Let's see how the arguments against #AbolishICE have aged...

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:09 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is, I mean, we used to call this Rapid Response, but I feel like it's just too fascist for that. Fascist Response. Oh, there we go.

0:00:18 Matt: There we go.

0:00:20 Thomas: Fascist Response Wednesday. I'm Thomas. That over there is real -life immigration attorney Matt Cameron. How you doing?

0:00:18 Lydia: Hi

0:00:27 Matt: It's been quite a week, Thomas. It has been a rough one. Exactly one week since we last recorded talking about the murder of Renee Good. We're going to be talking about that again, but happy to be back with you. We've got a lot to talk about.

0:00:30 Thomas: Is it really? Is something happening? Something in the news? It's been so long since we've done video. It feels like forever. When did we last do video? Lydia, when did we last do a video? How you doin'?

0:00:46 Lydia: It's been it's been a few weeks I want to say right before Christmas maybe yeah yeah so it's

0:00:52 Thomas: Yeah, that's a while. Well, it is good to be back.

0:00:56 Lydia: Been a while the last time our kids were sick that that's literally the last time yeah yeah and now they're sick again so

0:00:58 Thomas: That's why, yeah. Okay, and they're sick again. But to talk about today um don't you give us a preview

0:01:04 Matt: We're just going to take a quick look at the fascist response, as you said, to the week's events. It's pretty concerning, got a lot to talk about there. And then I just want to kind of touch on a piece from 2018, arguing against the abolition of ICE and see how that's aged. I'm going to suggest like lettuce, I think pretty much. But it's interesting just to kind of look at The Standard Liberal Arguments for preserving it, see how they've held up. Since 2018 we don't need to read the whole piece it's pretty long and then we've got a classic we have not yet read anything as far as I know from the baseball crank people might remember dan mclaughlin from uh twitter days no you're not not up in the baseball crack we'll have to talk about him uh

0:01:19 Thomas: Like iceberg lettuce no I don't know what what the hell are you talking about I'm

0:01:47 Matt: Man

0:01:46 Lydia: Only know because I researched it for this. So yeah, I don't think I knew before.

0:01:50 Matt: That was that was twitter glory days the the angry little baseball uh but we will uh we'll we'll talk no

0:01:55 Thomas: Gonna say you're not a sports fan so I know you're you're not actually talking about baseball. I don't know what's happening.

0:01:57 Matt: I do often quietly crank at baseball but uh I don't don't really have have opinions about it uh yeah but no dan mclaughlin writes for the national review among other things and he's just a real standard conservative type who's just uh holding keeping the faith even through trump he's a never trumper who's trying to be pretend to be conservative still sure

0:02:17 Thomas: Yeah. So we also solicited questions. I wanted to make sure we took on any and all, you know, terrible arguments in favor of state-sanctioned murder, I guess. And they're trying. They're trying their damnedest. You know, they'll cite random law in an attempt to make it seem like it's okay if you just murder someone in the streets for no reason. And, you Know, that's the purpose of a law show like ours is to clarify that, no, you can't, in fact, murder someone on the streets for no reason. But I mean, there's more to it, obviously, in terms of just what the law is and what it's going to take to maybe prosecute this person and what you're going to have to prove, all that kind of stuff. So we've been very interested in the law around this murder. And so we asked the patrons for their questions there. We're going answer a few of those. Let's see, anything else?

0:02:22 Matt: That's

0:02:43 Lydia: Yeah All right.

0:03:07 Matt: A show that's

0:03:08 Thomas: All right. Right. Well, we're also going to thank our patrons who make this show possible. Thank you so much, patrons. It's been too long since we've gotten to shout you out. So we'll still do it in thirds for our three commercial breaks. We'll start with, oh, and by the way, these are the Hall of Famers on patreon.com/law. The Hall of Fame is the all time greats. They pledge at that five dollar level and above for at least a month. So that's how you get your name read each and every time we read it I can't

0:03:08 Matt: Plenty

0:03:37 Lydia: They also get a lot of other goodies. Let me say they get a lot of others.

0:03:38 Thomas: Commit to any time period oh yeah that's

0:03:42 Lydia: I've just been launching some stuff.

0:03:42 Thomas: Right they're they've been getting some perks lately so thank you to Matthew Cutler, autistic streamer, Vetinari for America 2028, One Man, One Vote, UnreMerkable, Aminah, Donna Treadaway, Mother of Harridans, protect trans kids, Deep Space Nine was the best Star Trek, Mike Lapinsky, may a moody baby doom a game again the best palindromes

0:04:04 Matt: Solid solid

0:04:08 Lydia: Take your word for it.

0:04:09 Thomas: Sionitus, normalized bi-directional spooning, fourth circuit attorney, reluctantly changing her font, Charlie Kelly, attorney at bird law, Apprentice of Adventure, Probably a real person, Nick Fish, unfrozen caveman lawyer, and A Negative Phenomenon, thank you so much to our first third of Hall of Fame patrons, they made the show happen, join their ranks, patreon.com/law, get the ads, get the LOT, Awful Movies, oh man that was a ton of fun, we We've got another one of those scheduled, I think.

0:04:38 Thomas: Can't wait. All right, we'll take a quick break, and then we'll get into it. Matt, you came up with the incredible Amuse Douche that that stick, not only has that name been so good at sticks, Matt. I apply that. I borrow it for other shows. I hope that's okay. Sometimes we use the Amuse douche. So that means, of course, a tiny little douche, a small douche that we're going to start off with to

0:04:36 Lydia: We do I think

0:04:38 Matt: Test sure oh but

0:05:00 Lydia: Just a little baby one

0:05:02 Matt: It's a big one

0:05:02 Thomas: Get ready for the for the larger douchebaggery. So yeah. Where do we begin?

0:05:06 Matt: Today's amuse-douche is one of the biggest douches in the united states uh J.D. Vance our vice president um just this man has a yale law degree I just want to point out before we play this clip. He'd agree from...

0:05:17 Thomas: He's top douche. Now that I think about it, he's head douche because like it call, I would call Trump a lot of things. I wouldn't really call him a douche so much, you know, like at like, maybe it could fit if the douche fits, but sometimes, but like Vance is a fucking douche, like he is absolutely a douce, inarguably a douze. So he's top douch of the country. I think just realizing this.

0:05:27 Matt: That's That's true. He's so weird. Yeah.

0:05:28 Lydia: He has some douchey moments but yeah yeah yeah yeah what an

0:05:39 Matt: And he knows better. He definitely knows better, so let's see.

0:05:40 Lydia: Honor a

0:05:42 Thomas: That's a part of it.

0:05:43 Matt: Yeah, this is a comment shortly after the tragedy. Tragedy isn't the word after the murder. Trageny is an accident. This was not an accident. This is just J.D. Vance completely misstating American law for benefit of the troops.

0:05:57 Thomas: All right, let's take a look at the top douche. The nation's top douche.

0:06:01 Clip: First of all, the Department of Justice is going to investigate this. The Department of Homeland Security is already investigating this. But the simple fact is, what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that.

0:06:12 Thomas: Okay. I agree with that. No. Yeah?

0:06:17 Clip: You have woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.

0:06:17 Thomas: Hi. I would like to debate that. Didn't

0:06:22 Clip: Nobody debates. I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it's a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers. I think what is clearly happening here, and it's going to keep on happening unless the Democrats wake up and say, you know what, you don't have to agree with our immigration policies. You don't Have to agree With what the president or the vice president believe about immigration enforcement. But why don't you take this to the ballot box? Why don't You vote? Why don' you organize? Instead, what some of them are doing, what some of them are doing is encouraging

0:06:16 Lydia: We do no no we do tragedy of our own making exercising

0:06:22 Thomas: Happen. Of murder. We're

0:06:57 Clip: People to get violent with our law enforcement officials it's disgraceful and it's got to stop investigations the US Attorney's Office has essentially cut off the state investigations agencies access to the investigation what is the precedent for that and why shouldn't the Minnesota officials on the ground have access and evidence to work on this investigation first of all I wish the state officials INVESTIGATE WHY YOU HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE USING THEIR VEHICLES AND OTHER MEANS TO ACTUALLY INTERFERE WITH A LEGITIMATE LAW ENFORCEMENT

0:06:57 Lydia: Their constitutional rights yeah yeah

0:07:05 Thomas: Just playing through?

0:07:06 Lydia: Play through this question poor

0:07:30 Clip: OPERATION. THE PRECEDENT HERE IS VERY SIMPLE. YOU HAVE A FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL ENGAGING IN FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTION, THAT IS A FEDERAL ISSUE. THAT GUY IS PROTECTED BY ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY. HE WAS DOING HIS JOB.

0:07:30 Thomas: Has nothing to do with the question, asshole. Incorrect.

0:07:41 Clip: THE IDEA THAT TIM WALZ AND A BUNCH OF RADICALS IN MINNEAPOLIS ARE GOING TO GO AFTER AND MAKE THIS GUY'S LIFE MISERABLE BECAUSE HE WAS is doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity. I've never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge. So what I'd like Minnesota to focus on is the real issue that they're encouraging people. Minneapolis officials are encouraging people to commit violence against ICE officials. It's ridiculous. It

0:07:48 Lydia: Baby be

0:07:48 Thomas: Matt, law question. Is Yale Law sending their best?

0:08:18 Lydia: You're

0:08:20 Matt: Not to the vice presidency. That is just an absolutely flat, wrong statement of the law. No federal officer has absolute immunity to do whatever they want. And it's very concerning that J.D. Vance, I'm sure he knows better, is saying that, and he's telling them that because he wants them to believe that. I think that this is the message that they're were trying to convey.

0:08:39 Thomas: Either that or he got, you know, maybe a text or something from Alito. And it's like, yeah, no, don't worry, it's coming. That absolute immunity for murder is coming. It's on its way. I got, I ordered it late. It didn't get there in time for Christmas, but they say they're delivering the absolute immunity for ICE murders. I wish that was more of a joke than it is.

0:08:54 Lydia: Welcome yeah right

0:09:00 Matt: Yeah. And he's saying he's never heard of a case, maybe he's never heard one, but just offhand, just without really trying, you can go back to the Ruby Ridge standoff, you might remember back in 92. That was a year before Waco, kind of a tough time in American sort of nationalist violent movements. And the shooter I just double -checked, his name was Len Horiyuchi. He was a sharpshooter, a sniper that killed Vicki Weaver. And well, I think she was holding her baby at the time. It was terrible. She was unarmed. And that actually was allowed to proceed. The Ninth Circuit allowed that to proceed as a state prosecution because it was close enough. There was just no threat. There's nothing that would justify what he did. Uh the

0:09:42 Thomas: Well, hold on a sec. You said a prosecution. I mean, just to make very clear in case anyone hasn't followed this, they are not even allowing the investigation to happen. They're not even allowing this. There's no precedent for that, right? I mean, is there any precedent? I shouldn't make that statement. Is there any precedent for the president just shutting down from the top down, essentially, the investigation and not allowing the state to have access to any of the materials, even to just see just in case? For all we know, like, again, maybe not this one. Maybe they don't have sympathy for this one or something. Let's say, you know, in 2028, once we go ahead and decide to fire everyone currently in ICE and hire a bunch of radicals like Tim Waltz, yeah, we're going to hire a bunch of Radical Assassins like Tim Walz, and they're just going to go start killing people in red states. Are you going to say that you can't even investigate? You can't investigate if that's like just, yeah they're federal so they can do whatever they want. If that's the precedent you you want to set, then honestly, I'm just going to vote murder for 2028. I'm voting murder people in red states for 2029. If that's

0:10:14 Lydia: Tim walls because they're federal officers we've we've federalized them yeah

0:10:52 Matt: Dark

0:10:52 Thomas: The way we have to get them to figure out that it's against the law, that murder is against the law, I guess we got to do that. Or you could just do it now and realize that murder should be against the lot with the two options, two options. So anyway, question was, is there any precedent for just not even allowing them to investigate? All

0:11:03 Matt: I mean it's a tough prosecution yeah right not that I'm aware of that they would that the fbi would completely cut off and there is a lot of extrinsic evidence obviously we've all seen the videos and certainly the witnesses are happy to talk but uh it's much harder without the fb involved and maybe we'll talk about that later but uh you know as I said with the Ruby Ridge case, as far as I know, the FBI still cooperated. And it provides sort of the model for what we'd expect here, which is that it's removed to federal court and a state prosecutor is allowed to continue the case in federal court. It's kind of a strange thing using federal rules. We didn't really talk about this on Friday, but it's a very strange process, but potentially, and we'll talk more at the end about the legal stuff, but there is a path there. It'S just going to be very difficult and it is harder without the FBI's cooperation for sure.

