Dropkick Murphys: Citizen I.C.E (Public Safety Science with Phillip Atiba Solomon) | Transcript

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Phillip Atiba Solomon

Now look at ICE. Everywhere they go. They got protestors. They got folks who think they are not legitimate because they're not being used for legitimate public safety interest. So guess what? They think all that they can do is use their coercive authority immediately. I am unaccountable, it's never gonna come back on me. I have been told I have complete immunity and by the way, I have no authority in these streets.

It's as if they wanted to create a lab experiment to produce the worst versions of humanity.

Dropkick Murphys’ “Citizen I.C.E.” plays

They’ve poorly trained an army for our kids to fear today.

Take your mask and weapon and then be on your way.

They’re knee-deep in Proud Boys, the party never stops.

Too scared to join the military,

Too dumb to be a cop.

Matt Whyte

Welcome to Sing for Science, the show where musicians and scientists talk about music and science. I'm your host, Matt Whyte. Each week, we'll talk about a song by our guest artist and how it connects with our guest scientists area of expertise. Today, we're delighted to welcome Ken Casey, founder and vocalist of the Dropkick Murphys, a band whose music has long been rooted in working class identity, solidarity and a clear moral point of view.

Matt Whyte

Their new song, “Citizen I.C.E.,” is as direct and unflinching as anything they've released. A track that takes aim at abuses of power and the ways people can come to see themselves as enforcers of division. Also joining us is Phillip Atiba Solomon, a professor of psychology and black studies at Yale University, as well as co-founder of the Center for Policing, Equity, a leading research and action organization using data to understand and reduce racial disparities in public safety.

His work focuses on how identity, perception and systems shape the way people see and treat one another. The title of today's episode on the podcast is Citizen I.C.E. identity, power, and the Psychology of Us Versus Them. Hello, Ken and Phil, welcome to sing for science.

Ken Casey

Good to be here.

Matt Whyte

Ken, clearly you're no stranger to speaking. Speaking truth to power. And you've been at this for a long time. I've been wondering the, the now infamous MAGA wager video from a year or two ago that took on such a life of its own and got such tremendous traction. Do you think you'll look at that as any sort of pivotal moment in the way that people understand what you do, or is it one more point along the way in the continuum, the Dropkick Murphys Continuum?

Ken Casey

Man, we seem to have to keep making the point. You know, like, you know, you got to understand, we've been around for 30 years. We have this core fan base that gets what we're about and what we've been about and what we've sung about. But, you know, as you go along this, there's different levels of fandom and how people perceive your music.

And maybe they only know one song. So you can't expect, I suppose, everyone to know, but I'm always shocked when the moment comes where someone is at any point is still, you know, I didn't I didn't know this was going to be political. You know, I, you know, people I think sometimes, especially people that are MAGA don't want to acknowledge that a lot of their favorite artists don't agree with their politics, you know, and that's why there's the classic lines, shut up and sing.

You know, like, I can put up with you even if I know what your beliefs are. As long as you don't publicly speak them, I'll accept you still. And, I mean, we see, I see people flat out get up and walk out of concerts all the time when I talk about, you know, the state of affairs in the world.

And I say, that's wild, that, you know, you would buy a ticket, drive down to a show, park, come in, probably buy yourself a drink. And then, you know, I understand less is more. A lot of times when you're trying to make a point, you know, if I, if we're playing a 90 minute show and I spend 30 minutes of it talking about politics, I'm actually going to lose some people that agree with me.

So I know I have to get it in where I can. And, you know, so I might spend a minute, you know, talking about politics and then maybe 3 or 4 of the songs, obviously, some take direct aim at Trump in this regime. Some are just speaking about, you know, workers rights and treating people fairly and, and the facade that America is always kind of been an immigrant rights.

You know, those have been themes in our songs forever. And but man, people still seem to not be ready to accept, 60s of me talking and why do I talk for 60 seconds at every show? Because one, I always want to be on the record that where Dropkick Murphys stood in this time. But I also want to let people I want to normalize again, speaking out, saying, hey, this isn't normal.

This isn't right. And I think so many people have adopted that. I'm just going to keep my head down and stay quiet and not have the target come on. Me. You know, the MAGA target. And people just think if they keep their head down, it'll go away in another, you know, two plus years or whatever. And, you know, maybe it will temporarily.

