The ICE Age of Surveillance and Enforcement

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And the polar vortex continues to lock in the shitty feeling that everybody has in America in this present moment where, although actually the way that the people have stood up, the resilience that everybody has shown in Minneapolis, the resilience that those who have said this is not an acceptable manner by which the government can do anything to the people, and the pushback against the idea that those that are protesting against it are somehow against getting murderers off the street. Like all the lies and misrepresentations that the government is trying to force down people's throats have been exploded in the very specific disproving of their narrative by video. And that video is video that's taken by courageous people that have decided to protect their fellow citizens. and you can't be more proud of something than that. But how do we get an understanding of what are the mechanisms of how this is all occurring? That's the thing that I think we're gonna talk about on the show today. It's sort of this nexus between state power and now kind of these overarching technological advances that are being weaponized and fed into state power and how that's being used to hypercharge this entire deportation pursuit. I think we have got two people that are going to discuss some of the real specifics of this through the companies that are being granted these, you know, hundreds of millions of dollar contracts by the government and the police departments that are facing a real uphill battle as, you know, they're seeing these militarized forces and don't want to be mistaken for that because those are, you know, the police forces live in those communities. They're the ones that are actually there trying to do the right thing by their citizens. And these other more alien forces are coming in and, you know, creating the chaos. And we're going to do that with two real experts in this field, Radley Balco and Joseph Cox. so we are are joined today uh by two individuals who who really have this beat covered in in such a terrific way joseph co-founder of 404 media and the host of the 404 media podcast uh which is really influential in terms of looking at uh kind of the tech world and how that intersects uh with what's been happening and radley balco investigative journalist author of the book rise of the Warrior Cop, Militarization of America's Police Forces, the publisher of the Substack newsletter, The Watch. And Radley, first of all, Radley and Joseph, thank you for being here. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Radley, I've been reading your stuff for decades now and your work on kind of, and consistent work on civil liberties. How are you experiencing this moment that you seem to have foreseen many, many years ago about this militarization of police forces and now this border patrol force that, you know, massed and up-armored. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is I'm getting a lot of credit for having predicted this, and I don't actually think I did. It's actually, you know, when I've debated people from law enforcement about police militarization over the years, The debate is always – there's always been some common ground, which is that police, you know, exist to serve the public and, you know, keep the peace and that, you know, it's bad for the military to be doing domestic policing, that that's not something free societies do. And, you know, we disagreed about methods and tactics and accountability and where that tradeoff between civil liberties and public safety is. But there was always that kind of common understanding. And where we are now is you have an administration and its defenders who are just openly stating that these federal law enforcement forces, which are basically paramilitaries, exist not for public safety, but to carry out the will of a single person, of the president. And you have a president who's just openly saying, we need the military marching up and down U.S. streets doing, you know, day-to-day policing. And so, I mean, I think this is why you're seeing so many law enforcement officials also express a lot of alarm at what they're seeing because we are just in a completely new frontier at this point. And speaking to that frontier, Joseph, I think this is sort of where you come in because, you know, as Radley talks about the militarization of these forces and the roaming through at the behest of one man, they're also using the most sophisticated technology that has ever existed to help them geomap where their targets are. Has that been the focus of what you've been doing? yeah absolutely and i've actually covered the proliferation of technology among police forces as well i've done that for a long time where there's technology that can track the location of phones or intercept text messages and calls all of that sort of normal stuff this is different ice is on like and dhs more widely to be fair is on basically a surveillance shopping spree they're getting all sorts of stuff like access through local cops to ai enabled cameras they can track cars um phone location data map interfaces that bring up the location of all the immigrants they may wish to target uh even right up to like phone hacking technology which is very powerful and very very controversial but if you can imagine it um there's a good chance ice has also already imagined it and probably also got a check in the mail to buy that technology well they've got the budget i mean this is something when you talk about the tools that they have they have been given a budget that is larger than the military budgets of every country on earth save the united states and china yeah and they're clearly spending it and to be fair some of this stuff isn't even that expensive. Like you can buy data from a broker that can show the location of all the phones in a certain neighborhood and then track them home. And that's going to be, you know, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's basically pocket change to them at this point. And every day when I just scroll through US government procurement records, that's all I do all day, every day, essentially trying to find interesting or scary stuff. There's always some sort of new purchase in there. Radley, I remember the quaint old days. You remember the quaint days when you'd watch a police show and they would, you know, you didn't read me by rights. And then they'd have to let them go. And like, there's, you know, it was these little things like, but you have to ask politely to come in. You know, we're seeing on the street, I'm seeing guys on the streets of Minnesota after the murder of these two individuals who were there saying to people on the street, didn't you learn your lesson? Like literally just wandering through the town is what's happening here. I want to talk about, let's talk about the arguments that are being made that are, I think, overly simplistic. The first one is, I guess you want rapists and murderers to go free then. So if you complain about the militarization of this, we have two choices in this country. You can either have rapists and murderers go free that are here illegally or you just have to allow a militarized police force to do what has been traditionally civil enforcement. I mean the third option is you could elect them president and appoint them head of HHS, right? Right, right. Referring to the rapists, yes. Yeah, exactly. Well done. But isn't that the point that they give this false impression that I think what most people would say in this country is we would like the police and ICE and everybody else to target people who have committed bad crimes in a process that still honors our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. What we don't want is what seems to be overly aggressive, poorly executed, trawling expeditions where five-year-olds and grandmothers and people of mistaken identity and people in Target parking lots aren't getting the shit kicked out of them in an effort to satisfy Stephen Miller's bloodlust and his quotas. So, I mean, it was always going to be like this, right? When you look at the numbers during the campaign, the sheer number of immigrants that they were claiming that they were going to deport, you were never going to be able to get to that number by arresting the worst of the worst, right? Because to get the worst of the worst, those are the people who are not showing up for court hearings, right? Those are the people who are in hiding. And so it takes investigation. It takes resources. It takes eight to ten-man teams to go out and track these people down and arrest them. And so what you saw is very early on you saw Stephen Miller. There's a sort of infamous reported meeting that he had where he was screaming at people and saying, we need to be raiding Home Depot parking lots. We need to be casting these wide nets in the community. And the other thing that I think is really – the really damning thing is for a long time, ICE prioritized the worst of the worst. Like that was who we directed our resources at and that makes perfect sense. When Trump took office in 2016, one of the first things he did was deprioritize going after the worst of the worst and prioritize going after migrants. So people who were here are seeking asylum, people who didn't have a criminal record. Right. Biden revoked that policy and then Trump, within his first week of office last year, put it back in place. And so they aren't targeting the worst of the worst. They are going out and getting whoever they can, wherever they can. They're going to places where, you know, every stereotypical kind of racist asshole thinks all the illegals are right. Those are the places where they're going. And they're doing it very disingenuously. I mean, the idea that and if you question it, they really do say, oh, so I guess you want rape, as though it is a binary. And Joseph, what has so, I think, stunned the nation besides the thing is the blatant lying. I mean, technology is a two-way street now that we have all this surveillance and video, but now we also see the citizens surveilling and the citizens catching video that absolutely