0:11:48 Thomas: Right. I'll hold my questions for then. Uh, do we have any more for a top douche or sorry,

0:11:50 Lydia: Not from that video but I think we need to see what dhs specifically has been peddling um part of their response yeah

0:12:01 Thomas: We're getting a double amuse -douche.

0:12:03 Lydia: Well Kristi Noem is also a big old douche so So, like, she really, really is.

0:12:07 Thomas: That's fair.

0:12:09 Matt: Want to give a little sample of how DHS has been talking to us after this, because remember, this was a national tragedy. This is something that I think under a more sane administration, just to remind people, we might actually have some sort of soul searching on the part of a federal agency in which something like this had just happened.

0:12:26 Matt: I think, under a President Obama or Biden, we would have seen a very different different response. This is, I believe, day over the next day. And just check out what it says on the podium there if you haven't seen this. This is super creepy. This is Kristi Noem speaking to the press. This is the press conference in which she's talking about how the victim and her wife are domestic terrorists and everybody associated with them and anybody supporting them or telling them how to do these kinds of actions are domestic terrorist. Right there on the podium, it says in caps, one of ours, all of yours. And I've been thinking about that for days now. I can't get it out of my head.

0:12:56 Thomas: They went to Kinko's and printed that out. Went to Staples.

0:12:59 Matt: A placard. The website, you can't quite read.

0:13:02 Thomas: Where do they go?

0:13:02 Matt: It's a little blurry over there, but they have a website for what they call the worst of the worst, where they've just been featuring... And obviously, in the course of doing these, they are going down targeted lists of people that do have serious felonies. So you're obviously going to get the same way you do out of any other population. You're going to give people that have serious sex offenses and drunk driving and all these other things they're going after. But I don't understand what this is doing on that podium in this context, except to declare war on the American people. That's what it is.

0:13:29 Thomas: I don't even really understand what this is supposed to mean so if we killed if supposedly we the royal we killed one ice agent then you kill everyone all of us I don't even understand what that's supposed to be yeah

0:13:39 Matt: All of us, it's super fascist. And people were trying to connect it to the Falangist movement in Spain, sort of the original fascist movement in Spain. I couldn't find anything definitive on this phrasing, but it's just on its face. You don't have to know anything about history to know that's just fascist phrasing. It's collective punishment, which is what they're doing to Minneapolis right now. They're doing collective punishment. And it was to begin with, even before the shooting. It was collective punishment for this stupid Somali fraud stuff. So yeah, good

0:13:58 Thomas: That's insane yeah it

0:14:05 Lydia: Well, we see it, too, with just, like specifically if you zero in on Renee Good and her family, now the DOJ is wanting to investigate her widow, right, her partner, as part of this. And you have people resigning today, DOJ attorneys that are like, I'm not participating in that. And shout out to you guys, whoever you are, that's the right choice. Well done. But it's dark. So it's not just like all of you as a community, which could be like, it could feel maybe kind of vague and not tangible in any way. But if you think about it, like one of us, all of yours, like your family like that is really really scary um and we're seeing that happen like as of today yeah

0:14:51 Matt: We have to talk about this response because it's scary. It really is. I know it's supposed to be scary, but it is. And it's not how the government is supposed to respond. I mean, blaming the victim to the point that we're going to investigate her family for crimes and we're going to have to get her network and try to figure out the Antifa funding behind the ice watch we'll be talking about with the Dan McLaughlin piece.

0:15:09 Thomas: Just has nothing to do with anything like you can't just if you just kill a random person it doesn't matter what this all this there's just nothing to deal with anything it doesn'T matter her what does it have to do she was in a car she wasn't trying to do anything she wasn'T trying to hit anybody there's only one officer that had his gun out everybody else wasn't doing that because there was no need to and he had his phone killed somebody with his gun in one hand his phone another I cannot we've seen a lot don't get me wrong there's been shitty police murders of people done of course like that could that dates back a long time longer than we've had video to prove it for sure I do not recall ever one where the officer had a phone in onehand and a gun in the other. I mean, I could be, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if maybe it existed at some point, but that's it. That's a new one on me. I think my thing is always like, I wish people could appreciate how much worse things can always get. And it's significant that we've gone from to this new level. I means it's not just they're trying to justify it, which it'd be one thing and we've seen that for a decade. We've seen that more than a decade where there's an awful shooting of an an unarmed black man and the right will try to justify it. But in the times past, there was at least something like an investigation. And sometimes

0:15:20 Matt: You got to blame her. You have to blame her. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:15:29 Lydia: Gun and his phone yeah yeah right several

0:16:23 Thomas: We've gotten justice a few times, which is shitty, but is a step above where we had been. And now for it to not only be, yeah, for it, for It to be not just that, not just the president and the top douche and everybody commenting ahead of time on the investigation. That's a new one that maybe, maybe Trump did it. Trump won, I guess, but that's not normally something they do where they just declare that it was a murder or that it Was a terrorist, essentially, for it to not even just be that also them shutting down the investigation. I mean, we are so far down the path of fascism. And I just it's not helpful to, to blur the lines and say that, oh, it's always been this bad or whatever. No, it hasn't always been This bad. We're reaching new levels of bad. It's important to know that because guess what, there are always newer levels of

0:16:30 Lydia: Steps above this yeah right yeah

0:17:08 Thomas: That that are going to be even worse if we don't stop it.

0:17:10 Matt: We're not all the way there yet. But this is a real place to mark. And that's why I wanted to really feature this picture and make everybody think about what that sounds like. I mean, that is collective punishment and it is blaming the victim for their death, which is both classic fascist tactics. You know, why'd you make us kill you?

0:17:28 Thomas: And now we can joke that Matt's being arrested, but eventually it's not going to be a joke.

0:17:30 Matt: Once again, yeah.

0:17:31 Thomas: It's where we're headed.

0:17:31 Lydia: He's on the list. Yeah.

0:17:32 Matt: Let's take a look at the next picture, just because I want to talk about recruitment.

0:17:34 Lydia: Well, yeah, the reel.

0:17:36 Matt: But yeah, yes.

0:17:37 Lydia: Yeah, it's specifically and the song that they are featuring in their recruitment ad.

0:17:43 Matt: ICE has been on a real big recruitment kick recently, and they're calling it actually a wartime footing, basically. They're treating it like they're recruiting for a war, which, I mean, you saw what all of ours, all of yours is certainly very wartime, but no, unless

0:17:52 Thomas: Wartime. There's no such thing as a wartime ice anything. Nothing ice is doing could ever involve war. There is no such a thing. Unless we have a land army, unless the Mongols are coming, there's nothing.

0:18:11 Thomas: You know what? That's another thing. I'm so sorry to hijack things, but But I can't another another like we've gone another step further is it used to be that some of ice was sometimes masking or some of them were looking a little militant every single clip. And I've watched dozens of them, every single clip there in full, you know, Iraq war garb with their faces covered with no exceptions, almost like they're like almost like 90 percent minimum. Minimum. That's another escalation where it's, it used to be the outlier. Now it's the rule. They're all, they're all dressed like they're in a war. What are you doing? What

0:18:03 Matt: You... Yeah, yeah, yep, yep.

0:18:49 Thomas: War are you fighting? You fucking assholes. Even if they're, even if you agreed with immigration policy that they're doing, even если you agreed, you're not fighting a fucking war. You're deporting people who work in farms and factories and doing jobs that white people don't want to do.

0:19:04 Lydia: And cleaning houses.

0:19:05 Thomas: Apparently yeah cleaning houses you're not fighting a war there's a war it's unbelievable it's a I can't believe they're a wartime recruitment for ice it doesn't make any sense you might as well do a warttime recruitment for the post office what are you talking about fucking stupid here

0:19:22 Matt: It makes a lot of sense if you believe that the United States is full of enemies and that you're supposed to be going out there and rounding them up. I mean, this is a wartime footing. It's a wartime recruitment. This is how they're doing it. They've just added so many more people and they're going to do so many, but the Washington Post got an internal document showing that they're using using geofencing to go after gun shows, military bases, you know, specifically targeting people with these very, very fashy ads. But here is this Instagram picture. This is one of the many things they've been using. And we'll have our, yeah, yeah.

0:19:49 Lydia: It's a reel too. There's music there too but

0:19:51 Thomas: We go I'll hit oh what no it's just a picture well

0:19:54 Matt: Says, we'll Have Our Home Again.

0:19:53 Lydia: Is it gonna work? No, No, the Instagram, it should be a reel with music.

0:19:59 Thomas: So we does have music, but only on mobile. That's a new one on me. What a world we live in. So Lydia, yeah. Do you want to try to, I don't know, hold your phone up to the mic or something?

0:20:08 Lydia: Here we go.

0:20:09 Thomas: It's apparently has music on mobile, but not, oh, it's the Klan Siberian Orchestra. No, it'S the, uh, the clans.

0:20:23 Lydia: This is, yes. No, no. It's truly a neo -Nazi song. A neo -nazi song. It's credited as Pine Tree Riots. I don't know that that's actually like the name of a choral group or anything like that. But yeah, it's a neo Nazi song that they have as part of this and part of their marketing and messaging here on this ad yeah

0:20:29 Matt: That's good in

0:20:32 Thomas: It WAS definitely that. Yeah.

0:20:50 Matt: Our own towns we're foreigners now our names are spat and cursed the headlines smack of another attack not the last and not the worst so not too subtle and this is a dhs recruitment ad an ice recruitment specifically says we'll have our home again and we've got a b2 stealth bomber flying over a guy on horseback somewhere in montana or something I don't know know what's going on.

0:21:09 Thomas: What's going on in that photo? Is the, is the stealth bomber finding the horse back guy or are they on the same team? Are they like waving? Hey, I'm

0:21:17 Lydia: Hey

0:21:17 Matt: Hey, you guys like Firefly, right? I'm going

0:21:18 Lydia: Dude

0:21:18 Thomas: Hunting. Yeah. I'm looking for any other like stealth bomber immigrants up here. Like maybe they're like, in case they have like, you know, helicopters or fighter jets. If we have like a top gun situation, but with the illegals or something, what are you doing up there? What's that going to do?

