Will Stancil: The Heroes of Minneapolis

Hello and welcome to the Bullock Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We've got some good news about the Minneapolis live shows coming tomorrow. So if you were hoping to get a ticket but it's all that too quick, keep it close to your email tonight and tomorrow morning. Go to the bork.com slash events. We are trying to give people more opportunities. It's an awesome response. We really appreciate you all. So I will have some more news on that tomorrow. But you see, tickets went fast. So keep an eye out on the bork.com slash events. Also, stick around the end of this show for a little mile long, but a bunch of stuff. But I'm particularly the Texas Senate race, which might end up being my 13th reason why if something doesn't change down there. So I've got some thoughts on that. But first, these are Minneapolis based attorney and anti-ice activists, a former state legislature candidate or research on housing policy, a social media fire brand. It's Will Stancell. How you doing, man? Welcome to the show. All right. Glad to be here. You got a little shiner. What's happened in there? I do. I face planted on the ice. And so I've got half my face is a little swollen up. But that's a normal Minneapolis winner hazard. And of course, we have a different kind of ice. It's a bigger hazard here lately. So we obviously spend most of the show talking about that. But for people who are not social media sickos like me, maybe aren't familiar with your with your work product, with your, you know, really the artistic canvas with which you, um, take, you know, short form text-based social media, tell us a little bit about you, you know, first date stuff. Where did you emerge from? I don't even know. Like, you know, you just kind of like emerged into my vantage point sometimes on social media. Like, what's your story? I mean, I'm a pretty ordinary guy a little Minneapolis. I'm an attorney. I work mostly on civil rights and housing law, school policy. And then I've been involved in local politics up here. I do a reasonable extent. I ran for office, didn't win. I, you know, involved a lot of my neighborhood and my community. And I'm pretty vocal on social media about national politics. I'm a no fan of the current administration, the current president, you know, I think that I've got some criticisms of both sides, but, but, you know, ultimately I would describe myself as primarily someone who's, who's pretty fanatically fixated on, on the threat posed by Trump and all of his minions. And unfortunately, they have come to us. You're in a good place. I think people have said the Bullocks fanatically fixated on, on Trump and his minions. Why did people start following you on social media? Like, what happened? Do you, do you have a moment? Did you have a breakout tweet that went viral? Or did it all just kind of happen gradually over time? I think that there's been a few different things that, but the main thing I think in 2016 to 2020, I was pretty, uh, singularly fixated on the idea that Democrats were not going enough to obstruct Trump, to investigate him, to impeach him, and to hold him accountable after he left office to ensure that he couldn't come back. I, I have been fairly convinced from day one that Trump is, by all practical considerations, a fascist and a authoritarian and that all of the people who went down play him is, you know, just joking around or, or you know, Trump being Trump, that is, that's reckless and dangerous and he would do any of this stuff if he was given half an opportunity. And I think that, you know, it's just time passed that view has unfortunately been somewhat indicated. I have some more thoughts about some of your big social media moments of your maybe at the end, but obviously we have some more pressing matters. So, you know, these are, I reached out, it's like people kept seeing you, you know, you were, you're like in the background of these videos of things that are having on the ground of Minneapolis and all of us have been, you're kind of watching it with such great interest. You've been part of the reason for that, I guess you've been tracking ice in your 2011 Honda Fit, the best car ever made. Yeah, I took a chunk about that. So how did that start? What do you sing on the ground, just like paint a little picture for us? Yeah, so essentially, what we have here in Minneapolis is we built this extremely dense network of community observers and Raptor's undersize. And the reason this has happened is because especially in the early days, and after Renee good was shot around that, around when that happened, the way ice and border patrols conduct themselves here in Minneapolis have been, it's hard to even describe to people weren't here. You would go around the neighborhood and you would see armed masked men abducting people, tear gasing, you know, major businesses, major commercial intersections, people getting beat up in the street by these folks are rolling around, you know, these armed convoys, it felt like a military occupation. There was a push to figure out what we do about this. I think that with the approach that we have landed on, which is partly adopted from tactics that were activists put together in Chicago, when ice was in Chicago, but has been expanded on, is this sort of observer system. All the neighborhoods have, you know, signal chats that are rapid response signal chats, a sort of neighborhood specific suspected ice vehicles are reported into there. We have people that are looking at directories of known ice plates to confirm whether or not their ice. We don't know all the place or sometimes this ice and we don't know it. You know, and then you also just try and look in the car. I mean, if it's two guys in uniform with masks on, it's best confirmed. If we identify a nice car or ice agents, you know, a report goes out and we have people doing what we described to the term we've adopted now, and I think this comes from many apples I've learned is commuters. And so what I've been primarily doing is what we call commuting. A commuters are essentially car controllers. I drive around the neighborhood, my car, I try to look out for ice vehicles, I call them for plate checks over my phone, and if, you know, someone calls in, you know, a reporter or an observation, I try to get in front of them, get to them really fast, and then we just follow them. The ice people hate it. They do not like being watched when they work. If they get out of the cars, we film them, we put in the rap response, people come running, you know, 50 people show up with cameras within a few minutes. Sometimes not always, sometimes there's an attempt to make some noise to work people or to problem observers. So there've been a few instances, for instance, we had a large convoy, and I've gotten behind them and just lay on the horn, and then dozens more people come in, you get tin more cars, and they just get swarmed, and basically follow it out town. It is proven relatively effective, I think, at restraining them, although it has certainly not stopped them. I've seen them abducting a number of neighbors, and I've seen them do a lot of terrible stuff, but it's clearly been it's clearly been it's been it's been it's been it's been it's the goal. What it's effective in doing what? Like, you know, they just, they don't hassle people as much if they think they're being watched or like, what's the objective? So I think there's a few different things. I mean, first, on the goal is when I have seen them abduct people, for instance, it's hard to even describe the violence of it and the suddenness of it and and how shocking it is. This isn't like a police stop where they pull over, they arrest someone and they put them back at car, they, you know, they write up everything, they talk to people. You will be driving along suddenly out of the SUV in front of you, Jeep wagon year or whatever, often a wagon year, two masked men jump out. They won someone down on the street, maybe three more wagon years up and suddenly there's 20 armed guys on the street. They grab the person. They don't talk to them. There's no