disprove the narratives that are being put out by the government. Yeah, I mean, that clearly applies to both of these shootings, right, where civilians and witnesses have been filming on their own mobile phones and doing their own form of surveillance. And I don't really want to think about what would happen if we didn't have those cameras in everybody's hands. They're clearly a very, very good thing. That said, the flip side, when ICE officers or Customs and Border Protection officials use their own cameras, they have this facial recognition app on there, which even gets stuff wrong. They'll scan somebody's face. And we've reported a case where they pointed the phone at a woman's face they were detaining, and it returned two different names. And initially, when I heard that, I thought, well, at least one of those names has to be wrong. Everybody doesn't have two names. It turned out both were wrong as well. So there's a very strange irony in that civilians and witnesses are using their own cameras to figure out what's actually going on and posting it onto social media, then we can all see it with our own eyes. And then some of the technology, in at least some cases being used by ICE, apparently doesn't even work as advertised anyway. I don't know. I just find that a very, very strange disconnect. Do you think there's something, you know, because as we talk about it, when you think about the methodology of technology and using all these tools to track, it takes people out of the idea that they're human and puts them as almost prey. It feels like by creating these databases, I think one of the issues that really has struck me about this is it would not be possible if you viewed these immigrants or these worst of the worst as individuals. If you view them as individuals and with individual metrics of their cases, and these are people we need to get, it's a very different mindset than when you begin to view it as a horde of data and metrics. Yeah. I'll give you an example. Yeah. There was some really interesting testimony from ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials in Oregon. It came out in December, but I think the raid was in October. And they were talking about going to a neighborhood because it was, quote, target rich. Like, these are the terms that these people are using. They're not saying, oh, because there are a lot of high profile potential criminals there or something like that. Or even just using the word people. They don't use the word people. Never. They used the word targets and target rich. And that testimony was incredibly telling because not only did it describe some of the technology they were using, and we went on to write about that, all the Palantir stuff, but hearing how they describe a particular neighborhood, exactly like you're saying, they're not describing them as people. It's going back to the quotas and all of that, and this list of targets, or not even a list, just find targets. That's the goal. Hey, kids, how's your, what do you call it there? Search history going. Yeah. Listen, you're interested in what you're interested in. What can I tell you? 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You can verify if emails are phishing attempts. I mean, the damn thing does everything. Go to surfshark.com slash Jon Stewart and use code Jon Stewart at checkout. to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. That's surfshark.com slash Jon Stewart and use code Jon Stewart to get four extra months. Is this, Radley, in your experience, you know, as you've watched this, is this an utter change from the way, like, are we talking about something that has nothing to do with policing, that has nothing to do with even the complaints that we might have about militarization? Are we in a whole different minority report kind of world here? I mean, I think we are. I mean, you know, one of the things that really struck me before Rene Good, there was a man in Chicago who was killed in a remarkably similar situation. He had just dropped his kid off at school. They rushed his car. He tried to get away and they shot and killed him and claimed that he had tried to run them over. He was clearly fleeing. You know, he happened to be an undocumented Mexican immigrant. And so he didn't, you know, he didn't see the kind of swell of support and sympathy. But what really struck me was the press release that DHS put out right afterward. And I've written about so many, you know, police shootings over the years. And I've had lots of critiques of the way that the police departments, you know, they use what I've come to call the exonerative tense, right, which is like a gun was fired and a bullet struck a person, you know, not a cop killed someone. And, you know, you can criticize that, you know, you can criticize the bias in the police investigations and internal affairs. But at least those press releases over the years have said, we promise a fair, thorough investigation, right? At least there was solemnity for the fact that someone lost their life, right? And what we've seen from this administration after these killings is just jubilation and joy. And, you know, they describe these – the guy in Chicago, they described him as a criminal illegal alien. They don't refer to him as a person. I think they used his name once in the entire press release. And there's no pretense of a fair investigation. I mean it is almost – the way that they describe the people, the way that they instantly pass judgment, you know, they're sabotaging their own investigation before it gets started. But that's because they never intended to conduct one anyway. Right. Right. Well, they're conducting the investigation themselves. That was my favorite thing was, you know, it was very clear that all of the visual evidence showed that the narrative that Homeland Security was putting out was utterly false. And so the question was, well, who's going to investigate this? And they're like, oh, we'll do it. And the whole point was like, oh, okay, OJ. Well, I hope you find the real killer because it sounds like a very fair. Well, it's what scholars who study authoritarianism call performative lying, Right. This isn't lying to cover something up or to get away with something. This is when you lie in a way that everyone knows you're lying. It's a projection of power. You're saying we can get away with whatever we want. So in your mind, have we moved from this idea of like, OK, police forces that may have been utilizing heavy handed tactics or made mistakes into an entirely different area? Are we talking about something different than what we were talking about previously? It's completely – we're in completely uncharted territory. I mean these are paramilitaries. These are what – these are the kinds of things that – the kinds of muscle that Trump has wanted. Going back to his life in the private sector, I mean he's always admired – he praised the Tiananmen Square crackdown, right? I mean he has always admired these kinds of paramilitary forces that can do a strong man's bidding and that's what he has. I mean they use their legal justifications in court. They know their case law and so they'll say, oh, things are – crime is soaring. here. There's an insurrection. Immigration officers can't do their job. But then in their down moments, you see what they're actually about. So Trump posted on social media a couple weeks ago that the reason he sent these forces into Minneapolis was because he thinks he won Minnesota all three times and local officials stole it from him and that's why they're there, right? In Los Angeles, Christy Noem says federal forces are going to be in Los Angeles until they liberate the city from its socialist political leadership, right? I mean, those are the reasons why they're there. It's retribution. And I even think, you know, Joseph, if you heard, and I don't know even if you heard this, but Pam Bondi, you know, they said in Minnesota, look, this is untenable. Our citizens are living in fear. There's blood running through the streets. This is creating a war zone for the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota in general. And Pam Bondi said, well, we can make it all go away if you just give us, not your murderers, not your rapists, your voter rolls. Right. An insane, disingenuous trade-off, obviously. And I echo everything that just been said in that they put out these incredibly misleading incendiary statements You simply can believe what this agency says now even to the point where that makes my job as an investigative journalist, like a little bit more difficult. Of course, we're not relying on what DHS is saying. We have sources inside the agency, but even something as simple as, well, I have to go to DHS and get comment because, you know, even though that ice out of control i still try to be fair you know and you just can't take a single word that they say on face value to the point where we've even thought about do we even ping these people anymore like do we even when we're about to reveal a surveillance what does access do for you yeah right right and you know i don't really have official access or anything like that i just have my sources and my leaks and all of that sort of thing but um it's just this complete culture of lying where they've shown themselves as an agency. They just can't be trusted to present reality in basically any form. So let's talk about that as it relates to the intersection between state power and corporate power. Because right now, that seems to be the nexus of something that has magnified this geometrically as opposed to in a linear way. You know, this new authoritarian force that is clearly lying about the facts on the ground is basically turbocharged by private corporate technology companies like Palantir that are allowing the government to explore in a really kind of obtuse way where it's not transparent in any way. What about the nexus of corporate cooperation with this use of government power? Yeah. I mean, the second Trump administration is obviously drastically different to the first. I remember in the first one, when we were covering surveillance companies or tech companies, they would be a bit wishy-washy. They didn't want to fully commit