Today’s episode opened the way real life sometimes does: technology melting down, audio dropping out, StreamYard behaving like it woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
Lawrence fought through it while feeling like he’d been hit by a truck. I jumped in mid-travel exhaustion, and somehow, because this community always does, we landed on our feet.
Once the dust settled, the show moved quickly into the weight of the weekend’s news. I shared a moment that set the tone: a quiet Sunday, a post from one of our Whatevers, Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙, asking if everyone was okay, and a spontaneous live that turned into a reminder of why this space exists.
People are hurting. People are scared. And people are looking for each other.
At that point, we introduced our guest Arturo Dominguez. What followed was one of those conversations you don’t script and can’t sanitize. The killing of Alex Pretti dominated the discussion, not as a headline, but as a story about a human being. An ICU nurse. A helper.
He was someone we recognized instantly as “that guy” from our own lives. The lie wasn’t subtle. It was massive, bald-faced, and impossible to square with the video evidence.
Arturo laid out what many avoid naming: this wasn’t a training failure. This was the training. From Border Patrol tactics to ICE escalation, from crowd control drills aimed at protesters to the reflexive cover-ups, the system is behaving exactly as designed.
The conversation widened to detention centers, overcrowding, abuse, and the long arc of enforcement-first immigration policy that stretches back decades—through Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Arturo discussed his latest Substack story, The Mass Deportation Economy
The show dug into the machinery behind it all: fusion centers, data sharing, gang databases, surveillance contracts, and the quiet ways “sanctuary” protections are undermined. Arturo connected the dots between mass deportation and a full-blown economy—one built on federal dollars, private contractors, and human suffering.
Then came the hard question: what do we do now?
At this point we discussed the brilliant BlueAmpMedia (BAM) story Lawrence recently published Five Things We Must Demand Now—And the Seven Things We Must Do to Get Them:
We talked through escalation—not violence, but collective pressure. Labor. Money. Boycotts. Strikes. Corporate accountability. Even the idea that America’s most visible global spectacles, like the World Cup, could become mirrors reflecting a country in open resistance to authoritarianism.
Nobody pretended this would be painless. Revolutions never are. But the line was drawn clearly: peaceful resistance is still on the table, and silence is not.
The episode didn’t end on a comfortable note. It ended with clarity.
Thank you Nick Paro, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Cat The FireBrand Project, Sushipheliac 🍣🍥🍣, Caro Henry, Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, and our chat mod Karen Marie Shelton and many others for tuning in.
We’ll be back tomorrow bright and early for on The Daily Whatever Show with our guest Dissent.
We love you all—truly!—mean it.
