It Could Happen Here Weekly 220

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, Listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. 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Live from South by Southwest, March 16th, we'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative, talented creators in the industry. It's truly a who's who of the podcasting world. creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is... See all the nominees now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app, Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at audible.com. Call Zone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last Friday, I teamed up with Lance from the Canadian-based politics show The Serfs to talk about the tragic events of last week in Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia. On Tuesday, February 10th, an 18-year-old named Jessie Van Rutzlar killed her mother and stepbrother in their home, then took two guns and went to Tumblr Ridge Secondary School, where she killed five students, one teacher, and finally herself. Two other kids were critically injured with gunshot wounds, but have survived. The shooter did attend Tumblr Ridge Secondary School years ago, but dropped out. For the past three to five years, it's kind of unclear, Jessie identified as a transgender girl. Tumblr Ridge is a very small town, with just 2,400 residents in northeastern British Columbia. This was the worst school shooting in Canada since 1989. The sequence of events during this incident were very similar to the Lelouch shooting in Canada ten years ago, where the gunman killed two family members at home before going to a school. During our conversation, Lance and I discuss the spread of misinformation, how the online writers tried to weaponize the deaths of these people for their own political agenda, and how the shooter's online activity shows a growing fascination with mass shootings this past year. Here's that conversation. I'm sure everyone knows that right now Canada is a nation in mourning. And I also did probably want to start this out by reading the names of the deceased because it's one of the things that the families have been asking for. So the victims from the Tumblr Ridge Secondary School shooting are Abel Wanza, who was 12, Ezekiel Schofield, who was 13, Kylie Smith, who was 12, Zoe Benoit, who was 12, Takaria Lampert, who was 12, Shanda Evigwanda Duran, who was 39, Emmett Jacobs, who was 11, and Jennifer Jacobs, who was 39 years old. So I guess I'll start with Garrison. How have you been processing and or tracking the story since it happened? Yeah, pretty horrifying. incident that happened last Tuesday. Very soon after it happened, there was like right-wing narratives trying to use the deaths of these children and family members for their own political agenda. And I started tracking that pretty soon and then also trying to like verify as much information about the actual circumstances of the shooting and who the shooter was, around that same time. Things have gotten pretty clear now a few days later. But it's been a nightmare to sort through all this stuff, especially all of the political opportunism being done by a variety of right-wing influencers and quote-unquote news agencies. Yeah, I was doing the same thing right after the event happened. I noticed that there was a lot of, for people who don't know, right-wing online operatives like The Pleb Reporter and Juno News and Cat Canada. And these are all very popular right-wing social media accounts on Twitter in Canada, or at least based in Canada for their origins. But then they usually get retweeted, quote-tweeted, and amplified eventually by the far right in the U.S., which has a very corrosive effect. And I think by the time we're talking about this right now, I saw that Donald Trump Jr., the son of the presidency of the United States, is doing an entire, I assume, blowed out of his mind, rumble special on the shooting. Just uniquely going after trans people the entire time. Like, for a small little town of, what, just over 2,400 people? It has to be beyond a shell shock to first have to go through something that's horrifying and then deal with the international right-wing apparatus. Yeah, they're going through the motions, right? Like, this is not the first time. This won't be the last time that they try to do something like this. It's not getting as much traction, I think, as it used to. There's a lot of other stuff happening in the States. Around the time, like, news was breaking in the States about the shooting that happened. It was Wednesday during, you know, Pam Bondi's Epstein hearing. So there's been a lot of other stuff happening. So I don't think they've gotten as much, like, concentrated attention on this as some of the online right has, like, wanted to or, you know, like the Matt Walsh types, lips of TikTok, that sort of thing. but they're definitely giving it a go. It's gross, right? It's gross to use the deaths of all these people. Yeah, absolutely. Not to mention the way the entire thing's been framed is abhorrent. I mean, obviously, you know, we're speaking from a perspective where we don't want to vilify an entire group based on one, like, you know, horrifying monster's actions kind of thing, right? Because that doesn't happen in the other direction for cis people, and that's what you've got to be quick to point out. But I feel like the Matt Walsh's and the libs of TikTok have, and it's a horrifying thing to say, but like their perfect narrative, right? It's kind of like in a twisted way, something they're actually quite pleased about, it almost seems. Yeah, they make a lot of money off this. Yes, yeah, exactly. They profit off of human suffering and they try to spread as much of it as possible. The first aspect I was trying to look at this story from was what it was early. What are the families themselves asking for? Or what does the county in terms of support, that kind of stuff. And you move on from that, and then immediately it was, well, now there's just an overwhelming, very apparent right-wing mechanism gearing up, and it's going to be kind of devastating for a country like Canada that doesn't really have maybe or isn't as used to having the eyes of the world from the transphobic, you know, turf side of the Internet. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about Jennifer Strang, the mother of the shooter. despite being a self-described conservative libertarian Jessie's mother publicly supported her transition made posts in support of trans people in July 2024 she shared a LGBTQ pride graphic reading good people don't spend their time harassing marginalized communities and wrote, quote, as a conservative leaning libertarian who lives in the north and loves living in a small town I really hope the hate I see online is just boring old people and not true hatred do better and educate yourself before spewing bullshit online makes you look dumb. Evolve. I normally don't say anything. I normally don't go on shitbook to see the keyboard warriors, and I know I can't control or shield my kids from everything, but please, for the love of fuck, can you get your shit together so we don't have to bring our kids up in a world full of hatred? Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate? Please stop the bullshit." So, pretty soon after this shooting, based on an early active shooter report describing the shooter as a quote-unquote female in a dress with brown hair, online right-wing accounts started trying to identify who this possible shooter was by looking at trans people in the area of Tumblr Ridge. They misidentified one person who is a relative of the shooter, but put out photographs of them claiming that she was the shooter. This person is now having to lock down all of their accounts and is scared to go outside due to the horrific wave of harassment they're facing. What is wild about that aspect of the story is I've seen accounts like the Pled reporter who popularized, you know, publishing that photo. But I think Rachel Gilmore is the one who also pointed out that there was the misuse of a photo in an actual CBC radio broadcast image thumbnail as well, which is also kind of just shocking to hear because these are, again, innocent people who might have targets now put on their back because they're being directly identified as some kind of a mass shooter or monster. And then in addition to that, like now I'm wondering how much of this is going to be something that they're capable of containing, especially considering that it's being still proliferated. Like I saw an account called Bricks News, which I assumed would be about Bricks, you know, the economic lines between a number of different nations, and instead was publishing the false photo of, again, a completely innocent person. And I think at the time, 17,000 likes, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions. It's really dangerous. I mean, yeah, that's part of the intent here. You know, places like Kiwi Farms trailblaze a lot of this, quote-unquote, early research. And the point is to cast as large of an end as possible to damage as many trans people as they can using horrific events like this. The cruelty is part of the point. And, you know, Blaine gets laid at a combination of trans-enabled mental delusion, SSRIs and hormones, saying that those things are causing the shooting well before we have any evidence to determine what types of medications someone could be on, who they actually are, or any possible motive. One kind of crude thing that I've seen a lot is right-wing accounts like End Wokeness, allegedly Jack Posobiec, saying that the shooter, quote-unquote, gunned down 35 kids to make it seem like a massacre of such a large magnitude, right? The number of kids that have been killed, and other people as well, obviously is horrific. 35 people were not shot in this shooting, though. There was 25 people with non-gunshot-related injuries as a result of the incident. And that is the number that people are framing as being total number of people shot, which just isn't true. And then they also very quickly start sharing unsourced graphs. I'm sure you've seen stuff like this, right? Saying that trans girls make up the highest demographic of mass shooters per capita. You see these things go all over the place. By the world's richest man. He's sharing that a lot online right now. Yeah, and this has been a thing the past three years, right? This is something they've been doing well before any actual incident can be even used to create data. They've created fake graphs that show this. There's factors that get people to believe these sorts of things, right? There is certainly a selection bias that determines which types of shootings gets a lot of media attention. And the other issue that I've talked about a lot in previous shootings is there's a lot of different definitions of a mass shooting. You know, a mass shooting versus a mass killing versus like a school shooting, right? All these are different terms. Even the term school shooting can be used to refer to a variety of very different incidents revolving around gun violence, right? There can be gang-related violence at a school. There can be shots fired as an escalation of a physical fight. students bringing guns to school and accidentally firing them, which happens more often than what you would think, like as someone who just brings a gun in their backpack, not intending to do a shooting, but it accidentally fires in the school. This happens multiple times a year. There's shootings that... I didn't know that. Dormitories, right? Those get counted as mass shootings at like a college dormitory, interpersonal violence. There's neighborhood shootings that affect but aren't targeting the school, like drive-by shootings. or even something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which some people have categorized as a school shooting because it was on a college campus, right? But these are all very different types of violence, right? These aren't like, you know, intentional mass shooting violence where someone who's trying to shoot as many people as possible and then usually kill themselves, right? That's a different thing than a lot of these other things that I mentioned. But they all get lumped under this one label of school shooting. And all these different, you know, data collection criteria can produce very different stats. And depending whether you're measuring your injuries versus the deaths, you know, specific weapons like knives versus guns and how many years are being sampled or if there's connections to other violent activity, there could be very, very different results in how you categorize, you know, mass killings or mass shootings. The mass killing database has 631 incidents in the United States since 2006, of which about one to three, it's kind of unclear, one to three are done by people who have been reported as transgender, which is an underrepresented sample size. The Violence Project has one transgender mass shooter in their database of about 195 mass shootings. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, which also measures gunshot injuries, not just deaths, fewer than one in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender. According to a Gallup poll for 2023, about 2% of Gen Z identify as transgender. And if you also count non-binary people, it brings it up to 4%. but you can have all the stats on hand if that doesn't really do very much. Once you're arguing about statistics and like semantics of terms, when kids have died, you're kind of already starting to lose the emotional battle, right? Like I can say all of that, but like, that's not actually going to be helpful, right? Like fact checking doesn't work to dissuade disinformation. And when you're dealing with such an emotionally charged incident, like kids being murdered, having to read off a paragraph like that just doesn't, doesn't really help, right? Parents just want to know why this is happening and what can be done to stop it. And all they know is that, you know, since 2023, there has been a series of shootings done by young people who either attempted to or did transition genders, right? That's what they know. And they want to know, you know, why is this happening and how to stop it. Yeah, one of the things that I've tried to push up against, because you are getting a lot of Americans who are pushing that narrative right now, is to point out, because I've seen people saying like, this epidemic of trans mass violence is a scourge. And I think they're blending Canada and the U.S. into one nation because I was like, just to be clear, this is the first mass shooting committed by a trans person in Canadian history ever. And there's a lot of trans people in British Columbia. Yeah. Well, across the country. I mean, it's one of those things where I'm like, this is not an epidemic of which, like, oh my God, you have a high probability of being hurt by a trans person in your life. It couldn't be further from the truth, right? Like, the stats are still overwhelmingly in the other direction. You're more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence if you're a trans person than if you're a cis person. Yeah, no, that is another problem here is, yeah, a lot of these, you know, data collection tools aren't counting violence in Canada. These are all stuff based in the States. But for, you know, the culture war, it's not that hard to, you know, move that border up 500 miles to include things that are happening in Canada. in a rhetorical sense for, you know, your Matt Walsh's, your end wokeness's, even, you know, your Fox News anchors, right? Yeah. This thing that people are talking about on the right, about this, you know, epidemic of trans violence, what this has also done is created like a counter reaction from trans influencers to whenever something horrible happens like this, to blame these other groups like, you know, 0-9-A or 7-6-4, right? This has become something that's also now been very consistent. You know, there is a kernel of truth in this. This is based on a real thing that has happened before, but the invocation of this has often, you know, expanded greatly beyond its actual kernel. Can you explain it for people who are completely unfamiliar? Because I remember, like, even a year ago, I had to start reading up. I'm like, what is all this? satanic cult rituals with participation requirements of self-harm and all this stuff? Like, okay. Yeah. So you see a lot of people now, when there's news coverage, a lot of trans people who have accounts online, talking about how, quote-unquote, satanic Nazi pedophiles have groomed another vulnerable queer kid into doing a mass shooting. There's a viral tweet, a semi-viral tweet on Twitter right now, that reads, quote, Fuck anyone talking about trans and not Adam Wathen. This includes the cops and the media, like the CBC and BBC, unquote. So yeah, what are they talking about here? You know, Adam Woffin, satanic, Nazi pedophile cults. I said, you know, O9A, 764, right? These are originally, you know, O9A is this older group, but as contemporary internet lore, it is seen as this neo-Nazi occultic organization that grooms people into sexual exploitation or into doing violence like mass shootings. 764 is an extortion ring that operated mainly on Telegram and Discord, which tried to get kids to do self-harm, produce blackmail. And roblox too? Is that true? Yeah, they're active across a lot of places, but the organizing hubs were on Discord and Telegram, and they attempted to get child sexual abuse material out of these kids and then used that to blackmail them to get even more material and then also encouraging self-harm and acts of violence. These have been real groups historically. They are getting cracked down upon pretty heavily, at least in 764's case. O9A is not really a real group anymore, arguably, but it exists as like lore. And there has been no instances of 764-affiliated people doing public acts of violence. So in this case, there's been people who have, you know, trans people online or, you know, allies who have said that this shooting is another one of these instances where these online groups of, you know, Nazis and pedophiles have, you know, groomed someone into doing violence. And they have produced some evidence for this. There was a Twitter account that allegedly belonged to the shooter that had a profile picture of a son and rad on top of a trans flag, as well as the face of the Christchurch shooter. This account had posts glorifying white supremacist mass killers and promoting the idea of creating a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest. this was a Canada-based account, but in reality, this was actually just another Nazi's account who changed their username to match that of the Tumblr Ridge shooter. And this was an attempt to troll people and just spread disinformation. And this even fooled the ADL, whose research standards have dropped dramatically the past three years. But a few days ago, the ADL put out an article where they credited posts made by this Twitter account to the Tumblr Ridge shooter and claimed that a quote-unquote preliminary investigation showed that the shooter had showed interest in white supremacy. But this was not their real account. This was just someone who also is a fan of mass shootings, like the shooter was, as we'll soon discuss, but this was someone who was just trying to troll other researchers on Twitter and see how far their disinformation can spread. This is the consequence of an organization like the ADL doing preliminary research based on Kiwi Farms posts and not actually verifying the information. I mean, the fact that I think they're actively pursuing Hassan Piker more than Elon Musk is pretty much all I need to know in terms of where they're prioritizing the search for racism. Yeah. I can get into the actual online footprint of the shooter, which we do have a decent idea of, actually. Before you get to that, because I think that's what everyone is kind of interested in, And I just want to wrap up that last part. So just to be clear, when you were mentioning those groups, you know, 764, et cetera, there is no actual history of the shooter having been into Nazi, the occults, that kind of stuff. Based on their presence, they have not been active in specific 764 communities or have showed interest in white supremacy, neo-Nazism, or the occult pedophile Nazism of O9A. This is not observable in the online footprint they have left, which is not to say the online footprint they have left is normal and good. If anything, it does point towards significant factors that are causing kids to do shootings like this, and we can trace it to a number of shootings that have happened, But the 098764 thing is more so like a meme at this point, that people similarly deploy the same way that the right deploys this epidemic of trans silence. This has become like a counter-meme to say that every time a trans person does something bad, it's actually the fault of 098764. Right, because there has been incidences