to anything. You even had, I think, Amazon stopped selling its facial recognition tech to certain police forces, of course, around George Floyd and BLM and all of that sort of thing. I mean, the mask is off now. All of those tech leaders were at the inauguration, at the dinner, Tim Cook giving Trump like a golden statue, an iPhone or whatever that was. I don't know. It was the saddest thing I've ever fucking seen. It was so sad. Yeah. Yeah. And when you then look at the companies that are powering this, like Palantir, you know, I've got leaked material from inside Palantir and other journalists have as well. The way they frame it is that, well, if we work with ICE, we can make their work more efficient, accurate, fair, and all of that sort of thing. So that's how they justify it. And that, no, no, we're protecting civil liberties by working with ICE. Even when you have the CEO of Palantir, Karp, who says, we must defend Western democracy, we must defend Western values, while at the same time providing the technological infrastructure for the agency that now says it can go into houses without a warrant. I just cannot square that circle. And I've legitimately tried. I've read Karp's book, I've read the new book about Palantir as well, and I'm really trying to join those ideas together. And I just can't because it just appears to be a complete farce to me. Well, and it's undercut by their co-founder, Lonsdale, who comes out and says, well, this is an insurgency. This is, and Radley, what is that? And again, we talk about corporate power, but now you're also infusing corporate power with a kind of, it's really ideological. These tech guys, whether it's Palantir, whether it's Thiel or Karp or Lonsdale or Yarvin, who is the guy, like these guys are all tweeting like, hey, but white people are in trouble and Christianity is in trouble. And I'm not even sure the human race should not be transhuman and not, you know, even still exist. But we're still going to create all these tools. How can people not feel like we're in a dystopian Skynet situation where the merging of authoritarian government power and unchecked, non-transparent corporate power that is manipulating all of our – how can we not feel like this is in some ways, you know, the beginning of an Avengers movie? I mean, it is. I kind of think if George Orwell had written a book about our times, his editor would have rejected it as a bit sort of heavy handed. There's just no – I mean, you literally have people – Yarvin yearns for monarchy, right? Somebody posted something about 10 years ago. Trump's too soft. Where he talks about how like mentally ill people should be confined in like these tiny little spaces for the rest of their lives and shown like virtual reality so that they can live a fulfilling life but locked in this room. And like these are – like he is a – he has been cited by J.D. Vance as a major influencer on Vance's political development. I mean, we're like being run by the most like deeply dorky loser like 4chan message board is like those are the people running the country now. And they've been empowered. Joseph, you've been looking at this. You know, within Palantir itself, not at the executive levels, is there dissent amongst the people? You know, I remember there was always those emails that would get released every now and again from like the Twitter headquarters or something where people were like, hey, man, I don't think this is such a good idea. Yeah, the vibe is basically that. I would say that the leaks are rarer from Palantir than normal tech companies, you know, than from Meta or X or something like that. Because of course, you know, Palantir is kind of a big, big, scary company to a lot of people. And do they hire for ideological uniformity in the way that they accuse the left of doing at Twitter? I would say they're actually ideologically diverse inside among the employees. Like, of course, I'm not really talking about the executives as you just laid out, but among the employees, you know, there are absolutely left leaning people inside the organization. I don't obviously really talk about my own sources, but I will say that clearly people have been annoyed enough with what Palantir is doing with ICE to leak me, you know, and internal documents about it, internal Slack chats where Palantir executives are trying to fend their work with the agency and everybody's responding to it with emojis and all of that sort of thing. And let's be clear about what their work is. We should probably explain to people. Explain very quickly, what are the tools that these tech companies are developing for the government that they are using to help them in this uh stephen miller wet dream of a of a fantasy yeah so it started last year when they got this leak and they looked through uh procurement records and it said that palantir was working on complete analysis of target populations a fantastically obscure term what does that mean and also says nothing at the same time obviously so we continue reporting and like right oh it's clear they're working on something and to be clear palantir has worked with hsi the investigations arm of ice that you know investigates cyber crime child abuse uh money laundering they've done that for years but now in trump too they've pivoted to explicitly enforcement uh immigration uh enforcement so that we report that and then we don't really know much until recently i got another leak of a user guide from ice explaining something called elite and that's another acronym which i can't even remember what it stands for because it's also really complicated doesn't really say anything but basically i found that was being worked on by palantir by looking around the net and it provides this map interface where ice can draw a circle on the map then brings up a list or little points of all of the potential targets there. Again, I'm using the word targets. You then click on one. It brings up their name, a photo. Where are they getting that? What defines a potential target? Is it a Spanish sounding name? Is it a social security number? What data are they using to define these targets? So with the tool, ICE is able to sort of arbitrarily choose that. They can get a sort of message from headquarters or senior leadership to, we want to target this sort of population. Now, the leak I got doesn't say Somalis. It doesn't say that sort of thing, but it just lays out how to use it. The government made that pretty explicit. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I think people can draw the line. Right. But you then zoom in on the map. You click on a person, name, date of birth, photo if they have it. And most importantly for ICE, addresses and an address confidence score. So 88 out of 100, 99 out of 100 is this person's address. Right. And that's so important because if you remember when there was all the Doge stuff of all of this breaking down of the walls between different agencies. Yes. There is clearly data sharing going on. Where the guide I got. This all ties back to Doge? Potentially. Oh, fuck. All I'll say is that the guide says some of the addresses at least come from the Department of Health and Human Services, which I don't think people expect when they give their address to the Department of Health, it's going to end up in the hands of ICE or into this Palantir worked on tool that ICE is also using. So as I'm covering it as a journalist, as other people are as well, it does feel like we're all sort of doing one big jigsaw puzzle, but we're all coming with different corner pieces and that sort of thing. It's a weaponized Cambridge Analytica scheme. So here's then what what is blowing my mind about this if i can say like this is high-tech 21st century cutting edge uh biometric analysis to find their target things so radley explained to me then how these motherfuckers end up with a net at home depot or beating the shit out of the wrong people in a target parking lot they're using the most sophisticated information analysis and tools known to man that no government has ever had access to to get these things. And yet we see them out in the streets just like a hammer going like, get over here. Like, so what is the what is the point of all that? The idea seems to me that this could be a targeted, precise, nuanced police action on the worst of the worst. But instead, it's a ham fisted run through a target parking lot. What is going on? So the targeted worst of the worst using that technology to its capacity, as worried as I am about all that, if that was only what they were doing, if that was their interest here, I don't think a lot of us would be nearly as alarmed as we are. The problem is that's not the goal. The goal is to instill fear. The goal is to make entire immigrant communities – to scare the shit out of them, to make them not want to live their lives, to make them tell their relatives to stay home because it's too miserable here. It is to scare people. It's to make them suffer. I mean this administration has openly said that they want immigrants to suffer as much as possible because they want them to self-deport. They want them to leave. They don't want to have to go through whatever due process they still are willing to afford these people. That's expensive. What's up, kids? You know me as a gentleman, you know, who is nothing if not incredibly organized. You know, as someone who has everything, really, you know, I'm like, what do you call it there? Type A. I guess they call it type A. What is it when you're completely organized and you have, okay, all right. I am not organized. I am incredibly sloppy and in fact old, which is a terrible combination. And life is really, for the most part, 90% of life is keeping track of things. Bills, appointments, keys, subscriptions that you didn't even know you were paying for. I think I spend, I think maybe around $30,000 a year on Sirius Radio for cars I've never even had. That's where Rocket Money comes in. The subscriptions you didn't even know you were paying for. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions. monitors your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. And by the way, it doesn't judge. It's not like you get notifications where Rocket Money's like, really? You're going to throw money down for that magazine? That's how old I am. I just made a reference to magazines. I don't even know if they have them anymore. Rocket Money can help you out here. It's at budget goals. You get real-time alerts for large transactions, upcoming bills. It gives you a clear view of your financial picture, checking, savings, loans, investments, all in one dashboard. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rocketmoney.com slash TWS. That's rocketmoney.com slash TWS. Rocketmoney.com slash TWS. I thought it was incompetence, to be honest with you. And by the way, Radley is with his dogs right now because there's a terrible storm where he is and he's had to have his dogs. And I saw them earlier on camera and I got to say, pretty adorable. You got some big old pretty adorable dogs there. Yeah, we're in a hotel with a lot of other dog owners. So, Oscar, here are some people outside, but it's okay. Dog Hotel. I think I saw that movie. But normally, as a sort of skeptical but not necessarily conspiratorial thinker, I generally try not to chalk up to nefarious intent what can be easily explained by incompetence. But their incompetence feels like we can't chalk up. It feels nefarious. So I'll say I think there's a little bit of both. I think that they've clearly lowered their hiring standards for these agencies. They've put Border Patrol in charge of these operations, which is pretty well known as being kind of the – well, as one former ICE person told me, the FBI is kind of the varsity team. ICE and HSI are the junior varsity, and Border Patrol is kind of like the drunken office softball team. And that's basically who the administration has put in charge of everything. And by the way, if you're Border Patrol, what are you doing in Minneapolis? So are they guarding the border to St. Paul? Like what are we doing? It's mission creep, but it's also because Border Patrol has a long reputation of being rogue, of being extremely abusive, of not having much accountability. And I think this gets to the second point, which that is who the administration wants in charge of this. They want to inflict terror. They want to scare people. They want people to be miserable. They flat out said, you know, the reason for family separation during the first term is they wanted people to know that if you come to the United States seeking political asylum, we're going to rip your children out of your arms. We want you to suffer because we don't want you to come here anymore. And if you're already here, we want you to suffer because we want you to leave voluntarily. Right, right, right. And that's the way. So this is all sort of – it's of a larger plan, which gets us into sort of this idea. So it's a supposedly Republican conservative administration. And my understanding of conservative has been limited government. Pro Second Amendment. I mean, I'm watching every constitutional guardrail that is in place to prevent these kinds of abuses be thrown away by the people who fetishize the Constitution, who bubble wrap their tour buses with we the people, who stand with the Gadsden flag, who do all the cognitive dissonance of all this. is blowing my mind. Joseph, what is the ethos anymore of this group? They certainly can't argue that they are pro-Constitution and yet want one man to control the most sophisticated technology in the world to target these individuals. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, they can't say they're pro-Second Amendment when apparently having a legal firearm that you are licensed to carry apparently give some sort of justification for you to be shot in the street so they can't say they believe that the fourth amendment um when ice buys this location data they believe they don't need a warrant they don't have to get a warrant to go to at&t or verizon like they normally would right they here they just send tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to some data broker and the legal rationale is that well if people didn't want to be tracked they would turn off location services on their phone. So they're willingly giving it up, even though nobody listening to this has any idea what I'm talking about, because it's such an obscure technology that, you know, nobody reads about it or nobody knows about it, right? Until we reveal it. So of course, that's completely facetious and a farce as well. And then of course, most worryingly is the memo the Associated Press first reported on that, as I said, ICE believes it can now enter private property without a judicial warrant. And I mean, there was already several red lines for me personally, obviously, before that point. But that is just absolutely nuts to me. You know, when I wrote the warrior cop book, I did a lot of research on the founding era and kind of why we have these traditions of not letting the military serve as domestic police and why we have a castle doctrine and all of that. And in part of that, I found archives from a Boston newspaper when the British had put troops in the streets of Boston to do sort of day-to-day policing. And you go through those archives, and I just wrote about this on my newsletter, and you can find excerpts and they go on for years and years. But the descriptions, it was sort of like a social media feed of the time, like an old-timey, it was like firsthand accounts of like a soldier got into a scrape. Twitter by pamphleteer, sort of. Right, right. But you look at the scenes described in those accounts and they are remarkably similar to what we're seeing coming out of Minneapolis. And I think that's in part because this is an age-old problem of you don't put the military in the middle of cities to police their own people. And the anger from the tension in Boston of having those soldiers there or why it eventually will be to the Boston Massacre. But it is specifically why we have a second, third, and fourth amendment because you had soldiers who had these general warrants. They had the power to break into anybody's home at any time to look for untaxed goods, right? Well, what's ICE trying to do now? They're claiming they could break into anybody's home at any time without a warrant to look for undocumented people, right? I mean, the parallels are so incredible. And as you said, I mean, the hypocrisy is just stunning because the conservatives are always pointing to the founding, always pointing to, you know, what a just and righteous cause the American Revolution has. If they had been alive at the time in Boston, they would have been accusing, you know, Sam Adams and Paul Revere of being agitators and domestic terrorists. I mean, it's guaranteed. And insurgents, they don't understand. And by the way, love Donald Trump, say what you want, follow him blindly, religiously, whatever you want to do. But don't tie it to the revolution and patriotism because you guys are the Tories. You'd be the ones that were on that side. And you know, it was, I think, the most galling to me. Look, I first of all, I don't even know what the Republican Party or the conservatives even are anymore. I have no idea what sort of intellectual foundation they're standing on because it doesn't seem to have any coherent value other than what do you think, Donald? And then he says it and they go, that sounds right. So what truly upset me was to see them all talking about, I mean, this guy showed up with a gun and, you know, they quickly got off the like he was brandishing it when the video there. But they're still saying, I mean, you're not allowed to do that. And they fetishize it. And I think what was galling to me is. You know, they're willing to suddenly challenge their Second Amendment rights in this instance. But when a bunch of kids were gunned down in a fucking grade school at Sandy Hook or in Uvalde, not a word, not a word about, hey, guns might be an issue. We might want to think about that. It took a guy holding a phone trying to protect a woman who had just been pepper sprayed for them to finally go, maybe everybody shouldn't be armed. And that's the part that stunned me. Well, and Kash Patel said that, you know, don't bring a gun to a protest. Kash Patel offered to help Kyle Rittenhouse sue Joe Biden in the media for, you know, character assassination when, you know, he brought his guns across the state line. I mean, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, there was a guy in Texas during the George Floyd protest who texted a friend saying, I'm going to go kill a protester, who posted online in a forum, I'm going to go kill a protester, and then went out and killed a protester. And Greg Abbott pardoned him. I mean, he was convicted by a jury, and Greg Abbott pardoned him. That guy brought a gun to a protest for the specific purpose of murdering someone. And Abbott, because he was a right winger and killed a – turned out to be libertarian-ish protester, not a far left protester. But Abbott pardoned him. So it's all hypocrisy all the way down. And look in Florida DeSantis has been very clear If you want to use your car as a lethal weapon on protesters be my guest Are we in a situation now Joseph where all of these tools nobody cares what happens as long as the tools of the state are used against people that they hate Is that the philosophy now? Broadly speaking, it seems that. And usually the carve out would be, don't worry, the tools are being sold to HSI. Again, the quote-unquote good guy is part of ICE, that sort of thing. But when you have data from the Cato Institute saying there's something like 90% of HSI officials who would usually be actually trying to catch the bad guys, and they get all the fancy tools, now they're helping with immigration enforcement. I mean, it's like, again, the breaking down of data barriers between government agencies. And now you have the guys with the really fancy tools trying to find undocumented people. I mean, some of these tools also, and I'll be very careful what I say here, because I haven't seen evidence it has been used against protesters. But the phone location data stuff, the company that sells that is called Penlink. It's a big U.S. contractor. they explicitly advertised their phone location tools to monitor