Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Jack Boot Barbie and her public jobs program for losers, the Copaganda Industrial Complex, the completely real ICE Office of Television and Motion Pictures, the War on Terror again somehow, and Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Courtney Harris, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philanica Steele, Alton Sterling, Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and every other American civilian summarily executed by an armed agent of the state in the name of public safety. Yeesh, rest in power, my God. Yeah, Carol always has like the ideas for all the fun episodes where she shows up and she's like, we're going to talk about the gay hockey show. And then I come in and I'm like, shut up, everybody. Fun's over. We're talking about the police state today. Well, in my defense, Luigi Mangione was also a thirst trap side door into the terrorist conversation. So I'll be curious to see what hotties we're talking about today. So, Carol, before we get started today, do you want to give an update on our Q1 redistribution? Yes, we have decided to make an executive decision and to donate 100% of our redistributions for quarter one to ICE-related organizations. we're going to focus specifically on ones in Minneapolis, but also look at some federal ones as well. And we will give confirmation to you guys which organizations those are once we reach out to them and confirm that we can wire the funds. We also want to celebrate our Minneapolis liars who have been creating resource bags and working on the ground. And we are so blown away by the work that you guys are doing and want to continue supporting you however we can. Yeah, we are going to set aside a little bit of money to find Christy Nome a new injector as just part of our ICE-related organizations. As part of our charitable work. If we have to look at her lying bitch face every week, I at least don't want to be offended by the quality of her filler, okay? Her lying bitch face? At all of the internalized misogyny in my body, I just unleashed like a fire hose on Christy Gnome. Well, she deserves it. Okay, let's do it. Ice very much has a, sometimes to make a tomlet, you have to break a few Greggs approach to force, where the tomlet is a ethnostate, and breaking Greggs means tear gassing children. So, I mean, today's going to be fun, is really what I'm trying to say. So, to give away my thought process a little bit up front here, I think that talking about ICE like it is a story about immigration actually feels like a little bit of a red herring to me. This is less about immigration or the legality, you know, they're in and more about our comfort and complacency with the militarization of law enforcement and mass incarceration in this country. So today I want to have a conversation about three things. number one how media is used to manufacture consent how it has traditionally been used to manufacture consent and how new media might actually be changing that number two where individual identity does and does not matter when it comes to state violence number three what public safety and order really mean and what these concepts are used to justify and i lied there is a fourth thing. It's how we can contextualize what we are experiencing now as just another chapter in the same story that's been unfolding for the last 250 odd years. I feel like making a list and then saying, I lied, there is a fourth thing is like a motto for this podcast. Okay, so obviously we are here today because almost five years to the day from the insurrection at the Capitol. An ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a woman named Renee Good. And we know a lot about this encounter because it was filmed from nearly every angle. We know that one agent is telling her to drive away while the other is telling her to get out of her car. We know that the agent who kills Renee is walking around the back of her car, filming, holding his phone in his right hand. We know that her wife, Becca, is filming the agent who ultimately kills her, and right before he shoots Renee, Becca's kind of mouthing off to him and making it clear that she is not afraid of him. We know that after Becca calls him big boy, we can now see his shadow in Renee's car door, and we can see him switch his phone from his right hand to his left hand as he begins to reach for his weapon and then steps in front of the car. We know that the last words Renee Goods said were, it's okay, dude, I'm not mad at you. We know Renee was shot at least three times in the head and chest. And we know that as her car careened away that Jonathan Ross or another agent nearby muttered under his breath, fucking bitch. There was a lot that felt familiar to me about this video. It felt like so many videos of this nature that I have seen before, in which you are airdropped into the middle of an already tense situation where usually several officers often acting aggressively are descending upon a single individual, and there is an immediate sense of foreboding because you know that you are about to witness something horrifying. There's usually yelling, there's usually authoritative-sounding orders being barked, sometimes contradictory, and before long, you either hear or see gunshots, or you see someone getting their neck kneeled on, or their face pressed into the pavement to the sound of