0:21:27 Lydia: They're up in the skies like me yeah

0:21:35 Matt: To go ahead and say that the overlap between Firefly fans and ICE recruits is pretty thin.

0:21:41 Thomas: Firefly?

0:21:41 Matt: Yeah, this reminds me of the show Firefly with the spaceship flying over the...

0:21:40 Lydia: Space and

0:21:44 Thomas: Oh, a little bit. Yeah, the space. Yeah, that's true. Yeah yeah. I get that.

0:21:46 Lydia: Cowboys and yeah yeah yeah

0:21:48 Thomas: Yeah I think they're both on the same team, but I don't know what, what are you recruiting for there? Am I, I'm going to join ICE so I can fly a stealth bomber. I don'T think we, I donT think we're getting there. Given the fact that half of them can't pass the open book test. Uh, I DON'T think they're going to be flying stealth bombers anytime soon. I, that's just a famous last words, but I DONT think that's happening.

0:21:57 Matt: Or ride a horse.

0:22:08 Thomas: They might ride a horse.

0:22:08 Matt: Well, this is unfortunately... This is just one example of openly using white power memes, white nationalist imagery and phrases and things. You'd see that and you'd think that's kind of a strange phrase, but you wouldn't recognize it because you're not a white nationalist. But real dog whistle stuff here. And that's at a time when, yeah, sure, good.

0:22:16 Thomas: Truly disgusting. It's yeah. It sounds very fascistic and very wild. Like I would have guessed, you know, we'll have our home again because of what, Because when did you have your home? Hey, white assholes, when was this your home. It wasn't when we came here as immigrants in, you know, pre-America times. That wasn't our home. Obviously, we were immigrants. When was it? Was it because we established this country and we're like, like what time period was it our home and only white people and no immigrants? That doesn't exist. That doesn'T exist. You can't just declare a place we own it now because we we not we immigrated but it was slightly before the ones that I don't like so it's ours that's just nonsense it's fucking nonsense racist assholes yeah

0:23:15 Matt: Fascism. That's how it works. It's always the glory days. It was always that time just before you were born when everything was perfect. And yeah, so there you go. That's ice recruitment these days. Scary stuff. Just so we can see who these people are and what's going on before we get into our next piece.

0:23:20 Thomas: Matt that wasn't amusing enough for a douche I need an I just want a delightful bit of douchebaggery and you're giving me all I'm already this is This is 11 out of 10 fascism happening.

0:23:34 Matt: We'll get something funnier next time.

0:23:40 Thomas: Give me racist. I was trying to think of Mormon, Mormon clan, clan, taber, clan. I couldn't. I was try to think if I couldn and then I went to the clan Siberian orchestra.

0:23:39 Lydia: It's pretty bad.

0:23:50 Thomas: But that's that's not it's an orchestra. It's not a it's not acquire just a different thing. Doesn't work, but it's pretty good.

0:23:47 Lydia: Tabernacle. Yeah. No, that's good.

0:23:48 Matt: I think Klein's Siberian Orchestra is very good. Yeah, it works. Close enough.

0:23:58 Thomas: All right. Well, on that dark note, we're going to have to take our second break, which means we're going to thank some more patrons. So at least we have that. At least we got fun patrons to thank.

0:23:57 Lydia: Something

0:24:07 Thomas: Yeah, that, that puts me in a better mood. All right. Uh, thank you to tie, tag it.

0:24:06 Lydia: To look forward to. Mm

0:24:16 Thomas: I'll litigate it. Okay. There's weird characters in it. So I was, but I think, I think that's a, I think if I get rid of the weird characters, I think that that's an apostrophe and maybe it'll be a, um, palindrome. Tie it, tag it, I'll litigate it. Maybe. Okay, I think that works. (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Ex Parte). Jaysank. David Souther. I'm the top ambiguously non -human slash councilman slash class D felony patron. And all I got was this lousy B block shout out. Neil Armstrong.

0:24:43 Lydia: Still in the B block.

0:24:45 Thomas: Oh, this is a good one. Neil Armstrong gnorts Mr. Alien. I love that one.

0:24:51 Lydia: Good norths.

0:24:53 Thomas: Even a blind squirrel can find these chunks. Classic.

0:24:55 Lydia: Object.

0:24:56 Thomas: Cavalri. Today's episode is brought to you by the letter. I don't know. It's a character I can't read. That's good. Good. Thomas Freeman, Cajunkilla, Fraud Fishy Hates Everything, Chris Simpson, gavelhead chucking away a bowl of shise, Malaika Chandler, Mark Schultz, and the Cincinnati kid, thank you so much, top patrons, Hall of Famers, for the uh the middle tier there, and we'll take our next break and get to the next segment. All right, So Matt, tell us about what we're going to be talking about here. As I have up an opinion piece, abolishing ICE is a a very bad idea now this is not current so when is this from what are we talking about

0:25:30 Matt: This is from 2018. So this is an interesting year in American politics when a lot of progressives are trying to decide, including a campaign that I was advising on at the time. And I actually just pulled out a memo that I wrote for that campaign. I'm very proud of that work. It became one of the first campaigns to come out for publicly full -on abolishing ICE and not just defunding it.

0:25:47 Matt: And this conversation was going on amongst liberals and progressives about, should we just go all the way and say that this agency shouldn't exist? And those of us who'd seen it up close had no trouble saying that it shouldn't exists because we've seen what we'd created. But most of the American public had not really seen anything like what people are seeing now. Now. So I can understand, and I'm not really going to make fun of this that much because I understand where they're coming from. And I can see why at the time, certainly for liberals and certainly for these particular authors, why they would not want to fully abolish ICE. And I think Lydia's got some background on our authors here, if you want to scroll down to their names. But

0:26:19 Lydia: We have Nate Bruggeman and Ben Rohrbach. And they at this time, they were both partners with a company called Border Works Advisors LLC. That seems to no longer exist, at least via their website. I think their LLC still exists. I haven't seen that they've gotten rid of that at all. And it was incorporated June 2017 out of Delaware by an agent. So not a lot of interesting corporate -y things going on there. There. But prior to them working together in that capacity, they both held pretty senior positions with the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.

0:27:00 Lydia: Let's see, Nate Bruggeman was an affiliate of the Homeland Security Project at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. And Rohrbach was, from 2014 to 2016, he was the Director for Enforcement and border security at the National Security Council in the White House. And these guys are technically Democrats. They both worked on campaigns for Democrat politicians, for Obama, for Al Gore. You know, Bruggeman was doing campaigning as a college student for Al Gore way back when. They both work for the Obama administration in some capacity, volunteering for Biden -Harris.

0:27:37 Thomas: I don't care if it were in

0:27:38 Lydia: Harris.

0:27:38 Thomas: 2018 I just want to know what you did in 2016 17 you know I don'T care about any of that other stuff yeah

0:27:43 Lydia: So where they were at is they were coming out of positions deep in DHS and then partnered together on a consultant firm regarding the border. So it was to their benefit that the border continued to exist and that the enforcement, potentially the government, I'm not really sure. Because they don't have a website anymore it's hard to kind of track it right from

0:27:59 Thomas: Consulting whom like like okay not like political consult it wasn't like policy stuff like matt's talking about it's like they're actually providing

0:28:11 Matt: Probably also companies doing business with the government, I would assume, like how to get you your DHS contracts, because there were a lot of good contracts to be had back then, still are.

0:28:12 Lydia: What I can tell from what I can tell yeah yeah no

0:28:19 Matt: So yeah, these are people that are not entirely neutral on the subject, obviously. And they're

0:28:23 Thomas: It is an opinion piece to be fair, but like,

0:28:23 Lydia: There are two two white guys yeah but two white guys who are involved in projects that interface with both dhs and cbp yeah and

0:28:29 Matt: And are paid consultants. Yeah. So I just want to take a look at the top line arguments here. Yeah, good.

0:28:34 Lydia: And one note really fast I was trying to track down where they stand now on what's been happening can't find any of that information anywhere except Ben Warbach has a new company. He's a co -founder of Lantern Unmanned Autonomous Systems LLC, which develops systems to scan cargo containers using aerial drones. He is the COO there. In September, that company was awarded a contract with the U.S. Army to support the development of advanced AI-driven counter-unmanned aircraft system technologies designed to detect, track, and mitigate drone threats in complex operational environments.

0:29:10 Lydia: Around that exact same time, a lot of UAS companies, those unmanned autonomous systems companies, were receiving contracts. And, you know, I just think about like all the Venezuela boat strikes that happened shortly thereafter. So I think he's probably okay because he's still making money off of how, like with what's been happening, immigration.

0:29:11 Thomas: I mean, okay. We're not worried about like his

0:29:32 Lydia: No, No, no, no. No. With his position on immigration, with Nate Bruggeman, I'm not sure. And I can't speak to where he's at now.

0:29:32 Thomas: Wellbeing. Oh, okay, yeah. All Right,. Well, I've never heard of either of these people. The point is they're a little biased. But like setting this aside, I means, what's your memory of, and it sounds like if you worked on a campaign, you might have better memory than than I do, but I remember being pro abolish ice. And, uh, you know, I think the thing that is so frustrating about that is stuff that gets normalized. And this is another lesson for what's going on now. Um, I Think people just didn't realize that ice was, especially at that time, what was that like 16 years old or something at that time? Um, that's, that'S very young.

0:29:43 Matt: It is an interesting cottage thing. Yeah this

0:30:12 Thomas: That's, that's new. We don't't need, it hasn't been around for the founding fathers didn't give us ice. And I think the minute something's around for a few years, it's just normalized. And that was the biggest frustration to me is that all the people being like, how could you possibly even consider abolishing ice? It's like, it was not, didn't exist.

0:30:29 Matt: Institution.

0:30:29 Thomas: I can remember when it didn't exist. That's not that old. Now it's a little older, but it's still, you know, it still doesn't have its prefrontal cortex or whatever, but I don't think it ever will.

0:30:40 Lydia: Can rent a car.

0:30:42 Thomas: But I think it was was not a popular, I don't think it was a terribly popular idea, but I don'T, I DON'T remember it being like anathema exactly. What's your memory of it?

0:30:51 Matt: It was considered to be a pretty radical left idea and it was being floated at, Sean McAuley who was later disgraced under other circumstances, was really pushing this at the time. And there was a very active debate amongst progressives about how far we're going to go to. We can talk about defunding, about restructuring, about melting ICE, or whatever the phrase was going to be, or just getting rid of it. And this is an interesting sort of snapshot from people, as we talked about, with something to gain out of it, of the status quo, arguing for that, let's just keep this thing in place. And I think it's interesting to look at it now, because there are still some people, I think, who feel this way quietly, or maybe loudly. But abolished ICE is becoming the mainstream democratic position now, which is as it should be after what we've seen.

0:31:32 Thomas: Latest polling came out and it's, uh, yeah, people don't support this really.

0:31:35 Matt: So this is good to see how far things have come in eight years. But let's take a look at this middle paragraph here.

