Media.

Welcome back everyone to electile dysfunction.

Electile.

That's a new one.

Yes, yes, yes, the podcast about Why President Bad, also Why World Bad, also Why America Bad.

I'm Robert Evans, Introducer Extraordinaire with Me Today.

Garrison, Davis, Mio, Wong, James Stout.

Eventually special segment from James Stout later in the episode.

Yes, later, he is being held in custody by the FTC.

That's not true.

You cannot say that because that is something that actually could happen over time.

So unfortunately he is not.

That's why I made it be the FTC.

Garrison.

People will believe us.

I don't.

People will believe you can get arrested by the FTC any day now.

We could get arrested for the FTC any day now, thanks to the ads that I've been reading for British petroleum, even though exclusively use American petroleum.

This episode recovering the week of August seven to August thirteen.

Yep, for no, Yes, it's just so we were.

I think it's important to keep up because, yeah, if people refer back to these episodes, it's good to know what week we're talking about.

Yeah, I don't usually remember what day it is?

So yeah, good to do that, good to remember what day it is?

Meya you want to start us off?

Yeah, need I need to issue a correction about Sesame Street.

I was wrong about Sesame C's structure.

Where got a very street message from someone who works on the show about the way I talked about it being stripped for parts.

Sesame Street was never actually like ran by PBS.

It was ran by its own independent nonprofit entity, Sesame Workshop, I believe.

Yeah, yes it is not.

Yeah, all called Sesme Workshop.

And so the episodes that were being streamed on HBO Max and I think they're now they've now moved to like Netflix.

Those episodes all did still air on PBS.

However, Comma they only aired nine months later.

But yeah, I want to be clear about that.

And then Garrison, do you want to talk about PBS kind of not existing anymore.

Well, PBS may still find a way to exist, but specifically the Corporation for her Public Broadcasting, which helps facilitate the you know, the funding and the structure and the operation of things like PBS and your local MPR, after being defunded by the Trump administration, is now going to shut down completely.

So yeah, and that's and that's a lot of the how a lot of the funding for rural networks particularly was able to function.

If your PBS network is like mostly not funded by that or they can find other funding sources, it can survive.

But real bad.

It's pretty disastrous for public media.

Yep.

And like NPR specifically and all of its local affiliates are some of the best like local news journalism across the country, and this is going to be a big hurdle to get over with the loss of like a giant in the not just like the like national media space, but like forournalism and as well as children's educational content.

And it's you know, and it's worth messing to you, like this is one of the last as sort of local media and local radio and local newspapers have been carved out and got out of business and destroyed the adventure capital firms.

NPR was like one of the last local journalism outlets left in a lot of places, especially in rural areas, and that's just getting worse.

So we hate that.

Yeah, this has been the Sesame Street correction.

I deeply apologize to the cast and crew and production staff of Sesame Street.

Yes, sorry, particularly to Grover.

Not sorry to Elmo.

No apologies down, we saw what Almo was tweeting.

I'm on Larry David's side of that beat.

For our first main story this week, Let's Talk DC.

On Monday, Trump declared it was a liberation day for the District of Columbia to quote unquote take our capital back, and officially invoked Section seven four zero of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to place the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and order the Secretary of Defense to mobilize the DC National Guard to quote address the epidemic of crime in our nation's capital.

Along with this announcement, Trump pleased a presidential memorandum reading, in part, quote, the local government of the District of Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in the city.

The mobilization and duration of duty shall remain in effect until I determine that conditions of law and order have been restored in the District of Columbia.

Robert who in the past have you heard talk about federalizing the police?

Oh gosh, I mean just a Coppola.

Guys.

There's this dude, Hitler, who you know, worked with a guy named Hermann Gering and Heinrich Himmler to do that back in the past.

But that was in Germany, you know, a country totally different from the United States, almost three four countries away from US, so not really not really relevant at all to anything happening here.

And we can all rest assured it can't happen here.

Yeah, we're not Germans.

We have a lot of Germans, but we're not Germans.

