanding your adversary not just as this thing that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of action and then you both go home and like call it, but that they are constantly pursuing you, That you are being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade and maneuver constantly.

That security culture is a persistent thing throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep having to be a part of it and do so in a very disciplined way.

Unquote.

A lot of the success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a willingness to take an extremely militant approach to pre figurative infrastructure, which added longevity to the combative struggle.

Both were necessitated as symbiotic elements of this same creature.

Throughout the Cop City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not always able to engage in a directly combative fight.

Using militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way they would in a combative engagement helps prepare for what will be necessary when things do turn combative.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine, like it is always trying to acquire new tools and equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while they do this and be like, Okay, Well, at some point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen at the place that I live, and I'll go out there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta.

So I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.

Because if you do nothing for the next four to five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel over and over again, and all the fucked up trauma that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful at all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground, because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time.

Looking back at stop Coopa City won't provide all the answers to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in light of the end result of the movement, but it would be a mistake to overlook the ways stop Copacity made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility and the political situation in Atlanta and beyond.

I think there's ways of looking at degrees of success the movement had while still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, but a small group of activists turned a proposed police training facility into a national political issue.

Its opening was delayed by years at at least thirty million dollars over budget, and the current facility lacks the full mock city design that it initially had, which inspired the cop City namesake.

Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings will be internalized by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in Atlanta and joined in the movement to Stop cop City.

As Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training, and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists, and left wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists.

Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, What we are seeing is the logical conclusion of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed, taken to a nationwide scale.

This is the logical conclusion of that, and there's a reason that they are doing that, and if they are doing that, then we should also do that.

Like there's logical conclusions and escalations of the things that we learned in Atlanta, that it would be silly for us to not try and push those further, including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle.

The immediate terrain for Stop Coopcity was obviously the forest and now the cop City site itself, but there was also the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites, and then all these subcontractors around the country and everything that supplies them.

This same model can apply to, say, the Palestine protests.

There's a network that exists beyond Columbia University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw was shack but what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect, and in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the Copsity project as opposed to the infighting caused by a waffle House boycott.

When reframing what the terrain of battle could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what the reality of stopping these things might look like.

And as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond a physical building, it becomes this love crafty and entity that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving to contemplate what you'd be forced to do to actually realistically confront that.

Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's important to not get trapped in the you know, we're doing an occupation on college campus.

We're just going to keep trying to do an occupation on college campus over and over again, and the CoP's really good at clearing us up.

But now maybe this time.

And I think a part of the struggle here though, for people is when you decentralize like that, the thing that you're doing starts to take on a much different vibe.

It can be everywhere versus this is the college campus where we're doing protest.

I generally think at the end of the day, it starts to feel a little bit too much like terrorismy, it starts to feel too much like an insurgency, and you see the path, you see the Pandora's box start to open up a little bit, and you back off because it's scary and that this thing will kill you.

This thing will try and kill you eventually, if you push it far enough, it will try and kill you, and I might succeed.

And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism combatively as an ideology, it's the reality of engaging with advanced capitalism.

That was the reality of engaging with the police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and in many other places that this isn't a game.

You're not going to get anywhere, just kind of sitting on the same college campus green over and over again, hoping for a different result.

And as we've seen this year with the State Department cracking down on pro Palestine protests, just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you from being black bagged by the FEDS, taken to a black site, and deported to close the episode.

In September twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, though the defendants still remained on the reco indictment.

Almost a full year later, on September ninth, twenty twenty five, the defense successfully argued that the State AG's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute this sixth sixty one defendants under the state's Rico statute due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if the AG's office could prosecute this case.

Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute count one of the reco indictment, the racketeering and conspiracy charges.

Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing the sixty one defendants, just five defendants would be left with Count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have authority to prosecute, and Count three, the arson charge, though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be thrown out on a similar technicality.

The prosecution is appealing this decision, and the defenses argued that the state domestic terrorism law violates a constitution and is far too broad and should be altered or overturned.

Judge Farmer has yet to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon.

Some of the sixty one defendants could face charges individually in Fulton in a Cab County, but that remains to be seen.

The referendum case is still under appeal in federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich is still in pre trial.

Just because the Cop City trial is finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now.

Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very mindful going into the trial phase that that does not mean that they are safe.

There is no statute of limitations on a lot of this stuff.

Like with a lot of radical movements, You're gonna have to hold a lot of that shit forever.

Rely on support structures, rely on your community, be careful about who you talk to.

Unquote.

As Stop Coop City becomes history, there will be an influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement, whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation or who knows how many books are incoming.

There already has been a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as more objective than movement participants and removes autonomy from key subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.

To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one that we actually still have to win at is to not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital, define the ending.

That is a scope of battle that we are still engaged with and still have to win.

We need to close the book on it ourselves.

We need to rubber stamp it ourselves.

No other entity can do that for us.

It would be disastrous if they did.

Unquote this has been it could happen here.

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 it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans.

Yes, this episode recovering the week of November nineteen to November twenty fourth.

Boy, this year's just blown by yeah fast, Yeah yeah.

They sped up the time stream.

You know what else?

Sped up the time stream watching something on Twitter blow up again.

We can't seem to stop talking about this fucking website, and I'm tired of it.

But the big news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propagana app is see Everything Happen That they introduced a new feature to let you know the location of the account and also the number of like name changes, like how many user name change it's had since the account has started.

I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles.

The common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by this Daily Beast headline, top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign trolls.

No shit Now, As is often the case, this isn't entirely accurate.

Not to say that there's not a shitload of foreign trolls who are making money by pretending to be American MAGA influencers.

There definitely are.

We've known about this since well before this Twitter change.

One of the most prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong, is a Malaysian man who has never been to the United States and publishes nothing but maga content.

Now, what's happened here?

You can find going through there's a bunch of threads.

There's threads on Blue Sky, threads on Twitter threads and various articles that are basically all copies of each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts that have been busted, right.

One good example would be the Magination verified account, which has almost four hundred thousand followers.

Started in twenty twenty four, it's had five named changes since October twenty twenty five, and it is based in Eastern Europe non EU.

Yeah, that's mega nation.

Yeah yeah yeah.

A lot of people have taken to mean like it's Russian, right yeah.

Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which displays as Ivanka Trump even though it has nothing to do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio.

The account was started in twenty ten, it has had eleven user changes since August of twenty twenty four, and it is apparently based in Nigeria.

You have to see it you're seeing like aload a shitload of stuff like this, right, and it's being taken unfortunately.

I think this is a mistake and I hate to be like the hey, guys, stop being happy about this, but you should because you're wrong about what's happening here.

Most people are like the Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like this is total armageddon for the online right.

It's looking like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as Americans all along.

Now, let me clarify a couple things.

For one thing, nothing that Elon has done here, Nothing that Twitter has revealed has proven that these account exist in any particular country.

I'm going to explain why a lot of people use something called a VPN, and a VPN masks the location that you're browsing and logging in from, right, and you can use a VPN to look like you're posting from almost any country on the planet.

And there is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at all to deal with this, right to like make sure that they're getting someone's actual location.

A bunch of accounts, a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look, this is saying I'm from a country that I've literally never been to, like, here's my information.

I'm very transparent.

And there have also been organizations, including liberal coded organizations, that have been mistakenly identified as coming from a country that they are not set up.

And for example, the Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has ignited this conspiracy theory on the right, the Planned Parenthood is some European fucking influence op in the United States.

Now, they used a VPN because they're in danger because it's Planned parent right.

No, I mean I ran into a very similar situation because I mostly use Twitter to look at yowie now and when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't let me look at the AWI without putting in my government ID for like age verification, sure of course, and then the state hits garrison, so obviously a non starter.

I'm not I'm not.

I'm not giving X the everything app my government ID to allow me to look at YAWI in Germany, so instead I had to put on the VPN.

So I'm back into States and then I can look at the YAWI.

So it's basically the same situation between me and Planned Parenthood here.

Yes, I've said often that you and planned parenthood basically identical beings.

What's happening here is it is worth talking about.

But it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know the truth that it's been revealed about.

We don't really know anything more than we did before this change came in, right.

Well except Robert, I mean the biggest the biggest news is that the DHS has been a massad operation this last time.

Yes, that's right, Yes.

Like we've always suspected.

Yeah, so the the Department of Homeland Security out I think it was got listed as having been based in Israel.

This is not real.

This isn't even x fucking up.

Somebody just edited a screenshot and there's so many of these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right that this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood and a lot of people didn't catch it, right, and it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world.

Right.

This is a standard story with how Twitter works now.

And this is, by the way, is overall I think beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is that we know less every day about the world.

There's more disinformation about what's happening.

People are less keyed in on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions.

Like that's what the story is here, which is that this app and the way that social media in general works, particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just fogging up reality, and they're doing it in such a way as to make it so that like, no one knows anything about what's going on.

Right, this is like that this is the standard playbook that you've been getting out of like authoritarian regimes from forever.

Right.

What's important is not that just their propaganda be out.

It's that there's not really any any way for there to be a consensus reality, because if there's at consensus reality, then you can't put together a large enough block of people who all believe basically the same things about reality to stop what's going on.

Right, That's what's happening here, And you're wrong if you're looking at this is good.

If you believe that this has blown up the right and that this has done damage to them, they're saying the same things about you and about the left.

Because a shitload of people use VPNs and you can always cherry pick a bunch of and I'm not again, none of that I'm saying is not saying that they're in a shitload Like Elon has specifically incentivized foreign accounts in different countries to make money by getting into the US culture war, right, that is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today.

No denying that.

What I'm saying is that you don't know any more than you did before this came out, because you have no way of knowing if any of these accounts are based where X is saying they're based because of how VPNs work.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, that's what I've got to say.

It's incredibly annoying.

It's incredibly annoying that we have to continue writing about eggs everything.

The half of half of Blue Sky is people just virtue signaling that are not using Twitter, and I'm being mad at Twitter.

You know, it's the same Honestly, this will get me flat.

But it's the same thing about like whether people are angry about substack or fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever.

Like, if you're using social media, you're not doing yourself any favors.

And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people, and we use them anyway because that's the world.

Like we spend dollars anyway, and let me tell you, dollars support some bad things.

We pay taxes, and boy howdy, I don't like where a lot of those taxes go.

Yeah, but don't pretend.

That because you pick the right social media app that you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to a bunch of things that aren't true.

We all do it like that's the problem.

Yes, they're not good for humans, yea broadly.

