ICE Keeps Murdering Americans & Kidnapping Children

Welcome, Miles Taylor, to the Siren Podcast. Welcome back. I think you did my old podcast, Sainish, in another life. We have the Siren Podcast, and we've had it for a while, but welcome. How are you? It's great to be here, my friend. Doing well. Doing well. You know, we're all, like, hunkering down and preparing for this storm. Like, down here in the D.C. area, I think it might be a little more screwed up than it is for y'all up there, but they're anticipating, like, you know, loss of power and all this madness. Yeah, what are you bracing for? because I'm in what my Facebook, my favorite Facebook meteorologist calls the kaboom zone, which sounds like something I would have done in Boston in my college days and been happy about. But now I know it involves shoveling. So we're looking at something like 20 inches, maybe, of snow. Yeah. That's wild. Down here, the bigger issue is going to be ice and ice storms and the ice taking out power. And, you know, do we have enough food downstairs and do we have backup power? The answer to all of those things, of course, is no. So, you know, fast forward to Monday when I tweet out helplessly from a forest somewhere, please send FEMA to pick me up. Oh, well, you can't count on FEMA. I'm so sorry to tell you. They'll be like, sorry, who wants to be picked up? Enemy of the president. No, no. They have a tick list. They're like, oh, oh, oh, sorry, you said you knew it was Miles Taylor. No, I'm so sorry. We thought you meant Miles Taylor, the actor. We'll pick him up. But not Miles Taylor. Maybe Lawrence Taylor. But Miles Taylor. Taylor Swift, Miles Taylor. Neither of you two are getting any help from FEMA. I got to change my name. That's for sure. Let's hope for the best. And let's hope nobody loses power. But if anybody loses power, that it's just 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and everybody else. That's right. That's right. But let's jump in because, and I don't mean to do this lightheartedly, because it's not a lighthearted issue. But you and I were just talking before we started recording about your little one at home, toddler. I am the mom of two now, a tween and a teenager. And so I want to talk about what is being done to our children right now. And I want to start with this story of Liam Ramos in Minneapolis and five-year-old boy who was, I would say, kidnapped by ICE. I would use that word. I mean, that's my hyperbolic statement. But nonetheless, ICE took him out of out of his car where he was with his father, who they also apprehended. And I don't care if they say his father ran or not. They came to this country. His father came to this country. They're following the legal channels and doing all the things. And he had other family members inside and they made ICE agents, mask ICE agents, made him knock on the door as bait to try and lure other adults out of the house so that they could take them, too. And I want to start with that and the kind of sickness and rot that has to be in place for that to be a strategy that is being employed by this administration. Well, let me start off by saying, you know, this is the same type of thing that Trump and his allies wanted to do in the first term. And to achieve it, they had to they had to do some what will I say? They had to do some like policy, you know. Pretzel not type activity. And let me be more specific here. So take something like family separation. I had a front row seat to that very obviously catastrophic policy before it came into effect. Now, at the time, I was the counterterrorism chief at the Department of Homeland Security. But it meant I worked right down the hall from people working on immigration. and early, early in the Trump administration. And I'm telling you this, Joe, all for a reason. Early, early in the Trump administration, I'll never forget. We used to do these morning meetings, the core staff with John Kelly when he was secretary of Homeland Security. So there's like five of us that are the core advisors, right? I'm the immigration, or sorry, the counterterrorism and national security guy. Then there's the immigration guy. Then there's the cybersecurity guy. You know, we get together every morning with John Kelly. I remember one day him coming in and banging his fist on the table like that. And he said, God damn it. If Stephen Miller calls into this department and tells you to do something on behalf of the president, you tell him I'm the only one in this department confirmed by the United States Senate to be Donald Trump's subordinate. And Donald Trump can call me and tell me if he wants me to do something. And I walked out of that meeting and I asked the other guys, what was that about? You know, what was Stephen Miller trying to do? And what I was told, and this is, again, early days of the Trump administration, what I was told is there were plans at the White House to implement a deliberate policy of child separation at the border to rip a kid away from a parent as a means of deterrence, right, to do it so that if you were thinking about coming to this country, you would think twice because the U.S. government would rip your child from you. So it was intentional. Now, fast forward when the thing now known as family separation got implemented