How Trump and Tech Elites Are Branding AI Resistance as Terrorism — and How We Can Fight Back

This week, Chenjerai interviews reporter Daniel Boguslaw about his recent WIRED article, US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows. They discuss how tech corporations, law enforcement at the federal level, and even local institutions are collaborating to frame people in the fast growing resistance to AI and data centers as terrorists and threats to domestic security. Bogsulaw lays out what’s happening in detail and also tells us how people are fighting against these labels. 

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Further reading & sources from this episode

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/

https://danboguslaw.substack.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Room productions. What up y'all? Unruly subjects is outside. Yeah, yo, yo, it's real good to be with y'all this week. We got a really exciting episode coming up for you. We talked a lot about the fight against data centers and AI, how popular the fight is, and how unpopular these technologies and these data centers are. But this week we're gonna actually talk about how various actors, you know, government at the federal level, some local uh institutions, and also, you know, these corporations and tech companies are kind of working together to frame people who are in these fights as terrorists, right? To actually frame this movement against data centers and AI as like a threat to domestic security. It's really disturbing stuff. But of course, we're gonna talk about what's going on in detail and also some ways that people are fighting it. But before we get to that, I just want to talk about what's gonna happen with the show Unruly Subjects over the summer. Because like I said, you know, we're in summer, you know what I'm saying? And where I'm at, it's a little warmer. So, you know, uh, you know, getting outside a little more. I'm getting back on the bike, and you know what I'm saying? And yeah, man, it's things are happening. And we, you know, we've been going for a while here at Unruly Subjects, yo. With y'all help, we want to thank you for supporting the show. Yo, we are actually at, I think, episode, we've had 24 episodes. So this is gonna be episode 25, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

I remember when Unruly Subjects was just a little baby podcast. And now, with all y'all's support, here we are on our 25th episode. But we want to take the summer to recharge and really regroup, right? And because we've seen that there's, you know, we have so many uh people who have reached out to us with stories, and we're trying to think about how we can do even more. And so we I man, look, I already have a list of people, some of whom I've already interviewed, even more stories to be told that we want to get out to you. But we want to think about, you know, just how we're running the show, how we can make it better. And of course, we also want to recharge a little bit. You know, I don't know about y'all, but I'm I'm kind of fried right about now. And I realize that it's a privilege to be able to even have the option to rest. But we want to take a minute and, you know, regroup and then and kind of make sure we can sustain ourselves, and then we want to come back in the fall real strong. So what over the next couple of weeks, what's gonna happen is you're still gonna get our show. We're still gonna come out with new episodes and we're gonna come out with, you know, more interviews and material, but things are gonna be a little bit more streamlined. The episodes will be shorter, uh, more to the point. Um, and on certain weeks, we might actually like, you know, give you some reruns because we got so much good material, you know, over our 24 episodes. And some of y'all haven't heard it. So we may do a little bit of that. Um yeah. So I just wanted to let y'all know that's how things are gonna look. We'll still be coming at you. And of course, on the Patreon, we're gonna, I'll still be weighing in there, maybe in a raw form. Um, I'd like to even engage some of y'all there to hear what people, you know, would like to see and when we move into, I guess what'll be our second season. So by the way, shout out to the Patreon supporters. In case you didn't know, we are a free and independent show. You know what I'm saying? We're kind of doing this from the muscle, but we have had people join us on our Patreon, and we are now doing it with your help. And so we appreciate that. And if you are not part of the Patreon, I encourage y'all to join. If you like what we're doing, if you want it to continue, if you have ideas, join us. You know, there's different tiers that you can join at, including a free tier if you just ain't got it right now. You know what I mean? But we really uh you can do a lot for the for the price, for the price of a few drinks in New York, you can help our show a lot. So yeah, definitely please join us there if you can. Uh and yeah, um, I just wanted to say that. So, at any rate, let's get into this week's show. So today we're gonna talk about something that I think is really important. It appears there is a new dangerous, scary threat on the horizon, at least according to the government, federal government, and various corporate elites. And this threat is something that they call anti-tech extremist. So I started seeing this term on the internet that this was something that is kind of out there starting to gain steam and momentum. And, you know, initially it reminded me of the kind of labels that people have tried to apply to various kinds of organizing happening in the black liberation struggle, like black separate black separatist extremists or black identity extremists, right? These are these categories that the government creates. And then now they have the legal, you know, mechanisms to surveil and do all kinds of policing, decarcerate, create different kinds of charges, et cetera, right? It just sort of opens up the machinery of the whole carceral apparatus and surveillance apparatus. And so I was like, wow, now they're gonna do this with the tech movements. Because as you know, you know, these movements against data centers are very popular. All kinds of folks are joining this. In fact, uh, as we'll hear, I think maybe as many as 70% of people, according to some polls, oppose these data centers. And so it's really fascinating. Anyway, the reporter who kind of broke news on this and really did some of the original reporting and got the receipts is a reporter named Daniel Boguslaw, and he is going to join us on unruly subjects this week. Daniel Boguslaw is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. His work focuses on corporate corruption, congressional and White House investigations, American influence overseas, organized labor, and the expanding machinery of state surveillance. Daniel did the reporting on this for Wired magazine. He also has a substack. But before that, he's worked at the Intercept, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and yeah, he joined us to discuss his reporting on this emerging category and how opposition to AI, data centers, ICE, and corporate power is being reframed as a domestic security threat. So we talk with him about this. I think you're going to be really interested to hear about it. And one other thing I'll note is that while it's sort of disturbing what's happening, Daniel is really clear that he doesn't want us to overstate the threat or to minimize our power to fight this. He really thinks it's important that we try to fight for the rights that we do have and don't kind of complete power by, you know, just assuming there's nothing we can do here. And I think he even is gonna give us some examples of some people who are gonna fight back on this. So I can't wait for y'all to hear this interview. Here it is. All right, all right, unruly subjects. Listen, listen, y'all. Today we are gonna talk about something which is uh, I'm not even gonna lie to y'all folks. It's horrifying. It's horrifying. I can't try to put a uh a good, but you know, the good, but the good news, people, is that um because of the incredible reporting of our guest today, Daniel Bogaslaw, we are a little bit ahead of the curve on this, and we can at least begin to think about what this means. So basically, I think our topic today is gonna bring together two things that are going on. One is that it seems like there are for a long time uh the Trump administration, and I mean look, this doesn't start with the Trump administration, but he certainly has made this more acute, has wanted to find sort of legal mechanisms to retaliate, punish, incarcerate, maybe even deport people that are, you know, against not just his specific political agenda, but also other priorities, the priorities of his close allies, such as those in tech. The other trend that is kind of growing here that this is related to is the massive popularity and rising power of the anti-tech and specifically like the anti-data center movement. But I'm also gonna say anti-tech because it turns out um AI is very unpopular among a lot of people. People are anxious about it uh and all these other kinds of things. So I was looking at Wired, and you know, big shout out to Wired, by the way. I say Wired is killing it right now. And I was reading this art, I came across an article that was entitled U.S. Law Enforcement Warns of Anti-Tech Extremism as AI hatred grows, and it's a really smart article talking about, you know, a new category. And so when I heard that, I said, Oh my god, I gotta figure out what's going on here. And so we are joined today by Daniel Bogaslaw. Daniel does incredible reporting for Wired, but also the Intercept. He also has a really dope Substack that you want to get up on right away if you want to be on the cutting edge of this stuff. Uh he's an investigative reporter who is, I gotta say, Daniel, I was looking at your reporting, man. You are a problem for those in power. You would he found like the Bohemian growth. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. It's just so much stuff. Welcome to the show, man.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to talking.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah. So, all right, let's just jump right in. Can you very briefly state what this article is about and what you found?