onlookers screaming. But there was something very different about this video than most of the videos of this nature that we see. Do you know what that is? Renee Good is a white woman? That's right. The person being killed in these types of viral law enforcement murders are usually Black men. And of course, this happened in Minneapolis, about a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. So after this happens, of course, our fearless leaders, They're shocked. They're horrified. They condemn this agent immediately. They pledge to investigate the killer who called his victim a fucking bitch after shooting her on film. Oh, sorry. Wait, no. No, they did what law enforcement often does when it kills somebody, which is promptly criminalizes the victim and then lies about the circumstances. Wait, really quickly. I don't know if you've seen this, but I was dying. There were a few like statements by Democrat leaders where they like really showed, you know, some force. Like I think they're like, stop. I said stop. Literally Jacob Frey who is I think the mayor of Minneapolis made a big show of saying get the fuck out to ICE And I watched the funniest TikTok where it was making fun of Democrats being like fuck damn And like looking around waiting for everyone to be like super impressed that they swearing now Like wow you must really you guys better get the fuck out and just like waiting for something to happen Oh they serious now Yeah, it's pretty, when you went, at first I was moved. I was like, wow, he swore. And then I was like, oh, that actually doesn't do anything for anyone, so. Okay, I'm gonna have you read from the truth that Trump posted in the aftermath of Renee's murder. Okay. And as a reminder, my only job today to try to provide occasional comedic insight and timing for this otherwise extremely sobering conversation about America. It's very clever what he did with Truth Social, that he's posting truths. Trump truth. Like, that's so perfect for a conspiracy theorist. We don't talk about that enough. The man's got vision. Okay, this is a truth that he posted. The reason these incidents are happening is because the radical left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our law enforcement officers and ICE agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of making America safe, all caps. We need to stand by and protect our law enforcement officers from this radical left movement of violence and hate. All of those letters were capitalized as well. I love the title case. It's amazing. If Jonathan Ross could read, he would have loved that truth. So in the press conference following Good's murder, you know, the clown show continues. Noem said, and again, this is her comment on the murder of a U.S. citizen, right? That quote— Christy Noem? Yeah. Anyone who is a citizen of this country or is here legally has nothing to fear. Okay? In her statement about the dead U.S. citizen, she says, U.S. citizens have nothing to fear. Kavanaugh said something very similar last year when the Supreme Court ruled that immigration agents in LA were allowed to use race as a consideration during sweeps that, quote, if the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. This is not true. We are going to talk about specific examples today, but there is one in particular that I want to highlight. The case of Leonardo Garcia Venegas, who was working at a construction site in Alabama and had two experiences with ICE. The first was violent. He was thrown to the ground. And then the second time he encountered them, it was just like more of a chit-chat in a construction site that he was working on. But both times he supplied his government-issued real ID to be like, here's my Alabama ID. And both times they were like, seems fake. He was detained four days both times. Now, the government is, of course, not tracking how often immigration agents detain American citizens, because why would they? But ProPublica's reporting has kept track. They found 170 instances in the first nine months, which means on average an American citizen is being illegally detained every 36 hours. And we have to assume that those are low numbers. Right. That's just the ones we know about. So far, this includes 20 children, two of whom had cancer. Four were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to an attorney until their own congresswoman intervened on their behalf. So it is simply a fantasy that your legal status in this country matters at all right now to these agents or to the immigration system writ large. Yeah. Good wasn't the first U.S. citizen shot by ICE under extremely egregious circumstances. If you will, please read. When CBP agents shot Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old schoolteacher and U.S. citizen, also in Chicago, they labeled her a domestic terrorist and charged her with ramming a federal law enforcement officer. We know now that the agent, Charles Exum, rammed her vehicle, jumped out with his gun drawn, and said, do something, bitch, before shooting her five times. The DHS lies were so egregious, and Exum didn't help their case by bragging about it in text messages, that the prosecution had no choice but to drop all the charges. Okay, I just want to pause here and say, there is very obvious misogyny taking place, but our little fourth wall break, I am working on an episode right now about the tragedy of heterosexuality, and