attempt to say who are you. They've grabbed them. They are carried struggling into the back of the SUV and then the doors are gone. Shut them. They're gone. The whole thing can last 60 seconds. There's no chance to find out who it is. There's no record of it. So if we don't get the person's name before in the car, they're just gone. We can't, we can't confirm who they are. We can't confirm what happened to them. We can't get them an attorney. We can't confirm if they're a citizen or anything about them. There's no sense as they know who they're taking. Often it seems like they are working until they spot someone on the street who's walking on the company to as a person of color, but people I've seen being taken were, I think two of them were black and two were Latino. It's shocking. It's like it's like watching the abduction. If you didn't know if they didn't have uniforms with on it, you think it's a kidnapping. So you've just seen this just from your driving around. You've seen four of these. I've seen this happen four times. Two of them were ice cars. I was following that suddenly stopped and grabbed someone. One was like a military operation. They deployed into an intersection. There were tons of agents. They pepper sprayed a bunch of people. There was almost a riot because of the violence of it. It was a major commercial intersection. One was a car that I was following that I had flagged his eyes or thought was ice, but had only a moment to confirm. They suddenly pulled into an alley and chased them in into an alley and grabbed them there. I think it was probably the only witness. Then two of them were 16-year-old teenagers that were taken out of a car. I showed up after a number of other people showed up, but they were still in the process of taking them. That turned into a massive showdown. There was a crowd. The end of tear-gassing about half the neighborhood. The beating up several protesters. The infamous picture of them pepper spraying someone from three inches away on the ground was from that incident. So this was happening all over the city and all over the region. Yeah. So circling back to like, okay, I mean just almost like to be the devil's advocate or whatever. You might think people on the other side would say, well, you guys are creating the problem by following them around. You're not actually really solving anything. You've got the guys anyway. And this is some light nighting bullshit that's not actually achieving anything. What would be your reaction to that? They were doing this before. Many people started doing this. This appeared to be how they wanted to operate. It's really difficult even describe it. But for instance, I've seen many instances where ICE have gotten out of the cars and not really done anything really to immigration. Simply got out and brandished weapons, waited for a crowd to gather and then tear gas their crowd. But Vina would do this frequently. Vina would roll around in a large, common way. Park some were often in a gas station, often a speedway gas station for some reason. He would sort of wander around in front with his little platoon of guards around him while the crowd gathered. He would sort of posture. He always had photographers with him and they would take pictures from sort of posturing his steering at the crowd. And then he would peel out and they would just toss some here. The escanners were off the window on the way out. Or Vina would even throw one. He tore gas up, parked near me for no particular reason. And you see them operating. It becomes obvious that there's not any effort here to do this in a, you know, the right way. There's not an effort to do this in a way that is consistent with what we think of as law enforcement. And so what has happened, of course, is that the observers like me have enforced to adopt more aggressive tactics that were on them more consistently because they don't give us an opportunity otherwise. If you are not behind them at every minute, they may jump out and grab someone and that person will disappear. And one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is that when I saw this happen, you know, especially when I saw the image it was an alley. And I was the only witness and that was one of the first times I'd seen something like this. And I did not get that guy's name in time. I could have got in my car and said, what's your name? What's your name? I mean, he may not have given it to me. They don't always have the presence of mine because they're being abducted. But sometimes they do. The teenager actually managed to get her name and she was very brave. She was crying and she looked at me and stayed her name for the camera. But, you know, this guy, I didn't say it in time. And I remembered as he was being pulled into the car and I went out there and started saying, what's your name? But he was gone. And because of that, we will never know what happened to that man. We don't know who he is. We don't know what happened to him. And when you see that and that's on your conscious and you realize that, you know, you could have been there a few seconds earlier. You couldn't have gotten his name. You could have been gotten helped get him a lawyer. You could have figured out, you know, what happened to that man. It's really very, very hard to want to let these guys operate in secret. All right, guys, I've been waiting to update you on the cap situation in the house until the next mall's ad came back in the rotation. So this is the big moment for everybody. All right, people have been wondering, people have been asking. And dead happened. I I fold it. We folded like a cheap suit. And my daughter and husband got a cat an indoor cat, not just the neighborhood cat neighborhood cats still coming around. So now I'm like a cat, maybe. And, you know, I'm not that happy about it. But the family's happy. And the cats are happy because they've got small. So, you know, that makes me feel good, I guess, inside new cat's name, Slinky. In case you're wondering, it's kind of a one part of Slinky like he's sort of a dog-ish cat. And he plays fetch. Just kind of do not do cats play fetch. I have no idea. I've never heard of that before. But, you know, I'm not a cat person. I guess I am a cat person now. But historically, I haven't been so I don't really know. As mentioned, this podcast is sponsored by Smalls for limited time. We get 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to Smalls.com slash the bull. Smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients. You find them your fridge and it's delivered right to your door. That's why cats.com names Smalls their best overall cat food. Smarting with Smalls is easy. You just share info about your cat's diet health and food preferences and Smalls puts together a personal example for your cat. No more picking between random brands at the store. Smalls is the right food to satisfy any cats craving. And that's true about Slinky. I gotta tell you, there's an Wall Street Journal article about millennial parents who are going bankrupt because they're feeding their children so much sushi. And that's me. And I was just totally clocked by a trend story. And now it's true of the cats. It's like the child and the cat both have tastes like they're in Versailles. It's like they're in the Queen's Court. These little animals. But I'm happy to do it. Happy the cats happy cat doesn't want the crap. All right. The cat is happy with Smalls. So make 2026 your cats healthy as you're yet. Take advantage of their new year's special and get 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to Smalls.com slash the Bullwork. One last time at 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to Smalls.com slash the Bullwork. The economist called this what you guys have been doing. One of the most significant civil disobedience efforts in America since the civil rights movement. And to me, I think that the value of it from a distance is like obvious. Right? Like we have all of this now first person video of what's happening. People are seeing it. You're seeing the negative reaction. Even the fucking cowardly Republican senators