by the administration, it actually wasn't intended to be that the people who were working on it were implementing what Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department called a zero tolerance policy. In other words, they're going to arrest everyone at the border and deport them. But the consequence of that, and it was a foreseeable consequence, was the lawyers and the line people said, don't do that. Because if you do that and you arrest everyone right away, there isn't the capacity to keep them with their children in time. Unless there's a few more months to plan for this, you're going to have de facto child separation. And the White House said, we don't give a shit. And they did it anyway. And guess what, Joe? It had the obvious, predictable, catastrophic result of family separation. Right. And so, you know, then a host of us had to get involved in immigration policy and go convince people like Jared and Ivanka to convince their, you know, their father to end the policy. And that's one of the things that's like little known about this whole debacle is ultimately love them or hate them. And probably a lot of folks hate them. Jared and Ivanka were central in convincing their dad to put a stop to this. But I tell you that, Joe, because as early as the first Trump administration, they wanted to use kids as pawns. And I'll never forget, once immigration came into my portfolio after that debacle, a few months later, I became DHS chief of staff and I had to do immigration policy. I will not forget the meetings with the president and the Oval Office over and over and over. He was furious that we had talked him and his kids into talking him out of the child separation policy. And he said, I want to bring it back. I want to put it on steroids. People should be scared to lose their kids. This isn't some accidental thing. It's not like ICE accidentally is taking a five-year-old. The commander in chief believes children should be pawns in the immigration game to deter people from coming to this country. How sick is that? And I still think if it weren't for the fact that they have illegally sealed the southern border, that's what they would be doing right now. The The only reason you haven't seen Donald Trump come back into office and reinstitute family separation is because and we don't have to get into the nuances of immigration policy, but it's because they have violated the Constitution and said we're not going to process any asylum claims at the southern border. So right now there's almost zero immigration at the southern border. That's going to the Supreme Court. There's a very good chance that gets struck down. If it gets struck down and people start coming across again and claiming asylum, mark my words, they will bring back that policy. They will use children as pawns and it will be deliberate next time, not a not a foreseeable consequence of some other policy. So much of that, it shakes me to my core. But you mentioned Natsveratu, Stephen Miller, and and and we call him the architect of that policy. Now, you know better than most people whether or not that is true. So it's like which came first in terms of this evil chicken and egg. Did he put this idea in front of Trump? Was it born of his particular breed of evil? The one that is his meet cute with Katie Miller, from what I understand? Was it because people will tell you now that a lot of this that we've seen with ICE is really Stephen Miller, that Donald Trump doesn't give a fuck other than he hates brown people, etc. But like from what you're saying to me now, he he did. He wanted to sink his teeth further into this because he's a sociopath and malignant narcissist and arguably like a serial killer. But yeah. So my question is Stephen Miller's role here. You know, is this born of Donald Trump? Is this born of Stephen Miller? Is it Stephen Miller? Is it his agenda now? Obviously, we don't have any John Kellys in the room. We don't have any guardrails of any kind. Is it a little bit of both? almost everything you see ICE doing up to and including specific operations is coming from Stephen Miller. Now, he has the tacit, if not explicit approval of the president on everything. I mean, the president trusts Stephen more than almost anyone. But Stephen is so involved in immigration policy that, you know, he used to do exactly what Kelly was furious about all the time. He would pick up the phone and try to reach down into the bureaucracy and personally direct things and say, you know, this is a directive from the president. You don't need to talk to your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss and get it up to the secretary. I'm calling you and I'm telling you to do it. And that would scare a lot of people. I mean, they would they would go do stuff. And so we were in a constant game of whackable at the Department of Homeland Security to find out what Stephen was planning behind the scenes and who was he directing. Now, we were able, you know, that that's whackable. Now, that's not what it is anymore. I have no doubt whatsoever that Kristi Noem and her office have said, please, by all means, you know do whatever you want I mean from my vantage point she is not the Secretary of Homeland Security She is not Stephen Miller is the secretary