But if, if we don't, like, stamp this out, it's going to come back in four years or eight years or whatever it will be. And the last I'll say is that what I, what I view of this whole situation is that America needed a lot more work. You know, for a while, maybe during the Obama presidency, on the surface, you might say, oh, they were moving in a great direction.

I mean, I, often thought, geez, maybe we're going to move past America's past and never look back. Well, clearly that wasn't right. So I look at something it's like an alcoholic, right? He doesn't change his life until he crashes and hits rock bottom, while America has hit rock bottom. And maybe now will make some of the core changes that really needed to happen all along.

And that's what keeps me positive that maybe will come out of this a greater union than we ever alleged to be in the first place.

Matt Whyte

Yeah. It makes me think of Phil, something. I read the piece you wrote in time recently, and I think the either the title itself or just below it, the core point was this could be just the tip of Minnesota, could just have been the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. That, and in fact, the elevator can go further down.

Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about that article and your point of view?

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Sure. I want to be sensitive and honor where Ken is talking about, because I do think that there is a future we got to stay focused on. And the future doesn't have to be as bad as it was. So you just invited a professor to talk about how dark things could get? Get your night goggles on, right.

It can get incredibly sinister and diabolical. So in 2020, then President Trump empaneled a group to put together a report on the future of law enforcement. And it was it didn't include anybody from the civil rights community. It didn't include anybody, even from major cities chiefs, because that was too liberal. And the, report never got to be filed because it violated a whole bunch of policies.

Not that this administration has ever violated a policy before. Right. But the draft recommendations were leaked. And they were terrifying. And I wrote about the New York Times then to say what they want is wall to wall surveillance through federal law enforcement using technology that had not been really even invented yet at a scale that they couldn't yet achieve.

To follow through on those recommendations would require a sea change in funding for federal law enforcement and lack of accountability for that federal law enforcement. One of the things that made me feel at least a little bit better about how bad things were during the first Trump administration was that we were so federated in our law enforcement.

They couldn't go department by department's 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, and 75% of them are 25 officers or fewer. So it's a lot of mom and pop law enforcement, right? Since then, since 2020 and that leaked draft report, not only have we, leapt forward in terms of our surveillance capacity, but the very tech firms that are supplying that surveillance capacity are, at the foot trying to fight the police for being the most loyal lapdog to this administration.

The annual expenditure on Municipal Court of State local law enforcement is $135 billion, which is enormous. And they just appropriated $175 billion for Homeland security, Ice and Homeland Security Investigations, which means you can get 2000 folks from the federal government in Minneapolis when there's only 600 local law enforcement. Right. That's terrifying. And the goal of this is not public safety.

Right. Like let's be really clear. I am an expert on what keeps communities safe. And it's not this right. It's none of this. I'd love to talk about what actually keeps communities safe, because it turns out having the resources to not be in crisis is what keeps communities safe. It was never about public safety, not even the most, sort of punitive versions of it.

It's about having a mechanism that is unaccountable to local control, that can influence who is deserving of protection and not in our national narrative, and even more stupid and direct, who gets to vote like they're not being subtle? Like people say? Oh, they say the quiet part out loud. They're saying the aloud out loud part through a megaphone.

They want to attack the midterms as a practice run for, attacking the next federal presidential elections with an essentially private secret police force. And I want to be clear. I'm not. My job is not to be an alarmist. I am a quantitative social scientist. I am wearing my merch now that says justice nerd. And when I say nerd, I want to be really clear.

I'm not just a nerd because I do math for a living. I played Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. I am a real nerd. That's what I'm. I'm an OG nerd, okay? My job is not to be alarmist. They are literally writing. We would like to follow the fascist playbooks of other nations that have done this. Right. Fascist strongman authoritarians are their idols.

And they're writing down piece by piece how they're trying to do this. So if we're scared to say the darkest part of what they explicitly intend, how on earth are we going to be prepared when they start rolling it out? That's how bad it can be and why it's so important for truth tellers, which are journalists? Yes. And academics, yes.

But far more so artists to say it explicitly and to communicate to the folks who are interested in the sort of pleasures of the art, hey, this art is based in the reality of the political situation we're in. And the politics is not just voting, it's what's affecting you and your neighbor right now and tomorrow.

Matt Whyte

Yeah. I want to talk specifically about some of these lyrics to get your perspective. Phil, let's just take it from the top as it were, “Calling all Americans of below average intelligence, power hungry scumbags apply today. Parenthetically, I haven't been laid in years, and I'm going to need somebody.” That's nice that you wedge that in there, Ken.