Uh, do you want to talk about something else it's not good for humans?

Yeah, let's not talk about fucking X the every goddamn thing app anymore.

No, Unfortunately, I have I have something rubbic which does relate to X great everything app.

So let's talk about Axios.

Oh yeah, are you guys familiar with axios.

It's the new satelet for people who hate paragraphs.

People who love cocaine.

Yeah yeah, yeah, for people reading the news while they're having a dump.

That is what axios is for.

They shit out news for you to read where you're having a.

Ship again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of the picture here.

No, it's it's like it's like the ADHD is like ideal news source.

Yeah yeah, yeah, you do a line, you have to go take a ship, you catch up on your news.

Yeah, it's that's what they call productivity.

That's the Robert Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been off.

It's really it's really genius of fucking Axios to hit that demographic exactly because those people also have a lot of money because they're all day traders.

True true, yeah, yeah, smash, I have I have polymarket one to the Califi on the other axios always pulled up.

That's split screening.

You have one of those Apple like flat grass glass touch screen panels.

But it's just for doing coke off of you've just.

Got lines kind off on.

Yeah, it's because the metaglass is a contact right looping axio screen at Yeah, Axios and use that left for people who are taking cocaine.

Has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list as a proposed peace plant in Ukraine.

Yeah great, This is what happens when you do journalism the speed of paranoia.

But this has come at the same time as Trump has proclaimed via truth via the medium of a truth on Truth social that Ukraine was not showing fuscient gratitude for what we had like eleven month of him failing to end the war.

Yeah.

So this twenty eight point plan was first published by Axios, and it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number of Senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at a security conference in Halifax, Halifax, Canada.

Not og Halifax, shout out yeah, Halifax Junior.

The senators pretty much immediately said that the US was not the author of the document.

Rubio quote made it very clear to us that we are recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives, said Senator Mike Grounds.

So what they are saying is that the US didn't write to document and it was delivered to them, one can safely assume by Russia, right Rubio using X the everything app then attempted to deny this.

So what it appears has happened is that this plan was drafted by Russian Special Envoy Dmitriev.

Probably was Steve Witkoff.

Sure that sounds right.

So Wickkoff is Trump's what leads I think he's a special envoy to Russia at this point.

Yeah, I believe he's an onvoid of Russia.

Yeah, Warren Zevonn wrote a song about guys like him.

Yes, yeah, he has.

He has not covered himself in glory in his time doing this.

He's kind of a useful fool.

He's formerly like a real estate guy.

That'll prepare you to deal with Vladimir Putin, having sold houses during the subprime mortgage crisis.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty much what he's doing here, right, Like, he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of the times.

In this case, it seems that it was then strategically leaked to Axios.

Right when Barack Ravid, who authored the Axios article, posted it on X the Everything website, Steve Witcoff responded saying, quote he must have got this from k This is very funny because we have Steve Wikoff right negotiating a peace process which affects millions of people, and he also doesn't know how to use the DM button on X the Everything website.

To be fair, X the Everything, I've just changed their dms and the whole the whole user interface for the DMS is completely different.

Now you have to put in like a pass co and they claim to be encrypted, and it's much uglier to look at.

So in defense in defense of Steve, instead you can instead leaks.

Safe for more secure.

Option might just be to do it all in public, and.

To do it in public.

Yeah, So so Steve of course using a code name there K will never know.

Yeah, because we can possibly tell the careal Dimitria of my my might be using K as a code name, also the first letter of his first name.

So it seems very likely that either Dimitrie of someone else in Russia decided to leak this plan to Barakavid or Dave Lawler, knowing it would be raised at a press conference of belling that Trump, who, according to Wards the Post, seems to have very little detailed knowledges and negotiations, would probably see this as a quote unquote deal that then he could claim for himself.

Right, and it worked.

I want to talk about how Axios's model makes that possible.

Right.

I'm very well aware that Barack Gravid was a member of the eighty two hundred unit in Israel.

If people aren't familiar.

That's like a SIGINT Israeli intelligent unit.

This is widely known.

I've seen this being discussed in sort of relation to this.

The thing is, he doesn't need to be nefarious for this to happen, And I think the most likely option here is that the Axios model is to do insider journalism and then rush to be the first to post it on social media and then get a bazillion clicks for your seventy eight word article.

Right, that is how That is their entire business model.

It is the name of their whole game.

Yeah, that's why they don't use paragraphs.

It's news for people who are like waiting for their coffee at Starbucks or whatever the problem is in this case, states are or nonstate actors, right, can effectively place a leak and they know that Axios will rush it to press, probably in minutes if not ours.

And with the way that the United States executive branches right now, it seems very clear that that they can get it in front of Trump, then they're going to get a reaction one way or another.

So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out.

The United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of this whole process.

And there's a lot of reporting about like I don't want to do kremlinology for the Trump White House particularly, but it shows how these news outlets that lets to sort of don't fact check the Russia price to do everything for social media can effectively be used right in a way that the benefits in this case Russia, but any number of organizations could do the same thing.

Robert mentioned some kind of like Wartimes warn some kind of Wartimes song, and I was wondering, where is the country of Zevon?

You said, there's like a song about Warren Zevon.

Jesus Garrison, Garrison, get out of here about discrimination in the workplace.

Ah, I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie thing in my next series.

And Gary, it's just going to sail straight past Garrison.

You listen to Johnny Cash Garrison, I liked.

I like Johnning Cash.

Okay, James Cash, that's what they call me.

Here's some ads.

And we're.

New Doge News for the first time in who knows how long the news being.

There's no more Doge.

According to a report in Reuter's, Doge has dispended eight months before its scheduled expiration in July of twenty twenty seven.

When asked about the status of DOJE earlier this month, Office of Personal Management director Scott Poor told Reuters quote that doesn't exist, adding that DOGE is no longer a quote unquote centralized entity.

Yeah.

Boro has also said that the DOGE mandated hiring freeze is over and that there's quote no target around reductions unquote, meaning that the DOGE era rule of having to fire a certain number of people in order to be allowed to hire people is no longer in use as well.

And this isn't really surprising.

You have not really heard about many DOGE related stuff in a while.

They haven't been doing anything in a while.

Musk has basically been out of the center loop of things.

But also they did the things that they were needed to do, right.

They like did massacred large portions of government employees.

Yeah, did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several hundred thousand people around the world their lives through cuts in USA.

Yeah Yeah.

And like two former DOAGE employees, including big Balls, now just work on web design for US government websites, and other DOG officials have moved to agencies which they administered cuts to a former DOGE team member, Zachary Terrell is now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Jeremy Lewin, who assisted these slashing of you say it now overseas foreign assistants at the State Department.

Yeah, so those guys got jobs out of this.

All of the people who got fired or got natively impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to be coming out as will was mister big balls here.

Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks who worked with DOGE are now feeling left in the wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot of people who want these folks to be prosecuted for what they did.

Yeah, there's definitely talk about that.

If there's another Democratic administration, we'll see if they would ever have the big balls to do it.

But there was an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read a quote from that Musk had not just been their visionary leader for them, he was their protector, the man who had an elect direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.

A senior Doze figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still brothers in arms and that Musk would continue to protect them.

That led to another protesting and advising guys, seriously, get your own lawyer.

If you needed he lunch, great, but you need to watch your own back.

Watch your backs, guys.

Yeah, these guys would be some of the more like presumably very easy to prosecute and like obvious, Yes, another democratic administration's.

Some really obvious crimes in terms of like protection of information, you know, like some some pretty obvious rule breaking that went on that's not being prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right, it could be prosecuted in the future.

Those like first three four months of the Trump admin What it really was just full steam ahead on the Silicon Valley version of things, right, like the move fast and brave things.

Yeah, that's such a wild time to look back on, not only just in terms of how much damage they did, but the idea that if they were going to continue at that pace for the rest of the term, the government already is fundamentally different in some ways, but like how much worse that would have been?

Yeah, and if Musk's ego is in part, what's sabotaged that from being complete and really kind of doing that more like Jarvin inspired project Hubris Uh kills kills a man once again.

But there is aspects of like the doge idea and this government efficiency thing which aren't fully going away like this, this still is and aspect of the Trump administration there still is like some of those guys at the Auspice of Budget Management and the Heritage twenty twenty five guys who have a lot of this government efficiency quote unquote government efficiency type stuff that they're still working on, including at the Education Department, which last week the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department of Education by shifting some of its duties to other federal agencies, which the admin claims will quote streamline federal education activities on the legally required programs, and reduce administrative burden unquote.

That is going to be done by these six new interagency agreements which have been signed with the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State.

The Education Department riting in an announcement that this will quote break up the federal bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the President's promise to return education to the States.

So by splitting up Education Department duties among four different agencies in three different interagency agreements, this is supposed to cut red tape and lighten central bureaucracy.

You have seven entities now what one entity did before.

The elementary, high school, and post secondary programs will now be administered by the Department of Labor.

That's great.

We'll nowveresee over thirty billion dollars in education grants aimed at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce.

The Department of the Interior will be taking over the education departments to Indian education programs and integrating them into existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior, with quote unquote proper oversight by the Education Department.

College childcare programs, and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen by the Health and Human Services, and the State Department will now oversee all foreign education programs, handle international education grants, and fully administer the full Bright program.

Justification for this State Department takeover of these funds specifically cited five instances of grants that were used to fund academic and medical research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated from the core mission.

Quote.

The announcement from the Education departments reads that the State Department is quote best positioned to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and foreign policy priorities of the United States.

This partnership provides an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data collection measures, consolidate program management, and advance national security interests.

That's not good.

Yeah, that doesn't seem great.

Huh Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning that the US previously has done a lot of funding of education programs around the world, and to see that pretty much, I like, with this current vasion of the State Department, I to disappear or become even more straight up propaganda.

Like it's really worrying.

This kind of builds on that dose stuff that you were talking about, Like this is the end of the State Department doing anything other than the propaganda And I guess warmaking well.

And specifically, like Rubio's focus on education has been to crack down on academics, Palaestatian academics, academics who have who have protested in support of Palestine.

That's specifically what Rubio has has talked about in terms of, you know, universities.

Yeah, so with all the stuff in that statement about you know, national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to see what they could be gesturing towards.

Yeah, as the announcements are currently written, a lot of the programs itself, at least in the trench transitionary period, remain kind of the same.

They're shifting who is like quote unquote administering them, that's the word they use a lot.

But they're not cutting funds to these programs at the moment, and they do talk about them as like legally required programs.