This is part of Jarvin's writing on how to take over the government, centralizing the police as one of the key steps nationalizing local law enforcement, putting hum under federal control.

And here is another version of enacting such a policy, mainly citing this crime epidemic in DC, though according to DC Metropolitan Police and their own crime figures, violent offenses, which peaked in twenty twenty three, fell to their lowest in twenty twenty four, lowest time in over thirty years, and now in twenty twenty five continue to fall even lower than that.

Though Trump claims that these stats, just like uh, just like the Bureau of Labor stats are all made up.

We're all fake.

We'll get to that.

These aren't These aren't real stats.

And they're they're they're assuming that there's there's been fake, fake statisticians who have been covering up the real, the real crime wave happening across DC and even across the country.

Trump cited three incidents leading to the federalization of DC police won the assassination of two Israeli MC staffers in May, a fatal shooting of a Congressional intern in June, and most recently, an alleged violent car jacking of the DOGE staffer known as Big Balls, and a possible future recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor Or or Freedom one of the Metal Honorary.

Yeah, well, you know, big Balls.

Frankly, it might have some military credentials based on how he survived this latest uh, this this latest violent encounter.

Who's to say, this assault from a platoon of Romanians.

Yeah, quite quite.

Frankly, I feel like we're only about six to eight months out from him getting like commissioned as a lieutenant and then them giving him the actual Medal of Honor, saying there.

I go for his courageous service getting beaten up by two fifteen year olds.

So this latest incident with mister Balls, I think is his official title at DOUGH.

We're now the Social Security Administration.

Not related to Ed Bolls.

Different balls, but the very different guys.

This latest incident with mister Balls seemed to tip Trump over, though this is something that he has lofted for months and months he's been wanting to do this.

On Tuesday night, forty three arrests were made in DC in relation to the federal seizure of police.

Four and fifty officers were part of this operation, half from DC Metro Police, which are now federalized.

So far, only thirty National Guard troops have been deployed, but around eight hundred are on the way.

On Wednesday, Trump discussed extending his control of DC police past the thirty day limit.

Thank you, mister President.

Your federalization of the police has a thirty day limit unless Congress acts to extend it.

Are you talking to Congress about extending it or do you believe thirty days is sufficient?

Well, if it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress, but we expect to be to Congress before Congress very quickly.

And again, we think the Democrats will not do anything to stop.

Crime, but we think the Republicans will do it.

Almost unanimously.

So we're going to need a crime bill that we're going to be putting in and it's going to pertain initially to DC.

It's almost we're going to use.

It as a very positive example, and we're going to be asking for extensions on that, long term extensions, because you can't have thirty days.

Thirty days is that's by the time you do it.

We're going to have this in good shape.

And don't forget in the border.

Everyone said it would take years and you'd have to go back to Congress.

I never went to Congress for anything.

I just said close the border, and he closed the border and that was the end of it.

I didn't go back to Congress.

We're going to do this very quickly, but we're going to want extensions.

I don't want to call a national emergency.

If I have to, I will, but I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously.

Don't like that.

No, it's pretty dictatorial on like a y base level quote.

If it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress.

It's very Palpatine emergency powers coded.

And I'm not sure if if Lucas was pulling on any real world examples for Star Wars the prequels, or if he was just pulling all that shit out of his ass, who knows, it seems pretty fanciful.

Defense Secretary Pete heg Seth told his former co workers on Fox News that it's unknown how long DC will be under this militarized occupation.

He's got the guts to say, I'm to federalize the police that are that don't work.

I'm going to bring in the National Guard, I'm going to bring in federal marshals.

I'm going to bring in the park police.

How almost What.

Is the cost money?

Right?

It cost money?

And the question is are you there for a year?

Are you there for six months?

And when the troops pull out, what happened?

I would call this conditions based.

I would say it's a situation where we're here to support law enforcement.

Uh and the more we can free them up to do their job, the more effective.

They can be, the more we can work.

