Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to take It happened here a podcast about things
Speaker 3: falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 4: And I'm your host, Bia Wong.
Speaker 3: This is one of the most acute places where everything
Speaker 3: is falling apart and one of the most acute attempts
Speaker 3: to put it back together again. We're just going to
Speaker 3: get right into it with me to talk about a
Speaker 3: potential Brench strike that there is significant organization going on
Speaker 3: for right now in Minneapolis as a reaction to the
Speaker 3: federal occupation. Is Tara Rogavier, the director of the Tenant
Speaker 3: Union Federation. Tara, Welcome to the show. Thanks, So, okay,
Speaker 3: let's rewind a little bit. Can you talk a bit
Speaker 3: about what the specific conditions of the occupation and also
Speaker 3: just sort of the preoccupation world for tenants got us
Speaker 3: to a point where there is potentially the largest restrict
Speaker 3: we've seen in a century being organized right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 5: First of all, thank you so much for having me
Speaker 5: and I am boarding live from the Twin Cities, where
Speaker 5: we've been in a really intense organizing drive now for
Speaker 5: many weeks. And of course the people of the Twin
Speaker 5: Cities have very ferociously fought back against this federal occupation
Speaker 5: for nearly three months. But I appreciate your question because
Speaker 5: I think actually to take us back a little bit
Speaker 5: is critical to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in now.
Speaker 5: So the first and most basic thing to say is
Speaker 5: the rent is too damn high. Yep, pop looking not
Speaker 5: afford the rent in any corner of the country. You know,
Speaker 5: it's been true for many years now that a person
Speaker 5: earning minimum wage cannot afford a two bedroom apartment in
Speaker 5: any American county, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural. And
Speaker 5: as our rents go up, the conditions of our homes
Speaker 5: get worse. So what we have taken as saying these
Speaker 5: days is that we're paying higher rents than we've ever
Speaker 5: paid for the worst conditions we've ever endured.
Speaker 1: And I know you know that.
Speaker 5: As a tenant and as a former tenant organizer, your goal,
Speaker 5: but so many of our people are living this reality
Speaker 5: every day. And you know I organize. I'm based in
Speaker 5: Missouri and I helped to found and organize with Casey Tenants,
Speaker 5: and increasingly we're organizing tenants in places like Raytown, Missouri,
Speaker 5: on the outskirts of Kansas City, and the stakes are
Speaker 5: so high, and I really want to make sure listeners
Speaker 5: are aware of this. All of us are aware of it,
Speaker 5: But just to put a fine point on it, when
Speaker 5: you get priced out of a place like Chicago, you
Speaker 5: might end up in a place like Kansas City. When
Speaker 5: you get priced out of Kansas City, you might end
Speaker 5: up in a place like Raytown, Missouri. When you get
Speaker 5: priced out of Retown, Missouri, there is no place else
Speaker 5: to go, and you're just stuck renting from the landlords
Speaker 5: of last resort, the people who are very keen to
Speaker 5: exactly how desperate the tenant condition is today, and then
Speaker 5: they exploit that by keeping us living in filth and
Speaker 5: hiking the rents at every turn. So that's some of
Speaker 5: the context that brings us into this moment, and that
Speaker 5: will be the context underlying every crisis following this one.
Speaker 5: And I think that's a really important thing to note,
Speaker 5: because the story I'm about to tell you about what's
Speaker 5: going on here is then also a story of possibility
Speaker 5: about what might go on in every crisis that we
Speaker 5: encounter from this point on. So we started organizing a
Speaker 5: tenant union at Twin Cities Wide tenant Union at the
Speaker 5: end of January, and the reason for that is that
Speaker 5: the tenants of the Twin Cities had essentially been organizing
Speaker 5: unions for the two months preceding that as a way
Speaker 5: of fighting ice.
Speaker 1: Every building has a group chat right now.
Speaker 5: Every building has someone distributing whistles and zines so that
Speaker 5: people get information about how to spot ice, what to do,
Speaker 5: advice is there. People are organizing mutual aid to take
Speaker 5: care of their neighbors. That is essentially the work of
Speaker 5: a tenant union.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 5: So all we've done in the last couple of weeks
Speaker 5: is add some kind of structure and formality to the
Speaker 5: way that tenants have already gotten organized under this federal occupation.
Speaker 3: Could I ask a quick question here about how how
Speaker 3: the sort of citywide federation came together. Yeah, because there's
Speaker 3: something I've seen attempted before, but it is pretty difficult.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think this won't
Speaker 5: surprise you that in a moment of crisis, Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: actually easier than in other circumstances, unfortunately, to get people organized.
Speaker 5: So a process that might have otherwise taken months to
Speaker 5: sort of align all the various entities organizing tenants in
Speaker 5: the Twin Cities took a matter of four and a
Speaker 5: half days.
Speaker 4: It's astonishing. Yeah, it's the best I've ever seen anything
Speaker 4: like this mid.
Speaker 5: Right, And that's not to say it was easy, right,
Speaker 5: it took a lot, and you know, it took a
Speaker 5: lot from us as the Tenant Union Federation, but more
Speaker 5: to the point, it took a lot from tenants here
Speaker 5: who have been organizing in their own formations for many
Speaker 5: months preceding this crisis. So there's a local organization we're
Speaker 5: working with called Inqualinosunidos. They've been organizing for ten years
Speaker 5: and they've a base of mostly Latino and Somali tenants
Speaker 5: all across the city. Then there's a crew that's been
Speaker 5: organizing in South Minneapolis, the South Minneapolis Tenants Union. Then
Speaker 5: there's tenants to have been organizing in Saint Paul. Then
Speaker 5: there's tenants to have been organizing autonomously in their properties
Speaker 5: and forming tenant associations and marching on the landlord. So
Speaker 5: what we tried to do as quickly as possible was
Speaker 5: kind of assemble all of these forces and really focus
Speaker 5: ourselves on the project of building something that was bigger
Speaker 5: than some of its parts, that could create the potential
Speaker 5: for enduring power out of this moment. And the thing
Speaker 5: that we said in those four and a half days
Speaker 5: of sprint as we try to assemble this force is
Speaker 5: the Tenant Union is good for protection today and power tomorrow.
Speaker 5: So this is just an experiment, right, We actually don't
Speaker 5: know what's going to come of this, but it's an
Speaker 5: experiment that I personally feel extremely invested in because I,
Speaker 5: like you, have lived through many moments of uprising and
Speaker 5: activation in the last several years, and unfortunately, more often
Speaker 5: than not, that uprising and that activation eventually evaporates, and
Speaker 5: the Tenant Union offers one potential vehicle to hold some
Speaker 5: of that activation into the future and to channel it
Speaker 5: into real and enduring power.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's another aspect of this before we get into
Speaker 3: what's happening right now that I was really interested in,
Speaker 3: which is how did the sort of connections and organizational
Speaker 3: bonds with labor unions start happening, because that's another really
Speaker 3: cool feature of this that's pretty unique.
Speaker 5: Yeah, totally unprecedented, and even I, yeah, my mind kind
Speaker 5: have blown right. A sort of contextual piece that's important
Speaker 5: is that the people of Minnesota are built different. There's
Speaker 5: a longstanding alignment partnership relationship among organized labor and between
Speaker 5: labor and community organizations here that sort of doesn't have
Speaker 5: a comparison anywhere else in the country. And I might
Speaker 5: be speaking out of turn, but I've never seen anything
Speaker 5: like this. I've never seen this depth of alignment among
Speaker 5: organized labor, between labor and community and so that context
Speaker 5: is really important to understand because then I think in
Speaker 5: this moment of crisis, labor is much more open to
Speaker 5: a call from community groups and from tenants then they
Speaker 5: might be in other types of situations. So, you know,
Speaker 5: we really leaned on the local relationship and the depth
Speaker 5: of relationship between groups like Inculinosnitos and these like labor
Speaker 5: tables that have existed, and you know, further important context
Speaker 5: is like groups like SCIU Local twenty six, we're leading
Speaker 5: the call for this general strike day on January twenty third,
Speaker 5: and there was this incredible table of labor leadership that
Speaker 5: came together to sort of lead that day.
Speaker 3: Can you explain for our listeners, like, when you're talking
Speaker 3: about it like a labor table, can you explain what
Speaker 3: that is?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean, essentially, as far as I understand it, there's
Speaker 5: just a really regular conversation that labor leaders are having
Speaker 5: together and these days, I think more often than not,
Speaker 5: it's not just labor.
Speaker 1: It's labor.
Speaker 5: And then they've pulled in partners from community groups and
Speaker 5: tenant unions and some of the like resists informations as well,
Speaker 5: And that also is remarkable. Right I'm saying this as
Speaker 5: though it's just kind of like, you know, fact of
Speaker 5: the matter. It's amazing that labor leadership in a context
Speaker 5: like this is in touch enough that they understand who's
Speaker 5: leading some of the decentralized autonomous resistance work and is
Speaker 5: not only aware of that, but pulling them into these
Speaker 5: kinds of war rooms that are now existing, and you know,
Speaker 5: they're talking on an almost daily basis as far as
Speaker 5: I understand it, So the ask moved pretty quickly. I
Speaker 5: think we brought a vision and a strategy to some
Speaker 5: of the closest labor partners, and their willingness to join
Speaker 5: in on the strike drive comes from an intense clarity
Speaker 5: about the stakes for their members. Any of these unions
Speaker 5: include membership that cannot make the rent on March first,
Speaker 5: and so they're not taking this lightly right, This is
Speaker 5: a big risk. They're sticking their necks out. For some
Speaker 5: that is a total moonshot. We don't know whether or
Speaker 5: not we're going to be able to pull it off,
Speaker 5: but what we know is we needed to try for
Speaker 5: some additional leverage that we didn't have a couple of
Speaker 5: days ago.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm astonished by effectively every part of this because and
Speaker 3: every fourth thing you say is like, this is the
Speaker 3: coolest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 4: But yeah, how.
Speaker 3: Fast it came together is astonishing. The willingness and speed
Speaker 3: with which labor is mobilizing is sort of is astonishing,
Speaker 3: And yeah.
Speaker 4: I don't know this is this is really really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I guess the next thing I wanted to
Speaker 3: ask about outside of sort of the how did this
Speaker 3: organization come together? Is what are the specific demands being made.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there's three main demands related to the strike drive.
Speaker 5: One is ICE out, and a part of that that
Speaker 5: I feel like you'll be interested in is ICE is in.
Speaker 5: The federal government is pretending that the reason for the
Speaker 5: invasion is economic. They're like, this is an economic intervention.
Speaker 5: ICE is here to fix the economy by deporting a
Speaker 5: bunch of people who are taking your jobs. Part of
Speaker 5: what we're trying to do is highlight what is the reality,
Speaker 5: which is that ICE is bad for the economy. ICE
Speaker 5: has devastated the economy. We're trying to heighten that contradiction
Speaker 5: between what they say they're here to do and what
Speaker 5: is actually occurring. And so we will demonstrate if we
Speaker 5: authorize a strike, what actual economic disruption looks like if
Speaker 5: tenants exercise their economic power. So that's one thing, Ice out,
Speaker 5: ICE fully out. There's all this talk about a drawdown now,
Speaker 5: but there's still ICE agents here can napping people.
Speaker 1: On a daily basis.
Speaker 5: The second thing is a statewide eviction moratorium. And this
Speaker 5: has been a demand for the last two and a
Speaker 5: half nearly three months. The governor has not moved on it.
Speaker 5: The state legislature has not moved on it. Eviction court
Speaker 5: is running quote unquote as normal during a time where
Speaker 5: there are three thousand federal agents in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Speaker 5: So demand number two is end evictions, no evictions under
Speaker 5: federal occupation and frankly not for a long time until
Speaker 5: something resembling real recovery is possible. And then demand number
Speaker 5: three is real rent relief. And the real is important
Speaker 5: here because it's not enough just to get tens of
Speaker 5: millions of dollars that we would then be expected to
Speaker 5: apply for and turn around and give to the landlord.
Speaker 5: So when we say real rent relief, we mean tens
Speaker 5: of millions of dollars that come with strings attached. If
Speaker 5: landlords benefit from what is effectively a bailout because of
Speaker 5: how bad ice is for the economy, then they should
Speaker 5: be accountab to a higher standard of tenant protections. So
Speaker 5: one I saw out to eviction, moratorium three rent relief.
Speaker 3: These are fairly moderate demands, and they remind me a
Speaker 3: lot of a series of both demands and also just
Speaker 3: the way that policy works treating the initial parts of
Speaker 3: the pandemic, where there was there were a lot of
Speaker 3: in a lot of cases there actually were like eviction
Speaker 3: moratoriums that you were never enforced as strictly as the
Speaker 3: letter of what they said, but was a thing that
Speaker 3: was implemented in conditions where suddenly people just literally couldn't
Speaker 3: work because massive external force.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a lot of what we're working with right now
Speaker 5: is groundwork that was laid during the COVID nineteen eviction
Speaker 5: crisis or the early years of it. Right the bill
Speaker 5: that we introduced in the state legislature this week is
Speaker 5: literally modeled after the Rent and Mortgage Cancelation Act that
Speaker 5: we wrote back in twenty twenty to try to get
Speaker 5: rents and mortgage is canceled when people couldn't go to
Speaker 5: work and couldn't leave the house because of the pandemic.
Speaker 5: And I think that's actually an important thing again to
Speaker 5: keep in mind, because crises like this will continue happening
Speaker 5: under today's conditions. Right We're hurtling towards deep and encompassing authoritarianism,
Speaker 5: there's escalating climate catastrophe. We're going to be in this
Speaker 5: situation much more frequently and at higher degrees of stress
Speaker 5: pretty much for the rest of our lives. So it's
Speaker 5: good actually for us to start learning from the work
Speaker 5: that we did five years ago and applying it here
Speaker 5: to borrow and steal from our past selves to build
Speaker 5: from something rather than start from scratch.
Speaker 1: I wish we didn't live under these types.
Speaker 5: Of cascading cris but that's the situation we're in. And
Speaker 5: I've been feeling so often in the last month that
Speaker 5: the only touch point in my life I have to
Speaker 5: this moment is the early months of the pandemic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that gets at the depth and
Speaker 3: seriousness of the crisis in a way that I feel
Speaker 3: like is not understood.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Outside of Minneapolis.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think, you know, like my connections, I'm
Speaker 3: from Chicago, my connections in Chicago, there was a lot
Speaker 3: of that experience. But even in Chicago, it was kind
Speaker 3: of there were places that were like that, and then
Speaker 3: you could go like three neighborhoods over and everything was
Speaker 3: sort of operating normally for the most part until the
Speaker 3: next sort of raids came, and that I feel like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, it seems to be from listening to
Speaker 3: you talk about this, that that's been the catalyzing force
Speaker 3: for all of us, that it is just constant crisis everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think you're right that people outside of
Speaker 5: the Twin Cities maybe don't understand the depths of the devastation.
Speaker 5: But just to put a fine point on it, conservative
Speaker 5: estimates show over forty seven million dollars and lost wages
Speaker 5: among people who have not been safe to go.
Speaker 1: To work in the last three months. Forty seven million
Speaker 1: dollars in lost wages.
Speaker 5: I just had a conversation with a dad yesterday whose
Speaker 5: kids go to a school where there are eighty families
Speaker 5: where the parents have not been safe to go to work.
Speaker 5: They haven't been safe to take their own children to school,
Speaker 5: and so the other parents in the school have been
Speaker 5: organizing support around them for the last two months, and
Speaker 5: they just did a round of calls through all those
Speaker 5: families this week.
Speaker 1: None of them can make March rent.
Speaker 5: So even if we're living under a supposed draw down,
Speaker 5: the crisis is still so alive. And I think that's
Speaker 5: also why you see organized labor lining up alongside us
Speaker 5: in this strip drive. They know, like Local twenty six
Speaker 5: has two hundred members that cannot make the rent on
Speaker 5: March first. So I think that that sort of like
Speaker 5: economic side of this story is not really known felt
Speaker 5: or understood outside of the Twin Cities right now, but
Speaker 5: everyone here knows and feels it because they've turned their
Speaker 5: lives inside out for the last three months to organize
Speaker 5: you know, millions of dollars in mutual aid. But here's
Speaker 5: the thing is, we cannot go fundme our way out
Speaker 5: of this scale emergency. Yeah, it requires state intervention, and
Speaker 5: that's what we're calling for.
Speaker 3: I want to come back to that that forty seven
Speaker 3: million number for a second, because I think when we
Speaker 3: hear numbers like that, we're used to hearing them in
Speaker 3: the context of you know, state agencies or multi billion
Speaker 3: dollar companies, and this is not that. This is not
Speaker 3: a situation where these people have billions of dollars and
Speaker 3: you're losing some fraction of that. This is something where
Speaker 3: every single one of those dollars matters, so acutely. It's
Speaker 3: not forty seven million dollars coming from Google's forty seven
Speaker 3: million dollars coming from people like you. And that is
Speaker 3: a unfathomable humanitarian crisis.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a huge crisis and one that kind of ludicrously.
Speaker 5: The leaders at the state and city level have suggested
Speaker 5: that everyday people should solve forty seven million dollars for
Speaker 5: everyday people is enormous. You know, through extraordinary efforts, the
Speaker 5: people of the Twin Cities have organized something in the
Speaker 5: neighborhood of six million dollars in rental assistance for their
Speaker 5: own neighbors, like mutual aid style forty seven million dollars
Speaker 5: or fifty million dollars. Seventy five million dollars is nothing
Speaker 5: for the state to figure out. Right at the city level,
Speaker 5: there's you know, something to the tune of sixty million
Speaker 5: dollar pot that's funded through sales taxes that goes into
Speaker 5: the maintenance of the downtown infrastructure. They pulled some of
Speaker 5: that money just this past week to support small businesses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about the people.
Speaker 5: Right, what about the people who have had to scrounge
Speaker 5: together what they can to take care of themselves, dip
Speaker 5: into their savings, put together funds to take care of
Speaker 5: their neighbors. That can't continue like that forever. And it's
Speaker 5: ludicrous that they've been asked to do that until now.
Speaker 5: So the strike drive is really about making that point
Speaker 5: in public that the state needs to intervene. We need solutions,
Speaker 5: We need some level of commitment from the state, the governor,
Speaker 5: the state legislature and from the cities in order to
Speaker 5: protect people, to keep them in their homes for now,
Speaker 5: and to make them hole in the long run.
Speaker 3: I think the other element of this too, and something
Speaker 3: that I remember dealing with joint tenant organizing, is that
Speaker 3: on a very basic level, this is the most brutal
Speaker 3: possible time that you can be evicted. It is February
Speaker 3: right now, it is going to be early March, which
Speaker 3: is whether that can just kill you. And on top
Speaker 3: of that, on sort of political level, where we're very
Speaker 3: used talking about eviction as like a kind of process
Speaker 3: that we're used to happening, but it's like, no, we're
Speaker 3: sending a bunch of people out into whether that will
Speaker 3: kill them, and then also just into the arms of
Speaker 3: a federal occupation. And it's the only metaphors I could
Speaker 3: think of is it's like, yeah, you're evicting people into
Speaker 3: the hands of the Gestapo, which is one of the
Speaker 3: most evil things that can even possibly be contemplated.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and yet it's just what business as usual has been.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's hard to even find the words to
Speaker 5: describe the evil. And as you said, it's not dissimilar
Speaker 5: to the first year of the COVID nineteen pandemic, before
Speaker 5: there was a vaccine, eviction courts and states like mine
Speaker 5: and Missouri were just open. Yeah, you know, the courts
Speaker 5: were open in my county starting in May of twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: a full year before we had a vaccine, yep, And
Speaker 5: people were being evicted into the streets during a time
Speaker 5: when we were told to stay home in order to
Speaker 5: protect ourselves and our neighbors from a deadly virus.
Speaker 1: So it's a really similar thing.
Speaker 5: You know, the quote unquote business as usual of state
Speaker 5: sanctioned violence, and every eviction is an act of violence.