But I mean, Carolyn Levitt and Linda McMahon have said this is just one step towards well fully sending education back to the states.

Woh.

This also was sort like in massive disparities in educational outcomes state by state in the United States, right, Like, we already have that to some extent, but that's only going to be exacerbated by this, right, talking about things happening between the States.

Let's talk about Gregory Buffino, person who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States, but has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the Border Patrol.

He gave an interview to AP recently that I was just reading.

They did confirm, interestingly that like a few weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Baveno and like to work out if he was still chief patrol agent in El Centro.

It appears that he is, but he's also a commander of this operation at large, which is their sort of the thing that has moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte.

Right, this sort of internal enforcement operation.

He calls his team now quote unquote sanctuary busters, and he said that quote there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does build on what I spoke about in our last ed right when we spoke about the idea that the reason they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that CIS map quote unquote sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite the passage of legislation in the state which would have prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do.

I don't want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use of licensed plate readers.

CBPS has had these for like eight or nine years now.

I found the twenty seventeen piece where they wrote out their justification for use them.

Right, their use has grown immensely right in it.

Yeah, and it has grown under both administrations we've I suppose Trump administration from twenty to twenty twenty, by the administration twenty twenty, twenty eighty four.

We spoke actually in an episode that I think it was just Robert and I in that episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom.

People love that episode and they send me great feedback, because, guys, it's important that we all know that the only person standing up against Trump right now is Gavin Newsom.

Everything else is pointless.

But in that episode, we spoke about how many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal immigration authorities, even when California law prohibits them from doing so.

Right.

This is kind of one of those these things they grow.

It's a ratchet.

Right.

Once you give that power to the state, it belongs to all of the state, and you can never take it back.

Automated license to plate readers have been a big thing in this kind of the post only twenty tendency of democratic mayors in big cities to massively increase spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance.

We have automated cameras on our lampposts here in San Diego now right.

California has prosecuted one jurisdiction that I'm aware of, which is Alcoholone.

People will be familiar with alcoholne from Alcoholone.

Mayor Bill Well's attempt to make a country music song about how schools are turning kids trans that is un ironically probably the most national use it that ALCOHOLA has made for a while.

But bundahursued Alcoholone for showing that data.

My guess is that that is because it's alcoholone, right, Because Alcohol is a city where the mayor makes a country music song about how schools are turning children trans like, it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution.

There are many other jurisdictions doing this.

What Border Patrol does with these cameras is it targets quote unquote suspicious activities and then it requests stops.

Sometimes the stops are not made by Border Patrol, but are made by local police.

Right on the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal before you change lanes, having a break light out could be many, many things, right.

The ABC piece quoted Deputy Joel bab of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the Texas traffic code is there thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for.

The idea here is not to explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right, And the fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance is what they call it.

Right.

They're trying to highlight like suspicious patterns of vehicle motion and stop people.

The piece has some they obtained through public records requests from a court case, a WhatsApp group chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers which the officer has shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals, and home addresses of people who they were interested in surveilling.

Right, And it reveals a massive level of surveillance.

If you know, if you if you're thinking of border patrol and you're still under the impression that in America the border can't come to you wherever you are, this is another example of why that's not true.

Right, DHS uses these all over the country to include outside of one hundred mile border enforcement zone.

Right.

This piece seems to believe that the board one hundred miles zone is it's like a legal hard line.

It's not.

It's an interpretation of a quote unquote reasonable distance.

There is no hard line stopping BP for operating further from the border than that.

That is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance from the border is perceived to fall.

Border patrol has these cameras at fixed points, so like that would be border patrol crossings, you know when you enter or enter the enter or leave the country at a port of entry and then at checkpoints.

Right, people will be familiar with checkpoints that live in a border area.

And then they also have these in mo bile and cover capacities, right, And they're using them to find people who might be driving near the border or staying and then leaving at a strange time, and then they're building a profile of those people's movements and using that request stops.

Right.

It's a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying to many people.

And they have access to these like larger integrated camera networks, like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before, including I think yesterday's episode.

As Flock is like an Atlanta based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around the forest where cops that was being constructed.

Now Flock is all over the country, and Border Patrol has access to the Flock system.

Yeah, and it's used for a whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas.

I think four h four Media did a report not too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman getting an abortion, not in Texas.

Right, Yeah, yeah, I can see.

Yeah, Texas law makes it a crime to leave the state in order to get should or something, right, and so that would be their I guess their excuse here.

But like I think we can all see that that's a pretty pretty disgusting use of the svealan state.

But yeah, these things grew massively in the time period between twenty twenty and today, and it was not just in Republican jurisdictions.

Right, There's this like unabated support for state surveillance that we saw all over the United States is now being turned against migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which is not great.

Talking of not great, we have an obligation to pivot to add I'm happy.

I think that's great.

I love I love having a job.

I enjoyed to consume products and services.

That's right, and we're back.

How's everybody doing good?

Yeah?

Banging, pretty good, pretty good.

I just just finished my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social twenty twenty four cup, So I feel great.

That's great.

Yeah, that's good for you.

Garrison really coming together, you know, politics from different sides coming together to enjoy a smoothie.

Not unlike the meeting between Zora mum Donnie and Donald Trump.

Oh my god, Oh.

How long did you plan that for?

Garrison?

Like literally five seconds?

It just it just came out.

We don't do smooth transitions here like that.

Well, you know sometimes do you know who was smooth?

It was Zora moum.

Donnie during that meeting, which like a duck's back, like a like a seal, that kind of smoothness.

Trump seemed pretty pretty enamored.

Mister mum donnie mayor elect mam donnie.

Quote, we have one thing in common.

We want this city of ours to do very well unquote.

So this was on Friday, Trump and Mum Donnie had a private meeting in the White House.

Afterwards a thirty minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was sitting down, And so I was kind of looming over the side of Trump the whole time, never fully smiling, always having a little bit of like a a tiny like both sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile.

He had a very different look in the White House.

But as soon as the press conference started, it was clear that the meeting went very well for Momdannie.

Trump was exuberant about the man.

Yeah, he seemed really excited.

Yeah, it's a little weird, but he seemed really excited.

He stated that they have common ground on getting housing built, on affordability, on food and prices coming down, saying, quote, there's no difference in party, and we're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true unquote.

Everybody's streamftory amazing.

Yeah.

First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting.

I appreciated the meeting with the President, and as he said, It was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight and a half million people who call our city their home, who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America.

We spoke about we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out.

And I appreciated the time with the President.

I appreciated the conversation.

I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for the owners.

It's one of the posture people with the green line.

The green line.

Yeah no, I've seen, yeah, that's going on a couple of times.

They've already they've had that way with it, They've been on it.

Yeah, yeah, Okay, it does seem tense.

The vibes in that room must have been very, very weird.

N Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, no, Zorn's very tense.

Trump's trying to relax, like bad late.

Face that you've posted on gas he is, I can only it's like a shit eating grin on Trump's face.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he does seem genuinely happy, thrilled.

Yeah, it's weird.

He likes to be associated with winners.

This is one of the big things, right A lot of I mean, we'll talk about this more.

That takes okay at this, but but yeah, I think it's very clear why Trump's actually having a good time here.

Zoron's like the most popular politician in the country right now, and Trump likes winners.

And if anything, Zoron has proven to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning, and I think Trump does like that, and that, coupled with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoron was able to navigate around Trump pretty successfully.

When asked about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel very confident he can do a good job.

I think it's going to surprise some conservative people actually unquote.

And you should add what he said about liberal people, because I thought that was his funniest line.

Oh then also liberal people, but they already like him too or something.

Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised, they'll just be half.

Yes, they like him because they already like him.

It was very funny it was very funny.

Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters actually voted for Zorn as well, saying quote unquote, I'm okay with that, and so I mentioned that yes, one in ten Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron and Zorn mentioned the end to forever wars and the cost living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke about as he was campaigning.

Throughout this press conference, and we can assume some degree of the meeting, Zoran was very laser focused on New York specifically, and you've even seen this in interviews that he's given to like NBC and other outlets the past few days, where people are asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a whole and national level, and Zorn repeatedly just goes back to affordability in New York.

This is like the one thing that he's going to keep talking about.

He doesn't want to talk about any anything else really, And this was evident throughout this meeting the way that Zorn would would reiterate every question to being about New York.

But they didn't shy away from talking about the things they disagreed on on, like an ideological sense, ICE being one of them.

Here's one of their exchanges about ICE.

Resident you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City.

You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents in New York City.

On mister Mundonnie, you called ICE a rogue government entity.

I wonder how you reconcile your differences on both of those issues.

I think we're going to.

Work them out.

And I think that if we have known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people, you know, we want to get them out.

And the mayor ones have we discussed as a great length actually maybe more than anything else.

He wants to have a safe New York.

Ultimately, a safe New York is going to be a great New York.

If it's not safe, no matter how well we do with pricing and with anything else, we can talk about anything you want, if you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be a success.

So we're going to work together.

We're going to make sure that if they they're horrible people there, we want to get him out.

I think he wants to get him out, maybe more than I do, So we'll work together.

They talked about I is at one later point in the meeting where you get kind of a peek at what some of this conversation may have been like behind the scenes, about trying to target any ICE enforcement against people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids that round up but just swaths of undocumented people like the Canall Street raid a few weeks ago.

It's still not super clear what they are talking about, but there's not compromise in this point, like Trump's obviously going to try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's own positions on this, and I think Zoron will do the same.

Before we discuss I don't want to play this the second bit of their discussion because you get more of Zoron's angle.

We discussed ICE and New York City, and I spoke about how the laws that we have in New York City allow for New York City government to speak to the federal administration for about one hundred and seventy serious crimes.

The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the Five Boroughs, and most recently we're talking about a mother and her two children.

How this has very little to do with what that is.

We discuss crime more than ice per se.

We discuss crime, and he doesn't want to see crime, and I don't want to see crime, and I have very little doubt that we're not going to get along on that issue.

He wants to and he said some things that were very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction, and he wants to see houses go up.

He wants to see a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, etc.

And you know, we actually people would be shocked, but I want to see the same thing.

See that.

Yeah, that worries me a little bit.

What about that worries you?

I can tell what Trump's trying to do, which is that he really would like to get Mom Donnie on his side.

And interestingly for Trump, I think he is willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally get Mom Donnie to agree that ice has a use.

Yeah, right, Like that's what he's clearly trying to do, and he's clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that.