Ken Casey

That line. You see when I fix it though, and that I haven't been laid in years, that was like a guy in the background that was supposedly an ice agent yelling, I haven't been laid in years. And, you know, I think it's like, and I'm going to take it out on you or something. So the actual lyric ends that, call it all Americans of below average intelligence, power hungry scumbags apply today.

That's the intro and full disclosure for this story. The song was actually written in 2004 called, “Citizen CIA,” which is just basically a mock recruitment, thing for about how, you know, we've settled in regime change and caused the majority of the problems around the world that we then, portray ourselves as going into effect. Right? It was obviously political and it was a shot at the government, but it was a little more tongue in cheek.

A little less more lighthearted. So in this song, we're also working in the framework of trying to stay somewhat like the original, you know, I think the original line said, “calling all Americans of above average intelligence,” because it was supposed to be some recruiting. You know, we're looking for the best and the brightest. It was more like this is more tongue in cheek, but yeah, well, we'll continue on.

I love the idea of the scientific breakdown of a hardcore song. It's just an amazing collab we have going here.

Matt Whyte

Phil, I can keep going. Let me go a little bit further.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

“You don't get to come celebrate dictatorship and bolster the regime while abusing helpless immigrants. A bully's wet dream. You gotta get to it, man.”

Matt Whyte

“You've joined the traitors ranks to play the hand of God in a scumbag grifters kidnapping squad. They've poorly trained an army for our kids to fear today. Take your mask and weapon and then be on your way. They're knee deep in proud boys. Yeah, the party never stops. Too scared to join the military too dumb to be a cop, citizen I.C.E..No accountability and violence every day.”

Phillip Atiba Solomon

I mean, I don't know what you want me to say about it, except. Rock on. You know, like, turn it up to 11, would you please. I want that. I don't want that in my ears. I want in my veins. This is a moment when, where this isn't protest music.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

This is just popular people's music. Right?

Matt Whyte

What's the difference?

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Well, protest music suggests that there's institutions that are popular, and we need to tell the truth about that. But these aren't popular. These actions aren't popular. And it's important that we get that there are things that are unpopular that I think would be good to do. Right. There are ways of taking care of each other that aren't popular, but I think that that would be that would make us a better society.

But kidnapping children is unpopular. Right. Abusing sexually assaulting children is very unpopular. And we are working in the midst of a regime. We're living in the midst of a regime that would rather arrest a five year old and the people who want to have sex with a five year old. We should be able to say that fairly directly.

And so that is a popular people's opinion. That is simply being reflected in song in an era when the people who are on our news, for the most part, are scared to say so because it seems Partizan to say we have a class of folks who are interested in protecting child abusers and are interested in funding child abuse, but that's a plain spoken version of this that normally I work closely between black community advocacy groups and law enforcement.

I can't, I don't have to and I don't get to speak this plainly because there is nuance between how are we going to keep communities safe that have suffered from intergenerational neglect, and also what we're asking law enforcement to do in these communities inevitably leads to terrible outcomes and tragedies. There we end up with protest music and protest art because a popular institution must be changed, right?

We must have change the way we keep ourselves safe. This is an unpopular regime that is trying to pretend that it is popular. These are groups of people who have all kinds of money and power, pretending to get bullied, when in fact they're just picking a fight and losing that fight. Right. So I want to make clear that what's happening right now is the need for that kind of truth telling in advance of some protests that might be necessary.

Ken Casey

By the way, just to talk on that same topic, when you talk about popularity, and what an audience is ready and willing to hear when we travel. Not every tour can we afford this, but when we are traveling with a video wall behind us where we can display, you know, video content, our song, “First Class Loser,” we would dedicate to Donald Trump throughout the whole first Trump.

You know, the majority agreed. But there was almost that like, geez, I don't want to get punched in the head by the guy beside me. If I clap, you know? So there was almost this, like, awkward hug, should I, you know, there were cheers. But it wasn't. It wasn't over. It was. There was definitely a sense of like, oh no, they're going there in a public place, you know, and in the second Trump presidency, when we play that video, we play that song and play the video of him stumbling downstairs, doing others, you know, we show video of him with Epstein.