0:31:40 Thomas: You say that, I think it's a year. I wonder if that polling moved much from then to 2024. And then now it's like, oh yeah. Cause like to your point, and I think, you know, you've been on the ground, you're, you'RE an immigration attorney, you've seen this. I do think when people actually see the brutality of it, I think most Americans aren't in favor of this. It's just a struggle to get people to see. There's so much. It's a struggle to get people to actually see with their own eyes. But especially when it comes to their community, they don't like this. Nobody in fucking Minnesota is going to like having federal jackbooted thugs, apart from the hardcore MAGA racists. But talking broadly speaking, 80% of humans are

0:31:45 Matt: Yeah it's true. You're right. Mm -hmm. Yeah It is. Yeah

0:32:23 Thomas: Not going to like that. There's no way.

0:32:24 Matt: I can remember 20 years ago as a baby attorney talking to my client and realizing that ICE had busted his door down without a warrant and being shocked just because I didn't know anything, you know, and I got radicalized pretty quickly on it. But people are really seeing it now and what this has always been. So I just wanted just the middle paragraph there where it says, activists are arguing the ending I should be the position of the Democratic Party in a litmus test. This is a bad idea. When somebody tells you that this is a distraction from the real issue, you should probably just look at the issue because, generally speaking, I don't like it when people tell me something is a distraction.

0:32:55 Matt: So they're saying, you know, we should change the law, which is fine, except that part of the big change in the law that we made in 2003 was introducing the concept of a separate immigration enforcement agency that is completely unaccountable to the rest of the government. And that was the problem. And they don't really seem to be acknowledging that.

0:32:54 Thomas: Yeah, how did it work before Matt?

0:33:12 Lydia: It's also why not both like why I don't

0:33:14 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. How did It work before? Cause I, I'm sure that's, I know we don't have time to do a whole deep dive on it, but like, what, what was it like before that?

0:33:22 Matt: Yeah. I'd love to actually get an older immigration attorney on to talk a little bit about this, but I certainly, you know, the Department of Justice included the immigration courts and the immigration enforcement. And so when you're talking about, for me, what this comes down to is budgeting, right? When you're allocating the budget, when you'RE giving money to something called immigration and naturalization services, you'RE remembering that there's a holistic bucket of things that's happening there, including naturalizing people, right? And including giving them green cards and citizenship. And enforcement is a piece of that. And INS, you know famously, was not perfect and it had all kinds of problems. I'm not saying go back to INS necessarily.

0:33:54 Thomas: Of course. Yeah.

0:33:55 Matt: But if we at least reset the clock back to that, and then talk about what this function actually is, and bring it under the purview of the Department of Justice, bring it under true accountability and have, I mean, right now, we're in a position where they could just pretty much get rid of everybody who's supposed to be advising them on ethics, and good, you know, good governance, and they have no oversight, and their accountable.

0:34:11 Thomas: Well, I'm not doing a good job anyway. So yeah.

0:34:12 Lydia: Sorry

0:34:13 Matt: Exactly, never were. And they're accountable to the president. And also, what I've always said about this, when I'm teaching this is, think about the difference sort of psychologically as a policy matter of creating an agency and then arguing about how much money we're going to give that agency versus here's all of our immigration functions and how are we going to distribute them, right? When you get this hot button thing of, you know, one bucket of money that we're arguing about that is just immigration enforcement, nobody's going to want to stand up on the floor and say, we should give them less money, right. I mean, that's, I mean I want to, but you know that's much harder argument to make when you're isolating it that way. And that was always the problem is you're going end up with this runaway rogue agency. And the ACLU said it from the the beginning, and they were right. At this point here, this paragraph you got up.

0:34:55 Lydia: Removals of immigrants who do not have legal status track the law as it exists. If you believe its actions are capricious and cruel, this is because of American immigration laws, not because of some institutional racism within ICE.

0:35:08 Matt: It's both. It is both. Our laws are fundamentally designed to keep people out from the global south. But also, you're encouraging an agency that is only going to be dedicated to immigration enforcement and does nothing else. And what kind of people do you think are going to work for that agency?

0:35:09 Lydia: Why not both? Right. Right.

0:35:23 Matt: The people we see. That's what happens.

0:35:23 Thomas: And it's just, it's not, it just ignoring the real is realistic. You know, just how like human behavior works. I mean, if you have a speed trap where they're constantly pulling over people for going, you know, 26 and a 25 and people are getting all kinds of fines and whatever. You can be like, Hey, change the law. You got to change the lot of 20, 26 miles an hour. And then, then you, it's like, yeah. Or, you Know, it'S like the letter of the law might be one thing, but how is it being carried out? How's it being applied?

0:35:50 Matt: Right.

0:35:50 Thomas: You know, it's just a silly childish argument.

0:35:52 Matt: Can you imagine somebody running for mayor on we're going to catch every single person who's gone over 25? I mean, it's just not going to happen.

0:35:58 Thomas: I mean, it's the, it's kind of a similar thing. It like in, you know it's interesting to think about, you know, it's like going after this group of people and you can always, you could always demagogue and be like, they're breaking the law. They're breaking the wall. It's like, yeah, but it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't matter that much.

0:36:14 Thomas: I don't know how to it's. And it's, I think a reason it's so effective for their side is like, it is hard to be on that other side of being like, the, yeah. They might be breaking the line quotes, but I don't, what is it? Is it this big of a deal? Like, is it as big of deal as you're making it right now? Does it deserve, does it warrant this, this military response? No, really?

0:36:29 Matt: And it's also, do you want mass deportation? Because that's the option, right? We either selectively enforce in a way that targets people that everybody can agree should be targeted in some way, or we just go for everybody. And that's kind of the next point, the absence of less of a legislation paragraph a little further down there.

0:36:48 Lydia: In the absence of legislation, many illegal immigrants will be removed, often randomly. But the central fact is that ICE is simply the agency charged with carrying out an extremely unpleasant task that is necessarily deeply disruptive to communities.

0:37:03 Thomas: Cause they're They're having a great old time when they're doing it. I think they're having fucking fun, these assholes. I don't, yeah, they love it.

0:37:08 Lydia: Seems like it. Yeah? Mm

0:37:11 Matt: It's And also, getting written advice does not mean that we're not deporting people convicted of violent felonies necessarily. And there are some people who go that far, but if you go a little bit further down, there's a way to do this, which is pretty much how they were doing it through Biden, where you're going after the people who are already serving time and you're intercepting them from prisons or serving time for serious things and then deporting them where you don't see people on the street. You're not disrupting communities. I mean, you are potentially, but not the same way.

0:37:36 Matt: So, you know, abandoning law enforcement, right? And just, yeah, you can keep going. So yeah, we do not agree with, I think is a good one there.

0:37:38 Thomas: Where do you want me to go?

0:37:44 Lydia: Okay. We do not agree with everything ICE has done or does, and it's clear abuses have occurred. Reforms are needed. But as long as there are restrictions on immigration, there must be an enforcement mechanism for immigration laws if those laws are to mean anything.

0:37:59 Thomas: Let us not bicker about who killed who. It's always the law, to be clear. We don't like this, blah, blah. And this is, again, what, 2018 you said? So it's like, I mean, it's not, it wasn't as bad as now.

0:38:11 Matt: I would really be on these guys pretty hard if they wrote this this week. I'd be pretty mad.

0:38:14 Lydia: My god, yeah.

0:38:15 Matt: Yeah a little further down. Let's keep going just to hit the points, because I still see some of these points made.

0:38:21 Thomas: Well, and that's the same point they are, if the law means anything, then it has to mean, It's like a fucking child. You're a child. If the 25 miles an hour means anything, it means every single person who goes 26 miles an hour, we have to give a ticket. Otherwise, it's not a law.

0:38:34 Matt: Must be stopped. Yep, yep.

0:38:37 Thomas: No, that's not how it fucking works.

0:38:37 Lydia: Otherwise it means nothing.

0:38:39 Thomas: It's not big. It's just not how It works.

0:38:40 Matt: And no other law enforcement agency thinks that way. That's just not... You have to be selective.

0:38:45 Lydia: ICE a litmus test for Democratic candidates would be a political disaster for Democrats. The vast majority of Americans do not support unrestricted immigration. I'm going to take a moment.

0:38:54 Matt: Those are different things.

0:38:56 Lydia: You click that vast majority and it goes to Gallup polling. I looked at it. There's nothing regarding open borders, unrestricted immigration. I looked at all of the questions that they were asking. There is nothing in there that supports that claim in that in that opinion piece right here.

0:38:56 Thomas: Those are very different things. That's funny.

0:39:15 Matt: Those nothing about ICE either, about whether you should support this agency.

0:39:19 Lydia: No. It's primarily about immigration and deporting.

0:39:21 Thomas: Because the quote, yeah, to go back, it says, the vast majority of Americans do do not support unrestricted. Really? There's no question.

0:39:28 Lydia: The only thing I can think is that this top line one, which is should immigration be kept at its present level increased or decreased. Priest. And then if you go back to 2018, there, it's still not, I still don't see it there. I don't know. I'm not sure where exactly they're getting that particular point.

0:39:46 Thomas: There's probably got to be something,

0:39:47 Lydia: I looked through all of it. And I mean, unless there's reading between the lines that I'm missing that someone else will catch, you know, this will obviously be linked in the show notes. So if other folks want to poke around and hear you, more than welcome. And let me know if I missed it.

0:39:47 Thomas: Let's see. Yeah,

0:40:00 Matt: This is a straw man anyway. I mean, it's a strawman. They're saying it's... No, they're just not. And we're not talking about borders. Sorry, I was gonna say, just to be very clear, ICE and CBP are different things. They're not really talking about CBP in this, but they keep talking about border security.

0:40:02 Thomas: They're not the same thing.

0:40:08 Lydia: President Trump. OK. Right. Right. President Trump made political hay by accusing the Obama administration of allowing, quote, open borders at a time of record low apprehensions and the most effective border security regime in American history. Having the Democratic Party embrace open borders would actually fulfill the president's previously baseless accusation.

0:40:19 Thomas: This is great. Oh, this is great, this is fantastic. It doesn't matter, doesn't mater what we do, it doesn't matter what we do. They just declare that Biden had an open border, he did not have an open boarder, it's not how it worked.

0:40:37 Matt: Well, Biden did abolish ICE, you might remember. It was gone the whole time he was the president. So that does explain a lot actually.

0:40:44 Thomas: That's true, yeah. They will say this no matter what, it's what they have to do to get to accomplish their ends.

0:40:52 Lydia: Well, Us versus them. Yeah.

0:40:53 Thomas: Yeah. Like that. It's just, if we, guys, if мы just comply a little bit more with the fascists, then they'll, they'll stop yelling at us.

0:40:54 Lydia: That's always going to be the play.

0:40:54 Matt: And again,

0:41:02 Lydia: Yeah.

0:41:03 Thomas: Like, no, that's not how it works.

0:41:05 Matt: This is the classic thing of a man can believe anything if his salary depends on not noticing it. These are people that are... This last sentence here about ICE is not perfect, but abolishing it is not a solution to our problems. If you don't like what it's doing, change the law. No, part of changing the law is is getting rid of this agency, which was always going to end up this way. I'm sorry to say, like, I don't, you know, I'd hate to be that guy.

0:41:24 Thomas: It's also, again, two separate

0:41:25 Matt: But yeah, it

0:41:25 Thomas: Things. I don't even think that ICE would solve all the problems. I'm not saying that would solve ALL of immigration problems. Are you? I don'T think that would solve it, but it. We don't need ice and it's horrible and it is not helping.

0:41:36 Matt: Would solve a lot of other problems.

0:41:36 Thomas: Yeah. It would solve a lot of other problems.