And I think that within the context of this meeting, because of how the questions were being asked.

I don't think Zorn got enough of a chance to fully address that question.

So I'll leave it open to see how that is, like how he deals with that in the future.

But I don't think he got enough of an opportunity to push back enough on some of the things Trump was claiming here.

That does concern me a little bit, Like I think it's more a factor of how an oval office press conference is structured.

But I do think that it's like I can see what Trump's trying to do well.

I think what mom Donnie is trying to navigate for is if he can put an end to roving ice rates that just like that just round up people at whether they're at restaurants or from depots, and if there's people who are who have been incarcerated, who are incarcerated, and if removal operations are specifically against except like what one hundred and seventy like serious crimes, and if that is a sort of compromise, I guess I don't know.

He's not an office.

Yes, it's it's unclear the way that this would this would be enacted.

Yeah, but if it's an harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from happening or limiting the amount that ICE is able to operate as as basically a rodenty within the city.

And I don't think we know enough to like actually see what that will look like yet, because he's not taking office for another what like forty five days.

Yeah, yeah, what he's talking about.

When Trump goes about crime, crime is what they have always talked about, right, right, when they talk about the ICE enforcement, the crimes that they are speaking about, very right, they will always give the exact ample of the person who's been convicted of child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence.

Right, But then they will also go ahead and say the crossing between ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime, and then they will use that as a justification for taking anyone right and specifically people who have entered within the last two years, many of whom were shipped to New York from other states, and saying, well, these people entered between ports of entry, which they did after the end of Title forty two, right when we return to processing people under Title eight, and they will place him in actibility to remove all proceedings like that.

That is what they have been doing for a while.

When he talks about the sanctuary policies.

New York right now doesn't honor detainer requests.

Right in theory, sanctuary laws prevent and Y see, from what I understand, from honoring detainer requests, which would be an extra forty eight hour detainer.

We haven't, like, as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough to see you see what he's talking about there, But like, I don't know if he's talking about a change to those sanctuary policies or not.

But yeah, that would be disappointing if you did.

I mean, I don't see there's any indication that he's talking about a change to sanctuary policies.

Well, when he's talking about we can cull them on one hundred and seventy serious crimes, right, what does he mean?

Yeah, And I think this gets back to the fact that a press conference in the Oval Office is not going to give you a chance to adequately address an issue like this, and I see Trump trying to paper over it and move past as quickly as possible.

Yeah, And I understand why you'd show up for this meeting, and I think it was probably, on the balance, the right thing to do.

But like I am interested to see what he does next, because I think Trump is going to continue trying to push for accommodations.

And it is kind of it is wild and unique to see that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff, but he's willing to move on some stuff because he thinks he can get Mom Donnie to soften some of his stances.

I mean stances on what I mean.

I mean, I don't on ice.

I mean, that's what he's trying to do here.

He's trying to build a case for that.

I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to which we're using.

The saying that this is a rogue government agency to saying that this is a government agent.

That's what Trump is trying to push for.

Yeah, I'm not saying Mom Donnie agreed with that.

I think that the nature of this meeting did not give him enough time to push back on that.

Sure, sure you have Mum Donnie pointing there towards like an instance of like you know, a mother and like a child getting affected by this, and like and using it as an example of like what they are trying to prevent and like focusing on like the stopping ice rates from happening, as as like the thing that Mam Donnie is pushing for there and Mam Donnie as a New York City mayor cannot abolish the entity of Ice, and so like the degree in which we're framed that a is like Mom Donny's like softening, I think still.

I mean, yeah, like, as you've said, there's not enough here to make a full determination.

Yeah.

I just think that's that's what Trump wants to get out of this.

I think Trump just wants to be associated with this guy who is currently, as Garrison said, very popular.

And it is really wild to see him be so deferential to somebody.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean including in this this this question about Trump being a fascist, which he handled in a very uh, very fascinating way that this is nuts.

Yeah, are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?

I've spoken about.

That's okay, Okay, it's easier.

It's easier than explaining.

At Zorn did say yes during that exchange he did that he did not he in fact did.

Yeah, he absolutely did.

It's one of the most remarkable moments in American political history.

Yeah.

If I had any stretch of the imagination.

As Trump pats on the side.

And I mean it's it's wild for Trump.

This word doesn't mean anything right for Trump, like him saying it's easier than explaining.

That's just indicating to zort On that you don't have to do this like little like political game for this reporter and be like, you know, we have we have just we've disagreed on policies, which blah blah blah.

Like Trump's like, no, you don't have to do that, it's easy and explaining just say it yeah, yeah, which is a sort of like a point like against like the media.

That's from Trump's point of view.

It's like you you don't have to do you don't have to do like the little the little dance for like this like New York Post reporter or whatever.

Just say that I'm a fascist.

It's fine.

Yeah.

And because politics is for him a sort of behind closed doors boys club and they yes, they both have to go out and then deal with the media.

But like you can sort of see that in this sort of highly viviality that Trump goes for there.

I'm not saying that Ma'm Damie is less necessarily in his boys club.

I'm just saying that that is how Trump perceives politics.

Yeah, I mean he made other references like when when Trump was asked if he considers or on a g hottist, like someone else in the Republican Party called him, and Trump's like, no, I mean, the man sitting in front of me is not a too hottest People have to say certain things during camp pains, but the man I met was today, it's a very rational man.

And like little lines like that, like people, Yeah, when you're a campaign, you have to say things that I think that he's getting at a similar point there, But there was multip points for this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law versus the Constitution, or why Zoron flew to DC instead of taking a greener train.

Yeah, silly, silly stuff.

And Trump was like Trump like dismissed these questions if like for Zar essentially, I mean like all stand up for you.

Yeah, it's it's something else.

There are more salient criticisms that there were reasonable criticisms you can make of some stuff he's done.

Those are them.

Yeah, it's just gotcha media stuff right, like which which it's interesting how well Trump is able to call sort of their bullshit.

Yeah, always fascinating.

One of the more hilarious attempts at I gotcha question is from Jack Pasovic, who was in the room, who asked this.

God, he must have been having an absolute melt down.

Yeah, he can't be happy about this, Okay.

I want to know.

One of the policies as well that Mayor, like Mandomie, talked to a number of times about on the campaign, was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what he called minority communities to white based communities and putting more taxes on white people.

I also noticed that in your acceptance speech you didn't mention didn't mention anything.

About America or Christians or white people.

In general, and so I didn't know if that was one of the policies that you guys had spoken about.

Incredible, Yeah, And Trump's like smiling like a proud of father this whole time.

As weird question, it's such an odds like schizophrenic moment.

Yeah, it's it's weird.

How much more he seems to like Zoran than like his supporters.

Oh yeah, I mean a lot of his supports the losers, and Zorn's a winner, I mean from his cabinet members.

Yeah, because they're losers, like like Pete hagg saith Elon Musk, they're losing.

Yeah, they're all weeds, I mean JD.

Van's right.

Yeah, Zorn's has proved himself to be like an incredibly capable figure.

There's a little moment as Jack's first asking the question where Trump indicates to Zora, like, Okay, you you handle this guy, you could you can have fun with this.

Yeah, and it's it's it's very odd and not odd and it's unexplainable.

I understand what's happening here.

Actually I think this is actually very easy to understand, but it's just still it feels odd.

Yeah, yeah, and just give him the adversarial politics was so used to.

Like there's a lot of moments like this, like when when Trump's asked if he's gonna cut off federal funding to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's going to happen.

I think we're gonna help.

And this is like an indication of like what Zora was trying to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting, specifically around raids on National Guard deployment.

And on, like cutting off federal funds to the city.

One of the methods I think that Zoron used to help get Trump on his side is appeal to like the real estate brain that Trump has with mom Donnie's like left wing yimby style of policies, talking about rent coming down by building housing.

And how much that surprised Trump because Trump has this conception of people, like of people usually on these like left wing positions are very very nimby in a lot of ways, and Trump was like surprised by this.

I guess he hasn't really encountered like a left wing yimby before, and this like this like caught him off guard.

Yeah, there's a good point here where Trump expresses this.

Now we may disagree how we get there.

The rent coming down, I think one of the things that really gleaned very very much today.

He'd like to see him come down, ideally by building a lot of additional housing here.

That's the ultimate way.

He agrees with that, and so do I.

But if I read the newspapers in the stories, I don't hear I don't hear that, but I hear I heard him say it today, and I think that's a very positive step.

No, I don't expect.

I expect to be helping him, not hurting him.

A big help because I want New York City to be great.

Look, I love New York City.

It's where I come from.

I spent a lot of years there.

Now I'm right here, am Ray okay.

And later Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living in New York under Mam Donnie and compared Mam Donnie's popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how supporters of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa, and through Trump talking about this, you can start to kind of peak behind the current of like how Zorn was framing his version of populism, which was able to get Trump to be like friendly towards like the economic affordability sides of his policy proposals.

In talking about like the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump and twenty sixteen and the crossover support between Trump twenty four and Ma'm donnie in twenty twenty five.

At one point, Mom Donnie did also address the genocide in Gaza.

As mister Mumdney, you've accused the US government of committing genocide and Gaza white.

President Trump was working on peace.

Why that I've spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide and I've spoken about our government funding it.

And I shared with the President in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their ability to afford basic dignity.

And what we see right now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more than one hundred thousand school children being homeless in our city, and there's a desperate need not only for the following of human rights, but also the following through on the promises we've made New Yorkers.

And I appreciated the meeting we had and the work that we can do.

Agree that President Trump didn't do a piece and work hard to make the peace because we were hard to do with the peace in the Midate East and everywhere.

What do you agree with that?

I appreciate all efforts towards peace.

And I shared with President Trump that when I spoke to Trump voters on Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist, that spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that pharmacy not too far from Jamaine states that people were tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars.

And I also believe that we have to follow through on the international human rights and I know that still today those are being violated and that continues to be work that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of.

Man, that's I I that's so complicated, so conflicting.

That's a lot going on.

On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record said in the White House that the US is enabling Israel and continuing a genocide.

I'm glad that that happened.

Yeah.

On the other hand, the fact that it's off roaded so quickly to now let's talk about like what we want to do for New Yorkers, and it is like, yeah, it's not I don't know, it's it's the only way this was going to happen at all.

I suppose it's he's the main It's very no.

I agree, I agree, but it's totally awkward, like it's yeah, it's it's totally a little lot, especially when the topic is genocide, right, Like the vote from genocide to housing affordability and understand that both the serious issues.