The place goes fucking wild, you know, because people are starting to feel like the the community around me is stronger than the hateful community. You know, where people had their fear is starting to go and the the temperature to revolt is getting greater than the fear of staying silent.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

You know? Yeah. I mean, it's good. It could have come a little bit earlier, but that's not what we as a nation. That's not what we tend to do. Right? When the stakes get so clear, at some point, it's more uncomfortable to be in the middle than it is to pick a side. And, you know, I hear a lot of people saying, oh, well, you know, once it's us versus them, then we've already lost.

No, no, sometimes there's right and there's wrong. And what is happening? Under the color of law, at the behest of this, regime is morally wrong. Anybody who has eyes and ears and is looking says law enforcement shot somebody in the back multiple times, who is stepping in to prevent a woman from being brutalized.

Right. We have communities who are trying to encircle their daycares because people are laying in wait for parents and children who are trying to make safe spaces for children to learn. If you don't get that masked men waiting outside of a daycare drop off is wrong. There's something wrong with you. These aren’t controversial opinions, right?

Matt Whyte

No, certainly not.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

This is just the moral center of what grown adults do. And when you see people trying to say, well, I get that the way they do it isn't. But everything they said before but is a fuck you to your intelligence. Yeah, right. And to your and to your perception. Right. So just stating the facts on these things is it shouldn't be.

But it's an, it's an act of courage. And it's why this administration, when they got back in power, the first place they went was to the press. And the second place they went was to the Academy. And where they're going is the National Endowment for the Arts. And every artist who is speaking truth, those are the folks who are going to be targeted on the tail end of this administration.

Right. And the reason why it is so important that we're talking about science connected to art is they are both truth telling apparatus for the broader population. And if we abandon that or if we somehow turn the volume down on that, that's where it gets truly dangerous, because it is hard to have courage when the truth tellers won't speak the truth.

Matt Whyte

Yeah. And, you know, to be clear, my listener base, we're preaching to the choir here. And what you asked me earlier, what I wanted you to say. I think you have a unique perspective on how this can happen. And it brings to mind the Stanford prison experiment about how people can justify abuse.

When people stop being seen as people and they become categories. What can you tell us about that? And implicit bias in how, how, how these guys can put the Lone Ranger mask on and what could happen to them psychologically to justify executing someone in the street. But tell us more as a psychologist, what's going on.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Fair. And I just want to give a cautionary note that, I don't want us to peer too deeply into the minds of people who were set up for this because it, it, allows us to make the people the problem as opposed to the systems. Sure. Right. So that said, if you get 47 days of training, which is just there because the guy who wants this to happen is the 47th president, like, it's just so stupid, like and again, that's my scientific opinion.

It's just so stupid that it's not set up so that people can be safe. The officers as well. It's just set up for by, a narcissistic fraction of a man, who is so interested in his own, sort of, publicity that he can't imagine that he would set up policies that are maximizing people's good. So 47 days of training, you're never going to get to a place where folks are trained to keep themselves or others safe.

When you're not accountable. Which is why, by the way, no other law enforcement in the country allows for their agents, their officers, to be masked, right? When you don't collect data on what you're doing, which I know is not the sexiest thing in the world, as my wife likes to tell me all the time, I'm the king of unsexy things.

I don't know how to feel about that, but whatever. Thanks for sharing. Like, literally, the data collection is part of how we end up with secret police because we don't know what they're doing. And that's why, you know, when the Cato Institute comes out with saying only 5% of the folks are being detained by Ice, have former, violent, convictions, against 5%, 5% at a maximum.

Wow. They we're going to get the worst of the worst. Right? So I don't know what the other 95% are doing, but there's a larger percentage of the folks they're detaining that are U.S. citizens than there are who've been convicted of prior violence. When that's the situation. But you have people who are able to go on television saying, oh, that's just that's a private nonprofit.

And, we don't trust their data. Where are the government's data to make sure you're accountable? When you're not accountable, you can get away with some things and when you lack public legitimacy, which means when the public thinks that what you're doing isn't okay, it turns out you rely on the authority that you imagine you have. So let me break it down for you.

Like this. Regular law enforcement, which I want to be clear, a lot of times people say, well, like, there's so much worse than the police. I'm not saying the police are awesome either. My whole career has been not that so. My best friends are law enforcement, but we have problems in law enforcement historically. Okay, but if you're regular law enforcement, you usually have three forms of authority with which you can exercise control.

And by the way, if I don't have control of the situation, somebody's getting hurt, right? If I'm here to arrest you, Matt, and you think you can take me, somebody's going home. Hurt you or me. But if you know that I have the authority, everybody can be safe. That's what everybody is taught in law enforcement. I have first my formal or legal control, my authority.