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Sure. So the top line is that inside of federal law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and then there's sort of um, there's sort of state level components, which are fusion centers, which we'll go into later, maybe, there's this new idea taking shape. This idea that people, average Americans, normal Americans who who are unhappy with the direction of AI, people who are unhappy with data centers being built in their communities, are a new domestic security threat. That the majority of Americans, we know from polling that around seven in ten Americans oppose uh the construction of local data centers for AI. So 70% of the population is extremely unhappy with Wow, I didn't know that that was the number. I know it's a lot of people. 70%. That's from Gallup. Um, that these people, the majority of Americans are now potentially a security threat, uh, which is being described as anti-tech extremism. So a broad category trying to understand and frame normal people upset with the course of technological development as a threat on par with uh jihadi uh extremism, right wing neo-Nazi extremism, these types of extremist or terroristic categories. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

I mean, that is uh, you know, yeah, it's it's that's terrifying. And when I saw when I saw it, I know there's probably a lot of us out there when you see these new labels, you know, it reminded me of the history, right, of these other categories that have been created, you know, black separatist, uh, you know, black uh identity extremism, you know, and then they create these categories. So it's kind of like, all right, well, uh 70% of America, welcome to the club. You know, welcome to the people who get called terrorist clubs.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Absolutely. And I think it's a fusion of the sort of 20th century civil rights era surveillance, right? We know that the FBI and the CIA domestically during the 1960s and 70s and 80s were surveilling all kinds of left-wing groups, you know, communists, socialists, black civil rights leaders, uh, Latino civil rights leaders. You know, they were viewing these groups, these activist groups, as domestic threats. And there were reforms after that all came to light, right? In the in the 1970s with the church committee, where they tried to institute blockages for the CIA's ability to operate domestically, for you know, the FBI's ability to target, you know, civil rights groups, you know, constitutionally protected organizing. But after 9-11, right, what was once sort of focused around this idea of the Red Scare, this idea of the Soviets, right? This idea that MLK was a secret Russian agent or something, that then transitioned to this idea of terrorism, right? And so a big cornerstone of my piece was talking about these things called fusion centers, which a lot of people don't know about. I mean, these have been around since 9-11, but they are um a sort of unique formation that are still not widely reported on.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