0:41:38 Lydia: Going

0:41:38 Matt: Get rid of it. Yeah. So that's kind of the basics. And I think, you Know, we're going to keep talking about this subject, because I do want to have, obviously, Abolish ICE is a very simple, two words, straightforward platform, but there's a lot more behind it. And I think there's a lot of nuance that we can talk about. And maybe we'll get to it more in the questions. But I just wanted to kind of point out how far this rhetoric has come, because unfortunately, I think people did have to see it. And I don't blame people, I really don't. But they had to see in the streets, and they had the violence they're capable of.

0:41:38 Lydia: The other way. Yeah,

0:42:05 Thomas: Yeah I think we should amend the slogan as you did Matt to abolish and prosecute ice now. I'm going I'm that just that prosecution that abolishment just got 10 feet higher. The more you complain about me saying abolish ice now I'm just gonna okay now abolish them prosecute them. All every single fucking one of them. Yeah either way.

0:42:21 Matt: Well, or prosecute and abolish. Pick your order, either way, as long as both get done. All right, that's good for that.

0:42:27 Thomas: You keep complaining. I'll go further. I'm going further. They that the right gets to do that. Oh, the liberals are there. The progressives are so they're so weird that I get to be a Nazi. OK, well, you're such a Nazi that I got to be fucking Karl Marx now. Fuck you.

0:42:41 Thomas: Right, our next masterpiece, uh, the problem isn't ICE, it's ICE Watch. Really? It's ICE Watch marching through our streets in military garb killing people is that is that happening yeah because I don't I don't actually think even your picture, this is supposed to be their horror story of a picture, right? I see people with with flyers, guys flyers is the real problem we're

0:42:47 Matt: That is the problem. Yeah Yeah.

0:42:50 Lydia: Armed, yeah. Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:43:03 Matt: Let's say ice out. Yeah. The terrorist message of, I don't want ice around.

0:43:08 Thomas: Wasting paper too much printing yeah like what you can't find a scarier picture than that oh it says 'fuck ICE' you're right, that is worse than murder, I'm sorry, foul language language is worse than murder, okay, where are we going with this congrats

0:43:10 Lydia: Think of the trees. Think of The Trees. Yeah, yeah

0:43:19 Matt: That's violence. Yeah, well, I'd like to welcome Dan McLaughlin to Vapid Response, his first visit to Opening Arguments. I don't know how we even hadn't had a Dan McLaughlin yet. I sent you a picture on Slack, so everybody needs to understand the baseball crank. Let me know if this jogs your memory, because there was a time when America could not get enough of the baseball Crank.

0:43:30 Lydia: I know.

0:43:43 Matt: It was at Baseball Crank on Twitter, and he had the dumbest opinions. Everybody really enjoyed him. He's a Reaganite, a Catholic, and a Mets fan, and loves talking about all of those things. I know just enough about baseball to know that that's

0:43:42 Thomas: The baseball crank so that you what Am I, am I supposed to recognize this cartoon? What is this? I don't know what this is

0:44:00 Matt: His avatar for many years. That's the Baseball crank.

0:44:02 Lydia: From Twitter heyday I guess, I don't know. Yeah just

0:44:04 Thomas: What, what, so why do you know a baseball thing? What is that? Was it just because he was a baseball guy and then he just said bullshit, yeah

0:44:08 Lydia: He likes it. Yeah yeah.

0:44:07 Matt: That was his avatar on social media forever, and that is forever how I will picture his face. I assume that's what he looks like. I'm not going to ruin it by looking up his face. He looks like an angry baseball who's yelling at you.

0:44:18 Lydia: That's kind of actually what he looks like like, honestly. Like, I have seen his picture, and it's pretty close. It's pretty close.

0:44:21 Matt: I believe it.

0:44:27 Lydia: Yeah, he's a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross. That's where he met his wife.

0:44:31 Matt: Luster.

0:44:32 Lydia: And he was an attorney for a very, very long time practicing securities and commercial litigation in New York City. And then, you know, was also doing journalism kind of on the side. Went to National Review in 2016, and then became a senior writer there in 2020, full -time. So, yeah, he has just been hanging out out there yes

0:44:27 Thomas: All why did I I

0:44:49 Matt: He's a professional conservative commentator. That's pretty much his job. And if you want just a dumbass middle of the road or right -wing opinion, or just a slightly racist opinion, he sure

0:44:59 Thomas: Don t we We got enough of those.

0:45:02 Lydia: Well he wants to be heard, okay, yeah

0:45:05 Matt: Does. He has a lot to say. But, and he is, he's always been a never Trumper, but I don't give him any credit for that because he's one of those people that just wants like a decent, you know, whatever.

0:45:14 Thomas: Yeah. He'll be all for J .D. Vance or some shit. So, yeah.

0:45:17 Lydia: Uh So here we have this, this, uh, tagline: Renee Nicole Good's death was predictable from the direct action protest style of ICE Watch Democrats in Minnesota, Oregon, and other blue areas have leaped at the political opportunity presented by the ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good to demand what they were already advocating all along, the complete removal of federal immigration enforcement from their jurisdictions, thus ensuring an end to deportations of illegal aliens in those places. Their argument is that the confrontation that led to Good's death was an inevitable consequence of the Trump administration's broad dragnet and aggressive street -level tactics in rounding up illegal aliens for deportation. More sophisticated critics, such as Jeremiah Johnson in The Dispatch, argue that Good's death, quote, was the inevitable outcome of an immigration enforcement apparatus that has been poorly trained, sheltered from consequences, and empowered to behave recklessly.

0:46:10 Matt: Hard to get that.

0:46:12 Lydia: With a different set of facts, these critiques might have some validity. Large -scale deportations require a lot of law enforcement interactions with people who very much don't want to be apprehended, some of them violent, others just desperate.

0:46:24 Matt: Let's hold up for a second on that. A couple of things that he's presuming here. First of all, that he is obviously fine with the concept of what he calls large -scale deportations, which are inherently inhumane. Like if you're just going to round people up and ship them out of the country, there's no good way to do that. That's not going to look like what we look like right now. That's not going to involve the kinds of people that we're seeing right now.

0:46:44 Thomas: They're taking people and leaving their cars parked in the middle of the street. They're taken people and one time the car wasn't put in park was one that is such incident. Like, you can't just disappear people, let alone disappear people on a large scale and just think that's going to be fine. What about their kids? What about Their families? What about people who depend on them? Ridiculous.

0:46:51 Matt: So dangerous. Yeah.

0:47:05 Lydia: Yeah, there was a story kind of earlier on out of Santa Cruz where someone was taken on his way to work and just didn't show up for work. And his house was like, he had like nobody back in Mexico that he knew. And he was just taken back to Mexico. Eventually, he was able to get a phone. I don't know how. He just was like deported with nothing and called his boss. His boss was able to go over to his apartment and handle that. Because like he just left like rents due all these things and stuff yeah

0:47:32 Matt: See

0:47:35 Thomas: Pets? Who knows?

0:47:36 Lydia: Yeah

0:47:36 Matt: It all the time. I know it's terrible. The idea that some of them are violent also, I just want to point out as often as possible, being an ICE officer, unless you're throwing yourself in front of a car, it's not a very dangerous job.

0:47:38 Thomas: Ridiculous. No, I wouldn't think.

0:47:49 Matt: You're going after a population that is least likely of anybody in America to own a gun.

0:47:54 Thomas: How often do you think you're deporting someone that's like, hold up. Okay, I heard they're going to deport me, so I'm, you know, it's a standoff. Yeah, like, what are you talking about?

0:48:01 Lydia: It's a standoff yeah yeah yeah right

0:48:03 Matt: These are not people with large caches of weapons.

0:48:08 Thomas: And what does it have to do with what's happening here? It has nothing to do, it was a non sequitur. That isn't, that wasn't, like. Like, yeah,

0:48:14 Lydia: That wasn't what was happening that day

0:48:16 Matt: I love

0:48:17 Thomas: Rene Good wasn't trying to avoid being deported. What does that have to do with anything? Okay, I guess we've got to read on.

0:48:24 Lydia: Let's see, that greatly increases the odds of violence and is only a modest preview of what, what the left's preferred gun confiscation policies would look like.

0:48:32 Thomas: What, what, what is, what's the connection between those two thoughts?

0:48:36 Lydia: He's a gun guy. Yeah, I don't know.

0:48:32 Matt: This. I Love this parenthetical so much. He's got to try to say, you want to do this too. You want to send fascist stormtroopers into the streets to grab our guns. You know you do.

0:48:46 Thomas: Because what is gun control but a mass deportation of guns? And many of those guns have families and pets and jobs. And you pull those guns out of their cars and you don't even put those cars in park. Shut up.

0:48:51 Matt: Separating guns from their families. That's right.

0:49:00 Lydia: There are very fair policy debates over whether the benefits of such a broad deportation policy really outweigh the costs, and there are genuine and fair concerns that ICE, having staffed up very rapidly, has recruited too many sketchy people and

0:49:13 Thomas: Too many fucking Nazi dildos.

0:49:13 Matt: Sketchy people.

0:49:14 Lydia: Trained them and trained them in out inadequately concerns that and

0:49:15 Matt: Sketchy people.

0:49:18 Thomas: I, we haven't mentioned on the show yet that they reduced the training to 47 days. Have we, have you mentioned that on the shot? I forget if you, they reduced it to 47 Days because Trump is 47th president.

0:49:24 Matt: So stupid. Yeah. For

0:49:29 Lydia: Then catch brown people cool

0:49:29 Matt: Dear leader,

0:49:30 Thomas: That is in itself impeachable. I know we don't need more impeachible things, but that's in itself. Impeachable to have, to have them commit a murder as a result of no, well, I mean, that guy was a 10 year vet, I guess, or something, But still, like to be, yeah, to be to be reducing training to 47 days for this job and then putting them in military garb and face coverings like they're fighting a war. What do you think is going to happen? This has nothing to do with Icewatch.

0:49:32 Matt: I'm with you. He's a firearm destructor. Yeah,

0:49:56 Lydia: With all the rhetoric to behind it yeah yeah

0:49:59 Thomas: What does that have to do with ICE Watch? This is entirely the whole so far. It's like, well, OK, there would be good criticisms, but those more importantly, Icewatch is bad. I don't know. What are you doing here? What is what's happening?

0:50:11 Matt: Well, look at the rest of this sentence.

0:50:13 Lydia: Let's see, has recruited too many sketchy people and trained them inadequately, concerns that don't necessarily nullify the legitimacy of the mission of deporting a lot of people who are in the country illegally legally.

0:50:24 Matt: It literally does, because you're saying, we're showing over and over again, the only kinds of people that we're going to get to do these jobs are going to be these kinds of people, what you're calling sketchy people, right? This is not a job that normal people want. Anybody who sees this on TV and is like, I want to be a part of that is not somebody I want as my neighbor, to be honest.

0:50:42 Matt: And I also want to point out that the reason I want to highlight this is because the legitimacy of the mission, this is some more sort of straw man redirecting here, because DHS and ICE's original mission, and certainly even on their website right now, is not, quote unquote, deporting a lot of people. That's not the job. Job. They did actually at the beginning of ICE, I'd love to talk about this another time, but they had a plan called Operation Endgame, which I've always thought, they love their operation names. It was supposed to deport every single person they could deport by 2012, and that didn't work. There was no practical way to do that. It would have cost like several Afghanistans to do that, you know, just like several times over.