Right? I second have my social skills and social control. So if you don't respect law enforcement. But I can be like, hey man, like if I had hair like yours, I'd be a happier person, right? Not now. All of a sudden, like, we got some rapport and you're de-escalated cool if and only if those two forms of authority fail.

Do I use my third form of authority, which is my coercive authority? My ability to use violence to get can to compel, compliance. But if I'm coming up to you and you're like, hey, look at the racist pigs. I have no formal authority. I don't have social skills that are going to de-escalate, that I only have my coercive authority.

Now look at I.C.E. everywhere they go. They got protestors. They got folks who think they are not legitimate because they're not being used for legitimate public safety interest. So guess what? They think that all that they can do is use coercive authority immediately. I am unaccountable and it's never gonna come back on me. I have been told I have complete immunity by the vice president and the president of the United States.

Right. And by the way, I have no authority in these streets. So you are creating it as if they wanted to create a lab experiment to produce the worst versions of humanity. Then you get folks who don't get trained. And already I believe that there are some people deserving of discretionary beat downs by law enforcement.

And yeah, you're going to get people executed on the street for the crime of making me feel like you didn't respect me. Right. These are not just preventable, but fully predictable state sponsored executions. And we should have a better government than that. And the vast majority of folks who have far more conservative politics than I do and have far less experience than I do, I can just look at the video and say, that's fucked up.

Can't we do better? And the people who are in office right now are trying to say no. And so my encouragement that my scientific opinion get them out because they cannot be trusted with the bare minimum of what adult moral reasoning requires. That's what I would have to say. Again, the science says we're concocting these situations that would turn the best people into the worst versions of them, and it's not like we're targeting the best people.

Matt Whyte

Yeah. Just for our own edification collectively, what is the basic conclusion that we draw from the Stanford prison experiment about abuse of authority?

Phillip Atiba Solomon

So look, I'm not talking about I didn't respond to implicit bias in the Stanford prison experiment, when you first posed it, because there's actually controversy around both of those right now. What people tend to draw from it, and did for, for years and years, I did my graduate work in the Stanford Prison experiment because they happened in the basement.

I was at Stanford. I'm clear that the ghosts of that place were haunting me all to graduate school. Damn. I lost my hair. What? Phil Zimbardo and Christina Myles Lock said essentially, once you embody your role rather than your sort of humanity, you end up capable of incredible cruelty to people who are in a role where you're told you're allowed to treat them cruelly.

Right. Regardless of whether or not the Stanford prison experiment allows you to draw that conclusion, everything on the science of what we call moral exclusion says the same thing. Moral exclusion says, if I were to if I went like this and I was like, oh, I'm sorry, there was a mosquito on me, there's not a problem, right?

You and I are fine because they're morally excluded. Like, who likes mosquitoes? But if I did like this, I was like, oh, that's why it's my kid. So I just need to just smack him because I'm, He should know better. You're horrified because children are included in our moral universe and mosquitoes are excluded. The reason why I care about dehumanization, right?

The literal equating of humans with non-human entities is because non-human entities tend to be more or less excluded. Right. Whenever we decide that there's a group of people who are deserving of certain forms of punishment and others that are not deserving of it, we run the risk of morally excluding the deservingly punished. Right. That's the whole set up fries.

And listen to the rhetoric of the people who say well but we have to have a country, we don't have a country, we don't have borders. Shut up. Also, and the second point is shut up again. Right. Because that's not an argument. Right. That argument is, functionally there are some people who deserve the things I want to do to them, and there are other people who don't deserve that.

Right. Psychologically what that's doing is it's creating a norm of like yeah, they do deserve that. Right. So when we were hearing about Alex Preti. Right. And we just use that example, people saying, well you know the individual but who puts themselves, I ask you who puts themselves between law enforcement doing what they're supposed to do and the people are trying to enforce shut up.

You're who does that? People who have the First Amendment rights to do it, people who see that law enforcement as abusing their powers. And we have a rich history of law enforcement abusing their powers. We have a rich history of that in the last couple of months. Forget about the last several decades, right. And a century plus. So they're asking questions, to allow us to imagine that there might be a reasonable scenario for armed, masked individuals to lie in, wait at a daycare drop off.

Shut up. There is not a reasonable moral argument to be made there. And the psychology of it is we want those folks are saying we want for a group of people to be morally excluded, so that a lot of things we couldn't do to you and to your kids who are our base, we can do to them and theirs.