are starting to get weak need a little bit. And it's a big part because of the images. That's how you convince people what is real and what is happening in front of their face. And so I think that there has been some backlash. So the first purpose is to get the names that the people abducted to put some restraints on them so they can't operate like secret pleas. The second goal here is just to make a record for the public. The records that are being made by observers. And it's not just me. I want to be really clear that what I'm doing many thousands of people are doing. There's nothing special about me. But what people are doing that record is now filtering into the public and is changing public opinion. And I think that's vital. And even getting the press in, I mean, there's been some controversy recently in the local rap response groups who are wildly bring press and actually got kicked out of my local rap response. Although there's some others that are strict for bringing press. But getting press in the car and then they see this happen firsthand on camera. The view of the not having press in there is because some folks want to do it anonymously. They're worried that the government will come for them or something. So they don't want press. There's a lot of paranoia. And I would describe in the act of his circles that the government will come and impose consequences later if they're identified. But the reality is I would say it's mostly irrational. We're following ice in our cars. They have our license plates. And in fact, what they'll do sometimes is it'll happen to me twice. It's a look up your license plate when they're following you and then they will drive and park in front of your house and tell you you live here. We're going to rescue if you keep following us. They have done that to you? They've done to me twice. Yeah. Yeah. I saw another story about somebody who lost their clear. Like there are some other and it's hard to verify all this stuff. Is that a coincidence? Or this happened? They remove your PSA pre-check. But the reality is I think everyone who's involved in this understands there is a level of risk. These are violent men. The real risk comes from the fact that they could confront you on the ground and it would go out and get out of hand. This happened to outspreading Renee Good. You know, they could remove your PSA pre-check too. I mean, I guess I that's fine. I don't mind fancy enough to have PSA pre-checked. But you can take your shoes off. Yeah. I mean, I will live with that. I will live with that for the purposes of protecting my neighbors. I do not believe that they have they could like legally charge me in a significant way. They have occasionally detained observers like me. I have actually when they have stopped me in the past. There's been a few times for the stopgains that they're threatened to arrest me. I said arrest me. Do it. You know, and I will figure out in the court because I have a legal right to be here. What about the fear? I mean, obviously, Alex Freddie and Renee Good were doing some version of this. And so I do wonder what that's like among other activists that you talk to or folks more afraid or they're more precautions being taken. The real risk is that they are these men are quite violent. They're not well trained. Often they're not well disciplined. Even when they are well trained, they're heavily armed. There's always the possibility that this could escalate into. And I've seen observers get their windows smashed. I've seen them get pepper sprayed and dragged up kind of beaten up. And then of course, in those two instances, they got shot. I mean, now it's a praise case. I mean, just just brutally executed shot in the back ten times. That's the fear. I think that everyone understands that's a risk. You know, I would recommend if you're doing this to take precautions to avoid that. I, you know, not criticize I was proud of you because obviously I don't know who knows what situation he thought he'd end up in. But if I was doing this, I would definitely never take anything that would look like a weapon because it could be used as a rationale. And when you get confronted with ICE agents, you know, don't escalate. You say, I'm not impeding you physically. You say, have a right to be here. I say, if you want to arrest me, you can arrest me here. But you don't don't do anything that looks like escalation with that said with that said, I mean, I, you know, ultimately, I don't think Renee good escalated. I don't think out spreading X escalated. There is just an element of risk to this and it's inherent in the effort. Talk to us about the supposed de escalation. What's that that's what's like on the ground? It's kind of hard to see, you know, from a distance and tell like we're everything is mediated through what's coming in our social media feeds, et cetera. And I saw some reporting from Minneapolis Archivian that like about the same number of cars are going out of patrols as we're going up before. Obviously, you don't have like the little garbles like running around smoke bombing people. So that's a minor plus, I guess. Yeah. So the major changes that we've seen have primarily been that we don't see these militarized convoys rolling through with Greg Bavino. There was these really, really aggressive escalatory actions. They almost seem to intended to cite community violence where he would just roll through and try and cause chaos in the streets. And we haven't seen as much of that. But what we have seen, there's the other side of this is what I've described as the secret police side of this. And what we have seen is an increase in these or really, I guess, of stability in the number of these lurking ice cars that hide in alleys, unmarked cars, agents just sort of rolling through the neighborhoods, scoping things out. And we've also seen, I think, at least no change and maybe an increase in the aggressiveness towards observers like myself. And so it's a little confused on the ground. What direction we're going? I think that's because probably the administration's a little just confused about what direction they're going. So there have been, you know, I think the last really 48 hours, a lot more, you know, sort of social media conversation about some of the more aggressive tactics from protesters like on the left, like we saw they had lit something on fire in the neighborhood and got into a little application with somebody. There's this video going yesterday of people like shutting down a street and checking every car's plate that went by. That makes me uncomfortable, part of what I don't like about ice is the papers please culture, you know, and so I don't think that our side should be doing papers, please either. What's your sense of what's happening, you know, in the protest movement? Unfortunately, this is going on. I think there has been sort of an increase in paranoia among the community responders. For instance, at the beginning of this, I found it relatively easy to bring press on right along to see this stuff. There's an increasing suspicion of the press. Some of that is just kind of the evolution over time as people have been in this high stress state for a long time. I think some of it may be that you have more traditional left-wing protest leaders that have, and we're not initially not prominent in this at all, have made an effort to sort of step forward and sort of take control of some of these structures. And, you know, to be clear, the vast majority engaged in rapper response are just everyday people. They're not even particularly ideological necessarily. They're certainly not necessarily far left. I mean, it's just moms and dads, garstaining, watch outside their kids school, for instance. And so there's been a bit of a clash there. My view of it is that most of this stuff is pretty excessive. I'm not a big fan of putting barricades and checking people's plates. You know, I think that creates fear as almost as much as ice does. Certainly, at the other day, that was at the site of how it's pretty, he's killing. But, you know, when people were lighting fires, I'm very strongly