And yeah, we should talk, we should talk about this. And but you know, before we go into fusion centers, I just want to put this in the context of your reporting. Because, you know, look, among, you know, sort of a community of organizers, you get people who are like, you know, they speculate about this kind of stuff, you know, but sometimes the methods are like questionable among our people. They're just like they're just like, I know, they're watching it. They got, you know, and I'm like, oh, okay, what's that based on? And they're like, well, and it's like a Facebook post, a picture on a Facebook post that was actually related to, you know, no, people get and and and it's unfortunate because I I feel like oftentimes people are doing the Fed's work for them, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Like, that's what they want. They want people to be afraid, they want people to question their constitutional rights to organize and to speech. So I always tell people, like, yeah, they are watching, but you know, we do still have a constitution in this country, you know, and the best way to fight back against government overreach is to just continue trying to do everything you you would do, whether they're surveilling or not. You know, the more paranoia you give into, the more you're doing that's what they want. They want to shut down these words.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

No, I love what you're saying, man. I mean, it's like, you know, it's there is, you know, for those who study, you know, panoptic power and how it works, you know, you it is. You there's a way where the awareness can quickly collapse into you're inscribing power on yourself. You know, you're starting to self-cent, you know, censor and not move the way you would need to move based on your imagination. So it's important to be precise. And what and I want you to talk about how this reporting fits into your larger uh pattern and also how you find this stuff. Because you're putting in work and folks need to understand. Like I want y'all to go, if you would you're gonna break it down, and if y'all, you know, like this and think that's valuable, you know, you want to support this work too. So talk about how your how what you report on and how this fits in, how you find this.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Yeah. So, you know, we we talked a little bit about the history of these things, the development of these kind of ideas of threat categories, taking constitutionally protected, organizing its speech and turning them using language and and sort of the post-9-11 framing to view large swaths of the population as a threat. And, you know, the way I kind of found my way into this story is kind of looking for the tells, the road signs that have happened in prior examples. So before 9-11, the FBI, right before 9-11, in the in the early 2000s and late 90s, the FBI had listed environmental extremists as the number one domestic security threat. Not neo-Nazis, not jihadis, not you know, radical Islamic terrorists, but environmental activists as the biggest domestic security threat. And, you know, subsequently, again, like you mentioned, we saw that in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security was using a black identity extremism, sort of black nationalist threat category for, again, constitutionally protected speech. So there is a pattern when public dissent boils up to the surface to take protected speech and organizing and to criminalize it. And so what I saw was some of these kind of public-facing, quote-unquote extremism researching organizations, nonprofits, starting to talk about uh this idea of anti-technology extremism, people reviving this idea of Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, who was very anti-technology, and trying to take a couple of isolated incidents of violence, which is arguably much more tied to people with mental health issues than the overall ideology, and trying to spin this up into a new category that resembles a radical ideology like Al-Qaeda or like radical Salafist or like neo-Nazi refined ideology. And so I saw this bubbling up publicly. I saw these quote-unquote extremism researchers talking about this. And the reality is that people inside the government rely on these academics and rely on these um institutions to kind of catch their signals. So that was one piece, seeing this discussion on the outside of government and knowing that if you're seeing it on the outside in these places, the conversation's also happening on the inside, and you you better go look. Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Let me let me just say, you know, as somebody myself, you know, who's, you know, I'm in uh, you know, I have a PhD in mass communication. I I knew people who are studying ex you know radicalization, yeah, and sort of extremism, which is a whole rhetorical thing we could we could break down, what gets called what gets understood as extreme. But you could see that um you you do could you could see these ways of thinking forming, and it it's smart what you're saying, which is like if you look, for example, at the black identity extremes, they would take like these isolated examples, like black people who may have shot at a cop or something like that. A lot of those people are military, by the way. And then they're like former military, but like, you know, they isolated people, not affiliated with a movement at all. And then they would say, here's a real threat. Look, something happened. Right. And so when they start to gather those examples, so I hear you saying that that's happened before. When you see that, when you see those clouds gather and you're like, I'm just pointing somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Exactly. You know how the machine works, right? You know it's been done time and time again to to different groups that are challenging power. So so that was one element. But the other element that I think people don't realize is that for all the talk of protecting US citizens from terrorism or crime or what have you, it's not individuals, it's not local communities that have a front row seat when it comes to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security who who say that their mission is to protect normal working Americans. The truth is that corporations have a direct line into all of these federal agencies. There are multiple information sharing networks that are established between the FBI, between the Department of Homeland Security, between local police and these fusion centers. Um the FBI, you know, literally has their own information sharing portal, the Department of Homeland Security. There are multiple councils, meetings, conferences that give corporations a front row seat to say, hey, here's what we think is a threat to our company, to national security by way of our company's security, and by security, our company's profitability. And so it was not only the extremism white papers that I was seeing, but also the knowledge that corporations like AI companies are afraid of the American public that overwhelmingly does not like the way that their technology is developing. And that means that they're going to have the ability to communicate directly with these groups. And, you know, it you don't have to just take my word for it from my confidential sources. You can go look at um Kevin, what's the guy's name? Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy who's right, yeah. Who's backing this data data center in Utah? He just said publicly this week that anti-data center activism is a CCP Chinese front, and that he communicated this to federal law enforcement. So he came out and publicly said, I'm telling you know, the FBI that people opposing my data center are Chinese agents.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