And once we have decided we can do that, you end up with camps. We did that during the first administration. We did that during World War two. Right. But camps for the people who deserve a different kind of moral consideration, that's where this always leads. So I the thing I want folks to get is not the implicit.

This is explicit bias right. Not just the Stanford prison experiment but moral exclusion. That is the goal and that is the lever they are using to shift the norms. And it is so grotesque that everybody, including the folks who voted for them, can see it. What I want people to understand is if you don't push back on it, then later on you won't be able to see it.

And I guarantee you that your grandchildren will be ashamed of you, because that is that is as true as the fact that there are camps that come from this kind of political maneuvering.

Matt Whyte

Ken, there's one lyric I kind of want to unpack when you're talking about, “too scared to join the military, too dumb to be a cop.” It kind of implies that from your perspective, there's a hierarchy. And I know, you know, I've, I've seen you recently on an interview with a veterans podcast. You’ve always been, you’ve always been a big supporter of first responders.

So just from your own point of view, if I'm on to something there, how do you look at that? Like those three things? I mean, I have a pretty firm understanding of what your opinion of I.C.E. is, but the military and, and and police.

Ken Casey

You know, the bands had a big support base from the military, first responders just, you know, always, you know, we've had a lot of fans where we, you know, thinking off the top of my head, two Boston firemen who were killed in the line of duty. And we played at their funeral. A police officer from the town, I mean, now, you know, killed responding to a crime.

And, you know, he had a tattoo of us, and you know, we showed up for his family. So we've got kind of personal relations in that way. But we've also always been a band that like when there's an abuse of power by the police, we'll, you know, we'll cut. We're also punk rockers, you know what I mean?

Where, you know, all cops are bastards is what a lot of punk rock is, say, and I'm also a former, you know, 35 years sober, former recovering alcoholic. Find me any real alcoholic that has 100% trust of the police department. And I'll show you someone who isn’t an alcoholic. However, you know, we treat all people on a human basis.

Case by case. The problem, you know, Phil obviously could take you way deeper than I can, but any position of power corrupts people. I. I could tell you, was security guards at the venue. I've been watching. I can tell when there's ten security guards in the barricade between us and the crowd. I can almost look and say, oh, there's the guy that looks like he's had a bad day and is probably going to try to snap someone's neck tonight, you know?

And so there's, you know, so, so as much as we've always had we give respect where respects do. So when we wrote that particular line, “too scared to join the military, too dumb to be a cop.” It was really directed at the fact that was we've always been on the like front line of the anti-fascist fascist line and go way back in punk rock.

It doesn't exist anymore. By the way, the the old story of when, you know, in England, when the National Front targeted the youth movement of punk rock and, you know, took, skinheads, which it back in the day was, you know, a youth culture of British working class kids who were mainly formed around a love of scar and reggae and Jamaican roots.

And they took disenfranchised white working class skinheads and shifted them to be politically motivated and to, you know, prey on, you know, them being young, angry kids and turn them into their footsoldiers. Of course, that spread to America. And you had the real punk rockers and real skinheads who were mortal enemy number one, racist skinheads, because it made them look bad, you know.

And so oftentimes, our shows in the early days were the meeting spots for those two groups to the fight, and they were also the meeting spots for, sometimes when we were loaded in our gear for the Nazis to show up. And, you know, we were on the front lines of all that. So having seen that throughout our career.

And now I say to people when they talk about Nazis in the scene, I go, they're not in the music scene anymore. We're small potatoes. They're on college campuses, they're in the white House. They don't have to bother with Disenfranchized youth in a punk rock show anymore. They're going straight to college campuses. And that's why when you see a group of, you know, Proud Boys or, you know, these Patriot Front or whatever, they are walking around in their khakis and mass that they're not in touch with, our music or punk rock.

They, they're, they're nerds from a college campus. No offense. To a self-proclaimed nerd. I embrace it. But, you know, you know what I mean. So that and so we've always had that beef with them. So then to see racists full on white supremacist tattoos as ice officers or Proud Boys, it's like we were really targeting them, which, by the way, I don't know the science or the real the deal, but if I was a career Ice officer or Homeland Security person that signed up to stand at the border and, you know, put a mirror under a truck that got real training and didn't get a $50,000 bonus, I'd be more bullshit than anybody at these

guys getting 47 days training, you know, who have sketchy criminal backgrounds, and they're out doing this job. I don't know if I was. That might be more bullshit than anybody. But, you know, I don't know how they all feel. So anyway, that line was, a dig at, you know, the cowboy, white supremacist people who are infiltrating ice at what seems to be a large rate, you know? Yeah.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Yeah. I mean, for whatever it's worth, I don't know that any of the new Ice officers are ever going to see that $50,000 bonus.