I mean, this isn't my realm, but the justice system to make sure people who are arrested are actually locked up.

That's why the President's talking about cash list, bear bail, and sanctuary cities.

If you're illegal here in DC, that's going to be a problem.

So all of these things that apply to law and order are are front and center for us.

And I don't know, weeks, months, what will it take.

That's the President's call, but we're going to be there for him to execute as swiftly.

As possible, conditions based.

It's real, Like Warren Rock vibes.

Yeah, a lot of the these days.

Yeah, got a mission accomplished coming out of the Trump administration too, because they've learned that, like there's no consequence in just saying like, yeah, we close the border and we won the borders won You know, it's done.

No one's going to get to their base with a counter opinion that matters.

As bad as things are in DC right now, this is just the start of what they want to do.

Trump seeks to make a quote a quick example of DC, but soon wants to go further and attempt this in other cities, first naming places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and then later New York, Baltimore and Oakland.

We have other cities that are very bad.

New York has a problem, and then you have of course Baltimore and Oakland.

We don't even mentioned that anymore.

There's so they're so far gone, We're not gonna let it happen.

We're not gonna lose our cities over this, and this will go further.

We're starting very strongly with DC and we're going to clean it up really pretty quickly.

As they say.

We're not going to lose our cities over this, that gets into like the core part of their framing this, this idea that homeless people and criminals cough cough black people are making us lose, like lose our cities.

They're so far gone and this is necessary for such reasons, and like you can look at that pretty clearly.

And he's naming like Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, New York like it's it's it's not it's not very masked here.

Yeah.

I talked with DC resident bridget Todd this morning.

We should have an episode with her perspective coming out early next week.

I think Sunday night.

I wrote an episode early this year laying out, you know, some of my predictions for the year, and this along with weird terrorism, we're two of like my big ones, right that that DC in particular, he would be attempting to fill with soldiers and probably invoke the Insurrection Act.

Now, one thing that I have been surprised on is that they really do seem kind of hesitant to go full in on the Insurrection Act.

And obviously I didn't expect LA to get troops deployed in it before DC, but just based on what they were saying, like after the election, kind of as he was preparing to take office, it was very clear that they were looking at DC as a focus, in part because they had, you know, during his last term as well.

Right, this is not entirely unprecedented, but his desire to specifically not just take away any sort of autonomy that the city has and put it under direct federal control.

But to see troops in the streets and federal agents in the streets is not surprising.

It's something that like, it's not even should be I honestly shouldn't even call it a prediction.

It's just something he's been repeatedly saying he's going to do.

So the fact that it's happening now, you know, the only thing that's surprising to me is that it happened in LA first, right, and that they really do seem to have and who knows.

You know, this could change by the time the episode airs, but they do seem to have something of a I don't know if a block is the right way to phrase it, but they don't seem yet willing to go for the Insurrection Act.

That still seems to be a bridge too far for some reason.

I'm not one hundred percent sure why.

I think.

I think they're worried about like massive backlash to it, like they're really unpopular, and.

Right, I mean, they also just don't need to Yeah, that's that's a fair point.

Gar they have this like section seven forty to call on, and if Trump's going to try to get Congress to pass a new crime bill that can allow them to do this kind of stuff without having to use the Insurrection Act.

So I think it's more of like a matter of necessity, Yeah, just maybe just a risk they don't think they need to take.

Yeah, and like who knows what type of weird shit they would try to push into a crime bill, including like exceptions for almost any city to have their police force be federalized.

I think the interesting part of this to me is also so that like it feels like a lot of what their politics is is like the spectacle of making it look like there's power there versus like actually doing the thing, because like you can't actually hold DC with eight hundred National guardsmen, and like, you know, if if you look at what happened in LA, they kind of like declared victory, but then the actual thing they came there to do, which was like do this like unpresented mass deportation with they did some of it, and then they got right out of the city.

And so I think, I don't know.

I think I think there's a kind of apocalyptic framing of this where it's like, Okay, well it's over, they can just do this.