it's really interesting, after all the reading I've been doing over the last few days, to see this in full force. So just like think about that and it'll be interesting to have this conversation then have our next one and see how all these forces work together. It's genuinely fucking horrifying that these officers, and can I also just say, this is an aside, but you and I get flack for swearing on this podcast because we are women. I want to say that very explicitly. I was thinking about that. We got a comment from someone being like, they're interesting, but vulgar, blah, blah, blah. Scott Galloway swears all the time. Shut the fuck up. We have ICE officers routinely calling people fucking bitches, and no one thinks that this is indicative. I mean, besides, obviously, like, people like us. There is an entire portion of this country that thinks that that is entirely appropriate for a law enforcement officer to say. J.D. Vance is like, well, they have trauma, but they have trauma. Exactly. It's just, it's really, really crazy the way that we allow this and the way that we normalize it. Carry on, Katie. There are a lot of angles that we could have taken with this conversation. There's obviously misogyny. There's obviously homophobia. And we're going to get into that a little bit. But again, I think that that is where, when we get into the identity conversation here of where identity matters and doesn't matter when we're talking about state violence, I think we can flesh that out a little bit more. And so when it comes to these specific examples, I mean, we could do this all day. I read countless articles about this across all sorts of media, and I can basically boil down the two sides as follows. The argument on the right is this is only happening because civilians are being disorderly and are attacking our agents. And on the liberal side, there are of course calls to prosecute Ross in particular, but the broader argument is this is happening because the agents aren't trained well enough to follow the law. They're not following the law. So I want to just address both of these high-level arguments before we really get into the meat of today. To address the training and following the law side of the argument that we're going to spend more time on shortly, there are two important pieces of framing for this conversation that we should just cover now. Number one, even before all this ICE shit started, the number of people killed by police in the U.S. every year has risen since George Floyd was murdered. We have not been moving in the right direction. Everyone's like, we haven't sent the ICE officers to the IDF yet. They haven't gotten their training. They need their training. They need to go to Gaza and get trained Jesus Christ So unserious And number two Jonathan Ross is a veteran of the Iraq War and has been on the special response team of ICE enforcement and removal operation for the last decade He is a veteran in the ICE organization. He is not some guy that walked in off the street last fall. Renee Goode did not die because the agent who shot her was not trained. And to address the rights argument, obviously everything is being videotaped in these encounters all the time. ICE apprehension videos are all over the internet. So it is worth paying attention to what you are not seeing in those videos. This is an excerpt from a piece in The Nation about the LA protests to the National Guard deployment. We've heard a lot about the assault of police officers during these protests. Why haven't we seen it? Where is the body cam footage showing protesters injuring cops, striking them, putting them out of commission? I saw a police officer struck by a water bottle thrown by protesters in a barrage launched around 7.30 p.m. after those protesters spent hours absorbing, quote, less lethal rounds and being deafened by flashbangs. But that's about it. Meanwhile, we've got drone footage of a mounted officer using his horse to trample a protester who lies prone on the ground surrounded by mounted police. We've got cops beating protesters with truncheons, cops deploying tear gas, cops bringing box after box of ammunition to the line so that they could fire again and again and again into crowds of protesters exercising tremendous restraint throughout the day. If these ICE agents were being assaulted, we would see it. Because, spoiler alert for Section 3 of this outline, they are bringing camera crews with them everywhere. Jesus Christ. So we're going to talk about ICE now. Caro, do you know when ICE was started? I want to say recently. I'm going to guess Bush administration. Nice. Well done. Hell yeah. That's just like whenever anything particularly like clown show in this country, it's either Reagan or Bush. Yeah, it just smells like W. ICE was started in March 2003 with the Homeland Security Act as part of the totally reasonable expansion of executive power in the wake of 9-11. Before it was ICE, immigration mostly fell to the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So the INS was responsible for, quote, border security, interior enforcement, asylum, and immigration benefits. After 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security was established. So the Department of Homeland Security itself is very new as of the 21st century. And within DHS, you have ICE, you have Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, and you