Speaker 5: The sort of normalcy in the mundanity of that violence
Speaker 5: is practiced every day and in front of our eyes
Speaker 5: right now. And I think that that point about mundanity
Speaker 5: is important to draw out right because I think what
Speaker 5: we've seen in the Twin Cities in the last three
Speaker 5: months is really visible in your face state violence. As
Speaker 5: the ice agents have come and pupper sprayed and beat
Speaker 5: people up and of course shot and killed people as well.
Speaker 5: The day to day violence of eviction is actually harder
Speaker 5: to mobilize people around because it's so boring, it's so bureaucratic,
Speaker 5: it's so taken for granted that the state treats us
Speaker 5: like this, that the state exist to protect property over
Speaker 5: people and their lives and their needs. And that's an
Speaker 5: interesting thing to think about in this moment too, where
Speaker 5: there may or may not be a drawdown of the
Speaker 5: federal agents, but the long standing economic impact of this
Speaker 5: invasion are here, and it'll be an interesting test of
Speaker 5: people's solidarity and focus and endurance to continue showing up
Speaker 5: in the months after the agents.
Speaker 4: Go away, assuming they do, which is also.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, assuming they go away, right, But you know,
Speaker 5: I have faith, I have more faith than I've ever
Speaker 5: had in my life that the people of the Twin
Speaker 5: Cities who have so righteously fought this invasion are showing
Speaker 5: up and will continue to show up even after a
Speaker 5: time when the agents are gone, assuming that happens. And
Speaker 5: that's a critical test, that will be a turning point,
Speaker 5: because we live in a world where this mundane violence
Speaker 5: actually does happen all the time, even outside of crisis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the ability to turn the sort of rupture
Speaker 3: in these moments of crisis into an actual change to
Speaker 3: the way that everything works, I think to some extent,
Speaker 3: is the thing that we failed to do after twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: and is the thing that sort of, you know, the
Speaker 3: foreclosing of the possibilities of the uprising and of the
Speaker 3: mutual aid from the pandemic is what allowed the sort
Speaker 3: of monsters that rule our world today to sort of
Speaker 3: tear their way through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, So.
Speaker 3: I know that you have to go very soon. Is
Speaker 3: there anything else that you want to make sure people
Speaker 3: know and are there ways that people outside of the
Speaker 3: Twin Cities can support y'all?
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: We are running phone banks now through March first to
Speaker 5: increase our numbers for the strike drive. So depending on
Speaker 5: when this airs, it would be amazing for folks to
Speaker 5: join those phone banks. They can sign up at Twin
Speaker 5: Cities Tenants dot org. There's a link to sign up
Speaker 5: to join the phone banks. Tenants wherever they are should
Speaker 5: get organized and should get trained by Tenant Union Federation.
Speaker 5: We've got our big Union School training that's a virtual
Speaker 5: three month training coming up this summer. There will be
Speaker 5: more information to come on our socials and our website
Speaker 5: in the next couple of weeks and months, and they
Speaker 5: should follow along. People should follow along on social media.
Speaker 5: We're learning a lot and we're going to be sharing
Speaker 5: a lot of those lessons in public. And I think
Speaker 5: an important note to end on perhaps is that this
Speaker 5: is not a ViBe's based organizing drive. This is not
Speaker 5: social media only. You know, we're believers that words mean things,
Speaker 5: and when we say we're running a strike drive, we
Speaker 5: mean that shit. So we're running a really intensive organizing
Speaker 5: effort that may or may not work. You know, we
Speaker 5: are trying. We're trying something big and unprecedented, and part
Speaker 5: of that attempt and part of our seriousness is also
Speaker 5: acting with extraordinary discipline. So we will not authorize strike
Speaker 5: if we are anything less than ready to be on
Speaker 5: strike depending on the situation with our demands and whether or.
Speaker 1: Not they're met.
Speaker 5: People should stay tuned because I think in the way
Speaker 5: that this plays out, we will also be modeling some
Speaker 5: of what we're learning in real time around what it
Speaker 5: takes to exercise both vision and strategy and discipline as
Speaker 5: a collective in this kind of new territory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is quite frankly one of the coolest
Speaker 3: things I've ever gotten.
Speaker 4: To cover on this show. This fucking rocks.
Speaker 3: Love it, And yeah, I hope it goes well for y'all,
Speaker 3: And I hope you fucking win.
Speaker 9: Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Miya,
Speaker 9: of course, thank you for coming on. And yeah to
Speaker 9: everyone else out there, I don't know. I was just
Speaker 9: some random college kid when I started doing this, so
Speaker 9: you too can do tenants. Organizing in YouTube can do
Speaker 9: incredible things when the BOMA calls for it.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here a podcast where
Speaker 2: Robert Evans is slightly adjusting the levels on his microphone
Speaker 2: because I am in New Orleans traveling and with my
Speaker 2: friend and city resident and former guest of the pod.
Speaker 4: Carl Casarda. Carl, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 10: Thank you for having me, Robert. It's great to be back.
Speaker 10: I mean, we've done a few episodes in the past
Speaker 10: on different podcasts, and it's always I don't want to
Speaker 10: say a treat, but it's good to work with you
Speaker 10: because some of the topics, of course, are pretty rough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you and I have talked, I think primarily
Speaker 2: in our previous episodes about both like digital security and
Speaker 2: then guns, Like we've talked about people getting into shooting,
Speaker 2: We've talked about like kind of what's responsible and irresponsible
Speaker 2: when it comes to training and firearms advice. And today
Speaker 2: we're kind of starting by talking about guns in a
Speaker 2: different context, which is the fact that specifically they are
Speaker 2: often used as an excuse by a law enforcement like
Speaker 2: the fear of the fear or the reality of some
Speaker 2: in being armed as an excuse for killing them. Right,
Speaker 2: we can talk about the killing of Filando Castile in
Speaker 2: July of twenty sixteen, who was a black man who
Speaker 2: was stopped by the police and a legal license concealed
Speaker 2: carry holder and was shot during that traffic stop because
Speaker 2: the officer panicked. But the case that's right now on
Speaker 2: people's minds is the case of Alex Pretty, who was
Speaker 2: killed by border patrol earlier this year. Was wearing a
Speaker 2: gun during a confrontation, but he was just filming. They
Speaker 2: stripped him of his weapon and they shot and executed
Speaker 2: him in a case that has actually drawn criticism from
Speaker 2: gun rights organizations towards the Trump administration, which doesn't happen often.
Speaker 2: But I think the kind of point you brought up
Speaker 2: when you and I started talking about this was that
Speaker 2: what happened to Pretty, you know, not only can you
Speaker 2: go back to other cases where law enforcement have shot
Speaker 2: people legally concealed carrying, as we talked about with Castile.
Speaker 2: But this is not a thing that is the result
Speaker 2: of the escalation of the Trump administration's use of bord
Speaker 2: patrol and ice. This is a long standing behavior that
Speaker 2: border patrol agents have exercised and been exercising elsewhere for years.
Speaker 2: Like what happened to Preddy is novel because he was
Speaker 2: a white guy in the middle of Minneapolis, but it's
Speaker 2: not a novel because border patrol shot and killed somebody
Speaker 2: and then justified it by saying he had a gun.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's border patrol, and really by that extension of
Speaker 10: all law enforcement in the US. Because there's so many examples,
Speaker 10: it's almost hard to draw out just one or two.
Speaker 10: You can go for on forever for this, but there's
Speaker 10: some real prominent ones that make a lot of sense.
Speaker 10: In fact, even here in New Orleans, right after Katrina,
Speaker 10: there were a family that were crossing a bridge trying
Speaker 10: to just recover some water and supplies, and a bunch
Speaker 10: of law enforcement officers jumped into unmarked vehicles, ran over
Speaker 10: on a bridge, jumped out, and with unauthorized guns, including Ak's,
Speaker 10: unloaded on them. And it was called the Danziger Bridge shootings.
Speaker 10: I have a video on the channel about it. And
Speaker 10: this is where this gets relevant. They not only shot them,
Speaker 10: they chased them down from a moving vehicle and killed
Speaker 10: them in their back with a shotgun while he was
Speaker 10: running away. But they used the pretense of them being
Speaker 10: armed even though they were not, by dropping drop guns
Speaker 10: and calling them ham sandwiches. So again, the pretext of
Speaker 10: there were guns, therefore we're allowed to kill them is
Speaker 10: just an example of that right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is really interesting because first off, you
Speaker 2: get the gun rights people, or at least a chunk
Speaker 2: of the conservative gun rights people, who will come out
Speaker 2: whenever someone actually is carrying a gun. But the fact
Speaker 2: that this happens so much more often, where the police
Speaker 2: just kill someone and say because we thought they had
Speaker 2: a gun is also I mean, it's a human rights issue,
Speaker 2: but it is a Second Amendment issue, right You've got
Speaker 2: this weird dichotomy. We're on the right the existence of
Speaker 2: the second because it's often said that like, oh, the
Speaker 2: presence of a gun, even though you have the Second
Speaker 2: Amendment means the police can kill you. But the reality
Speaker 2: is that the existence of guns in the country means
Speaker 2: that the police have the ability to justify killing, and
Speaker 2: border patrol has the ability to just to by killing
Speaker 2: someone for no reason.
Speaker 10: Which it really brings up a really interesting question because,
Speaker 10: I mean, the Second Amendment is literally the second Amendment
Speaker 10: of the Bill of Rights, which is now right enshrined
Speaker 10: directly in the Constitution. It's the first is freedom of
Speaker 10: speech and the second one is the right to care
Speaker 10: and bare arms. And so if that is a constitutional right,
Speaker 10: even in instances where you see like Alex Pretty who
Speaker 10: is a legally licensed CCW holder still can be killed
Speaker 10: with essentially no justice being delivered for their actions, raises
Speaker 10: a very interesting question about how is a right a
Speaker 10: right when they can kill you for the presence of
Speaker 10: a gun, even when it's legally possessed and not even
Speaker 10: being used in a offensive manner, like even if it's
Speaker 10: just on you or they think there's one there, suddenly
Speaker 10: they can kill you and nothing comes of it. And
Speaker 10: that's the case with so many instances. I got a
Speaker 10: few more here if you want, Like Daniel Shaver, this
Speaker 10: is one in Masis. It's not border patrol, but it's
Speaker 10: still law enforcement. It has the precedent of the problem.
Speaker 10: Twenty sixteen, he was a Texas exterminator. He was traveling
Speaker 10: through Arizona and he was up in his hotel room
Speaker 10: and someone on the street saw him or thought they
Speaker 10: saw him messing with a firearm. Turned out it was
Speaker 10: like a pellet gun or something he used to shoot rats.
Speaker 10: But they rolled up. They called him out of his
Speaker 10: room and in a very horrific video of screaming at
Speaker 10: him and giving very inconsistent commands, along with another gun
Speaker 10: that was illegally modified or at least not authorized to
Speaker 10: be modified, where the dust on the air fifteen and
Speaker 10: said you're fucked on it. They unloaded on him while
Speaker 10: he was crawling on his hands and knees begging for
Speaker 10: his life, literally begging for his life in the video,
Speaker 10: and again really nothing came of it. In fact, the
Speaker 10: officer that shot him ended up getting back on the
Speaker 10: force just long enough to give him essentially a life
Speaker 10: pension for the trauma he received for killing the man.
Speaker 10: So the presence or the perceived presence of a firearm
Speaker 10: justified them killing him while he was crawling on his
Speaker 10: hands and knees.
Speaker 2: You know, we've talked about the warrior cop ethos and
Speaker 2: guys like Colonel Grossman who have helped to inculcate this
Speaker 2: idea in law enforcement that you are in like dire
Speaker 2: threat of immediate death every second of every day, as
Speaker 2: like the sworn law enforcement officer, and thus you have
Speaker 2: to react like this, right, Like you have to react
Speaker 2: immediately with lethal force the instant someone like reaches into
Speaker 2: a pocket or I can't tell you how many times
Speaker 2: it protests. I can remember one really clear time from
Speaker 2: twenty twenty where I was with a group of people.
Speaker 2: They were promising to arrest all of us, and I
Speaker 2: was kind of talking to the police officer basically being like,
Speaker 2: looker the mayor's most recent orders, like we are allowed
Speaker 2: to be out here. Yeah, anyway, it was a whole thing.
Speaker 2: But one of the protesters, who was just kind of
Speaker 2: standing behind me, very nervous, like reached into his pocket,
Speaker 2: I don't know what it was to get a phone,
Speaker 2: and all of the officers tend stuff, and I had
Speaker 2: to be like, don't fucking go, like keep your hands visible, man,
Speaker 2: Like we're standing in front of a bunch of and
Speaker 2: you shouldn't have to do that, right, putting your hands
Speaker 2: in your pocket shouldn't be a justification for a man
Speaker 2: pulling a gun and blowing you away with the authority
Speaker 2: of the state behind him. But the reality of the
Speaker 2: situation is that like whenever I am talking to police officers,
Speaker 2: I keep my hands in front of me and fucking visible.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it produced a situation in which regular American citizens,
Speaker 10: or we'll get into this too, the tahona Otam Reservation members,
Speaker 10: Indian members, members of the tribe. You have to be
Speaker 10: as a civilian trained how to interact with these very
Speaker 10: dangerous people who have been given a ideology of like killology.
Speaker 10: You mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, who actually never shot on
Speaker 10: anyone himself, but was one of the sea crystals of
Speaker 10: this training mentality in which he espoused, don't be afraid
Speaker 10: to shooting. That's going to happen is you might get sued,
Speaker 10: but don't worry about getting sued. It just gives you
Speaker 10: a little break and some time off the force until
Speaker 10: you get it cleared. He's on video saying this stuff,
Speaker 10: and that mentality so imbued into all of the law
Speaker 10: enforcement agencies now presents a problem where the legal right
Speaker 10: of having a firearm is I'd say very questionable that
Speaker 10: it's the right when they have all authorization to kill
Speaker 10: you for the thought or presence of a gun. And
Speaker 10: it shouldn't be civilians, just regular people that have to
Speaker 10: be trained how to deal with these dangerous agents of
Speaker 10: the state, because they're the ones that are indoctrinated into
Speaker 10: this fear mindset when we're prayed to at this point
Speaker 10: because they can kill you and nothing seems to come
Speaker 10: of it.
Speaker 2: I think the thing when we were chatting about this
Speaker 2: kind of behind the scenes that you brought up that
Speaker 2: was really interesting to me to emphasize was the degree
Speaker 2: to which this is not a training problem, right, This
Speaker 2: is not a lack of training problem. You hear a
Speaker 2: lot on the kind of more moderate Democrat side of
Speaker 2: things about how we need to be retraining these agents
Speaker 2: and that like the murder of Renee Good, the murder
Speaker 2: of Alex Preddy is the result of like bad training
Speaker 2: behalf of Border Patie, and it's kind of part of
Speaker 2: this whole rogue agency thing you get with Border Patrol
Speaker 2: and ice that like because of the Trump administration and
Speaker 2: how they've flooded it with bad recruits and how they're
Speaker 2: not getting properly trained. That's why things have been so deadly.
Speaker 2: And when you look at the history of how Border
Speaker 2: Patrol has worked on things like the Dahanamodo Reservation. What
Speaker 2: you see is a whole bunch of cases that sound
Speaker 2: a lot like what happened to Inna Good and alex Pretty.
Speaker 2: They're just not happening to white people in Minneapolis, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think that's something that a lot of people who
Speaker 10: haven't had the experience of living near the border, because
Speaker 10: I also spend a lot of my life in Arizona
Speaker 10: near Tucson, and therefore the Tahuna Autum reservations right there,
Speaker 10: and therefore have some insight into the things that go
Speaker 10: on right there near the border. And this is not new.
Speaker 10: The thing that's new is that it's being extended across
Speaker 10: the country and now into internal spaces. But the policies
Speaker 10: and the way the Border Patrol and ice have acted
Speaker 10: is by no means a new standard. For example, not
Speaker 10: only with the firearms, but their instances at least two instances,
Speaker 10: if not more, in which there's verified video of Border
Speaker 10: Patrol agents intentionally swerving their vehicles to hit tribal members.
Speaker 10: It's on footage, not only car footage, but footage of
Speaker 10: the cell phone being struck. One instance, at Leach, they
Speaker 10: were killed another instance, they were hurt, and with that footage,
Speaker 10: even though it very clearly the car swerved to hit them,
Speaker 10: nothing came of it. So it's hard to not see
Speaker 10: that there's something going on here. I don't think this
Speaker 10: is a training thing. I don't think they're training them
Speaker 10: to run over people. But there's some cultural maliciousness that's
Speaker 10: imbued into some of this that's hard to ignore. Another
Speaker 10: example of that was in twenty twenty three there was
Speaker 10: a TO member, Raymond Mattia, that he was called for.
Speaker 10: Supposedly there was gunfire heard and so Border patrol shows
Speaker 10: up and he's in front of his house and he
Speaker 10: reached for his cell phone in his pocket, much like
Speaker 10: you just described. Again, Wow, there's a recurring theme here.
Speaker 10: And he was shot nine times, thirty eight rounds fired, killed,
Speaker 10: He had no gun on him, he was just a
Speaker 10: TOO member and therefore it didn't really make any press.
Speaker 2: Again, you see, this is a qualified immunity problem, right,
Speaker 2: And it go back to that, And there's been some
Speaker 2: talk of like if you're going with the reforming ice
Speaker 2: rather than the abolishing thing, which is you know, certainly
Speaker 2: something a lot of Democrats talk about. Like I've heard
Speaker 2: some discussion of like, well, maybe removing qualified immunity at
Speaker 2: least for border patrol and ice, And it's so much
Speaker 2: bigger of a problem than that, Like I certainly will
Speaker 2: I will accept any reductions in qualified immunity for law enforcement,
Speaker 2: because that's where a lot of this starts. But even
Speaker 2: without that, if these go to court, if the officer
Speaker 2: in that specific shooting had gone to court for that
Speaker 2: specific shooting, I think there's a very good, if not
Speaker 2: overwhelmingly likely chance that he would have just been able
Speaker 2: to argue us in fear of my life.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows how dangerous police officers' jobs are. Of course,
Speaker 2: you know, if you reach into a bocket around them,
Speaker 2: you're signing your own death warrant. And some of my
Speaker 2: problem with this is the degree to which Americans, and
Speaker 2: maybe this is starting to shift, but things are as
Speaker 2: bad as they are because for a very long time,
Speaker 2: Americans were willing to go along with the idea that
Speaker 2: police officers lives were so dangerous and their jobs were
Speaker 2: so important that almost any violence they meet out is
Speaker 2: justified by the danger that they exist in. And I
Speaker 2: want to talk more about that with you, but first
Speaker 2: here's some ads.
Speaker 4: And we're back, Karl. I'm going to hand back to
Speaker 4: Mike to you if we're going to continue ourtist cut.
Speaker 10: Well, that's the challenge that I see with all these
Speaker 10: and these are just like again a handful of examples
Speaker 10: of which there are so many you can't even enumerate
Speaker 10: them all. I mentioned the Danziger Bridge shootings in which
Speaker 10: two men were killed, and there was really no justice
Speaker 10: came for that, although there was long trials and almost
Speaker 10: almost someone got in trouble, but not really. They all
Speaker 10: eventually got out with very little justice. Daniel Shaver was
Speaker 10: killed in Mesa. That guy got pension Borlando Castile, Nothing
Speaker 10: really came of that. Paul O Reims, the guy hit
Speaker 10: by the Border Patrol SUV, nothing came of that. Another example,
Speaker 10: while this was a protester to Guita in twenty twenty
Speaker 10: three protesting cop City was unloaded on in his tent
Speaker 10: where they said he had a firearm. Again, another similar
Speaker 10: example fourteen times and was killed in the process. Hey everybody,
Speaker 10: Carli here and an important update to the podcast. Once
Speaker 10: it was released, we quickly realized that there was a
Speaker 10: mistake embedded in it, and it really kind of lies
Speaker 10: on me. We recorded this today after Marti gram That's
Speaker 10: no excuse.