So it's not just it's not just that they're aware of it, but you're like they're actively doing this. I think yeah, I I just want to lift up two things. That's really important. You know, by the way, last week we talked to uh Astrid Saylor and Saul Levin about something, you know, the data center movement. And as part of that, we sort of listened in on a pod, you know, a one of these podcasts, I think it's called All In, where it was like these tech leaders worrying specifically about this. So you're absolutely right, you know, and there's a lot of receipts on that about how scared they are. I have to say, one solution that they posed to this problem of how hated these data centers are, they were like in AI, they were like, we might have to start giving people health care. Right. We might have to raise the minimum wage. It was like one of the one of the guys in the room was horrified, but he was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, how do we how do we get to that? I'm like, where do we get to that part? But so I mean, I I would say, you know, but that's so that's like that represents like, you know, e even that is one part of their thinking, right? It's like it shows you the leverage, but there's another part which is like we incentivate actually, right, the the power of the state uh in this way.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

I think Sam Altman too, I think this week announced like a 250 million dollar put down your pitchforks fund, basically, which was like wow, you know, we're just like gonna spread this money out and everyone's gonna be chill and just everyone shall calm down. And really?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Um I I yeah, you know, and and listen, I gotta say, I gotta say that's not the solution, but do you know that do you have the link to that?

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Because I can give a couple of let me look, I I'm pretty sure uh yeah, yeah. This was or sorry, this was um man, maybe I'm crazy, but I feel like I saw this on my feed. No, foundation, yeah, yeah, yeah. Manage the

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Foundation.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Yeah, no. So this was this week. Um OpenAI's new $250 million foundation initiative aims to manage AI economic changes and support workers in economies worldwide. And this is this is nothing new, right? I mean, this is something that corporations have done for centuries, right? They build a school, you know, the oil barons would build, you know, a new schoolhouse in town while they were extracting all this wealth.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

So But it's important for people to see this because I think when you see that, you know, they're gonna set up the whole philanthropic front and it's gonna and it's gonna appear very well-meaning, they're gonna hire people who are genuinely well-meaning, but it's important to understand that this is meant to sort of curb and limit a movement, right? Right. Um, but I think the other reason why what you're bringing up about the inroads and the special line of communication that uh these tech elite folks and corporate folks have to the government is that sometimes when we just call it Trump, it's flattening, right? Like people are just like, it's Trump, or it's this. Your reporting really shows a very kind of, I mean, I don't know if I would say very diverse, but a range of different kinds of actors who are contributing to this.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Yeah, and maybe that's a good segue to talk about the data centers because sorry, the fusion centers, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Yeah, let's talk about the fusion centers, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Because those predate Trump. I mean, those are an issue that that have existed, you know, from Bush, the Bush era through the Obama era, you know, through Trump uh won, through Biden. So, you know, after 9-11, there was kind of a a long, protracted finger-pointing session of, you know, who was to blame for this? Uh, you know, how could we have let this happen? And, you know, the truth, at least my perspective about that, is that there wasn't so much an intelligence gathering failure around 9-11 as opposed to an intelligence sharing issue. And and the the federal government ultimately landed on that conclusion too. The FBI, multiple FBI field offices had actionable intelligence about the hijackers. They tried to raise the alarm bell with FBI headquarters in Washington. They were ignored. The CIA similarly had um intelligence about Al-Qaeda operatives, but the thing people forget is at that time, you know, the terrorism threat was just people, most people didn't even know what terrorism was. You know, it was this marginal thing, including the people running the FBI and CIA. So after 9-11 happened, there was a lot of finger pointing. They were talking about blowing up the FBI and building it from the ground up. You know, they ultimately created an entirely new and extraordinarily corrupt domestic law enforcement agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Um, but one of the other advents was this idea that because there was a breakdown in the way that information was shared regionally and locally and federally, that we would create these fusion centers that mixed local intelligence with federal intelligence. And, you know, I think anyone who is thinking about uh civil liberties or constitutional rights, you know, the idea that states should have their own ability to charter their own their own path and to not be uh controlled and manipulated by the federal government, you know, that all goes out the window with these centers which basically fuse FBI, DHS, sometimes even CIA intelligence with local police. And then that gets shot down into state from state police to local police, you know, local police, state chiefs. And it also goes the reverse way, where you can have a local, you know, the example I always give is some guy, you know, imagine your 60-year-old uncle is a you know police local police chief, and he's listening to some Zoomer kids talk, you know, making jokes and talking about smoking on uh you know WMD fire weed or whatever, and all of a sudden he hears WMD and he writes a threat report about you know peep WMD, you know, marijuana, and then that goes to the fusion center, and then that goes all the way up to the chain of command, and now there's you know narcotic grade WMD marijuana circulating in local Minneapolis. And I've seen reports like this. I mean, this is it sounds like a joke, but for example, like I saw a real report that was about kids putting water bottles in their pants and kind of doing an optical illusion where it looked like they were peeing on their school sign. That got written up and circulated to the Department of Homeland Security, kids messing around, pretending to pee like so the point is that it collapses the distance between local issues and federal issues, and it just creates a sense of pervasive paranoia where everything and everyone starts looking like a threat.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