in the past that could point towards that. Yeah, there could be suggestions in the past, and certainly when 764 was more active years ago, So, I mean, a lot of the kids they were grooming for child sexual abuse material were a lot of queer kids because those kids are uniquely vulnerable and are looking for community. But, I mean, that is the majority of kids affected by 764 are people who have been groomed into self-harm or producing child sexual abuse material to circulate among the organizers of these groups. So it turns out that there isn't really a connection in those two directions. You're correct in putting it out there. There's a counter push. Like I did the same thing with Charlie Kirk, right? Like I remember when the first image of the Charlie Kirk shooter being in a Groyper, hit bay with the frog style jumper. I was like, all this has to be a Groyper, right? Like I said immediately where my brain went because they do have a history of targeting that community. So, you know, you can understand why there's a pushback. Yeah. And I think people feel like they understand ideological violence easier, like, like violence caused by political ideology and are uncomfortable with the increasing amount of horrific public violence that is seemingly linked to no political ideology. It's much more nihilistic and scattershot, and that's uncomfortable. It's harder to understand the causal forces producing that, rather than just saying, you know, oh, it's another Nazi, right? That's easy. At this point, sadly, easy thing for people to understand because of a very high number of neo-Nazi mass shootings that happened in the past 10 years. But it is not 2017 anymore. And the circumstances that are inducing shootings like this have changed. Can you talk about that? Because, like you said, it's a conversation that people don't want to have. Is it because we are uncomfortable with the conversation itself, or because there's not enough information available yet to truly understand what is leading these super online shooter-slash-nihilistic deep-in-the-memes style stuff? Yeah, I think I'm a mix of both. It is both an emerging phenomenon, so people have to observe it for a certain amount of time to see the pattern. And then also it's uncomfortable and it sucks. It sucks to be in these places and look at all this stuff, right? Like I've been the past few days, I've been looking at these horrible forum posts and reading about all kinds of bad stuff and it sucks. And no one wants to do that. So I think it's a mix of factors. But yeah, I do want to talk about that. That's the kind of the... I have kind of like two sections that get into that. The first one based on her actual online footprint. The second one on more like, you know, basic societal forces, I think, is getting people to go so far to the social, like, margins. That pushes them to places, like, where the shooter hung out online. So in 2021, Jessie's mom shared a link to her kid's YouTube channel, where, quote, he posts about hunting, self-reliance, guns, and stuff he likes to This YouTube account shared the username as Jessie's Reddit account. The earliest posts from 2019 were about Roblox gaming. Then in 2021, Jessie started posting about firearms and shared a photo of her Chinese SKS, which is kind of like an AK-47 style gun, which she used for hunting. Around 2023, she started posting about, quote-unquote, starting MTF transition soon, as well as her phobia of needles. The police say that she started transitioning before this, but the earliest indication we have from her online activity puts this around 2023. On other posts on r slash trans, she asked for advice on girls' clothing, what to expect from HRT, and talked about body dysmorphia. Her very last gender-related post on Reddit still refers to herself as pre-HRT. Jessie made a single post on r slash trans guns in October 2023, sharing a video of her firing a Desert Eagle handgun at a shooting range. At this point, around the end of 2023, almost all of her posts switch to being about psychedelic drug abuse. Asking how to vape or smoke weed without leaving a smell in the house, being scammed by an online psychedelic seller in Canada, and asking if you can get high off drinking the urine from a drug addict, and asked on Reddit if it's safe to do 5-MEO-DMT alone. after she returned from the quote-unquote psych ward. She was admitted to a psychiatric facility after attempting to burn down her home with a count of aerosol while on three grams of mushrooms. Jesse also said that she was diagnosed with ADHD, autism, major depressive disorder, and OCD, and was prescribed a mix of different SSRIs as well as an antipsychotic for sleep. In one comment on one of her multiple Reddit posts asking about trying 5-MeO-DMT after being arrested for arson. She wrote, quote, It is a wonder I'm still alive, yet I am. Speaks volumes about how much I've been trying to keep breathing when all my effort goes towards keeping alive, unquote. Her Reddit activity drops off in April of 2024. This could mean that she just stopped using Reddit around then, or that she has deleted a whole bunch of posts. She did scrub some of her online activity prior to the shooting. Now, in the aftermath of the shooting, The police have said that they made multiple mental health-related visits to the shooter's home the past few years and had previously confiscated guns from the home, but the owner of the guns, it's unclear who exactly, successfully petitioned for their return. And Jesse did have a minor's firearms license, but that expired in 2024. It's unclear if the guns that were confiscated were the same ones used in the shooting. Jesse has posted a number of different photos of guns, and we still don't know which exact ones were used. We just know that there was a long gun and a handgun recovered. So, though the shooter's Reddit activity ceases in early 2024, her online presence moved to darker corners of the internet, which demonstrated a declining mental well-being and a growing fascination with mass shootings. The past year, Jessie was active on an internet forum called Watch People Die, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a website to host footage of real-life gore. Yeah, I was like, is that what it sounds like? It is. Okay. All right. You know, like snuff. Like, real gore is hosted there and shared, as well as a lot of, you know, like, edits of mass shooter footage, of people filming themselves doing mass shootings that then circulates. This forum is way more of, like, a social orbit around this recent wave of mass shootings than 764 is. And, you know, there is some crossover. You know, there is some 764 people who are also, you know, active on this form, people who used to be 764, because that group is also, you know, not really what it used to be. But this form is its own thing. Rather than being linked to, you know, explicit Nazi groups, you know, the occultic 09A or the child's exploitation of 764, the shooter's verifiable online footprint suggests much more of a nexus of involvement with what I've been calling the school shooter fandom. They call it TCC or the true crime community. And in the past two years, we've seen an increase in shootings based on this like neo-Columbiner variety, right? People doing copycats of other school shootings. The Abundant Life Christian school shooting in December 2024 by Columbine cosplayer Natalie Samantha Rucknow, who's the right, falsely labeled as trans. There was also the Catholic school shooting in August 2025 by Robin Westman, who did at one point attempt gender transition, but later regretted it, and originally planned to attack an LGBTQ music venue. Westman was similarly obsessed with mass killers and wrote the name of Repnow on one of their rifles. Last April, a 22-year-old man in Florida was arrested for threatening to commit a mass shooting on Discord. The FBI believes that he was in communication with Samantha Rupnow prior to her shooting, and they both discussed with each other plans for their mass killing attacks. In September 2025, a 16-year-old named Desmond Hawley shot two kids before killing himself at Evergreen High School in Colorado. He also idolized Samantha Rupnow, replicated her selfies, and was active on the same forum, Watch People Die, that Rupnow herself was active on. So Jesse was on this forum, but Jesse also displayed other traits similar of the TCC group. Jesse created a mass shooting simulator game on Roblox, which was set in a mall where you act out a shooting, killing people in the mall. I'll talk a little bit about this forum specifically now, right? This forum essentially exists to desensitize people to extremely violent content that glorifies mass killings. jesse's very first comment on watch people die was on a compilation video of mass shooter footage and she wrote quote i appreciate this post she also commented on another thread of mass shooting footage quote i love these first person perspective type videos when a shooter records his or her own actions it's always heat unquote the most worrying comment is something that you know if police were aware of, should have been caused to prevent this from happening, came about five months ago in a thread on Watch People Die about the psychology of watching gore. She wrote, quote, I find it addictive. It's hard not to watch violent content. I'm just drawn to it. I don't think much of it. Though, to say it doesn't affect me is likely naive. I'm sure maybe subconsciously it does. It just doesn't feel like a big deal. I'm drawn to substances too. It's easy to get high and just zone out into videos of this stuff. Does it impact my mental health? Eh, mine's probably already fucked. I tried to stay away from watching this type of thing before, because it really sucks me in, and it's a massive useless time dump, but I never really saw any benefit. I think the R words in the comment section are more bothersome mentally than the videos, so I try just not to interact with dorks. XD. And these types of sentiments are not uncommon among people who regularly engage with this type of content. I think it's an unusual thing to ask you, but at this point it almost seems as if the two biggest things that are often blamed for mass shooting that I have to push up against and I have been doing my whole life, drugs, and, in the other case, hyper-online radicalization, right? The history that you're painting here kind of seems like someone who needed a variety of help. 100%. I'll reiterate that in, like, a sec. Okay. Yeah, I mean, as I was reading this, this reminded me a little bit. There was a shooting a few years ago at a 4th of July parade. The Highland Park mass shooting. The sort of, like, writing that Jesse did in this post reminds me a bit of the writing done by this other mass shooter. talking about getting sucked into violent content, or this idea of it beckons you further into the concept. It's almost hypnotic. Very similar writing done by this other shooter. So one other post, a reference that she made on this forum, was a video of a father hanging himself in front of his children. And she claimed that her stepdad attempted the same thing, trying to kill himself in front of her when she was just a little kid. And she wrote, quote, I wish his bitch ass would have died on the noose then and there, probably better than beating your kids, unquote. So obviously, you know, this person had like long standing issues that at certain points seems like better, right? Like around 2021, they seem to be doing better, right? They were making YouTube content about guns and hunting and felt like they had more of a stable social outlet. And then around 2023, with this abuse of psychedelic drugs leading to this mass shooter obsession, it's a pretty clear picture of a mental spiral. Two months before Jessie's own shooting, she did visit the Watch People Die profile for Samantha Rupp now. And if we're going to talk about causal factors, right, And especially like in reference to, you know, this idea that, you know, parents have where, you know, there has been a sequence of trans people doing shootings. You can argue about, you know, the per capita percent rates are like stats again, but that doesn't go so far. But at a certain point, I mean, we have to all be comfortable or maybe comfortable is the wrong word. But we have to, like, you know, realize that, like, as more people transition, right, gender is not this immutable thing. As more people attempt transitioning, there's going to be some trans people who do bad things. This happens with every social group of people. To borrow from sociologist Mark Worrell, who wrote about the social phenomenon of mass shootings, destruction of others is the means towards another end, the desire for self-destruction that the self was incapable of inflicting in isolation. A lot of mass shootings end with suicide, or trying to get the police to kill you through suicide. public shootings like this have a very strong suicidal component. And some people might not be able to do that themselves, so they need to create a social context in which they feel like they can. And at least in terms of the states, and to a smaller degree in Canada, these shootings exist as this cultural ritual, this ritual of destruction of the self. And destruction of the self can include the social apparatus that makes up the self. And for a young person, that's what? That's their family in school, the two things that were targeted in this shooting, right? This network that makes up, like, my sense of self as a 17-year-old, 18-year-old. It's going to be my family, which is, you know, for Jessie, that's her mom. She's been separated from her father for a while, as well as her stepbrother. And then also this school that she used to go to, right? That's the network that makes up your idea of the social. And like I said before, as the trans community grows, there's going to be some overlap between antisocial, mentally unwell individuals who act out a math killing as a suicide and disintegrated and socially under-regulated people who try transitioning as a way to ease tensions, both internally and externally. And if anything, I think transitioning can often be maybe one of the healthiest ways to attempt to relieve some of these tensions. but like being trans is like a marginal position in society right and the people who commit school shootings and suicide through mass shootings are at like the very very extreme end of social dysregulation and like marginal isolation and some people in those latter categories will also try transitioning as a method of social regulation and in jesse's case like considering all their posts about like mental health and drugs never once is being trans cited as like a point of their distress like that's the thing that's causing them the distress it is it is a method of relief at least according to like their own writing on on reddit like the the cause of the distress are all these are these other things and like people can blame mass shootings or mass killings on like any number of specific factors right such as access to weapons whether that's you know knives firearms, bullying, substance abuse, mental health, and lacking mental health services and, like, mental health oversight. But, like, the common base factor across, you know, most of those things is that there's, like, social disintegration and deregulation happening. That's, like, a failure to balance, like, egoism and altruism, right? Like, a healthy individual sense of self, as well as a place of belonging within a larger social group. Like, we need a mix of freedom and available structured paths for social life. Ritualistic outbursts of suicidal violence against society happen when these things are extremely unregulated and someone falls out of the social fabric. And, like, marginal classes, like trans people, can be particularly affected by social disintegration and deregulation. And it's important to note here, this isn't caused by some vague medical condition like gender dysphoria. That's not causing the violence. Prescribed estrogen is not a causal force in this. We don't even know if Robin Westman or Jesse was even on estrogen. We don't know. But these things aren't causal. But these are social positions that include these larger social factors that affect large populations. One of those populations can be trans people. There's a lot of social disintegration that affects the cis men currently. They do a lot of shootings. Majority is the same. Yeah, the overwhelming majority. You can also grab these things on class lines. Lots of people who go and do public shootings, either themselves or their families, are suffering from economic instability, or people in the middle class as well, which has this other problem in Durkheim's methodology of suicide, which I'm kind of pulling from a little bit here. is like this sense of over-regulation can also produce an unhealthy balance. So it's either very over-regulating people, like Elon Musk, has too much freedom, has too much access to money and possibilities, that he's then a very dysfunctional person. This can happen with some probably middle-class kids as well that can produce violent outbursts, but a lot of the time it's lower middle-class or lower-class conditions that can lead to violence. and sometimes it does not go to the extreme of doing a mass killing. It can often just result in petty crime, which is arguably a more healthy method of regulation compared to something like a mass shooting, which is the most desperate, the most marginal act of suicide that we can envision as a society. i just want to specifically say when it came to factors you're distinctly not saying that video games uh were in any way responsible and i'm i i know you're not but i just like i people should know that when you mentioned roblox people like i i had i think my mom and someone else asked like oh, well, what's the storyline for Roblox? And I was like, it's like asking what's the story for Minecraft, right? I was like, yeah, I was like, these are world building. It's similar to seeing someone basically trying to journal out their thoughts, right? I think in that she was building these mass shooting simulators. That wasn't her being influenced, I say, by some kind of like template that Roblox had. That was her showing, yeah, creating something to express something else. Yeah, and that sort of, like, cause player replication, very common among this, you know, growing community of the true crime community, the school shooter fandom, which attracts a lot of people in marginal populations, right? Like, the fact that Samantha Rupp now is, like, one of the first, like, you know, cis female school shooters, like, is notable here. And, like, a lot of, like, the early, like, Columbine fandom on Tumblr was young girls. The fact that TCC is attracting, like, a wider net than just cis males, I think, is interesting. but it points to these other social forces, I think, condensing it down to being like a certain mixture of SSRIs and HRT is what's causing this. Or psychedelics, right? Yeah, or psychedelics, right? Like anything, these things can exist within a healthy equilibrium, right? Psychedelics can be a very healthy tool for people to deal with, like mortality PTSD or a range of things. Yeah, no, absolutely, right? Whether that's MDMA, ketamine, or mushrooms, like mushrooms are being used to treat people who have cancer, right, to help them get comfortable with this idea of their own mortality. These things can exist within a healthy equilibrium of the social, but they can also exist in an unhealthy non-equilibrium, right? And I think the types of ways that Jesse was writing about psychedelics online, I think, demonstrates a very unhealthy use of these drugs, especially as, like, you know, a 16-year-old. Right. Well, it sounds like self-medication. It sounds like unsupervised medication. and it also sounds like something that was most likely acting as an accelerant, right? Like, if you already have a host of other problems, if you are introducing a very large amount of incredibly powerful, like, you know, psychostimulants into, you know, what you're ingesting every day, then it's going to have potentially very, very dangerous outcomes. Yeah. Again, these are largely correlating factors, not causal forces, right? The causal forces is this, like, social disintegration and deregulation, of which, you know, abuse of psychedelics can do a lot of damage to your sense of self and your sense of self within, like, a larger community. And the fact that I think, like, specifically, you know, lacking mental health services, lacking, like, oversight of these things, in terms of, like, a policy outlook, like, these are things that we, as a society, should be putting more work into if you actually want to start solving this problem. I mean, you can get into, you know, larger things about, you know, the alienation of, like, quote-unquote late-stage capitalism, which, you know, also can be a factor in this. Another accelerant, right? I think a lot of these are accelerants, right? Every other thing that you've been listing, and it seems to me like, you know, this compounded upon this, which compounded upon this, and eventually led, you know, someone to looking up more and more extreme content. Yeah. Well, one thing that I do want to mention, which I've kind of seen discussed, is like this term like radicalization, saying that, you know, she was like radicalized into this like violent content. This is more like a semantic note. I'm not sure how useful the term radicalization is in this case. If anything, I think she was desensitized to horrific acts of violence through repeated viewing and was in communities that encouraged this sort of thing. I think that's the way that I'm framing it, as opposed to radicalization makes you think of politics and ideology. Right, or not Nazism or white supremacy or something like that. Yeah, and it's not that they're getting politically radical, it's that they're dropping out of the social fabric. and desensitizing themselves to this concept of horrific, societally targeted violence. I know now that obviously the right wing has decided that they're uniquely going to be attacking trans people. I'm not sure if you're aware of the shooter's father's statements that were just made recently. The father intentionally uses terms like, I am the biological father, refers to her with he, him pronouns, says that he was allowed to raise her, that she was taken from him. part of me is also really fearful that this is going to be maybe the future of the the matt walsh lives at tiktok circuit right here we have the the case or the like the number one horror story that every right wing you know personality always talks about right or or that you admit that elon musk perpetuates yeah exactly but this is somehow negatively impacting their children no yeah that is a good thing to keep an eye on i haven't have not seen that in terms of like you know your analysis and i i appreciate it by the way a lot uh i hadn't thought of it in those terms in terms of, like, disconnecting from the social fabric itself, is there things that can be done? Like, is there recommendations beyond, like, obviously, you know, late-stage capitalism, mass alienation? I'm not solving that tomorrow. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to solve that on a stream. No, you have to. On a Friday the 13th. Isn't it called it could happen here? Let it happen. Come on. I mean, yeah, like, there's a lot of things that we can do, Even just increasing social services, funding social services can be a thing. What can we do to strengthen the social fabric, give people available paths for their life? That's through education, free college. Make life actually feel like you have a way to exist within a social matrix. Canada already has, compared to the States, fairly restrictive gun laws. Those are a factor, but there's even mass killings like this that happen in Europe where people find other means of enacting them besides guns. For Japan, it's swords and knives oftentimes. Yeah, right, yeah. So these things have some based social aspects that are going to be the things that solving is kind of more challenging rather than just taking away guns, making drugs that are already illegal harder to get, right? These things aren't going to actually eliminate this problem. But, I mean, funding social services can be an aspect of this, having more comprehensive mental health care, you know, free health care check-ins. You know, that's a big thing in the States. Canada has that to some degree, but still there's obviously room for improvement. But I mean, yeah, solving these like larger social problems, that's like that's the question of the 21st century. Yeah. And I mean, you know, based on the story that you're telling and the research you did, it does really seem like this is one of those cases where this doesn't happen often, but when you see it get to that end state, this is pretty much, right, the patterns become a lot more evident. The obsession with prior shootings, the mental health episodes, and now combining that with very, very prolific psychedelic drug use. And then here we are. This person should not have had guns, right? At a certain point, their guns were taken away, or guns in the house were taken away. If police knew about their activity on these forums, I'm sure this wouldn't have been returned. So there's certain things like parents being more aware of these sorts of, like, online spaces, the school shooter fandom, you know, picking up signs of, you know, social isolation, how much time your kid is just spending alone on the internet, and you might not be knowing what they're doing. Solving that's, you know, hard, because the solution for a lot of, you know, states is just, like, increased surveillance on platforms like, you know, Discord, age verification, but those types of, you know, guardrails don't exist on a forum site like Watch People Die, right? You can have a very, you know, safe, regulated Discord, which just pushes people to, you know, even more niche, even more dangerous parts of the internet. You know, I started as a Reddit page that was, you know, taken down like seven years ago. And now it's, you know, far, a far less regulated, you know, thing that, that kids are spending a decent amount of time on. But, you know, being aware of, you know, the risks of this type of like social isolation, you know, is, is also, also a start. And ideally, we do not have a forum site, you know, dedicated to glorifying mass killings. But banning a website is not so simple. It's easier said than done, you know, figuring out a way to take that down, right? Same problem with, you know, like 8kun or like, you know, 8chan back in the day, 4chan. And eventually Kiwi Farms. But this one seems blatant to the point of illegality. And I know you don't have time for me to start a whole topic, but like, I'm going to study this. I mean, like, 8kun's also illegal, right? They host a lot of illegal content there. finding a way to take it down is still tricky. You know, a lot of websites host illegal stuff. Just because it's, you know, illegal does not mean it's going to be solved. Like, the legal pathway there is tricky. But isn't the rule of thumb typically that if a lot of those companies that provide them with the necessary, like, DDoS security, their, like, through line seems to be, as long as it's not illegal, right? Like, if you're not running a child porn, or sorry, a child sexual abuse material website, if you not running like an assassination or a cryptocurrency like drug site you fine in practice work out I unsure of the current hosting situation of Watch People Die but I wouldn't be surprised if they went through the same kind of loopholes by registering at, like, a certain foreign country, which has very loose guidelines. Like, you know, that was the thing with, like, 8KUN for a while. But, yeah, I'm actually unsure of the current setup that Watch People Die has. I've been talking about, you know, TCC and the school shooter fandom increasingly the past two years, and it's really tragic that it is something that I've, that is, you know, a pattern that is continuing, right? This is, like, the, really the main, the main force across these shootings, whether you're, you know, a cis girl, cis boy, a trans girl, trans guy, whatever, whatever demographic, you know, racial, you know, there was the, the Antioch school shooting in January 2025 that was done by this, like, black, ironic neo-Nazi, similarly linked to TCC as well. like whatever the demographic is the through line that we're seeing is this is this just like nihilistic obsession with like the act of school shooting and this like fandom that is developed around it do you find the media picks up on that at all like i know you've done a lot of research into it do they reach out to you like do they never say every every once in a while but it takes them time it took about three years after like the peak of 764 to start reporting on 764, and now it has 764 articles all the time. But it took them about three years to, like, catch up to it. I would not be surprised if in a year and a half we get tons of articles about TCC. But a lot of legacy media is very slow to this sort of thing. My own internet presence also exists kind of in the margins. My monitoring is in the margins, but those margins can have, you know, very, very destabilizing social effects. But it does take a while. I mean, same thing with the FBI, right? It took them years to get on top of 764, even though people were, like, reporting this stuff in, like, 2019, 2020. But before 764 was even that organization, there was previous iterations called, like, CVLT. Like, you know, that style of thing was a problem for years. And the FBI did not really get on it until much later. And the media then followed suit. Right. I do appreciate that you still have trust in, you know, the current American law enforcement and the credit to really be on it right now. You know, I'm unsure of how that works in Canada at this point, but certainly I don't think Kat Patel's FBI is going to be, you know, on this one super well, even though they've been trying to, you know, push some stuff like the nihilist violent extremism label, which does cover stuff like this. but I know this is controversial but in my opinion it almost feels as if Cash Mattel is actively trying to push narratives that will benefit this entire story that we're talking about in the opposite direction right like if you're trying to push a narrative that Charlie Kirk's shooter and we're not going to change topics but I'm just you know bringing this up because you mentioned Cash Mattel you're trying to push that narrative that he was in fact trans or inspired by trans ideology or inspired by furries or furry culture etc they've tried everything and now now we're at the point where it's like the loosest of connections It's like, well, there may have been a lover who is or is not, may or may not be trans or non-binary. We're not sure. But that's enough. We got it. Catch for tell. We'll push the story. I mean, yeah, this administration comes out of the same kind of network of influencers who try to grossly use horrific events to their own ideological advantage, including to, you know, attack groups of people that they find to be bad. It's wild because it turns out they're all pedophiles. they're all part of an elite group of insiders. So let's start talking about the Epstein files for next year. My brain is... I know, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Where can everyone find you and your incredible work outside of listening to the amazing It Could Happen Here podcast? Yeah, well, I mean, I occasionally post about Yaoi on X, the everything app, by Shonen Type. I'm trying to post more about Yaoi on Blue Sky. There's just not as much of it. But, you know, maybe I should be the change I want to see. Is it not friendly, the environment? It's more so that there's just not as many Yaoi artists on Blue Sky. A lot of Yaoi artists are shockingly Japanese. And Japan has a very large presence on XC Everything app, at least at the moment. I know some of their, like, AI image stuff is pushing people to other platforms, but it's slow. So, but yeah, I'm on those two places. I also occasionally post photography at Instagram, also by ShonenType. And I suppose if you enjoyed listening to me getting informed by the only information you heard here today, you should check out youtube.com slash atthesurftimes, where I post videos. And this one, too, will be there. Hey, you can look at, yeah, me in a black turtleneck, talk about sad things. There you go. If you enjoyed the audio version and you want to see the visual version of it, head on down to youtube.com slash atthesriftimes. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a ton of fun. Well, actually, it was sad, but it was very informative. Yeah, that's the needle I try to thread. Absolutely. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been as fascinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, The students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought of Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did The Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the biggest night in podcasting. The countdown is on to our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards. Live from South by Southwest, March 16th, we'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative, talented creators in the industry. It's truly a who's who of the podcasting world. Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is... See all the nominees now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at audible.com. Hello, everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Mick. I'm here with James and Giorgio. and we're going to be talking about the documentary Sarajevo Safari. Yeah, hi Nick. Thanks for having us. Hi everyone. Good to be here. Giorgio, do you want to introduce yourself? I am Giorgio. I am a Bosnian genocide researcher. I'm also the founder of the educational tool Voices from Ladrina, which is a new educational resource on the genocide in eastern Bosnia in particular, which allows researchers to follow the events of the genocide through a simulated social media style news feed. So the words of the survivors and the perpetrators come to life via the medium of social media. I'm also a member of the fantastic mutual aid group Lambus Mutual Aid in South London. You can follow us on Instagram at Lambuth Mutual Aid. And you can follow me on the hellhole that is X at Giorgio Con. Con is K-O-N, not con as in a con man. Yeah, that's, I think, the key information. Okay, great. Then we're going to do the following. I've prepared roughly one page of context here. For those of you who remember, a few months ago, it was announced that the Italian prosecutors want to try and find the people who participated in the Sarajevo safari. And we'll be talking about the documentary that highlights and tries to shed a light on what happened there. The main accusation is that the army of Republika Srpska, which is an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, that they charged lots of monies for tourists to come over and shoot at civilians, which is, yeah, obviously horrible. Yeah, horrific. Nowadays, Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two parts, which is like the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, which is essentially the territory that the Republika Srpska army gained during the war. Because I don't want to be there any confusion as to who the parties are, but it's pretty much two entities living in one nation state. Yes. So after I've given some context on what happened during the Balkan Wars, which led up to this event, we're going to be talking with Giorgio about the documentary. Unfortunately, the documentary is not available with English subtitles. So I'm glad we're having you with us, Giorgio, to illuminate us a bit more. I also want to preface that obviously it's not a thorough history of what happened there. That would be way too much information to condense into one episode. Also, while this episode will focus on the plight of the Bosnian people, I do want to note that pretty much every side in this entire conflict did horrendous things, committed atrocities, and I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention that. So, we're going to start with, like so many things, the Second World War, around the formation of Yugoslavia as a communist state, with the Serbian city of Belgrade being the center of power. The Balkans were a major point of conflict during World War II, with a lot of different parties and state actors trying to gain control over the region. Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania are some of the main actors. A variety of alliances and other entities were formed, which will later be used in ethnic and ethnic nationalist discourse as a way to highlight the specific ethnic grievances. As a federation, Yugoslavia contains multiple ethnicities. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Muslims, which would later become called Bosniaks, and that's how I will be referring to them. So at the end of World War II, Joseph Tito would be the dictator of Yugoslavia, and he would try to counteract all this ethnic dissent and friction by promoting something that he called brotherhood and unity, which sort of put Tito on a pedestal as a fatherly figure under whom everyone from all the different factions and ethnicities would be equal as Yugoslav people. This was only partially successful. The friction was never really resolved. And after the death of Quito in the 80s marked the beginning of the end, it coincided with an economic crisis that sort of made all the different republics, where all the different ethnicities were centered, beholden to themselves. It became a bit of a free-for-all. So after that point, ethnopolitics and ethnonationalism became the focus of all politics. Just to be really concrete, with ethno-nationalism, we mean a form of nationalism that is based solely on ethnicity, not on citizenship or participation in a community. It's a lighter version of the blood and soil politics that became very synonymous with a certain German period of time. So what happened with this ethnic-centric discourse is that perceived and real grievances became central to almost all politics, most notably but not certainly exclusively under Slobodan Milosevic, who came to power in the late 80s in Serbia. Ethnic rhetoric would be the focal point for his politics and a sense of power. You would say things that would turn into slogans, and with that captured a vital part of the animosity that a large part of the Serbian population would feel. Phrases like, a weak Serbia means a strong Yugoslavia, hinting at the decline of Serbian power and the way they perceived this sort of slow fracturing that Yugoslavia was going through. Another one was in response to a Kosovari Serb who was allegedly beaten by a Kosovari Albanian. And Milozovic said, no one should dare beat you, meaning that by virtue of being Serbian, they should be granted some sort of additional status or some sort of untouchability because they were ethnic Serbs. These examples serve to make clear that the changing and growing public opinion among the Serbs was that the only way for them to be secure and safe was as a national state controlled by the Serbs. So the whole idea was that they would control the entirety of Yugoslavia and that their ethnic group would be in control of the majority of the political institutions that were present there. As I think you both can imagine, this did not go over well with other ethnic groups. Yeah. So we're just not very keen on being part of a federation controlled by the Serbs. In March of 1998, the Croatian War of Independence started. And later that year, Slovenia did the same. Both these instances sparked a war already with the Serbs. Bosnia and Herzegovina followed later. A referendum was held in early 1992 on whether or not they were going to secede. They chose to secede. And in March of that year, Serbian forces attacked Bosnia and claimed towns and terrain that they deemed to be Serbian territory. Near the end of May, the Yugoslav People's Army attempted to gain control over the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, but failed to do so completely. At this point, the battle became a prolonged siege that would last until February of 1996. Just to add a little bit more about the location, geographically speaking, defending Sarajevo was really difficult. The city lies between several mountains, which made it very easy for Serbian forces to set up artillery, ordnance, and snipers. These would have very long lines of sight and greater range due to the elevated positions that they were set up in. If you look at a map of Sarajevo with, like, the terrain for Google Maps or something, you can see how much elevation there is all around the city. Roads and passes leading out of the city were blocked by Serbian forces, and once they had full control of the airport, there was little to no way for food, medicine, or reinforcements to be deployed there. Within the city itself, Serbian forces also controlled a majority of major military positions, With additional snipers being positioned around them, multiple areas became incredibly dangerous to cross our approach, particularly the main road leading towards the airport. It became known as Sniper Alley. And I think it is in this context that we should start to discuss the documentary and allegations. So, yeah. Anything to add from either of you? Yeah, it might serve to explain how in the greater European political landscape, entities on the right, I guess in the global north generally, began to sympathize with actors in the former Yugoslavia, right? and how maybe we can draw some lines between them based on their definition of nation, what they consider the nation to be. If that's something you'd like to explain to people. Yeah, absolutely. I think what's really important to stress is that when it