This is Julio's Corner, my corner of the internet, where I talk about whatever is on my mind.

This is my audio diary, where I'll dump my thoughts into the ether for anyone to hear.

I'll mostly talk about stuff I've watched, read, or listened to, but I may get introspective at times and reflect on my life or on society at large.

This episode is being recorded on Monday, June 16th, 2025.

And it's been another two weeks or so since the last episode.

A couple of random thoughts here.

The reason why I didn't record the previous weekend was because I was busy filling out job applications, trying to better my financial situation without no real, no end result.

At least not an end result I was looking for, which was, you know, a new job.

Or at least with an interview.

So I applied to some jobs, but no one wrote back.

So I am still in the same rut that I've been in all this time, which sucks for me.

So yeah, and this episode that I wanted to do was going to be an episode about a TV show called Persons of Interest.

I wanted to break it down, get all, you know, get really intro, analytical on it.

But with everything that's been happening these past two weeks, it just seems very trite to talk about entertainment when the world's on fire.

So yeah, so that's the situation in my life.

And of course, I got a mail-in ballot for the New York City Mayoral Democratic Primary, which I will be filling out.

It's a ranking voting system this time around.

So I'm going to be voting for Zoran, of course.

He's my number one.

And I got a, I think Lander will be my number two since they both are co-endorsing each other.

Stringer might be number three for me, or maybe this female Harris that AOC is recommending as her second choice.

And so yeah, that's on my docket for later today, after I'm done with this recording.

But yeah, that's been my, that's my personal random news on me and what's happening personally with me.

And like I said, there's so much going on.

So we're going to talk about what's been going on these past two weeks, because essentially it's pretty much the same, because it happened, you know, some of the things that we're going to talk about started last weekend, which is another reason why I didn't record.

Just it was just so overwhelming emotionally for me, that doing a show about persons of interest was just so pointless.

It was it was trite.

And but now I decided, you know what, scratch that, that that'll be a show for another time in the future.

Let's talk about what's happening right now.

So to make things a little to to lighten the mood, so to speak, I'm going to use my little seldom used ring music tone for the news.

So here we go.

So yeah.

So first off, as you know, as I mentioned in the past, ICE agents have been illegally grabbing immigrants from the streets, from their jobs, from the court system, you know, from court houses, I should say.

You know, just legal immigrants going to their depositions, and then as soon as they leave the court and go to the hallway, they're apprehended.

But some are also getting apprehended at their jobs, some are getting apprehended at Home Depot, some were getting apprehended at farms, because, you know, a lot of these immigrants are farm workers.

And so this has been happening for some time now, because originally, according to Trump, the ICE agents were going to apprehend the criminals and the worst of the worst that are illegally in our country.

But of course, that number, if there were really that number, maybe 10,000 out of 100,000 immigrants that have been apprehended, because it's less than 1% of immigrants in this country that are criminals, because they don't want to draw attention, because they're trying to get their green cards and become citizens of this country.

You know, that's the whole, that should be the whole, what's the word I'm looking for?

Like, that's the history, wow, the history of this country is immigration.

Like, you know, we have the Statue of Liberty here in New York, in downtown, across downtown, near Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty is out there floating.

For all to see, you know, give us your dirty, your poor, or your, I don't know all the words of the Statue of Liberty, but it's supposed to be the, we're supposed to be the beacon of hope for immigrants, for an opportunity to come to this country and, you know, better their, you know, have a better future.

But that's just a bag of lies because obviously, what we're currently doing is we're trying to grab all these immigrants of color because, you know, white immigrants are okay.

There's been recent Twitter messages out there by a bunch of right-wing lunatics like Matt Walsh and the guy from Prager, Charles Kirk and some others basically saying, we don't want immigrants from third-world countries, which, you know, we don't say that anymore.

We call them developing nations, but no, now they're really taking off their masks of racism, and they're saying, we don't want immigrants from third-world countries.

Essentially, what they want is Europeans or people that are white, white immigrants.

But anyways, so all of these, all these, as I said, all these illegal raids are happening by the ICE agents in masks, with no identification, in unmarked vehicles.

Some of these people are just being deputized on the spot.

Some of these are Proud, are Proud Boys, which are a white nationalist terrorist group in this country.

Some of these guys have Nazi tattoos, but now they have the power of the government behind them as ICE agents.

They're also going into schools.

And so yeah, a lot of this is happening.

So because of this, in LA last weekend, and all this past week, they started protest, they started having anti-ICE protests in LA, peaceful anti-ICE protest.