BLM protests back when that happened. Now, that is the product that has been sold to ICE and to HSI. But if they reverse engineer those products, for instance, there are certain products that can track ICE. Those are being banned. Right. I've reported extensively on ICE block being removed from the Apple App Store. I mean, Apple even removed an app that wasn't even reporting sightings of ICE officials. It was just an archive of videos from like TikTok and stuff of ICE abuses. And Apple took that down, which is going even a step further. There was no doxing, no surveillance. It was just like, we would like to preserve videos. So in the future, we might be able to hold some people accountable legally and justifiably. And Apple took that down as well. We have to hold so many things in our head. You know, Bradley, I'm sure you remember the 1984 Apple commercials where, you know, Big Brother is on the giant screen and all the people are watching and somebody takes a sledgehammer, throws it through and think different and all that. And now they're the screen. You know, I mean, the other thing that I think is worth pondering here is the way that they're going about recruiting people, right? I mean, they – I've written a lot about police recruiting and how they kind of select people at the very first stage of the process. And you used to be able to – you probably still can go to YouTube and type in police recruiting video and you'll see this really kind of vast range of videos. So what I think would be a productive video would show cops helping people in a community, right? Assisting people. But then on the other end of the spectrum – Like the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial. They come out, but then they get a Pepsi and everybody's healing. Yeah, right. But you want to emphasize like the community service aspect of it, right? Well, on the other end of the spectrum, it's too many police departments that are recruiting videos are blaring guitars, cops rappelling out of helicopters, sicking dogs on people. When that's what you're appealing to at the very first step in the process, I think that's indicative of a police agency that doesn't have the right priorities. And what we're seeing with ICE and these federal anti-immigration groups, you know, on social media, how are they trying to recruit to people? They're appealing to blood and soil narratives. They are making explicit references to white supremacist literature. I mean, some of that iconography that they're using. The iconography is not even an echo of fascism. It's – no, it's – They could be sued by Mussolini for copyright infringement. It's an amplification, right? And beyond that, though, I mean, you know, they're also – they're content creators, right? I mean, I remember one of the first videos we saw out of Los Angeles. You saw ICE agents chasing this immigrant down the sidewalk. And then behind all the ICE agents, you saw another DHS employee carrying a camera running behind them to get it all, you know, on video for social media. Oh, like a cops episode. I see. Right. And if you think about, like, who is watching these horrific videos that we're seeing, like sitting at home unemployed and thinking, you know what? that's what I want to do for a living. Like that, that is, you know, that is excited by it. You've just been pardoned for your role in January 6th. You're having trouble finding another job and you see this commercial. I mean that the, the, the people that I've seen, and here's what, what is really troubling to me. I like, I know a ton of cops and firefighters, like, and maybe I'm too close to it. I have such love and respect for those guys and I know they're, what they're trying to do and help people in good hearts. And, And this makes their jobs infinitely harder because of the way that people are viewing it. They're not separating any of the two out. And I will say this. I think that the flood of weapons into our streets and our inability to have any kind of sensible regulation of even the illegal weapons creates an arms race on our streets that inevitably leads to a militarization of police. because they can't be outgunned. Like the insanity of our gun policy is what leads them to be in danger in the first place. So they overly militarize, start to use this technology. And now we're caught in this vicious cycle where all of a sudden the one problem with it is a legally permitted gun at a protest rather than what has started this arms race. You know, I think the one way I would push back a little bit on that narrative is that, you know, I have talked to a lot of law enforcement people, particularly reform-oriented law enforcement people, and they're furious about what they're seeing. They're absolutely furious. I agree with you. But I will also say that one of the biggest supporters of this president, one of the biggest supporters of opponents of gun control measures are police groups and particularly police unions. I was going to say unions and sheriffs. I wouldn't say – like sheriffs are – they're political. Correct. And unions are relatively political as well. I don't – I think the rank and file – I think big city police chiefs. Big city police chiefs are like, we got to get these guns off the streets. Exactly. Right. But the unions are extremely – and also the NRA is one of the most absolutely pro-police organizations around. Like they can't bring themselves to condemn any of these shootings. I've often pointed out that one of the weirdest things the NRA ever did was they went to war with Colin Kaepernick. And Colin Kaepernick was actually a gun owner. Like they could have actually made some inroads and, you know, but it was more important to them to sort of be this, you know, symbolic kind of pro-cop organization. And I think that nexus is hard to get around, I think. Well, it's also hard to get around if you are somebody who feels you see something wrong in your society. It's hard to get around what are the rules of acceptable protesting. So you can't go out there with an iPhone. You can't go out there with a whistle. You can't try and help a woman up who's been maced. You can't bring your car. You can't, but you also can't kneel before a football game. Right. You can't kneel before a football game. Like what exactly is acceptable in this world? And Joseph, I want to ask you, and what are the guardrails to protect us against this consolidation? There is an unprecedented consolidation of tech power and government authority. And Congress is absent. And even if they weren't absent, they're so fucking overmatched. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, frankly, things do not look good. You know, Democratic lawmakers have tried to introduce some sort of guardrails on ISIS facial recognition app saying, hey, you can't roll out to local cops, which is what they wanted to do as well. All of those sheriff departments and those sheriffs you were talking about, they would potentially have ISIS facial recognition app on their phone as well. so they could use it. You know, democratic lawmakers are trying to rein that in. I don't. Frankly, I don't see that happening. Obviously, it's a group of six against however many. And then even going back a couple of years, ICE was told, hey, you're using some of this location data illegally. They basically said, we don't care and we're going to keep doing it. uh so even when there is internal oversight you know from inspector of uh you know the the oversight bodies inside dhs and that sort of thing it doesn't really mean anything and that was when things were better a few years ago so i have very uh little hope for that so folks you know i'm one of those people the people are very annoying who always saying things like, oh, I got this idea. I got a business idea. And I actually do have a business idea. It's actually for, you know how, do you have a dog? You know how like when you throw your coat on the floor, when you come into the house and then all of a sudden you look, turn over and your dogs are sitting on it because they love topography. They don't just love a mat. They like a little topography. So I've invented the crumple. The crumple is a blanket for dogs that you throw on the ground. And each time you throw it down, it gives a different topography. 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So in 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash TWS. Go to shopify.com slash TWS. That's shopify.com slash TWS. Here you're first this new year with Shopify by your side. Has Europe been more successful? I mean, I'm watching right now in the Iranian revolution, they've gotten so much better at shutting off the internet, using the technological tools against people. Is Europe finding a way to be more proactive at regulating these abuses? Yeah. And not to get too jargony, but it really just comes down to- Jargon it up, baby. Let's go. It really just frankly comes down to there is no federal privacy law in the United States. California has their thing. Illinois has a biometrics facial recognition one. There's no overarching law in the US that could help with this. In Europe, you have GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, which stops that melding of private companies and state in such a way where they're just feeding off one another. Of course, surveillance still happens in the EU, but not to the extent where I'm Germany, let me go buy all of the data from my citizens. Whereas that's the norm now in the US, because you don't have that foundational guardrail, which then everything would spiral out from that. We don't even have that. Which is so fucking mind-blowing, because you think about what is their general reason detour, which is we have to get the elites from being able to run our lives. And by elites, they mean sociology professors or whatever it is. But the actual elites are allowed to run amok. Radley, is there any recourse to kind of what we're talking about? Because this is – I can't think of anything that's more elitist than the trillionaire tech class joining forces with a president that is granted total immunity by the Supreme Court and them joining forces to do whatever they want. Yeah. I think your question is about