have of Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. We're going to learn a little bit more about how each of these agencies describe themselves straight from the Homeland Security website, if you'll please read their little recruitment blurbs going left to right. All right, we've got a little, we've got a nice little triptych. On the left is some real tough-looking, diverse folks representing law enforcement, and it says, on the ground. Folks, F-O-L-X. Yeah, exactly. On the ground, in the air, across the water. And it says, CBP operates in all 50 states in over 50 countries and at 328 ports of entry to protect the American people, Team America World Police, safeguard our borders and enhance the nation's economic prosperity. Your journey begins here. They're like the people care about the gas prices. All right, next. The next one is a very classic kind of World War II era Uncle Sam pointing at you. It says, America needs you. It says, America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need you to get them out. That feels very video game-esque. All right. And then on the right, we have a very clip art looking American flag that says, protect the homeland, defend the culture, which I think is Nazi territory. Little dog whistling. I think it's dabbling a Nazi. Little blood and soil there. And it says, become a homeland defender. Join USCIS's critical mission as a homeland defender protecting America from criminal aliens. Protect your homeland and defend your culture. I didn't spend too much time looking into, you know, what specifically USCIS does, but it is my understanding from the articles that I read that it's kind of like the paper pusher division. It's like you're the one that's determining immigration status and, you know, asylum claims and all that kind of shit. So the fact that even that job is being described as Homeland Defender, I'm like, oh, okay, so like no one's getting in. No one is getting into this country in the next four years. And now I just want you to see and please read the only text on the, when you click on the, I clicked to join ICE. I was like, yeah, fuck yeah, let's do it. Clicked join ICE. This is the landing page it took me to. And this is all that landing page says. All right. So we've got another World War II era Uncle Sam. With like a really, really shoddy Photoshop. Really, really, really lazily Photoshopped. It's like all glitchy at the edges. I'm certain that the Doge boys were just folded over into the graphic design departments. Because these scream 20-year-old boy who thinks he's better at stuff than he actually is. Okay. It says, America needs you. And the U is in red. It's all caps. America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need you to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree. Fabulous. I don't know why that got me. Now I'm going to have you read from the History of ICE page. So this is from the ICE.gov website. All right. Congress granted ICE a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9-11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE's primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration. Okay, so I had you read that because there are a couple of phrases and words that I noticed came up repeatedly in all of their materials and in all of the media coverage of this event and kind of ICE more broadly. we are constantly harping on the idea of safety and of order. So we're going to come back to that, but I think just kind of like pay attention to that throughout when and how those concepts are deployed. So something that experts have pointed out about these agencies is that because of how they were started as like a reaction to a terrorist attack and then how quickly they expanded, there have always been issues with these agencies. For example, the last time that there was a big of Customs and Border Protection agents An agent was on average arrested for something whether it was domestic violence or corruption or something else every 24 hours for seven years Wow The ACLU described border protection's treatment of people, including children, as, quote, monstrous during the Obama years. I read a few stories of abuse that occurred during Obama's presidency that, like, I don't even want to repeat here. They were so vile. Even by 2017, so a decade after that Customs and Border Protection hiring surge happened, the agency was still seeing an agent or officer arrested on average every 36 hours. Well, you also have an entire agency that's founded on a lie. Like, when you think about the Iraq war, I think it's now well-trodden territory that this was all bullshit. But I'm just imagining what it would be like to be behind the curtain and to be working in those agencies and you're dealing with officials giving you conflicting information all the time. You're dealing with them constantly iterating on their own story. Like the entire notion of it is based in Islamophobia and greed. And so I can imagine, and I'm sure a lot of our agencies are also, I mean, the police state is like founded in the Confederacy, I'm pretty sure. So like a lot of this stuff always goes back to its founding. But when you think about 9-11, it's like, yeah, no shit. It was a disaster from the jump. That was a disastrous foreign policy moment for us. Then obviously a lot of Americans died and millions of Iraqis died. So tragedy all around. There was also a rapid