And of course, the president, Donald Trump, started escalating tensions over there by federalizing the National Guard, and then sending the Marines, and doing all this on his own authority, illegally, he tried to use a clause which I'm not going to know the minutiae, so I'm not going to pretend to say that I know, but he used some kind of legal clause to justify sending the Marines and federalizing the National Guard without realizing that even that in the clause that he used, it states that you're supposed to get the permission of the governor of California.

And, of course, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, did not authorize this.

In fact, he said the police of Los Angeles are handling this situation fine.

These protests were peaceful, nothing's going on until you sent in the National Guard and started attacking these protests.

And of course, that just escalated the anger and resentment.

Some property was damaged, you know, some Waymo cars, which I guess are these automated cars in California for people who are...

don't want to use people with Uber or Lyft.

They're going to use these Waymo cars over there.

And now you have a centrist and everyone saying, oh, look at these protests, they're violent.

When it's just a couple of cars, they're not people that are getting damaged.

And let's look at the bigger picture here, like what's worse, a couple of cars on fire or the 100,000 immigrants that are being corralled and illegally deported from this country, with only maybe 10,000 of these 100,000 that are actually criminals.

The others are legal immigrants who are either A, in the middle of getting their green cards, or B, already have their green cards.

Some may even be citizens and and so on.

So that's happening.

And on top of that, there's already been reports, as per Kyle Kalinsky's podcast that I listened to this week, there are reports that Trump also wants to bring these type of actions to other blue states, to other blue cities like New York City, my city, Chicago, and Seattle.

But, you know, because those are all sanctuary cities.

So he's targeting those cities, because these are cities that are set up to help protect immigrants, and so by attacking these cities, he's just further showing his racism, and also by doing so, he's helping to, you know, bolster his reputation amongst the racist people that voted him into office, which is a loud minority.

And the reason why you know this is a loud minority, we'll get into later on.

And as I mentioned, all these illegal actions that he's doing, he's doing it to help set up what Project 2025 is calling the unitary executive theory.

Basically, he wants to, he wants a dictatorship, and so he's going to use these actions, never mind that he's been doing a lot of illegal things already that are against the Constitution, but there's no opposition that's happening, so he just keeps pushing the envelope.

And only now, you have Governor Gavin Newsom, he sued Trump for these actions, and the courts have appealed, not appealed, they approved his, the court, what's the word, they judged in his favor, so they denied Trump's actions as legal.

So the Marines and the National Guard should go back to the authority of Gavin Newsom, and the Marines should be going back to wherever they're supposed to be going.

But as far as I know, that hasn't happened, even though the courts already ruled in Gavin Newsom's favor.

So you have that going on.

He also renamed a couple of forts.

He named them Confederate, you know, former Confederate soldiers.

So you have Fort Lee, which is General Robert E.

Lee from the Confederate Army.

I think Fort Bragg is another one.

There was like four of them.

He renamed them from whatever they were.

They were originally the names of Confederate leaders, but they had been since renamed because obviously the Confederates were traitors and seditionists of this country.

But Trump is renaming them once again to these Confederate leaders because even though supposedly he is for the Constitution and he's for patriotism, he's renaming these forts to these seditionists as a calling card, as a flag to the really the mega the mega Republicans out there that yeah we're going to make America white again.

That's essentially his whole thing.

We don't want immigrants of color in this country and we want it to be all white.

We want to get rid of all the immigrants that are currently here.

And we just want to white everything up.

Despite all that, this Saturday, June 14th, was Flag Day, which for people who know what Flag Day is, it's supposed to be a remembrance of the Continental Army, who was fighting for, you know, and the creation of the first American flag of the 13 colonies.

And, you know, the Continental Army was set up to help protect this nation from the monarchy and for free, and they were about, you know, free speech and the Constitution of these United States.

And here we are with a leader currently in office who stands for the opposite things about this country.

If you're for the, if you're for your freedom of rights and you're protesting the fascistic actions of this leader, he calls you unpatriotic and he calls you a seditionist, and he wants to send the army after you, which does not de-escalate violence of any kind.

It only escalates it because the Marines are not about crowd control.

The Marines are all about killing.

That's what the Marines are trained to do.

They're not trained to help control populations.

They're trained to go to war and kill people.

That's what the Marines are for.

So anyway, he wanted to have this military parade on June 14th, Saturday, which was also his birthday.

And he wanted it to be, you know, this big affair with tanks and soldiers in garbs of different eras of the military history.

He wanted planes and helicopters and, you know, just show the might of the Army.