sort of reforms and I'll let Joseph talk about the tech reforms because that's a little outside my wheelhouse. But in terms of police accountability, there are some very basic things I think that we could do, assuming the Democrats take control of the House and the Congress, possibly the White House. I mean, currently right now, there is no real way to sue a federal law enforcement officer if they violate your constitutional rights, whether they kill you, whether they beat you, whether they racial profile you. Do they have absolute immunity? That's what J.D. Vance was saying is they have absolute immunity. So Vance is wrong. They don't have absolute immunity from criminal charges. They can still be charged both federally and locally and with crimes. But in terms of civil liability, so if you sue a state police officer for violating your rights, let's say they beat you or kill your relative unjustly, you can sue – you can file a federal lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act called Section 1983 suit. But they have qualified immunity, which is hard to get by. But you can't – it can be surmounted. If it's a federal officer, you can't even – they don't even – they have absolute immunity. So it's another layer of protection. It's almost impossible to sue them in federal court. And Congress could change that tomorrow. They could pass a bill tomorrow saying we're going to give federal police officers the same qualified immunity that state officers have, which is still pretty significant. But we're not going to make them completely and utterly above the law, which is insane. So, Bradley, are they using ICE to get around that even qualified immunity? Is that what they're doing? Are they circumventing so that they aren't going to be liable? Yeah, they're not. I mean, that's what Stephen Miller, when he goes on and says, you have absolute immunity, what he's saying is nobody can sue you in federal court civilly for damages, right? We're not going to charge you criminally in federal court because we support what you're doing. So it's not going to happen at the federal level. The best that you can owe for is maybe a state prosecutor or an attorney general could criminally charge these people. But those cases are going to get removed to federal court. And then the DOJ is probably going to be defending those people against local prosecutors. And so in terms of accountability, the only real thing that's left at this point is shaming and social stigma. Well, why do you think they're all wearing masks now, right? Because that takes away that last kind of vector of accountability that we have. But the thing is what I guess what I'm saying, the hopeful part of this is Congress could change all this tomorrow. They could pass a law tomorrow saying, here's a way that you could sue federal officers for civil rights violations. They're going to get qualified immunity, which is still great, but not absolute immunity. And that would be, I think, a really important step forward. And Joseph, that's still – the ICE agent on the street, the perp that they're going after, the innocent person that they end up targeting, that's still a kind of old-fashioned analog interaction, human to human, face to face. where can there be accountability in a world where we're not even sure you know when you're in the tech world a those guys aren't uh elected in any way so there's no recourse there and b it's not really a consumer facing business it's a government facing business so we don't even have consumer power there is no bud light boycott of palantir i wouldn't have any fucking idea where they get their, you know, Tesla can go again, but as long as Elon knows he's got a trillion dollars coming in for SpaceX, like what are the incentives? How do we in any way push back on this dystopian new reality? Yeah, I have seen it when I'll post one of my Palantir articles and somebody will reply on social media, it's time to boycott Palantir. And I'm just shaking my head like, what are you talking about? That's not how this works. I'm not going to their store. ever again. I think they're confusing with a Peloton or something like that, probably. I'm going to burn my exercise bike. But I mean, obviously, to get to your question, there isn't much an ordinary person can do. And I'll just say as a journalist, it is really, really hard. It is now months and months and months into the mass deportation campaign. And only now are we finally figuring out, oh, that's actually what Palantir is building. It's the little map to find immigration targets, which of course we could have assumed, but now we only really know it is really hard to even get an idea of what is going on and of course these companies like that obviously um and even of course they're not really accountable to the public they're barely accountable to their own employees when you have palantir certainly not the shareholders yeah right when you have palantir workers saying hey we don't like this and they're saying this internally in slack we reported that and then why i just did another one recently as well they continue to defend the work like it would require like a tectonic shift inside the company to make any sort of change because frankly they are making bank on this it's tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars palliative stock is you know performing exceptionally well right i don't see any incentive for not even just the palliatives but even the metas and the zuckerbergs as well i don't see any incentive from them to disalign themselves with this administration. Hey, if there's another administration, if there's another administration in the future, maybe- If there is. Oh, that's dark. Sorry. Maybe those tech companies will then flip again. And of course, they'll expect us to just forget everything that they just did during the second Trump administration. But of course, they flip-flop. That is what these tech companies do. You know, these new tools, and I don't know this to be a fact, but my feeling is these are more explicitly overt political actors than even what you would consider defense contractors who would send lobbyists to Capitol Hill, but they don't really give a shit who you are. They just know, I want more unaccountable money. I don't want to pass an audit. I just want you to keep feeding the military industrial complex. This is a new kind of appendage of that military-industrial complex that feels much more overtly ideological. Oh, yeah, 100%. Gone are the days of, as you allude to, Lockheed Martin just doing their thing or whatever. Come to a party. We have shrimp. We just sell the weapons, whatever. Now you have these very charismatic founders and owners. There's Palmer Luckey of Andral, which provides AI-enabled towers for the US, Mexico, and the Canadian border. He's very obviously coming out, we need to defend the homeland. Of course, you have Karp from Palantir as well saying we need to defend the West. And Karp actually constantly beefs with Silicon Valley saying, you guys have just made food delivery apps for years. We're actually trying to make a difference. It's completely explicit now. It's not even a subtext. I mean, there were adverts on bus stops, I think, throughout the United States for Palantir trying to get more people to come join the company saying, you know, come and do something that actually matters. It's completely front and center from these people. It is an ideological business. It is not just making money for these people. Right. Like we never would have seen the CEO of Raytheon, you know, giving lectures about the Antichrist, right? I mean, I think you're right. Like this is an entirely like different class. But could it be Greta Thunberg? I mean, let's be honest. You know what's so interesting about the movie is the guy, like the guy giving the lecture about how Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist. And we're talking about Peter Thiel. Like, is this powerful, not transparent billionaire who runs these tech companies? And you're like, if I'm making a movie about the Antichrist, not to be Joe Central casting, but I think I'm going to go with the powerful billionaire guy as Antichrist. Not the girl on a flotilla. doesn't doesn't feel as anti anti-christ-esque uh we're only a year into this you know the one thing that i think has been demonstrated here is that this is an alien format to a lot of americans and what you're seeing in minneapolis and the people and these are just i know that the the big word on the right is these are paid agitators they're fucking regular people with whistles that's their technology out on the streets and yes maybe they organize on social media like most facebook groups do or signal chats or whatever it is but this these are not you know that that's that's a lie well i would yeah well this is this is my optimistic take, I guess, which is that, you know, I've been doing a lot of reporting on immigration. It's not something I reported on a lot in my career, but that's required me to kind of bone up. But it's also required me to watch a lot of these really horrific videos that we've seen. And I've taken in a lot of them and it can be a little overwhelming sometimes, nothing compared to what the people are actually going through. But I will say that, you know, the thing that has just really inspired and invigorated me is exactly what you're talking about, which is I first saw it in Chicago because that was where I first kind of started, you know, covering this in depth. And going into the Facebook pages of these whistle brigades and these groups and seeing people, you know, that I went to college with who have never been political in their lives, who are now, you know, setting up online, you know, data spreadsheets for who's going to go to the local school to chaperone immigrant kids back home so they don't get arrested? Who's going to do the laundry for these immigrant groups who are afraid to leave their homes? Who's going to get groceries for them? There were spreadsheets about where people were writing down when ICE was at Home Depot so immigrants who make their living in construction could go get supplies without having to worry about being arrested. I mean I