Daily Episode 249 - This Week In Fascism #42

0:00Hey, Cory here. We've had an influx of new listeners, and so I just want to make sure that if you are new to the podcast, you don't just jump in and start listening to these daily episodes which we've been doing. Please go back and listen to the first at least eight episodes. So you have an idea of what collapses, what it is that Cory is talking about. Also if you've been with us for a while and you're enjoying the content, please join us on Patreon. We would love to see you there. There's a link, as always, in the description. From kickoff to the final whistle, trade the biggest moments in football on Kowshi, America's number one prediction market platform. Denver is currently trading at 40% to upset Los Angeles, meaning a $100 trade pays out $197 if they win. Download Kowshi, use code FAL to get $25 when you trade $25. KALSHI, Kowshi, trade on anything. 18 plus only restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors.

1:01Kowshi products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see kowshi.com slash regulatory. At QVC, FAL shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead, with brands like Loric Eller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Saturday, September 26, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide, Bear Nuckle. Liverpool's own down in the Kurela Tille coast of Moore with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bear Nuckle middleweight championship of the world is on the line when the rating champ Dave Verredneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger, Jack

2:01the meat cleaver colon, BKFC 94, Tillverse Romero. Watch it live only on the zone. Sign up now at thezone.com. It's Friday. Everybody's favorite day. Surely this is the week in which there's not enough content to fill an entire episode about how the world is falling apart to the fascism, right? I guess we'll find out. Let's dive in with the tiny little bit of content I was able to scrounge up this week, just kidding. There's lots of stuff to get to. Well, let's start with the way that our rights are being taken away by this administration. The big story or one of the big stories of the week was that reporters for CNN and MS now were turned away Saturday at the White House and had their credentials confiscated. Donald Trump announced that these organizations were not going to be allowed anymore at White House press briefings. As he said, they were constantly reporting fake news that they were national security threats, et cetera, et cetera. And instead, just a day later, announced the new Trump TV, which is the White House's

3:06version of state controlled media, reading a little bit from NBC News on this topic. It says White House faces mounting legal backlash after barring journalists from CNN, MS now, and Politico, who I had failed to mention previously. The three news organizations condemned the restrictions while the White House correspondence association called for reporters access to be restored. Jamil Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told NBC News that the move was pretty clearly unconstitutional and predicted that a potential legal challenge would succeed. The restrictions put into effect a ban President Donald Trump announced Friday against the three outlets over what he called their constant reporting fake news. Trump also warned that other outlets would face similar action, but did not identify them. On Saturday morning, MS now reporter Akala Gardner, CNN reporter Betsy Klein and political reporter Cheyenne Haslet, arrived for work at the White House and were denied entry. All three had their credentials confiscated or disabled. All right, as a response to this, all three organizations did sue Donald Trump a judge ordered

4:11Trump administration to restore White House access to these folks and anyone from their organizations, this according to CNN.com, saying CNN has been allowed back into the White House after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate press badges for the network, along with MS now and political. After multiple attempts to enter the building in the morning, CNN reporter Betsy Klein and a photojournalist were let into the premises on Thursday at noon. A reporter for MS now was also granted access according to the network. Now this is all just happening in the last couple of hours as I'm recording this, which is on Thursday. This article claimed that finally CNN and MSN now were allowed in. However, a video from just six hours ago shows that MS now reports that their White House reporter was denied access to the White House this morning, despite a court order demanding she have access. So essentially the court said you got to let him back in. The White House said now we're not going to do that eventually this afternoon. They have allowed them again. We'll see what happens tomorrow and moving on from there. Now an interesting little spin on this story as well.

5:11The White House cited a story coming out of Politico from June and they used that story to justify banning Politico from the White House. They said it was a national security threat that Politico was able to get information from inside the White House and spread that information around. It was found out and leaked that guess who was this anonymous source behind that story? It was JD Vance. So JD Vance leaked something from the White House to Politico, which then Donald Trump used that story to be able to say that Politico should not be able to report on the White House. The national security threat is not Politico. It is JD Vance. And of course amidst all this, Donald Trump is citing national security and midterm coverage as his justification for the press ban. This is from Politico and it says President Donald Trump is asking federal courts to let him pick and choose which media outlets get White House access and launching a legal drive to overturn a decades old precedent that provides broad protections for journalists