of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Advisor and the White House deputy chief of staff and is personally pulling the strings on all of these things. And he does that with a series of angry daily conference calls, apparently, according to recent reporting. And that wouldn't be terribly different from what he was trying to do in the first term, except this time they are taking their orders from him. And I say up to and including specific operations, because there are plenty of reports out there that Stephen has named specific people he wants picked up. He's named specific cities he wants people to go to. I mean, he is calling the shots here. So that's where the accountability is. You cannot see operations like this happening in Minnesota or doors being kicked down without warrants or people being shot in the street and not say this goes all the way to the top because it does. And it does feel personal in terms of their targets. Right. I mean, I would say from what I understand about Stephen Miller, again, starting with California in many ways, because I believe he's from California. Right. And I yeah, I think he's probably got some acts to grind there with watching, you know, what's happened in his state and how, you know, he had to grow up in this liberal state. But also Trump with Minnesota. Yeah, I mean, I think their retribution in both cases. Look, Trump went after you very early when he came back this term from almost from the very beginning. Right. Didn't he name you and the first or second round of people that they wanted to investigate? Yeah, they issued an executive order in April directing a federal investigation into me that we believe is still ongoing, basically to try to go find something. Right. The executive order said, I'm guilty of treason, but then effectively said, and by the way, please go find evidence that Miles is guilty of treason. Let's find something to charge him with. So, you know, we're under that cloud right now. But, you know, we're not going to just sit back and sit on our hands and be quiet because that sends a signal to people that especially the White House, it sends a signal to them that the intimidation works. And I'll tell you, Joe, I mean, a week after they issued that executive order and on the same day, they did the same thing to my former colleague, Chris Krebs, who was the top election official under Trump, who said 2020 was a secure election. And then Trump fired him by tweet. Yeah. A week after that or a few days after that, Rolling Stone ran an article with sources from the White House that I suspect include Stephen Miller that said the reason they issued those orders was not because they had found some crime Chris or I had committed. If they had, you know, they should have arrested us. Yeah. Yeah. It's because and the quote was we did it to send a message. They did it intentionally to say to people, don't criticize the president or you will be investigated. Clear violation of the First Amendment. Ultimately, these orders are going to be found to be unconstitutional. But I'm not going to give them that. I'm not going to give them that. And that's why, you know, I'm continuing to speak out. I am officially done with skin care that promises miracles and delivers vibes. I want science. That's why I use OneSkin. Their products are powered by the OS1 Peptide, built on real longevity science that targets aging at the cellular level, not just the surface. I've been using the OS1 Eye Cream, and it's one of those rare products where you actually see the difference. Smoother under eyes, less crepey texture, and zero irritation. It feels like I finally swapped hype for something that works. And right now, you can get up to 30% off your subscription orders when you use the code JOJO at oneskin.co. That's up to 30% off with the code JOJO at oneskin.co. Use the code, support the show, and give your skin the science it deserves. No, but again, it speaks to retribution, right? So much of this is driven by retribution and this chilling effect that you're talking about. And we've seen them unsuccessfully go after Tish James and James Comey and others. And it drives so much of it's so insidious and disgusting. But also this chilling effect thing that you're talking about is clearly intentional. And they're doing that, too, with what they're trying to convey to the American people in terms of domestic terrorism and recording what they're doing. I mean, Renee Good, they have completely whitewashed that story and turned her into a domestic terrorist, despite the fact that she did nothing violent of any kind. And she was, I would use again the word murdered, kidnapped, murdered. These are words I use. They're probably not legal terms and whatever. But but they they want people to be afraid of recording them, interfering with them, being lawful, peacefully protesting them. I saw a video yesterday of a girl in Maine who was recording an ICE agent and he started recording her back. And she said, why are you recording me? And he said, because you're part of a database. Now you're going to be identified as a domestic terrorist. And we've seen his executive order labeling us as Antifa and Antifa's domestic terrorism. And all of that, again, is designed to be a chilling effect so that people are afraid to