I mean, that's just yeah, and by the way, I don't know if this is linked at all, but I do know that, you know, when we're talking about immigration, for example, I mean, I don't know if this is these exact fusion centers, how they were involved, or if this is like distinct entities, but I do know that, you know, it started before Obama, but the sort of communication of people's immigration status, a wide net of people who, you know, could be now sweeped into like, you know, a kind of immigration to custom process. I know that that started to expand. And I know Obama really expanded that to like, I, you know, I heard he expanded it from where it was like maybe in like less than a hundred cities, he expanded it to like 3,000 place cities. You know what I'm saying? So, I mean, I don't know. This sounds like a similar kind of thing where suddenly all these entities are working together. And, you know, this is by the way, driven by a lot of people. I mean, well, it's driven by different kinds of folks, but in but in the current case, driven by people who their whole thing has been states' rights and shielding from the federal government.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

Right. Right. And and and yet they've allowed this insane infrastructure to blossom. I mean, speaking of the immigration changes to the immigration system, I mean, you know, people hold different views in both parties about, you know, how immigration in this country works, you know, what's the fix. If we don't have some kind of immigration enforcement, then companies can, you know, use undocumented people to drive the wages down for both those undocumented people and American workers. But one thing that seems to be somewhat universal is that people do not like shock troopers coming into their city and brutalizing, you know, American citizens in the pursuit of wildly violent immigration raids and arrests. And I mean, one really fascinating piece of this that documents I received document is the fact that now the FBI is getting involved in tracking people who oppose ICE operations, right? Like there are now, under the some of the directives that President Trump has signed, the FBI is now investigating people who oppose like violent immigration enforcement, U.S. citizens opposing the way that the immigration system is going out. I saw this morning um the DOJ just released, I think, subpoenas for uh social media companies for people posting ICE and border patrol agents information online. And, you know, that's that's protected speech. You you can identify, you know, people on the city.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Yeah, you have to do that. I mean, and that's and it's like, I mean, I just got back yesterday. I went out to Delaney Hall over uh where where there's you know a whole sort of uh uprising, you know, the detainees are on hunger strike and protesters and folks have have rallied around them and there's been like real struggles and something like that. I mean, you could just see how they could try to take, they could just say, okay, anybody out there, you know, people posting on media, social media particular, you know, they're setting up this framework. So you start to, it does start to, again, we don't want to um overstate things because again, I I appreciate the way that you're sort of following the development of this. But you do see where they're really setting up the mechanisms to like, okay, it's like if you're if you're critical of ice, if you're sharing information that people might need to know to protect their rights around ice, if you're expressing opposition or participant in a fight against a data center, if you're critical of AI, like wow, it starts to be a lot of people who they now have a mechanism to kind of, you know, uh react retaliate against you.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Yeah, and I think the clearest cut place to understand that is um is in this presidential directive called NSPM7, which was signed last year, I think in September. And this was basically like a presidential decree criminalizing huge swaths of the American public and opening them up for investigation. Some of the sort of threat categories that the president included there were things like anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-Americanism.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

Which by the way, how do you even define those things? Exactly. So then, I mean, if you could, that still is crazy vague. But then one thing I'm trying to understand is a lot of these things sort of say we're opening up the ability to assess or to investigate. Is that is that kind of how this works? But then that that, you know what I mean? That's right.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Yeah, you know, I take issue with some of the people who say like fascism is here, you know, they're putting us in the gulags. I mean, I don't think that's I don't think that's helpful. I don't think that's a helpful framing for understanding what's happening. I think we have a president who's very authoritarian, but I also think that we we do still have rights. We do still have tools to use, you know, we do still have a constitution, we do still have courts that understand the constitution, that the Supreme Court doesn't always. So really the the biggest tool that the government has is not prosecution, it's fear. And the things that NSPM7 opens up is the toolbox of fear. And I think that's what you see with these subpoenas that are happening today, right? Trying to go after, you know, uncovering the people behind Reddit accounts and social media accounts talking about ICE agents. I mean, those cases, if they were ever to go to court, like they were those would not end in prosecution, right? Those were not end in conviction.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Right. I was just a case I just saw. It was like a teacher who was, this was like in a totally different area, but it was a teacher who, you know, was sort of targeted by the by the Trump administration for something, maybe it was related to diversity, whatever, but she just won like a $200 million law school against it. And I, you know, again, I'm on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors. There's cases all the time where you see the headlines, you see what happens, it's like, oh, and then once once it's out of the news, right, in some cases people win these or they get they get dismissed and turned up. So let me just slow down a I want to rewind a little bit because you brought up this for the fascism thing. And I think this is this is productive. Look, I use that term all the time to describe what's happening. But when I use it right, I'm part of I think the when I use it in people like in my world who use it, are trying to sort of say that trying to get past a kind of American exceptionalism where the sort of his really oppressive historical trends we've seen in the past in other places. It's like you this is there's a way people got to some of those historical examples. Yeah. By the way, for people who are trying to paint those as only foreign, you know, there is a there are also, I think, a really important analysis that says there are people who have already been experiencing like fascist-like conditions inside the US in prisons and things like that. And now, that said, I really do take what you're saying, which is that if people are using that term in ways that sort of just collapses or reduces and says, like, this is the exact same moment as other kinds of moment, and we don't recognize the freedoms we have or it if people are deploying these terms in ways that actually demoralize people and reduce people's need to fight with the mechanisms that we have, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:23