6:14who work in the West Wing. In a court filing Tuesday night, the Justice Department defended Trump's decision to ban Politico, CNN and MS now, from the White House describing it as a move rooted in the outlets publication of sensitive information. The president determined that plaintiffs have failed to maintain minimum professional journalistic standards by publishing classified and national security information according to Trump's brief. Of course, he would drag the midterms into this acting, you know, as if yet again, the left is some major threat to midterm security to voting standards when obviously the case is that's not where the threat is coming from. You know, I've mentioned several times on this podcast about my family's bingo guesses our long shots where each year we kind of describe what we think is going to happen during that year. Well, it was not in 2026, but 2025 that I had put as one of my long shots that Donald Trump would face legal battles after trying to take away rights from CNBC and MSNBC. I was a year early and I fear that many of my long shots may end up being that way.

7:18I wish they were flat out wrong, but I've had a few now that I had said what happened last year, starting to happen this year, including a skyrocketing oil and energy prices due to all out war breaking out in the Middle East, Russia starting to aggress against NATO, things love that nature. All right. Well, moving on from the press stuff, but staying on the topic of our rights and the way that our rights are being taken away from law and crime.com, the government was entitled. Trump's border agents can now search cell phones without a warrant, probable cause or reasonable suspicion according to the second circuit. The Trump administration won a substantial victory in a fourth amendment fight on Tuesday as a federal court of appeals ruled a traveler's cell phone may be searched by government agents at the border without a warrant or suspicion. Consider that any person in an airport, which they consider a border here in the US because it gives sweeping access to the homeland security to basically have jurisdiction over the entire

8:21United States. They say within a hundred miles of a border, which they count as airports as well. So pretty much within a hundred miles of any airport in the entire US, which covers a significant portion of the country. So any person in an airport, any person within a hundred miles of any border can have their cell phone searched without any sort of due process in a case that began under the Biden administration. Chinwendo, a Lysigwee, a green card holder, sorry for the pronunciation of that name, was convicted of financial crimes in 2023 on appeal ended in an earlier suppression memo. He argued that his fourth amendment rights were violated when Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection agents scrolled through his cell phone and took photographs. The Department of Justice in bipartisan fashion aimed to keep the cell phone evidence in play, arguing the border search exception applies. The government further argued against extending the reach of a landmark fourth amendment opinion by the US Supreme Court in which the justice is unanimously found police must have a warrant to search a cell phone seized during an arrest in an effectively unanimous decision with

9:21one concurrence. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with the DOJ. The appellate courts ruling, however, notably and explicitly breaks with the district court's decision that reached the same result. So now it's all kind of confusing but it comes together here. Quote, first we conclude that the district court properly denied a Lysigwee's motion to suppress evidence obtained at the border. Contrary to the district court's reasoning, however, reasonable suspicion was not required. In other words, the second circuit dispensed with the lower courts ruling in order to carve out a broader exception to the fourth amendment. Routine searches at the border are reasonably simple because those searches occur at the border, the panel concluded. Because the search of a Lysigwee's cell phone was a routine search, the government was entitled to conduct the search without suspicion. The appeals court in reaching its conclusion likened a traveler's cell phone to a piece of luggage. Under our precedence, no suspicion is required before the government searches a traveler's property at the border. Because a cell phone is property, our precedence established that the government does not need

10:21to have reasonable suspicion before searching a traveler's cell phone at the border. All right, plenty more there in that article if you want to read more on it. But yeah, you know, you better not have a meme photo of fat JD Vance, a text message criticizing the administration or according to Trump's new at an SPM seven, any anti Christian anti capitalist or anti American sentiment. Okay, moving on from the rights topic, let's go through some ice occurrences this week. NewRepublic.com says ice just made thousands of detainees vanish from its system. It's now hard to determine where thousands of people are after they've been taken by ice. The Associated Press reports that the agency's online detainee locator database no longer contains any records of these individuals preventing their family members and legal representatives from locating them. The move also hinders lawyers from filing habeas petitions for their release since they don't know which federal district to file in and means ice could quickly detain and deport a person