came to Bosnia, and it's still the case to this day to a lesser degree, The Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks, found themselves at this very peculiar interception of oppression in which you had the Western European rights framing the war against Bosnia as a restoration of Christian Europe. This was what John Major, how John Major was talking about it, who was then the prime minister of the UK. It's also the kind of language we heard from Mutherland in France. And to some extent in the Clinton administration, after Bill Clinton read that horrendous book, Balkan Ghosts by Kaplan, his administration's rhetoric began to change and sort of framed this as this inevitable, you know, clash between these perpetually fighting tribes in the Balkans. You know, the legacies of that rhetoric are still heard in today's journalism. You know, I can't count the amount of times in even left-leaning, supposedly, Western journalistic publications, I've seen the word balkanization being thrown around. This is what I'm talking about in terms of the intersection of dehumanization, exoticization, and oppression that particularly Bosnia and the Muslims of Bosnia, Bosniaks, have found themselves at. And so you had that on the one side coming from the right. And by the way, the Serbs, nationalists, knew this. They tailored their rhetoric so, so, so effectively to present this case of we are fighting Europe's battle against Islamist extremists. But at the same time, you had the Western European political left, and by political left, I mean your Marxist-Leninists, that sort of tradition within the political left in Western Europe, sort of buying into this co-opting of anti-fascist discourse from the Milosevic regime. You know, Mick referenced the no one shall dare beat you speech in Kosovo, which was actually in response to a, at best, hyperbolized, at worst, fictitious claim that the Kosovo Serbs were facing this institutional violence. And that co-opting of that rhetoric that the Milosevic regime did so well as these anti-imperialists fighting against the evil axis of the West did kind of work to some degree when we're thinking about the response of the political parties on the left in Western Europe that were very sort of anti-any intervention. And we can have a conversation about, you know, NATO intervention and how problematic that was. But this very black and white thinking, very black and white rhetoric coming from those political actors in the West of, well, this is nothing to do with us. Don't buy into the rhetoric that there are bad things happening. You know, everyone's doing bad things. Therefore, we shouldn't do anything to put any pressure on the Milosevic regime. And so the reason why I'm bringing this all up is because if people can understand that, then it becomes more understandable how Bosnia was left to burn, how the Bosnian Muslims in particular, who have been targeted by Serb forces and Croat forces, both on the basis of their religious and ethnic identities, they found themselves completely abandoned. And obviously that abandonment really is embodied in the arms embargo that served none of the victims. It only served the Yugoslav army, which was effectively funding and sponsoring the CERD forces who were committing genocide in Bosnia. And of course, the Croat forces had Zagreb, had the Croatian regime funding them. So this arms embargo, which was supposed to be this, you know, for want of a better word, neutral stance for the world to take, was not neutral at all. Of course, as we know, there's no such thing as neutrality, blah, blah, blah. But this was really how it became possible for such a high number of people, the vast majority Muslim people, to be killed whilst the genocide was being televised. Yeah, that's super important. You brought up Bill Clinton reading that book. I thought of putting it in there, but I didn't want to resmirch Bill Clinton's good name here. But essentially what that book does is it sort of, correct me if I'm wrong, it sort of puts forth this clash of civilizations kind of rhetoric where these two people are so different, they will always inevitably clash and fight and kill each other as sort of a biologically determined factor, almost. Yeah. I mean, we see a similar sort of thing. I mean, there are specificities to Palestine, but we see a similar sort of thing with the sort of liberal, humanistic rhetoric of let's view what's happening in Gaza as beyond ethnic labels. You know, we're going to see the humanity behind everyone. And, you know, I saw there's a German comedian who was putting up posters of Palestinians who had been killed and Israelis who had been killed and removing the ethnic labels and just putting human killed. And it's going back to this, what you're talking about in terms of here are two communities that are always fighting each other and we lose sight of everyone's humanity as a result. And if they would just stop fighting, if they would just, you know, stop for a second and look beyond the labels, then the world would be a better place. And it's all, in my opinion, tied up in the same illogic as that book was getting at. a sort of I don't see color approach, but the conflict, yes. A similar narrative that's deployed in Syria and Myanmar, actually. It's a go-to response of neoliberalism when they have absolutely no understanding of the situation beyond that there is conflict there and people are dying, right? It's a very easy response for anyone who's a politician or an NGO who wants to write a shit book. It's very easy to do that and to sell that narrative, right, to repeating to people who don't know fuck all about it. Yeah. Yeah. And I also want to add another thing, because nowadays Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two parts, which is like the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, which is essentially the territory that the Republika Srpska army gained during the war. because I don't want to be there any confusion as to who the parties are, but it's pretty much two entities living in one nation state. Yes. This was also like a recurring theme when I was in Bosnia for my master thesis. There is a deep sentiment with the people, but also politically, that Bosniaks were left to their faith because Bosnia Herzegovina is the only Muslim-majority country in Europe. And there is a very deep feeling of like the reason that we were left out in the cold, that we were abandoned, is because it was a Muslim majority country. And I think that is just a very important thing to highlight because that is also a starting point of the vilification of Muslims by virtue of being Muslim. That sort of ideological war of the West versus the Eastern Muslims that sort of started to coalesce around that time. I think, I don't know if I'd say it was the start, but what I would say is the legacies of Europe's obsession with the Ottoman Empire really came to the fore in Bosnia. because a lot of the rhetoric and the discourses that were being produced by Serb forces hinged around this idea that we, the Serbs, are finishing the job that we started in the Balkan Wars of the 1800s and 1900s. we are finishing the job of getting rid of this remnant of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims in Bosnia. And in fact, you know, I always go to a piece of footage from the 11th of July 1995, when the general of the army of the Republika Srpska, Ratko Mladic, who is serving a life sentence for genocide, His forces entered, they invaded Srebrenica, Srebrenica had fallen, and he says to the camera, we have come here to take revenge on the Turks. And I think that really embodies what I'm trying to say here, which is that the legacies of this clash of civilizations that was sort of prominent in the various wars against the Ottomans came back and they were redeployed. They were reactivated by Serb forces in particular, but also Croat forces to a lesser degree. and you know I go back to what I was saying before John Major saying this is a painful but inevitable restoration of Christian Europe on some level on some level Western Europe was buying into it on some level yeah so yeah I don't think it was the start of the vilification of the slims but I think that it was intertwined with previous legacies that were reactivated yeah and this was very much like the zeitgeist at that time, right? Like Huntington's writing Clash of Civilizations then. It seems like a lot of the response in much of the world to the end of the Cold War was to create another enemy, and that became Islam. That's sort of the discourse after Fukuyama. Sorry to mention Fukuyama. But, like, people didn't want there to be, apart from him, like an end to the conflict of how to organize our societies, because that's a ludicrous thesis. And so they very much re... I think a lot of the sort of fear that plays such an important role in politics in many of our countries was remobilized in this orientalist packaging towards Muslim people that, as you say, built on centuries of bigotry. my only engagement with the uh the conflict when i was much younger was that somebody who i knew through cycling had previously been a football hooligan i think that's probably how he would describe himself and there was a great deal of exchange in uh fan violence i guess would be the academic term between the former yugoslavia and the rest of europe which is an interesting and not great way to learn about things i mean what's interesting is that there has been a direct connection between the far-right nationalist gangs, the paramilitaries that committed atrocities, and some of the Serbian football clubs, and in particular the ultras in those clubs, because those football clubs were the sort of gateway for mafia bosses to transition back into normal society. So yeah, it's a very interesting area of the broader conflict. I think at this point we should get back on track a bit Yes, let's talk about the thing we came to talk about We're going to talk about the Siege of Sarajevo and the documentary Sarajevo Safari but first we should experience the prolonged siege of advertisements And we're back. As we said before we left to the sea juries with advertisements, we should talk about this Sarajevo Safari. I guess maybe, should we just begin by summarizing the, maybe allegations is still the correct word, I don't know, the events that are documented in the film, let's say that. Yeah, so the Sarajevo Safari documentary is a documentary that was made by Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanic, and it presents long-standing allegations that there was a form of war tourism taking place during the siege of Sarajevo, in which affluent non-Bosnians were paying very high fees to shoot at civilians from sniper positions being held by the army of the Republika Srpska. These allegations and the narrative of the documentary is presented through witness testimony, including an anonymous former intelligence agent. And the film and the sort of the testimonies that are part of the film claim that this war tourism or this safari, this hunting, human hunting game, effectively, business was a sophisticated, organized and secret operation. One of the most shocking allegations that the documentary brings to light is that these non-Bosnian forests, for want of a better word, would pay even more money to shoot at children Now, in total, I mean, we don't have exact figures for various reasons that are very complicated. It's estimated that over 11,000 people were murdered in Sarajevo from these snipers. So the fact that this documentary is presenting these allegations that it wasn't just a Serb affair and that there were other nationals taking part in these crimes is huge. It is huge. Yeah, so that's kind of the gist of what the documentary is trying to put across. Obviously, there's more that I could say about the context and about sort of the context of the case that has been taken up in Italy. But, you know, we can talk about that as we go along. Yeah, I think one of the allegations is also that there's like tourists from like the United States, from Canada, from Russia, and also from Italy to not go down the rabbit hole instantly. I just wanted to ask you, Giorgio, because I first heard about this film when I was in Sarajevo. And back then, well, my first instinct was that this has to be some sort of conspiracy theory. and it is partly to do with the person I interviewed back then and the way it was presented to me during that interview but also because I don't think any of us is shocked at the atrocities and the crimes against humanity of war but this somehow feels like another level so what was your first impression as a Bosnian genocide researcher to something like this happening my first The reaction was, I mean, I don't want to take away from the gravity of the documentary. I was shocked but not surprised. So it is shocking that this sort of spectacle of violence was happening to that extent. In the same way that it's shocking that the concentration camps of Omarska, Tarnopoli, Keratern, all of those concentration camps were being televised and were still in operation. I mean, yes, eventually the international pressure shut them down, but it took a long time. That is all shocking. It is shocking that the peace agreement that brought a formal end to the conflict legitimized simultaneously the political project of the Republika Srpska by recognizing the entity. All of these things are shocking. so for me the allegations of the documentary fall into this broader abject failure and complicity of the so-called international community in the crimes that were being committed in bosnia so that is why i'm not surprised i was it's shocking the content is shocking the fact that it was able to happen is not surprising and i think the documentary speaks to the broader complicity of so many layers of society in the atrocities that were being committed. You know, let's be real. Let's be really, really blunt here. The countries from which the tourists came are not the only countries that are implicated in the atrocities of the war and genocide in Bosnia. You had far-right volunteers from Greece who were being trained by Ratko Mladic's army, who were in Srebrenica on the 11th of July that the Greek state has never investigated. You had banks in Cyprus that were allowing Milosevic to funnel his money into them during the embargo. You know, there are so many states who on some level have played a role in the atrocities that have not held themselves or their nationals accountable. So, yeah, that is my reaction, if that makes sense to you guys, you know. Yeah. Like, we live in an age where, again, most people's thoughts are directly transcribed to their social media profiles at all times, right? And I think it is probably easier than it has ever been for us to bear witness to a genocide as multiple genocides are occurring, like at the time that we're recording. Right. But obviously, that's the most. I wouldn't even say the most well documented, the one that certainly gets the most social media attention is the one happening in Gaza for pretty obvious reasons. people are probably better placed now to understand this in the context of a genocide than they would have been five years ago even, right? The project of a genocide has happened so in the open. And then they have seen nations which claim to be opposed to these things and institutions which were created to stop genocides do nothing. so I think it's probably easier than ever for people to understand the dehumanization that happens and the way that these things progress but I wonder like it's just such a like you said Mick it's one thing to go to war and it's another thing to have war come to you like I have traveled to report on wars but the as you said, Red Legg War isn't trying to be violent and in this particular war acts of inhuman violence happened often and from a great deal of actors, right? It's one thing when it's your community that is under threat, your family have been killed and then you respond with violence like it doesn't make it right, that is how war is. It's another thing to pay to hop on a flight and go and shoot a child that is particularly craven. so I wonder like it seems that the cases the prosecutions are mostly focusing on people from the Italian far right, do you have an idea if this was for them part of that project of like doing the second Reconquista for want of a better term like purging Muslim people from Europe or if it was simply the thrill of killing other humans? I think it would be remiss to try and detach the thrill of killing humans from who those humans are. That's my honest opinion. That's fair. I think, you know, I know less about the granular details of these people from Italy, from the far right, who were going to do this. But if I think about what I know about the Greek far right volunteers, where we have a bit more information to go on and why they were going to Bosnia. This was all about fighting the Turks. This was all about helping our Christian brothers, the Serbs, in their fight against the Muslims. And I suspect that it wasn't too dissimilar in the political imaginary of the Italian far right. And not just the Italian far right. I mean, as we said, from all the other countries where they were coming from. So, yeah, I think there was a framing that was behind a lot of this international participation that the Serb nationalists were very aware of. And they were very deliberate in the discourses that they were producing. I'll give another example. When I was working at the memorial centre, I was reading the transcripts of the assembly of the Republika Srpska during the war. And in those transcripts, I can count on one hand the amount of times that Serb nationalist officials referred to Bosnian Muslims as Bosnian Muslims. They were, in the vast majority of cases, referred to as either Turks or Islamists or terrorists or even Ustasa, who, for anyone listening who may not be aware, were the Croatian-aligned regime that took control of what is today Bosnia-Herzegovina and also what is today Croatia during the Second World War. And so, you know, discourses, they are produced for a reason. And I know I'm going a little bit, you know, sort of Foucault and whatever. I don't like talking in that way, but I will try to keep it as accessible as possible. when people produce discourses it's to create not only a sense of what is true and what is false but also it's to create this feeling of truth it's what feels right so you know it felt right to so many members of the far right to take up arms and hop on a plane or whatever and go to Bosnia to fight you know without questioning what actually the war and genocide was about it felt right and so that's how these discourses that's what they served to create this feeling of this is the truth and this is the right thing for us to do yeah that was a very long-winded answer i apologize no it reminds me a lot of the discourses that we saw in nyanmar uh preceding the genocide of Rohingya people, right? Very rarely did we see them referred to by that name or them being natives of Myanmar, right, or them having been there for centuries. They're referred to as terrorists. They're referred to as Bangladeshis. They're referred to as illegal immigrants. They're often referred to as members of the Islamic State for Iraq and Al-Sham, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of those last two words. But it's important, I think, to see these commonalities because we should be able to identify these things and then like see how dangerous they are. Yeah, absolutely. You know who doesn't produce discourses that make people hop on slides to other countries? I'm not sure we can say that these days. Let's hope. Yeah, that's true. But we have to think of something. So I guess this will do. Yeah. Can't have golden pivots all the time. All right, we are back. Should we talk a little more in depth about this practice of human safaris, right, or at least the allegations that are made? So, well, I am curious, Jojo, because I was still reading into this a bit earlier today. and one of the testimonies that popped up during the trial of Dragomir Milozovic, not Slobodan, not sure if they're related to be honest. Probably not. But there's an American called John Jordan who testified at the International Criminal Courts. He led a volunteer fighter-fighter unit during the siege, but he also says that some of the people he worked with also had seen tourists in other areas and Mostar is named specifically. Is there any more detail in there about this happening in other areas of Bosnia or other places? Well, about Mostar in particular, I am not sure because I've not heard myself of those allegations. Obviously, there was the Greek volunteer guard who were in places like Srebrenica, but also Visegrad. They went on after the war to become, well, actually, sorry, I'll correct myself. Even at that time, they were part of what later became Golden Dawn, the far right, now criminal organization, was a political party. So, you know, you had that happening. In terms of