That's my point, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Yeah, and then and I you're right. I mean, I fully agree. In a way, isn't that like one of the challenges of this moment is that you want to articulate to people the horror of what of what's happening, you know, like I get a Delaney Hall. I mean, they they they they took down the ombudsman that would assess what's going on abuse. They won't let the governor in. There's people in there, you know. I think there's one person I think who died because he has a tooth abscess that became septic and he died. And so that feels extreme. And yet, you also want to say to people, don't get so, you know, discouraged that you don't fight in court, that you don't take the little steps. Because that's kind of what, like you as you said, power works that way. They want you to, what'll happen because because they actually don't have the power to actually suppress everyone. And that's why they rely on us to do that.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

Yeah, and that's why, you know, I I just gotta say, like, you know, I see these talk about professors. I mean, I see these professors, you know, saying, Oh, they're gonna come for me first, and they're leaving the country, you know, and and they're saying, Oh, I'm I'm going into exile. And it's like, my feeling is like, you know, screw you. You know, you have the monetary means and ability to leave the country and you're gonna, you know, go screw off to Canada or whatever. It's like, how about you stay and fight? How about you put your body where your mouth is, you know, and show up for people and show up to the protests. And like, how can you say this is, you know, it's just to me, that is like, no, you're an American, you stick up for your fellow Americans, you stay and you fight and you organize. And I think we should talk about some of the victories, you know, we've seen.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

For example, like we should, but there's just one thing I have to say because, you know, I've been in conversation with uh professors who have left, and I think that uh again, I take your point. It's like I've chosen to stay here and fight. I mean, I do think that the threat to people is real, and I understand some people's choice to like, yeah, take whatever steps they do with this thing. And uh, and so I think that there's people who are who are trying to navigate it, but I think that you know, again, two things can be true at once, right? I take your point.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah. But but um, but I don't want to contribute too much to the negative, you know, all to discourse. I feel like I always try to give in all my pieces, I try to also like point out how you can fight. And um Yeah, that's what we want.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

We're big on that unruly subject. We gotta how can we fight?

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Well, okay, one of the most amazing things that I think is so cool that like I'm always shouting from the from the rooftops is the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, these fusion centers, their ability to work within states, you know, is predicated on agreements with each individual state and each individual community. So there's a couple of really incredible examples of municipalities voting to kick the FBI out of their police force. So one of the other things that you know we haven't talked that much about is something called the JTTFs. So in addition to fusion centers, there are these things called joint terrorism task forces. And these are partnerships between Department of Highland Security, FBI, and then also state and local police, another post-9-11 dark arts invention for the government to inject the feds into your local community. But their ability to operate in local communities is predicated on memorandums of understanding that are usually signed either with the governor or the state police or local cities. So multiple cities have actually terminated those memorandums of understanding and kicked the FBI out of their towns. Oh, hell yeah. Why don't we hear why don't we hear those stories, man? Portland, Oregon, I think San Francisco, I think uh either Berkeley or Oakland. Well, because and the reason to answer your question is that, you know, these agencies are really good at using fear to say if you leave this, you know, your city's gonna be the next one that's you know bombed or you know, gassed or uh whatever. But, you know, sorry, these cities have left and terminated their MOUs, and it seems like every, you know, there hasn't been a bombing or gassing or mass casualty incident in any of these places.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

I remember in Philly, there was a big anti-ICE. This was like more like the first Trump term, there was a big anti-ICE protest, and the victory moment was that the city of Philadelphia canceled its sort of contract. It was like SARS with some kind of ICE enforcement entity, and it was like reported. One wonders how real that is. I mean, like I want to believe it's real. We fought for it. It there was something happened because they were they were resisting something, you know. We protested for you know a couple weeks. It was like, but what do you think is the reality of what that does and doesn't do?