But also it has not been going well for them.

And like was it from DC that the video of the guy of the guy just like throwing a sandwich at the National Guard throwing a subway sandwich?

Yes, yeah, right, Like actual regular people really don't like them.

And I think I think we're just going to see escalating resistance as more than like fucking eighty guys get deployed there.

And I don't know, it's unclear to me whether they can actually just like maintain this or if they're just gonna say, like we did it.

Joe in like thirty days and pull out, right.

That's kind of what some of the rhetoric looks like, is that they're going to try to arrest as many homeless people as they can, put them in jails, lock them up into hospitals, like the executive order that we mentioned a few weeks ago.

Yeah, and like scare teenagers, and that's most of what they want out of this, and they're going to make a big show of it.

And then they'll yeah, declare that the city is now safe, and then they'll use the legitimate crime stats showing crime falling and be like, look, we proved it, so that I think that is probably what it will what it will turn out to be.

But if they try to push forward to a new crime bill like Trump is mentioning, or call it a national emergency to help strengthen his own powers, I think that's indications that this could have some longer lasting results.

Let's go on and ad break and return to talk terrif I suppose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that and we're back.

And obviously the big tariff news this week, as we'll get to, well, one of the pieces of big tariff news is that Trump has ordered another extension of the kind of delay before enacting tariffs against China.

You might say Trump looked at his tariffs against China and decided tariff He no like it.

Lie jazz lighty jazz sorry lot, lie jazz bin lie jazz bline.

Okay, that was min true talk tariffs honestly.

Okay, So this is kind of a light tariff news week.

There isn't that much.

Also, because if you want to hear me talking about tarriffs for like forty five minutes, go listen to the episode on Wednesday.

You just did a tariff episode.

I just really wanted to lead into the tariff thing that way.

Yeah.

No, there is actually a very important piece of tariff news today.

Arizona iced tea is considering raising prices for the first time in over thirty years due to Trump's fifty percent aluminum tariffs.

All right, everyone get off the call right now.

It is time to riot, find it building, burn it down.

No, this is this is not a drill.

Not acceptable.

Arizona iced tea has been the shining beacon resisting inflation for decades.

The proof proof that inflation is fake is on every Arizona iced tea can and if Trump's gonna take it away from us, burn the whole system down.

Yeah, that's it.

I want CEO handing out cans to throw at your at your local government building of choice, to defend the ninety nine cent can.

It's one of the important aspects of American culture.

It's the only thing left of the American dream.

It's the one last piece of the American dream is a ninety nine cent can of Arizona iced tea.

That's all we have left.

Fifty percent aluminium tariffs will not take this away from US aluminium.

Yeah, just just move past it.

Maya, forget it.

It's it's Canadian.

Where are it going on?

Okay?

This is actually a good way to pivot into the just complete mess at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So one of the things that Trump has been really harping on is so the Buera of Laboratistics published a jobs report and it was bad.

And Trump has been absolutely furious about this ever since.

And we will actually come back to I think we will literally come back to the Arizona cans after this, thank God.

But however, good Lord, the people they are trying to put an office right now, I so long ago in the galaxy far far away, I made an argue that Trump regime is built on peer stupidity, that there is no plan at all.

There is only, you know, a raviting mall of the oblivion of reason that obliterates all attempts to comprehend it and leaves only the words, yes, they really are that stupid.

And this argument was about a guy named Stefan Miron who was Trump's share of the Council of Economic Advisors and his plan to like make other countries pay taxes on holding US bonds, a thing that is just unequivocally good for the United States.

And you know, this is a plan.

You can go back and listen to that episode from a few months ago.

This is a plan so monumentally stupid that the only way I can think of describing it was like yelling at the moon to stop the tides.

Anyways, Trump is trying to get that guy appointed to be one of the board members of the Federal Reserve.

And the staggering thing about that isn't just that he's doing this.

It's not like this is not the guy who's in the news right now for being unbelievably stupid and getting apointed to an extremely important ructural agency of the American economy because they are trying to appoint senior economists at the Heritage Foundation EJ and Tony as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after they fired the last head for like releasing the job support.