found it I mean in Minneapolis you had 50 to 100 people come out in zero degree weather right because they were angry about what ICE was doing to their communities and what it was doing to their neighbors I mean, this is – it's every – all the major elite institutions have just completely buckled and it's been really disillusioning, overwhelming, disheartening to watch. But man, on the flip side of that, watching people stand up, just individual regular people putting their like bodies on the line, putting their – just defending their neighborhoods and their neighbors. And it's been inspiring and it works, right? I mean, look at what happened to Bovino. You know, like it works. But he's a cartoon character. And, you know, getting rid of Bovino reminds me of bombing a Venezuelan drug boat where you're like, OK, you you've sacrificed a low level non-entity. One thing I'll say about and I'll ask your guys opinion of it. I generally think and I'm not talking about in the Nazi sense of blue. We're just following orders. But generally, law enforcement follows the will of the communities. Like the police go to places as a quarantine to keep bad things away from the richer people, generally. And the abuses that go on there, people don't want to see and they don't want to know about. But the police themselves are not there to abuse. They're there to just try and do the job that people have said. To get rid of Bovino is to suggest that the architect of this, Stephen Miller, the executor of this, Donald Trump, are somehow have been hoodwinked by an overly aggressive force that has bungled what is a righteous job. And I just don't think that's the case. They have been given a quota to get rid of people and communities that are part of the fabric of community. nobody's out in the streets trying to make sure that you can't find the rapists. That's just not true. They're just trying to say, I'm sorry, man. I know this person as a human. They work hard. They're just trying to do what they do. Treat it as a civil matter, not a criminal matter, not a military matter. That's what it feels like to me. Well, it's funny because ICE has just cycled through all of these leadership changes, right? I can't remember how many there were, but there were like several where we'll kick out this guy because he's not bringing in enough. Then we'll bring in somebody else and that person's out. And then operations are moved, as you say, to Border Patrol. And now he's out as well. And of course, the Trump administration is distancing itself from it. Like, oh, no, no, we didn't want to do that. It's like, you're orchestrating this. Obviously, he wanted to do that. So, I mean, we'll see what happens now. But they are, it seems quite desperately cycling through these leadership positions. And the system right now is incentivized to abuse. Right. They get these numbers. When you put a quota on human beings and you say hit these numbers, you've just incentivized to abuse. Radley, I know that whole little speech might not have hit you exactly right, but go ahead. No, no. Look, I think you're exactly right about the system. I also think you're exactly right that this is, you know, on some level, you have a president who's literally called immigrants, it said immigrants poison the blood of the country, right, who calls people out exercising their rights, domestic terrorists, and then who sends these officers who have been recruited with white nationalist propaganda out into these communities and tells them that they have complete immunity for anything they do. I mean, that's a recipe for violence, right? We should be surprised by what we're seeing. However, I guess the point that I was trying to get at is that I do think that people making themselves heard is working. It is forcing Trump to backtrack from his defense of the murder of Alex. Freddie. Freddie, yes. Yeah. It's forcing them to backtrack from that. And it's also – look at polling. I mean Trump had a healthy majority. I think he was plus 10 on immigration policy when he took office. I think he's at like minus 15, minus 20 now. Right? These aren't sustainable numbers. They're going to continue to do it for as long as they can get away with it. But I think it's encouraging and inspiring the way people are making their voices heard, the way they're doing it, even after they've been explicitly threatened. They're still out there tracking ICE agents. They're still out there recording them on their cell phones. And to me, that is far – I take such heart in that after watching all these lead institutions crumble in front of Trump. It's remarkable. And it's the tough thing for me is that public opinion only begins to move when we have explicit, not very nuanced evidence to the contrary of what they're saying. And it does it really does make you wonder, like if they'll lie that clearly to us when we're presented with very clear evidence to the counter, what are they lying about when we don't have the counter evidence and when public opinion can't be swayed? because we haven't seen it as explicitly. And that's the tough part. Joseph, you know, as we wrap up, I think what Radley said is exactly right in terms of how we can be heartened by the people. In terms of the tech piece of it, the one thing that I think maybe could provide some optimism is, you know, what technology can create, technology can, you know, nothing can fight AI like AI. and surely there must be people working. And you know what? And join me, we'll form a company. But to create AI, to counter AI, algorithms to counter algorithms, information to counter misinformation. If you can engineer it, you can reverse engineer it. And we have to form companies whose sole purpose is to design and utilize technology to unravel nefarious technology, no? Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of people who are either in government and they were laid off in these massive layoffs via Doge, and now they're doing investigations into data brokers and that sort of thing. And then they send me information. There's, of course, people inside these companies as well who say, you know what, I actually don't agree with what our firm is doing. I'm going to push back against it. And then I do think most importantly, throwing back to it's the technology that every single person has, which is their mobile phone. This is a phenomenal tool. And, you know, we used to have to rely on maybe the New York Times verifying something or Bellingcat, which does a lot of open source sort of verification stuff. When we see the videos of the shootings, you don't need that. You can just believe your eyes, despite what DHS is telling you to do otherwise. And that continues to be exceptionally powerful. Yeah, we were saying that, that Peretti actually was armed with perhaps the most dangerous weapon to a regime built on lies, which is something that can capture the truth. And I really appreciate you guys helping to set the parameters of what this moment is and how dangerous it is and where we can go in it. Any last thoughts from you, Joseph, on where this military industrial and now tech complex may be headed and then Radley on other things that people can do to sort of stand up to that. So Joseph. I would just say that the marriage between tech companies and States, I think is going to become maybe not a norm, maybe that's too strong, but it's just going to become tolerated by the technology industry. You even have Mark Zuckerberg, obviously CEO of Meta, welcoming back Palmer Luckey, who makes all these AI towers for customs border protection, welcoming him back in to now work on some sort of military product as well. Now, these agencies want technology. Again, usually they went to the Raytheons of the world, that sort of thing. It's now Silicon Valley. And I don't think that's going to go backwards anytime soon. If anything, I think these tech companies are probably going to think, well, we have several more years of this, at least. Why don't we lean into this? And I just think it's going to get way more aggressive. And it's almost a money laundering scheme. They're getting billions of dollars from the government. And then they're turning around like Elon Musk and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to get these same people elected. And it really is, it looks like a corrupt money laundering scheme. Yes, to solidify power. And I mean, that's an obvious point, but the gloves are off for these people where they can absolutely do that sort of thing. They've never had such a strong hand inside sort of the levers of government as they as they do today i mean it's amazing for them of course right radley uh i would just you know uh encourage people to continue um speaking out for your neighbors for the people around you for your communities and keep recording um you know very early on when they started sending troops into los angeles and dc i was so heartened because you would see these videos of these immigration officers, you know, roughing someone up. And obviously, that's very disturbing. But you'd see four, five, six people in the video that was uploaded also recording video on their phones. And that is, as you said, I think a lot more powerful than weapons at this point, because that's the kind of accountability. That's the only thing that's going to keep them accountable. That's right. Well, guys, I so appreciate you taking the time. Joseph Cox, co-founder of 404 Media, host of the 404 Media Podcast, and Radley Balco, an investigative journalist who's been on this beat for a very long time, author of the book Rise of the Warrior Cop, Militarization of America's Police Forces, and the publisher of The Watch, a Substack newsletter. Guys, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thanks. Guys, my takeaway from the entire conversation, if I may, is that Peloton is about to get hit by a very angry yet somewhat misguided boycott. Peloton catching strays. I didn't really, you know, I actually found that conversation like very clarifying, laying out actually just how the tentacles between big tech and the sort of marriage with them and authoritarian state and like how it filters down into the militarization of this kind of enforcement. It