document what they're doing. Yeah. And you know what? The thing that gives me heart, Joe, is that people aren't putting up with this shit. They are starting to push back. You know, the organization that I run day to day now is called Defiance.org. And in the past couple of weeks, our members have really wanted us to go invest in exactly this. How do we make people more empowered to push back? And so a couple of the things you just mentioned, we have started to fund. So we're one of the biggest funders of ice whistles around the country, those whistles you hear in videos. So people can say, hey, federal agents are coming into the neighborhood so you can film them, document them, protect your families. And then we've started to fund that next piece, too. We're funding training in places like Minneapolis and around the country for people to know how to lawfully and peacefully document ICE's abuses because we've seen how important this is. We would otherwise not know about ICE's law breaking from warrantless entry to murder if people didn't have the courage to do this. Now, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And so that's why we're funding that training on the ground. That's why we're funding Know Your Rights training, because it's really, really important for people to do that. But the thing that gives me hope is people are doing it and it's having real effects. And it's from the grassroots to the grass tops. And I say to the grass tops because a third thing that we've been trying to fund is lawyers for people inside the government who want to blow the whistle. And just this week, one of the organizations that we fund, Whistleblower Aid, came forward with two anonymous whistleblowers inside of ICE who revealed that the agency has secretly ordered agents to basically ignore the Fourth Amendment and enter homes anyway. That would not have happened if two brave people inside that agency hadn't said, I'm sick of this shit and I'm not going to be intimidated and I'm going to go make those disclosures. So, you know, from top to bottom, there are ways to fight back against this. And I'm very encouraged that in the past few months, people are saying I'm sick of it. I will not be intimidated. And they're stepping forward. I 100 percent agree. And thank God. I mean, there is this attack also on whistleblowers, as we saw with them going into the home of a Washington Post, I believe it was, reporter and seizing their hard drives, their cell phones, etc. Someone who was getting anonymous reports from sources from the inside. And again, talking about chilling effects, right? They don't want people reporting from the inside or from outside or from anywhere because they want to be able to do all of this unchecked. And like I want to revisit a couple of things. I want to revisit, you know, like again, love him or leave him, John Kelly, et cetera, the adults that were in the room. I mean, once upon a time, Kristen Nielsen was considered, you know, evil incarnate. Like she wanted to take your Dalmatian puppies and I'm not going to, I'm not going to sane wash her either. But by comparison to the actual puppy killing Kristi Noem, she looks like a Boy Scout. But I want to talk about that. I want to talk about where we are now in terms of there being no, no gatekeepers, no checks, no guardrails whatsoever in this lawless White House. But you mentioned Jared Kushner. And so I want to start with Jared Kushner's return. I'd say he probably never went anywhere. But let's let's talk about the difference between the first season of this dumpster fire shit show and the grownups in the room and where we are now. Well, I mean, look, I always say, and myself included, there were no heroes in the first Trump administration, only survivors. And of those survivors, there were people who either tried to keep the ship of state from sinking or who were detonating things in the hull to make it sink, as in the government. Right. They were in on the chaos. That's it. Those were the people that were inside the administration. And even some of the folks you mentioned, I mean, everyone's got a spotty history. and also inside the Trump administration, it was a moral choose-your-own misadventure, okay? There were right ways, wrong ways, and there was a lot of fog of war to do things. So take someone like Jared Kushner. I'm just going to call the balls and strikes. Jared Kushner did all sorts of very stupid things in the Trump administration, and I'll be the first to say it was totally inappropriate that one of the president's, you know, children, his son-in-law, basically wore the hat of Secretary of State some days, Attorney General other days, Secretary of Homeland Security. And that's how the cabinet complained about it is Jared wasn't coordinating with people. We would find out he was down in Mexico negotiating with the president when at the Department of Homeland Security, we were working with the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to negotiate with the president of Mexico on something. And so that leads to all kinds of problems when Jared is cosplaying as secretary. But I will also say there were people like Jared who were the few people who could get Donald Trump to turn around on something reprehensible. I mentioned family separation as