Ken Casey

No hell no.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Trump promised, which means that the people who have earned it are definitely not going to ever see the money.

Ken Casey

They'll get it right after they get their Doge, dividend and all the other exact kickbacks as well. Yeah.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

I think that's the same economic package.

Ken Casey

Yeah, the $50,000 isn't coming now. And if it does come, I was told it was going to be like, $10,000 a year. And if you didn't make it the full five years, you had to pay back the other ones. And that's and that's like you said, even that's even if you see nickel one in the first place.

So anyone that's joining for purely monetary reasons, putting their monetary needs over moral compass is, you know, kind of going to where it's hard in the end, anyway.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Like one of the things that Ken is, is saying that I think it's really important. And part of the reason why I was talking about I don't want to peer too deeply into the psyche of folks is because it makes it about the people. I think it's entirely appropriate to criticize folks who are deciding to join Ice right now, given what the incentives are.

Right? They're saying explicitly, hey, we want you roving the streets, hurting and terrorizing vulnerable communities, and we're going to give you money to do it. That's their ad campaign explicitly. People who respond to that, you know what? You deserve a little public critique, okay. But these are often in both military law enforcement, first responders. And these are working class folks in many cities.

The best job you can get, with a high school equivalency in terms of best paying, best benefits, is a first responder job. And often you are legitimately walking, moving towards the danger. In response to that, you can be upset with the way that law enforcement is set up without blaming individual officers for that. If you can't do that, you don't understand how systems work.

And again, there's a there's a you should go take a nap because adults are talking here. Right. It's perfectly fine to critique institutions and reserve the critique for the institutions. That's not what's happening here. Individuals are choosing to sign up for something that is morally grotesque on its face. And I, having known a bunch of folks who are legacy, and have been at Ice and Homeland Security for some time, because of the work that we do, nationally, I can tell you, Ken is not wrong.

It is. It's discouraging. It is the nicest way to say what it feels like to put your heart and soul into something and try and make it better than it would be without you, and then see what it becomes in the same way that career DOJ folks have been resigning en masse. But they stayed on to try and make the thing that they were part of better and try to prevent it from being uprooted.

So I don't I don't think you have to, you don't have to hate Ice agents or hate, cops or a hate hate, veterans to say I've got critique of American Empire, I have critique of police brutality and have a critique of this regime that is targeting vulnerable communities for terrorism. Yeah, right. And again, while I'm saying that in a way that sounds like I'm intellectually daft, like all you got to do is say, fuck those guys.

Y'all okay? And everybody understands what you mean. It's not that complicated of an issue in the living of it. Yeah, right. Which is why you can make music about it that resonates with so many people.

Ken Casey

Also, I would also say that, you know, you know, obviously there's a lot of people that are part of the MAGA movement that are, you know, first responders, the military, of course. But you know what? There's a real lot of people that cosplay with their flak jackets and, you know, they can't wait to put out, you know, and it just seems like so many of those, you know, I didn't serve.

But boy, do I think I'm in the military now because I'm watching the streets, you know, so the costume of it is also what we were trying to do at the pageantry, that mentality. Yeah. Yeah. You know stolen valor in a way you know. Yeah.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

And the stolen valor gets really dangerous when you get people realizing, oh, if I wear a mask and a flak jacket, I am in literally the same uniform as federal officers. So there have been hundreds of false detentions by people who are cosplaying and then taking people who look like immigrants to them off the streets. Right. One of the things that you want to think about when you talk about history is, what is the legacy of the people who try and act like you and people trying to act like ice are kidnappers and child abusers?

And folks that need to be arrested for their actions. That's part of what needs to be said in this moment to make sure that we're not flinching in the face of reality, like how ugly this is. It's a truly ugly moral moment. And if we're not saying it will be vulnerable to getting worse.

Matt Whyte

And we don't need to look to Nazi Germany. For, a point of reference, we have it in this country is, as you point out in that time article, like asking people who have been at the business end of state sponsored violence, fire hoses, batons, dogs. It's happened right here already. I know we just got a couple more minutes.