Speaker 4: We were both a little tired.
Speaker 10: But at the same time we had a conversation in
Speaker 10: which we discussed we just removed this from the podcast entirely,
Speaker 10: just snip it out, and both of us came to
Speaker 10: the same conclusion that it was too important to leave
Speaker 10: Tortugita's story in the podcast, because the reality is they're
Speaker 10: not talked about as much as they should be, and
Speaker 10: what happened to Tortegita matters very much and it should
Speaker 10: be kept in the public consciousness, especially since the bodycam
Speaker 10: footage has not been released. But in this I mistakenly
Speaker 10: used the pronoun he and him, and Robert followed suit,
Speaker 10: just because we were kind of recording together in that
Speaker 10: time and space, and this was recorded very live and
Speaker 10: raw and real. But tortu Ghita, the queer indigenous activists
Speaker 10: that gave their life fighting against Cop City, went by
Speaker 10: they them. So please accept my apology and our apology
Speaker 10: for this mistake in the podcast. But again, we wanted
Speaker 10: to leave it in because it was too important and
Speaker 10: too significant to tell Torteguito's story than it was to
Speaker 10: snip it out. Due to this mistake, So hopefully you'll
Speaker 10: understand and accept this disclaimer and apology for this mistake
Speaker 10: and realized that was of course not intentional. Thank you.
Speaker 10: There was a bunch of actual bodycam footage that's never
Speaker 10: been released to the public. But at the same time,
Speaker 10: the autopsy of him showed that his hands were up
Speaker 10: in the position he was in when he got hit
Speaker 10: with those multiple fourteen rounds. But we don't even get
Speaker 10: to see the bodycam footage. And there was audio where
Speaker 10: the cops at least implied that one of the cops
Speaker 10: shot one of the other cops and that's what instigated
Speaker 10: the shooting.
Speaker 2: It's the kind of thing that, like, we don't know
Speaker 2: what happened in the shooting of Tortuguhito, right We simply
Speaker 2: don't know, in part because they haven't released a lot
Speaker 2: of the information. And right now, the burden of proof
Speaker 2: is on Tortighita in this case, or you know, people
Speaker 2: who think he was unjustly killed to prove that he
Speaker 2: didn't shoot the officer, as opposed to where I would
Speaker 2: argue the burden of proof should be, which is on
Speaker 2: the agents of the state. He shot somebody, right, like
Speaker 2: if you were going to say, this kid pulled a
Speaker 2: gun and fired on you. I want the proof, and
Speaker 2: it's on you to give me the proof. And if
Speaker 2: you the police do not prove beyond a shadow of
Speaker 2: a doubt that you were in fear for your life
Speaker 2: and being attacked when you use deadly force, my assumption
Speaker 2: is going to be that you murdered a guy.
Speaker 4: And I think that's.
Speaker 2: How everyone should feel, right, Like, that should be how
Speaker 2: we treat police violence in any society, not this the
Speaker 2: United States. I mean, if you're listening to this in
Speaker 2: the UK or Germany and you're a reasonable person, I
Speaker 2: would think that your attitude should be Yes, if a
Speaker 2: Bobby or whatever the Germans call their police kills somebody,
Speaker 2: he should have to prove that he or she should
Speaker 2: have to prove that they were an immediate fear of
Speaker 2: their life, which is not so different from anybody else, right,
Speaker 2: I can think of I can think of one police
Speaker 2: shooting that I saw a video of spreading on Twitter,
Speaker 2: where like a guy was literally like sprinting around in
Speaker 2: traffic with a gun, like pointing it at people in
Speaker 2: traffic and got shot and killed by an officer. And
Speaker 2: I was like, look, if I'd had a gun and
Speaker 2: felt like I could take the shot.
Speaker 4: I might have shot that guy.
Speaker 2: Too, because he was parjacking people at gunpoint and pointing
Speaker 2: a firearm. And they're like, yeah, that's the case in
Speaker 2: which maybe you have to shoot a guy because like
Speaker 2: he could kill someone at any second, right, And I'm
Speaker 2: not going to judge a police officer for shooting in
Speaker 2: that instance, But I wouldn't judge a civilian either. I
Speaker 2: don't have a different standard for them. If you are
Speaker 2: a cop or a civilian and somebody shoots at you,
Speaker 2: you have the right to defend yourself, right, but you
Speaker 2: also should expect to prove that they.
Speaker 4: Were trying to hurt you.
Speaker 10: This is the challenge I have with all this is,
Speaker 10: like you said, in any instance, that's a self defense shooting.
Speaker 10: And in this and in many instances, law enforcement are
Speaker 10: put in a situation where they're not necessarily even defending themselves,
Speaker 10: but defending the community or others, and therefore they have justification.
Speaker 10: I'm not to say here to say that every law
Speaker 10: enforcement shooting is not justified. Many of them are, but
Speaker 10: in the instances where there are questionable circumstances, of which
Speaker 10: many we've just enumerated here, even instances in which they
Speaker 10: have body cams on which are supposed to be would
Speaker 10: validate their actions, but they won't release it to the
Speaker 10: public to see it. It draws a very significant question
Speaker 10: of the validity of these events and what they're doing
Speaker 10: and why there I would say, no better way to
Speaker 10: say than covering something up. In fact, going back to
Speaker 10: Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, there's a video of him talking about
Speaker 10: law enforcement, which of course extends to ice and Border patrol,
Speaker 10: as the samurai of the land. And you know, that
Speaker 10: reference isn't really a good one because when you know
Speaker 10: what the samurai are, that's a disturbing statement. But in
Speaker 10: his mind, he's making this point that they have these
Speaker 10: tools that are for life and death and the right
Speaker 10: to essentially kill, and referring to them as samurai. And
Speaker 10: I think that mindset is sadly very much permeating the
Speaker 10: law enforcement agencies of this country.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's the myths of the warrior cop.
Speaker 2: And I think one of my frustrats here stems from
Speaker 2: just as someone like you, I carry a firearm regularly,
Speaker 2: and I think a lot about what would happen if
Speaker 2: I had to use it, and I think about not
Speaker 2: just the practicality of like, okay, am I trained properly
Speaker 2: to use this thing competently?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: But what would the order of operations need to be
Speaker 2: if somebody tries to kill me and I successfully kill
Speaker 2: or injure them with a firearm, Well, I'm going to
Speaker 2: need to call the police immediately. I'm going to need
Speaker 2: to contact a lawyer immediately. I'm going to hope that
Speaker 2: there are eyewitnesses there. I'm going to hope and seek
Speaker 2: to provide as much evidence that I possibly can that
Speaker 2: I had no other choice to do what I was
Speaker 2: going to do. Right, Any civilian carrying a firearm responsibly
Speaker 2: thinks about the same things about like if I am
Speaker 2: in a shooting. First off, there's the question if I
Speaker 2: need to defend myself, But then there's immediately the question
Speaker 2: if I need to defend myself in court and police
Speaker 2: don't have that second part not really, not in a
Speaker 2: way that matters.
Speaker 10: And this, to me is why the Alex Pretty situation,
Speaker 10: which was so visibly documented by multiple cameras, is such
Speaker 10: a concern because in this instance, we see two officers
Speaker 10: unload on the guy. One guy shoots him at least
Speaker 10: once or twice, and then another guy unloads on him again,
Speaker 10: and we have multiple video angles, Yet the narrative from
Speaker 10: them is that this guy was attacking them, which is
Speaker 10: clearly not the case on the video. I mean, you
Speaker 10: can look at it from multiple angles, whether or not
Speaker 10: you agree with his protest methods. He was not attacking anyone.
Speaker 10: He was standing between them getting pepper sprayed and being
Speaker 10: beaten with pepper spray can and then getting unloaded on
Speaker 10: And at the same time, we now live in this
Speaker 10: situation where at least some parts of the firearms community
Speaker 10: or gun community, which isn't owning a thing, isn't a community,
Speaker 10: but we use that term gun community. Like you said,
Speaker 10: some of these rights groups have said something, but the
Speaker 10: response to this is still disturbing to me because there's
Speaker 10: a lot of people saying, well, don't show up to
Speaker 10: a protest with a gun, don't be in public with
Speaker 10: a gun, you can't bring gun. In fact, we saw
Speaker 10: parts of the Trump administration saying don't show up with
Speaker 10: a gun. This man had a handgun and two magazines
Speaker 10: on him looking for trouble. Well, if he was, he
Speaker 10: didn't have the gun out and by the way, carrying
Speaker 10: a handgun with an extra magazine is by no means abnormal.
Speaker 10: In fact, that's a normal procedure for most people that
Speaker 10: concealed Carrie. If you and I were hanging out on
Speaker 10: the street and we decided that we got into a
Speaker 10: fight with some guy, you know, Sheila Woof comes out
Speaker 10: of the bar and starts swinging on us, and then
Speaker 10: and then not only did we punch him and knock
Speaker 10: him to the ground, you shoot him, and then I
Speaker 10: shoot him nine more times, and there's video evidence of that.
Speaker 10: We're going to jail forever. But we at footage of
Speaker 10: these guys doing this and really nothing comes of it.
Speaker 2: Part of like what I really want to get across
Speaker 2: to people is how bog standard this behavior is. The
Speaker 2: agents that shot Preddi were experienced veterans. They were not newbies.
Speaker 2: They were not proud boys who just gotten inducted into
Speaker 2: the force, you know, and tasked with doing vigilante justice.
Speaker 2: They were sworn law enforcement officers with decorated careers, and
Speaker 2: they were acting the way the average cop expects people
Speaker 2: to act in a lot of situations, or at least
Speaker 2: at least a significant chunk of the law enforcement community
Speaker 2: expects police officers to be able to act right, like,
Speaker 2: I don't know that. I think most police officers are
Speaker 2: going to shoot a man who has been disarmed when
Speaker 2: he's in the middle of a pile of guys who
Speaker 2: have their hands on him. But most police officers will
Speaker 2: defend their colleagues who do the same right. That's almost
Speaker 2: more of the issue. It's not that the average police
Speaker 2: officer is looking for an excuse to shoot somebody. It's
Speaker 2: that there's enough of those guys on the force and
Speaker 2: all of their friends support them when they do it right.
Speaker 2: And that doesn't exist on the civilian side of things,
Speaker 2: right I think about like in Portland we had a
Speaker 2: mass shooting that was stopped by a protester who was
Speaker 2: then gave himself up to the police and was taken
Speaker 2: into custod He was initially charged with murder. And if
Speaker 2: there was the knowledge as a police officer that if
Speaker 2: I shoot someone, whether or not, it's totally justified, the
Speaker 2: next few months of my life are fucked completely. I'm
Speaker 2: not getting time off to chill, I am having to
Speaker 2: defend myself and have some of the worst stress of
Speaker 2: my life. Maybe we'd have fewer police shootings right if
Speaker 2: they knew it was going to be a miserable situation
Speaker 2: whenever they drew their gun and fired on somebody.
Speaker 4: And I think you have to have that be the understanding.
Speaker 2: And I know, like the counterpoint that at least police
Speaker 2: defenders will come up with is like, well, that might
Speaker 2: make them less likely to defend themselves, and like, well,
Speaker 2: then why are you calling them heroes if you're not
Speaker 2: expecting them to risk their lives for the good of
Speaker 2: the body politic? Right, we'll talk more about this, but first, ads.
Speaker 10: What's really interesting about this? And I would think, I mean,
Speaker 10: I'm sure you have a really large amount of cops
Speaker 10: in the audience here, but here's the thing. Really, everyone
Speaker 10: should be concerned about this, even cops, even border patrol,
Speaker 10: even ice. Law enforcement in general should be concerned about
Speaker 10: this because as this activity becomes frankly more common and
Speaker 10: more accepted in their ranks, that thin blue line being
Speaker 10: not one about solidarity but one of silence and lack
Speaker 10: of justice, that puts them a danger too, because if
Speaker 10: a person or people are so afraid of the reality
Speaker 10: of the fact that they can be just executed in
Speaker 10: the street with no repercussions of it, it sort of
Speaker 10: gives civilians, well it takes away our trust in the system.
Speaker 10: There's no due process. You can just die for nothing
Speaker 10: for having a cell phone in your pocket. It'll make
Speaker 10: some people more reckless in their actions when dealing with
Speaker 10: law enforcement because they are like, what do I have
Speaker 10: to lose. I'm gonna die anyway.
Speaker 2: It's the same logical problem as if you're like, well,
Speaker 2: armed robberies should have the same consequences as killing a guy,
Speaker 2: or they should be very similar. Your life should be
Speaker 2: over either way. Well, then what's the reason not to
Speaker 2: shoot someone and kill them in a robbery. Leaving them
Speaker 2: alive just increases the odds they identify you. If you're
Speaker 2: looking at the difference between thirty years in prison or
Speaker 2: fifty years in prison for robbery and murder, why not
Speaker 2: just commit the murder right Like, it's this calculus that's
Speaker 2: being forced on people. If you know, any time the
Speaker 2: police take you into custody or start to move to
Speaker 2: put hands on you, you feel like there's a very good
Speaker 2: chance they're just going to murder you, then people are
Speaker 2: going to start making very different choices when they're physically
Speaker 2: in contact with the police, and that makes life a
Speaker 2: lot more dangerous for everybody. And that's part of why
Speaker 2: this is what we're seeing is just so fucking irresponsible.
Speaker 10: And historically there's realities for this too, depending on what
Speaker 10: part of the community or who you know, your demographic,
Speaker 10: if you want to go back to the past, whether
Speaker 10: or not you agree or disagree with like the politics
Speaker 10: or actions of for example, the Black Panthers, the reality
Speaker 10: is because black men were just shot by cops with
Speaker 10: no justice being delivered ever, they started taking on strategies
Speaker 10: and policies that reflected that fear and concern. But now
Speaker 10: that's being extended to people well beyond that, when we
Speaker 10: see middle class VA nurses with a license being killed
Speaker 10: the same way, well, this is what's been going on
Speaker 10: in those communities for decades and decades, well before the
Speaker 10: Civil War. Let's be realistic. And so I'm not saying
Speaker 10: that was right or wrong, but I'm saying it is
Speaker 10: a logical conclusion. When you fear that the agents of
Speaker 10: the state can kill you and there's no justice to
Speaker 10: ever be had, well what do you have to lose?
Speaker 2: When we were talking about this early, you brought up
Speaker 2: something the Attorney General of Arizona had said recently on
Speaker 2: the subject of ice agents who are not identifiable as
Speaker 2: law enforcement coming to your door with guns.
Speaker 10: I don't have the direct quote, but I'm paraphrasing here,
Speaker 10: but it was along the lines of if people are
Speaker 10: at your doors that are unidentified with masks in Arizona,
Speaker 10: the castle doctrine essentially provides you the right to use
Speaker 10: force against them. And that is a very interesting statement
Speaker 10: to be made by someone as high in power of
Speaker 10: government of a state level at that point. But I mean,
Speaker 10: there's some truth to that, and the reality is when
Speaker 10: people aren't identifiable, it is very easy to show up.
Speaker 10: And I mean we've already seen examples of people pretending
Speaker 10: to be ice because it's very easy to put on
Speaker 10: some body armors, some camouflage and a mask and look
Speaker 10: like these guys that are not identifiable. And therefore, when
Speaker 10: that is the case, how do you know what's there
Speaker 10: and what you're facing is even law enforcement in the
Speaker 10: first place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And this is Chris Mays, Chris with a
Speaker 2: Kay who's a Democrat, and the Arizona Attorney General. And
Speaker 2: as you said, the way that it was framed in
Speaker 2: this conversation was basically, this is a disaster because if
Speaker 2: you have law enforcement agents that you can't identify people
Speaker 2: absolutely have a right to just start blasting in Arizona
Speaker 2: based on Castle doctrine, And in fact, the interviewer in
Speaker 2: that brom Resnik, asked, like, are you giving people permission
Speaker 2: to shoot federal agents? And May said, like the law does, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's the issue. You know, how do you know
Speaker 2: if some guy's just in a mask at your door
Speaker 2: with a gun. How do you know? And the fact
Speaker 2: that you're expecting Americans, a jumpy country of paranoid conspiracy
Speaker 2: theorists with four hundred million guns to see masked men
Speaker 2: at their doors and show discretion.
Speaker 4: Seems like a bad bet to me.
Speaker 10: You know, this comes back to the point I was making.
Speaker 10: I don't think the Attorney General was there was saying
Speaker 10: just go shoot federal agents. I don't think that was
Speaker 10: the point. The point was simply what I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 10: which is when you can't identify, or you don't know
Speaker 10: what is going on, or you're in a situation in
Speaker 10: which these people are not acting in a reasonable manner,
Speaker 10: you don't know what you're dealing with. It's the same
Speaker 10: thing I mentioned earlier, in which if you're that concern
Speaker 10: or you don't believe that due process or justice is
Speaker 10: going to be served, your decision making logic might very
Speaker 10: well change. And like you said, in a country where
Speaker 10: many people are armed, I think this is something that
Speaker 10: every side of this issue should be concerned about, including
Speaker 10: the law enforcement agents, because they are at risk too.
Speaker 10: As this continues, the risk to them increases, which will
Speaker 10: then be used to justify more force against civilians because
Speaker 10: it's a vicious circle. Well, that's a fun note to
Speaker 10: end on, Carl. I want to direct people towards en
Speaker 10: Range TV. You mentioned that you have a video about
Speaker 10: one of the shootings that we talked about, so I
Speaker 10: want to let you kind of plug that at the end. Yeah, thanks, Robert,
Speaker 10: I appreciate that a lot. So in Range TV is
Speaker 10: my video project. It's about ten years old.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 10: You can just find it at range dot tv, which
Speaker 10: is my website, or you can just google in Range
Speaker 10: TV on YouTube and you'll find it immediately. The algorithm
Speaker 10: will give it to you. But the search engines bight
Speaker 10: and the video that I'm referencing there, and there's a
Speaker 10: lot of them on there in regards to topics like
Speaker 10: this historically speaking, but the specific one about Danziger Bridge
Speaker 10: is right there. So if you go to Range TV
Speaker 10: and type in Danziger Bridge dn ZINGR, you will find
Speaker 10: that two thousand and five shooting, which is just an
Speaker 10: example of so many of these that happened. And I
Speaker 10: do have some discussions on there about recent events about
Speaker 10: Alex Pretty and such as well. So Robert, thank you
Speaker 10: for having me back on the show. I always appreciate it,
Speaker 10: and I appreciate our collaborations. And hopefully somehow this stuff
Speaker 10: makes a difference.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I hope so too.
Speaker 2: But at least I think it gives people something to
Speaker 2: like expect, right, like to look at this is kind
Speaker 2: of the cycle we're going to continue to see unless
Speaker 2: they pull back, unless ice and border patrols start using
Speaker 2: a great deal more discretion. Like, I think we've given
Speaker 2: people an idea of like where the future is trending,
Speaker 2: you know, and I unfortunately I'm not super optimistic about
Speaker 2: it right now, but you know tomorrow's unwritten.
Speaker 11: Welcome to it happened here. I'm Garrison Davis, joined by
Speaker 11: James Stout.
Speaker 8: Hello, I get what are we What are we learning about? Today?
Speaker 11: We are going to be learning about a man named
Speaker 11: James Fishback.
Speaker 8: Okay, get first name.
Speaker 11: Oh yeah, I've wanted to get someone kind of unbiased,
Speaker 11: but I now understand, unfortunately that you might be might
Speaker 11: be just kind of, you know, drawn drawn to him.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've come here to defend the James name.
Speaker 4: I don't think that defense will last very long.
Speaker 8: I okay.
Speaker 11: James Fishback is a former Hedge fun analyst who's been
Speaker 11: worming his way into the political world of the New
Speaker 11: Right during the past two to three years.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm giving up on that one already. Got no
Speaker 8: interest in defending this guy.