an example, but who also would sometimes protect the people who were fighting those things in the administration. When I started to push back against some of this stuff internally in the administration the White House tried to fire me I never forget the night the Secretary of Homeland Security who was then Kirsten Yielsen took me out to dinner to basically say everyone wants to fire you from the administration You're basically speaking out too much against this stuff internally. And one of the people who, you know, had my back in the administration of all folks was Jared Kushner. Again, it doesn't mean Jared did everything right. But sometimes folks like him, I don't know if he would still admit to that to this day, folks like him didn't want to see the folks who pushed back against the president go. And again, Joe, I'm going to give Jared a little credit here. I can knock him on other things. One of the few people I ever saw sit in meetings in the Oval Office and fight with the president was Jared Kushner. John Kelly would do it. Kirsten Nielsen would do it on some issues, push back very hard against him. Jared Kushner would do it. A lot of the other folks in that cabinet would sit there quietly. And now they would leave those meetings in the Oval Office and go back to their departments and say, we're not going to do that or we're going to push back against the president. But to his face, very few people had the boldness. Today, I don't know of anyone who's got the boldness to push back against him. Now, I'm not saying I'm heartened to see Jared reenter the fray. I'm actually not. It lends itself to all sorts of corruption and double dealing. The fact that Jared is so dependent on foreign money for what he's doing raises this huge red flag. He should not be negotiating foreign policy issues. He's not a U.S. government employee. He's the son of the president. Like corruption, red flags everywhere. Yeah. So I don't mention the Times-Gerod pushed back as a way to say he should be back in the fray. It's that if the president's son-in-law was one of the few remaining, you know, guardrails in the first term, it's pretty damn bad news that he's the only returning character in this cast because the other so-called axis of adults characters are not there. They are there are not people pushing back. You have an axis of enablers in this administration. And as I often say, the Oval Office has become an echo chamber. So all of the illegal, immoral, unethical and unconstitutional things we spent so much time trying to get Donald Trump not to do in a first term. You're seeing it. They're all coming to fruition. The last thing I know, I've been on my stump too long. joke. The last thing I will say is I tried to run an analysis of this last summer. You and I talked a long time back about a book I put out called Blowback, which was an attempt to say, hey, everyone, listen, this is what Donald Trump will do in a second term. And don't take my word for it. I talked to 100 former colleagues in the Trump administration to paint a very clear picture. Here's what he wanted to do in term one. Here's what he will do if he comes back. And you can love or hate ex-Trumpers. You don't need to like them to say this is what they saw. Here's what they're warning about in the second term. So this past summer, I did an analysis. I went back to the book. I said, how many of these things that people predicted would happen have come true? 50% of the forecast people had made in my book had come true by last summer. I just did a one year of that on January 20th on our site, defiance.news. It is now 90%. Now, 90% of the illegal things that Donald Trump wanted to do in a first term, just the ones I mentioned in that book have already come to fruition or are underway. That's really, really scary stuff. In one year, they went so much faster than I predicted. And people shouldn't be too comforted by that. It's not like, oh, well, most of the bad stuff has happened. Most of those things are systemic. They are things like he'll hijack ICE as his personal police force. That's not just a thing that happens once and then it's over and done with and we're better. That has enduring consequences for our constitutional republic. So a lot of those very bad things have been put in place. And one of the reasons is because there are not people at the White House in those cabinet departments and agencies to say no. I remember going, that was going way back. So it was the summer of 23? No, 24? Was it? Summer of 23, yeah. 23, yeah. And I remember one of the things that you said that stood out to me the most was about his use of ICE and others to attack our own citizens. And I feel like, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, did we talk about him fantasizing back then about being able to shoot his own citizens? Okay, and so here we are. Here we are, you know, in the wake of what we're seeing and in the wake of Renee Nicole Good's murder. Again, I'm using that word, murder. But the fact that DHS immediately came out without any investigation of any kind and said there's nothing to see here. This was a domestic terrorist. And they have now said multiple times from Tom Homan to Kristi Noem to Todd Blanche that there is no investigation of that killing. No matter what you think