It's still a tonal shift that is jarring.

And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the mayor of New York.

He has no ability to influence US policy in terms of selling arms to Israel, and the fact that he brought it up at all is positive.

But boy, is that is that a wild nit or so of talking.

I think the reason why he brought it up is to talk about specifically, like funds that we are sending to Israel should not be sent to Israel now, those funds that should be being used in the United States to do things to help people here.

And that is like why he brought that up as a seg well.

And reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea that we should not be spending this much money on this sending weapons over the world to fund wars overseas.

It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela, how that all moves.

But I think it's valuable to like really slam that home in the White House that like, hey, you ran on getting the US out of these kind of violent entanglements overseas.

Yeah, yeah, I'm glad someone said it.

I guess, yeah, it's just weird.

This is all a very weird meeting.

Yeah, yeah, the whole thing was jarring.

I guess.

There was another point there where he was talking about like like local local New York businesses and Trump's father like went to this pharmacy, and I think stuff like that is the tactics that he used to get Trump to be friendly with him as well as Trump later spoke about how in one of the rooms that they were meeting and there was a portrait of FDR which Trump had personally like picked out of the storage faults to hang, and Zorn asked him about the portrait and asked if you could get a picture with it, and this seemed to please Trump a lot.

Trum.

Trump wasn't able to talk about how he picked up the picture, and then Trump said a few really interesting things.

He's like, I guess or it's a big fan of FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from Zor a classic technique to get like democratic socialist politics across to someone.

Again, there's moments like that stuff with stuff of how we talked about like Bernie some some you know, the you know, regular populist rhetoric, talking about the crossover between you know, voters from between Trump and Mamdannie, just his general love of New York and FDR New Deal.

You can see all these things that were used to like navigate through this meeting to get to get Trump to actually seed ground on a lot of stuff with I think very very minimal concessions, if any, if any real concessions even from zor like at all.

Like I think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically throughout this meeting and moved on like actual like actual like promises to withhold funds to invade the city with National Guard troops.

I think Trump was the one who actually seeded territory in this meeting.

I do not see much evidence of things that m Donnie had could have personal impact on actually like losing losing ground on those things throughout this meeting.

It is almost important to remember that he has a man ARMBI two, has a rhetorical role to play, right, and yes, he is Mayor of New York.

He is also an extremely popular politician at the moment, and like when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza, that that has rhetorical value.

I'm not saying he can go to New York City Council and stop it, but like him saying that it is a genocide at the White House is important, and like it is important that, like when he has this this podium in front of the whole world at the White House, so he used it to talk about the genocide and he did, But like, I don't think we should only think about this in terms of New York.

Like, it is sure important that someone said that, and I hope he keeps using that platform he has right now to say that as someone who like is definitely looked up to nationally in like DSA circles.

I mean, I think, and this this goes into some of the the I guess kind of I mean, some of them are critiques, some of them aren't even really critiques of this meeting.

I think a lot of them are people jumping on the opportunity to to just attacks or on with no real construction critique there.

But then there's this kind of relates to these two different forms of politics that people use on the left, like politics as a form of personal expression, as a form of like posturing as a as a form of like maintaining of moral purity versus politics as an actual practical method of achieving cyst like systematic change, and people engage in these two different modes, and there're thing there's a role for both of these modes of politics.

Actually, I think both of these have have a degree of necessity.

And Zoron has has taken one specific path, and there's the others who are who are very clear in having taken the other path.

And there's there's a bunch of a bunch of a bunch of critiques from this meeting quote unquote critiques, including from a formal Seattle City councilman who is now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashauma sawant quote.

If I were in Mamdani's position, instead of asking Trump to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally of tens of thousands of people in New York City to protest against ice rates, to declare that New York City will not tolerate ice and will fight Trump every inch of the way.

I will lunch mass campaign for free transit and free childcare, and build a militant movement to win unquote.

These are things Zoran's are already participated in.

These are things that have happened.

Just one more, like one more protest that's going to be more effective than actually having Trump seed some ground on the scale of enforcement.

This is part of why I have this like hesitation around discussion of Zoran, because I think he's actually doing kind of strategic moves to actually limit the amount of damage that Trump's able to do in the city.

And he's doing it through like rhetorical maneuvers, and some of that may feel awkward to watch in a like a live press conference, but I think the actual end results of that have a lot more potential than say, you know, a rally of ten thousand people which effectively does nothing.

Yeah.

I mean we've had a bunch of those that that is politics is performance right lately like that.

Yeah, people are very attached to that mode of political engagement in the United States, like that that lie you know, walking around with signs of shouting, demonstration and political intent.

It has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random people of the street, I'll just say that.

And people have been criticizing Zoran just simply for even taking this meeting because it's somehow quote unquote like humanizes Trump in some way, like Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right, Like it's like Zoron's platform by Donald Trump.

He is the president of the United States.

He doesn't he he wins, he has that position, he has bought the legitimacy like this this, I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates Trump's image in a meaningful way.

I think what he's doing is trying to actually make New York a safer and more affordable place to live by doing a kind of complicated political maneuver, which I'm sure it's kind of upsetting to kind of go through, but he's doing it.

And the wave of criticism that it's kind of based on based on that sort of you know, humanizing argument or this stuff on, like why doesn't Zorn just protest instead of actually trying to like cut deals or like not and cut deals because that sounds so like slimy, but like actually like negotiate with the president.

And like this criticism comes on the tail end like a week's worth of very reflexive criticism of Zoran for his retention of New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tish, as well as advocating against the New York City DSA's endorsement of city councilmen and new DSA member she offses primary campaign against Congressman Jokim Jeffries.

Some of these criticisms, I get the jeffersone a little bit more, But some of these criticisms I find to be a little odd, mostly considering the fact that Zoran has been open about his plan to retain Tish for literal months, for literal months, and just this week people acted like it was this massive betrayal in his like ideological purity or his stated promises, which just isn't true.

He's been open about this like since like last summer, and on the on the Jeffrey side of things, I think Zorn's point of view here is at a difficult primary campaign and one that's probably going to be unsuccessful.

Based on the Zoron twenty twenty five general vote map, it shows that that'd be very, very challenging.

But this, this this difficult primary against referees would also inhibit Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda in the city.

The New York Times quoted a leaked portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoran saying, quote, the choice before us is not whether to vote for Chai or Hageeme at the ballot box.

The choice is how to spend the next year.

Do we want to spend it defending caricatures of our movement or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement.

Unquote, Zora has a very specific focus right now on the New York City government and implementing the agenda for New York City and the congressional campaign would, in his view, only put more roadblocks to that at this point in time, versus, you know, keeping a left wing ally in the New York City Council.

I guess I don't see why they can't do both.

Like they will be defending caricatures of their movement for sure the next forever, right until the Internet and and stupid politics the stopping part of a politics which isn't coming anytime soon.

Like, I think it'd be perfectly possible to give that endorsement and still say my job as mayor is to do the shit that I promised to do.

I also endorse this person because I think they're a better person than the Keem Jeffries, who has been very poor.

Okay, I don't I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive.

We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.

What is there to say.

That Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed the acronym?

Oh good, Yeah, Marjorie Tayler Green leaving politics?

Well maybe, well she's leaving the house.

Is at the end, at the end of the year, is leaving the House.

See what she's announced?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is unclear how she will continue her career.

Maybe maybe Zoran will be taking her seat.

Maybe the Trump's new friends.

I mean, I really don't think he's much interest in being in the House of Representatives, especially in Georgia.

Oh would jesus.

He has a much more important role now.

I guess like he's able to do a lot more as executive New York than he ever would be as like a single rep in Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, no more MTG.

Okay, well great.

If you want to contact us, do you can reach out to us at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me.

We reported the news, We reported the news.

Grinder.

I hardly this is it could happen here where today the it is gay flirting and or harassment, and the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

During the twenty twenty four Republican National Convention.

I'm gay also known by my undercover alias Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be one of our on the ground RNZ correspondence.

A few weeks ago.

We provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think tank ghoules, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by popular speakers at the event.

We'll have some more in depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention.

But on top of our regular coverage, I also had a special assignment that I'm more or less assigned to myself.

On this show, we often talk about right wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people, including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment, and physical violence.

As these are two of our most frequently covered topics being at the Republican National Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between conservatism and homosection U.

For years, I've heard rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans flocking to the gay hookup app Grinder to get laid during the RNC.

Whether they be twenty year old Republican twinks from Miami or fifty three year old self hating, closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages, curiosity has often gotten the better of me, and I needed to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grinder.

In case you're unfamiliar, Grinder is technically a dating app that serves the LGBTQ community, but in actuality, it is a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers in their forties to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures of their penis.

Grinder was launched in two thousand and nine and is arguably the largest and most popular gay dating app, especially among men.

Grinder has only been around for two in person RNCs prior to this point, twelve and twenty sixteen.

Since all convention activities moved online during twenty twenty for the pandemic.

So this July, for the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around the country could gather in one city and once their wives fell asleep, log onto Grinder and this episode, I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience.

Before traveling to the city that was about to be invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and success in my investigative endeavor.

I hope you queers liked that terrible pun.

Based on the massive increase in violent anti trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew that I would be dusting off my old boy motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male.

Although my ability to pass as a straight mail is debatable, I can at least easily pass as a not quite straight mail.

My transfeminine fashion taste has been skewed more mask lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue.

I packed up basically all my button up collar shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige London fog trench coat.

Basically, the vibe I was going for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy dressed as a nineteen fifties FBI agent.

I refer to this as Dale Cooper moting.

I was unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like Baron Trump meets Total Swinton in Constantine.

I was kind of Gabriel maxing for most of the convention, and though most attendees were unable to pick up on my dikish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did get she heard by the Secret Service when entering the convention through a security checkpoint.

They're going woke.

So that was my general look for the convention.

I also completely remade my grinder profile for the RNZ for simplicity's sake, I got to emphasize my twinking past and removed the explicitly non binary transgender aspects of my profile, replacing some of my more trans coded photos with pictures of my light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay.

Perhaps next RNC I can experiment with discovering how many of the RNC attendees are chasers.

But for safety's at sake, I went to more stealth, both online and in person at RNC related events.

For my main profile picture, I chose a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted.

I chose the simple yet elegant user name Twink, and for my bio wrote gen z in town for Convention, which I thought was pretty funny and signals to people that yes, I am here for the R and C, but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious.

So this was my bait.

On my way to the airport, I was already dressed for the part, as I says expected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part of the whole RNC experience.