SPEAKER_01 37:44

I mean, I think that the Panopticon, the surveillance state, is very all present. It is very powerful. It is kind of a machine without a mind, you know, it's always just expanding, it's always looking for new threats. In one sense, I think it's fair to say, you know, how much does one contract do? Are they gonna go somewhere else? But at the same time, I also think that, you know, I like the old expression that, you know, your rights are like a muscle. You know, if you don't advocate and flex your rights, you just lose, you atrophy. So I also think that like even a symbolic win, you know, where they're gonna try to shuffle the pieces around and go to a different contractor, it's still it raises awareness and it empowers people to say, like, okay, we can still fight at the hyperlocal level, we can fight at the you know state level, and we can try to fight for a representative to advocate at the national level. And I think you have to start somewhere, you know, and you have to start.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

And I'm not arguing at all that these things are only symbolic. I was just wondering what what you what you what you knew. Because my position is to your point, if you weaken, you know, a contract or limit it or cause them to kick it out, and then that helps somebody, for example, in court, and that helps people's court cases, people do less time where there's, you know, it raises the costs of a particular legal strategy. All of that matters. I'm I'm all so I really hear your point on this, and I I think those battles matter more. So um, yeah, I mean, what else do you think is important? I mean, I I'm tempted to talk a little bit about the Zizian thing, but I I I kind of, I mean, I I know that part of your thing is like, I don't want to hike, I mean, it's just fascinating to know what it is, but they're they want us to center that, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Yeah, it's a good example of a really crazy thing that checks a lot of the boxes in the paranoid mind of the federal government. I mean, what you're referring to is there was this sort of like little cult of very well-educated, right? College educated, PhD educated, sort of technologists, ethicists, philosophers who kind of convince themselves that like AI is going to become godlike in the near future, and that they had to kind of like appease future AI god by you know killing and rampaging.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

And I mean, they were just crazy people. They had to appease a future, you know.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

Yeah, wow. Like, yeah, like so there was like just some like thought experiment called Roku's basilisk, which was like this idea that if AI becomes conscious, then it will know that people tried to stop it from being coming conscious, and it'll try to kill those people. I mean, look, this is just a crazy, I mean, it's just a crazy, it's like not, it doesn't matter. It's not real. The point is that is that there was a group of crazy people who were like, we have to stop AI by any means necessary. And they took action, they killed some people, but look, there's all kinds of weird cults in America. I mean, there's all kinds of weird little subgroups.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

What does this have to do with the people who are trying to fight a data center in their town? Exactly. You know, exactly 40, 50 cities in the US.

SPEAKER_01 40:42

Right. But it checked all the boxes, right? Whereas like, okay, it's like a cell, right? It's like a terrorist cell. You know, it's seven people across the country, right? So it's a cell, and and okay, they they've got guns and they they killed a state trooper. Okay, and they have an ideology. And so this like random, you know, nut job thing, you know, you I don't know, you just go go drive around Northern California, go drive around the desert Nevada. You're gonna find crazy people with guns that have weird ideas. Right, you know, like but right, exactly like you said, then are extrapolating that to this entire normal population that's just saying, hey, we don't want our utility prices going up. We don't want our water, you know, getting sucked out of the ground and totally dried out.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Let me ask you this. You know, one of the strengths of the data center movement is how multipartisan it is, right? It's all kinds of folks and you know, who might not be able to come together on other issues, but it just really is shared material interests, and I think, you know, could be the basis, right, of other kinds of resistance to what's happening to this, you know, really powerful historical block. Do you think that this thing, like the awareness, could this a sort of awareness of surveillance against this movement could be another thing that could like, you know, could grow because of that? Like could we make in other words, like people who maybe again think very differently, you know, like I I tend to lean a little bit more to the left on a lot of my analysis. But I mean, and by the way, that's just because I'm always just trying to figure out what's true. I I'm not bound to any particular category just because it's like I want to label, I just want to like know what's what makes sense. But I wonder, could I you think we could also appeal to these same folks and say, hey, now we're in this category? Could do you think it could intensify that? Totally, totally.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

And and I think it's so powerful because, you know, my personal belief, you know, I'm have a lot of left-wing beliefs, but I also have some, you know, kind of libertarian tendencies. And one of those tendencies is to say, you know, I'm very skeptical of this idea of extremism. You know, I think there are crazy people, both on the left and the right, but I think they're extremely marginal. And I think that the idea of extremism turns people against each other, as we've seen with Trump, when someone on the right is in power, all of a sudden it's, you know, the left, the extreme left, Antifa, anti-fascist, trying to draw these huge categories. But also, I'm sorry, when the left is in power, it becomes right-wing extremism. You know, anyone who supports Trump is a potential extremist. And that's not good for our democracy. You know, it's not healthy when both sides are increasingly convinced and paranoid that everyone on the other side is out to get them, you know, and that's just not true. I mean, I try to talk to people on the right wing. I try to talk to Trump supporters as much as I can to show them who I am, you know, to hear, okay, why do you feel like you have to support this guy? And I feel really upset when I say that, you know, sometimes I say that to people and they're like, how could you talk to someone on the right? How could you talk to a Trump supporter? And my thing is like, look, it's a big part of our country, and they're not just going to go away. So there has to be an understanding, not that they're correct, but to say, okay, how do we and exactly like what you're saying, all of a sudden we have this issue that both people can meet up at a city council meeting and talk about and say, you both I agree.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