0:51:15 Thomas: And we got Afghanistan's to pay for. So,

0:51:17 Matt: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We got Afghanist at home. 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. That is their stated mission on their website is to, you know, yeah, and

0:51:31 Thomas: So it sounds like safety is the end goal. So you should do stuff that that's around that.

0:51:34 Matt: Security. Right. It's safe for people.

0:51:36 Lydia: And the training should

0:51:36 Thomas: So unless, so if an illegal immigrant, as you say, is causing an actual danger. Okay. I'm sure. All right. Is that happening?

0:51:36 Lydia: Reflect that. And yeah.

0:51:46 Thomas: Is that that

0:51:45 Lydia: And then apprehend them in a safe manner yourself as well. Right?

0:51:50 Thomas: Really

0:51:50 Matt: Yeah, but you know they were not created to do mass deportation necessarily when Congress came up. I mean it was inevitably where it's always going to go but let's keep going.

0:51:58 Lydia: But none of those criticisms have anything to do with the death of Renee Nicole Good. They don't fit the facts. And more importantly, they go out of their way to ignore the actual cause of her death, which which

0:52:02 Thomas: Nothing to do okay which is a guy murdering her yeah

0:52:11 Matt: Shooting her in the head. Yeah

0:52:13 Lydia: Is likely to produce more dangerous and and possibly deadly encounters of this kind, the leftist strategy of direct action protest.

0:52:21 Matt: Leftist strategy. Okay, by definition, direct action is almost always going to be against people with more power than you, so it is often going to be a leftist thing. But January 6th was direct action. The Brooks Brothers riot was direct action, right? I mean, I remember that from 2000, people going down to riot in Florida. And of course, even just the dozens and dozens of people who have been murdered by pro -lifers, by people that want to stop abortion clinics.

0:52:46 Matt: Bombings, arsons, assaults, that's all direct action? And a whole

0:52:50 Thomas: That sounds like a lot worse than what they were doing it's putting her in a category of that doesn't even seem quite right to me but because she wasn't blocking anybody like I, did she try, so did she park like that initially? Was that to try to block anyone in, or was she trying to turn around? I still don't know the full story on that.

0:52:54 Matt: Lot worse.

0:52:54 Lydia: Then whistles. Yeah.

0:53:01 Matt: No. I gather she was monitoring. But either way, yeah, she was not blocking the road. I mean, it's direct action in the sense that you're watching them.

0:53:13 Thomas: Someone drove around her before the murder. Like one of the ICE cars just was like, okay. She was letting them go around her.

0:53:19 Matt: The lane was open. Yeah.

0:53:21 Thomas: There was no reason for this. None.

0:53:22 Lydia: Also death wasn't the natural result of the deportation dragnet. She was a citizen, one who hadn't even lived in Minneapolis that long. Who cares? And there's no reason to believe that Ice was investigating her as a possible deportee. There's no sign that Ice wasn't interested in her at all.

0:53:31 Thomas: Doesn't matter. No. No one thought that. No one. What do you do? What is the point of this? No one fought that.

0:53:41 Lydia: Until she inserted herself in their business. Nor was she some bystander caught in a crossfire between Ice agents and someone else they wanted to apprehend. So there's nothing in ICE's strategy or tactics that put her inevitably in their crosshairs. She had to actively try to make herself a target for an ICE agent. That was her choice, not ICE's.

0:54:00 Matt: It's so fascist. That is so fascists.

0:54:02 Thomas: What? I love trying to get into people's stupid fucking fascist logic. Tragic. So you can take the fact that she isn't in their alleged mission as proof that she's the one who has a problem. What if an ICE agent did something outside their supposed mission? That's another possibility. Why isn't that a possibility?

0:54:19 Lydia: Mm -hmm. Right.

0:54:24 Thomas: There's nothing in ICE's strategy or tactics that put her inevitably in their crosshairs. Okay. Maybe the guy was doing not ICE's tragedy or tactics. Maybe he was the one who did something that wasn't necessary. Necessary.

0:54:24 Matt: Yeah and because he didn't like her.

0:54:39 Thomas: These fucking idiots think they're so smart.

0:54:33 Lydia: Or tactics, yeah. Right, nor Was her death the result of poor training by the current Department of Homeland Security. The agent who fired the the shots had reportedly been with ICE for 10 years and was assigned to

0:54:49 Thomas: Maybe they've always trained them badly. I don't know. I mean, it could be.

0:54:52 Lydia: An elite tactical unit. He was an experienced agent who had previous experience with vehicle stops, including one last year in which he was dragged by a vehicle. That doesn't place his decisions above criticism, but it does suggest that those decisions were not the result of inexperience, hasty recruitment, or inadequate training within the past 12 months.

0:55:09 Thomas: I'm mean, fine. Sure.

0:55:11 Lydia: But again, having a gun in one hand and your phone in the other, that is not anything that you would see in any type of law enforcement action. Like, that is NOT safe. That is NOT SAFE.

0:55:19 Thomas: Well, this also doesn't do anything. So the way he's tried to structure his argument is he started by saying, look, the get rid of ICE people are dumb and the ICE protest people are dum, but here is a good criticism. A good criticism is there's not enough training, but this wasn't a result of not enough training. So it's like, but you set up that before. Like I don't, like I think there's both problems.

0:55:47 Thomas: There's both not enough training and also fuck this whole fucking thing. Like there's two separate distinct points and it doesn't help if the ICE agent murderer just did a murder for fun, not because he was trained to do a murder. That doesn't change it for me. Like what does that change?

0:56:04 Lydia: Right?

0:56:04 Thomas: Change. The job's, to your point, Matt, the job's going to attract the kind of people who want to kill a woman and then say fucking bitch after they kill her.

0:56:12 Lydia: Also, an investigation would help answer some of these questions, too. So, let's just do that.

0:56:16 Matt: And as part of that investigation, I would like to know why he was released back to the street because I did see the pictures from the injuries from the dragging. Frankly, I think that he did not handle the case in which he was dragged very well either, from what I can tell.

0:56:26 Thomas: That's true. Sounds like it.

0:56:27 Matt: He did something that no cop would, I mean, I don't know that much about cops, but I really don't think any cop would really do what he did to get dragged in that other case. And then they just put him back on the street with a gun. And that's a question about ICE's overall training and supervision too.

0:56:42 Lydia: Right." Now, consider why she WAS there. If you want to scroll down. Oh, sorry.

0:56:45 Thomas: That'S so interesting. Yeah sorry. I

0:56:47 Lydia: Sorry. Yep. Go ahead.

0:56:47 Thomas: Was just thinking about that, Matt. And you mentioned how ICE is not that dangerous of a job. I wonder if that's like, look, we also hate police or I'm not a big fan of the police and they do a lot of things. But like the police often kill people because they've decided the level of acceptable danger for this job that's supposedly dangerous is zero. They've decided there's no allowable danger. And that it like you don't see cops for as much as they do stupid shit and kill people. You don't often see them putting themselves in danger first. Like that doesn't like I'm not saying it's any better, but I just think it's interesting because I wonder if it's because of what you said, Matt, where it's like because ICE is a safe job, they feel this like, oh, well, I can just create a dangerous situation and then then kill someone over it. And it's like this feeling they're not actually, they're not actually doing this because there's a real danger. I think they're creating danger because they're actually in danger and they want to justify stuff. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

0:57:42 Thomas: Like, yeah,

0:57:42 Matt: No, it's more dangerous to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the federal government. It is more dangerous to work for the Bureau of Prisons. I just wanted to mention this before. 359 law enforcement officers, state, local, and federal, are known to have been killed since 2020 in the line of duty. And that number for ICE in the entire history of ICE is zero. ICE agents killed on the job.

0:58:02 Thomas: Ice agents have ever died on the job in

0:58:03 Matt: One was shot in a workplace shooting.

0:58:05 Thomas: Ice on ice crime. Guys, we got to talk about ice on Ice Crime. We got to fucking say ice point inward.

0:58:07 Lydia: Like at his desk.

0:58:17 Thomas: Look Fucking A.

0:58:17 Matt: Says

0:58:17 Lydia: Meanwhile, some of my favorite first responders, firefighters, go into danger, put themselves in danger, but to save other people, not to then shoot people. So anyway.

0:58:18 Matt: A lot. They don't usually start Start the fires. Yeah.

0:58:28 Lydia: No, not usually. Not usually.

0:58:30 Matt: It's just Ray Bradbury. Yeah, not

0:58:31 Thomas: Yeah. They start a fire so they can shoot it with their water gun. Like, yeah.

0:58:36 Matt: Enough to do. All right, let's keep going.

0:58:38 Lydia: Now consider why she was there as Stephen Vago, Chris Nezzi, and Natalie O'Neill of the New York Post reported, Good quote was part of a group of activists who worked to document and resist the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota good

0:58:50 Thomas: Well, that's surely punishable by death. Document and resist. Is that you trying to sound scary, man? Like you're like, and they, even the New York, oh no, that'S the New YOrk Post and these people say, quote, document and resist, thatS the best you can do? Document and resist?

0:59:01 Lydia: New York Post yeah and this This tabloid magazine has

0:59:08 Thomas: Yeah, I'm not. That's not scary.

0:59:09 Lydia: Reported, Yeah, the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Good became involved in Ice Watch, a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ice raids in the sanctuary city. Coalitions similar to Ice Watch have cropped up all over the country, with activists using phone apps, whistles, and car horns to warn neighborhoods when ice shows up. Ice Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational, with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.

0:59:28 Thomas: Scary stuff. Oh.

0:59:36 Matt: All of those true and not at all lies. Sure.

0:59:39 Lydia: As the Post report notes, quote, ICE agents have faced an unprecedented—we've talked about this—spike in car attacks, surging by some 3200% over the last year. Shocking data released by the Department of Homeland Security revealed to the Post yeah, they revealed the number and no one ever wants to supply the data behind it like that's even by an act of Congress it's not coming to them yep

0:59:50 Thomas: That is shocking. Yeah. No, if you have a group of Nazis who can say, oh you hit me with your car, and no, there's no fucking way to challenge that narrative most of the time, wouldn't you know it? There's a surge in 3200%.

1:00:10 Lydia: You tapped me

1:00:10 Matt: And we already know, certainly a lot of people learned last week, it's one of their favorite tactics and has been for a while, and I've had them do that to multiple of my clients now to lie that say that they were trying to run them over or that their cars were trying to ram them. We can skip, there's an excerpt here in which they go in depth analyzing the Minnesota Ice Watch Instagram account, which I don't think it's like an official publication of the Minnesota Ice Watch, but he really doesn't like that there is some stuff. And I went looking, I don't know if you went looking. I took a look at the Instagram. I couldn't find this. I'm sure maybe they took it down. But he's alleging that there's some stuff here in which they're telling people to directly get in the way of arrests, which we've always been very clear you should not do. But I don't know. And again, it's just the Instagram account. This is not like some official published guide or speech that somebody gave.

1:00:53 Thomas: And it's also not what was happening with Rene. Good.

1:00:55 Matt: No, in the least, not at all.

1:00:57 Lydia: Uh read the whole thing

1:00:57 Thomas: So I thought that he was all about that a second ago. This is not what happened here. OK, this is not what happened there. What are you talking about? You can use it for you, but not for us. Fucking idiot.