And he's saying it's to celebrate World War II, which is on, but this, but it's Flag Day, which is not about war, it's about freedom, and it's also his birthday.

So really, he's using Flag Day as a shield, because what he really wanted was this big party to celebrate himself, because he was always bragging in the past how you have all these dictators in the world, you have Xi Jinping in China, you have the guy in North Korea, I don't remember his name at the moment, you have all these dictators that have all these military parades to celebrate the grandeur of their great leader.

And of course, France also has their military parade for Bastille Day, the day that they got liberated from the Germans.

So anyway, he doesn't see the difference between Flag Day and Bastille Day.

Bastille Day is a celebration of this country that was invaded by a foreign nation, by Germany, Nazi Germany, and got freed.

And yeah, we did help them, but the whole purpose is celebrating their freedom.

Whereas Flag Day is about celebrating our freedoms, but he just wants to show off the military because he wants to show off his might.

So anyways, while this is happening, there was an organized grassroots movement called the No Kings protest that was happening throughout the country.

There's a website, nokings.org, I'll have it in the show notes.

And they wanted to have these protests throughout the country on the same day to show that we are not happy with the actions of this president in office.

We're not happy with what he's doing with ICE because what he's doing is illegal.

You shouldn't be sending the military to these sanctuary cities or to any city to help ICE round up immigrants because we're not at war.

You're not going after criminals.

You're going after mothers and children and just people looking for work at Home Depot and at 7-Eleven or at places of work like the farms, farmlands or factories and so on, auto garages and things like that.

So yeah, so these no-kings protests were happening throughout the country, especially everywhere, except Minnesota.

I'll get back to Minnesota in a moment.

So the one good bit of news about June 14th, Saturday, was that when Trump was having this big parade to celebrate him, essentially, but you know, he's doing it for World War II veterans or whatever, even though they've cut all these benefits from the veterans, so he doesn't really care about them.

He just likes to use them to help bolster his image or whatever.

So as he was having this parade, you could clearly see in the video footage, that practically no one was there except for those that had to attend.

So you had his people there, you had the people in the parade, you had some paid audience members, I guess they had to pay some fillers, but it was not enough to really make it look like a successful event, because no one went to go there, they didn't care.

No one wants to celebrate a dictator in this country.

That's why I say that his mega follower fan base is a loud minority, because they are loud on the internet, right, on Twitter and Facebook and what have you, like you hear them everywhere, because their voices are elevated, for everyone to be saturated with their opinions and whatnot.

But the reality is that the majority of the people in this country are not gung-ho like they are.

And that was exemplified by the fact that no one really showed up, practically no one showed up, to the flag day parade, the military parade that he had in DC.

However, for the No Kings protest throughout the country, millions showed up.

Now, Minnesota was the one place where it didn't happen, and the reason for that is that a Minnesota senator was shot, and I think his wife was killed.

Hold on, let me look that up.

So, yeah, there was a guy named Vance Bolter.

He actually just recently got arrested for the fatal shooting of Minnesota rep Melissa Hortman and her husband, who got...

Oh, okay, so Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot, and also Senator John Hoffman was wounded, him and his wife.

So four people were shot, and it was done by this guy named Vance Bolter, who I believe was a lawmaker.

Oh, never mind, no.

Okay, so I don't know what his occupation is, but he got captured.

So because of that shooting that happened, Minnesota was the one place where the No Kings protests were canceled, but everywhere else throughout the country, they were a big success, and it just further exemplified for Trump that, no, we do not agree with your actions.

Right now, what you're doing is wrong.

It's fascistic, and we are not a fascistic nation.

We are supposed to be, at most, a republic, at the least a republic.

Ideally, we would like to be a democratic country, but, you know, we are a republic.

And, you know, you are an elected official.

You are a public servant of this grand nation.

We do not serve your whims.

You're supposed to serve the whims of the country, even though that hasn't really been the case because our political leaders cater to the moneyed interests.

But that's another story.

So you have that happening.

On top of that, we have Robert F.

Kennedy, our anti-vaxxer who's head of our health departments.

And he recently fired the entire CDC vaccine advisory panel because as I mentioned, he is an anti-vaxxer.

He believes in alternative medicine.

He was a big anti-vaxxer advocate during the whole COVID-19 epidemic.

And naturally, he was put into Trump's cabinet.

So the guy who was against medicine, against modern medicine, is the one in charge of it.

And even though he says he's not against all vaccines, he just got rid of the advisory panel for vaccines, which is just going to further destroy the fabrics of our government that's keeping everything together.