Speaker 11: If you're active on you know, any kind of political feeds,
Speaker 11: whether that's you know, short short form video, blue sky Twitter,
Speaker 11: you've probably seen a video or two of James fish Back.
Speaker 11: But this episode we're gonna dive a little bit more
Speaker 11: into his background and his current political activities, which includes
Speaker 11: some things you probably haven't heard before. So James Fishback
Speaker 11: has tried to attach himself to a lot of, you know,
Speaker 11: various aspects of the New Right. He attempted to attach
Speaker 11: himself to the presidential campaign of a vek Ramaswami back
Speaker 11: in the Uldie days.
Speaker 8: Okay, yeah, remember when.
Speaker 11: But he did so just by like showing up at
Speaker 11: campaign staff events. He wasn't a staffer, like he just
Speaker 11: kept like appearing. He asked, like, stay overnight at a
Speaker 11: hotel that this staff was all staying at for this
Speaker 11: campaign event in Florida, and tried to build a personal
Speaker 11: rapport with the VEC over a few months, and eventually
Speaker 11: Fishback outstayed is welcome. He then pivoted to becoming what
Speaker 11: I would call a D tier right wing commentator and
Speaker 11: an advocate of Doge. In twenty twenty five, Fishback was
Speaker 11: a frequent guest on Like News, netw Works, CNN, Fox
Speaker 11: and others, speaking as a quote unquote Doge advisor. Huh,
Speaker 11: a role that he never officially had great never actually
Speaker 11: worked with Doge. His quote unquote advising was through adding
Speaker 11: Elon Musk on Twitter with random suggestions.
Speaker 8: Yeah, just at least literally in their comments online.
Speaker 11: And yeah, his Doge claim to fame is that he
Speaker 11: came up with this idea of the Doge dividend, which
Speaker 11: is like a stimulus type check that the government would
Speaker 11: send to people based on the savings that they found
Speaker 11: or created through slashing government agencies. Cool, So that that
Speaker 11: was his idea that he added Elon Musk about and
Speaker 11: this idea gained some traction, and then this this kind
Speaker 11: of boosted his image as a quote unquote Doage advisor
Speaker 11: and helped him trick news agencies into boosting his public
Speaker 11: profile by associating him with Doge. Eventually, this led to
Speaker 11: DOGE official Katie Miller, wife of Steven Miller, having to
Speaker 11: clarify in July twenty twenty five that Fishback was not
Speaker 11: involved with Doge in any way, but he got a
Speaker 11: lot of traction off of this Doge advisor thing right
Speaker 11: back when Ramaswami left Doge.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, it's forgotten that he did. Wow, how time flies.
Speaker 11: Before the inauguration, because he was planning on and is
Speaker 11: planning on running for governor of Ohio, Fishback tried to
Speaker 11: put his name in as like a hey, all become
Speaker 11: the co chair of dog elon since my pal Ramaswami
Speaker 11: is going to be busy. That also, you know, did
Speaker 11: not did not work obviously.
Speaker 8: Yeah, what needy guy.
Speaker 4: He's just very very needy, very clingy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, paid, very parasocial.
Speaker 11: Yes, And after Katie Miller released a statement being like
Speaker 11: this guy's not part of Doge, Fishback began lobbying Trump
Speaker 11: for the vacant seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Speaker 8: Really no shame.
Speaker 11: Based on his you know, credentials as this like patriotic
Speaker 11: America first investor right who's worked at a hedge fund
Speaker 11: or two and tried tried to get his way onto
Speaker 11: the SPACON seat. When that didn't turn out, obviously, Fishback
Speaker 11: set his sights on his home state of Florida, launching
Speaker 11: what I would call a groper style campaign for governor
Speaker 11: Cool and this is what we're going to be discussing
Speaker 11: for the rest of this episode.
Speaker 8: I'm not like intimately familiar with the grouper space, but
Speaker 8: this seems to be like the most kind of like
Speaker 8: Beata behavior to constantly like notice me, uh, I forget
Speaker 8: what that's a wed that begins with s pick me, No, yeah,
Speaker 8: it could be pick me. I guess it's like a
Speaker 8: notice me SEMPI or something that people say.
Speaker 4: I never expected you to say noticed with.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've unfortunately I've been on the internet too. Like
Speaker 8: that's what he seems, right. He seems like extremely uh yes, yeah, listen,
Speaker 8: is like I think what would be coded as like
Speaker 8: beata behavior in the.
Speaker 11: Yeah and now he's kind of trying to do this
Speaker 11: with when tesen the Gropers, although as to this point,
Speaker 11: more successfully Okay, he's actually more successfully ingratiated himself with
Speaker 11: the Groper's space. On Tucker Carlson interview, he talked about
Speaker 11: how the Twitter account sorry x account af News or
Speaker 11: af post it's America first post America First News was
Speaker 11: a part of his like political radicalization towards the sort
Speaker 11: of Groper's style politics. This is like a news aggregation
Speaker 11: account that promotes far right nationalist talking points through and
Speaker 11: like framing through various news stories. A lot of people
Speaker 11: used to share a post with this account, like not
Speaker 11: knowing its political orientation, just because it was very active
Speaker 11: as a news aggregation source.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there are a few of those on Twitter, like
Speaker 8: bno news is another one that just aggregates from repost.
Speaker 11: Stuff and you know, Fischback has pointed to this as
Speaker 11: being a part of his like Graper style.
Speaker 4: Read pilling is the activity of this.
Speaker 11: Account to get a sense of his kind of very
Speaker 11: groper online background or at least like a place within
Speaker 11: the new right. I'm going to read a tweet of
Speaker 11: his from February eighth, twenty twenty six, quote as Florida Governor.
Speaker 11: I will refuse to let sub human gesterres spike our
Speaker 11: collective cortisol, not even once. Also, no foids or egirls unquote.
Speaker 11: How much of that do you understand?
Speaker 8: James, I got cortisol. I'm familiar, all right, Okay.
Speaker 11: So yeah, this is using the kind of currently trendy
Speaker 11: like looks maxing terms the jester, which has been used
Speaker 11: a lot since Clivicular's stream with Fuentes and sneak O
Speaker 11: at that club where they played the Kanye hal Hitler song.
Speaker 11: Spiking cortisol is a frequent way that people in the
Speaker 11: looks back in space will refer to your stress being raised,
Speaker 11: especially like through politics, Like through politics raising your stress. Okay,
Speaker 11: and foids an ego is just like misogynistic ways to
Speaker 11: refer to women coming out of like the in cell space. Okay,
Speaker 11: So you know this this post is you know, kind
Speaker 11: of a joke, but it's also signaling to a certain
Speaker 11: a certain type of person that hey, I'm.
Speaker 8: Your guy, Yeah, I speak your language.
Speaker 11: And it's also just really annoying. Right, He's he's trying
Speaker 11: to be off putting on purpose because that will drive
Speaker 11: attention to him from people who don't like him, and
Speaker 11: you know, and try to cover him in this episode,
Speaker 11: you know, I'm trying to like ride that line of
Speaker 11: not just unnecessarily giving him publicity because he has outrageous things,
Speaker 11: but then also framing his rising profile within a certain
Speaker 11: like context, which is Groyper candidates popping up more and
Speaker 11: more frequently across the United States.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So, in terms of Florida, Desantists can't run for another term.
Speaker 4: He is term limited.
Speaker 11: The clear front runner to succeed Dysantis is US Representative
Speaker 11: from Florida Byron Donald's who has Trump's endorsement. Last month,
Speaker 11: Lieutenant Governor j Collins also announced to run for governor.
Speaker 11: But Fishback is not a non player in this race,
Speaker 11: and his candidacy displays attention within the Republican Party between
Speaker 11: the former like Tea Party and classical MEGA wing, which
Speaker 11: is now the effective conservative establishment, and this New America
Speaker 11: First wing, which takes some of Mega's originating principles to
Speaker 11: their far right nationalist conclusion. I talked about this tension
Speaker 11: last year in the episodes about Nick Fuentez's interview with
Speaker 11: Tucker Carlson and this surge of Graper adjacent gen Z
Speaker 11: staffers filling out the ranks of the Republican machine in DC. Now,
Speaker 11: Fishback is one of the first candidates to draw a
Speaker 11: lot of attention by essentially running as a graper candidate,
Speaker 11: and depending on how well he does, it could indicate
Speaker 11: how successful this politics can be when presented in front
Speaker 11: of Republican voters. The primary election isn't doneuntil August. There's
Speaker 11: not tons of polling yet on this race, like let
Speaker 11: alone from a stafflish pollsters, But as of late January,
Speaker 11: Fishback's most favorable pole puts him fifteen points behind front
Speaker 11: runner Byron Donald's according to quote.
Speaker 4: Unquote Patriot polling.
Speaker 11: Meanwhile, Donald's own sponsored poll puts them upwards of forty
Speaker 11: two points ahead of Fishback around the new year. So
Speaker 11: all this stuff is really out of date night and
Speaker 11: Fishback certainly has risen his profile since then, but we're
Speaker 11: still waiting on like reliable polls to come out. Yeah,
Speaker 11: but he's certainly getting a lot of headlines and is
Speaker 11: doing a successful job in raising his public profile.
Speaker 4: Now. Part of Fishback's strategy to.
Speaker 11: Raise his public profile and like name recognition both in
Speaker 11: Florida and nationally, it seems to be just through generating
Speaker 11: controversy very similar to how Fuentes did this or the
Speaker 11: more recent social ascension of the looksmaxing streamer clovicular. Earlier
Speaker 11: this month, Fishback claimed that a fire was quote intentionally
Speaker 11: set in his sideyard, prompting him to do a publicity
Speaker 11: stunt where he walked out of his porch holding an
Speaker 11: AR fifteen style rifle above his head, promising to shoot
Speaker 11: anyone who attempts to harm him and his staff. I
Speaker 11: will share a clip.
Speaker 8: I've seen this one. I'm excited to wash it again there.
Speaker 12: If you come back to this home and our staff,
Speaker 12: our volunteers are working hard.
Speaker 4: We're not waiting for the police.
Speaker 13: We're gonna shoot you with an AR fifteen sight on scene.
Speaker 4: Five five six. Yeah, that's what we're going to do.
Speaker 4: It's very simple. Shall not be infringe? We have a right.
Speaker 8: It's just a bunch of woods. They're saying, like, no
Speaker 8: in any particular. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't make much sense.
Speaker 8: It doesn't know it. It's also five point five six.
Speaker 8: I guess people do call it five five six bit Yeah, fascinating,
Speaker 8: two two three thirty round doesn't as you have a
Speaker 8: sine in there? I noticed no, no, that bake sites
Speaker 8: folded down as well. It's for those familiar with such things,
Speaker 8: a straight at the box Smith and Western MP fifteen.
Speaker 8: It looks like he may have bought it quite recently.
Speaker 11: So this is one such incident where he tried to
Speaker 11: generate some kind of publicity through this, you know, very
Speaker 11: provocative gesture. But he's also done this through the language
Speaker 11: he uses. Fishback refers to front runner Byron Donalds, who
Speaker 11: is black as by Rone, which is just not his name,
Speaker 11: and has said, quote by Rone wants to turn Florida
Speaker 11: into a section eight to ghetto unquote. He's also used
Speaker 11: Charlemagne's nickname for Hakeem Jeffries a pac Shakur to refer
Speaker 11: to Donald's, and has called Donald's a quote unquote slave
Speaker 11: to his donors Jesus Christ. So yeah, a lot of
Speaker 11: stuff like that.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Fishback has proposed a fifty percent income tax on OnlyFans creators,
Speaker 11: calling it a quote unquote syntax, and one of his
Speaker 11: very first campaign videos was titled I'm running for Florida
Speaker 11: Governor to make the trains run on time.
Speaker 4: Oh cool?
Speaker 11: So this has not like generated tons of controversy in headlines. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's you know, caused some social media posters to be like, oh,
Speaker 11: look at this guy clearly doing a Nazi dog whistle.
Speaker 11: But then it's also signaled you know, early early in
Speaker 11: the campaign signals to you know, grapers and people in
Speaker 11: the very very far fringes of the right, has signaled
Speaker 11: to them that hey, I'm going to be your guy. Yeah,
Speaker 11: which in part he's doing so that he can count
Speaker 11: on them to kind of do free, free publicity for him, right,
Speaker 11: Like he wants to activate a certain type of overly
Speaker 11: online young male to be like a public spokesperson to
Speaker 11: like to just to boost his name recognition. And even
Speaker 11: if he doesn't win in Florida in this race, it'
Speaker 11: at least help his career like nationally in some way.
Speaker 11: So he's he's counting on this like a graper block
Speaker 11: to do a lot of heavy lifting. And that's part
Speaker 11: of what he does. Some of these very very late,
Speaker 11: gross tongue in cheek stuff make them trains run on time.
Speaker 11: Come on, dude, Yeah, it's like a clumsy dog whistle, right,
Speaker 11: It's embarrassing. There's no like a sleight of hand here
Speaker 11: or whatever. You know, he's just kind of blundering his
Speaker 11: way towards being like look at me Nazis. Yeah, and
Speaker 11: like this video he just talked about trying to bring
Speaker 11: back the Amtrak to the Florida Panhandle.
Speaker 4: It's like a one minute video.
Speaker 8: Cool.
Speaker 11: It had nothing to do about actually like making trains
Speaker 11: run on time. It's about trying to return Amtrak to
Speaker 11: a certain section of Florida. Fitchback has promised to quote
Speaker 11: divest every penny from Israel on day one unquote, which
Speaker 11: would include three hundred and eighty five million in foreign
Speaker 11: bonds invested in by the state. And he's opposed to
Speaker 11: adopting anti Semitism definitions in schools that make it quote
Speaker 11: unquote against the law to criticize Israel.
Speaker 8: H yeah, Yes, this is where the right and the
Speaker 8: soft dare.
Speaker 4: I bet.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm sure it's Israel you'll concern with here.
Speaker 11: Buddy, Yeah, no, I bet, I'm sure he's not to
Speaker 11: being this out of you know, principled stances of Palestinian solidarity.
Speaker 8: And he just wants to do anti Semitism like the
Speaker 8: old fashioned way.
Speaker 11: Yes, And this can be displayed during a campaign event
Speaker 11: at the University of Central Florida where Fishback discussed how
Speaker 11: to make lunches in high school cafeterias more healthy topic,
Speaker 11: what's with.
Speaker 12: The pop tarts in the Broward County public schools in
Speaker 12: the cafeterias. I'm not saying that the test scores are
Speaker 12: a result of the pop tarts, but if you wanted
Speaker 12: kids to fail, if you wanted to set up our
Speaker 12: kids for failure, you would feed them the absolute boy
Speaker 12: slop in our cafeterias.
Speaker 4: And that that is on gentile.
Speaker 8: Okay, everyone's really excited to hear that. Hey, uh yep, wow, Yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean the crowd is like they love it. Yeah,
Speaker 8: but it also looks like they just derived from like
Speaker 8: a Southern Florida be a pong invitational tournament. Like it's uh,
Speaker 8: it's a lot of like frat boid type.
Speaker 11: Yes, it's a lot of the people who are who
Speaker 11: consumed like the menosphere type content online. Yeah, short clips
Speaker 11: of Nick Fuentes probably aren't regularly tuning into his like
Speaker 11: three hour livestream on Rumble, but engage with his content
Speaker 11: through short clips online. Yeah, same thing with like sneak
Speaker 11: o clvicular Right, it's it's it's this type of this
Speaker 11: type of influencer which has right wing politics, but they
Speaker 11: aren't like super invested in politics. It's this it's this
Speaker 11: mix of like post in cell male influencers that combine
Speaker 11: right wing politics, and it's a very common form of
Speaker 11: like entertainment for these people that we see in the
Speaker 11: background this video. Right, it's a lot of college guys
Speaker 11: eighteen to twenty two.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's like it's mostly white men, yeah, from like
Speaker 8: traditional college age.
Speaker 11: Speaking of schools, in twenty twenty two, a Florida school
Speaker 11: district cut ties with Fishback's debate organization after a female
Speaker 11: student came forward with allegations at Fishback quote initiated a
Speaker 11: romantic relationship unquote with her while she was working for
Speaker 11: his student debate organization when she was seventeen years old
Speaker 11: he was twenty seven.
Speaker 4: Jesus.
Speaker 11: The student claimed in a protection order request that after
Speaker 11: joining the debate organization when she was sixteen, Fishback quote
Speaker 11: unquote systematically cultivated a relationship with her by increasing quote
Speaker 11: unquote opportunities for personal interaction, and that Fishback later quote
Speaker 11: unquote explicitly directed her to keep the relationship a secret
Speaker 11: while she was working for his school debate organization. Jesus,
Speaker 11: after turning eighteen, she moved in with Fishback. The two
Speaker 11: were briefly engaged. Fishback denies the student's characterization of the
Speaker 11: relationship timeline. After the girl broke up with him, Fishback
Speaker 11: allegedly sent hundreds of unanswered texts to her over several days.
Speaker 11: This information comes out of a harassment case that was
Speaker 11: later dismissed. The case wasn't about the legality of their relationship, importantly,
Speaker 11: it was about harassment after the two had broken up,
Speaker 11: where these details emerged.
Speaker 8: Yeah, his debate organization, this is some kind of like
Speaker 8: like plastic turning point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it kind of it was.
Speaker 11: It was a Florida based debate organization in high schools
Speaker 11: to encourage encourage debate. It was active around twenty twenty two.
Speaker 11: It was bought by another company a year or two ago,
Speaker 11: but in twenty twenty two a district ended cooperation with
Speaker 11: this organization after news came out about this relationship. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it is interesting considering the amount that Fishback and Fuentes
Speaker 11: and these guys will talk about the Epstein file and
Speaker 11: then have this in your.
Speaker 8: Yeah, inappropriate relationships with underage women.
Speaker 11: Yeah that work for you in your high school debate organization.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that gives me the age in a substantial way.
Speaker 8: Also kind of not that surprising from this kind of
Speaker 8: area of the right, but it's still gross.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's time for an ad break, but we will
Speaker 11: return to discuss fishbacks reoccurring campaign rhetoric and his promises
Speaker 11: as governor.
Speaker 4: All right, we're back.
Speaker 11: A big part of Fishback's campaign is targeting H one
Speaker 11: B visas he promised on day one as governor to
Speaker 11: fire as many H one B workers as you can
Speaker 11: and quote unquote incentivize companies to hire Americans. Again, here's
Speaker 11: a radio appearance where he discusses.
Speaker 14: This on the first day in office. I would fire
Speaker 14: every single H one B who works at a state agency.
Speaker 14: Number two, if you have a state contract with Tallahassee,
Speaker 14: I don't care if it's serving NILS or serving.
Speaker 4: Up IT tech support.
Speaker 14: You have twenty four hours to pick, as President Reagan said, Drew,
Speaker 14: now is the time for choosing.
Speaker 4: You got to pick.
Speaker 14: Do you want your fifty million dollars a year state
Speaker 14: contract from Tallahassee or do you want your fifty year,
Speaker 14: one hundred h one bees.
Speaker 4: You pick. You can't have both.
Speaker 14: There's no negotiating, and you have twenty four hours that's
Speaker 14: how we create a culture that stands up for the
Speaker 14: dignity of American workers.
Speaker 8: That's an interesting approach, Like you can't get h one
Speaker 8: b jobs not for the federal government, but for state government.
Speaker 8: I kind of imagine that, especially in Florida, there are very.
Speaker 11: Many Well, he's not just concerned about h one bes.
Speaker 11: Fischback is also railed against student visas as a threat
Speaker 11: to the American way of life, and has falsely said
Speaker 11: that Trump plants descended two hundred thousand students from China
Speaker 11: to Florida's public universities, which serve only about four hundred
Speaker 11: and thirty thousand students, so.
Speaker 8: They'd be like forty five percent.
Speaker 4: It's not real. It's that's just not true.
Speaker 11: Yeah, this was proposed as an idea, not Florida specifically.
