The U.S is Unraveling (Advanced)

Advanced Listening Practice - EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

A New York Times article read-along about the ongoing clashes between ICE agents and the people of Minneapolis. You'll find that this episode is a bit more demanding than others I've put out in the past, in that it features more complex sentence structures and trickier vocabulary. I want this to be a test of your listening and general comprehension skills.

The goal is not to understand every word, but to keep up as best you can and learn to tolerate that uncomfortable feeling of not catching every word. Don't get discouraged if you struggle. In fact, struggling should be your goal. Struggling is what comes right before growth and improvement. You should feel proud for sticking with it and keeping up the improvement, even when it doesn't feel linear. Here's the full article.

Transcript

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Hey, what's up? What's going on? Welcome to another episode of English with Dane, a podcast designed to help you enjoy the process of perfecting your English. Today's episode is a bit different from my usual ones because I made it specifically for more advanced listeners or speakers. I thought I would try something new, and by specifically for advanced speakers or listeners, I mean that this episode will feature more complex language than other episodes, and it will also be a bit faster too. I realize that for some of you, this will pose a formidable challenge, and I don't want you to get discouraged. No quiero que te des motives, okay? I don't want you to get discouraged. If it's too fast, then slow it down on your podcast app. I know most apps give you that option. Now, in terms of the language and sentence structures used in this episode, these will also be more complex and harder to follow. Take this as a bit of a test because it will test you. This episode is an article read-along, and I'll be reading an article from the New York Times. The reason I chose this paper is pretty straightforward. Its language is dense, deliberate, and very representative of high-level written English. It features long sentences, embedded clauses, and abstract nouns. If you haven't heard that term embedded clauses before, they are simply parts of a sentence that add extra information inside the original sentence. Embedded clauses are a core feature or a staple of advanced English, especially in writing and informal speech, and they are used to pack a lot more meaning into relatively few words. This is the kind of English you'll see in serious journalism, academic writing, and opinion pieces. It's harder to keep up with, of course, más difíciles seguir, it's harder to keep up with. So I think it's very important to say that the goal of this episode and this article read along is not to understand every single word, okay? Again, the goal is not for you to understand every single word. I want you to approach this episode as training. You're going to train your tolerance for complexity, ability, and speed. I want you to start getting comfortable with not understanding every sentence perfectly, but keep following the general thread. Okay, I hope that my intentions are clear. I'll add the transcript to this episode in the episode description so you can follow along, which I recommend you do, and the link to the article as well, if you want to read the whole thing, because we won't cover everything. Okay, longest intro ever. Let's get to it. You are listening to episode 39 of season two of English with Dane. Hit it. So the title is In Minneapolis: Trump Administration's Ice Crackdown shows the U.S. Unraveling. This is by Charles Homans and Philip Montgomery. Already a really significant word there in the title of this piece, which I decided to also use in the title of the episode. To unravel. To unravel means to come apart. When I hear unravel, I think of a woven sweater, unjersey tejido, right? A woven sweater and someone pulling a thread that slowly makes it come apart and begin to disappear. In Spanish, I translate it to deshacer o desilachar. In a figurative context, to unravel also refers to something like a situation, a story, or a problem becoming clearer over time. In this case, I think it's being used a bit more as the first thing I described, that visual of the sweater. A quick point, which I think is interesting, Ikonesto Yakawa, because I don't want to just explain one word for the whole episode. A quick point, which I think is interesting, is that this word is not used by accident. It's quite significant in this context for a reason that I don't want to go over your head, como que no te descuenta, I don't want it to go over your head. When we talk about society, we often say the fabric of society. It's a metaphor tied to an older idea in English. We often use this phrase, fabric of society, because society can be visualized as a woven set of connections that holds people, institutions, norms, and stability together. When something unravels, the threads pull the strings loose, and the fabric loses its shape and strength. So in this context, unraveling suggests that the social and political fabric of the US, so its trust, its cohesion, and civil order is coming apart under the stress of aggressive actions by the part of the government. I just wanted to really drive that point home. Quería resaltar eso. I wanted to drive that point home. Let's read some more, and I'll try not to stop as much because that's the whole point of this exercise. So, watching America unravel in Minneapolis. What I saw as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality. Charles Holmans, who is from Minnesota, is a political correspondent for the Times. He spent ten days in and around Minneapolis observing clashes between federal agents and city residents and interviewing immigrants, activists, and the mayor. So this is January 25th, 2026. Donald Trump's most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state's relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules, but rather by expressions of power at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump's Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge. On January 14th at 7.44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis's official X account announced that there were, quote, reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis. Federal law enforcement, as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge. Hennepin and Ramsey counties, home to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs, are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration's first such immigration crackdown last year. It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercise citizen's smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE. In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry, so they became messy, okay? They grown blurry. Ice officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers, but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on January 7th. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on January 24th of Alex Jeffrey Predi, a 37-year-old VA hospital registered nurse by Border Patrol agents. Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city's ex post on January 14th, a crowd of perhaps 100 people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis's north side, where according to an FBI agent's affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime scene tape, and milling around, so like walking around in the darkness beyond it, were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE's enforcement and removal operations unit. Rapidamente, camera wielding is a good compound adjective there. If you wield something, wield is spelled W-I-E-L-D, you are holding it in your hand. So camera wielding, people that were holding their cameras or phones up pointed at the action. At the scene of the second ICE shooting on January 14th, federal agents looked more like a platoon of soldiers navigating a hostile foreign capital than conventional law enforcement in an American city. The agents, in their masks and military-style kit, suggested a fierce omnipotence, but ICE and the other agencies have just as often been visibly unprepared to handle the policing situations their presence created in the city or even the weather. Across the intersection, an agent slipped on an icy pavement and then fled, leaving an unsecured magazine full of live ammunition on the street, to the jeers of the crowd. Nearer to where I stood, an unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee was struggling to get clear of the crowd, escorted by a few officers on foot. Get out of my street, someone yelled. A woman in a fur roughed parka swung a plastic post at the rear windshield of the vehicle, which shattered with a dull crunch. It was not long before the air was alive with smoke grenades and stingballs and thick with tear gas. Faces peered out of second floor windows along what had been less than an hour earlier a quiet residential street. Stingballs, by the way, um called that because they really sting when they hit you, I assume, are rubber pellets, bolitas de Roma, rubber pellets that are often used in riot control situations, and are referred to as non-lethal ammunition. But a little while ago I read, hace poco lei, a little while ago I read that they are starting to call them less than lethal instead of non-lethal, because the term non-lethal has implications that they cannot kill someone, but they absolutely have that capacity if they hit someone in the right place or well the wrong place, depending on how you look at it. There are many people who have received life-altering injuries and even life-ending injuries because of these forms of ammunition. Thought it was important to make that point because the language and the terms we use dictate how we frame events in our minds. Let's keep going. The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why. I saw no police officers. I had passed a Minneapolis police department cruiser parked some distance down the street. But here, where the agents were clashing with the crowd, they were nowhere to be seen. For weeks, these agents had become actors in a kind of theater of power, meeting out various forms of state force and violence framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration's various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier, and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night, certain it would happen again. I had to look it up. To meet out means to give or impose something in a controlled, deliberate way, often by an authority. It's most commonly used with things like punishment, justice, discipline, or treatment in general, both good and bad. Look at us learning together. That's the power of reading articles like this. I'll add that one to my list, and hopefully you'll hear me use it organically here on the podcast in the future. Let's read a little bit more before we finish up. This next part says, take out that phone and hit record. Tim Waltz, Minnesota's embattled governor, appeared live on camera from his official residence on the night of the second shooting and clash. He described the federal deployment to his state as an occupation and a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government. In his remarks, Walls implicitly affirmed what has been widely understood in America since at least the civil rights era confrontations over integration in the South, which is that the tools state governors have to formally resist the imposition of federal power in real time are extraordinarily limited. What Minnesota and every other state did have, though, was plenty of personal electronics. Carry your phone with you at all times, Walls advised the state's residents. And if you see ice in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. The aim, he said, was to create a database of atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution. Government Tim Walsh described the federal deployment to Minnesota as an occupation. This sort of citizen surveillance of federal agents is a tactic that had spread widely, often with the support of Democratic officials like Waltz, along with the immigration raids themselves, refined over the course of previous operations in Los Angeles and especially Chicago. As Wals suggested, it served a kind of double purpose: capturing evidence and also capturing the narrative, showing the world what Trump's immigration crackdown looked like in practice. Because of Minneapolis's small size, the sledgehammer scale of the deployment, and the extreme contempt that Minneapolitans had for it, ice watching had attained a manic intensity in some neighborhoods of the city, which became an exacerbating factor in the fog of war confusion and paranoia the raids brought to town. Okay, let's finish up there. Like I said, the link to the full article is in the episode description. If you want to continue reading it, which I highly suggest you do. If you've listened to English with Dane for a while, you know that this show isn't a political show, and rarely, if ever, do I give my take or my view on these types of events. Not because I don't have one, but because I like to keep it to myself for the sake of you guys. I know some of you don't want to hear what I have to say in terms of politics, and you listen to this show to work on your English, and hopefully because you find it entertaining and maybe different to other things out there. I like to keep politics out of it, but lately I feel like I'm doing a disservice to myself by not talking about certain events. There's a lot of horrible stuff going on in the world, I'm sure you're all aware. This is just the one that I've been reading about most recently, or the one that's been thrust in my face the most recently, I guess. The last thing I wanted to say is that this isn't about immigration anymore, I think. And it isn't a left versus right thing in my mind. It's about everyday people like you and me and an oppressive and violent government that is tearing apart the very fabric of society and eroding its trust in the system and pinning us against one another so we stay busy blaming the other side while they try to consolidate their power. So let's try and look at this with empathy and with unity, and let's try to not be at each other's throats. I think that's a good message. It was trickier than most, like I mentioned in the intro, like I mentioned it would be, but I hope you stuck with it, que aguantaste, I hope you stuck with it and allowed yourself to feel uncomfortable, and I hope you were able to tolerate that feeling. I'm sure you didn't pick up on everything that we read, but I'm proud of you for making the effort and for getting a little bit better today. Alright, that's it for me. Have a good week. Talk soon. Later, I'm not sure.