with your eyes and what you heard with your ears, they're not investigating it. That is the permission structure, clearly. And the not the beginning, probably the second tier of the things that he's wanted to do. Obviously, it's going to get much worse. But did you we did we talked about that way back then? You were absolutely right. Because here we are. If I'm if I'm correct and, you know, we could easily pull this up afterwards and find it. I think when we talked in summer of 2023, one of the biggest concerns that I discussed with you was my worry in a second term that they would start formally designating opposition groups as domestic terrorists. And a number of people I had spoken to for the book, in addition to just my experiences with that in the first administration, but a number of people I'd spoken to in the book, including Trump allies, said that they would try to create a junior Gestapo in a second Trump administration. and that they would use domestic terrorism designations to go after the political opposition. And I got blasted by the Trump universe for this. Trump came out and he said, this is all BS. He's a phony. Stephen Miller said the things that Miles says in the book are preposterous. I mean, they sent everyone out to tear those claims down and say, you know, he's saying the sky is falling. This is crazy. I go back to 90 percent of those things have come true, including what's called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 that came out in September. This is the order from the White House that designates opposition groups as domestic terrorist organizations. You can't get more authoritarian than this. Like this is a blatantly unconstitutional autocratic order. It ultimately will not hold up in the courts. But the problem is it's not going to get challenged until someone gets arrested and prosecuted as a domestic terrorist under the auspices of that order. And then there's a case. I mean, that's why the justice system moves slower. But mark my words, this is a fully illegal order from the White House to start investigating people for First Amendment protected speech around the country. And it was foreseeable. You know, I'm not some Nostradamus that I predicted that. It was obvious that this man, the way he talked, wanted to start treating political opponents as terrorists. 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Limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required, $15 a month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra, initial plan term only. 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. And again, just to reiterate here, you have an unchecked Stephen Miller and you have a Department of Homeland Security full of Kristi Noems who are enabling the worst and enabling these kinds of things and enacting. I didn't even mention Pam Bondi or Kash Patel, for God's sakes. Right. Like all of these lackeys and toadies and sycophants who will do his every evil whim that have their own bringing their own to the party, too. I mean, all of that. And we have now seen, again, Renee Nicole Good, but also what they just did with that church related to Don Lemon, who they are continuing to threaten with legal action and arrest. They are, again, telling you, they are telling us all out loud. And they did it with that memorandum. Like you said, they are setting the table for being able to arrest and charge and incarcerate. And God knows what comes after that. Any one of us who dares to speak up. So in closing, let's get back to defiance, right? Defiance.org. because one of the things that comes with all of this is that people look around and they feel disheartened, disconnected, disillusioned. They're afraid. They're anxious. They don't think they have any. They're hopeless. Right. They don't think there is anything they can do. It can feel like we are boxed in. It can feel like they have all the power. They control the courts. They control the you know, all the levers of democracy, etc. So what does defiance.org do to kind of be an antidote to all of that? And then where can people go and how can they get involved? Yeah, I mean, look, I'll be the first to say this isn't what I want to be doing right now. Not that I'm not enjoying what I'm doing. But, you know, as you know, Joe, and as you and I have talked about before, after I put out that warning about a second Trump administration, My hope, like everyone else, was that the man wouldn't get reelected and I could go back to my normal life. I did technology and national security consulting and went and did that. You know faded into the background for a number of years and wanted to stay away from politics and all of this wanted to grow a family And you know we moved out of the city and started to do exactly that. After the president issued this order against me last April, it upended our lives again. It destroyed the business we had built and the 50 people who were dependent on us for paychecks lost their paychecks to the company was obliterated. It upended our security. It upended our finances. You know, we weren't sure if we were going to have to sell the house to defend ourselves. I mean, it was a nuclear bomb inside of our lives. And I would like to say immediately, my wife and I decided, fine, we're going to fight