Right, this guy, Okay, I make fun of economists for being dumb as shit all the time.

He might legitimately be the stupidest economist I have ever seen.

Just on Blue Sky, like the day this was announced, right, I saw someone dunking on him for drawing a chart where he doesn't seem to understand that people retire and that when they retire they're not in the labor force anymore.

Where he was doing this trend line that was based on the assumption that like people wouldn't retire.

There are so many just incredibly basic economics since he doesn't understand.

There's a post that I saw.

This is the first one.

That was the second one that I saw, the first one that I saw, And it's really funny because this is like in the New York Times now, but I just like saw this on Blue Sky.

Was this post by this econs name Joey Paulitano, who said, quote an economists so dumb.

I had to explain to him how the price index works.

Will now lead the BLS kill me good.

So he was doing his thing where he was like posting the price index and being like, prices aren't going up.

But the thing about the import price index is that it calculates price is pre tariffs.

Okay, so of course they wouldn't go up because they're not calculating the tariffs.

And he was posting this as like, no, see, the terrorists don't do inflation.

Ugh, he is he's being chosen for this position because he is just like a rigid ideologue of the Trump administration, right, but he's also he's so fucking stupid that things are happening.

I have never seen with right wing economisy before, where other right wing economists are going like, this guy can't be allowed to take office.

He's going to fuck everything up because he's too dumb.

Like I am watching economists at the Manhattan Institute, which is an organization that was literally founded by Reagan's Director of the CIA, William Casey, right like that the Manhattan Institute is a right wing institute, right, Like again, this is this is this is an organization founded by Ronald fucking Reagan's CIA director.

And I am watching those people go, this guy is too stupid to be put in office.

Please don't put him there.

This is unprecedented.

I've never seen right wing economists break rank on the sort of like affirmative action program they all have for like really really underachieving right wing shithead economists.

It's astonishing and so and the reason he's being brought in and this is also the reason he was like the chief economist of the Herritor's Foundation, is that he has been calling for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and also thinks that again like like Trump does it, they've been like cooking the books to make Democrats look good and Republicans look bad.

And so if he gets appointed and this is also like goes to the Senate, but him being appointed here effectively signals the end of independent economic data from the federal governments, hooray, which is a just catastrophic Like every single part of the government's, every policy organization, every like, every every single element, every corporation, every element of the entire US economic system relies on this data being nonpartisan and accurate, and it's obviously like yeah, all, like all data is political, but like it being like reasonably accurate is like the defining thing about the US economy is that this data is there and functions and this is what everyone based their decisions off of.

And he very much looks like he wants to just end that, and I want to close by noting that're like one of you know, at the very end of the Soviet Union, right one of the things that was taken as like the giant signal that things were going to shit there was that like their leadership by like the like the mid late eighties was deploying satellites specifically so they could use satellite imagery to check the output of their own factories because they're they're their control of the economic statistics had become so like just annihilate right by just like mass falsification, their loss of control over the standards that they're measuring.

Regime was seen.

It's like, this is the regime falling apart, and we are like eight months out from Google doing that shit, right, Like we are not very far out from companies doing a thing you have to do with like remote provinces in China, where the fault were, like there's data falsification of like okay, we're like using satellite data to like measure freight loads and like measure electrical consumption and like figuring out what factories are open at night to figure out how much that's You know that that is something that is very much in our future.

I'm only kind of joking about the satellite shit.

I think we probably will live to see that, assuming this thing goes through, assuming they remember how to launch satellites.

Well it won't.

It won't be them, It'll be it'll be like corporations doing this.

Oh sure, sure, yeah, like you using their own satellite grads.

And I mean I can, I can.

I can see the uh yeah, the Blue Origin satellites launching to keep track on it, to keep track of Amazon's efficiency.

Yeah yeah, oh good lord.

Yeah.

I want to close on like one final brief note, which I've said this before, but I want to say it again.