seems, I thought, incompetent, but purposeful. Yeah, I was kind of counting on them being incompetent, and now I'm left with nothing. Well, it feels like a continuation of processes that were already in place of this circulation of tools and tactics that, I mean, we've talked about before were born out of wars and ultimately trickle back. And they started talking about that a little bit, which I found really interesting. It does remind me a little bit of the times of, you know, when you think about tech titans and the marriage of politics, and you do think back a little bit to like Ford and the sort of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and how he really also had these very similar blood and soil kinds of leanings and was also at the forefront of creating really like the modern proletariat in America and how that all infused into it. Because we're not used to business leaders being this vocal. I mean, I don't know if you see on social media, but these guys are like Elon Musk. You can't go 30 seconds without him throwing a couple of like eyeball emojis on a story about white victimhood. Yeah. It's pretty wild. He is, quote, looking into a lot of things on Twitter. Right. Or just throwing up like exactly true on shit where you're like, I don't think that's necessary. And it's always in one direction, by the way. He's not bringing up like a variety of crimes. No, he's pretty single minded. And for Elon, you would think like that sort of those like vocal white supremacy statements would be like at odds with his business because, you know, you theoretically want a consumer base. But luckily for these Palantir guys, it's right in line with their business interests. They don't even have to go out of their way. No, they're unaccountable to politics. They're unaccountable to consumers. They're only accountable to their own sort of weird utopian fantasies, which feels dystopian to everybody else. Yes. But I do agree. I don't know how you guys feel in terms of the optimism of it, but I do think this is alien. And I do think in the same way that it's hard to do a national strike in America because of federalism and there's 50 states and there's all kinds of different rules, it's also very hard to do proper fascism in America for the very same reasons. We're not an easy place to control. Look, Greg Bovino, he got run out of Minneapolis by moms with whistles, and I hope that keeps him up at night. Well, if that haircut doesn't keep him up at night, I don't think a whole lot else is there. I wouldn't say that the Congress stepping up part gives me optimism. The people stepping up to protect each other does. And also these fractures, which you touched upon in the Republican Party. And I was going to say even Fox News seems to have some fractures in the sense that the main page is very much what you would expect coverage to be of this. But then individual reporters are really getting into the truth of it. And I saw one of their congressional reporters was talking about DHS's response internally. And one person said it's a case study on how not to do crisis PR. DHS is wrong. We are losing this war. We're losing the base in the narrative. See, I still feel like they view it, though, as a PR war and not as a function of government overreach or authoritarianism or overly militarized. Like, I think it's like, fuck, that video is just so clear. We just we even we even the experts in spin, even the high priests of no principled. We're just going to buckle down and get our talking points out there. Even they go like, I can't polish this turd. Right. I just can't. And so they say, well, and then the tragedy here is we're losing the PR war. And I really think that's the extent of it. For that. I won't be optimistic about it then. But it did seem. I don't want to yuck your yum. It did seem like a step in the right direction. No, I get it. But I just feel like even that, like, they've just been handed an assignment that they can't complete. And they'll go right back to completing the assignment as soon as the smoke clears. because that's their new leader right that's that that's exactly right uh and they'll pretend that getting rid of bovino did it and steven miller will still uh sit back and sup on you know the rotting flesh of whatever it is he's trying to do to this country that little troll man motherfucker uh britney what do the people want to know this week what do they what do they want to know i'm happy to i'm happy to help good uh john do you think barry wise will fix cbs news and finally make it fair and balanced? Oh, there's no question that she is on her way. You know, look, the difficulty with all this, everybody's like, Barry Weiss is going to ruin CBS News. Like, I don't know about you, but like, did you watch CBS News? I'm like, I didn't. I mean, 60 Minutes is a great show. I hope she doesn't fuck up 60 Minutes. But like, the network, the idea that- Jillian's a big 60 Minutes fan. They do a really nice job on 60 Minutes at times. They do some great stories. But like, are we all really like, we need you on that wall to fix network news. Like network news is, is a relic. Like, I just don't think it's even a, a relevant addition to the information biome. What do you guys think? I look forward to whiskey Fridays with Tony. I was already doing whiskey Fridays. So join me, Tony. But I just think it was, it was one of those things where like, How dare you ruin now? If you're talking about the morning show and 60 Minutes, I think those are still viable cultural forces and can be. And I don't know what she's going to do with them. But, you know, and also the idea that making something fair means making sure that MAGA has a voice like that to me, it's just the mistake of not understanding what the problem with news is. The problem with news isn't there's not enough Republican or conservative voices. The problem is it's not focused just on corruption. It's focused on the binary of left and right. Like who gives a fuck? Do corruption versus integrity. No? Yes. But where will they find the corruption? They'll find it at 60 Minutes. She's looked in there and she's decided. The calls come from inside the house. That's exactly right. What else we got, Bernie? John, at what point does a billionaire become a supervillain? Asking for a friend. Oh, man. I think it's when they mistake their ability to make money for their ability to design the world. And it's the kind of hubris that, you know, where even Icarus is like, too high. Like every one of these fucking guys. What's so interesting to me is how bored they are with everything. They all want to go somewhere else. They want to go to Mars. They want you to live in the metaverse. This world is being experienced by these billionaires at its highest level. This is as good as you can do. And they're not satisfied with it. And in their mind, it's that weird instinct of, I will be the one to reverse engineer the human condition. Like, I will be the one to break the bounds. Like, I want to go up to every fucking one of them and just whisper in their ear, death will be victorious. Like, it's such hubris. And I think it's when that hubris takes over and you are surrounded by people who are just like, that's a great idea. And I mean, you look at the folly, like it's wild. Go the fuck to Mars and stay there. And you want to say like, go, leave already. Go. Let us steal. If you're bored here, knock yourself out. But no, they have to stay because we all have it wrong. And they're the only ones who are qualified to redesign the human condition. Lauren, do you think, Wendy, or is it just, is it when they get vested with their stock options? I'm not sure I believe being a billionaire is completely ethical considering what that money could help. Maybe if you've made a billion dollars off selling your like Beanie Baby collection or something, but that's not really where this is going. I always feel like that's a failure of society. not them. Like, we're all sort of greedy in our own way. And it's a society in the same way where they're like, you know, there used to be a thing when people who are against the death penalty, they would come out and say, what would you do if, you know, one of your relatives was killed? And you're like, I would go over there and cut the person open and eat their heart in front of them while they were alive. You're like, but that's why we live in a society. We live in a society because not every human impulse is necessarily the right or stable one. And we have to create some, some ground rules. So if we create a society where people can accumulate that kind of money, we also have to create a society where that money also, we have to figure out how you redistribute some of it to create stability and prosperity. That's sustainable, you know, for, for any of that shit. All right. Brittany, what else we got? Last one. No question, but thank you. Thank you. They just wrote thank you? Yeah. No question, but thank you. More of a comment. I wonder if we sent them something. Did they say what it was? Maybe it's one of those things. Wait, was this, did I go to their wedding? Did I give them something? No, you don't leave the house. That's lovely. Here's how, can I tell you? Here's how I know how fucked up things are right now. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, as bad as it was, if people on the street were recognizing me, they'd be like, hey, hey, hey, funny show the other night. Oh, that fucking, I love that Bush impression. Funny. And now, if people see me on the street, they just do this. Hey, thank you. They like whisper, like, keep doing what you're doing. Thank you for your courage. And I'm like, it's really the same show. Same shit. It's very lovely. Brittany, how can they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are Weekly Show Pod. Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are Weekly Show Podcast. And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart. Boom! All right, kids. As always, want to give big thanks to our lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. We'll see you next week where hopefully the world will be healed. All right. Bye-bye. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.