objected to that because I was here in 2020 and I saw all the risks that you have this spills over in a civic unrest. And I think it's very important that what we're doing here, part of why we have such massive buy-in from the community and part of why it's been really effective, is that we are restricting ourselves the things that are legal and constitutional. We are simply driving public redways. We are observing people's license plates. We are communicating publicly through public channels. We are maintaining lists of suspect plates. We are blowing whistles when we see something fishy. None of that is too dramatic behavior, although when you aggregate it to thousands of people, it's pretty effective. We start doing things like setting up barricades. We start setting fires. The things get violent, for God's sake. I really think that undercuts our case. And I really hope we can avoid going down that road. And I think buy-in-large people agree with me. I mean, I think the rank and file of people doing rapid response are, again, they're just ordinary people, and they don't want that. But there are certainly, as always, there are some people who are more radical or more aggressive, and they want to push us out direction. And I think there's some tension here. All right, guys. I want to tell you about one of our new sponsors, Helix. The Helix mattresses, and they're sick. Okay, that's great. And I got a little problem, actually, for myself, which is that we just got a new mattress, far bedroom, before Helix became a sponsor. So we got the new Helix mattress for the guest bedroom. And I got a guest stand here this week. He's in for the nine-inch nails concert on Thursday. And he's sleeping on a better mattress than me. And I'm reflecting on that. I guess that makes me a good host and all that. But Helix mattress is comfy, sturdy, it's exactly what I'm looking for in a mattress. And I guess that's the key thing about Helix is that it can be a little bit different depending on what you're looking for. You've got a Helix sleep quiz that matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. That makes buying a mattress easy. You have free shipping and seamless delivery. They deliver the mattress right to your door. I can tell you how I experience that. That's awesome. They also got a Helix guarantee, which means you can rest easy. They're seamless returns and exchanges. It's a customer first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress, the 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. And let me tell you, it's worth it. The Helix, they got a study. They even did math. They did some math for you. If you don't believe my testament to how much better the Helix mattress is, a study they found that 80% of those involves on increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on a Helix mattress. So get on board. Go to helixleap.com slash bulwark for their president's day's day. It's 27% off site line exclusive for listeners of the Bullwark podcast. That's helixleap.com slash bulwark for 27% off site line. Make sure to enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you that's helixleap.com slash bulwark. Back to the regular folks you were talking about. You mentioned this also on blue sky yesterday. There's a bunch of other activism happening that's like a little bit off the radar of folks. And I just thought it'd be nice for you to talk about like the other things you're saying from the community as far as community response in Minneapolis. Yeah so this gets overlooked. It's not as exciting as following an ice car on a car chase which is getting all the attention. But what is happening? We have thousands of people in hiding here in Minneapolis. You know not just people who are undocumented. I used to appear to be pretty indiscriminately targeting anyone who's not white. And so many families of color, Black, Latino, are basically pretty gotten public. They're afraid to send their kids to school. Some of our schools are 50, 60, 70% absenteeism. Our school system is more or less in a state of collapse right now. It's akin to COVID. It's a disaster if someone who works in school policy. And what we've seen is that many of these people are basically being supported by their neighbors. So I have friends, you know and we're talking not particularly political, middle class white moms who are spending all their time just going to Costco every day loading up on food and supplies and then driving down this to a list of 40 homes that they have and dropping off food for the families every day. There are thousands and thousands of people engaged in this. It's less public partly because it's just less glamorous I guess. But also because these are people who are directly engaging with families who are afraid of being targeted. So no one wants them to public eye because they have lists of houses and vulnerable families. But this is there in some ways. I think the most heroic of all of the people here because they are doing this kind of selfless work just to keep their neighbors fed and supported. You know, delivering supply for the kids, delivering games for the kids, delivering them school material so that they can do at least try to keep up with their schooling. Yeah. And this goes back to kind of what you're saying earlier about just the mass appeal. Like the thing that's been so inspiring about what's happening with Minneapolis. The thing I think has been so effective about it like politically is just like these sort of just regular acts of kindness. These are sort of defending your neighbors and trying to protect your community, you know, from this mass like invading force. Like if something that just resonates with most people who aren't sociopaths, you know, and I think that like focusing on that is something that is politically salient in a way that some of the other more 10 US political issues are not. There are people here who make this into a movement to push out law enforcement generally or even people who want to make it a democratic thing. What has really made it, like you say, so given to this mass appeal, is the sense that there's something just offensive about the idea that armed men are going to come into your community and they're going to grab your neighbors and make it terrify your neighbors and they're going to keep your neighbors kids out of school. I know these are people we live with, some of them we know, some of them we just see, it doesn't matter. You know, our sense is that our job is to protect our neighbors. And I think that that sentiment is, it just goes deeper than any political ideology. And people have written about this, this is not an original idea in my part. But what's ironic here is in some ways, it seems that the premise of Stephen Miller and the Trump administration is that we wouldn't feel this way about our immigrant neighbors. We're different culture than them, we're different race in them, and so we wouldn't have this bonds of community. And it turns out that not only do we have them, but they're so much more powerful than ICE ever expected. Yeah, actually the vice president's made the opposite case, right? That like social cohesion is hurt by having, you know, all these different immigrant communities in the city. And you guys would demonstrate that to be not the case. And it's the vice president that is the one that is trying to be socially discohesive. There's just one element, as you can imagine, COVID in 2020 and there's like this kind of masking subtext of all this. And it's like brought some clarity to me. I got into a little trouble over Chris's break. I was on a John Stewart and we were making some old jokes about people that were still like we're forever masking. And that created some backlash on social media, as you might imagine. And obviously, I want people to protect themselves with their sick and protect their neighbors. They're sick. And you know, obviously, but like one of the reasons I think why like a sort of permanent masking culture is a turn off for me is that like it is unneighbourly, right? Like there's this kind of cultural norm of communication of being able