I arrived at the gate and the vibe shift was immediate.

Older white men with even whiter hair wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range.

They all kind of looked like my Republican grandfather.

The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were all cause playing their favorite female Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair.

There were a handful of delegates as well as Republican super fans wearing Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention, the way a NERD would be excited to go to San Diego Comic con.

Others at the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the Atlanta airport, but I could still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their RNC expectations and in hushed tones, asking others at the gate if they were going to the convention.

And that's what everyone called it, not the Republican Convention, not the GOP convention or the RNC the convention.

As I was bording the plane, an older woman with straw like blonde hair, sitting a few rows in front of me waved me and asked, young man, are you going to the convention.

I gave my best yes, ma'am, took my seat, and then heard her remark to her friend about how happy she was that more young people are attending the convention, and I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the convention and what I was doing there, mainly trying to collect as much information about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans as I can.

And you will hear more about those weird Grinder RNC Republicans after the break.

This episode is brought to you in part by the top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening to as I was coming down from adderall while writing the second half of this episode, as well as these products and sponsors.

Okay, back to the Grind.

Most convention activities took place in the Piser Forum, which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce.

This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my Grinder cruising so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area.

Every time I walked into the Pfiser Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up Grinder and refresh my feed to see what profiles were in my proximity.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grinder, one of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away.

Every night, when I got back to the hotel after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check a Grinder to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by the airport.

The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grinder, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels roughly fifteen hundred feet away from my bed.

The Grinder proximity detector was quite useful to me and locating profiles active around the footprint of the R and C, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the rn C from out of state.

Because Milwaukee is about six hundred and fifty miles away from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the R and C from out of state.

Even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange.

I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons for why the distance markers might not line up exactly.

And I think I have it narrowed down pretty well.

Okay, you've been very patient, and now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my grinder in box.

And I gotta say I think I started off pretty strong.

While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started, I got one of the very first messages I received from a twenty one year old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and magenta tie, already horrendous vibes.

He asked me if I was quote unquote with the GOP and I said I was attending with friends, and then I got no further response.

I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then after the convention was over, he moved like three hundred miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for the RNC.

I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative of quote but not a hardcore Republican unquote, and he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would quote meet my future husband unquote.

The first chaser I encountered with the bio looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass, saw through my CIS gender disguise and messaged me cock question mark.

I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be Tea for Tea, who asked me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an anime convention in Green Bay.

A nice local messaged me, quote hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face, which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking for some other gay Republican.

Another local with the name Older for Young sent me the message quote boomer, who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.

I asked him if the quote unquot talk politics pickup line works very often, and he replied quote less often than I would hope for on here zero unquote.

He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app, telling me that they have infiltrated grinder.

He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at, So that was the end of that conversation.

A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely excited that the RNC was in town.

They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend.

One such fellow, who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd unquote, would have liked to attend, but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed quote extra staffing just in case unquote.

Now, the worst profile picture I found was an older guy wearing a baseball camp and one of those half faced skull masks like Adam Offfen used to wear.

He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the RNC but to visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot.

This guy's politics were impenetrable.

Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent, very baffling fella.

A younger guy messaged me asking you're a Republican and I said not really, putting it lightly, and he never got back to me.

I did find a thirty one year old chaser named Greg who I do believe was attending the convention and his bio read quote anon come drain Me trans CD as crossdresser sissy fem to the front of the line.

I asked, you like trans and he responded yes.

We had no further conversation.

I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grinder at the Heritage Foundation party.

And lastly, really the only guy I saw who openly claims to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a thirty two year old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the user name suck me Off one Word.

He described the convention as exhausting but awesome and told me he was quote proud to support President Trump unquote and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing.

A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump, talked about Corey Competour, the man who was killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination.

So after mister sucked me off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was, I just replied to him, poor Corey, and he messaged me back Corey Who, and that he told me what exact hotel he was today.

Now, part of the danger of trying to use Grinder directly in the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non zero chance that some passer by or persons sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dickpic that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages.

And this is simply a non negotiable part of the Grinder experience.

Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some balding, forty three year old married man will appear in your inbox.

Ordinarily, I would check the profile first to see who might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a DM.

Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this.

For one, this was research, so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible.

But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my dms, this was impossible without opening up to each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chat log.

Due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grinder at the RNC, about halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently.

But the main glitch I had to deal with, which has since been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile from the DM's page.

I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited Dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.

So there I was watching Ted Cruise's speech, sitting underneath about fifty Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see who was local and who was here for the rn C, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the rn C around mis day.

On Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over one thousand users reported a Grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the website down Detector.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the final day of the r and C that quote reports that the Grinder app crashing increased by more than ninety percent in the past forty eight hours across the country unquote.

The down detector heat map showed Grinder outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hot spot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in activity, and you will hear more about that activity after this ad break.

This episode of It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part by the Challenger's soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I was listening to as I wrote most of this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta.

This episode is also brought to you by these products and services.

We once again returned to the grind.

We got to keep on grinding.

We're almost done, but we got to grind a little more.

Just one more grind bro I swear about addictors.

One more grind broachs one more grind.

During the influx of reports about the Grinder app breaking during the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive increase in activity.

Quote breaking, an executive of the gay dating app Grinder says, the Republican National Convention is quote basically Grinder's super Bowl unquote.

This quote from a Grinder executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the Internet about five different articles and even disgraced former New York Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon content warning, gay Republican.

So executives are calling the RNC convention the Grinder super Bowl.

Folks.

Look, I'm openly gay, no qualms about it.

Proud conservative Republican.

I met my husband on Grinder and we've been together for six years going on seven, married.

For almost three.

Let me tell you something.

Just come out the closet, boys, come on, it's fun.

You can be.

Gay and conservative, but look, Grinder's already out of you anyway.

Based on the hits and guess who's in town.

It's all you conservatives.

Bye.

Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to.

I also received messages containing variations of hay sexy from at least five accounts that have since been deactivated.

And this does line up with a report from a Milwaukee area Grinder user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users.

Quote.

On any given day, you'll go on there and see a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source, who did not want to be named.

The Grinder user said, on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe ten users with no public profile.

But Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at fifty blank profile photos unquote.

Now, we don't have any official data yet on Grinder usage near the twenty twenty four rn C, only the down detector reports which our users submitted.

But we do at least have data from the last in person convention in Cleveland, Ohio, all the way back in twenty sixteen.

A Vice article by Candice Brian spoke with sources from Grinder and wrote that quote, Grinder usage near the Quick and Loans Arena showed a sixty six percent increase during the r and C.

Other active destinations including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach, and Trump Tower showed no comparable increase in active users.

Unquote.

Many of the local twinks and trains certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app.

People would often first ask me if I was a Republican or why I was in town before trying to hit on me.

One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something, but I had to check.

As the week progressed, more locals told me that they had found a handful of out and proud patriots online, but really not many.

In fact, multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who were online for the same reason I was, to see if there was an influx of closet Republicans.

Someone told me, quote, for the record, it's like three times busier here than normal.

Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up to and the chasers have come out of the woodwork unquote.

Far from being the app's super Bowl.

According to WECE, the twenty sixteen rnc's sixty six percent bump in activity is less than one half of the increase in Grinder activity that was seen at the last in person DNC, an event which was also a whole day shorter i'llreage from wece.

Quote.

However, from Sunday to Monday, the week of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher one hundred and forty eight percent increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia unquote.

It's also worth noting that of that sixty six percent increase in activity around the twenty sixteen r and C, only about forty percent of those users were visiting Cleveland, most were locals.

Meanwhile, sixty percent of Grinder users active near the DNC in Philadelphia were visiting the city.

Oh, and that quote from a Grinder executive calling the RNC Grinder's super Bowl, as well as George Sandos's other claim about Grinder purposely outing gay conservatives.

Both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.

It is totally made up, pure fiction.

It's fiction.

It's fiction.

We made it up.

We made this one up.

It's a made up tail, it's a total fabrication.

It never happened.

It's an urban legend that never happened.

So no, the RNC is not grinders a super Bowl.

I got messages from over one hundred and fifty different people.

Over ninety percent of the messages I received and profiles visible online even while inside the Pfizer forum were from locals completely unaffiliated with the RNC, and any boost activity that can be attributed to people visiting for the RNC is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy festival of out of town gay Democrats who travel to the DNC, And like, if you think about this logically, this shouldn't at all be surprising.

The Republican Party has spent the past two years screaming about how all drag queens are child groomers, and though this was the first year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to and attacks against trans people and really any display of a visible queerness like come on this is the Republican party.

There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are secretly gay.

And while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed homosexual preacher, this is not the norm and all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia.

It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism, and now for people like Elon Musk and more, young Republicans of fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people white people aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex.

Never mind the fact that queer and trans people are often times can and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit.

So No Grinder wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to be attending the RNC, and while there may not be as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored.

Basically figured out based on my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of local Grinder users and journalists I talked with who were online during the twenty twenty four rn C, and considering the twenty sixteen Grinder data, I can report that merely a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNZ attendees.

The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly used Grinder or were specifically curious about who might be online during the RNC.

I observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity.

Not everyone who attends the RNC are guests or delegates.

A lot of people work at the convention center or work tech, and a sizeable chunk of people are like myself researchers, posters, or journalists who attend conventions like this for work.

And lastly, the final group that fills out the bump in Grinder activity, one that for some reason didn't really expect to see upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense.

Are cops so many cops?

There were so many cops online at the RNC, just like delegates or reporters.

They are coming to town from all around the country.

There was cops or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana, and many more states, as well as US Capitol Police, Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI.

They were all in town as a part of the security detail.

A few of the guys that messaged me I can absolutely confirm are one hundred percent police or some kind of military police.

A thirty three year old cop or military guy quote looking for sexy bottoms with the tag's jock, military discreete and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in the gym.

Said it in his bio that he was quote really into slim, skinny toned, and muscular people.

He messaged me saying, Hey, now, I got a lot of haze in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grinder.

You will probably mostly get hay as a message as well as just like, you know, a picture of someone's penis, but between a penis and hey, those are probably the two most received messages you will get on Grinder.

There was another guy with a username DL military who said in his bio he was working security for the week and that Grinder messages had completely broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat.

The DL in DL military stands for down low.

It's a tag that only the worst people on Grinder will use, mainly like self hating gay men who are closeted, and it's download because they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay.

Just absolutely the worst.

We do not fuck with DL, both literally and figuratively.