expansion of ICE during Obama's presidency, up to 21,000 agents, and this is when the hiring standards, if they could ever be classified as good, really began deteriorating. Did Obama ever answer to this? You tell me. Have you heard anything about? I'll DM him on Instagram. I'll see if he has any report for us. There's always that quote that's like, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed. It's like, these men never answer for any of this. There is never accountability. There are never consequences. Yeah. But Obama is also the president who appointed Tom Homan as associate director of ICE. On the campaign trail in 2024, Harris promised to hire thousands more border agents. In 2018, she pushed back against calls to abolish ICE. She claimed that it had a, quote, purpose, a role, and should exist. Gavin Newsom just reiterated his support for ICE in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro. He was like, we work with ICE. We get rid of criminals all the time. So he's taking the Kamala Harris approach to the presidential campaign. Good. Well, we all know how that worked last time. I'm just imagining Gavin Newsom, like, with Oprah, pulling out the gun and being like, I am a gun owner and just, like, doing it to a T. Anyways, this is really satisfying to think about. Gavin's a little pink-glocked. So I tell you this to say that both parties are reflexively pro-law enforcement. They're not the same. I mean, like, any reasonable person can say that, like, yeah, Trump's approach is worse, but there is no opposition party to ICE in the United States or, like, to forces like them. But in the last year, ICE's size has doubled from about 10,000 agents to more than 22,000. That is unbelievably fast. To more than double the force in a year, a lot of people pointed to that speed alone and said there are going to be problems. And, you know, like one indication that I think there's never been any intent to follow due process here is that with this much expansion on the agent side and an intention to ramp up arrests, you would expect to see a commensurate surge of new immigration judges too. But we haven't seen that. And now it's not a stretch to say that they are just arming random people. So one journalist who went undercover to get a job with ICE wrote a story for Slate about just how shoddy the hiring process was. Many of ICE's critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs, January 6th insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc., for a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier. ICE's recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who's joining the agency's ranks. We are all collectively in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America's streets. She also had a little passage about the demographics of the agency now and the type of people who she encountered while she was going through that very brief recruitment process, which were often people who were ex-military, which I find just not surprising, but still noteworthy if you can read this. The agent then told me a bit about his own background. Like me, he enlisted straight out of high school, then got out and vowed to get as far away from the violence of the military as possible. Like a lot of veterans, he had trouble assimilating into the civilian world. After about six months, I was like, these people aren't like me. I want to be around like-minded people, he said. He found his way into law enforcement. That was well over a decade ago. He's on his way to a very comfortable retirement, and he enjoys the work. I like that instant gratification of, hey, that guy committed this crime, these X, Y, and Z, and he's not even supposed to be here, he said. Great. Okay. He's like, I like being judge, jury, and executioner of the American people. It makes me feel good. Makes me feel powerful. It is noteworthy to me that America's foreign policy and the way in which we essentially recruit people straight out of high school, like this kid, this kid who probably had very few other options, we send them to these violent and horrifying and often ill-defined jobs overseas. Then they come back. They are probably traumatized. They do probably have PTSD. They have a very hard time fitting back into a polite society after seeing and doing the things that they saw and did. And law enforcement hoovers them up. It becomes like a way to manage that population. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that, too, and kind of the function that it really serves. On the note of the military, I was thinking about this. I was thinking about the idea of the draft and what it means to be drafted and how that notion would seem so absurd now. But then I was thinking about it and I was like, well, we have an ongoing draft at all times. We have a population that could never afford college, that can't find meaningful work, that can't support themselves. And the only way for you to get a free education, 0% down, is to join the military. That is essentially a draft. That is coercive. Mm-hmm. So it's obvious that ICE is essentially an unaccountable group of roving random masked people with guns and bulletproof vests who are emboldened to do basically whatever the fuck they want. And this is an extremely concerning situation, right? This is a situation that I think we would all agree warrants some public outrage and some outcry, right?