to say to your neighbor that like you know who I am, I know who you are. We live here together. We care about this community and we want to help you. And having these masked thugs come in and try to screw with that, I think brings a little clarity to why maybe some of us were uncomfortable with some arguments around masking. I'm wondering what you make of that. You know, I'm enough a libertarian to say that if people want to mask. You do whatever they want. Yeah, they want to mask the mask. I mean, if it makes them feel safe for that's fine. I will say that personally, I don't really wear a mask ever. I'm not overly worried that ice will identify me, you know, and I, you know, sure take the risk, I guess with this getting sick. And one of the things that has made the ice agent so unnerving when you see him is they are all masked. They're all masked and it looks like a street gang. Right. There's something disturbing about a bunch of men unloading from a black SUV who are all heavily masked. There are identities totally obscure and they're all carrying weapons and they start engaging in violence and grabbing people in the street and, you know, carrying people away. There's something about that image that leaves you shocked. The first time I saw it had to come home, I literally came home and I laid on the couch over there for about two hours and just sort of tried to process what I'd seen. And I think that if they were not masked, if they wore uniforms that look more official, if they, you know, basically look like employees of the government as opposed to a street gang, you know, maybe the public backlash would be lessened. So, so I think there's probably a less than that. One other news item is other, you know, kind of people that are showing some, some heroism right now are the folks that work for the government. We have eight additional federal prosecutors who are quitting the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office, who had been in the Apple Star Tribune yesterday. There are six other prosecutors that already left. So that's 14. Basically, the short of this is that they are, you know, being asked by the government to use the power of the state to terrorize people like Renee Good's wife and others. And it's nice to see that like level of resistance and pushback as well. I don't know what else you're seeing on that front or otherwise. It's hard to sort of even even put in the words the unanimity of opposition ice in a Minneapolis, especially, but really across the Twin Cities and a lot of Minnesota, I think, at this point. No one here really believes that what ice is doing is immigration enforcement. If you were doing immigration enforcement, this is a horrendous way to do it because you require many men with guns and a lot of violence to even arrest one person. The overwhelmingly sense on the ground here is that this is a retributive campaign against our city and our state. And I think that that has leaked through into the broader culture here. There's anti ice material on every street post on every storefront, you know, every business. And I just think that, you know, you've seen it in even, you know, in places that are more ordinarily, what I think would be more predisposed to be at least, you know, somewhat friendly. I mean, I think, for instance, our police department, but while there's complicated politics within the police department, I can tell you from the ground that it's very obvious there is no love loss between the Minneapolis police department and ice. You will be doing a rapid response observing ice. You know, frankly, I've had a couple times all-spotting ice carnival trying to get away from you by making a legal turn or running a red light in this like I'm sorry, no, I'm not going to let you do that. So I'll just follow them right through. And you know, there's a police car right there. They don't see anything. They're not pulling over. They know what's happening. They just let me go. Ice is not making the jobs easier for a law and rest the law enforcement here in Minnesota. We appreciate those guys looking the other way. All right, we're going to go rapid fire through a couple of your past internet controversies just to get updated on them. All right. You're really? You're your biggest one, I guess, when you're fighting a lot with people during the campaign in 24 about whether the economy is actually bad or whether you're in what you'd call a vibe session, whether people just felt like it was bad, it wasn't that bad. I would say that that argument split us at the bulwark as well. Like, like JVL was I think more on your side of that case. I was kind of one on the other side of it that the economy was annoying. It wasn't a recession, but it was like really annoying for people. It was like in people's faces how much they had to pay more and how quickly that happened. We're like a year away from that now. The Trump economy is not as a little worse, right? But it's not kind of on a similar trajectory. I'm wondering how you feel about all of that now and and what you think the current state of affairs is. I definitely haven't changed my view on that. I think that Trump's economy is like you say, it's worse. It's not. It definitely seems like it's on the downslip a little bit. But the amount of anger about Trump's economy is extraordinary. I mean, people really seem to think that we're experiencing severe inflation. And while certainly tariffs are a terrible policy and not helping, inflation is not that high. I mean, it's much lower than it was during a lot of Biden's administration. And I can't think of any reason that people would be so angry about 3% inflation or whatever beyond this social media and media narrative that the economy is terrible. It just seems severely disconnected from what we're seeing on the ground. I expected whatever happened with Biden, essentially, end with Trump. That Trump would take office in that the aura of good economy that seems to surround the Republican presence would suddenly attach to him and that everyone would think the economy is great. I was completely incorrect. People hate it. People are miserable. And so at this point, I really just don't see any other explanation than that there is just a deep seeded pessimism that is somehow leaking into the psychosphere. You're blaming the phones. You're blaming the phones. Not inflation being annoying. I think it's largely the phone. I think it's, I think it's that we communicate all day on social media and media and what sells on social media, what gets clicks and retweets and shares is gloom and doom. No one's going to click something and say, oh, it looks okay. It looks pretty good. But if you say worst of the economy ever, no one can afford anything. No absolutely nothing's affordable. Inflations 50% everyone shares that and that is what permeated all of our brains. All right. This one is a little harder to explain for people who are not on the internet. So stick with me. But last year, Groc targeted you. Groc is Elon Musk's AI program inside of X. I guess this AI explained in detail how to break into your home, assault you, do other things to you. This happened after an update to Groc. So I think there's some theories about what was happening there exactly. I just explained that and then I have an updated news item for you on it. Yeah. I mean, essentially Elon Musk updated Groc to make it less woke and immediately malfunctioned. I started calling himself mechahiller. I actually noticed initially it was making really egregious anti-submitted comments. Making comments about people's Jewish sounding surnames. The far right asked it to essentially generate sexual assault fantasies about me. It did so enthusiastically and then they just extended from there and to telling people how to break in my house, how to kill me. Just very, very graphic material and it has become kind of a fixture unfortunately. And my public reputation I guess is that someone always comes in and starts talking about Groc and me and it's pretty weird. How did you react to that in a moment? Did you? I mean, I was kind of like, I guess I'm not a lawyer. Did