There were a bunch of other non locals who I would describe as cop types.

I can't one hundred percent say for sure that they are cops, but they have like the look, you know, like the look, the cop look.

I don't know.

They could also be like a bodyguard or work in private security.

But one of these cop looking guys message to me asking if I was a trans guy, which I always love to see.

It means I'm doing gender very well.

And a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages.

So yeah, a lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the fact that basically half the cops in the country were at the Republican National Convention in some form or another.

A few final notes, Now, this really make up a sizable chunk of the Grinder population.

But after saying I was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grinder, just completely unprompted, told me that they were attending the protests against the RNC.

Please do not do this.

That's a horrible idea for multiple reasons.

You gotta stop talking about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grinder, especially at the RNC.

Horrible idea.

Do not do this.

And despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile, a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter or the pod, but they were very nice.

They gave me some recommendations for what gay bars to check out after conventioned hours, and one person told me this interesting anecdote that I'd like to share.

Quote, I don't think Trump is going to win.

I can missed for Hillary in twenty sixteen, and at least here it doesn't feel the same unquote.

I thought that was a little interesting tibit that I received at probably round three am on Grinder, So there you go.

Well, anyway, that was my RNC grinder experience.

I'm sorry to report it is not the hotbed of closeted Republicans that we mean it to be.

It's mostly local gaze, a few reporters and a few more cops.

I do not think I'll be reporting on the DNC grinder, but I am curious to see if there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to the RNC Grinder, So I guess I will maybe posted by that on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie if you want updates on that.

Anyway, stay safe out there.

Be careful if you're ever on grinder.

Please especially don't tell someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests.

But in general, be careful on these types of dating apps and I will see you on the other side.

Message from Quickie Grinder said you were super close yesterday, wasn't stocking?

I promise?

Message from birthday present emoji I almost thought you were Josh Thomas.

Message from anonymous wait are you pro or anti Republican?

I'm not gonna lie.

I mainly asked your politics because I thought you were cute, but I didn't want to hit on a Trumper message from older for young aren't all the delegates propositioning you?

You're cute?

Message from anonymous?

Why establish a detlitarian state if I can't breed It's a dictator message from suck me off?

I'm down for anything.

Lol.

Are you supporting Trump?

Ha?

Ha?

Cool media.

Welcome to you can Happen Hear a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world to everyone to think that they're gamers.

It is it is your host me along with me as Garrison Davis.

I I've I've played a video game before.

I'm not very powerful, but I I.

Too, have played many several video games.

See I wouldn't.

I wouldn't say several.

I've I've played like a few many.

I have played too many, simply too many video games.

So okay, this is this.

Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing.

Is something going on out there.

It's all really bad, and one of the people who's been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers, the PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of x.

I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in my gamer cave for the past like five months.

I've not left.

I'm just hearing about this now.

Yeah you might.

You might.

You might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.

We will get to that.

See, I don't play those games.

Those games are gay.

I only play Nintendo Mecca games and hell Divers too, like a loser's that's reasonable, that's reasonable.

Those are those are?

Those are fine games.

Oh and Sonic?

Oh god, okay, pushing aside the subject to Sonic.

So okay, I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers.

And I think the place to start here is with the fact.

That gaming is in one hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry.

Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies and music combined.

So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of.

Just dollar value.

Right, something like three billion people play video games.

It's mostly mobile game which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games again, it's it's a lot of mobile games, and it's also mostly people who are women and non white.

And yet, however, Comma, when people think about like the gamer TM, you are not thinking about.

That, yeah, like as a political class.

Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right wing dipshits who are white and suckass.

And this is in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first, like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity.

And obviously this is you know, this is a fascist movement.

Now.

Part of the reason this works, and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people because it's new, no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before, and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their ident He is a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit, or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money, and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.

Yeah.

Yeah, And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people.

And this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on their right.

There are a lot of like sort of political figures.

I don't know, you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming, like like h Bomber guy, I guess an example, like Hassan.

To some extent, there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then by sort of like become political.

But on the other hand, gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space.

Oh god, Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is.

Have I told you the story about Kabob the German No, oh boy?

Okay, So back in the dawn of Time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.

Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people.

No, this is this is the World of Warcraft card game.

Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing.

Yeah, really bad, really bad.

I think I think I peaked at like two K Legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world's digital collectible card video game.

Come on, oh yeah, yeah, but two k legend DNA is like fucking shitter ranks.

It's bad.

I was never like good, good at it.

I was just like, okay, kind of but you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up, and something I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers and these are like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kobob the German and it turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because he was a fucking German neo Nazi.

Well many such cases, yeah.

For people who like are not aware of of like mid twenty tens German fascism.

Remove Kabob is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of.

Turkish people in Germany.

So great stuff, great stuff, this is just was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the twenty tens.

Now, this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.

And so the two examples we're gonna look at are Sam bank and Freed's and this is this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum.

Right, We're gonna look at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon musk are new Overlord.

I guess.

So we're gonna start with Sam Bankon Freed, and you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.

And I guess it is important to note like Sam Bankman Fried like is I guess like he is a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly.

Yeah, he looks the part too.

No offense.

Yeah, yeah, before before he was put in prison for twenty five years for fraud.

Well, probably not anymore.

He's probably gonna get part of God.

Maybe we'll see, we'll see.

I don't know.

Crypto vote, it's the most valuable voting block.

Now all young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put all their money in crypto.

So now they're gonna vote for whoever makes line go up.

I'm gonna become the joker.

So okay, then think about Sam Megan Frieda.

For people who have forgotten who SBF is.

He is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and betted on the stock market and lost it.

And you know, Robert did a behind the bassardes on him.

And one of the things that happens constantly is he's just like always fucking playing video games.

He's playing this really dogshit game called Story Big Bralgy Meetings.

He is a League of Legends addict, which is like as as as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories people who's ever existed.

And one of the things that that SBF did as as a sort of pr thing right, was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big shorts, We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.

Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.

But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him.

But this is something that like ICBF was like, you know, was like projecting right in order for this to be the image of him was him as like the gamer.

And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right, because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays vide games all the time and doesn't give a shit.

So you play video games stream meetings like no one has ever been like this.

I have no idea what you mean.

I actually don't play video games stream meetings because it is too obvious.

But I play I play video games a once a week.

That's that's that's kind of my Oh.

God, this is the one part about Sam bankmon Free that's relatable to me.

I play so many video games.

It is my like antidepression strategy basically, like when I need to not think for a while, there's just MEO playing actually pat the faxtyle too.

One of the games that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.

That I play a lot of.

I've done so much fucking gaming, Like God, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a it's like a mob but like League of Legends but like third person.

And I played so much Smite that they were pro showing my casual games.

When when the Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know that's reasonable.

Like I can't argue with that.

I'll inform the council.

I can't our next folks council meeting, I'll bring it to the table.

But you know, so, so what what What what happens with this sort of thing is that is that Michael Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things.

He's mind must be so unbelievably brilliant.

Yeah, totally, because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time.

And and this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing and and like and like SBF like is a gamer, right, but like why why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around.

It doesn't exist that you would see or something like movies or.

Like respectability in some way, except in like the reversed Sam Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an extent your genius, right, like like like that era of like Silicon Valley guy.

Yeah, that's like he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's he's not like put together, and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker.

So it's like it's kind of like a double edged sword in like that specific way.

Yeah, well, this is all a feedback loop, right, because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play video games.

They're one of the figures people who just like don't game.

Are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on, And it's just really really easily just sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like, you know, you like, you show a gamer like a League of Legends addict, and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book.

Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of a fake thing.

I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person.

It simply does.

You just get mad all the time.

I've known too many League Legisp players of my goddamn life.

Holy shit, terrible game.

Yeah, but arcane though, right, All right, oh god.

Okay, We're gonna take an ad break, and then when I come back, I'm gonna explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael lewis Well.

I look forward to that.

I love hearing about unique incompetence.

So we are back now, Okay, Obviously.

Part of the reason this works too is you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market.

Right.

But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really truly an unbelievably glible dumbass.

And to get an understanding of this, I'm gonna go into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports.

So Lewis has.

Written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're gonna be talking about, which I'll get to in a second.

And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bass Riaging listen to that, But I want to go in on Moneybomb.

Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog athletics team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well, and and like I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, Like whatever.

I'm not gonna argue about baseball statistics.

What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta.

He is he is like one of the main figures in this book.

He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach.

Basically, what baseball team is this?

Oh?

This is the Oakland Athletics.

Are now the last Vegas Athletics or some shit.

I don't know that they moved to Vegas.

I don't know what they're called the athletics now.

No, no, they are originally called the athletic I don't know what they're called now.

They've always been the well except what just calls them the Oakland A's.

They've been the A's forever.

But yeah, they've they've they've also been stolen.

Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.

Oh see, I was thinking of the football team.

Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las Vegas Thetors go there too.

Yes, yes, they stole both of them.

That's what I was thinking.

And I am more of a baseball head than a football head.

But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about football here.

So this guy, right, Paul Padesta's like one of these sort of geniuses she later goes on to be.

It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns.

Now to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are.

My opening savment for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons, going one in thirty one, which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports.

I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go one in thirty one in two clus two seasons of football.

Again, so again, that is a one in fifteen season followed by an owen sixteen season.

The second oh to sixteen season ever unclear how responsible for this he is.

But what he is responsible for is the Shaun Watson trade.

Okay, it's like mea, why the fuck you're talking about this?

Part of this is also like these people are just evil.

Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator.

I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly have accused him of sexual assault.

He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit.

So so that that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson's that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right.

He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season.

And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting, is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for DeShawn Watson, who've been on the Texans, and again, like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds, Nia.

Do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans.

It is a team from Houston, Texas.

That's all you need to know about this.

And they traded this guy.

Hey, at least it's not Austin.

No offense to our Austin listeners.

They fucking traded this guy, right, and popadest to orchestrates this trade that is three is it is the worst trade in the history of football.

It is three first.

Round picks, two thirds, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick.

And they hand this guy, who, again I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right, they hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL.

So okay, So, how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who is now laundering being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural like being a rogue outsider.

Right, how does.

Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due on the field.

So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately.

It is second season, in weeks one through five out of out of seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks.

Since the year two thousand, to start weeks one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.

They traded three first round picks for this guy.

He has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get point three less points than an average team would.

How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?

I only agreed to this because I thought it was video game.

Don't worry.

We're we're we're we're almost We're almost done with the sports part of it.