We're going to go in...

We're going into the dark ages, we're regressing as a nation, which is insane.

Internationally, we have...

You have the whole Greta Thunberg...

Tom Thunberg?

I can't say her name.

Greta Thunberg.

She was in a flotilla trying to go to Israel.

Not Israel, well, specifically, she was trying to go to Gaza so she can give them food and medical supplies.

It was a peaceful envoy.

And of course, she was essentially kidnapped by the Israeli government in international waters.

So it wasn't like she was in Israel or in Gaza at the time.

She was in the ocean, in international waters.

So no nation controls that area that she was at.

But they invaded her boat, captured her, brought her into Israel, and then deported her as if she was an illegal immigrant of their country.

And yeah, it just shows how inhumane Israel is being with the Palestinians over there.

Like, they won't allow anyone to bring food or medical supplies to them.

They want to continuously starve them off, because they're all about genociding these indigenous people of the Gaza Strip.

And on top of that, not only did Israel do that, but they also attacked Iran, because why not?

Let's attack everyone around.

Let's try to kill off this group of people in our border, within our border, in our outside prison that we created.

Let's attack one of our border nations over here, Iran, and let's play the victim while we're the aggressors, because that's the Israeli playbook.

If you say, free Palestine, you're being anti-Semitic.

If you're saying, Israel shouldn't attack Iran, you are being anti-Semitic, because obviously, Iran is trying to build nuclear missiles, even though they were in talks with the US to bring back the Iran nuclear deal that Trump, in his previous term, got rid of, because it was a deal that was put in place by Obama.

And so naturally, he wanted to get rid of anything Obama created, because he's an idiot, and he's petty, and now he wants to put his name on it.

So now he was trying to basically bring back the Iran deal, but it's the Trump-Iran deal, not the Barack Obama-Iran deal.

But that's not even an issue.

That's a non-starter now, because Israel basically put a kibosh to that situation by attacking Iran and killing a lot of the Iranian leaders that were involved with those talks, you know, killed a bunch of top generals in Iran.

And of course, Iran retaliated and attacked them.

And then, as I mentioned, oh, what was us?

We're being attacked by Iran.

Dumbasses, you attacked them first.

What do you expect?

So that's happening over there.

So right now, Israel and Iran are bombing each other.

But of course, Israel has the advantage of having US as an ally.

And this could possibly escalate to a World War III situation.

Here's hoping that doesn't happen.

But we shall see.

And in lesser serious news, you have this whole anti-trans issue going on with Riley Gaines and Simone Biles.

So Riley Gaines is this woman who tied for fifth place with a trans woman.

And at first, when it initially happened, it wasn't a big deal.

In fact, she actually congratulated her co-fifth place swimmer of that race.

But then she realized, oh, wait, I can make money by being anti-trans.

And since then, she gave up swimming because she was bad at it.

It wasn't like she lost first place to a trans woman.

She lost fifth place.

So you're not even in the top three.

You're not getting gold, you're not getting silver, you're not getting bronze.

You're getting a piece of paper saying, thank you for participating, essentially, is what you got.

Fifth place.

So you're complaining about trans women are have an unfair advantage.

When the person you lost to was for fifth place, it wasn't like you lost first place or second place or third place.

You lost fifth place.

You're, if not for your anti-trans advocacy, you would be an unknown.

You would be a nobody at this point.

No one would remember your name because they would only remember the first three.

If even, most people would just remember who wins gold.

Everyone remembers Michael Phelps.

No one remembers who got silver or bronze when Michael Phelps won gold.

Same thing with Simone Biles.

She is a gold medalist winner for the US gymnastic team.

Who got second place?

I don't know.

I do know Simone Biles.

So anyways, there was this high school softball team that recently won some tournament or whatever.

And of course, Riley Gaines tried to dox them because why not?

Let's attack high school students because you're a miserable anti-trans, you're transphobic, and you want to harass these poor women.

And you're inciting hate against them because wherever they posted the pictures showing them for the high school softball team from Minnesota, wherever they posted it, they turned off comments so that no one could leave comments because why harass teenagers?

And of course, she made that an issue like, oh, I wonder why you turned off your comments so no one could talk about that your best player is trans.

And so naturally, you know, the transphobic people out there were foaming at the mouth to go after these poor innocent high schoolers.

And then Simone Biles entered the fray and essentially, you know, called her a bully.

It wasn't even that much of a pro-trans stance because she said, because she even, because then even in her in her commentary, it was like, you know, why not talk about making a trans category for competitive sports or whatever?