you call authorities? I had spoken to some lawyers about it. My example I've used is that there were safety restrictions on Groc. They were there for good reason. They knew why they had them. They took them off. It's like taking a seatbelt off a roller coaster. You, someone's gonna get tossed out and I was a lucky one. But clearly Elon Musk has just continued to be pretty reckless with Groc given what it's going out. Well, I'm rooting for a lawsuit. You should do it's best for you. There's a Groc news item today. This is from FaZe, Sidiqi at the Washington Post. I thought this was interesting. Elon Musk has pushed internally to get Groc to lean into NSFW, not say for work content. Workers were told they'd be working with sexual material. They're advised to gauge new job candidates comfort with doing so. Soon they're training Groc on glued conversations and depictions of sexual violence. So that was happening internally. It's a new Washington Post story. It seems kind of relevant to your backstory. That does seem relevant. I'll have to think about that a little bit. It's honestly one of the things that I'm interested in here is it seems very clear that Groc's malfunctions are just directly flowing down from Elon Musk's severe personality effects. No reasonable product engineer or even company head would push for any of this. But Elon Musk believes himself untouchable and thinks that he can make this into his pet robot that will just do horrific things for his amusement. You might even call it mecca musk. That yes. There's the third one. This one I was even hard for me to follow. That's the Will Stancell show. There's neo-Nazi propaganda. This was a person this is a real story. Okay, for people who are listening who are like what and how are you talking about? This is going to feel like it's a madlibs of a dystopia. There's a person who worked in concessions at the Philadelphia Phillies stadium. They were fired for their commitment to white identity politics. She created a cartoon about you that was neo-Nazi propaganda essentially a white supremacist cartoon that then musk obviously allowed the proliferate on his platform. It's particularly relevant just in the bleak path of where we're going. It just got a lot of views and if somebody that doesn't have a lot of resources can use these AI's to so easily make white identity politics cartoons targeting not really public figures. No offense. Very minor public figures. That's pretty scary. I'm a strange person to be a subject of a show. This actually kind of flows out of the rock incident and that I think it attracted a lot of attention to me from the far right which John did very hilarious. One of the things that happened is that they did create this cartoon show about me. The premise of which is just basically that I'm I think I'm the ultra liberal that is constantly being assaulted by rock. I mean periodically I transform into a neo-Nazi and you know brutalize somebody. It's very strange but it's a little surreal. It has gotten more of an audience to expect. I think that Elon Musk has made jokes about it. It's gotten written up in the spectator somehow by the raw nationalist who's a prominent fascist. I think it really kind of goes to show how much of our politics now is just kind of this weird I would describe this almost like a digital dream space that you know random ideas and people like myself who again I'm not a person of any particular public relevance just kind of bubble up into the into the consciousness and then become these figures and then I mean I would say that as the person who's subject to that it's a really bizarre experience. I mean you know you know I just go about my day and then someone says oh there's an excellent pre-day cartoon episode about you and I'm like well I guess I'll go watch that at some point figure out what that's about but I got to go to work. I guess that is in some ways that because it ties us together too like the gap between that like what is happening in this in this digital world and you know having AI create these kind of disgusting like sort of fantasies of cartoons about universes what is like happening in the community like what you're seeing from neighbors helping other neighbors. It feels like at some point where you need to figure out a way to like you know create some better connective tissue and I don't know maybe it's our kids will be able to figure that out because they'll be more digital natives. It's strange and I mean I'll say the my personal experience I I'm very involved in my community I am the vice president of my neighborhood board I I'm cheering my DFL my Democratic caucus tonight I'm convening it I'm organizing that you know I know all my neighbors I knock out the doors my ran for office I know all the business owners of my neighborhood I'm out there just doing this for a wrap response and then there's also the second half of my life there's essentially kind of this fantasy version of me that exists on the far right there's also kind of a fantasy version of me that exists on the far left that's this you know reactionary ultra-centre in maybe collaborating with the feds kind of guy and at some point it feels like they all have to collapse together a little bit I I live in constant fear that that these internet versions of me will begin to my real life and it seems like maybe that is even happened a little bit with the ice rapid response where where there's been some hostility to me taking part and it is difficult to know like what sort of the future holds for this because this it's not a it's not a particularly fun way to live I mean I know I mean people sometimes say oh you you know everyone you're in for the cloud but it's like really it'd be nice just to not have all of this happening well man I appreciate you I appreciate the fact that you're doing this I really wanted to have you on and talk to you about it so thank you I have to ask since you're in Minnesota since you're this you know you're in the politics from the DFL there's that there's a center primary happening there Angie Craig and Peggy Flannigan I haven't followed it that closely I don't really know Peggy Flannigan that well and candor I like Angie Craig with some discrepancy of a couple of policies but I'm wondering what you what you make of that primary I have to say that I'm not I haven't at the moment I haven't paid damage attention to the to that it's a little bit ways off and we got a lot going on yeah I would say that my sense of it right now at this moment and this could be totally incorrect so don't really get us wrong sure is there's a tough moment for Angie Craig simply because ice is so predominant issue here in Minnesota and and Peggy I think has been a bit more consistent in her opposition yeah Angie has voted for things like the lock and Riley acted that I think will be used against her so I so I would have probably have I had to give someone the you know the advantage of ice yeah I probably Peggy but honestly like I don't really know and and you know they're they're both pretty strong candidates ultimately and I think it probably go either way well I appreciate you being out there in the streets all right we keep us posted as things are going off and there's anything we can do to help out with it I want to say this also but thanks for paying attention to the miss out on it's really important what's happening here and and really keep us in mind I mean again I'm just one guy there's thousands of people out here doing this and and they are every day standing in the cold for hours watching for ice to try and keep their neighbors safe and so we every one of things has really been a problem here is there assistance sometimes that they'll rest of the country has just forgotten about us and so the tension paid to what to the sacrifices of the city of this region in my neighbors it's just greatly appreciated it really helps us you know like keep hope alive right now so all right man well that's easy for us you're doing the hard work we appreciate it uh thanks so much tutti again soon everybody else stick around I got a couple things to get off my