1:01:04 Lydia: Do you want me to continue here matt all

1:01:10 Matt: Yeah, just skip the excerpt. Yeah that's fine.

1:01:12 Lydia: Read the whole thing. This is far beyond simply engaging in protest speech to bring attention to a political controversy or an injustice. It's a campaign that aims at two ends, neither of which is mutually exclusive

1:01:32 Matt: It's neither of those things. It's community protection, it's community defense. It it's, I mean, eh, okay, yeah.

1:01:38 Thomas: I don't, it's not, I don't really think it's provoking conflict and confrontation, even like speaking as somebody who supports this. Like, I don't really, again, again, if the officers just left, I think they'd let them go. You know, they're not trying to like start shit. Yeah. You fucking leave. The problem is ice.

1:01:54 Lydia: Yeah. And ICE Watch chapters and similar organizations are doing this sort of thing all across the country. Good's death is the inevitable, and to some extent intended, outcome of this style of direct action, which is designed to create headline-grabbing conflict and drama.

1:02:04 Matt: Intended. By getting moms killed, that's what we want to do.

1:02:10 Thomas: Man, you don't just get to say that.

1:02:14 Lydia: Direct action is a long-standing leftist protest approach, which predates the Trump era by decades. In its broadest definition, the term can simply mean staging a fairly passive conflict with an unjust law and demonstrating that injustice by provoking arrests—think of civil rights era arrests of lunch counter-sittings. Progressives and liberals tend to think that all forms of direct action are harmless or beneficial because of this heritage. But the justice of the civil rights movement does not retroactively justify every tactic that was used in its cause.

1:02:41 Thomas: This is stupid. Is there another thing we need? Sorry. This guy's too dumb to even countenance. Is There Another Thing To Get To In Here?

1:02:46 Matt: I was just trying to imagine the baseball crank writing in 1963, because I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about the civil rights movement tactics too.

1:02:50 Thomas: Of course. Absolutely. Yep.

1:02:52 Matt: No doubt. So yeah, this is how you get the assassinations. We can just skip ahead because this is how we get people killed.

1:03:00 Thomas: Is this the end here? Okay.

1:03:01 Matt: Oh yeah, there's some more idiocy in the last couple paragraphs.

1:03:00 Lydia: And close it out with this.

1:03:03 Matt: It's worth talking.

1:03:01 Thomas: Wait. Oh. He does look like a baseball.

1:03:04 Lydia: All right. Do you want me to get to this is how you get the assassinations?

1:03:08 Matt: Yeah, I might as well just finish it out.

1:03:09 Lydia: This is how You Get the Assassinations, Assassination Attempts and Assassination Plots Against Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Brett Kavanaugh and His Fellow Justices and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, among others. This is just like really just throwing everything in the mix.

1:03:15 Thomas: What? Oh, did they do that? Oh man, I missed it. What? What? You could just blame everything on whatever you want, I guess.

1:03:26 Lydia: Yeah, because of the whistles, Thomas, it's because the whistles. It's how you get senators chased into elevators and out of restaurants, protests at Supreme Court justices' homes, speakers shouted off campuses, and all manner of volatile confrontations.

1:03:37 Thomas: All this stuff is lit. How do I get this? Hold on. How to act now? How do I get this for just 1099? Give me this. I want all this.

1:03:46 Lydia: It's an approach specifically geared to create a climate of fear of physical violence in its targets and to set both the protesters and the targets on the very edge of their last nerve. Even when we can justify this kind of thing in American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the vigilance committees that thwarted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, what we tend to see at the end of that road is revolution or civil war.

1:04:00 Thomas: Awesome tea party.

1:04:06 Lydia: I like that he also names all these things and again, skips right over Jan 6, right? Right. Like, I feel like you would if this weren't just like a left versus right thing and you just have a problem with direct action protests, like you Would include that too, wouldn't you?

1:04:06 Matt: Such an interesting sentence. Yeah, it's

1:04:22 Thomas: Well, yeah, wouldn't that be for? Well, plus, wouldn't that help him, though? Wouldn't it? If you were were trying to say like this kind of thing is bad just look at january 6th or whatever but like sorry, do I, not, I am notoriously did not get a good education for history, the Boston Tea Party, what, how is that, no but

1:04:30 Lydia: Well, that's my point. Like like,

1:04:38 Matt: That was direct action. That there was a lot of property destruction. It cost a lot of money.

1:04:43 Thomas: But why but he just said specifically geared to create a climate of fear of physical violence in his targets and then he cites the tea party but was there some part of that where they threw the tea at people or something or they so

1:04:48 Lydia: Well, and just maybe it's the second part and to set both the protesters and the targets on the very edge of their last nerve, like they were just really annoyed that they threw the

1:05:01 Thomas: Was the tea on the edge of its last nerve I don't understand I maybe

1:05:04 Lydia: Tea companies were really annoyed. Yeah. I don't know.

1:05:08 Matt: But even, I mean, he's acknowledging that direct action is sometimes justified, right? He cites the Civil Rights Movement, Boston Tea Party, and protection of fugitive slaves. But then he says what we see at the end of that road is revolution or civil war inevitably. And that's, okay.

1:05:26 Lydia: This is why the question of the day right now for every Democratic politician and commentator in this country should not be how much they hate ICE and its agents or whether they want to see federal law nullified by disabling its enforcement. It should be whether they encourage Ice Watch and other similar tactics of creating potentially violent confrontations by protesters inserting themselves in the face of agents on duty to obstruct the enforcement of the law. Because if they do the blood is on their hands not ICE's, yeah

1:05:52 Thomas: If you can just say stuff, the blood is on your hands, asshole, this is nothing, this is terrible arguing, you don't have a point that people are so fucking dumb, there's no, you can't do this, you can do this, you can say stuff, you just say tough, there's no standards, these are terrible arguments, these aren't even good arguments for his side, like it's just stupid, it's all non sequiturs, what if the ICE agent was doing something totally wrong, that had nothing to do with, like, you don't get to just say that's people's fault because somewhere in the world they have a problem with ICE, so therefore anything ICE does, is no longer, they're not responsible, that's crazy, ICE doesn't have to be responsible for the murders they do just because people don't like them, it can't be right, a

1:05:59 Matt: This is the height of intellectual conservatism apart from the MAGA movement in the United States right now. Dan McLaughlin, everybody. Here we are. Switch again.

1:06:41 Thomas: Fucking barely sentient baseball okay all right well we're gonna take our last break here oh we're over time as usual, well let's uh thank our final third of patrons, of Hall of Fame patrons. The best of the best. Thanks to Bob Loblaw's Law Podcast. Philly Basement Bar will be getting a new house rep in the midterms.

1:06:43 Lydia: We are oh

1:06:44 Matt: Very angry baseball. Let's do it.

1:07:03 Thomas: Elect, I think. Yeah. Elect Thomas Smith, President, American Honkytonk Bar Association. Baltakatei, Philip Kizer. Given how important that list is, I feel like maybe Santa should check it more than twice.

1:07:02 Lydia: Congratulations, maybe or I'm sorry sorry hmm

1:07:16 Thomas: Coryn_Lann, Malaika Chandler, RhondaTheDork.com. Milo Meadsong is fighting petty tyrants. Hors d'oeuvres in the court before we report, Big Easy Blasphemy, Chris Waltrip, FRED R GROOTHUIS, Sam Donow, whoa, that's we had a major disruption wait did sam come back is that what it is yeah because he wasn't this is huge this is large this is a bit this is big, Sam Donow, Classic libtard, and Mitchell, Mitchell at the top, uh, well done Mitchell, but I don't remember if Sam, I remember the name but I don't remember, he's came back from after a long time but, but, or if he just, maybe it's just because he got ahead of Fred that I'm noticing

1:07:15 Lydia: Oh maybe maybe I'd have to I'd have to check yeah yes yeah yeah

1:07:54 Thomas: It. But either way, thank you so much. And if you are returning, thank You, Sam. And thanks to all our Hall of Famers. You're the best. You make the show happen, along with anyone who pledges a patreon.com/law. We'll take our last break and then we're going to get to some of the patron questions, I think. Right.

1:07:54 Lydia: Glad to have you back

1:08:09 Thomas: So another perk of being a patron. Right, Matt. Matt. We solicited some patron questions about how legal murder is. So would you would you like to answer any of them?

1:08:08 Lydia: Yep

1:08:09 Matt: You got it? Murder is still not legal, but I do.

1:08:22 Thomas: Done. All right. Good night, everybody.

1:08:24 Matt: Got to say, I have the same feeling with the Venezuela when we just put this up as a thread. I love it when patrons jump in because they do always think of things and come to us with such good questions. I'm just going to run a few of them here. We've covered some of of these things. Some of them we haven't. But sort of one of the buckets of questions here from Ryan. One argument I've heard is that while the tactics employed in the incident were flawed, the shooting was justified because the driver posed a genuine threat. And I wanted to mention this because there's actually a Supreme Court case from not that long ago, from last year, that we did not talk about. AndI wanted to pull it up just for a second. It's Barns v. Felix.

1:08:58 Matt: And I really kept meaning, we had so much terrible stuff to cover last year. I kept meaning to go back and say, hey, look at some of the decent things the Supreme Court did. This was a 9-0 decision, Barnes v. Felix, and it solidified and it returned us back to the standard from Tennessee v. Garner, which is a much better standard about how we analyze when a shooting is justified in the moment, right? When you have something that may or may not be perceived. Now, this isn't exactly the question with genuine threat, but this covers a few of the other questions and it gets into the issue here.

1:09:29 Matt: And it's relevant too, because the Fourth Circuit, where Minnesota is, had actually adopted something called the moment of threat rule. So literally, they were arguing that we should only be able to look at the two seconds before, in this case, a traffic officer shot somebody after finding out that he owed tolls on a rental car that he wasn't even aware had overdue tolls. This is just a terrible, terrible shooting. I mean, there's no good police shooting, but this is up there with the Rene Good shooting. And this was a 9-0 reversal and said that the moment of threat rule just can't be enough. We have to look at the totality of circumstances.

1:10:05 Thomas: It can't be. It can't

1:10:06 Matt: It just can be. And right.

1:10:06 Thomas: Be. You can't just put yourself in a situation.

1:10:08 Lydia: It's not how human beings operate yeah

1:10:10 Thomas: Yeah. You can't. Just I'm going to take your arm and make a fist and put it right here and then shoot you. And then it's like, if you look, you only can look at that. Look, it was going to hit me. That's stupid.

1:10:20 Matt: Exactly, so that's a good case. We'll link to it. But it kind of goes to the point that a lot of the overall rule here is, and you have to look at it in the perspective of an objective officer in that moment in the totalities of the the circumstances. And the totality here in the Rene Good shooting, we've already gone over the details. Everyone is familiar, unfortunately, by now with what happened. But I just can't say how there's any justified use of force whatsoever. Maybe arguably from one of those angles in the moment, if you're using that test and looking at nothing else, you could try to make a colorable argument, but I just haven't been able to see it. Emphasize with a lot of these questions, we all know this already, it is very hard to prosecute police officers. I'm not even talking about the qualified immunity civil damages, which are also important, but just getting a police officer through a grand jury to sustain a charge against them is very difficult because you do have to show that they're acting in a way that a reasonable police officer wouldn't in the moment, even if they did put themselves to some degree into the danger.