And and more importantly, we're talking about high school, right?

We're not even talking about college because you already, thanks to your anti-trans advocacy, the NCAA has gotten, has there were only out of, I don't know how many colleges and how many hundreds and hundreds of athletes that are in the NCAA, only like 10 athletes out of hundreds, maybe thousands, only 10 were trans athletes.

And now these 10 athletes are no more because the NCAA has recently, you know, changed the regulations that have made it, that have banned trans athletes from participating in collegiate sports competitively.

So now trans can't even participate in college.

So all they have is high school and middle school and elementary.

And now you want to even take, you want, well, that's not enough for you.

They don't really participate in professional sports all that much, if any.

You know, the Olympics are probably, well, yeah, the Olympics are probably it.

Because that's who, you know, she lost, she tied fifth place for.

You weren't even, oh my God, she tied fifth place for Christ's sake.

It's not a big deal.

You didn't get top three.

But anyways, so you got, you made it hard for trans athletes to participate professionally.

You took away their collegiate avenue.

So that's not enough.

Now you want to go after high schoolers.

So anyways, Simone Biles, you know, spoke up against this anti-trans stance of this female gains and essentially just, she called her a bully and basically just said, stop being a bully.

Stop bullying these high schoolers.

This is essentially her message.

Her message isn't really about transphobia so much as bullying unnecessarily, like being cruel and being a bully.

And then of course, Riley Gaines upped the anti by saying, you know, insinuating in transphobic, manner, that the trans people are sex or sexual predators essentially.

And how would you like it if you, Simon Simone Biles, who was a victim of sexual abuse by this medical doctor for the Olympic Gymnastic Team, how you who've been sexually assaulted or been a victim of sexual assault, why would you then force other women to be sexually assaulted by trans people?

Because that's what she's trying to assinuate, that trans people are sexual predators.

And then she put a picture of Simone Biles along with her abuser together in that tweet, which, if you look at your argument, it's so, it's a dumb argument, because as you just stated, Simone Biles was sexually abused by a man who identifies as a man, who did not say he was trans or pretend to be trans.

He was just a man dressed like a man and was allowed to have access to these women who he took advantage of.

So, your whole insinuation that predators pretend to be trans so that they can get access to their victims is a weak argument, because they don't need to do, they do not need to go through those efforts to do so.

They just flat out abuse their authority and power.

So yeah, that is their broken logic in their anti, in their transphobic responses and whatever.

Wow, I got through this a lot faster than I thought I was going to.

Maybe because I'm just bad at really breaking down political news and whatnot.

So yeah, these are the serious matters that were happening throughout our nation these past two weeks, past two weekends.

And with all this being said and done, talking about a TV show just seemed pointless.

Like why?

I just can't separate.

I know my show is supposed to be about whatever is on my mind.

And well, yeah, I guess that's the point.

This is what's in my mind right now.

So with all this on my mind, it just, talking about a TV show just seemed, it just seemed, yeah, pointless.

I can't even, my words are failing me.

My vocabulary is failing me.

I just can't, I can't justify it.

I can't rationalize TV talk at this time.

We'll see about next episode.

But for now, this is probably going to be what we'll be talking about in the future.

More political stuff, just because it's getting more and more serious with each passing day.

We're only five months into this presidency.

We have three more years, three years and seven months more to go.

Unless the guy gets impeached, which is highly unlikely, since the Democratic Party is not lifting a finger, except for a few small minority dissenting voices in your Bernie Sanders and your AOCs out there.

With those few exceptions, the leaders of the Democratic Party are not saying much about anything.

Or at most, they might bring it up to safe face, but they're not really doing it in a serious manner.

Like Schumer recently brought it up in...

I don't even remember what event it was, but he brought it up on the Congress floor, just to bring it up.

And then he said what they say to cede the floor to someone else, which was just so lame.

It's just...

It's pathetic.

We need him out of office.

We need to get more progressive-minded leaders in office, which is why for New York City, Zoran is the way to go.

I hope he will be a beacon to other dissenting voices out there that are debating whether or not they should put their hat in the ring to also get into office, whether locally in their districts or cities or states, or whether they want to get into national leadership, like the Senate or Congress.

Anyways, that wraps up the show.

If you have any questions, comments, or any thoughts you like to share, you can reach me by the contact form on my website, or click on the contact me link in the show notes.

If you're feeling extra generous, you can click on the donate link in the show notes as well, and send some dollars my way.

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And as always, thank you for listening.