11:22before they have a chance to fight their case in July about 16,000 people who were arrested and processed into detention by ice were given final removal orders. That's more than a third of all the ice's bookings that month. Quote, families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don't know where the person might be. Said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. On the attorney side, he said this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney client relationship. Ice made the move on September 15 without announcing it publicly, according to three unnamed current and former agency officials who anonymously spoke to the AP. Immigration lawyers confirmed to the wire service that they suddenly couldn't find their clients in the online system this week and the AILA alerted its members on Friday. It's yet another move meant to thwart legal challenges to the Trump administration's callous mass deportations while adding the cruel measure of preventing family members

12:22from knowing where their relatives are. Considering ice's record of medically neglecting detainees, some could even be experiencing serious health issues at the same time. But for this administration, spreading fear and cruelty is by design. The Guardian makes a proof of that point with this article, ice lost count of miscarriages while detaining a record number of pregnant women. Lawmakers, advocates, and immigration attorneys have raised alarms that pregnant detainees are not receiving basic prenatal care and screenings. Ice is arresting a record number of pregnant women and teenagers, placing them in detention centers where they say it can be exceedingly difficult to access medical care. At the same time, the agency appears to have lost count of how many suffered a miscarriage. Independent documents obtained by the Guardian show that the Trump administration placed more pregnant immigrants in detention last fall and winter than at any time over the previous year. Ice recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration, the document show. But the agency has no data on miscarriages after the 3rd of October 2025. Meanwhile, detained pregnant women report that they are struggling to access routine and

13:24emergency medical care. In interviews with the Guardian and in testimony shared by their attorneys, women who miscarried or were hospitalized for pregnancy complications, said they did not receive follow-up care, despite experiencing ongoing pains and symptoms. The article goes on to tell the stories of a few different women who experienced these things. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of a miscarriage, it says, or to attribute a miscarriage solely to the conditions in detention, it is clear that detained women aren't getting the medical care they need when they experience miscarriage symptoms. Women who miscarry and don't receive proper treatment, including an ultrasound and other tests to ensure that their pregnancy tissue has been vacated from their body, could experience infection and other severe complications. Your Soca Honda dealers are honored to help the community. Our program started the first deaf and hard of hearing football team of its kind in our league. The helpful Soca Honda dealer surprised us with brand new uniforms and giving our athletes more than just jerseys, a community investing in their program. When we want to help you too, with 1.99% APR on a 2026 Rigeline for well-qualified buyers,

14:28at your Soca Honda dealers, made their contract limited by finance through Honda Financial Services, not all buyers will qualify to take delivery by 11226. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. It's destroying, athlete, creator, and YouTube Maxar. YouTube Premium enhances how I use YouTube with awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite training videos before I hit the gym. So no Wi-Fi doesn't turn leg day into loading day. Plus, I get ad free videos, background play, and so much more. YouTube Premium is like YouTube got some extra gains. Try YouTube Premium for 2 months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. According to courthousenews.com, ICE is accused of continuing warrantless arrests in Oregon despite injunction. We've talked multiple times about the court cases against these warrantless arrests. The courts have demanded them to stop. They are not. I'm not going to go into depth in this article. You can read it here if you would like. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that once again, Trump administration is ignoring

15:29court orders, but there you have it. Here's an interesting one. ICE is quietly firing their recruits, including a marine reservist who shot himself in front of the Philadelphia ICE field office. This is from military.com. Some heading says former DHS officials said the hiring moved so quickly that some recruits were cleared for duty before they were adequately vetted. The article says the ICE has begun quietly firing recruits at hired during last year's rapid expansion, reportedly including a marine reservist and a father of two who died by suicide days after being told he would lose the job. Joseph Moore, 38 of suburban Philadelphia, had spent years trying to build a career in law enforcement. He died August 28th outside ICE's Philadelphia field office, according to the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's office, which ruled the death of suicide. He died three days after ICE notified him that he would be fired and one day before his one-year anniversary with the agency. His family has questioned the ruling and how authorities handled the scene. Well, looking at the wider hiring surge and the now firing surge, says Moore was one

16:31of roughly 12,000 recruits that ICE brought on during a hiring push meant to support the Trump administration's mass deportation goals. He was hired in the fall as a deportation officer. Moore Department of Homeland Security officials told the post that the hiring moved so quickly that some recruits were cleared for duty before they had been adequately vetted. Those officials said ICE has since begun removing some of those employees over performance problems. They also noted background issues that they believed should have been identified before the recruits started work. An ICE spokesperson responding to questions from military.com about the dismissals characterized the personnel decisions as routine. They said ICE can remove employees who fail to meet agency standards. This is nothing new, the spokesperson said. ICE is hiring the best of the best to go after the worst of the worst, including drug traffickers, murderers, and pedophiles. When individuals fall short of that standard, personnel decisions are made. This is standard practice in almost every American workplace. The department did not directly address whether or how it responded to the whistleblower's August 2025 warning about the pace of the hiring expansion.