1:11:05 Lydia: Dude

1:11:17 Matt: So that creation of exigent circumstance is another question from Mike Michelinie. And there's a point to which you get to argue even if you put yourself into danger that it's still exigent, but there's a point at which you don't. And I do think that we're here. We're at that point where it should should be reviewed by a jury. I'm the dude hat, or the dude hat, I guess, in this case. Good old dude hat. I am in the Twin Cities, and there's a lot going around about ICE taking pictures of protesters and using facial recognition for some Orwellian database of dissidents. Is this a realistic threat? Should we be masked while protesting? I don't like the idea of it, because protesting unmasked shows we have nothing to hide, unlike ICE. And I do have to tell you, yeah, I mean, honestly, the truth is that ICE is investing in a lot of surveillance tech and a lot of really sophisticated AI and a lot of phone tools. Practice the best possible digital hygiene that you can with VPNs and Signal and whatever else you can do, because they're using some stuff that's pretty scary. But yes, DHS generally has facial recognition beyond pretty much what anybody else has, so you should be assumed that your face could end up on camera for what that's worth.

1:11:38 Lydia: Hat.

1:11:57 Thomas: Think we should be masked. Yeah. Is there any downside to, to, um, protesting with masks? Is there a reason you can't do that or any?

1:12:34 Matt: Depends on your jurisdiction. You really should know your local law. I want to be careful about that. I'm not even sure about Minnesota. I am assuming it's not, but I want be very careful not to tell people they automatically should. You should just check your local law because there have been efforts to try to keep people from going out masked that way.

1:12:47 Lydia: And organizers for a lot of these protests, I imagine, would be familiar with that stuff, too, and probably offer some good advice.

1:12:53 Thomas: That's a good point. Yeah!

1:12:57 Matt: And we've got Stoldny McStoldnitson is asking about how much does violating the handbook, that's the DOJ and DHS handbook are both pretty closely aligned on this point about how you use force and especially how you use force against people who are driving away. And the Garner standard, I believe, yeah, you don't, right? I mean, you just don't. Unless they're actively driving into children or something, right, you get their plate and follow up and that's what she's...

1:13:16 Lydia: You get their license plate. Yeah.

1:13:13 Thomas: You don't. Yeah and it's just so important to realize this is not a police action. They weren't, this isn't like a suspect that's, a murderer that's on a getaway thing. You can just give them, if you're going to get them in trouble, if Renee Good did anything wrong, you just get their license plate. You fucking deal with it. It's not, it doesn't need to be this confrontation. It doesn't needs to be.

1:13:40 Lydia: And you go serve a

1:13:41 Thomas: You're ice. Go do your fucking ice fascism.

1:13:41 Lydia: Warrant at her place place of residence yeah yep

1:13:43 Thomas: You don't need be killing citizens.

1:13:45 Matt: Yeah. And so the question from this patron is, does it matter that he's in violation of the use of force policy from DHS and DOJ, which is essentially you only shoot at a vehicle if it's putting somebody else in danger, like real danger, or there's some kind of felony in progress or something, but it's a pretty extreme measure. And I think that's a jury issue.

1:14:05 Matt: I mean, it doesn't automatically make him liable, but I think certainly if you're talking about what a reasonable police officer is supposed to do in the moment, they're supposed to follow the rules that they have. So I think

1:14:13 Thomas: Even if you wanted to defend this fucking fascism, look, what happened after he murdered the mother in the car for no reason is the car, because she was dead, slammed on the accelerator and ran into a car. Imagine if a kid had been there. Imagine if other people had been THERE. He would have created that death and that injury and that destruction. He did create, I mean, I don't, you know, in the vast scheme of things, I don't care about the person's parked car, but he created that. That didn't need to happen in any way, shape or form.

1:14:38 Lydia: It's a consequence of his action yeah hmm

1:14:45 Matt: There's the second and third shots. The first shot, and again, I'm looking from the government's perspective as much as I can here, but no, no, I

1:14:49 Thomas: It's not even close. It's just this isn't a close case. It'S just not a close case. You don't shooting as it's going away. There's nothing so fucking it's not close. I can't even deal with how stupid this is. Fucking fascists.

1:15:05 Matt: The apologetic, that his name is too long. He says, so what recourse does a citizen have if a US official either within or outside their official duties defames or disparages them? I know you have a right to a fair trial, but what if you haven't been charged yet? If I'm the secretary of HHS, can I go out tomorrow and say, Matt illegally eats puppies whole like a snake? There's no legal way to eat puppies whole, like a snake, but check out these actual real real videos I ask Iraq to find. Let's keep my diet out of this. But yeah, so we have talked about this a little bit before, but the Federal Tort Claims Act specifically excludes federal officials in the performance of their duties from any kind of defamation suit, anything to do with things that they say. And so if you've got the press secretary for DHS coming out and calling, for example, the surviving widow a domestic terrorist, calling the victim a domestic terrorist, which I think is slander. We didn't get to talk about that at the beginning. We're going to have to talk this sometime soon about the way they're using domestic terrorism in all of this. But unfortunately, there is no FTCA claim unless you can show they're completely outside their duties. So I'd love to be able to sue over some of these things that they say about our clients, but we really just can't do it.

1:16:14 Thomas: Yeah, I'd say the reason that normally this doesn't happen, I would assume that you can tell me is it's, not so much slander, which is obviously is also bad, but also Also, it prejudices the case.

1:16:32 Thomas: And I mean, the recourse isn't necessarily suing someone for slander. It's like that might fuck their case, right? I mean we're seeing examples of the stuff that the Trump administration is saying is at the very least making it complicated to accomplish their bullshit justice that they want to do, right. Right. I mean, so saying stuff like this could be bad for them trying to, you know, if they're trying to go after anyone or if they'RE trying to. And maybe even in the case of this officer, I don't know if it would affect that because they're kind of, you know, slandering the victim on his behalf a little bit. So it's not necessarily like it doesn't necessarily say anything about his motives or his actions in the moment, but it doesn'T help their purposes and their causes. And a lot of times it does hurt in different examples. Right.

1:17:18 Matt: No, that's a great point because actually just looking at the lawsuit right now that Minnesota has filed, which we'll have to talk about soon. Not today. But the lawsuit, like so many of these suits against the Trump administration, quotes Donald Trump and some other administration officials saying terrible things about Minnesota. He isn't calling Tim Walz the R -word. I mean, it's all in there. This is what happens when you spout your mouth off. So there's plenty of other consequences, fortunately. But you just can't actually sue government officials for libel. So that's pretty straightforward, unfortunately. Several people have asked how far this prosecution can go without FBI cooperation.

1:17:52 Thomas: I want to talk about that.

1:17:53 Matt: And so we've got at least three questions on that. And I just want to say that, obviously, this is an extremely well -documented crime. The people who took these videos are available, and I'm sure they'll be happy to participate. I'm certain that they're going to be able to participate in this. I'm not sure if they're one of those witnesses who cannot wait to get in front of a grand jury. But at the same time, you're also going to be restricted in how you get his records. You know, it's going to be harder to get a lot of the things you would usually get when the FBI is cooperating. And you're talking about a police prosecution, which is one of the most delicate and complex prosecutions that you can possibly do as a prosecutor. It's one of the hardest things to pull off. So you need all of the evidence and cooperation you can get, it's gonna be a lot harder. And I do want to urge people to give some patience to the state officials who are trying to do this, because this is a really hard thing to do. This is very much kind of an Olympic task of trying to prosecute a cop under any circumstances, but especially this, they have to bring the best possible case that they can. And

1:18:43 Matt: I know that they've opened up a tip line and they're collecting as much as they can, they certainly have evidence to the medical examiner's information, they've got everything that they need. It's a state investigation of the death.

1:18:52 Thomas: They do. Okay, so this day. Yeah okay I wasn't so what stuff don't they have that they don't do they not have the vehicle and the right they don'T have

1:19:07 Matt: And none of the officers who are around him are going to be able to be cooperating, so they won't be able to get the whole picture. And I think those officers should also be prosecuted because, you know, we watched the video of them denying medical care, the way that they behaved, the ways that they, you know, yeah,

1:19:15 Thomas: The can't they be forced to testify or forced to answer questions? Because I mean, like, right. I mean even if you, if like, even if you want to say they're immune, wouldn't at least they have to like cooperate with like a criminal investigation, right?

1:19:25 Matt: I, I think you'd have to open a grand jury investigation, which is going to be a little further down the road, but yeah, no, they, they will have to at some point, but, you just think about the difference between the FBI willingly giving up all of its personnel records and, and people and making them available. You know, it's, it'd be indicted.

1:19:47 Thomas: No, for sure. It's not good. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's not good. But I guess my thought during this whole thing has been, yeah, obviously not ideal. What? What?

1:19:53 Lydia: A a battle. I just said, yeah, it'll be a battle for sure.

1:19:57 Thomas: Not ideal. But Matt, like if this was a normal like if if this was just any old crime and you had forty seven fucking angles of this on video, that's not particularly hard. Right. I mean, it's like if it was a normal person committing this crime, it wouldn't be close. Isn't this more evidence than you have for like and most anything ever like direct video?

1:20:15 Matt: They'd be indicted as long as you know where that video came from and you've got the witness testimony to back it up yeah no this was this would be very very chargeable

1:20:21 Thomas: Video. Yeah. So I get that it's hard to prosecute police. I get that. But I just don't see how from the evidence we already have it, it's at all difficult to say that this wasn't excusable. I mean, the second two shots, especially, it just not it's not close. So you do you think that but I do I do understand that, you know, that they should be taking their time and making the best case they can I do, I do get that point. But it's got I would be astonished if they can't at at least give this a good try right okay he's

1:20:55 Matt: They have to they have too and you know this is so loaded on both sides and you knows there's going to be a lot of popular opinion and I'll cry about this either way so they just have to be careful and jacob fray the mayor actually said in an interview recently he's concerned about even the process of serving a warrant on this man who is now in hiding. But even just the number, yeah, yeah, he's left his house and nobody knows where he is. So, yeah. No, we're gonna...

1:21:14 Thomas: In hiding wow sounds like he's a fucking fugitive manhunt let's go let's get him there's a dangerous person loose in our country let's some if only somebody was going around getting dangerous people loose in our country yeah

1:21:27 Matt: If only there was someone securing the homeland, but

1:21:36 Thomas: Matt. Well so many Good questions there, thanks patrons. I know we had more to get to, uh, we're, we were a little over time to say the least, but good to get some of those and obviously we'll be keeping an an eye on this.

1:21:46 Lydia: You guys will be talking about this again. I'm sure.

1:21:48 Thomas: And I do really appreciate, I'm probably going to do this more often, you know, the asking the patrons specific questions. It is really cool. It's another reason to be on patreon .com slash law. Thanks so much for everybody watching, listening, supporting all of that. And thank you, Matt. Thank you, Lydia.

1:22:01 Lydia: Of course.

1:22:01 Matt: Thanks, everybody.

1:22:07 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments, produced by Thomas and Lydia Smith, with editing help from Peter Baird. The intro is by Thomas Smith. This outro is by Matt Cameron. Support the show at patreon.com/law. Contact us through Patreon or openarguments@gmail.com. Make sure to follow our blue sky at OpenArgs. But most of all, please share the show. Thanks for listening.

1:22:38 Thomas: Can you scooch a scoocher a little on camera here? No, no, It's just, there you go. You're going off the side a bit. Yeah. I

1:22:40 Matt: I just have