This is the exact thing that but like one is.

One of the big things that brought down the military katorship in Brazil was that they were lying about inflation data.

You know, the thing about inflation is that you can just see the price of the Arizona can go up.

Just like you can see Huey Dewey and how we expand and our favorite inflation fetish pornography.

They don't give me Hazard pay for this.

They really should Hazard.

I feel like this is a bonus.

Oh, I guess this is also mentioned.

Part of the reason they're trying to put this like absolute clown on the board of the Federal Reserve is that they want to replace the Chairman of the Federal Reserve so that Trump can just directly set interest rates.

That's a looming crisis that is coming.

Trump is threatening to sue the head of the Federal Reserve right now.

Oh yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

He is yep, he sharees, which is a fasc's gonna be amazing precedent.

I am excited.

Oh it's it's astonishing.

I don't know.

It's been very funny because a lot of the kind of internal publications from like the banks about this have been like, ah, if you're a Boostero and Powell, it's not that big of a deal.

Like the banks can like autonomously said interest race technically without the Chairman of the Veederal Reserve and it's like, Okay, I don't think you understand how bad this is going to get.

So we're we're still in cope.

I don't know what we'll report to you back on the show when all of that enormous clusterfug blows up.

Yay, before we go and break again, I'd like to have an update for one of the stories we talked about last week, the Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois and then later to California to brick orm to stop or delay a redistricting vote in Texas.

And now Texas Democrats are set to come back home, possibly as soon as this weekend.

Yes, after govern Greg Abbot ended the special session to redraw the congressional map, which would add five new Republican House seats.

With some Democrats expected to return very soon, nothing stops Abbot from just calling another special session once the Democrats return.

In fact, he has said that that's exactly what he's gonna do.

He's definitely going to do that, yes, and add in new legislation to convince some of them to stay.

So we will see that they can just leave the state again if they want to m hm, unclear, if unclear, if they will.

I mean, other states are threatening retaliatory redistricting, specifically the governors of New York and California.

This is going to be a really annoying mess with different with different states all redrawing their maps just to create some kind of congressional balance.

Of Florida also threatening to do the same.

So we will we will see how this develops over time.

But yeah, Texas Dems may be home sooner than expected.

It's so cool that on the one hand, you have the Republicans creating the image of tyranny and then expanding their actual power, and then you have the Democrats doing the image of resistance and then giving in.

I mean they're not really giving in yet.

Yeah, we'll see, we'll see.

But they are going home because this session is ended.

Yeah.

What still remains to be seen is if they will flee the state a second time, like a week later.

Yeah, which who knows.

I have little faith in that, but we'll see.

Yeah, I'm not sure at this point.

Yeah, but I thought we should include that small update there, and now we should include a secondary ad break.

Okay, we are back.

In other news.

Last week, on Friday, a mass shooting was targeted against the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The thirty year old shooter broken to his father's safe to retreat.

Five firearms were then used in the attack.

The shooting started at a CVS across from the CDC main entrance.

Shooter then fired upon six buildings on the CDC campus, with the total five hundred rounds being fired during the incident, with two hundred shots hitting CDC buildings.

One Decab County police officer was killed.

The shooter later shot and killed himself.

Police were contacted several weeks before the shooting by unknown individuals due to quote recently verbalized thoughts of suicide.

According to the GBI director Chris Hosey, this was about the soon to become shooter.

Police found written documents from the shooter expressing distrust in the COVID nineteen vaccine.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Josey said the shooter quote wanted to make the public aware of his discontent with and distrust of the vaccine, with sources who knew him telling ABC News he blamed the vaccine for making him sick and depressed.

The CDC director sent a letter to its ten thousand employees earlier this week, saying, quote the dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led to deadly consequences unquote.

The Monday after shooting, RFK Junior oh No, who recently defunded mRNA Vaccines, visited the CDC campus to express condolences for the family of the officer killed, as well as to quote offers support to all of the CDC employees who are a part of a shining star health agency around the world.