chest all right everybody before I get to my rant um I just want to shout it out my friend Savannah Guthrie and and her husband Mike they're going through some really brutal stuff right now I guess there is good reason to believe according to the Pima County Sheriff in Arizona that Savannah's mother Nancy Guthrie age 84 was abducted out of her house she's disappeared uh and have it over the weekend they're asking for tips down there so um few know anybody down in Pima County uh in Arizona please make sure to have them reach out to the sheriff's department and uh if not uh just you know keep Savannah and her family in your prayers I want to talk a little about the Texas Senate race uh on the Democratic side because I'm gonna lose my fucking mind about it but before I do so I'm gonna take on a little winding road so I want to reflect a little bit on my conversation with Tana Hasse last week I have to say I love that dude he is in good cheer he's like the the ideal the platonic ideal of a podcast for me like when other people are like what are you looking for in a podcast guess I'm gonna send them that conville the first question I ask him he responds with a question that you would think that would be rude but opposite that's actually great that's how normal people talk and what you're trying to do on a show like this is have conversations where you like get into challenging topics and learn about the other person's perspective and sometimes don't to understand their perspective you have to understand why they're asking something right the guy like makes me think even when I disagree I thought his point from the last show about like thinking back to the civil rights era and like the internal factions and you know how that gets sanded down over time it was like super important perspective that you know I lose uh from time to time I wish that Kamala Harris president it's like I have more conversations focused on big things stuff like that and uh unless just focused on the latest atrocities but um unfortunately that's not what we're at one person emailed criticizing me about that I think it's it's a legit critique and unexplained my response to it in the context of the of the Texas Center primary when I was pushing back on Tannasi on various things was talking about how like there were some excesses of this period of of the whatever you want to call it I kind of hate calling it the great awakening whatever you call it the critical race theory in this moment where a lot of these kind of issues came to the forefront there were some excesses to it in my opinion a person that that you know replied basically saying to me hey man like you want to live in like a colorblind society that like isn't reality and I don't actually I can and I think that's wrong and I also think that there's just a lot of space between like the cliche like I don't even see race you know like that nonsense and a like racially essentialist worldview where like skin colors essential central factor you look to in every social problem right and like there's a huge territory between those extremes and by the way I'm not saying that Tannasi's on the other extreme and you know I'm just saying that like there's a lot of different nuance in there and a lot of ways to kind of navigate all that and I think that it's important to think about it and you know one way I think that this is like in the Higaliian view right there's like in any big social movement there's a thesis there's antithesis and their synthesis right and and I think we're in this period now we're trying to find like some synthesis you know like there was all this good stuff that I think came out of that period like increased visibility like I always tell the story about like how awesome like how lucky I am that like now like for my kid there's a lot of kids books and kids stories that I feature people look like her which I wouldn't have been true a generation ago that's awesome like I think that representation matters I think that having diversity of thought and experience matters I think about that obviously a lot on this podcast I try hard to have people in a different background different perspectives different ideologies of course different you know racial perspectives like guys like I like I don't want to have just white guys on now like guys do love to podcast I should say so like the list of people pitching me is a lot of like guys maybe there's something structural about that we could learn about but some of the structural issues right like redlining one of the other things toonassi said last week that caught my ear was just you know the way in which like yeah sure we disagree with the school's kind of the school is really disagreeing in New Orleans I don't know like I think that there are real questions that are worth exploring all that I also think that there was just some bad stuff right like there were some of these extreme examples but there were examples of like re-segregating classes right where like you had race-based struggle sessions among kids I got bad I don't think is is the answer like some of the worst stuff you saw at the San Francisco school but it's like in just just go follow the news about what's happening the San Francisco school district if you don't think that there's some potential drawbacks to the policies that were advanced during you know this this kind of a wokening and and COVID period nothing I don't really like is using skin colors a pejorative just for white women like I don't understand why the only group that we can that we can attack their skin color and is white women and and I think that's very common right now you see that on social media a lot and I don't think we should do that it's not it's not not not saying like reverse racism is as bad as racism or anything but like that's not great I think we could stop that and and move forward as a society and be just fine and another bad thing I think is that I don't think we should be trying to stir up identity and race wars when none exactly exists and this takes us to the Texas center race here's this drama that was going on yesterday there's this tic talker who says that in a private conversation James Talleriko told her that he when he got in the race he thought he was running against a mediocre black man but it turns out he's running against a very talented black woman did he really say that I don't know that seems like a very weird thing to say I don't understand the context of the conversation hey this person was was like putting it in a worse light than it would have been in if she actually had a recording in the conversation when she doesn't but you know that happens people on social media pop off but the reaction to it then from the candidates I thought was madness first I should have mentioned the aforementioned mediocre supposedly mediocre black man that he mentioned is Colin all right I love Colin all right okay good to meet him few times obviously extremely talented person nice guy for whatever reason I key had a reaction to this that was extremely disproportionate I think to what happened and I want to just play a little bit but I understand that James Talleriko had the temerity and the audacity to say to a black woman that he had signed up to run against a mediocre black man meaning me not a formidable intelligent black woman meaning Jasmine Crockett let me just break this down into a few segments here first of all let me just give you some free advice James if you want to compliment black women just do it just do it don't do it while also tearing down a black man okay we've seen that play before we're sick and tired of it retired of folks using praise for black women to mask criticism for black men you are not saving religion for the Democratic Party over the left we already had Senator Reverend Dr. Rafael Warlock for that we don't need you you're not saying anything unique you're just saying it looking like you do so let's not talk about about like trying to find synthesis it's like every sentence in that reply is like about race it's like I'm a black man she's a black woman he's a white guy like he randomly