Speaker 11: But this was proposed in spring of twenty twenty five
Speaker 11: as a negotiating tactic with China over tariffs. This isn't
Speaker 11: a real thing. Since then, Fishback has promised to raise
Speaker 11: tuition on all foreign students to one million dollars via
Speaker 11: executive order. The governor cannot legally raise state school tuition
Speaker 11: via executive order.
Speaker 4: These are just words that he's saying, well, so like.
Speaker 8: A lot of these state schools having a certain number
Speaker 8: of students who are paying a higher fee, be that
Speaker 8: the non US or out of state, like it's integral
Speaker 8: to their budgeting, right, Like, yeah, they're not making it
Speaker 8: on in state tuition.
Speaker 11: Fishbag has talked about all this in an interview on
Speaker 11: Tucker Carlson's Internet show last month, where he said that
Speaker 11: a child quote from Shenngin, who doesn't know what Florida
Speaker 11: orange juice tastes like, can't possibly in an economic sense,
Speaker 11: but I think I mean not to sound gay, but
Speaker 11: in a spiritual sense, does not represent our state and
Speaker 11: our heritage unquote. Tucker replied, that's the opposite of gay. Actually,
Speaker 11: quote that's.
Speaker 8: A head of an exchange of words. Again, Like I'm
Speaker 8: like a little lost here.
Speaker 11: Yeah, this is this is a sizable faction of the
Speaker 11: new right of of the of of of the gropers
Speaker 11: who are filling staffer positions at Heritage and in DC,
Speaker 11: Like this is the sort of media environment, like linguistic
Speaker 11: environment that that they that they are coming out of,
Speaker 11: and the pearl clutchy reaction is is not useful here, right,
Speaker 11: I'm not like who cares right, this is obviously embarrassing.
Speaker 11: This is like a man in his thirties trying to
Speaker 11: sound like a kind of homophobic eighteen year old who's
Speaker 11: kind of only homophobic via like linguistic reflux.
Speaker 4: This is like embarrassing cosplay.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's very cringe.
Speaker 11: I can't even find this stuff offensive, Like this is
Speaker 11: this is just it's.
Speaker 8: No, it's sad. Like the primary sentiment I feel is
Speaker 8: like vicarious shame, yeah, for this guy and his like
Speaker 8: desperate search for attention.
Speaker 11: Now, a core component of selling fascism into people is
Speaker 11: that they were promised a future that's now been taken
Speaker 11: away from them because of some people that are the enemy. Right,
Speaker 11: this is like the dream of finding a subservient wife,
Speaker 11: a cushy, full time job, buying a home, raising two
Speaker 11: point five kids in a safe and secure homeland. But
Speaker 11: because of quote unquote them, this dream is no longer possible.
Speaker 11: Through the years, we've seen different versions of this targeting Jews, Feminists,
Speaker 11: palace Indians, Muslims, Mexicans, Central and South American immigrants. Now,
Speaker 11: during Fishbeck's Carlson interview, he elucidated on like an updated
Speaker 11: version of the like twenty first century version of the
Speaker 11: American dream that was stolen from gen Z.
Speaker 13: Gen Z was such an important part of the president's
Speaker 13: victory last year. Yes, and they feel betrayed by a
Speaker 13: lot of these Trump advisors and what they've chosen to
Speaker 13: prioritize and not.
Speaker 4: I can see why.
Speaker 13: And when I've met them, and I've met them where
Speaker 13: they are at their universities, whether it's UF a couple
Speaker 13: of weeks ago, I'll be at FSU and just a
Speaker 13: couple weeks from now. Their number one frustration is that, look,
Speaker 13: they don't want to be lectured anymore. They got a degree,
Speaker 13: they got good grades, they got good test scores. They
Speaker 13: didn't study gender studies or black intersectionality. They did the
Speaker 13: stem thing that Republicans told them to do, learn to code,
Speaker 13: Learn to code. And now they say, you know what Amazon,
Speaker 13: Google fed acts. No, No, those jobs aren't available for you,
Speaker 13: upesky Americans. You want paid time off, you want to
Speaker 13: go to church on Sunday. We're going to give those
Speaker 13: jobs to an entire new class of foreign serfs known
Speaker 13: as the Indians and the Chinese. And we're not going
Speaker 13: to even interview you for those positions. They don't even
Speaker 13: pretend that the Chinese or the Indians are smarter. They're not.
Speaker 13: They don't speak our language, they have no skin.
Speaker 4: In they're not smarter.
Speaker 13: Act they're not at all.
Speaker 14: I know.
Speaker 13: And so the issue then becomes, do we actually have
Speaker 13: a labor market that is utterly rigged against American citizens?
Speaker 13: The answer is yes.
Speaker 11: I think this is a really interesting exchange on a
Speaker 11: sort of slide that's happening on the right.
Speaker 4: Beyond talking about like illegal immigrants.
Speaker 8: What's really interesting to me is that like the first
Speaker 8: real immigration lik restrictions that were part of the United
Speaker 8: States was the Chinese Exclusion Act, right, Yeah, and we
Speaker 8: have circled all the way back to essentially a very
Speaker 8: similar argument.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: The slide from talking about illegal immigrants in like the
Speaker 11: far right space to really honing in on on student
Speaker 11: visa's foreign workers, I think is an interesting pivot. And
Speaker 11: this new version of the American dream of like, you know,
Speaker 11: stem jobs, learned to code that's now been taken away,
Speaker 11: that's no longer accessible because so many young Americans aren't
Speaker 11: getting hired because they're adamant about going to church on Sunday.
Speaker 4: Something that's not true. That's not real.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's not a real thing.
Speaker 11: First of all, young Americans are not in large numbers
Speaker 11: going to church on Sunday. Nor is their hiring this
Speaker 11: discrimination because they don't want to work on Sundays. Right,
Speaker 11: These things aren't aren't real, but it taps into a
Speaker 11: certain feeling that someone in college might might have right now,
Speaker 11: especially in the wake of like ai Vibe coding, of
Speaker 11: they were told that there's this like lifetrack where you
Speaker 11: can work in tech, and now there really isn't many
Speaker 11: tech jobs open to people, and they're trying to turn
Speaker 11: this situation into this fight against legal immigration.
Speaker 8: Yeah, into fascism. It's funny to see Colson repeating that
Speaker 8: they learned to code thing, as if that was like
Speaker 8: a serious piece of career advice given to people Like
Speaker 8: that has been a meme for no close to a decade. Yeah,
Speaker 8: like everybody knew there was bullshit that it's it's literally
Speaker 8: like that. The phrase is a joke.
Speaker 11: Fishback later says after this little rant that quote, our
Speaker 11: north Star should not be a free market but a
Speaker 11: free people. He's okay, if the market's not freeze, Okay,
Speaker 11: if we're going to be restricting which types of workers
Speaker 11: are allowed, as long as we have a free American people.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So his strategy for winning this race appears to be
Speaker 11: through appealing to homeowners and prospective homeowners through tax cuts
Speaker 11: and down payment assistance, but then also really trying to
Speaker 11: engage gen Z voters. Looking at the successive of previous politicians,
Speaker 11: including Trump and how much of his victory was related
Speaker 11: to the gen Z vote, He's he's really really honing
Speaker 11: in on trying to activate young voters in Florida. He's
Speaker 11: planning to visit every single state college and so university
Speaker 11: and talked with these issues as a social media stunt.
Speaker 11: He's going on a statewide waffle house tour, visiting all
Speaker 11: the locations in the state. Great and through this he
Speaker 11: continues to talk about these beliefs on legal immigration. In
Speaker 11: an interview with a local magazine, Fishbeck discussed his belief
Speaker 11: in the quote unquote great replacement, stated quote, you can't
Speaker 11: make America great again with Chinese, you can't make America
Speaker 11: great again with Indians. You can't make America great again
Speaker 11: with Haitians. So when I speak about the great replacement,
Speaker 11: I speak about legal immigration programs that for far too
Speaker 11: long have been overlooked. A legal immigration has been a
Speaker 11: primary concern for establishment Republicans, but each one of many
Speaker 11: legal immigration programs, by definition, takes spots and slots jobs
Speaker 11: away from American citizens. My campaign is the one that
Speaker 11: stands up and says America is for Americans, and so
Speaker 11: we have to stop apologizing for that. Yeah, little slight
Speaker 11: move there with the Americas for Americans. Yeah, in reference
Speaker 11: to German Germany for Germany for the I'm sure he
Speaker 11: knows exactly what he's doing, Oh, most certainly. Yeah, Like
Speaker 11: this is the obvious next place. They have made so
Speaker 11: much political headway with racism, and like the obvious direction
Speaker 11: to keep going there for is to be the one
Speaker 11: who's willing to lean a little bit further into racism, Right,
Speaker 11: See if that can get you a little bit further,
Speaker 11: a little bit, a little bit more popular. Yeah, it
Speaker 11: makes sense in that. In that way, That's why I
Speaker 11: find his canaidacy really interesting. Regardless of how well he's
Speaker 11: gonna end up doing in the primary, he is trying
Speaker 11: to trojan horse something into not even trojan horse in
Speaker 11: a way, he's kind of openly trying to pull something
Speaker 11: into Republican politics and something that's been like festering in
Speaker 11: the sidelines for a while. You know, start that Nick's
Speaker 11: been advocating for a while. There was that fight around
Speaker 11: H one B visas about a year ago. Yeah, and
Speaker 11: he's he's really honing in on this as a potential
Speaker 11: future for the party. And what we're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 11: see how successful this is. Like in part right, there
Speaker 11: could be other factors that make his campaign not do
Speaker 11: very well beyond these sorts of politics, but this is
Speaker 11: the first time you've really seen these deployed at this scale,
Speaker 11: I think. And he's counting on the Graper support and
Speaker 11: this is what Nick's been talking about for a while,
Speaker 11: trying to run candidates like this as much as possible.
Speaker 11: In twenty twenty six, we'll talk more about Fishback's relationship
Speaker 11: with Fuentes and the Grapers after this ad break.
Speaker 4: All right, we're back.
Speaker 11: In my episode last year about the right wing fallout
Speaker 11: of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson's brief friendship, I discussed
Speaker 11: how Fuentes was making threats and promises to deploy his
Speaker 11: Graper fan base to influence elections, both in twenty twenty
Speaker 11: six and then in the Republican presidential primary in twenty
Speaker 11: twenty eight, and after that new cycle had peaked, Fuentes
Speaker 11: continued to really hammered down his promise and threat to
Speaker 11: various candidates that if they do not adopt sufficient America
Speaker 11: first messaging, he will deploy his fan base across many
Speaker 11: different primary states to influence the election through support and harassment.
Speaker 11: And I believe that Fishback is attempting to hold Nick
Speaker 11: to this promise. On a podcast appearance last year, Fishback
Speaker 11: said that Nick fuent Has quote unquote broke the Internet
Speaker 11: by speaking truth to the deranged maniac Piers Morgan in
Speaker 11: an interview.
Speaker 8: I do love how Peace Morgan is now like an
Speaker 8: avatar of woke for the Nick American Right.
Speaker 13: For the biggest interview of the year, Nick fuent Has
Speaker 13: and Piers Morgan were Nick made very very clear, we
Speaker 13: are done with the pearl clutching, We are done with
Speaker 13: the white guilt. We are done with this pseudo religion
Speaker 13: that attacks us for just wanting to exist in our
Speaker 13: own country, to buy a home, to get a job,
Speaker 13: and to bet fit from all the things that we
Speaker 13: were promised.
Speaker 11: There he is again talking about all the things that
Speaker 11: we were promised.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and us right, like he's a thirty year old
Speaker 8: hedge fund guy. Yeah, like he got all the things.
Speaker 11: No, he did get the dream that he is saying
Speaker 11: no longer exists, like that has been his life.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, and he's just trying to cash in on
Speaker 8: it now.
Speaker 4: No, but it's.
Speaker 11: Through this interview he just keeps talking about Fuentes and
Speaker 11: glowingly refers to the Groper fan base.
Speaker 15: I'll tell you the truth. I found the audience of
Speaker 15: young men who follow and watch Nick Fuentes to be
Speaker 15: actually incredibly informed and insimple and very patriotic young man.
Speaker 15: I'm gonna be completely honest. I probably shouldn't say this,
Speaker 15: but I think Nick's following is actually really impressive. There's
Speaker 15: a lot of young men who are patriotic, who are
Speaker 15: well informed, who know our history, which is why they
Speaker 15: are so frightened by the current path that we are on.
Speaker 11: Having a candidate talk openly about the gropers in this
Speaker 11: way I think is super interesting. This is the one
Speaker 11: of the first cases, and I don't think it'll be
Speaker 11: the last where nicks fans and Nick himself are like
Speaker 11: openly referred to in a race like this.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's interesting again, Like super duper surprising to
Speaker 8: me how easily the Overton window is moved to the
Speaker 8: right right now. And there's a whole network of these
Speaker 8: like short form and long form video places to do
Speaker 8: that right that are kind of set up to incentivize that.
Speaker 8: Almost he doesn't have any particular genius that allows him
Speaker 8: to do it right, Like, there is a system in
Speaker 8: place both with like Fointe is kind of outside of
Speaker 8: the electoral politics Overton window. And then all these places
Speaker 8: that straddle the line right like Tucker Carlson, et cetera,
Speaker 8: et cetera, where, yeah, that exist to bring these further
Speaker 8: right discourses into the admissible discourse of electoral politics in
Speaker 8: this country.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and a fishback, as a largely unremarkable candidate is
Speaker 11: counting on a group of probably hundreds to thousands of
Speaker 11: young men to do free campaign work for him by
Speaker 11: telling them that they're good, smart little boys, by complimenting them.
Speaker 11: He is counting on his success being contingent on this
Speaker 11: graper army of gen z Internet users. To him, these
Speaker 11: are like a valuable political block and like that that's
Speaker 11: the thing that I find interesting about this, as you
Speaker 11: they used to be like pure poison, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 11: Now now they're seen.
Speaker 4: As like a as like a possible asset.
Speaker 11: Yep, And Fishback knows that there could be some drawbacks
Speaker 11: by going this extreme. A few days ago, Fishback walked
Speaker 11: through Miami's nightlife on stream with Menosphere influencer sneako who
Speaker 11: asked Nick foyant as if you would endorse Fishback as governor?
Speaker 8: What you say already said?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 16: Nick Foyn says has endorsed James Fishback for governor Florida.
Speaker 2: That'll really help go Wait, you want to voting for
Speaker 2: five one?
Speaker 8: Nick ones, He's voting for Byron Donald's.
Speaker 7: But that's a bad name, myrown Donald's.
Speaker 10: Does that even sound like it could be a governor?
Speaker 11: So there you can see that he knows that it
Speaker 11: could have some possible negative effects, but he's he's willing
Speaker 11: to play in this like irony irony zone while still
Speaker 11: very clearly embracing Fuentes and and the gropers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like this stream with Sneakos is like indicative
Speaker 4: of a few things.
Speaker 11: After Fishback talked about goyslop at that school event, you know,
Speaker 11: he said afterwards that he wasn't aware of like the
Speaker 11: offensive connotations.
Speaker 4: The fuck else is getting which is not true.
Speaker 11: Right, This has been like a four Chan term forever
Speaker 11: to talk about how like the Jews are poisoning gentiles
Speaker 11: with food to make them like subservient. Right, that's what
Speaker 11: the term means. He knows that, And he continued to
Speaker 11: use the goyslop term on Sneako's stream, and after jaywalking
Speaker 11: on this stream, Fishback joked quote.
Speaker 4: The headline will.
Speaker 11: Read tomorrow, Florida govenatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer,
Speaker 11: referring to sneak O great And based on the most
Speaker 11: recent polling we have on this race, Fishback's youth centric
Speaker 11: strategy does seem to be getting its intended results. In
Speaker 11: a University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab poll
Speaker 11: from the middle of February, Byron Donalds is up thirty
Speaker 11: one percent to James Fishback at six percent, about a
Speaker 11: twenty five percent gap, which is kind of in between
Speaker 11: the more Fishback friendly Patriot polling numbers and Byron Donald's
Speaker 11: own internal polling. A sizable gap, to be sure, but
Speaker 11: not one that is insurmountable. What's really interesting about this pole, though,
Speaker 11: is the youth numbers for ages eighteen to thirty four.
Speaker 11: James Fishback is at thirty two percent, whereas Byron Donald's
Speaker 11: is at eight percent. He's massively ahead among youth. Meanwhile,
Speaker 11: Byron Donald's tactics to address Fishback's connection to the Gropers
Speaker 11: has been a little odd. I'm gonna read a statement
Speaker 11: from last week. Quote, Dear James Fishback, I heard you
Speaker 11: crashed out when I told the truth about your stupid
Speaker 11: anti Semitic BDS plan that you stole from Kamala Harris,
Speaker 11: just like you stole your whole gimmick from Nick Fuentes
Speaker 11: and Zoron. Mam Donnie, You're no racist, your no groper,
Speaker 11: You're no anti Semite. You're what people hate about politics.
Speaker 11: Performative slop unquote. So Byron Donald's approach to addressing Fishbeck's
Speaker 11: ties to the Gropers are not to actually attack him
Speaker 11: for these ties, but to say that he's a fake groper,
Speaker 11: that he's not actually one of them, that he's stealing
Speaker 11: his policy ideas from Kamala Harris and stealing his gimmick
Speaker 11: from Fuentes and Zoron, Mom Donni quote unquote, your no
Speaker 11: anti Semite, your no racist. So basically attacking Fishback for
Speaker 11: not being a real enough racist, and Donald isn't the
Speaker 11: only one linking Fishback to Zoron Mamdani. The conservative magazine
Speaker 11: The Spectator released a positive profile on Fishback last week
Speaker 11: with the headline is James Fishback the rights answer to
Speaker 11: Zoron Mamdani, The similarities seemingly being that he's behind in
Speaker 11: the polls in a race that could be very influential
Speaker 11: for the future of the Republican Party, while gaining a
Speaker 11: lot of traction among youth and having a savvy online
Speaker 11: element of the campaign, and so Byron Donald's response to
Speaker 11: Fishback's popularity online a popularity among young voters is to
Speaker 11: compare him to Kamala Harris and Zoron Mamdani and claim
Speaker 11: that he's not actually a real racist, that he's not
Speaker 11: actually a real groyper. I do not believe this is
Speaker 11: going to be an effective line of attack or damage
Speaker 11: his numbers among the young, especially male supporters that he has,
Speaker 11: because Fishback already knows that he has the groper base
Speaker 11: in his pocket, and that's why he's able to make
Speaker 11: jokes with Sneako about how no, no, no, Nick Fuentes
Speaker 11: is actually supporting the other guy. He is secure enough
Speaker 11: in his Groper support to jokingly distance himself from Fuentes
Speaker 11: as a strategic move, because he knows the Grapers are
Speaker 11: already going to be doing free labor for him to
Speaker 11: boost his chance of winning. He already has them cool.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, Like he's relying on social
Speaker 8: media exposure from them, and then he can even say
Speaker 8: other stuff to conventional media and it probably won't matter
Speaker 8: that much.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: And I mean he's still getting profiled by major outlets
Speaker 11: like every every week, and it's it's it's it's gonna
Speaker 11: be a long race. He wants to eventually debate Donald's,
Speaker 11: like in a televised debate. Unclear thataught's going to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 11: but as of now that that's that's kind of the
Speaker 11: current state of his candidacy, his strategy to overcome the
Speaker 11: gap and polls. And I will be keeping an eye
Speaker 11: on this race specifically because it does relate to what
Speaker 11: I was talking about last year in terms of this
Speaker 11: like wave of Groper friendly candidates expected to try to
Speaker 11: get into the Republican Party in the next two to
Speaker 11: four years.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's The election is November of this year.
Speaker 4: November is the general August is the primary.