I mean, listen, it's tricky because in the space Where people have sort of racist and you know sexist and anti-queer, all these other views, I understand it for a lot of us, it feels like you're asking people to endure like just straight up disrespect in the name of solidarity. But I would say, you know, I'm sorry to say, but there are a lot of historical examples of you look at powerful movements of people overcoming those, you know, black folks who worked with racist white folks in the labor movement, etc. So I'm not here to tell I don't I don't I don't feel anybody has to endure disrespect, but I also know this we're unless we have those kind of formations, we are not gonna win. That's what I know for sure. Because it's you just need power that gets beyond our little our little bubbles, and we you know, and and and like you said, it's also about wanting to relate. I I don't want to give up on people, you know, I don't want you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 44:49

And it's it's forced from above the racism, the sexism, the the anti-queer. It's it's trying to tell people don't get together and meet your neighbor. Right. They're black, they're queer, you're not gonna get along. Don't even don't even talk to them, right? And it's the same with the left. Those guys are racist. There's no there's no getting through to them. And like, look, of course, look, I'm coming from a privileged position. It's easier for me to endure, have those conversations than other people, but at the same time, I believe in my core that the people at the top, it's the capital owners that are pushing this ideology down onto normal people, and that people really do have a lot more in common. And that it's this fear, it's this fear of each other, and it's pushed and it's hammered. And look, it does spread. People do get these racist and sexist ideas in their head. But I think from my experience, you know, like every summer I worked on a wildland firefighting crew, it was like the craziest, most politically, racially diverse.

SPEAKER_00 45:42

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 45:43

I mean, and that experience you showed me was like if you force people to talk to each other for like a month, even when they come in with really fucked up ideas, they're just like, okay, I know you, you're a person now, you know. And so the question is, how do you break down the ideas that are being fed into people and just force them to recognize the humanity in each other? And that's why I think this data center stuff is great because it forces people into a room together to say, look, let's drop all that crap, let's focus on this one issue, and through that, you show people that like look, there's no real differences between us. That's all lies that have been injected into you by you know your respective. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

And by the way, this is why I think your reporting is crucial because part of what you can also show people is you can see the sort of that this comes from above. You make a powerful argument that you're not actually protecting yourself necessarily or your community by feeding into these divisions in the way that they want us to understand them or these different, you know. And like you're actually what you're doing though is putting real receipts on that. You're showing through the emails, through the documents, which you've slowly, painstakingly, expensively gathered, we can actually see these people doing this, forming these things and dividing us, and we can see why they're doing it. So we really appreciate your reporting. I know we just scratched the surface, but tell us a little bit about where people can follow your work, um, any kind of like next steps you want, and and uh we definitely want to have you back on the show because there's so much, there's so much to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Yeah, thanks for having me. Uh you can check out my sub stack, it's called Deeper States, covering, you know, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, U.S. politics, and then also on Twitter at DR Boguslaw and at places like Wire, American Prospect, Intercept. Are you on like Discord?

SPEAKER_00 47:24

I'm not on Discord. I feel like I'm not smart. I gotta I gotta figure it out. I know, I gotta figure that one out too. That's where the that's where the youth are at these days. Well, unruly subjects. Give a big thank you to Daniel Bogaslaw for joining us. We really appreciate it. We'll put all the links to this different stuff in the show notes. And uh we really appreciate it, and hopefully we can have you back on soon, man. All right, thanks for having me. So that was our conversation with Daniel Boguslaw. Kind of reporting Daniel does isn't easy. You know, he gets the documents, he gets the receipts, and uh, we really appreciate that. Appreciate what he does and that he talked to us, and I hope y'all learned something from this week's show. Unruly Subjects is produced in partnership with Ro Home Productions. Boy, I'm proud of Ro Home. Alex Lewis is Ro Home's creative director, John Myers is Ro Home's executive producer. Thanks to Dania Abdel Hamid and Alan Sao for their help. Thank y'all, appreciate y'all. Shout out to my wife, Sadaka, and my daughter in Yola. I love y'all. And yo, big major thanks to my guest this week, Daniel Bogaslaw. We really appreciate you, Daniel. Keep going. And speaking of guests, did you hear our episode from last week on Delaney Hall, where I talked to Sally Pillay? Y'all definitely want to hear that. I mean, you know, I really gotta give props to those uh Delaney Hall folks out there doing all the kinds of work. They have definitely made sure we can't ignore that. And they are raising the stakes, and and and I appreciate it, you know what I'm saying? But check that episode out if you want to hear about another part of the work that you might not have known about. Our theme music was composed by Axel Kakutier. Alex Tatusian made our tile art. Make sure you subscribe to Unruly Subjects wherever you get your podcasts. Unruly Subjects is now on YouTube, you know what I mean? So you can go to YouTube if it's easier for you to engage there. Yeah, man. You definitely check that out. Uh, you can also follow the show on Instagram at Unruly SubjectsPod. My personal Instagram is at Chinjirai. And by the way, why do you listen to Unruly Subjects? You know, if you we want we want to know what you think for real. And uh we actually put together a brief survey. The link is gonna be in our show notes, and it'll take you less than a minute. And that what we you know, whatever we learn from you is gonna be important because we're about to recharge and regroup. So we want to know what you think. So please do that. It'll really help us out. Like I said, y'all, we're going into summer mode, but we will be back with more soon. Peace. Rohome productions.