17:32The spokesperson said ICE's office of professional responsibility applies personnel vetting requirements and evaluates each applicant's information. During that ICE whistleblower, they wrote to the DHS office of Inspector General in August of 2025. They warned that the hiring surge had overwhelmed the agency and that some applicants were being cleared for duty without completing important parts of the background process. In Moore's case, the agency belatedly identified that he had been fired from two prior law enforcement agencies, drawing on employment records included in federal court filings. Two of Moore's former colleagues at the Philadelphia office told the newspaper they believed he should not have been hired in the first place, noting that once a person has been fired from a law enforcement job, it is very difficult to return to the field, which is an interesting thing to say because I feel like every time we hear about an officer involved in an unjustified shooting or one that they might claim is justified, but they let them go anyway or when they're fired for beating their wife or for whatever abuse or corruption of justice they commit, they often go and are simply hired somewhere else.

18:33All right. Moving from one US agency to another, there was an FBI security breach this week, hackers stole data on every one of cash Patel's agents and claim that it's not financially motivated. The group calls itself shiny hunters and they claim that they have breached multiple FBI-related services stolen data on all FBI employees and applicants, including personally identifiable information like the agents names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and even information on their significant others. A representative for the hacking group said shiny hunters attacked on Monday night, telling tech site 404 media, we hacked the FBI, we hold data on all FBI employees and applicants. The hackers also took credit for defacing the FBI jobs website on Tuesday with a message that read, this site has been seized by shiny hunters. The group's message continued, all FBI data was compromised, including personally identifiable information and protected health information on income and former FBI employees and all

19:36applicant information. We have a lot more than we claim here. The announcement ended with a note mocking President Trump's true social post conclusions, saying, thank you for your attention to this matter. The FBI had previously raised the eye of the group after the agency said shiny hunters exaggerates its claims of access to sensitive data to illicit payment, as if to say that they're doing some sort of blackmail or extortion for that money. However, shiny hunters replied they aren't looking for any type of financial gain, telling 404 media what we plan to do is not something I'd call extortion, maybe coercion. The group insisted this is not financially motivated. All right, now to end the episode today, let's talk a bit about elections, everybody's favorite topic. You know, every week that I do this episode, we are seven days closer to the midterms. How's that from, I just, I look at the date every time I record this week in fascism episode. And I think man, was it really only a week ago that I did one of these episodes and are we really already a week closer to midterms?

20:39We are now officially less than six weeks away from the midterm elections. November 3rd is the official date and it's just around the corner. While here is an article from the Atlantic dot com titled, the supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms. Trump's advisors have been working for months to move his focus away from baseless theories of election fraud. A group of outsiders is making that difficult of all the outside advisors urging president Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall. The attorney Peter Tickton can claim the deepest ties. The two men went to military school together as teenagers in 2022. Tickton helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment, which is why it might be worth listening when Tickton says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. Quote, he's the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it. Tickton told us this month before taking the stage at an election skeptic conference in Las

21:41Vegas. While every other channel is fighting for your customers' attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here. They trust the voice in their ears, and when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising. It sounds like a recommendation from a friend. Acast gives you that trust at scale. Digital precision, host-read authenticity, and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention. Buy it with Acast. Want more by visiting acast.com slash advertise. The way Tickton sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first, a smooth election, won't happen in his view because he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3rd. Quote, either martial law or step aside, he told us about Trump's choices in the last scenario.

22:45When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Tickton said he was not concerned. Believe me, he said, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are, meaning the rioters. Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. To head off at crisis, Trump's White House and Cabinet Advisors have been working for months. Move Trump's focus away from baseless theories of election fraud, peddled by people like Tickton, Root, and Peters. At the same time, they have authorized, as yet, unsuccessful efforts to uncover actual evidence that would make the conspiracies more credible. Trump's advisors gathered once classified documents that he could share on genuine foreign efforts to influence elections. Set up a prime time address where he again falsely suggested that the 2020 election was stolen. Authorize the seizure of Georgia election records and reviewed voting equipment used in Puerto Rico. None of these efforts have revealed the type of large-scale fraud that Trump has alleged, though they have allowed the president to keep the idea of election theft in the news.