Speaker 8: Okay, yeah, so I guess the kind of Republican primary
Speaker 8: in Georgia is the big deal. I mean in Florida. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 11: The primary race in Florida is going to be the
Speaker 11: one that I'm keeping the most track of.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and you know, don't be surprised if if you
Speaker 11: start seeing fishback pop up and more stuff in the
Speaker 11: next few weeks. Yeah, great, Well that does it for
Speaker 11: us today at it could happen here. Yeah, now it's
Speaker 11: time to end the podcast, to lower the collective Cortisol.
Speaker 17: Welcome to it could happen here. I just want you
Speaker 17: to know our nation is back. It is the Golden
Speaker 17: Age of America. And we're going to talk about the
Speaker 17: sears say the Union by President Donald Dage Trump.
Speaker 2: And I've been saying our nation's back since way before
Speaker 2: it left, honestly, so I'm glad to see that we've
Speaker 2: caught up.
Speaker 4: But back to.
Speaker 17: When, sir, you know, it's a transformation like no one
Speaker 17: has ever seen before. Turnaround for the ages.
Speaker 4: We're gonna We're gonna do it better and better.
Speaker 17: Better and bigger and brighter and whatever B word he
Speaker 17: can decide to include.
Speaker 4: We just keep winning.
Speaker 2: So you're getting some idea from this about the tenor
Speaker 2: of the President's State of the Union speech.
Speaker 4: That we all just listen to. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: Like eight thirty pm at the end of a long
Speaker 2: work day that was already long before we listened to the.
Speaker 17: President eleven thirty pm for Gear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, eleven thirty pm for Gear. But I don't actually
Speaker 2: believe in time zones. I think that's a gon spere,
Speaker 2: but we'll talk about that later. So, in terms of
Speaker 2: like first responses to the State of the Union, I
Speaker 2: think mine was Trump spent a lot more time focusing
Speaker 2: on the achievements of other people, like literally handing out
Speaker 2: a bunch of awards, and less time, as a percentage
Speaker 2: of the speech actually trumpeting things that he did and
Speaker 2: his own successes in a way that I found kind
Speaker 2: of telling. And I think this merges with the fact
Speaker 2: that he did not mention Ice by name during the speech,
Speaker 2: So I kind of saw this as a recognition by
Speaker 2: him and his people that like, there's some face that
Speaker 2: needs to be saved, and we've got to try in
Speaker 2: this speech to kind of minimize our least attractive attributes
Speaker 2: and maximize the positive you know.
Speaker 17: Yeah, My take was that he was trying to simulate
Speaker 17: empathy and try to keep hold of that Republican crowd
Speaker 17: and try to endear himself to them as much as
Speaker 17: he could despite the state of things.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and trying to associate himself with a lot
Speaker 8: of acts of heroism or military valor or you know,
Speaker 8: which is classic strong man's stuff, right, like the you know,
Speaker 8: we're achieving a time of national great notes. Here some
Speaker 8: examples of masculine virtue. Blah blah blah. We saw the
Speaker 8: US men's ice hockey team.
Speaker 11: I really hated that twelve minutes in. Yeah, came in
Speaker 11: because we just keep winning. Our country is winning too much.
Speaker 11: We're winning so much that we don't know what to do. Yeah,
Speaker 11: And here are a bunch of a bunch of those winners.
Speaker 2: And I did find that kind of surprising too, like
Speaker 2: how quickly they got brought in and how much of
Speaker 2: a like a lot of the length of this was
Speaker 2: just him announcing people who had won something or were
Speaker 2: about to win something, and everybody clapping.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's the most medals that we've seen in a
Speaker 11: State of the Union address.
Speaker 2: And I wonder, because I know one way in which
Speaker 2: these get quote unquote rated by news agencies, like how
Speaker 2: much percentage of the time was its standing ovations? How
Speaker 2: much percentage of the time manytimes they have to stop
Speaker 2: for applause. Maybe he's just trying to game that system. Amazing,
Speaker 2: that's pretty funny.
Speaker 11: It was really easy to take notes because of how
Speaker 11: much applause there was in single lines he sat.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and not just applause, right, there were there were
Speaker 8: large periods of time when people were chanting USA, USA,
Speaker 8: or Charlie Kirk's first name.
Speaker 5: Weird.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it started off with some
Speaker 11: some more like statistics of dubious origin, but the economy
Speaker 11: and various other things. He claimed that fentanyl was down
Speaker 11: fifty six percent. That yeah, the strongestport of security ever.
Speaker 11: There's been no illegal aliens admitted to the United States
Speaker 11: in the past nine months.
Speaker 4: Zero.
Speaker 8: Well, that's a tortology, right, Like when you were admitted,
Speaker 8: that means you have been processed to release into the
Speaker 8: United States. So by definition, yes.
Speaker 4: Have there ever been illegal aliens admitted to the United States?
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's not what admission is, right, It's like saying
Speaker 8: there were.
Speaker 2: It's like being like, no bank robbers have eagerly robbed
Speaker 2: a bank. Yes, it's well, no, I guess you're right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, fish have walked under my orders.
Speaker 17: And Robert, you mentioned you wanted to say something a
Speaker 17: little bit about the fentanyl thing. He brought up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I love fentanyl, obviously, big fan of
Speaker 2: the stuff. You know, I don't like to use it,
Speaker 2: just like to read about it, study it uses.
Speaker 4: No, that's a joke. It's a bit.
Speaker 2: Don't do fentanyl, folks, please, And actually people aren't doing
Speaker 2: as much fentanyl, which has nothing to do with the
Speaker 2: Trump administration. So when he was like, there's fifty six
Speaker 2: percent less fentanyl getting into the country, I just I
Speaker 2: knew that was wrong, because, first off, I remembered reading
Speaker 2: that during the Biden administration there had started to be
Speaker 2: like a significant constriction of the international finnyl supply market.
Speaker 4: So I looked it up and I was in fact accurate.
Speaker 2: In my recollection, I found a pretty good article hosted
Speaker 2: by the University of Maryland's Medical School by Carl Hill,
Speaker 2: which notes that in twenty twenty three, the journal Science
Speaker 2: published an article by a Maryland criminologist that argued that
Speaker 2: the overdose deaths that had started to be noticed in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three was driven by a collapse of the
Speaker 2: international fentanyl market supply chain. And you may note twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three is when Donald Trump was not the president.
Speaker 2: For this article, we were trying to understand why Finnel
Speaker 2: overdose deaths, after rising rapidly for a decade in mid
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, suddenly turned downward. Peter Reuter, professor of
Speaker 2: public policy and criminology from the University of Maryland, told
Speaker 2: The Baltimore Sun, where you're reasonably sure that something has
Speaker 2: happened to the precursor chemical supply from China, there was
Speaker 2: a significant cause of the downturn in fentanyl. So again,
Speaker 2: what he's saying is the supply constriction happened in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, and it doesn't seem to have happened because
Speaker 2: of stateside US policy. In other words, the contraction of
Speaker 2: the supply had nothing to do with US stopping fentanyl
Speaker 2: at the border and everything to do with an issue
Speaker 2: somewhere in China. Now, there's been a couple of theories
Speaker 2: as to this, including some international laws that have altered,
Speaker 2: like the way these kind some of the chemical companies
Speaker 2: in China have to work but the gist of it
Speaker 2: is that this started in the Biden administration and has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with border policy. It's purely result of
Speaker 2: the actual physical supply of fentanyl, and that constriction began
Speaker 2: in China. Anyway, That's what I had to say.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think it's worth noting. I'm not quite sure
Speaker 8: where that fifty six no idea. It could be sieges
Speaker 8: that they maybe seized a lot of fentanyl. Like, I'm
Speaker 8: not quite sure where that came from. Like, there were
Speaker 8: a number of statistics which I couldn't track down, right,
Speaker 8: the nineteen billion of fraud in Minnesota by Somali people.
Speaker 2: There was one I loved. He made a note that
Speaker 2: two point four million Americans have now sentded wasn't the
Speaker 2: word he used, but got.
Speaker 4: Been lifted off of food stamps. Lifted off of food stamps.
Speaker 17: Two point four million Americans are off of food stamps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's specifically lifted off, as Garret noted, which
Speaker 2: would insinuate that, like their circumstances improved and they no
Speaker 2: longer needed food stamps. That's not true. Yes, we simply
Speaker 2: introduced like work requirements and other restrictions that kicked two
Speaker 2: point four million Americans off.
Speaker 4: Of kicked people off of the food Style program.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we've pushed people in into starvation because we.
Speaker 2: We lifted them into starvation. Garrison, we lifted them there you.
Speaker 11: Govation and this was this was his line right before
Speaker 11: he started talking about how we're winning so much and
Speaker 11: broad the hockey team that was the segue was talking
Speaker 11: was talking about how there's millions of people who now
Speaker 11: can't get food stamps and look, look how much we're winning.
Speaker 4: Quote, we're winning so much. We don't know what to do. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's my big problem.
Speaker 8: I Folt so encountered that what to do with all
Speaker 8: the victories.
Speaker 4: But no, there's there's a few other stuff.
Speaker 11: I mean, he's talked about like, you know, the lowest
Speaker 11: inflation in five years, which is continuing, you know, continuing
Speaker 11: trends that have been going on for the past like
Speaker 11: three years, right in inflation, gas prices, mortgage rates. Did
Speaker 11: this interesting line. A short time ago, we were a
Speaker 11: dead country.
Speaker 4: Now we are the hottest, hottest, the hottest.
Speaker 11: And then he said hottest again, and then he had
Speaker 11: a really a really beautiful line of pros our new
Speaker 11: friend and partner, Venezuela and us barrels of oil, our
Speaker 11: new friend and partner.
Speaker 8: He called out Delsey by name and was like, she's
Speaker 8: doing great things for Venezuela. We're going to do great
Speaker 8: things together. Like a bizarre, really occurrence. Like then, I
Speaker 8: think that it goes to show how he understands foreign policy,
Speaker 8: which is in a very transactional way. It's not about
Speaker 8: an ideological disagreement. This is about having someone who he
Speaker 8: feels is personally loyal to him and owes him the
Speaker 8: position that they have, and that's I think what he's
Speaker 8: going for in Venezuela. He didn't mention the amnesty, but
Speaker 8: he at one point brought down a Venezuelan man whose
Speaker 8: niece was in the audience to reveal that her uncle
Speaker 8: had been released from prison. I will be eagerly awaiting
Speaker 8: news on that man's ongoing immigration status.
Speaker 17: So bizarre.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there was a lot of this, like really weird
Speaker 8: political theater.
Speaker 17: And so much of it that just was in seats
Speaker 17: for all them and they were really like awkward open
Speaker 17: door moments that were just just unnecessary. But that that's
Speaker 17: what he was going for tonight in Metal Metal medal, A.
Speaker 8: Lot of medals, a lot of medals, a lot of awards.
Speaker 8: We got the list, right, the whole, the trifecto. We
Speaker 8: got the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the Medal of.
Speaker 4: Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Speaker 8: Pident sorry, Presidential Medal of Feeding, Purple Heart at Purple Heart.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we gave out of purple Heart and Olympic Gold.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, many of those.
Speaker 17: He like had this ex strange moment where he's like,
Speaker 17: I would like one of those, but apparently like.
Speaker 2: It's not for the Medal of Honors. You can only
Speaker 2: get him in the army. Maybe they'll open it up.
Speaker 2: Maybe they'll open it up, and if they do, I'll
Speaker 2: be the first one in line, sir.
Speaker 17: Yeah, he did teut that we ended d I in America,
Speaker 17: just like one of the annoying talking points that means nothing.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, so I were not mentioned by name. There
Speaker 8: was a lot of border chat.
Speaker 11: Right, Yeah, especially at the at the Star and then
Speaker 11: a few times towards like the middle end.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And one of the things he did pretty consistently
Speaker 8: was was talk about horrific incidents, often involving the death
Speaker 8: of children, sometimes in front of their parents. Yeah. I
Speaker 8: just want to highlight a couple of those the first one.
Speaker 8: He talked about Delilah Coldman, right, who was injured in
Speaker 8: a crash with Big Grig, the drivers, which was not
Speaker 8: a US citizen, but did have a work permit, a
Speaker 8: work permit issued by the federal government under Donald Trump.
Speaker 8: And this has been a claim on the right. This
Speaker 8: guy was undocumented for some time, right in that California
Speaker 8: has been giving CDLs two undocumented people in this case
Speaker 8: said that is not the case. I'm interested in what
Speaker 8: happened to the Coldman family. I understand they've been through
Speaker 8: like a horrific thing. Right, their daughter, it looked like
Speaker 8: she was going to use the use of her legs.
Speaker 8: She's now relearning to use her legs and to walk,
Speaker 8: which it's great. But previously they had met with the
Speaker 8: person who was driving the vehicle that caused their daughter
Speaker 8: this horrific injury, and they had explicitly declined to politicize it,
Speaker 8: say that they weren't interested in doing that. So I
Speaker 8: don't know what happened here to now Trump proposing a law,
Speaker 8: which Delilah's law, he's calling it, right, which would I'm
Speaker 8: trying to remember if he said stop non citizens or
Speaker 8: undocumented people or illegal aliens to use his parlents from
Speaker 8: getting CDLs, obviously.
Speaker 4: I think are legal aliens.
Speaker 8: There are states which will give you driver's license without
Speaker 8: asking for documentation for the very obvious reason that people
Speaker 8: in this country have to drive. Large parts of this
Speaker 8: country are set up around driving. You cannot exist in
Speaker 8: some parts of America without a motor car, and it
Speaker 8: is better that people get a license and insurance than
Speaker 8: that they don't do that.
Speaker 11: He said, Barring any state from granting commercial driver's license
Speaker 11: to illegal aliens was his frame Okay, yeah, that's.
Speaker 8: His normal framing rate. I have never had a CDL
Speaker 8: in this country, and I've never gone through the application process.
Speaker 8: But I assume one would first need a federal work permit,
Speaker 8: right as one would for any employment.
Speaker 4: Well, you need a driver's license, pud also need to
Speaker 4: drive there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you gotta have a driver's license to get a CDL.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, there's a background check component, it looks like
Speaker 8: to the CDO.
Speaker 11: One of the lines that he used right before this
Speaker 11: call to action was that illegal aliens cannot read road signs.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how we introduced the section of like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're all through this country driving around they don't know
Speaker 2: what like a warning sign is or a stop sign.
Speaker 8: Obviously, lots of people come to this country in a
Speaker 8: perfectly capable of speaking English, sir. Also people who are
Speaker 8: born in this country you don't speak English.
Speaker 4: Well, we just we don't have an official language.
Speaker 17: Just to say, a lot of people can't drive very
Speaker 17: well in this country. Yeah, as an as an LA driver,
Speaker 17: A lot of your people don't know how to merge.
Speaker 17: And it has nothing to do with your what language
Speaker 17: you speak or your citizens state. Okay, like this is
Speaker 17: a pointless remark to me.
Speaker 2: It's just it's a policy that they can make, right.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, didn't he sign an executive order officially making English
Speaker 8: the official language. It's at some point early on. Yes, No,
Speaker 8: I'm just I'm trying to remember if that's the case
Speaker 8: or not. Yes, yes, okay. The other claim that I
Speaker 8: thought was interesting was the killer of this young woman
Speaker 8: in Charlotte, right, who has killed.
Speaker 4: The trains stabbing incident from last year.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Arena's a Rutska, and Trump claimed that the man
Speaker 8: who killed her had come in through an open border.
Speaker 8: I am not able to find any evidence that this
Speaker 8: person is an immigrant to the United States, and I
Speaker 8: have not found that reported anywhere. His father appears to
Speaker 8: have at least resided, if not been born, in the
Speaker 8: United States. So his name is to Carlos Brown Junior.
Speaker 8: And so assuming that the cartis Brown, who is resident
Speaker 8: in the same place is his father. Therefore, I would
Speaker 8: assume that he was born in the United States and
Speaker 8: had citizenship through Bethey citizenship. I have no idea about
Speaker 8: his father. Could well be a citizen two. I'm just
Speaker 8: trying to research things in a hurry. I have not
Speaker 8: seen it reported anyway.
Speaker 11: Zero reporting about this man being an immigrant, including from
Speaker 11: right wing out let's who use this horrific incident to
Speaker 11: stoke like racist crime panic narratives last year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that may not have been the goal. It
Speaker 2: may have just been more traditional like race panic.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that was what it was. They used it for
Speaker 11: racialized crime panic. This comment by Trump inferring that he
Speaker 11: is an immigrant may have been an unscripted ad lib
Speaker 11: that he just did.
Speaker 4: But from what we could tell, this man was not
Speaker 4: an immigrant.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, it's just like a guy did a bad thing.
Speaker 11: Nor was he released early from custody, by the way,
Speaker 11: which is part of the narrative that the right was
Speaker 11: using in the reporting around this was that this guy
Speaker 11: was like released early from prison, and he did serve
Speaker 11: the entirety of his sentence.
Speaker 2: He may not have been released early from his sins,
Speaker 2: but you're released early from your sentence of not listening
Speaker 2: to us.
Speaker 4: Here's some ads. That's one of the worst ones. Yeah, well,
Speaker 4: too bad, and we're.
Speaker 8: Back, hooray.
Speaker 11: So in the start to middle section where he was
Speaker 11: he was still kind of talking about the economy before
Speaker 11: the entire pageantry performance took over. He started talking about
Speaker 11: the tax cuts and the one big beautiful bill, and
Speaker 11: he had this fun line about how all the Democrats
Speaker 11: voted against these tax cuts, and this made all the
Speaker 11: Democrats stand up in.
Speaker 8: Applaud that funny.
Speaker 11: But then he talked about this mom who was homeschooling
Speaker 11: two kids, who also worked as a waitress during the
Speaker 11: night shift on top of her husband, who also, you know,
Speaker 11: works full time, and how these these tax cuts have
Speaker 11: have gotten them to take an extra five thousand dollars
Speaker 11: home each year. Right, this is the no tax on
Speaker 11: tips thing. And this story of this of this mom
Speaker 11: who's homeschooling kids and working a night and a full
Speaker 11: time husband was was like framed like as this like
Speaker 11: triumph of the American economy. It was hard to interpret
Speaker 11: this as like a massive economic triumph when you were
Speaker 11: talking about a mother who's not only doing labor at
Speaker 11: home by schooling her children and then also working nights,
Speaker 11: and a husband who's also working full time like that,
Speaker 11: that that demonstrates how difficult it actually is to exist economically,
Speaker 11: especially if you have a family in the country right now.
Speaker 11: And his his kind of twisting of this scenario to
Speaker 11: to support his his his notion that he is he's
Speaker 11: helping the American economy I found to be quite interesting,
Speaker 11: And that is that's mostly with the Democratic response. Like
Speaker 11: ri Spenberger was about, it's like how it's pretty clear
Speaker 11: to most Americans that it's actually been quite economically challenging
Speaker 11: based on his wildly unstable trade agreements and tariffs which
Speaker 11: have caused a great deal of economic instability in this country.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there was a feeling during the Biden administration, especially
Speaker 8: with like Pusaki, right, like the Biden administration was somewhat
Speaker 8: gaslighting people as they struggled economically. Sure, but Trump has
Speaker 8: not not diverged from that policy. Right. No, And obviously
Speaker 8: now the dams are calling out talking of budget tree issues.
Speaker 8: Did anybody else catch that the Democrats have frozen funding
Speaker 8: to dhs who would like to be out there helping
Speaker 8: people shovel their snow.
Speaker 4: I missed this. I missed this shoveling snow line. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I didn't catch that either. Really, I caught it.
Speaker 17: I caught it. Okay, I thought hallucinated.
Speaker 2: Maybe that flooded the banks of like guarantized nonsense filters
Speaker 2: and we just shut down for a second.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that one, Like I actually went back on the
Speaker 8: live stream and that was one of the few moments
Speaker 8: where I, yeah, I wondered what heck he was talking about.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I'm sure he's going to be deploying FEMA FEMA,
Speaker 11: Yeah right, FEMA to New England to help to shovel
Speaker 11: the snow.