brings out Rafael Warlock and and you know talks about how James Talleriko's only is getting attention because of how he looks and he's saying the same thing that Rafael Warlock says but I guess it's because he's a white guy that he's getting attention can we just show everybody a little grace here does anybody really think that like James Talleriko was like intentionally like trying to be racist and denigrate people like there are a lot of fucking racist out there right now we just talked about a little stance and he is a cartoon targeting him find some white supremacist let's maybe focus on the act the racists not that we all can't live and learn and get better but I've just seen the political sense like these are allies supposedly this is an important center race the democrats want to take another center they need to win this center race why are we escalating this and making it into like again this like identitarian war between factions within the parties I don't I don't get it I want to come back to the ref at Warlock Park in the second tip then there's pockets reaction crock it puts out a statement it begins it's an unfortunate that at the start of black history month this is what we're facing it's like then Talleriko puts out a statement he talks about how he knows how hard it is to be a black person in America and how it's harder for Colin Allred and I just all that stuff maybe true or whatever but like is this the message for Texas voters this is a Texas primary Donald Trump won Texas by double digits like why are we doing this what is do we think this is helping anyone do we think this is helping the democrats win in Texas to make this primary about this about like racial tension between Jasmine Kraken and James Talleriko like when you read all these people statements it sounds like like they're in a racial studies symposium at Bowdoin like there's a place for racial studies symposiums at Bowdoin it isn't a Texas Senate race though and like the median Texas voter is a 60 year old white guy that didn't go to college a key swing demographic which I talked to about Bobby Polito last week Hispanic voters that didn't go to college what is the message for them who's talking to them if you're running for Texas Senate you got to think about those people in your mind not that you don't think about black people are college educated people or whatever but like your message needs to appeal to the people you need to win you should be talking about costs and how health cars are going up and how housing cars are going up and how fucking Ken Paxon doesn't care about them and how he's a corrupt that's what you should be talking about how Donald Trump is screwing them over how he let them down like that's the stuff that you should be talking about and they're playing right in the hands you know what else what out of statement after all this Tim Scott Tim Scott put out of statement said something ain't white here James Talleriko fuck you Tim Scott like now he's trying to play on this and like and try to stir up racial tensions between the candidates let's just be honest like Tim Scott doesn't care about black and brown people like if he did he would have spoken up when brown people were being sent to a foreign concentration camp in El Salvador he would have spoken up when the Trump administration went after black refugees in Ohio and said that they're eating dogs and cats like he didn't do any of that he's not doing that he's just trying to stir up racial tensions in the Democratic primary and the Democratic candidates are letting him like this is all crazy like you have to talk about things that voters care about this isn't about let me just let you just another example this is also not about Jasmine I would like for her to run a campaign that has a message for Texas voters right now she doesn't have an issues page seems like all that she wants to talk about is drama between herself and Trump and herself and James Talleriko there are a lot of strong black women candidates out there I don't know if you guys know this I also want to tell you about some of these other candidates Julianna Stratton and Robin Kelly they're both running for Dick Durbin seat in Illinois does anybody even know they're running how about Lauren Underwood she's a congresswoman in in Illinois that I love she's great our people talking about her Angela also Brooks she's a new senator from Maryland at least of blunt Rochester she's the new senator from Delaware all of these are black women running in blue states as the less polarizing candidates not attacking other people within their party on like racialized grounds who doesn't like any of them they're great which Warnock earlier think about how Warnock ran this is one example that Raphael Warnock I love I was trying to get him on the show talking I don't know a year and a half ago and I couldn't get him to do it and I was like why and I started searching for like the interviews he does and the profiles he does the only profile I ever I saw at the time I'm sure he's had more sense was like in the Atlanta business journal or something like that Raphael Warnock was in Minnesota this week talking about the ice shootings getting people you know into the streets and getting ice out of the streets good on him for going to Minneapolis talking about actual issues he has an actual issues page on his website he knows how to run in a in a swing state and he's doing a great job and so we need more people of every race on the democratic side learning for Raphael Warnock and talking like him hopefully they're ripping him off because he knows how to win all right like that's good doing like real housewives of TikTok between the real housewives of Salt Lake and the real housewives Houston like that's not good that's not helping anybody right that's not that's not how you win Raphael Warnock knows how to actually win so I'm begging everybody in this race learn from Mary Peltola she's running in Alaska and it's kind of there is an element of identity politics to it I should just say not all identity politics is bad she's running on fish family and freedom that is about I lasking identity it's about issues that matter to people of Alaska that she is talking about and if the Democrats are going to win back the Senate they need to win in Alaska or Iowa or Kansas or Texas or Ohio and right now Sherrod Brown is running a race that is authentic to him and authentic to the people of Ohio and Mary Peltola is doing that in Alaska I've seen some decent things about the Iowa Senate candidates we'll see how that shakes out and pretty good things about the person potentially running in Kansas Leo that shakes out it's time to turn this around in Texas I'm begging James Talleriko and and Jasmine Crockett and their supporters to focus their campaign on Ken Paxton and John Cornyn and how much they fucking suck and focus their campaign on having a message for Trump voters that are disappointed about the way Trump has managed the economy and how he only cares about himself and the Trump Kennedy Center and his crypto bag and the East Wing and how he doesn't give a fuck about Texas voters how about contrasting with Trump by demonstrating that you actually care about Texas voters and they don't you can criticize each other over issues electability that's fine it's a campaign but like doing this drama nonsense where you know everything is about James Talleriko being a white man and Jasmine Crockett being a black woman it's not helping anybody it's not good nobody's learning from this nobody's growing I think that both of those candidates would be much better for the average Texan of every race than fucking Ken Paxton what and so make your case to those voters and stop with the bullshit all right there's my rant on the Texas Senate race if you stuck around for that you are also a sicko like me and David Plough but we'll be back tomorrow do we have a fun one tomorrow yeah we've got a double letter tomorrow might be a little kooky we'll see how it goes all right so we'll see you all tomorrow please the baller podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brape