tourists, non-combatants, I am not aware of other places where it was happening on a large scale, like in Sarajevo. So, yeah, I'm not perhaps best placed to go into more detail about that. But I will definitely talk to my contacts in Mostar about any allegations there. I guess one thing that I want to ask is we're seeing a very limited prosecution in Italy and I think maybe also in somewhere in Belgium or the Netherlands I thought I read that there was another prosecution, not to confuse those two countries, Mick, sorry but for the people who survived the genocide what does this and obviously you can't speak on their behalf of course but like on the one hand it is some very small move towards justice but at least it's a movement but on the other hand right like the deaths of their family members have been played out in this documentary and it must be very difficult to understand just how like I don't know casually life was taken during this genocide side yeah do you think it helps healing like i guess i'm struggling to phrase that as a question but you know like i'm interested to know how this this this lands from that perspective i guess the general mood among survivors in bosnia is that no one cares about what happened to us these films that go on to get awards potentially, and they know the filmmakers get a pat on the back and all of that, they sort of, there's a lot of cynicism around that. And we saw this in particular in regards to Quo Vadis Aida. I'm not sure if you both watched that, but that recent, when was that? 2021, maybe, a few years ago, which for anyone who hasn't watched it is a film that depicts the genocide in Srebrenica. And, you know, and that won some awards. I can't remember the titles of them. But, you know, the sort of response among particularly the Bosniak community was one of mixed emotions. Yes, on the one hand, it was, you know, something that they were willing to support. You know, they would hold screenings of the film, they would, you know, collaborate with the director. But on the other hand, there was this sense of, okay, and now what? And I think from the conversations that I've had with Bosniaks and from the articles that I've read in response to this documentary, there's a similar sort of mood of, yeah, this is really important. And we have been making these allegations for a long time, or we've been aware of the allegations for a long time. Why is it getting attention now What going to happen now Can we trust that the Italians will that Italy will actually carry on with this investigation and that justice will be had And also, you know, the notion of justice is so fraught in Bosnia as well. I think that to sort of imagine that we are on this path towards, you know, this linear path towards absolute healing and absolute justice and reconciliation, I think is a sort of a notion that comforts a lot of Western NGOs. It's not necessarily reflective of reality on the ground. So, yeah, I don't think I would be connecting this with any sense of healing at this stage. yeah I think that makes sense it can be easy to see it as like well it's out in the open now and people have watched a film about it right you know like I think a lot about the the genocide the Euclidean people and how like it essentially just has been what 12 years ago now and it's been entirely forgotten by most people. Many of those people, you know, have been to where they are in terrible conditions in refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, right? And, yeah, people are aware of it. Every now and again, someone writes something about it. But, like, those people are no closer to any form of healing. You know, they still can't even in many cases have not returned to their homes. I mean, this is the thing in, you know, particularly in the Republika Selska entity, you know, Bosniaks who are living in that entity, they face material precarity on an everyday basis. They face threats. They face genocide triumphalism every year when the Republika Selska celebrates the founding of the entity. All of these everyday violences don't go away because of a film. And I think that Bosniaks that I have come to know in living in the entity of the Republika Serska, really carry that sense of we're dealing with shit every day. Every day we are facing material battles and we're doing it alone most of the time. So, yeah, it's very difficult to put an optimistic, hopeful twist on these things. Yeah, I remember, I was one year later than you were there, I was also at the memorial in Srebrenica slash Potocari. And I remember, I'm not going to name a name, but there was someone who was living in the area who spoke to us, and someone from my group wanted to film that. And I remember that the man was very adamant that, hey, I do not want to be filmed. I already need to walk these streets. That is enough. You should have asked for permission. I also remember Putin posters when walking through Serebunica on certain windows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also want to cut in with something else, because after James mentioned that other countries were prosecuting as well, I quickly Googled something. Apparently, Italy has already named a suspect in the investigation. Oh, interesting. Yes. Now 80-year-old man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, who was a truck driver. Yes. This is something that had come up when I was writing and everything. I had assumed that this was something that was extremely, I don't know, expensive, I suppose, just because it's so fucked up. And that, yeah, once it was someone who, if they're 80 now, would have been 50 at the time, so someone who was not young and had a relatively working class profession. that just isn't the profile I had in my head and I just wondered if you knew any more about developments in the case that might like I mean to be really honest I don't have much more to contribute in terms of that the suspect and what's going on you know I think it was he was summoned to testify last week I think he was going to testify on the 11th or maybe the 9th, I think maybe the 9th, but I haven't heard anything beyond that. So, I mean, in terms of what you were saying about the profile of the suspect, I mean, yes, on the one hand, it goes against the whole idea that it was wealthy tourists only, but let's also remember that in terms of domestic participation, There was a lot of capital to be gained by serving the Republika Srpska project. I mean, you had everything from Serb civilian truck drivers who helped to deport civilians, Bosniak civilians. You had Serb civilians who were hired to dig secondary and tertiary graves, mass graves. There was an array of positions, capital that was created for people who had very little. And I think that's important to bear in mind. Obviously, that's in reference to the domestic, to the participation of civilians within the former Yugoslavia. what the story behind this Italian truck driver is remains to be seen um but that's where my mind goes when you were talking about you know his profile yeah I mean there is there are things to be gained internationally through that same participation in that same project right like not necessarily like from the Serbian project but like in terms of one's status in groups in terms of social capital on the right. I guess we shouldn't ignore that. Maybe it should just remind us that especially these struggles can all seem so disparate, but they're not. The struggle against a domestic right in Italy would be the same thing as the, or at least shared an enemy with the attempts to fight back against this genocidal violence there. Yeah. I think it is important to keep in mind that I think when we all initially thought of the type of person who would do something like this and pay money for this, we all had an image in our head of the type, that type. And I do think it's very important to then take into account that it can also be everyday people who can be capable and willing to do something like this. Yeah. Also, another suspect who is not named but is mentioned in this article, it's from the Saturday Times, just to be transparent, is a banker. So it fits a lot better with the image we had in our heads. Yeah. Yeah. Something to add about the documentary's context. One of the people who testified in the documentary is a man called Edin Subasic, who was a former Bosnian intelligence agent. Now, the reason why I'm bringing him up is because he actually says, I believe he says it in the documentary, or he may have said it in a subsequent interview. I'll double check. He has said that himself and the Bosnian Intelligence Agency first informed the Italian Intelligence Service about what they believed, what they had evidence was happening in terms of the Sarajevo Safari. They first informed them in 1993. And then a few months later, in March 1994, the Italian Intelligence Service informed them that the matter had been closed. so that's just some interesting context to sort of think about in terms of perhaps some of the scepticism and cynicism that Bosniaks have about where this is going and the potential for change that could come as a result Are there projects in solidarity with the people and descendants of people who survived this that you think people can engage with? I think that I would encourage people to follow Bosnians for Palestine on Instagram because what they are doing is that they are being very intentional in highlighting the commonalities between the violence against Palestinians and what Bosniaks in particular endured during the war and genocide. I would also point people towards a very interesting grassroots. I don't know exactly what they are in terms of are they. They're not an NGO. I don't know if they're an association or just a grassroots initiative. They're called, it's a Bosnian title. They're called Ostra Nula. O-S-T-R-A. New word. M-U-L-A and they are based in the Republika Srpska entity but they are a group of young activists from all ethnic backgrounds, all of the three major ethnic groups in Bosnia that's Serb, Croats and Bosnia who take an explicitly anti-capitalist approach to their work so they are very interesting and the fact that they're doing what they're doing to fight against the corruption of the Republika Sarska authorities and ethno-nationalism, and they're doing that within the entity, I think it is really quite extraordinary. So you can also follow them on Instagram and keep up to date with what they're doing. I mean, they're always, there's always either a march happening in solidarity with Palestine or there was recently a reading of names of all the murdered children of Sarajevo alongside all of the murdered children of Gaza in the recent wave of the genocide in Gaza. So there's a lot of very interesting stuff happening which people from all around the world can at least follow on social media. And if you're in or around Bosnia, then of course you can meet some of these people in person, which is great. Yeah, for closing thoughts, I was pleasantly surprised to read that they have suspects. So I'll take this win and I also feel, I I should have seen this earlier. But, Jojo, thank you for coming on and having a chat with us about horrifying stuff. Thank you for inviting me. Our pleasure. Yeah. Let's go pet coffee. Let me go feed my chicken. All right. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been as fascinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on him. but the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. 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And then he took his silence to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette Podcast. Each week we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Over the course of about a month, the general strike went from a pipe dream that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen until potentially maybe 2028 to something that happened here. We saw a one-day general strike in Minneapolis, and everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for general strikes. It's become a demand, it's become a tactic, and it's become a term that is on the tongues of people who never would dare to speak of it before. And on this show, we are going to talk about the history of general strikes, how they happen, how they're organized, how they succeed, how they fail, and what the contemporary history of the tactic looks like. now when I originally planned this first episode I was going to do a overview of about a hundred years of history of General Strikes to try to get us roughly to the modern era and then as soon as I started well not as soon as I started writing that deeper into the process than it should have been I realized there was absolutely no way I could cover a hundred years of General Strikes in one episode What I kept coming back to was one specific strike, a strike that most of you have never heard of. It's the general strike in Shanghai in 1925, what became known as the May the 30th movement. I want to begin here because intellectually, most of you have never heard of it. Emotionally, you already know everything about it. Now, I have written about this strike before. It was, in fact, the first thing I ever wrote about for Behind the Bastards, an episode about a Chinese warlord named Zhang Zongcheng. But about a quarter of those episodes were about what became the May the 30th movement. And so I'm going to recap a little bit of what I talked about in that episode and talk about some different stuff. And, yeah, we're going to get you introduced to how you get a general strike and, you know, how the course of these things can go with a strike that will look shockingly familiar to anyone who has lived through this year, which is to say this is a strike that starts when an occupying army has taken over a city and starts fucking killing people. so a little bit of background about what is going on in China in the 1920s 1925 is in the middle of what is called the warlord period in China which is a period where go listen to the bastards episode the short version of this is that after the 1911 revolution that had overthrown the Chinese imperial system, China became split between a bunch of warlords composed out of different sort of parts of the armies. Now, also in this period, large parts of China are under the direct control of foreign occupiers. These are countries like Japan, the UK, France, Russia. I think there's an American concession sort of in there somewhere. And these countries just own parts of China. And for our purposes, they also own parts of Shanghai. and these things both the territories they occupy sometimes literally you know the occupation is they own a rail line when i say they own a rail line it's not just a company or even the country owning the rail line they physically own the territory so it's theirs like this rail line belongs to japan and so the land around the rail line belongs to japan and they can enforce their laws in it, and this is how it works also in Shanghai. Inside of these concessions, there is an armed occupation, and in Shanghai, there are British or French or Japanese police and military personnel there who do law enforcement and will just kill you. Where, my dear listener, have we seen this before I leave that as an exercise to the reader? Listener? Yes, I guess you're the listener. Now, this state of affairs came to a head in May 1925, when a Japanese foreman was meeting with Chinese union organizers of what was basically supposed to be a contract negotiation session. There's a team of Japanese foremen and business people there and a group of Chinese union organizers, and the details of what exactly happened are very, very sketchy, but a brawl broke out, and the conclusion of the brawl was that a Japanese foreman killed a fairly well-known local union leader. Now, the police had also arrested several of the workers who had been in the negotiations and continued to hold them even after a massive demonstration for the Chinese union organizer who'd been killed's funeral. So on May the 30th, protesters gathered outside of a police station run by the British to demand the release of their comrades. This set off a climactic confrontation that changed the face of Chinese history forever. The British opened fire on the crowd, killed 10 people and wounded 50 more. Now, half a decade ago, when I first wrote about this for Cool Zone, I read a quote from the great Chinese author and anarchist Ba Jin. This is quoted from author Waldron's book from Warden Nationalism, China's Turning Point, 1924-1925. And I want to return to it now for reasons that I think will immediately become apparent. This is about a student who witnessed the killings. At the entrance to Yunnan Road, he saw the child who had been killed a short while before. He thought, about half an hour ago, the crowd was marching peacefully towards the police station to ask the police to set free students who had been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human beings endowed with reason and human sympathy, that human blood flowed in their veins. They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed their human nature, but reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people. For this, there was no precedent in Chinese history. The imperialist oppression that had endured for so many years ached like a deep wound in his heart. He struggled inwardly. He felt the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted to spill his blood to sacrifice his young life, that he might show that not all among his people were lambs that allowed themselves to be led without resistance to slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the murdered child. His eyes shone with fire. His whole body began to burn as though on fire. His heart, be violently. You, dear listener, understand this. When I first quoted this passage in 2021, it was about George Floyd. Now, it's about Renee Good and Alex Pretty. you understand the horror, the suffering, the rage, the overwhelming fire to do something. You understand that they are like us. And you understand why they fought. What followed was the largest, to that point, general strike in the history of Shanghai. 