To quote from an interview he gave with Scripts News, when Kennedy was asked what would be done to stop the spread of vaccine misinformation to prevent future incidents like this shooting, Kennedy said, quote people can ask questions without being penalized, and quote we don't know enough about what the motive was of this individual.

Quote hate that.

That's all pretty pretty disgusting seeing narratives that RFK Junior has promoted for his own profit for years yep being used to justify as shooting targeting the CDC headquarters.

Yeah, and it's you know, it's kind of unclear exactly what because it seems like he was shooting at the buildings.

He fired at least two hundred rounds, roughly two hundred rounds into the buildings, about five hundred rounds fighter total.

But I've seen people say that means he was like shot five hundred He did not that a lot of those rounds are the police.

No, that's the host of them or the police.

You know, two or three hundred rounds would not at all be odd for how many police would fire in response to a guy like this who is just bag dumping, you know, into a building.

It's unclear to me did he see people through the windows and was he trying to hit them or was he just shooting at the buildings to make a statement.

The fact that he did shoot and kill a police officer, presumably with intent, makes it more likely that maybe he he was trying to hit people inside the building.

I don't know how much it's worth splitting hairs here, but I am like, it is kind of unclear to me.

Was his goal more to make a statement or was he hoping to like rack up a body count of CDC employees and this was just as close as he could get.

I don't think we really know, Maybe we probably never will.

It seems he had trouble accessing or getting close to some buildings on the CDC campus.

This was mostly done from the CVS, which he at a certain point, according to police reports, he could not get out of.

He was locked inside the CVS what and tried to exit by shooting like the windows and doors, and was unable to and then killed himself inside.

Huh jeez.

So it is a kind of odd situation.

We don't have a clear idea yet because this just happened a few days ago.

We don't have a clear idea yet of like the exact on the ground situation, just these kind of general facts about which buildings were hit and how many shots were fire and then the anti vaxic opinions and writing found allegedly in his home.

Yeah, so we'll say more will come out about this in time, but I mean the basics are pretty clear, which is that this is the natural extension of decades of anti vaccine rhetoric and specifically the last several years of OURFK relentlessly attacking the CDC.

Now the piece of news this week that I should mention, though frankly, we don't have much to stay on this because it's unclear this will actually turn into anything real or not.

But later this falls, the Supreme Court will consider whether to take a case that could overturn the national ruling on gay marriage.

This specific case that they would be considering has not done very well in all lower federal courts, which is why it's been appealed to this level.

The legal justifications used for the First Amendment have not made much progress in federal appeals courts so far.

If the case does get chosen, it would be primarily for like ideological reasons based on specific new Supreme Court justices.

But it is still unclear if this will get accepted, and I'm thinking not super likely.

I don't think this is something that we need to have tons of panic about at the moment.

So something that I mean, I don't know if panic's the right word, but did actually happen and is very bad?

Is that?

So Trump issued an executive order a while back about like getting rid of collective bargaining rights for a bunch of different kinds of government employees, like nominally under the auspices of national security.

There'd been a whole bunch of court cases kind of winding the way through the courts.

But last week, the VA became the first government agency to actually do it.

They just straight up got rid of the union contracts for three hundred and seventy seven thousand workers.

Like, three hundred and seventy seven thousand workers is an astonishing number of workers to just straight up the union doesn't exist the next day, Yeah right, because they just their contracts aren't being recognized.

This in and of its self is really stunning, and also the lack of response by the union movement, especially considering the number of people involved.

It's just been like strongly worded statements and encouragements for the Democrats to pass a bill through Congress to like recognize collective bargaining rights, which speaks really really ill of the broader labor movement that like again, they just they just took away the unions of almost four hundred thousand people, and Organized Laborer's collective response was just to kind of shrug.

So that's really fucking bleak.

It's probably going to be spreading to more agencies as this plays out.

Yeah, it's really I don't know.