back against this guy. We didn't. It took us two months to figure out what we're going to do. In the aftermath, we were like, can we even afford to fight back against him? Does that increase the risks? Are they going to try to come to our house and arrest me? Those are real considerations you have to go through. But ultimately, credit to my wife Hannah, she was the one that said, look, at the end of the day, this is just wrong. This is all wrong. And if we capitulate by just going silent, it gives them what they want. And her proposal was instead of our family being defensive and being in a defensive legal posture with lawyers ready for what was going to come at us, that we go on offense. And instead of being defensive, we be defiant. And that was like a switch flip in my life. I mean, I was navel gazing in that period. I was like, you know, woe is me. All of these things, this private life I'd built had blown up. But that switch flip, that literal word defiance changed my entire mindset. I felt energized again. I felt empowered. I was like, no, we have control. We're not just we can't let this guy unconstitutionally come and pursue us. No, we can fight back. And then, you know, like all good things. I got on the phone with a friend in October, Joe, who said, you know, have you looked in to see if that domain name is available? You should go try to create like a nonprofit civic club to give other people ways to fight back. Because a question you and I and others get all the time is, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? And so within like a week of that phone call, we decided, well, look, the domain name is available. Let's go do that. Let's not overthink it. Let's create a club for people to basically go crowdfund efforts around the country, not to create another group to do another thing. There's so many amazing groups already doing work to fight back against Trump's abuses of power, to fight back against what ICE is doing, to fight back against all of the unconstitutional orders, to create whistleblower protection networks, to give people legal support, all of those things. Those groups exist. The problem is your average American, they don't know what groups are out there. They don't know what needs to be funded each week, depending on what the Trump administration is doing. So we created an organization to go do that. And so, you know, we're just shy of three months old, but in that time period, you know, we've got 10,000 paying club members around the country. And every week we pool our member dues to go fund a new mission every single Wednesday to push back against Trump's abuses of power. So if folks wanna be a part of that, they can. They can go to defiance.org and they can sign up, But they also can sign up for free and follow what we're doing and take some of those actions. And if they want to, folks can chip in and actually pay for some of those actions around the country and the support of really, really great groups out there. So that's what we're doing. It's been honestly one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my life. I'm so proud and honored to be a part of this community. And, you know, it means you can just not just doom scroll every day. You can have something to actually do. So anyway, in short, each week we pick a new mission. And in addition to funding that group and their mission, we give our members additional actions they can take to go help that group succeed in whatever it's doing. So in the case of ICE, it's been things like Know Your Rights training and ICE whistles and, you know, trainings to help people document those abuses of power and also actual legal support for people who get caught up in the Trump administration's dragnet. So many layers are the things that we need right now. First and foremost, community, but also like giving people calls to action that they can manage themselves because it's not one size fits all. But lastly, information. That's the best weapon in our arsenal right now. Getting information out from people that you trust is critical. So thank you for doing that. And I'm looking at your website, State of the Swamp, the rebuttal to the State of the Union. That looks like quite an event, Robert De Niro. Well, so I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I kind of think that you and the siren should be there with us in Washington. I mean, like, here's the thing. We built an effort at Defiance.org that, like, we don't give a shit who gets the credit. And so we decided that the night of the State of the Union, we would pay for and host a huge rebuttal and invite all of our friends in new media to come down to Washington. This, like the launch of the organization itself, came together in really short order. So you and I haven't had a chance to talk yet, Joe. But I'm going to put you on the spot here or there. We would love to have you down. We would love to have you speak. We would love to have you guys there broadcasting with us. Like I said, this is like a community open source effort to go host a huge rebuttal to Trump's State of the Union. So you don't have to answer now, but we would love to have you guys down in Washington. I swear to God, this is not something we coordinated. It was really literally. I swear. No, no. I was