200,000 people walked off the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes. The strike spread to almost every major city in China in some form or another. Massive student protests began. Tire cities rose as one. 250,000 people went on strike in Hong Kong. Students, workers, business owners, and gangsters stood precariously as one to drive out the armed men occupying their cities. In an instant, the world changed. Things that were impossible the day before suddenly began commonplace. People flooded the streets. They were attacked by cops. They fought back. And for three months, they held on. Now, this was a much rougher time than even contemporary 2026 America. we are in a little bit going to get to the part where a bunch of people's heads get put on spikes by the government and you know unlike 1925 Shanghai for example American cities are not contrary to the beliefs of a significant portion of the American conservative population run by networks of organized crime who control every facet of political life and also economic life and also social life to the extent that if you're a union organizer in 1920s Shanghai, you are effectively a mob organizer, both in the sense that you probably have to belong to one of the organizations and to the extent that the people you are actually organizing this time are like you're organizing the mob guys who bring in workers to serve as the migrant worker population. This is also actually an important aspect of the strikes in 1925, which is that much of the labor population in Shanghai are migrant workers and have been brought in from other parts of the country by organized crime. Now, obviously, that's not, that is not really how migrant labor works in the United States. But, you know, to some extent, the pressures of the labor discipline are very similar in that, the threat that is held over the heads of migrant workers is that armed men will come in the night for you. And right now what we are witnessing is the armed men coming into the night. But, you know, as much as I talk about sort of the differences between these movements, I think the immediate question for our purposes is, are there things that we can learn from this movement? and I think the answer is yes but in order to get to the what can we learn from this we have to talk a bit about how the movement collapsed so I said that the movement held on for about three months that was in Shanghai the history of some of the other cities is different and we kind of don't have time to for example divert talk about general strike in Hong Kong where the primary method that people used was they simply left the city and went back home, which solves some of the problems that we're going to be talking about in a little bit. But okay, in Shanghai, what happened to this movement and why did it fall apart? So I think there are roughly three factors and I think the first two are actually more important than the third one, which might be surprising when we get to them but the first two factors were people being able to eat and the pressure that that put on the unions and secondarily betrayal from the business elites that they had allied with to get the strikes to work and the third is pure repression and the scale of the pure repression here is astonishing one of the guys who runs this strike is just executed by the state Again, I'm promising we're going to get to the heads on pikes in a bit. But the repression isn't what killed the strike. It was the problem of how do people eat, and it was the pressure from the business elite. So we're going to talk about the business elite first. Now, when I say the business elite here, in the early days of the movement, and this is a tension that's going to sort of haunt the Chinese Nationalist Party for its entire existence until it splits from the communists completely, and even later than that, they're in a very, very uneasy alliance with left-wing students, workers who are rapidly becoming left-wing, because this is also a city that was not enormously politicized until now and suddenly becomes politicized in ways that seemed impossible like a few years before. But there's a tension between them because initially, these sort of patriotic business owners are really, really pissed off that the foreign occupiers are murdering people in their city. and sort of nationalist and communist leaders are able to sort of broker alliances with them, and they're able to broker alliances with organized crime, which is less important for our purposes. I cannot emphasize enough how important the organized crime people are in the history, to the extent that, like, Chiang Kai-shek, who you may know as, like, the leader of the Nationalist Party and the guy who's eventually going to run Taiwan after losing the Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek was an organized crime guy. Like, he was in the Green Gang. so like you know very important to their story less important to our story but they act in a very similar way to the business owners which is that in the beginning and this is something that we saw in Minneapolis too during their one day general strike which is that a lot of business owners either out of you know just actual genuine rage and grief over just the raw fucking horror of these monsters grabbing people from their homes and shooting people in the streets, cooperated and shut their businesses down for the day. Now, obviously, there are other business owners who do this because they are producers. Am I allowed to say that they looked outside and were like, it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing, right? You know, they saw what was going on and were like, okay, maybe my workers aren't going to show up Or if I don't publicly support this, it's going to get real fucked for me because everyone else around does. And that meant that there was a lot of cooperation from businesses. But we also saw very quickly after like a kind of a whole bunch of businesses and like sports organizations to like sign the thing that was like, ah, we need to restore order, do-do-do-do-do, maybe end the occupation, but also please stop causing disruptions, protesters. Now, in the Chinese case, what we see as the strike goes on is that the business elite began to see the strikes themselves and the marches and fighting with the police, and particularly the fact that they were also not making money and they were also putting their own money into keeping the strikes going as a problem because they are business people and the only thing that they really care about fundamentally is making money. There's a Marx line I wish I had here about, like, what the national character of Britain was and it turned out that its only fundamental principle was land rent. And that's like this, right? Like, at some point, these people are like, okay well given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and my workers gaining power i will choose imperialist occupation and this is something that in cross-class movements like this specifically if you are trying to do a general strike you're eventually going to have to deal with this which is that a lot of particularly large businesses and you know some small business owners will fall in line with this too right will eventually get to a point where they're like i would rather keep making money than, you know, not have my neighbors taken away. And that is unbelievably fucking bleak. But that's, you know, like that's one of the things that killed this general strike in China. And eventually, in the face of this, right, we come to the second problem, which is that people needed to eat. So the Union Federation that's set up had been just sort of giving people money. so that they could eat. But they eventually start to run out of money and they don't really have a way to organize the sort of production movement and logistics of providing everyone with food without relying on the bankrolling of those business owners. You know, this becomes a problem because it means that they're suddenly getting attacked by portions of the workers who are supposed to be their base because they don't have food. And those people also just start, like, walking up the Chamber of Commerce meetings and walking in and beating up the Chamber of Commerce people for not paying them and then, like, eating the banquet food. The cheap room commerce is a great story in a book called Shanghai on Strike, by Elizabeth Ferry, who's a renowned scholar of Chinese labor history, about this. Very funny. There's lots of absolutely wild stories from this strike. One of the sort of recurring themes of this period of union organizing, and again, this is a really rough time, right? Imagine, like, gangster movies, 1920s New York, and, like, that's Shanghai, but like the gangs are way way way way stronger so like the way politics works to a large extent is that people beat the shit out of each other and like haul hits on each other and the city is technically speaking it's run by like what is a warlord army and then beneath the warlord army there are all of these organized criminal organizations but like you know the unions have this thing called dog-beating brigades, where, um, dog-beating brigades, like, if you, like, publicly started scabbing, or you very publicly were standing against the strike, like, the dog-beating brigade would show up in the middle of the night, and it was just, like, a bunch of guys with hatchets, and they would just, like, beat the shit out of you, and this was just, like, a normal thing that was happening during these strikes. So, this whole period of Chinese history is nuts. It's wild. There's so much shit going on that's just, I don't know, they had the dog-beating brigades. I guess in the American context, we'd call them like the scabby-beating brigades or whatever. But, you know, it's a rough time for everyone. But what they kind of don't have without sort of business owners, they're never really able to sort of seize control of production and repurpose it towards, you know, keeping everyone fed. And I will say this is something that actually I think we are better at than they were in the sense of we are better at running the logistics of getting a bunch of people food and the stuff that they need to survive. And this is something we can look at in Minneapolis where, and this is obviously coming from people's money, but a lot of the organizing in Minneapolis is about getting people who can't leave their homes food. We've also seen in the last day or so, tenant and labor union leaders are talking about a rent strike in Minneapolis, which can help people, you know, not get evicted because they can't go to work. But it's also something that if you're going to do a general strike, yeah, you probably also have to do a rent strike. But if you want to keep a general strike going, and this is something that we're going to get to a lot more in later episodes, the Seattle general strike is a very large example of this. if you want to keep this thing going, you have to take control of the places where you're working and, you know, have them provide the food for people and have them provide the resources that people need. But in this sort of context, almost everyone who's involved in this, this is their first general strike. What really happens here, right, is that the unions are forced to call off the strike. They get minor concessions in exchange from the foreign bosses. But what it does is politicized the entire city and it politicizes all of China in a way that is going to shape all of the politics in the country forever, I guess. Like if the thing that creates modern China is the politicization that comes out of this period, you know, it's what sort of transforms Chinese politics and something that was purely that almost purely domain of warlords into something that's now the domain of the nationals and the communists. And obviously, you know, the military conflict is a large thing in this that we don't really have time to get into, but this period transforms the entire politics of China. People who had never thought about politics before, people who had never heard the words imperialism or heard the words militarism are suddenly in the streets talking about it. They're talking about general strikes and they're talking about how can we run these occupying armies out. And I want to sort of mention how this whole thing ends, right? Which the people keep organizing and they keep fighting. And one year later, in 1926, the first of the uprisings begins. Now, the first uprising, and these three uprisings are all sort of like called by the Chinese Communist Party and their unions. The first one fails horribly. And the warlords put the heads of workers they'd killed on pikes. They have these squads where there's two guys with broadswords. and a guy with, like, a sheriff's badge, effectively, who go door-to-door, and if they find someone who they think had, like, handed out leaflets, they would execute them on the spot. This is the kind of repression they're dealing with. And they did it again. They tried again in 1927. And that one failed. And the second time, by the way, it's worth mentioning, was supposed to be a general strike coordinated with an uprising, and they fucked up the coordination of it. But it did also. The second one was a 300,000-strong general strike. And the third try was an 800,000 strong general strike. And they seized the interaction, and they run the warlord armies out of the city. And for a sort of brief, glorious moment, Shanghai is in the hands of its workers. And their subsequent betrayal and slaughter by the USSR and Chiang Kai-shek, mostly Chiang Kai-shek, the USSR is also at fault here for telling them to keep allying with Chekyshek and the Nationalists. That's a story for another time. But I think to close, we are used to thinking that the times that we live in are unprecedented. And in some ways they are. But people have fought our struggles before. People have fought and died and won to stop the reign of men with guns over our cities. And if we learn the lessons of both their time and ours, if we use that knowledge to act in the moment of crisis, we can win. Conscience, history, and the cries of the suffering demand it. So let's go win the war. We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history. Martin Luther King Sr., and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. but the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. This episode we're covering the week, February 11th to February 18th. Some small news items up top. Last week, the FDA declined to review a new flu vaccine from Moderna. On February 12th, Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge has concluded, and quote, significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week, unquote. Zwar Mamdani has ordered a new audit of city agencies to ensure compliance with sanctuary city laws in New York. And Stephen Colbert says that CBS refused to air his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Tallarico, citing the FCC's equal time rule, despite this rule historically having an exception for late-night talk show interviews. Last month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to enforce the rule regardless of the well-established precedent that excluded talk show interviews. And finally, the owner of a warehouse facility in Hutchins, Texas, says that they won't sell or lease the building to the federal government as a detention facility. The city's mayor and council all opposed the project. seizure by eminent domain is still possible. Yeah, and I guess with that, there's been campaigns in a couple of other small, traditionally conservative rural areas to not lease facilities for ICE. And it's still a little unclear. And I suspect it's kind of column A, column B, how much of this is, you know, nimbyism and how much of this is resistance to ICE specifically. Yeah, we covered a little of that in the episode I did on Social Circle, which is in Georgia last week. But I think it's fair to say both. Yeah, and obviously when I say nimbyism, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's bad to have this in your backyard, but their issue isn't a moral one in some cases. Yeah, in some cases. I think in some cases it's a little column A, a little column B. Yeah, it's hard to tell. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting, for instance, hearing in Southern California, right, a town called Dolzura, pretty small town, maybe you've heard of it from when the KKK did border patrols there back in the day, but the the border patrol are trying to build a big new facility there and have been for some time uh called new brownfield there has been local opposition to that among people who are very like people who i have spoken to are otherwise conservative and like some of it is yeah i don't want this changing the character of a town i don't want a giant detention center that would eclipse the population of this very small town some of this also like i don't want them to be locking you know, people out here, we have a nice life out here. And, you know, we have lots of fields and horses and space. And it seems like it would be really fucked up to have people detained out here. Like, I think that that NIMBY impulse can sometimes like can still combine with even people who are not, you know, abolitionists. They don't want to be confronted with the horrors directly next to them. Yep. And we'll talk a little bit more about the numbers, like ISIS polling numbers, like how popular they are with Americans. But one of the things we've seen this year is that, like, they've been shedding support even from Republicans. So, like, you know, whatever debate we have here, that's, like, certainly not a non-factor. Definitely. I think it's now time for us to talk about the biggest news story this week, which is that Shia LaBeouf was arrested in New Orleans during Mardi Gras after getting into a series of fights. Who? He was in the movie Holes. Oh yeah He was also in a different production called Holes But not based on a book He was in Holes, I forgot Yeah, it was in both holes I don't know who this person is I've never He's a child actor who was very popular During the early 2000s And has gone He played Indiana Jones' son In the reboot Or in the fourth Indiana Jones movie And then he has Since kind of fallen into madness and disrepute. He's a spousal abuser. He's repeatedly assaulted people in public. He showed up on that webcam. White supremacists were drinking milk on once for reasons that are still to this day somewhat unclear to me. And he got into a fight in Mardi Gras, which is just a fun little bit of news. My favorite part of this is that he assaulted a guy. He was repeatedly restrained by members of a bar, and whenever they would let him go, because they just wanted him to leave, they didn't want to call the cops, he would then continue to attack the guy he was assaulting until they were forced to call the police and have him arrested. And I've been in Mardi Gras over the last few days. And let me tell you, getting arrested by the police during Mardi Gras, not easy. I don't have a lot to say about that other than I was surprised by the number of very political floats that I saw, particularly at least one that was entirely paper mache ice guys in a very like non flattering way. There were a lot of like costumes and a number of like references on floats. There's a couple of pretty hideous caricatures of Trump on floats. And they all got like a widely positive reaction. And I find this interesting and I'm bringing this up because the research that I've largely been doing for the EV this week is trying to get a handle on like where Americans are polling right now and how popular or unpopular is the president and his agenda. because you see articles every week about Trump's polls hit a new low or the most recent article that I think it's Gallup is no longer going to be doing presidential popularity polling. But I wanted to get a look at how the actual parties and their agendas are holding up. And it's a pretty shocking gap between September, October, fall of last year and today. So in September of 2025, per YouGov, the Democratic Party had about a 64% unfavorable. So like 64% of polled Americans didn't like the Democratic Party. And a little less than 34% of Americans had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party. And if you actually look at the graphs for those that YouGov presents, they're basically making like a wine glass shape, right? So what that means is unfavorability is moving up and favorability is moving down rapidly, like at the time at which those polls were taken in September of last year. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, neither party was popular, but the Republican Party, the wine glass shape was a lot more muted. It's more like a shot glass. 55.4% of Americans polled by YouGov expressed an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party and about 42.3% expressed a favorable opinion. You can compare this to October 2025 polling by Pew Research, which showed something similar. 64% of Americans were frustrated with the Republican Party. 75 of Americans reported being frustrated with the Democratic Party 49 of Americans polled replied that they were angry at the Republican Party 50 reported being angry at the Democratic Party Similarly, Republicans, 36% of Americans felt hopeful about the Republican Party. 28% of Americans felt hopeful about the Democratic Party. And then 27% of Americans were proud of the Republican Party. 16% Democratic Party. Those are pretty bleak numbers for the Democrats coming in the fall of 2025. Like that is kind of blackpilling stuff, right? Yeah. This was in the fall of last year, pretty rapid change from where things have been about four years ago. For example, in September of 2021, about 64 percent of Americans had expressed frustration with the Democratic Party as opposed to 75 percent four years later. So that's all fall of last year. Now, between when the polls that I read to you came out and now, we've had several major things happen. One of the more significant was the long shutdown, which was disastrous for Republican favorability and for Trump's unfavorability. And we also had a significant, I mean, obviously in L.A. and in Chicago, ICE had been doing very terrible and very like, you know, I guess I should say like documented crimes, like horrible things that were spread widely on social media. But that has also accelerated massively in the first couple of weeks of 2026. And what we're seeing now in more recent polls taken in late January and anywhere from early January to late January and early February is a significant reversal. So NBC News' Decision Desk collated a bunch of different polls like Daily Mail, Marquette, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, YouGov, Fox News, Emerson. And over the last month or so, you're looking at an average spread of all of these polls of about negative 19.9% favorability for the Republican Party and about negative 12.8% favorability for the Democratic Party. So when you think back to those numbers from last fall, that's a pretty dramatic change. And it kind of correlates to a dramatic change in Trump's unfavorability, which has gone down by about 12 percent per the average of those polls that kind of aggregated by NBC News Desk. Their article notes, quote, Ipsos polling released in late January found 51 percent of Americans say Trump's immigration policy is on the wrong track. Amazingly, just a year ago, Americans said Republicans have a better planned policy and approach than Democrats on immigration by a 22 point margin. Now that advantage is down to five points. So while Trump is underwater with immigration, his and the Republican Party's policies towards immigration are still more popular than the Democratic Party's responses to immigration. But they have also collapsed in terms of like the gap between those two things. Again, 22-point margin to a five-point lead is a pretty dramatic narrowing. And one of the things that has come along with this is an increasing agreement among Americans that ICE has not only gone too far but needs to be, if not abolished entirely, then severely curtailed. And a lot of Americans, a shocking amount, currently support abolishing ICE entirely. A PBS News NPR Marist poll released recently found that a majority of Americans feel ICE is making the country less safe and has gone too far. Six in ten Americans disapprove of what ICE is doing. Only about three in ten approve of it. So by a two to one margin, Americans disapprove ICE's operations to approve of their behavior. This is a very, like, political breakdown. About 91% of Democrats disapprove of ICE. 60% of independents disapprove of ICE. Meanwhile, 73% of Republicans approve of ICE. But even that number has dropped fairly recently, right? In fact, the percentage of Americans that believe ICE hasn't gone far enough dropped from 18% to 12% over the last year. and only about 22% of Americans feel like ICE is doing a good job compared to 26% of Americans a year ago. So we're seeing pretty unequivocally Americans rejecting the Republican tactics on immigration and they tend to be blaming ICE for it, right? That's one of the things that's most interesting to me is that both ICE and President Trump have seen the most dramatic collapses in public support, which suggests to me that, like, Americans are kind of tying these two things together. Currently, per YouGov, as of January 24, 2026, more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it. Now, this does not mean a majority of Americans support abolishing ICE. I've seen some people misstate that. 46% of U.S. adults, as polled by YouGov, somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. 