And even the language unions of using it talk about it, they're like, oh, this is union busting for speaking out against anti worker policies, and it's like no, it's union busting because they literally got rid of the unions of three hundred and seventy seven thousand people.

What are we doing here?

I don't know.

I'm gonna have more on this as I get more word from union sources.

There's a staggering lack of information about this, and people are being slow to respond, but I want to mention it here because it's devastating and hideous and yeah, it's real fucking bad.

Before we close this episode, James Stout has a special report on immigration and information about a fundraiser.

James, all right, So, immigration report.

With the change of the month, children across the country are returning to schools.

This means that ICE agents are also returning to enforcement at schools.

Not just ICE agents as we know at the Federal Agents Board, Patrol ATFDA, etc.

Are all taking part in immigration enforcement now they're no longer restrained by the Sensitive Places doctrine, which previously stopped them from doing enforcement at schools and churches and other places where it's generally considered not worth it because doing so obviously provides a massive disincentive for families to take their children to school.

In this instance, in Chula Vista, second largest city in the county San Diego.

I detained a parent a block away from a school, leaving two young children in the car.

Like most schools in the area, to Ula Vista Elementary School District will not allow ice on campus without a warrant unless there's an active emergency.

Just to explain that active emergency thing a bit, I guess, for instance, in Uvalde, because all the local cops were coward and stood outside, it was actually a border patrol team or attack specifically who killed the shooter there, So that would be an example of when immigration agents might enter a campus during an active emergency.

In Los Angeles, a fifteen year old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed, and detained by federal agents at gunpoint.

He was accompanying a relative who was registering at the school, and he was in the car with his grandmother.

The agents, who appeared to be border patrol from videos i've seen, release the boy after intervention by school staff and left live ammunition on the sidewalk.

For some reason, these looked like five five six rounds from the pictures I've seen, I'm guessing it's just all weapons handling procedures.

Here, it appears that this.

Boy was not the person they were looking for, but nonetheless they've obviously horrifically traumatized this young man for no good reason.

In response, LA Unified School District is ramping up safety patrols.

These include volunteers, teachers, and school cops.

Apparently, obviously, school cops cannot directly prevent immigration enforcement officers from doing immigration enforcement, but they can notify people of their presence, and they're trying to have safe zones around school so that people can safely walk to school or safety drop their kids off.

They're also changing their bus programs.

Buses are part of the school district's property right, So, just as ice could not enter a school without a warrant, nor could they enter that bus without a warrant, and it would be within the training of the bus driver to deny them access if they did not have a warrant right.

So the bus would potentially be a much safer way for people to get to school than having their parents drive them.

And sola USD is doing is expanding their bus programs in LA.

I've seen a lot of information on this in the resource guide that was published by the LA Office of Immigration Affairs.

So now is a good time to remind everyone that San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria defunded the San Diego Office of Immigrant Affairs because he refuses to stop giving the cops a fire hose of our money.

This has left migrants in one of America's largest border cities even more vulnerable.

We're also doing a fundraiser this week.

We're going to fund raised for Bouquet again.

I'm going to go see her later this week.

I know she has hearings coming up.

Bouquette, for those who do not remember, is an a Levy Kurdish woman.

Because of her ethnicity and religion, she wasn't safe in Turkey and she came to the USA to ask for refuge.

She's been in San Diego for six months right now, and she is trying to raise money for her asylum case.

She can't work because she doesn't have work permit, and she has cancer, which is obviously something which is very difficult for her to manage alongside the massive stress of immigration enforcement.

Right now, she needs to raise seven thousand dollars to pay her lawyer.

I'm looking at the GoFundMe as I record this and it is at one thousand, nine hundred and forty one dollars.

If you would like to help, you can go to www dot GoFundMe dot com, slash f slash urgent, hyphen help, hyphen four, hyphen bouquette, b uk e t s, hyphen asylum, hyphen case, or you can just go down as a show notes and click the link.

We really appreciate the support you guys have given.

Thank you to James for that.

Well, I guess that's our week.

We reported the news, We reported the news.

It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

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