Speaker 8: Yeah, great, I'm sure that will be received. Well. Yeah,
Speaker 8: that was one of the more insane ones that I
Speaker 8: that I just it really took me a second to
Speaker 8: work out on earth was happening. But yeah, I believe
Speaker 8: that that was maybe a FEMA reference.
Speaker 11: No, I won't be happy until Homeland Security Investigation agents
Speaker 11: are shoveling snow.
Speaker 2: Honestly and make them do it. In every state, even
Speaker 2: though ones without snow. Just get out there and pantomime
Speaker 2: it with a shovel.
Speaker 8: You know, we got sand in California. We'll find him
Speaker 8: some work.
Speaker 4: Shovel some sand.
Speaker 11: I think the most interesting portion of the State of
Speaker 11: the Union address was when Trump talked about his tariffs,
Speaker 11: specifically because just days ago Supreme Court struck down his
Speaker 11: tariffs as not being legal. This will get discussed more
Speaker 11: in Executive Disorder tomorrow, but I found this to be
Speaker 11: quite interesting because Trump acknowledged all of this and then
Speaker 11: discussed how he is going to keep doing the tariffs anyway,
Speaker 11: right in front of the justices, just just openly talking
Speaker 11: about defying a Supreme Court order in front of them,
Speaker 11: and the camera kept going back and forth between the
Speaker 11: President and the justices as they just like sat there.
Speaker 11: It's a completely blank face as he's talking about defying
Speaker 11: their order. And this is like real, real peak constitutional
Speaker 11: crisis stuff.
Speaker 17: He kept saying, it's an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme
Speaker 17: corip Mind you, there was four of them there. They
Speaker 17: all stayed stoic, and some voted for him, some voted
Speaker 17: against him, so it was a mixed bag. But he
Speaker 17: was basically like it was like you know, when you
Speaker 17: do something wrong and the teacher lectures you in front
Speaker 17: of the class. It was very much that they didn't
Speaker 17: really give him much of reaction. He was talking about
Speaker 17: all countries and companies want to keep the deal, talking
Speaker 17: about tariffs and it's safe our countries and this is
Speaker 17: such an unfortunate ruling by the Supreme Court, but that
Speaker 17: it doesn't matter because he's going to keep doing it.
Speaker 4: We're still doing the tariffs. Yeah, we've talked a lot
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 11: You know, there's going to be a certain point in
Speaker 11: this in this administration there where it's going to come
Speaker 11: down to a Supreme Court ruling saying that something he's
Speaker 11: doing is illegal and he's going to keep doing it anyway.
Speaker 11: He's already flirted with this in the past year. There's
Speaker 11: a few kind of more minor moments where, if not
Speaker 11: fully breaking a ruling, was bending it to a near buckle. Yeah,
Speaker 11: but like this is I think this is the most
Speaker 11: blatant incident so far of the President just blatantly ignoring
Speaker 11: and then defying as Supreme Court ruling. And then he
Speaker 11: talked about how, you know, ideally tariffs will take the
Speaker 11: place of income tax, which sure man.
Speaker 4: Good luck with that. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 8: He had a bit where he was like, we've worked
Speaker 8: out a new and totally legal way to do it.
Speaker 17: Is that when Nie mentioned that congressional action won't be
Speaker 17: necessary for the new tariffs.
Speaker 8: I think, yeah, there was some new and.
Speaker 11: Established I mean, because that would be the legal way
Speaker 11: to do it. That is, that's the power that Congress has.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, we have their need to work it out,
Speaker 8: like we've got that one COVID.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 11: Do you want to talk about the rate Player Protection Pledge? Yes, sure, yes,
Speaker 11: the idea that tech companies will have to provide their
Speaker 11: own power to the data centers popping up around the country,
Speaker 11: lowering energy costs for residents of these neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is relevant for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 2: He's talking about allowing Basically, the issue is that all
Speaker 2: of these data centers have increased electricity costs for a
Speaker 2: lot of Americans, and he's claiming we're going to put
Speaker 2: that on the tech companies by allowing them to make
Speaker 2: their own power plants. Like that's probably, he says, by
Speaker 2: making them responsible for funding the power that their data
Speaker 2: centers cost. But specifically, the way this is supposed to
Speaker 2: work is by letting them build power plants.
Speaker 11: Is that explicitly laid out in this plan, because the
Speaker 11: way he said it certainly was unclear.
Speaker 2: I mean he said they're going to have power plants.
Speaker 2: The direct statement was like tech companies will be operating
Speaker 2: power plants that they're using to fuel these facilities. And
Speaker 2: that's like in line with lobbying Silicon Valley he's been
Speaker 2: doing for years to make it easier for them to
Speaker 2: create small nuclear reactors, like this has been for the
Speaker 2: last like several years. Silicon Valley interests, including like KRO's Power,
Speaker 2: have been pushing to make it a lot easier regulation
Speaker 2: wise to operate small nuclear plants. Like that's definitely what
Speaker 2: he was referring to.
Speaker 8: That's great. Feel good about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's a good BBC article on it
Speaker 2: from like twenty twenty five with the title why Big
Speaker 2: Tech's nuclear plans could blow up, But it features like
Speaker 2: a lot of quotes from guys at AI companies and
Speaker 2: at Google talking about like small nuclear reactors can provide
Speaker 2: twenty four to seven clean energy near data centers. According
Speaker 2: to Hyder Raza, an expert in AI and energy use
Speaker 2: at the University of Essex. There's a lot of these
Speaker 2: quotes that have been going around for years. So when
Speaker 2: I heard Trump say they'll have their own power plants,
Speaker 2: that's what I read it in the context of.
Speaker 17: Okay, and he just he says big tech companies. He
Speaker 17: didn't list out like.
Speaker 4: Who's Yeah, he doesn't who who that.
Speaker 17: Would be, because it's just like not a thought out plan.
Speaker 17: It's just something for a headline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like the kind of conclusion of years
Speaker 2: of lobbying for small nuclear plants on behalf of like
Speaker 2: big tech companies. And I'm not against the idea of
Speaker 2: more nuclear power. I am against the idea of letting
Speaker 2: open AI.
Speaker 8: Yeah, i'd be the ones who offer.
Speaker 4: A power plant of any kind. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: And having it in the State of the Union is
Speaker 8: something of a signal by him to them, right, like
Speaker 8: that they are like his constituency.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think it's also, as gare noted, it's like a
Speaker 2: nod to the affordability thing, Like he's had to deal
Speaker 2: with that a lot because people can'tnot notice that things
Speaker 2: are getting more expensive. So he's promising your power bill
Speaker 2: will go down. Because I've done this thing.
Speaker 8: Yeah, talking of getting more expensive. He spent a while
Speaker 8: talking about prices, like how he'd gone around and he'd
Speaker 8: seen like one eighty five a gallon gas and blah
Speaker 8: blah blah. Like I thought it was interesting that clearly
Speaker 8: they understand right again, it shows that affordability is something
Speaker 8: that they know they're week on and he's trying to
Speaker 8: trying to, I guess, reinforce the areas where he feels
Speaker 8: stronger within that and not talk about the ones he doesn't.
Speaker 8: He talked about home prices, talked a lot about his
Speaker 8: Trump savings accounts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Trump accounts for for kids.
Speaker 17: If there is an infomercial vibe this day, Yeah, he
Speaker 17: plugged a couple.
Speaker 4: Of different Trump r X and accounts.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And he talked a lot about like I think, Rob,
Speaker 8: youve got the transcripts in front of you, if I'm
Speaker 8: not mistaken. He said that with a small investment, they
Speaker 8: could be worth one thousand dollars, hundred thousand dollars, one
Speaker 8: hundred thousand dollars by the time the person is eighteen.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 17: The website describes it as we're building a long term
Speaker 17: financial security for millions of children by creating tax advantage
Speaker 17: investment accounts for you as citizens under the age of eighteen.
Speaker 17: It asked you to thought a form and then it says,
Speaker 17: get one thousand dollars for every American child born between
Speaker 17: January first, twenty twenty five in December thirty first, twenty
Speaker 17: twenty eight. The account is fully in your child's name,
Speaker 17: and you are the soul custodian until they turn eighteen.
Speaker 17: No contributions necessary, but you can deposit up to five
Speaker 17: thousand per year for maximum growth. That's what the website says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like and like if this is I guess to
Speaker 2: start off, this was like real. If it was real,
Speaker 2: then like I don't have a problem with the idea,
Speaker 2: Like it's okay, share, but that's my immediate question, especially
Speaker 2: since it seems like the big thing that he was
Speaker 2: harping on is that like this was funded in large
Speaker 2: part by like a six something billion dollars nation by
Speaker 2: the by the.
Speaker 4: Dells, by like Michael dellahs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so first off, I've used Dell computers, so I.
Speaker 4: Was immediately like, oh, this doesn't seem like it could
Speaker 4: be good.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't, like I don't know enough about
Speaker 2: this program to really know though, it's just like, my
Speaker 2: it's a Trump thing involving so I'm on edge. But
Speaker 2: what are we actually looking at here?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So I'm just going to work out the amount of
Speaker 8: interest it would take for that one thousand to turn
Speaker 8: into one hundred thousand in eighteen years if I just
Speaker 8: plug it into the inflation calculator. Yeah, even at sixteen percent,
Speaker 8: that's not doing it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 11: If they put that one thousand in Nividia stock five
Speaker 11: years ago, then it's certainly possible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which I think.
Speaker 11: I think that's part of these accounts is that it's
Speaker 11: like it's tight end with stock investments. It seems it
Speaker 11: seems like it doesn't sound like it's just like a
Speaker 11: high yield savings account, right. The other Trump branded service
Speaker 11: that was advertised infomercial style during the State of the
Speaker 11: Union dress was Trump Rx, which is essentially Trump's version
Speaker 11: of Mark Cuban's cost Pluster Drugs website to get prescription
Speaker 11: drugs at very close to the cost of manufacturing, something
Speaker 11: that Trump reiterated multiple times that he did not name
Speaker 11: the Trump Accounts or trump Rx himself.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Sure, is this what the part when you tried to
Speaker 17: use a woman's IVF story for propaganda. Yeah, I really
Speaker 17: disliked that.
Speaker 8: Yes he did.
Speaker 11: He did one of these, like one of these people
Speaker 11: either brought in or sitting sitting high up in the pews.
Speaker 11: He tells a lot of these little stories throughout the
Speaker 11: State of the Union. He talked about a woman who
Speaker 11: was trying to do IVF and the drugs were very
Speaker 11: expensive and now thanks to Trump Orex's it's less money.
Speaker 17: Well, it's just obnoxious because Trump said that he was
Speaker 17: quote unquote the father of IVF and claimed to be
Speaker 17: able to provide resources for people that want to pursue IVF,
Speaker 17: and he has not fallen through on any of those promises.
Speaker 4: He signed some executive orders that.
Speaker 17: Did boo all and it's still an absolutely outrageous cost
Speaker 17: to do IVF and he's done nothing. He's done nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 17: So to use it as propaganda, I find it to
Speaker 17: be extremely offensive.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, sure, but there's a lot that's offensive about
Speaker 2: the propaganda he does in this, like about the things
Speaker 2: he uses for propaganda, all the murders and.
Speaker 17: Like that's I just didn't want to I just didn't
Speaker 17: want to skip over that because it's not going to
Speaker 17: get as much of a headline as some of the
Speaker 17: other horrific things he did.
Speaker 1: But it sucked.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, what else sucks pretty hard? Rub it ads?
Speaker 4: Not the ads for this podcast.
Speaker 8: Oh no, absolutely not. No, I was thinking something entity different.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back.
Speaker 11: One thing that did get both both chambers of plotting
Speaker 11: to the surprise of Trump, because both for the Democrats
Speaker 11: applot again a little bit of the Republicans is he
Speaker 11: talked about the Stop Inside or Trading Act, which would somehow,
Speaker 11: I need to look into the actual actual bill itself,
Speaker 11: but restrict to Congress people from doing inside or trading.
Speaker 11: And this did cause a lot of applause on the
Speaker 11: on the Democrats side and some applause on the Republican side.
Speaker 11: And Trump remarked on both being interesting, and I made
Speaker 11: a Nancy Pelosi joke.
Speaker 17: She was there. They showed her later on. She was there.
Speaker 11: In terms of disruptions to the Democratic side, Al Green
Speaker 11: did a little protest thing at the beginning, and then
Speaker 11: during the section where Trump was talking about the Democrat
Speaker 11: DHS shut down, he told he told the room to
Speaker 11: stand up if you believe that that protecting American citizens
Speaker 11: is more important than protecting illegal immigrants or something something
Speaker 11: to that effect.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the role of the government is to protect American citizens,
Speaker 8: right like, yes, not illegal immigrants.
Speaker 11: And this caused a shouting back and forth between Alan
Speaker 11: o'mar and Trump would which lasted for lasted for quite
Speaker 11: a while. I wasn't able to hear very much on
Speaker 11: the car to newsfeed and it's there's I'm not seen
Speaker 11: much reporting on it yet because we were recording this
Speaker 11: literally minutes after.
Speaker 17: She shouted that he's killing Americans.
Speaker 4: Okay, that makes sense, Okay, yeah, yeah, which accurate? Which
Speaker 4: which he is? That is That is a solid That
Speaker 4: is a solid retort.
Speaker 11: And when you're talking about the DHS shutdown and standing
Speaker 11: up for American citizens as American citizens are being gotten
Speaker 11: down by the DHS, that is a fine retort, a
Speaker 11: retort that was mirrored in the Democratic response, which we
Speaker 11: might talk about an executive disorder tomorrow. He mentioned trans
Speaker 11: people kind of one time in the speech close to
Speaker 11: the middle. He talked about how a school socially transitioned
Speaker 11: someone without telling parents. This this kid ran away from
Speaker 11: home and then a left wing judge refused to return
Speaker 11: the child home. And this this person who was who
Speaker 11: was at the time a trans a trans guy was
Speaker 11: sent to an all always stay home but is now
Speaker 11: a proud young woman with a scholarship to Liberty University.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: And this woman who is part of this little performance
Speaker 11: did this like zoomer finger gesture bit, Yeah.
Speaker 17: The Hailey Bieber hand gesture.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm hit with the kids.
Speaker 8: Yeah I'm not. I didn't know what you talking about.
Speaker 11: It was annoying, like we need more normal d transitioners.
Speaker 11: But if you are, you just never are never going
Speaker 11: to show up to anything like this?
Speaker 8: No, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, who wants to have the
Speaker 8: President of the United States talk about your transition?
Speaker 11: You know what, when Joe Biden gets gets elected again,
Speaker 11: I'll show up. I'll show up at the State of
Speaker 11: the Union, Joe.
Speaker 4: I think it could happen.
Speaker 17: You know, stranger things have.
Speaker 11: But you know, Trump's line after this was, you know,
Speaker 11: talking about how there's all these transitions happening without telling parents,
Speaker 11: and the quote we must ban it and we must
Speaker 11: ban it immediately. Whatever the trans stuff was all was
Speaker 11: all in relation to miners transitioning without rental approval. That
Speaker 11: was Trump's framing for the entirety of the transition stuff.
Speaker 11: It wasn't expanded beyond that.
Speaker 8: He did go off script to be like, these people
Speaker 8: are crazy, you're in that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, when the Democrats didn't applaud for his transcommence, he did,
Speaker 11: he did start talking about how, you know, deranged the
Speaker 11: Democrats are.
Speaker 2: He said, shame on you. Shan like got like a
Speaker 2: kind of a chant going almost.
Speaker 11: There was a lot of shame stuff back and forth
Speaker 11: in this section, say same thing during the like the
Speaker 11: stand up of you believe that the role of governments
Speaker 11: to protect American citizens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those were the most like out and out fascist
Speaker 2: moments of this whole thing. Yes, like that in my opinion, Yeah.
Speaker 11: We got a Kirk moment after this trans thing. Talked
Speaker 11: about this renewal in Christianity among young people thanks to
Speaker 11: one Charlie Kirk who was.
Speaker 4: Martyred for his beliefs.
Speaker 11: Yeah, they you know, charted out Erica to do her
Speaker 11: like shtick that she's been perfecting for the past like
Speaker 11: six months.
Speaker 17: Surprisingly, no like fire or sparkers or anything.
Speaker 11: It was hard to recognize her without the fireworks. Then
Speaker 11: after this section, after the Charlie Kirk Christianity section, after
Speaker 11: the Saint Kirk section ended, it really became a military
Speaker 11: pageant for the rest. It got very metal gear solid
Speaker 11: correct for the final final, you know, forty five minutes,
Speaker 11: where he brought up a whole bunch of people and
Speaker 11: gave gave the medals as we've discussed, and then recounted
Speaker 11: the Maduro extraction. Yeah, in an extremely metal gear solid style.
Speaker 11: You talked about, you know, the bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Speaker 11: He talked about bombing drug smugglers and remarked that we
Speaker 11: quote seriously damaged their fishing industry unquote, which is a
Speaker 11: little joke about how the people that they blew up
Speaker 11: might have just been fishermen, not actually drug smugglers.
Speaker 2: Well, in a joke about how, like the fishing industry
Speaker 2: has collapsed because people are too scared to get murdered
Speaker 2: by the US to go fish, so they support their families.
Speaker 8: Yeah, in addition to the fact that they were already
Speaker 8: struggling to afford fuel for like I know, Venezuela and
Speaker 8: fishermen wotings won't going great for them.
Speaker 11: Talked about how Hamas had to dig through piles of
Speaker 11: hundreds of bodies to find some of the slain hostages
Speaker 11: to return them as a part of the negotiations between
Speaker 11: Trump Moss and Israel and boasted that he had ended
Speaker 11: ten wars, and Marco Rubio looked a little soulless.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Marky, mark I took a little.
Speaker 17: Bit of a note on Marco Rubio because he said
Speaker 17: he will go down as the best ever Secretary of State,
Speaker 17: and it seemed like he was really throwing his support
Speaker 17: towards Marco Versus Vance tonight at the State of the Union.
Speaker 11: No, because Vance is now in charge of the War
Speaker 11: on fraud. The totally real thing. Yeah, yeah, that is happening,
Speaker 11: which Trump announced is JD. Vance's new role is to
Speaker 11: be in charge of the War on fraud.
Speaker 4: Great pig, JD Vance War Fraud.
Speaker 11: But do you want do you want to talk a
Speaker 11: little bit more about this, like medical gear solid, Hideo
Speaker 11: Kajima military pageant finale to this speech.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well I know about Hideo kajimas he tweeted in
Speaker 8: support of the FDF and then deleted it sad. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Wow, you live by the tweet, you die by the tweet.
Speaker 8: A lot of this was kind of textbook FASCI stuff,
Speaker 8: not to like, you know, overly belabor the point, but
Speaker 8: the bringing out of the survivors and victims of crime,
Speaker 8: the parading of military heroes, right, Like you can just
Speaker 8: go to Robert Paxton's book, which I have just over there,
Speaker 8: but I'm not going to read from it right now,
Speaker 8: Anatomy of Fascism. Yeah, see Anatomy of Fascism, and you
Speaker 8: can start checking off the list and you see so
Speaker 8: much of it here, right Yeah.
Speaker 11: I mean a mix of like you know, war veterans,
Speaker 11: World War Two. Trump had a lot of this to
Speaker 11: seventeen seventy six, the fact that the two hundred and
Speaker 11: fifty anniversary of the United States is coming up.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and then the national betrayal and the Scapegoat Group
Speaker 8: and him being the renovation.
Speaker 4: Like we got it all baby.
Speaker 8: Yeah. His speech read like he looked at Paxton has
Speaker 8: these motivating passions of fascism, and it looks like he
Speaker 8: kind of went down that as a checklist, as he
Speaker 8: was as whoever wrote this was writing it right like
Speaker 8: it has almost everything from that, the glorification of Marshall Valor,
Speaker 8: like I said, the blaming of Escapegoat group, like I
Speaker 8: alone can bring this nation back to great nurse things
Speaker 8: that were not new Fort Bragg is back, James, Yes,
Speaker 8: I believe different, a different different brag. Yeah, they found
Speaker 8: another guy called Brag, which he didn't mention. The Fort
Speaker 8: Bragg is back, but it's a different brag this time,
Speaker 8: and I'm sure just a coincidence it's the same as
Speaker 8: the first.