23:46Meanwhile, Trump has failed to persuade Senate Republicans to pass legislation, called the Save America Act, that would restrict mail-in voting and impose new voter ID and citizenship checks on ballot access. And the Supreme Court has rejected his effort to restrict voting by mail. At the White House, the constant lobbying by election deniers continues to be viewed as problematic. A White House official told us that, ticked in, Root, and Peters, played no role in election policy at the White House. A Justice Department spokesperson said there are no plans to declare certified voting equipment unreliable or unusable absent credible verified evidence and the legal process for doing so. Suggestions that such an initiative is underway are the department's faults, the spokesperson said. Some officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Cain and Homeland Security Mark Wayne-Molen, have said publicly that there are no plans to forcibly take over the role of state election administrators or deploy federal officials to polling places, though, Molen said there could be exceptions in the case of specific threats. But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election denying

24:49supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump's inner circle admits remains possible. Such measures are broadly opposed by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and within Trump's own administration, not least because they're considered bad politics. Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the Save America act passed, it was likely to increase democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout, particularly in red states, such as Florida, that have long embraced male-invoting according to a person who has reviewed the numbers. The tension with Trump's orbit has created an added layer of high stakes uncertainty in the final weeks of the midterm election campaign. Tickton told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a Lindell TV host and Gateway-pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text. Trump regularly reposts them on true social. Quote, I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allen Root, Root told us last week,

25:50because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency. For Time's sake, I'm going to skip towards the end of this article where it talks about Tina Peters a little bit. It says Peters acknowledged to us that there was widespread discontent among MAGA supporters that nothing has changed about the nation's voting systems and that they want to see the government do something quickly. Quote, they can't trust elections, they've seen too much, she told us in an interview, adding, we don't have a lot of time to fix this. What we asked was her message to the president and those in a position to make changes to election systems. Peters answered after a long pause, listen to the people outside of the administration. One stark quote that I want to kind of impress upon us all as we, and this article, was from Tiktok, who said that Trump wouldn't stand for losing the election. Quote, there's not another soul on this planet that understands what it is to be the president of the United States and have to leave office for a rigged election so someone else can step in and

26:51steal the country. He added he's not ever going to do that again. Well, I've got a few articles here. I'm not going to read them now for the sake of time, but I'm going to read their titles and then link to them so you can read them. They are about the ways in which Democrats are trying to prepare for the upcoming turmoil at the midterms through primarily legal means. So one from Democracy Docket is titled Democrats sue Trump admin to keep armed agents from polls during midterms from government.california.gov. Governor Newsom signs new laws to protect California elections from Trump interference and from npr.org. It's illegal for armed federal officers to be at the polls. Lawsuits seek to ensure that the big question facing our nation today is whether or not the laws that already exist are enough whether or not Donald Trump has to answer to the law or if the law will bend around him or simply allow him to ignore the rules for his own benefit. Up to this point, we have seen him largely ignore those rules. Yes, he loses battle after battle, but some he wins

27:57and whether he wins or loses he continues on anyway. And like Tipton said, there is no way that Donald Trump will accept a loss this midterm. We will have to wait and see. Less than six weeks now. Thanks for being here. See you Monday. $1,000 a month in fund an investing account for a .25% increase. Cash account offered by wealth fund brokerage LLC member Phenra SIPC not a bank. Here's a tip for you. There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer. They tune in every week. They trust the host. And that host wants to talk about brands like yours in their own words to their audience.

28:59The problem is you just haven't been introduced yet. We're a cast where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you browse shows, see you's listening, and book host red sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform. Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control, start advertising on podcasts by visiting acast.com slash advertise. Hey, Corey here. If you are listening to the back catalog of Breaking Down Collapse, thank you. Those episodes are so vital. They're so important. But I also wanted to let you know that I am now doing daily episodes. Yes, that's right. Here on the podcast, daily episodes. So if you are enjoying the back catalog, great. Please also feel free to zoom forward to the most recent episodes. Catch us daily. They are quick little episodes. And I think you'll enjoy them. Thanks.