But there, I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is which is the argument that's that that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for the right.

Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that.

I can I can see that.

Yes, also, I've always wanted to fuck you can played about this on area, and this is this is the best fucky chance I've ever gonna get.

So Jesus fucking because it's like what I talk about like movies or something.

Is this, yes, yes, this is what it feels like.

Is this what I sound like?

Yes it is.

It is absolutely what you sound like.

So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback.

They sign away basically the entire future of this team hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator two hundred and thirty million dollars.

And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius.

And this all comes back to again, like you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on, like by the jock or whatever.

Right, That's that's like that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there's are like oppressed by this.

But like it's just like.

The same masculinity bullshit all the way down, And you can watch, like, just like the worst people in fucking history, this trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using both of these fucking affects.

So I want to read something, you know in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like you knows as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world.

I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called game Boys.

Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement.

Consumer choice is a form of control.

An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one was mastered to live under current economic conditions.

Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches.

Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.

They give white men aggrandizing power inventions fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism.

This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games, despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by CIS men.

So, I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Sambap been freed and also for the construction of right wing gaming movements in general, and for what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is content tested ground right.

As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers right, there are a lot of what you would call to like traditionally sort of left looming demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn, the kinds of like, ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work, they're also a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally.

And like, I mean I know this, right, Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese, chances remen better, he's better at video games, and both the people have been to be fucking talking about in the story, right.

Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path of Exile character was actually quite advanced.

But oh, we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path of Exile character fucking next, you know.

But but I mean it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which is a very very trans genre.

Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games.

Uh yeah, it depends.

It depends a lot on the genre.

But yeah, like competitive fighting game like yeah, Melee, I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black, non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time, incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat someone thirteen to zero in a first to eleven absolute legends, right, But you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force.

And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life.

Right now, these people are in power, and you know who else is in power.

It's a product and services to support this podcast.

All Hail, we are back now.

Obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked of it.

We've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.

And you know the thing about gaming, right is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system.

And like I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dipshit.

Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad.

But you know what the problem with what's happening here right is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence and different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from the gender system that it is the same system.

But these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right, and this is you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and like I would compare it to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence, but like you know, on the other hands, most of us don't become mass shooters.

Most most Yeah, I would say, that's that's true.

Yeah, right, and so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like fuck them, like eat shit, like I'm sorry, you've you've become Nazis, like fuck off.

Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.

But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right, I mean, like yeah, like okay, like Elon Musks weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right, but like also he is the richest man in the world, He's the most powerful man live, He's one of the most powerful people who.

Has ever lived.

And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement that powers all these people.

And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever.

And now it's it's been shifted to this not anymore.

Yeah, now now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women in minorities, right.

And and it's actually the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the top of the system.

Now it's it's been we have we've had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso.

But the thing is, these people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right and like, but but it's an it's this feeling they have of their of them being the ones who are oppressed, that like you know, made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate.

If you're gonna read one vikiosc wral thing, and I'm signing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with.

Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games, industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good, but like as a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music.

But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read a piece called goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it came out.

And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being i mean literally being used as like scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games, and you know, and this expands out to like workers more broadly, they're literally being used to silence anyone who st talks about the problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint twenty seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in ante they didn't warn anyone about because it.

Was a broken, shitty game.

And you know, they're also used for just like anti queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're also like signaling to their base that like I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera, like you should fucking support me for this shit now.

Pivoting a little bit, so when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as at of Sam Bankman freed, because like.

Man, they said, yeah, many such cases.

Yeah, like the last, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam.

And it turns out though I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamers stick thing, like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

They're both fucking doing it now.

And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk.

And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I would say, like he sort of plays video games.

He's a Kenemine user, he's a Twitter power user.

He is the shadow President.

Yeah, theis man of the world, bridges man who's ever lived.

Yeah.

Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like in a he's an elite video game player in like multiple games.

He's obsessed with this.

He's also I believe the term is a meme.

Lord h if I'm reading this right.

Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two characters I didn't put in this script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus.

So like, this is the level of mind that uh, that is one of his favorite names.

In his White House office, he has a he has a Kechius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk.

There's an AI generated image of like pet bite the Frog and like and like Roman, like like Caesar.

At higher I hate everything.

So yeah, this is the guy who does the country now.

Yeah.

Oops.

So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games, and the preface to everything we're going to get to you is that he has actually he's like for a long time been doing a like I'm a gamer thing.

So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're gonna get you in a second.

This is something that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game, and he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense.

It's like over encumbered, Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to I figured out for Like how bad at this game he is?

Is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car.

It's stepping into like the shittiest call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking break on.

Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like the game of Criminals.

And everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived.

This man has no idea what the fuck he's doing.

He is just like like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game, like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit.

And this was like kind of a scandal for him.

It wasn't like a huge one, but like especially like this is one that sort of broke on to the left a lot, and people were giving him shit about it.

So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diabo four.

I'm not gonna talk about Diebow stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not diable player, the diable and Path vax Ale like Fairy much the same kind of game basically, like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.

But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the best Path of Exile two players in the world, and he was doing this on his alt account, which is has to handle.

It's Cybergamer for twenty but the all the e's are threes, So with CYB three r G A M three R four twenty Wait wait.

Wait, wait, say say that again.

It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.

So I think I found something.

I think the four to twenty at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday April twenty damn it.

So okay, he like claims to have one of the like the best characters in hardcore, which is in mode of Path of Exile, where if he died once you get kicked out of it.

So it's very hard to like prove that he actually did this.

He like does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing.

Like it's not just obviously people who play the game.

I hadn't played Path of xel To at this point, right, I had only played the original one like a decade ago, like a little bit of it, And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before, like has no idea what he's fucking doing.

Like it was so unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those valuable currencies in the game, just like walked past it.

Didn't notice it.

It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays video games.

This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing.

And this actually explodes on him, and eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of exel to account and then he claims that he never claims.

That it was his path of xl too account.

And this Jenny Weinley has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene.

So you have videos with like millions of views.

Some guys like Asthmagold, who was like a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry and fucking asthma Goold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck?

And like everyone fucking reacts like this.

It's genuinely wild.

I've never actually seen people like react to this, to like to elon like this and like like again, like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying.

Now.

What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like, there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of Little Pets of Path of Exile on a stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that, And a lot of people he talks to you about the stuff, for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people, right, it's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers, and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation.

Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer.

But the thing about gamers is that, like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very very popular.

That is just like people exposing people who cheated video games, cheated record to video games.

And Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right.

And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished.

Wrap it up, We beat Elon, got him.

It's over.

He's he's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game.

He has lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.

So what's next?

We have what he has?

He has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.

Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?

Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story in my opinion?

Which which are you which?

What are you talking about?

That's the one that that that he he had to publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five.

Oh, that was funny.

I forgot about that because he doesn't like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene just couldn't do it unquote.

Oh, I really forgot about that.

So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity.

God.

Now, some some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know, violence power fans, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GDA five.

That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times strange behavior.

Yeah, that's also like that's also him signaling to like a different like the weird Christian part of the bass.

That's like, oh, violence and video games is bad, which because he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously, and all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.

It is pretty embarrassing.

That doesn't bring me much joy because again he is the most powerful man in the world.

No, but it is mildly amusing.

Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that like the pushback he is getting here is like I think actually kind of is significant.

So the last thing I want to talk about it is is him pretending to have been like a quake pro which the thing that he did, and there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jops was like his thing is like people who fake who like fake things in video games basically, and he is like not a leftist.

He's like like a center right guy basically.

I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is.

But he did a video about about Elon claiming to be a quack player and what he found so is Elon like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of the good players were there, and he he came his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better WiFi than everyone else and so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good WiFi and then he got destroyed, which I just I just think it's funny, right, That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he he he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran some much who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.

But the reason I bring this up is that like at the end of this video, jobstays like goes on this whole thing about how and this is this is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie, and because he is just obviously lying out of his ass, but literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know.

And this is a real shift, right.

I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this, and so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says.

This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about.

What Elon Musk is doing.

And like just the willingness to just be like this guy is a fucking just just a serial liar, like everything says is a lie.

He literally calls him a con like, says that his activity is like a con man.

He says the things that he's saying are like either liars or delusional.

There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him.

There's day that happened literally today where Ubisoft.

You know, ubi Soft is a famously like not a leftist company, right like thea've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff.

So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as like a character in it, and literally the official Assassin's Create accounts replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your Path of Axile two account told you?

And like replied and replied to a thing about Hassan like we we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right This thing that had been like a really really consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him and is sort of being polarized against him by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably transparent it is.

And like obviously, like I don't think like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up or whatever.

But the actual serious point to all of this, other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these people do this and like gamers is like a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily bypping everyone over to your side, right, that.

Doesn't happen that often.

But one of the ways you can do this, and this is this is, you know, to take a really really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution.

They got their opponents to allies to stay home and that was enough enough.

People just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for Currency's government was enough for them to take power.

And I think like the actual, like the actual serious points of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can, they can be stopped.

So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the start of gamer Gate two.

Gamer Gate two is already happening, damn it.

This is gamer Gate three.

This is an open call to begin gamer Gate two point five right now on.

Behalf of me along, becaure you at me a oh no, and then hopefully and I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik revolution after we get enough gamers just to stay home or even better rise up right.

We can we can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or a keyboard.

If you're a nerd about it.

Gamers are the cosacks.

We've got to get them to knock back the regime.

That's actually the Fembry revolution where they stood down.

But you know, same point, same point.

Come on me a geez fuck, I am one of.

The biggest things of Like people need to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar.

He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist guy who was run the provisional government in between the first Okay, we're done, we're done here, We're done here, we're sucking out, we're leaving.

What games are you playing?

What games are I playing?

Pathovaxyle too.

Don't play Rotato it will consume your life.

Okay, play rebo Quest.

Robo Quest is great.

Rob Request dares to ask the question, what if like the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice.

But also you're doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat.

That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.

Then I do Hell Divers too.

Nearly every Monday.

Armored Corps six Course six rules.

Love that game.

Love that game.

Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy, Sevin, and I'm waiting for Mecca Break to come out for like their their official release now that the beta's closed.

Unfortunately, the character selection is very gooner coded.

Many many such cases, so I made.

Sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my on my model.

But the gameplay is fun.

This has been it could happen here.

I good lord, they pay me for this.

I had to.

I had to watch so.

Many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of of of Elon.

Must thank playing video games for this.

Oh hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes.

Every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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