You know, you mentioned about. Well, actually, I want to know two things. One, what do we know about friction between, law enforcement, as we've known it, and Ice agents?

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Yeah, that's a super, sticky area. And I'm so glad that you asked. So we just put out a report that people's safety, at the center of policing, equity, in collaboration with a bunch of immigration, groups. And we're looking to launch some new initiatives based on that. But it's a terrifying situation.

So the way that local law enforcement and federal agencies usually work is they have memorandum of understanding or memoranda of, like, like, collaborative agreements. They're written documents that are not binding, but like, hey, this is how we're going to treat each other when you show up. We're going to do this when we need your help.

We'll ask about this work. ICE has been showing up in ways that sets fire to those agreements. Yeah, right. And the result is that, in New Haven, you had a mother who's driving her. I think it was eight and 13 year old children. The grandmother is in the car. She is held at gunpoint by masked folks who are unidentified, pulled out of her car.

Kids are left there screaming and terrified. Grandmother is left there screaming and terrified. And at no point in time until she's at the detention facility does she know that it was ice that had taken her. I want to be clear. That's kidnapping. Legally, that is kidnapping. When law enforcement shows up to that, to an armed kidnapping, what are they supposed to do?

Because in another circumstance, they would shoot those people, right? In this circumstance, they're thinking, should I shoot them or are they part of the federal government? There's no reason to set up the world that way. But this federal government decided that that's a fun situation to enter into. Right. Because of no notice that they're going to do it.

So you don't know who are the good guys or the bad guys quote unquote. Are who's a federal agent and who's an armed violent kidnapper. Right. Which by the way, in this case, I don't think that there's legally separation from that. So the lack of communication breeds an impossible situation for local and state law enforcement to manage.

They want to keep people safe, and at the same time, they don't want to escalate a situation with poorly trained folks who can surround them and have more fire power than they do. What's ended up happening is you end up with tacit collaboration where local law enforcement, against the wishes of the local community, formally collaborates with Ice, or just passive collaboration, where they don't want to send someone because they could end up in armed conflict with federal agents.

Because the federal agents have failed to collaborate with local folks are tired of that. And so they're trying to figure out what legal recourse they've got. The legal ground is a little bit murky. So they're passing laws. You've seen California do this. The TSA was up until apparently recently all the way shut down ice and home security is shut down for the same reasons of California passing the bill that says if you're a law enforcement of any kind, you can't wear a mask, law enforcement, any kind of hat, identify yourself.

Illinois and other states are passing data collection acts. Right. But those are even that weak T against armed elements of the state showing up and not letting you know that they're there in advance and engaging in what is truly illegal behavior under color of federal law that then local law enforcers got to decide. Am I going to step in and protect the Constitution?

At risk of being the center and in the spotlight of this, again, narcissistic fraction of a man in the white House, or am I going to protect my job and watch as something that is illegal happens in front of me, knowing that the law isn't going to protect me? Right. It's an impossible situation that we've put local and state law enforcement into.

We got to figure out what the right remedies are. But I know a lot of local law enforcement who are incredibly pissed off about this situation. Line officers and chiefs and, you know, mayors and city councils who are looking for a way out.

Matt Whyte

Well, we lost Ken.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Ken, did we out punk rock Ken? Is that what happened?

Matt Whyte

Yeah, I don't think so. Probably not. Thanks a million. Phil, I, I really appreciate it. I'd love to stay in touch. And, I hope, hope to have you back on, Ken can't thank you enough for doing this as well.

Ken Casey

I can listen to Phil talk all day. Very enlightening. And, Matt, you're amazing as well, so thank you.

Phillip Atiba Solomon

Thank you both. Ken, I have listened to you sing all day. And as, the two saddest words in the English language, a former musician, as a former singer and bass player. It's wonderful to be here talking with you. And I appreciate the work in the arts that you got to produce. Thanks.

Matt Whyte

Thank you both. Cheers. Take care. Sing for Science is co-produced by Talkhouse and made possible in part by a grant from the Simons Foundation. Our music is by Panorama. Social media manager is Bailey Constas and our digital producer is Keenan Kush. If you like Sing for Science the best way you can support us is to give us a review.

Matt Whyte

Tell a friend about the show and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice for more information and show notes. For today's episode, please visit our website, singforscience.org and follow us on social media @singforscience. Thanks for listening.