literally just looking at this because, like, this looks fucking awesome. It's Mark Ruffalo, Marianne Williamson, George Conway, Tom Arnold, Joyce Vance, Glenn Kirshner, Maddy Hassan, you. So many incredible names. So many of my friends, too, Brian Karam. I know Olivia. Like, I was just literally like, this is great. This is the best counter-programming ever. I would be honored in whatever capacity. And the siren would be honored. Because what the siren is doing, it's the same quest, right? We really are sharing. We are aligned in our destination. here, different paths that are parallel, if not intersecting. And I would love to contribute however possible in our siren 100 percent on board. Well, can I tell you something really fun about it is, you know, like everyone's volunteering their time and their efforts and coming together. And one of the groups that is co-hosting this with us is the Portland Frog Brigade, the people who, you know, have been wearing the frog suits to protests around the country. And these guys are awesome and they are funny. And like more than anything I have seen in the resistance in the second term, they have harnessed the ability to use absurdity to highlight the insanity. And I steal those words from them. That's what they say that they do. And so they're gonna be there. And there's gonna be frog suits for people if they wanna dress in frog suits and protest this administration. It's gonna be great. And I'm probably gonna get in trouble for this, Joe, because we're not supposed to give these out widely, but the team just sent me a discount code we can use for friends and family. If folks want to sign up for it, first of all, the live stream will be completely free nationwide. So like tune in. Don't pay a dollar if you just want to watch the live stream and you don't have a dollar to give. But if people want to help fund the event costs and then counter Trump efforts, they can buy tickets to the event and come in person or they can use one of the virtual packages. So I've got a friends and family discount code. It's frogfriend15. So if people want to use that, they get 15% off of tickets. We think they'll sell out in the next couple of days. They're almost sold out. But if folks want to use my friends and family code, because my friends and family are like all across the country, they're not going to fly in. So you guys can be my friends and family. So Frogfriend15, and I'm sure my producer is going to hear that. She's going to be like, who the hell gave out their code to like hundreds of people? It keeps popping up. But whatever, man, we're going to make this a party. And go to defiance.org and it's on their homepage. State of the Swamp, the rebuttal to the State of the Union. The State of the Union is on February 24th. This event is at 7 p.m. The National Press Club, Washington, D.C., but also there's lots of links here, I'm sure, for the virtual. And we're going to have Joe and the siren there. So, like, that just happened. So, like, if anything, come down for that. And by the way, Joe, we have another group of folks that volunteered to build out a new media room there. So there's going to be, like, a whole new media room for, like, everyone to broadcast from. And, like, the outpouring in just, like, seven days has been insane. Look, I love it. I absolutely love it. This was complete serendipity right now. And yeah, I mean, I cannot wait. I am so down with all of this. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for all of that. And for the friends and family code. Fuck yeah. That's awesome. Well, I will be seeing you then, my friend, for sure. You can count on that and getting my hotel room as soon as we get off this podcast. But as soon as we jump, I'm going to text you and put you in touch with the team so we can make it all happen. Amazing. I am honored and blown away. So thank you so much. As always, good to see you. I am very, very grateful for you. And I'm glad to see that you're doing well, despite all of this awfulness and despite, you know, the nuclear bomb that went off in your family because somehow the plurality of people returned him to that office, which I'll never for as long as I live understand. Can I say, Joe, real talk, I so admire you. I know your story. I know a lot of your followers know your story. You have been so brave amidst all of this and inspiring other people to be courageous. I will just say for the siren, I admire what you guys are doing. I urge folks who are listening to this, if they're not already paid subscribers to what you guys are doing, and I swear to God, we didn't coordinate on this either. But the only way that independent journalists and commentators and leaders and pro-democracy champions like Joe are able to do this is because they are crowdfunded. They are crowd supported. And so I just huge admire what you guys are doing. Urge people to subscribe and follow you guys. The siren has been truly amazing. Wow. Thank you so much. You can. I'll mail you your check as soon as we're done. No, for real. Thank you. It means a lot to me. Yeah, I wish. It means a lot to me. Somebody once said it takes a village. So we are in this fight together and I'm glad for that. Thank you, Miles Taylor. I will be seeing you soon. Thank you, friends. OK, bye. Thank you.