12% are not sure. 41% somewhat or strongly oppose abolishing ICE. that's still pretty striking yeah a plurality right maybe now would be a good time to talk a little bit about where the Democrats different Democrats different wings of the Democrat Party are on abolishing ICE because I think it's one of these areas where the further up the party you go the more detached from that public opinion you get so maybe we'll start with Hakeem Jeffries Democrat leader in the House Here's him on the Joy Reid show on the topic of abolishing ICE. Why not lead and say abolish ICE? Because what you're telling us is you want our taxpayer dollars to pay for a lawless mass armed agency to continue terrorizing our cities. And I'm trying to figure out how you, as a leader, can be telling Americans that their taxpayer dollars should be going to ICE. I don't understand anything that you just said. I don't understand anything that you've just said to me. when I've made clear that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not brutalize or kill them. That's the whole reason we're in this fight right now. That's the whole reason the DHS is getting ready to shut down. That's the whole reason why we're hoping. Abolish ICE. Listen, I'm going to use the language that I want to use. You can use the language that you want to use. you can see Jeffries visibly kind of tense when the phrase abolish ice is used right like he's yeah he wants nothing to do with it his immediate response is to go to affordability I do want to note that when he was previously asked if he would use the appropriations process to rain in ice he did exactly the same thing but why not use the appropriations process to rain in ice What I'm focused on right now, Chad, is to make life better for the American people by extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which, by the way, a lot of folks in this institution believe was not possible. But Democrats made clear before the government was shut down that we were in this fight until we win this fight on behalf of the American people. But why not? Cancel the cuts, lower the cost, save health care. That's our objection. Then he does the same thing, right? He goes back to affordability, which is something the Democrats have done for the last year and a half, right? When asked to take a strong leadership stance on ICE, far too much of their leadership has instead tried to deflect through affordability. I do want to note that they are now doing exactly what he was deflecting from there, right? Yeah. And that was only less than a month ago. It's interesting, because it's like this cowardice on, like, specific terms and messaging. Yeah. Even though they are using the appropriations process to try to rain it ice. Like, that is, yeah, that is what they are doing now. But it's like a complete, complete cowardice on actually, like, trying to, like, use, like, public pressure to your advantage at the moment. Like, yeah, he's doing the thing and almost, like, failing to, it's not that he's doing his thing, you know, as many of us would wish he did. that he's failing to take the easy win because of, like you say, this institutional cowardice. It's like there's some kind of red line, rhetorically, for Jeffries and other leadership Democrats that they will not cross. And I have to believe that some of that comes from what they see as the long legacy of 2020. There's perceptions that the Democratic Party is too far to the left, is too extreme, or something. Yeah, specifically the perception that they attempted to abolish the institution of policing, which was not really anything that was not in their policy platform. They were not Democrat leaders saying, we're going to do away with the cops. In fact, Biden was talking about how we need to fund the police, not defund the police in 2020. But nonetheless, there seems to be this real, it's very hard for them to break that rhetorical boundary. it's not entirely just Jeffries on this seven Dems cross party lines in late January to vote for a DHS funding bill so we've got representative Henry Quella of Texas the worst Democratic congressman holy shit what a fucking asshole I hate that guy Texas Dems hit different and like specifically like Rio Grande Valley Democrats are a different breed god he sucks so much There's Jared Golden of Maine, Mary Glusenkamp Perez of Washington, Laura Gillan, Don Davis of North Carolina. Laura Gillan is New York. Tom Swozy of New York and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas. This is not a position that is unique to Jeffries, right? There's this idea that perhaps there needs to be some reform of ICE, but abolishing it would go far too far. Other Democrats have introduced an act which would essentially move funding from ICE to local law enforcement. So it would take that $75 billion budget allocation to ICE and move it to local COPS, right? This is called the Providing Useful Budgets for Localities to Invest in COPS by Substituting Six Appropriations from Federal Enforcement to Yield Results Act. holy shit no wonder these people say rebilities like negative one trillion percent yeah it's what we call a backronym in that they have started with the word public safety and then made a really horrendous attempt at turning that into an acronym there is also like a wing of the democratic party right on the left which is more forthright about abolishing ICE here's a clip of AOC talking about why ICE should be abolished And this is at an event in Queens. Yeah. ICE is a very young agency relative to many others. Enforcements of people who committed crimes that were undocumented or had visas used to be under the Department of Justice. And in the Department of Justice, if someone wants to come to your house, you need a judge. You need an entire judicial process. You need a warrant to ensure that your constitutional liberties are respected. You need all of it. What they did was that they took ICE out, well, they took immigration enforcement out of the DOJ, which had very tight reins on what you're allowed to do. They take that, they put it into this new agency that they put at the time, which is the Department of Homeland Security. First of all, in what world does FEMA belong under the same umbrella as ICE? It makes no sense at all. No sense at all. And what happened is that once you take that enforcement piece out of that agency, they then start to answer to nobody. Even though I technically, statutorily, their responsibility is just supposed to be on immigration enforcement, they are now expanding their data collection to U.S. citizens, to everyone on this soil. They are waving these phones around and saying that they're implementing facial recognition technology to a centralized database. We have to fight this tooth and nail. We need to defund it. We need to not allow this to be collected by private companies. A lot of what we need to do is not just revisit Section 702. We need to abolish ICE. And we need to have comprehensive changes to that data. One thing I do want to note about her statements is that during the appropriations process, she did give statements about how she was pushing to defund ICE as an agency. And this did cause a reaction from some, I'll call them overly online leftists, claiming that she had changed positions from wanting to abolish to defund. This is some sort of slide, and then she then had to follow up with saying, well, currently the way to restrict ICE and lead to abolishing it is through defunding it. So that's what we're doing through the appropriations process. No, my position has not changed. I still think the agency should be abolished. Yeah. Yeah. There's a broad issue we had, which was that at the end of 2020, as a result of all of the federal agents that were in American cities and had been videoed brutalizing citizens in places like Portland, there was a lot of anger about DHS in particular. I wrote a column for Business Insider about, like, look, this agency is going to remain under Biden, but if we don't cut the legs out from under the entire agency, it's basically set up to be the president's secret police. And broadly speaking, the Democrats didn't do anything to stop it. But I also like I guess where I am on this is I think it's kind of counterproductive. At this point, the failures of the Biden administration, I think, are quite manifest in what the Trump administration is doing right now. And what I want to focus on is the fact that we've had in the space of several months, Americans become more than twice as likely to support abolishing ICE, which is both a fragile coalition because the fact that the number has changed so rapidly means that it could potentially change back. Like I don't feel solid in counting on that to be the permanent state of affairs but it introduces an opportunity and it's an opportunity to build support to destroy this agency and I think it's probably too much to hope for DHS as a whole and anything close to the near term But the fact that during the Biden administration so much got punted on, I don't know, like we're past that. We have the opportunity now. Yeah. We have the anger now. I do. I retain my worry. And I would say almost one of my biggest political fears is that 2026 and 2028 go well for Democrats. They do again what happened under the Biden administration. Yeah. And they leave all these things intact. But one of the big differences that we have, at least right now, is that at no point was abolishing ICE polling the way it is right now during the Biden or the first Trump administration. Yeah. And I think we have to take advantage of that. There's momentum right now. Like, this is a crucial time. Look, we're talking here in terms of like abolishing ICE moves us back to the 2003 norm. right like what it doesn't do is fix the fundamental issue here which is that there are not legal pathways for people to come to the u.s and there need to be and like i think like now is the time for people who are involved in democratic politics right to agitate for like a a genuine reform package i don't think we will ever see support like this again for legalization of undocumented people for dreamers right or people who are impacted by uh deferred action for childhood arrivals which is a policy that became placed under obama like now is the time for substantial immigration reform i say this knowing that this will not fix a problem like more than most people you know i have seen the horrors of our immigration system firsthand but like there is a moment right now that we could change things for the better and i share robert's worry that if democrats get like an easy win even in the midterms that we might not get that and like what we saw under biden was a big pointer to what we're seeing under trump that essentially the dhs was almost impossible for him to control yeah in that he acquiesced to oads he is still responsible for and the buck stops with him, he's president. I'm not certain that he planned it, but nonetheless it continued to happen for months and months and months under his presidency, right? Like, it was very obvious the way this was going to go if we got another Trump presidency. And if they do that again, we're just setting the table for things to get worse again. Right, and I think, James, the task before us is twofold, right? Because on one hand, we have to reform the system by which people gain legal acceptance to live in this country. And that also includes, I think, there needs to be a push for some sort of federal law that will make it impossible or at least much harder to reverse these acceptances and to do things like nullify or cancel green cards in permanent residency like the administration is doing right now. Like both we need increased pathways and we need increased resilience to promise people that, hey, if you go through all of these hoops to become a legal resident or a citizen or whatever, it can't just get pulled away the next time a Republican wins office. Yeah. And then on the other side of things, you have this vast, uncontrollable militant agency built as the armed wing of the presidency that has to be destroyed because it can't exist in a democracy. Yeah, it's not compatible. And then you have, I mean, I would extend that to DHS as a whole, but it's my same issue with like, if we can defund ICE right now, I'm always in favor of taking away some of their money. That's not the extent of what I think should happen to ICE. It's just like it's a salient, right? Like you have to look at it that way. Like it would be as if you're like, well, it's not worth winning the Battle of Stalingrad because that doesn't give us Berlin. But these are steps. You know, you try to damage and reduce the agency's power and ability to function while you're continuing. And I guess the worry about that, too, is that if you do defund ICE, if they because we've had some. Trump has made a couple of comments about worrying that, like, we need to reduce kind of the tempo at which ICE is operating because it's bad for them. So that is kind of one of my concerns that maybe if they pull back on the throttle a little bit, the rage will decline enough that there's not this kind of motivation behind abolishing. But I feel like that's just a fear you kind of have to eat as opposed to not trying to stop and reduce the harms the agency does in the immediate term while you're working long term for abolition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did want to talk a little about other numbers because immigration is obviously a major issue for American voters. It's an issue people pick who they're going to vote for the presidency on. It's one of them. But it's not the main one. As a general rule throughout most of modern political history, the kind of the top issue for Americans is the economy. And if the economy is bad, it is very hard for your party to stay in power. If the economy is good, it is a lot easier for your party to stay in power, right? Like these are fairly basic facts of political life in the United States, always with some caveats, but that it bears looking at how do Americans feel about the economy and who do they blame for the fact that they feel badly about the economy. And per Politico, which carried out a recent survey, about 46% of Americans say the cost of living is the worst they can remember it ever being. This includes 37 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024. And Americans pretty significantly agree that this is a Trump problem. Inflation, the fact that they can't afford things is on him because he's the president. Again, 46 percent of Americans say it's Trump's economy and his administration is responsible for rising costs. Yeah. And this is true both among Republicans and Democrats, which is very interesting to me. A percentage of Americans based on the vote in the 24, 24 election, 53 percent of Harris voters in 2024 say the cost of living is the worst they've seen. And again, 37 percent of Trump voters in 2024 feel the same way. So that is it's an example of something that we've talked about and wonder about on the show a lot, which is like, how much does reality break through the fever swamps? And this is suggesting that like to a pretty solid degree that actually Trump is. I still think he's got a floor of somewhere around 30 percent of Americans who will follow him into the pits of hell, even if it means shoveling themselves into it. But that number used to be like 40 percent. Right. And it does seem to be declining. this is being treated as a five alarm fire among the the trump white house which is interesting to me for a couple of reasons you know anytime you talk with especially people on the left about but also increasingly a lot of democrats about the midterm elections in the 2028 elections i think you have to deal with this people saying but are there going to be elections right and you know it's i i don't dismiss those concerns out of hand obviously in part because the administration is talking right now about having ice agents and polling places, right? You do have to acknowledge that as a concern. But at the same time, I think if you're looking at this rationally, you have to note that the Trump administration internally is acting as if there will be elections and that those will be competitive elections. They are worried about the economy. They are worried about their polling and they are taking actions to try to mitigate the worries that they have, which they wouldn't be doing if they were already sure there's never going to be another election, right? And that is important to remember. It doesn't mean there's not a danger. It doesn't mean they won't try shit if they lose, but it does mean that they are treating these political issues as political issues that they have to deal with via messaging. There was an article in Fox News recently about Trump's team huddling to decide on midterm messaging. I'm going to quote from that now. The meeting, which was confirmed to Fox News by sources familiar with the gathering, was hosted by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who was steering Trump's political strategy. According to sources, the message during a slide presentation by Chief Pollster and Chief Strategist and Strategist Tony Fabrizio was that the economy will be the top issue in the minds of voters, and the White House needs to spotlight its efforts on easing affordability. The meeting was held as the GOP works to defend their control of the Senate and their razor-thin House majority in November's midterm elections. Republicans are also dealing with the president's continued underwater approval ratings, and a slew of surveys, including the latest Fox News polling, that indicates Americans are pessimistic about the economy. And publicly, the administration's claim is that Americans are happy with the economy. The economy's the best it's ever been. Look at how good the Dow is. It's over 50,000. Right. But everything we're hearing internally, like all of the reports from people inside the administration about what's going on day to day, is that they're wide awake and worried over the fact that their economic numbers are completely fucking dog shit. Now, what does this mean for the midterm elections? Well, very few people that I have found who are like credible analysts don't expect the Democrats to retake the House. Right. Meaning most credible analysts do think the Dems are likely to retake the House. That said, there's fairly few people who expect a 2018 style Democratic blowout among like the professional poll watchers and stuff, which is, if you remember, the Democrats flipped about 41 seats. There's a couple of reasons for this, right? And I found a good article in The Hill that's kind of analyzing why we shouldn't be expecting some of the exuberance that you're seeing on social media about early elections and how bad Trump's numbers are is maybe making people overly optimistic about flipping all of Congress to Democratic control, which is not currently the likeliest outcome. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of them is that as unpopular as Trump is, and I've hit on that quite a lot, the Democratic Party's overall favorability is about 33%, which is nine points lower than the Republican Party's favorability. And, you know, depending on the poll, five to ten points lower than Trump's own favorability. This is based on a Marquette Law School poll, right? So Trump is very unpopular and sort of the Republican Party, but people don't like the Democrats. The Democratic Party as a whole, people like individual Democrats. A lot of people like their congressperson. A lot of people like whoever it is they want to see as the presidential candidate. You know, you can look at, you know, you've got folks who really like Mamdani or really like Pritzker, but as a whole, voters, including Democratic voters, don't feel very positively towards the Democratic Party. In many cases, more negatively still than they feel about the Republican Party. That started to turn around. But if you're kind of hoping that there's going to be like a full on switch that makes it immediately possible to successfully impeach President Trump, that is extraordinarily unlikely to come in 2026. Right. Which doesn't mean that it's unlikely to have a good result. Republicans losing control of Congress is a good result. Right. There's just a lot less. I mean, there's a lot less, even if you're kind of taking the unfavorability of the Democratic Party out of it, there's a lot fewer seats up for grabs right now. In 2018, when the Democrats flipped 41 seats, there were 75 competitive races. This year, heading into the midterms, there were only 18, right? There's a lot less that can flip, and I don't think Republicans are likely to lose control of the Senate, right? and the polling shows things being pretty razor thin there. Democrats have about a 4% advantage, according to economist YouGov polling, right now in the congressional midterms, and there's a three-point margin of error. So you're looking at like a lead, but not enough of one for a complete fucking blowout, right? There has been some more positive data, like kind of right before we came on to record this, I looked at some charts by focal data that was kind of breaking down midterm voting intention by groups and looking at like likely voters. And this is always kind of a little bit like voodoo, right, in terms of how you're trying to like, well, how likely is a likely voter and how do we like factor in realistically are they going to show up? Anyway, if you're kind of assuming that like people who self-report as likely voters will only actually vote about a third of the time, per this study, Democrats are ahead by about seven points in a generic House ballot. So, you know, that's kind of where we are right now. I think we're looking at a midterm season that's going to go well for the Democrats, but I don't think we're looking at a midterm season that delivers us from the Republican Party being able to ram through legislation. I think our kind of best case scenario is one in which they have to give major concessions because the Democrats have, you know, flipped the House at the very least. Like, and that's that's big. But I don't think I don't think Trump's going to get impeached starting January of next year. the one thing I will say about the polling data is that so obviously Democrats tend to perform better in special elections because to vote in a special election you have to be a higher interest voter and that also special election cycles get driven by immediate like anger over stuff and there's a bunch of different factors that drive special election turnout and also the Democrats have been absolutely obliterating the Republicans in all the special elections that have been happening recently or and even in the cases where they lose they're losing by very small margins in places where trump was winning blowouts yeah so i think if you want to be optimistic i think that's the case for optimism but also yeah like if we're not going to have all of our problems magically solved by the midterms yeah yes to specify on that what you were saying there was a uh a special election in Tennessee and Republican Matt Epps beat the Democrat Afton Bain by nine points but Trump had won in 2024 there by 22 points. We talked about this on the show but last year there was an election a special election in western Iowa that Trump had won by double digits and the Democrats won by double digits and that kind of thing shouldn't be happening. It sure shouldn't. It is. And, you know, so that's the optimistic case. And, hey, like, I've just come in saying, like, hey, don't expect Congress to be completely flipped. But, like, you know, times are crazy. Who knows what else? Who knows how many more people ICE is going to murder? Who knows, like, what other, like, how bad the economy is going to get? We might have invaded Canada by then. Like, who knows? Yeah. Anything's on the table. Anything's still on the table. We're just kind of looking at shit from February. Yeah. Yeah, and some of this shit will depend on what atrocities they commit in the weeks and days before the midterm election. We see surges around the killing of René Good, the killing of Alex Preti. We see those things shift public opinion dramatically in the ongoing snatching of immigrants and deportations and sending people back to places where they'll be tortured and killed. That's kind of the background, it makes people angry, but it's these specific actions which seem to shift public opinion dramatically. All right, so on that topic, I guess, we should talk about the quote-unquote shutdown, and specifically the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, right? I guess the first thing to clarify is this isn't a government shutdown in the sense of the shutdown we saw last year, right, that lasted like 40-plus days. Right. It's a partial shutdown. It's a partial shutdown. What's happening right now is the Democrats are holding up further funding for DHS until the administration agrees to some concessions that they have asked for. This is unlikely to impact ICE and CBP a very great deal for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the tax and spending cuts bill right in 2025 bill funded them to an absolutely unfathomable degree, I think $65 million and $70 million respectively. More quickly, it will affect other agencies under DHS. Those include the Transport Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard. some TSA workers will be working that they will likely not be receiving pay this is pretty common right they're deemed as quote unquote essential workers and that means that they will be expected to need to work what we saw last time was that as the shutdown dragged on people were calling in sick or not coming into work because they were taking other jobs right because they had bills to pay the reason this is happening is because Democrats successfully managed to get Trump to separate DHS funding from another spending bill, which passed through and funded the rest of the federal government. They are demanding an end to masking. I should clarify specifically, like masking in the sense of law enforcement officers wearing gaiters over their faces, a return to officers displaying their name, badge, and ID number, increased oversight of detention conditions, coordination with local law enforcement, an end to the detention of U.S. citizens, Targeted enforcement and not roving patrols And a unified use of force and uniform conduct policy for CBP and ICE And then an end to raids using Form 215 I'm just going to note here that moving forward We're going to refer to that using that name And not call it an administrative warrant Because an administrative warrant kind of implies the action of a judge But these are forms that are filled out It is not the same early aspect as a warrant, unless a judicial warrant. The Republican counterproposals so far have shown pretty little common ground on this, aside from over body cameras where Noam did implement body cameras. As I said, ICE and CBP will continue doing what they do. I was at the border on Saturday and I saw tons of CBP patrols. they do not seem to have slowed down with their wall construction that that may over time slow down they won't be paying like the workers week by week on those contracts they will be paying a contractor who might be paying a subcontractor so that would take time to slow down the things that will slow down are things like the oversight functions of dhs uh potentially administrative and hiring functions things like that right but the actual like on the ground patrolling most of those people are deemed as essential workers. So it seems unlikely that we will see, for instance, fewer CBP patrols at the border or fewer ERO, ICE agents tasked with doing these ongoing raids. So, yeah, talking about DHS, I want to talk a little bit more about the Coast Guard. I think it's likely that some people won't be aware that the Coast Guard is an element of the DHS. They're also a branch of the military. They're the only branch of the military that's under the DHS. Yes. So they're considered veterans, but they're not under the DOD or the DOW, as you can now call it. The NBC has a piece suggesting that there is, I guess, a split in the Coast Guard between lower ranks and higher ranks. And specifically, they're talking about feeling that Coast Guard is moving away from its core mission, which is search and rescue. they highlight one incident in February of last year when a Coast Guardsman went overboard and a Coast Guard C-130 was detailed to participate in a search for that Coast Guardsman it had previously been detailed for a deportation flight but it was re-tasked to assist with the search according to the piece, quote, Noam verbally instructed the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lundy to pull the plane off the search and rescue mission So it would not miss the immigrant flight as part of DHS's so-called alien expulsion operations, according to two U.S. officials and a Coast Guard official. As a result, what happened is that local Coast Guard officials in San Diego scrambled to find two C-27s that could fulfill that deportation flight. In doing so, that freed up the C-130 to then go return to participate in the search, right? They did continue searching, I believe, for 190 hours, but they never found the missing Coast Guardsmen, right? You cannot and will never be able to conclusively prove that all of this back and forth with this C-130 had any impact on that. But this incident has clearly had an impact on morale. And it suggested general shift in priorities away from search and rescue and towards doing more border enforcement. Under Gnome, 750 flights have been redirected from their regular work to instead deport migrants. this comes after she removed the high-ranking Coast Guard official from her house so that no could live at the house. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. She kicked the Coast Guard person out of their house? Yeah, this was last year. She moved, with like very short notice, she moved onto a... Yeah, she moved onto a base. I missed this. With Lewandowski, right? That might be the case, guys. There was like a few people in like the cabinet or orbit. Yes, I thought you meant they were cohabiting. Oh, no, no, no. Beautiful domestic life. Okay, I was... I don't want to doubt you, but that would have been a news to me. Yes, a number of Trump's executive officials are living on bases more than is usual. I think the Millers maybe do as well. She also purchased two Gulfstream jets to fly her around. Unlike Like most government jets, which tend to be returned to what's called a sterile state after use, that just means that they go back to being completely clean. They're like a generic jet. They're not your jet. Gnome prefers to keep some personal items aboard the Gulf Streams, but one of these items, a heated blanket, was left behind after her jet broke down and shot to switch planes. Koi Lewandowski reportedly shouted at the Coast Guard flight staff and demanded they turn around before attempting to fire the pilot who refused to do so. Jesus Christ! I need my blankie. I need my blankie. Turn around. Yeah, I think she'd had a rough week, I guess, wanted the blanket. These are absolutely just, like, the softest fascists that have ever ruled a country. Like, turn on flight around because I left my baby blanket. Yeah, right, like... Oh, God. Fortunately, I guess they de-esquited that one continued to fly blanket free he turned the fire in the pipe yeah I think it is interesting to look at Coast Guard's morale right like Coast Guard's traditional mission has been search and rescue and then the interdiction of like drug vessels and they have been doing a great deal of border enforcement stuff and removal stuff and it's obviously like people who have been at Coast Guard for a long time not what they joined the Coast Guard to do. I will just say that there are very few areas in which the United Kingdom has worked shit out, but the lifeboats are one of them. They are mentioned in mutual aid. The Royal National Lifeboat Institute has an article on for Popkin on their website. And it is one of the really genuinely good things about Britain. By contrast, they are not part of our late government security apparatus. Yeah, because that makes no sense. The entire agency of DHS makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, there are better ways to do this. I mean, again, it makes a lot of sense as the president's private army. Yeah. For our final segment in this episode, some tragic news. On Monday afternoon, February 16th, two people were killed in a shooting at a hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, before the shooter died by suicide. Three others were shot but survived their injuries. In the aftermath of the tragedy, people across the right and the left have both used this shooting offensively and defensively in the culture war because of the shooter's gender identity and far-right conspiratorial politics, even though evidence points towards this being targeted domestic violence. The deceased are the shooter's ex-wife and eldest son, and the deceased ex-wife's parents were critically wounded but survived, as did a family friend. The shooter's other son was on the ice playing hockey while the shooting took place. Ordinarily, we would not talk about an incident like this in the news, because there's a lot of domestic violence shootings that happen across the United States every week, and not all of them become national news stories. This is news because of its weaponization in the political culture war. But under most methodologies, this incident would not even be categorized as a mass shooting because less than four people died. It does qualify under the Gun Violence Archive criteria, which counts injuries, not deaths, in which this would be the 41st shooting in the U.S. this year. But after the shooting took place, right-wing accounts and influencers started using this as a part of their trans mass shooter narrative. On Monday night, the Pawtucket police said they believed the shooting stemmed from a family dispute. The shooter was 56 years old with six kids. About 10 years ago, the shooter started identifying as a transgender woman and used the name Roberta Esposito. The legal last name is Dorgan. They're not Hispanic. Oh. Uh-huh. The shooter was divorced about five to six years ago. and Dorgan's ex-wife lists the grounds for divorce in the documents as, quote, gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic and personality disorder traits. Then she crossed that out and instead wrote, quote, irrevocable differences, which caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage, unquote. The shooter was extremely active on Twitter, made anti-Semitic and conspiratorial posts, and frequently interacted with a large assortment of mega-influencers, as well as far-right, neo-Nazi, and conspiracy theory influencers like Nick Suentes and Alex Jones. Dorgan also shared pictures of a massive, like, SS Totenkopf tattoo on their right arm, and wrote on Twitter, quote, Post-op trans, to the right of Hitler, and, quote, You can be pro-LGBT and pro-Trump, unquote. from looking through their Twitter, it mostly appears to be someone who is suffering from extreme mental distress. It's hard to, you know, chart how much of the political beliefs that can be displayed on the Twitter are, like, genuinely held versus how much they relate to long-standing mental health issues this person suffered from, which I'll get into in a sec. I'm still a little hung up on the name. The name also, I think, relates to just this person's very, very not well. Okay, they're just trying to piss people off, conflict with. Correct. I think everything about this person can be seen as an expression of like anti-sociality. Politics, their presentation, the name. Now, while right-wing news agencies and influencers have used this horrifying incident of domestic violence for their trans mass shooter narrative, framing every trans person as at risk of randomly becoming a mass killer while ignoring this shooter's own extremist politics, people on the left have blamed this tragedy on the shooter being a quote-unquote far-right Trump supporter or a quote-unquote Nazi groiper. And this is in part a defensive reaction against the right's own misleading and non-sourced claims about a statistical epidemic of transviolence. But laying blame on Make America Great Again and the MAGA movement doesn't really get us much closer to understanding this violence. We're so used to defaulting to this partisan culture war, like ideological explanation for the cause of public violence, whether that's, you know, if for the right to trans ideology or neo-Nazism. Even though, both in this case and the shooting in Canada last week, which I talked about a few days ago on the show, this was, like, antisocial, unstable, and self-destructive individuals who killed family members and then created a deadly public situation, leading them to kill themselves. Despite Nazi tattoos and Twitter posts, This hockey game shooting was not ideologically motivated violence. This was targeted interpersonal violence against family stemming from extreme mental health issues. This goes beyond right-left politics. This shooter just seemed to be drawn to anything seen as extreme or anything that produced anti-social effects. The daughter of the shooter briefly spoke to local news on Monday, saying that the shooter was her father and that the shooter had, quote-unquote, mental health issues. and was quote-unquote very sick. The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence said in a statement Monday night, quote, while details are still emerging, we know that violence within families and intimate relationships can have devastating and far-reaching impacts. Domestic violence does not stay behind closed doors. It affects children, extended family members, and entire communities, unquote. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you want to do analysis of it, it's that, like, the thing that's actually a predictive for violence is domestic violence. and this is another really horrible domestic violence incident. Yeah, it's pretty tragic. Yeah. Interestingly, there was some news that came out today, which was Wednesday, that one of the other sons of this shooter was arrested a few years ago in North Providence for setting fires to a black church, which did appear to be ideologically motivated violence. and police found notebooks inside of this person's home filled with hateful writings, quote, gun down everyone that isn't white. If one is white, spread the gospel, always give our bloodline a chance, unquote. So this incident of arson in a black church is definitely ideologically motivated. Yeah, it's in a great, extremely normal country. And this person was sentenced to six years in prison. Oh, wow. So the person that's the son of the shooter. The son of the shooter. One of the sons of the shooter. Yeah. They had several sons. Yeah. Yeah. Just a pretty tragic series of incidents with this family. I do find it really disturbing that the thing that you mentioned, Gare, where people just kind of drop into a channel when it comes to responding to a tragedy like this. And I find it really upsetting when I see it from left and progressive organizations that promote firearms training. I just find it really kind of disappointing, I guess, to see people dropping into these same kind of callous and dismissive responses. It's just something that's been weighing on me recently. I am a person who owns guns, but it's still, I don't know, I'm disappointed, I guess. Yeah. All right. Well, we reported the news. Put a trans girl on your couch. and if you have some news that you think we should report some tips you can do so by emailing coolzonetips at proton.me if you have someone that you would like to be a guest on our show or a topic that you think Robert should cover from behind the bus we will make another email for that but you can just not email the tip line if you're a publicist and you email I will block you we reported the news Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. 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