Speaker 11: But no, Robert, I think you're totally right that, like
Speaker 11: he started off by, you know, you have to adjust
Speaker 11: the economic stuff at the front because he ran on
Speaker 11: so much of it. But they want to get through
Speaker 11: that as quickly as possible. Then in order to try
Speaker 11: to coax this, like you, patriotic spirit, it devolves into
Speaker 11: this ceremony of like military greatness, of like returning to
Speaker 11: military greatness something that was lost and now we have Redone.
Speaker 11: You know, this was the most successful military operation in decades.
Speaker 11: I had four leaders calling me to congratulate me on it.
Speaker 11: You took down the Chinese and Russian defense systems. This
Speaker 11: guy's leg was ripped apart by bullets, but he still
Speaker 11: landed the chopper. Like so much of it becomes about,
Speaker 11: you know, the heroic moments done by other people to
Speaker 11: had pad around the actual fractured state of of Trump's
Speaker 11: of Trump's America.
Speaker 2: And waving the bloody shirt is a phrase you hear
Speaker 2: like it is a phrase you hear associated with fascist movements.
Speaker 2: It's literally referring to like a thing that happened during
Speaker 2: the rise of the Nazis, right as a result of
Speaker 2: like the murders of some of their street fighters. But
Speaker 2: that's I mean, like he's doing very much a version
Speaker 2: of that here, like including the fact that while he
Speaker 2: was talking about this attack on Venezuela and the that
Speaker 2: injured piloting the chopper, he spent like a lot of
Speaker 2: time talking about blood like sloshing around in the bottom
Speaker 2: of the of the of the flight down the aisle.
Speaker 4: The isle or whatever nil the isle of the chinook.
Speaker 11: The blood was streaming down, so all of the all
Speaker 11: the special forces in the back knew that the pilot
Speaker 11: was injured and that they were all at risk. Very bloody,
Speaker 11: very very bloody speech in general.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a lot of blood mentioned.
Speaker 11: There's Similarly, like the Lake and Riley sections of his
Speaker 11: State of the Union addressed last year were very similar,
Speaker 11: and he was trying to, you know, play play the
Speaker 11: hits in terms of how much that stuff, that stuff
Speaker 11: played well among his bass last year. He was trying
Speaker 11: to recreate that in a few moments when when one
Speaker 11: of the instances you have is you know, someone who
Speaker 11: was socially transitioned who now isn't and someone who was
Speaker 11: injured in a car accident, you know, not a murder.
Speaker 11: Those are two of your instances. It's starting to get
Speaker 11: weakened a little bit. He tried to use the Kirk
Speaker 11: assassination as one of these instances, and then one one
Speaker 11: instance of a stabbing that was a murder. Those were
Speaker 11: the bloody shirts that he was waving, as well as
Speaker 11: the National Guard and Jared Kushner.
Speaker 17: Kushner was that the mentioned him by name? I think
Speaker 17: more than once. It's always a jump scare for me.
Speaker 8: Yeah. He may have mentioned Kushner more than Vaughan's.
Speaker 4: Yes, definitely.
Speaker 17: He barely mentioned JD Bands, which is very interesting.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Does anybody else have any thoughts?
Speaker 4: No, it's ober.
Speaker 17: I'm glad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's be done with this.
Speaker 17: Let's be done with this. That I was it was
Speaker 17: too long to begin with.
Speaker 2: I wish we were finished with this state of the
Speaker 2: Union as soon as al Green was that's there's our
Speaker 2: reference to him getting for the second year in a row.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he's made to have it like.
Speaker 2: Plans dinner for halfway through We're like, don't. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to be there long. I'm gonna I'm gonna worry
Speaker 2: out immediately.
Speaker 4: Don't worry why not?
Speaker 17: And you know, if we decided there's more to talk about,
Speaker 17: we'll mention it on Edie. But for now, that's all
Speaker 17: we got.
Speaker 11: The Save America Act, he did mention, which we need
Speaker 11: to cover in depth very soon and.
Speaker 17: We will, yes, we will, but for now, I.
Speaker 8: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder are weekly
Speaker 8: newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the
Speaker 8: crumbling of our world and what this means for you.
Speaker 8: I am James Stout and today I am joined by
Speaker 8: Sophie Lichtman and Mia What. This week, we're covering the
Speaker 8: week of February eighteenth to February twenty fifth.
Speaker 17: We'll also have a segment by one Garrison. Davis added
Speaker 17: on later they were out in the field covering a
Speaker 17: story which will be an episode coming out soon.
Speaker 8: But yeah, they were inside the capital, not the not
Speaker 8: the January States Capital. Yea, yeah, so around maumbarmy. I
Speaker 8: understand who's going to pardon them and it will be fine.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, seems like four people who actually believe this.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, please don't take to the subreddit. Garrison
Speaker 8: has not been arrested. It's up to a couple of small things,
Speaker 8: I guess. Last week, the Georgia State Elections Board voted
Speaker 8: to reprimand Elon Musk's America Pack for mailing absentee ballot
Speaker 8: applications prey filled out with voting information during twenty twenty
Speaker 8: four elections that violates state law.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: And they didn't they did this thing. I don't know
Speaker 8: if you remember this. They didn't indicate like it wasn't
Speaker 8: a ballot, it wasn't from the government to vote with,
Speaker 8: it was from Elon Musk.
Speaker 4: What that's so unhinged.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was really on one back then. It'll be
Speaker 8: interesting to see how he approaches the mid terms with
Speaker 8: his America Party.
Speaker 17: Wow. Scotus did say that USPS is legally immune for
Speaker 17: intentionally missdelivered mail. They're basically saying, you know, and this
Speaker 17: was a five to four decision and it happened on Tuesday,
Speaker 17: February twenty fourth, that the US Postal Service can't be
Speaker 17: held liable for intentional failure to deliver mail only.
Speaker 3: Hinge's decision by the way that the actual the actual
Speaker 3: story behind it is this black woman who was renting
Speaker 3: property out to people and all the like. The people
Speaker 3: were pissed about it because they're racists, and so they
Speaker 3: were doing shit like intentionally not delivering bills and stuff.
Speaker 3: They were like locking their mailboxes with like locks that
Speaker 3: no one had the keys to because the post office
Speaker 3: people were just putting locks on it. And it got
Speaker 3: ruled that they have immunity for this.
Speaker 8: Wow. Bizarre.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean all of this just feels like it's
Speaker 17: being targeted for voter suppression. But yeah, that's a bigger story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's also another case of Supreme Court says racism, Fine.
Speaker 17: Yeah, money such cases.
Speaker 8: Yeah, let's see. Uh that's the dog trine. The other
Speaker 8: thing was this this week is part of the DHS shutdown.
Speaker 8: Lewandowski and nom decided that they were going to shut
Speaker 8: down TSA, pre check and global so those people aren't familiar,
Speaker 8: are like expedited processing. One is for getting on the
Speaker 8: plane as you go for security there and the other
Speaker 8: one is for when you arrive in the United States
Speaker 8: and nuclear customes. That this lasted for like minutes. It
Speaker 8: seems to I think global entry is still paused. There
Speaker 8: are other ways in which having a global entry car
Speaker 8: can exploit your entry into the US. Still, but the
Speaker 8: pre check thing did not last very long because that
Speaker 8: would have probably pissed off all the wrong people, right, Like.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and also make lines even longer, which is airports
Speaker 17: are already a nightmare. Come on, come on, they.
Speaker 4: Would have gotten killed by the wrong congressional staffer.
Speaker 17: Right you think Ted Cruz doesn't have TSA pre check?
Speaker 8: Please the idea that like, Okay, so we're like, they're
Speaker 8: forcing all the TSA people to work anyway, right, because
Speaker 8: they are essential employees. But be like, if you can
Speaker 8: find a way to make those people work less, let's
Speaker 8: say by having a group of people who have been
Speaker 8: pre cleared so the TSA people don't have to spend
Speaker 8: quite a long checking them.
Speaker 4: That helps.
Speaker 8: Actually, this is not a cost saving measure. This is
Speaker 8: clearly to try to punish people and put it on
Speaker 8: the dems.
Speaker 17: I simply have TSA pre check just so I don't
Speaker 17: have to take off my shoes, and because it brings
Speaker 17: me great joy when I get to ditch people who
Speaker 17: do not have love ditching Robert Evans at the airport
Speaker 17: and every time we travel together, it's a battle who
Speaker 17: will get through the line first, And one time it
Speaker 17: was him and he was like, ah, you know what
Speaker 17: I deserve that a prettiest years of a previous job
Speaker 17: bought me that PSA prew check and I've had it
Speaker 17: for years and wow, I love not taking my shoes off.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 17: That's the only person for me. I'm like, Wow, get
Speaker 17: to wear shoes first worldbum.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, let's talk briefly about Mexico.
Speaker 3: Yes, oh god, dramatic tone shift.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, yeah, well you know you might use your
Speaker 8: pre check on a trip to Mexico.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 17: Transition.
Speaker 8: Wow, yeah, that's a transition. That's what we do here,
Speaker 8: I see, Yeah, professional podcasting. The Mexican military killed Elemento
Speaker 8: on Sunday. Mencho's legal name is Nemesio where a servantees.
Speaker 8: He was, of course the leader of the CJ and G,
Speaker 8: which is I guess the English translation would be like
Speaker 8: the Hallisco Cartel new Generation. The Spanish acronym is how
Speaker 8: it's generally used. He was also the most wanted person
Speaker 8: in Mexico. The operation was carried out by the Mexican military.
Speaker 8: I've seen some reports they didn't notify local law enforcement
Speaker 8: so he wouldn't be tipped off now. Mento is reported
Speaker 8: to have died on a military flight after the raid,
Speaker 8: so have been injured in the raid and then died
Speaker 8: on the way back to Mexico City, where he was
Speaker 8: obviously going to be treated, and then questioned if he survived.
Speaker 8: I guess in response, more than two hundred and fifty
Speaker 8: nar called blockadoes knuckle blockades, if you're not familiar, are
Speaker 8: roadblocks that are generally made up of vehicles that are carjacked.
Speaker 8: They're often like buses, and then they're set a blaze
Speaker 8: that they're set at ninety degrees to the direction of
Speaker 8: travel of the road right, so it makes a roadblock.
Speaker 8: So more than two hundred and fifty of these were
Speaker 8: set up around the country. This is a relatively common response.
Speaker 8: The most I guess like serious response we've seen to
Speaker 8: a government action before was called the Kolia Kanasso Couliacan
Speaker 8: was in a lower cartel. This this one they're calling
Speaker 8: the men jassel right, using the same etymology. I guess.
Speaker 8: There have also been a tax on Mexican National Guard troops,
Speaker 8: killing more than two dozen in twenty four hours following
Speaker 8: the raids. More than sixty civilians I've now been reported
Speaker 8: to being killed, including a pregnant woman. Yeah, it's all like,
Speaker 8: it's folks in Mexico who are going to suffer, right,
Speaker 8: Like it's everyday people trying to get on with their lives.
Speaker 8: Another of the things that happened is the bank will Benstar,
Speaker 8: so like well being bank, I guess I would translate
Speaker 8: that as it's a bank that exists to bring people
Speaker 8: into the banking system who would otherwise be unbanked. It's
Speaker 8: a government initiative in Mexico, so a lot of branches
Speaker 8: of that bank have been burnt down. This is part
Speaker 8: of a tendency on the part of shinen balm Right
Speaker 8: to repudiate the previous policy of hugs not bullets, and
Speaker 8: to go after organized crime in Mexico more violently. I guess.
Speaker 8: It seems like the country's security forces have been leading
Speaker 8: the charge against the seen a Lower cartel, and this
Speaker 8: may be indicates that it's the military who were going
Speaker 8: after the Hallischoo cartel. So like the two branches are
Speaker 8: pursuing separate missions against against different entities. Right, it remains
Speaker 8: to be seen if there was any US involvement. I
Speaker 8: kind of take issue at the Niegiac suggestion that there
Speaker 8: has to have been US involvement. Like, the Mexican government
Speaker 8: is more than capable of doing state violence. It has
Speaker 8: done so for a long time. Ye, you know, the
Speaker 8: Mexican government is capable of acting on its own. Not
Speaker 8: everything that happens is about America. I don't want to
Speaker 8: cover this in too great of a detail. It's not
Speaker 8: really a beat that we report on other than this
Speaker 8: is a relatively major occurrence in Mexico.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and Gear is gonna plug in now, future Gear,
Speaker 17: tell us what you got.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 11: Garrison Davis here with Sophie Leuchterman for a special segment
Speaker 11: about the Super Bowl commercial for Ring the Doorbell, owned
Speaker 11: by Amazon Yep. During the Super Bowl, Amazon's Ring Doorbell
Speaker 11: air commercial showing off a new feature called search Party,
Speaker 11: which was advertised as a way to locate lost by
Speaker 11: automatically searching through footage captured by ring cameras in the
Speaker 11: neighborhood to track of pet's movements.
Speaker 17: Ooh, who picked the name search party? And who thought
Speaker 17: that wasn't creepy?
Speaker 11: Search Party is interesting because it makes you think of
Speaker 11: like a crime scene. Yes, that is a brain link
Speaker 11: that they may not have intended. Let's play, yes, please
Speaker 11: the audio from this commercial because, as Sophie discussed before,
Speaker 11: we started this segment where we're unsure of the overlap
Speaker 11: of it could happen here listeners and Super Bowl watchers.
Speaker 11: So here is the Ring commercial audio. It's thirty seconds.
Speaker 8: This is Milow pets or family.
Speaker 16: But every year ten million go missing, and the way
Speaker 16: we look for them hasn't changed in years.
Speaker 4: Until now.
Speaker 16: One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app
Speaker 16: starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from
Speaker 16: Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.
Speaker 8: Since launch, more.
Speaker 16: Than a dog a day has been reunited with their family.
Speaker 16: Be a hero in your neighborhood with search available to
Speaker 16: everyone for free right now, Join the neighborhood at Ring
Speaker 16: dot com.
Speaker 4: Join the neighborhood.
Speaker 15: No.
Speaker 17: Also, when did they launch this?
Speaker 4: Do we know it's launched? I'm pretty sure search parties launched.
Speaker 17: I just don't believe that Dog and Day bullshit.
Speaker 11: It launched in late twenty twenty five, Okay, And I
Speaker 11: can speak to this a little bit more, actually sure
Speaker 11: because I saw this feature early when I was in
Speaker 11: Las Vegas actually right this commercial. This intends to portray,
Speaker 11: you know, a heartwarming unification of a dog and its owner,
Speaker 11: but in effect the ad sparked public backlash, including from
Speaker 11: politicians like Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, and privacy rights organizations
Speaker 11: and among normies, because this ad accidentally demonstrated the technological
Speaker 11: capacity to turn every neighborhood ring camera into a web
Speaker 11: of surveillance that AI can use to locate anything.
Speaker 4: Based on a picture.
Speaker 11: Now, as I said, I saw this feature unveiled at
Speaker 11: CEES last month. I talked about it on Better Offline.
Speaker 11: At ces the AI search functionality was described like this.
Speaker 11: The owner of a lost pet can upload a photo
Speaker 11: and post a notice in the ring app an Amazon
Speaker 11: will utilize ring cameras in the area to search for matches,
Speaker 11: and if a match is found, the owner of the
Speaker 11: camera can share the footage with the owner of the
Speaker 11: lost pet. But the public display this technology during the
Speaker 11: Super Bowl has stirred trouble and bad headlines for Amazon.
Speaker 4: Senator Ed Markey said that the.
Speaker 11: Ad quote exposed a scary truth the technology in its
Speaker 11: doorbell cameras can be used to hunt down a lost
Speaker 11: pet or a person. Americans oppose this creepy surveillance state unquote,
Speaker 11: and the privacy rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote
Speaker 11: in a statement that the ad was quote unquote disguised
Speaker 11: as heartfelt, but actually quote previewed future surveillance of our streets,
Speaker 11: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer
Speaker 11: devices to identify, track, and locate anything human, pet, or otherwise.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 11: Now, these concerns are in the wake of high profile
Speaker 11: ICE rates targeting neighborhoods, and a recent announcement that RING
Speaker 11: was going to partner with the police surveillance company Flock,
Speaker 11: which operates large scale, integrated camera systems that allow police
Speaker 11: to tap into a network of surveillance in urban areas
Speaker 11: through cameras and license plate readers. Now, Flock claims that
Speaker 11: they do not give federal immigration agencies direct access to footage,
Speaker 11: and that may be true, that.
Speaker 17: Doesn't mean that won't change that they don't have capability
Speaker 17: to do.
Speaker 11: So well, and that doesn't mean that CBP and ICE
Speaker 11: can't acquire that footage in an other ways and currently
Speaker 11: right now, a four h four media report from last
Speaker 11: May showed that local police working with ICE used Flock's
Speaker 11: camera network to track immigrants as a part of ICE
Speaker 11: and homeland security investigations, so they are getting access to
Speaker 11: this footage even though they aren't directly tapped into the
Speaker 11: Flock network because they can work with local agencies in
Speaker 11: states that do not have sanctuary city policies and in
Speaker 11: states that maybe do, because police.
Speaker 4: May not be always following those laws.
Speaker 11: Ring, not Flock, says that their footage can be requested
Speaker 11: by local law enforcement and users can decide whether or
Speaker 11: not to respond, though Ring is also subject to warrens
Speaker 11: of subpoenas and court orders requiring some footage be handed
Speaker 11: over to authorities. Following the backlash to the Super Bowl ad,
Speaker 11: Ring canceled its partnership with Flock in what the companies
Speaker 11: describe as a mutual decision. The deal would have allowed
Speaker 11: Ring owners to directly share footage with the Flock network.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 11: All of this happened around the same time that the
Speaker 11: FBI was able to access recorded footage from Nancy Guthrie's
Speaker 11: Google Nest camera as a part of that kidnapping investigation,
Speaker 11: despite Guthrie not having an active recording subscription, so this
Speaker 11: too sparked privacy concerns. Cash Rettel FBI director said that
Speaker 11: the footage was recovered from quote residual data located in
Speaker 11: back end systems. This was footage that Google records and
Speaker 11: stores for free on a temporary basis, usually for a
Speaker 11: few hours before it is quote unquote deleted. So if
Speaker 11: you have one of these Nest cameras, Google will store
Speaker 11: a few hours of footage for you to look at
Speaker 11: for free and then says that it's going to quote
Speaker 11: unquote deleted, and Nest owners can pay a reoccurring fee
Speaker 11: to keep that footage accessible on the Google Cloud for longer.
Speaker 11: Guthrie did not have such a subscription, so this data
Speaker 11: that was recorded was marked for deletion. But data deletion
Speaker 11: is not an immediate process. It just a piece of
Speaker 11: data as being okay to write over with new data,
Speaker 11: which means until that happens, fragments of that data can
Speaker 11: be retrieved and pieced back together. But this can be
Speaker 11: tricky and take a lot of time, and in this case,
Speaker 11: it took Google over a week for a very high profile.
Speaker 17: Case, and they're still working behind the scenes to retrieve
Speaker 17: even more footage. Yeah, from this Nest camera.
Speaker 4: It's it's not easy.
Speaker 11: I think the sort of privacy concerns for this case
Speaker 11: do not reflect largely for I think most people's concerns
Speaker 11: because the specific way Google stores it footage in the
Speaker 11: cloud is also unique to the Google Nest system.
Speaker 4: Ring doesn't do it in this same way.
Speaker 17: They also ended up outsourcing this to private security retrievers
Speaker 17: for data retrievers, as opposed to doing it internally either
Speaker 17: with the local sheriffs or FBI, which says a lot.
Speaker 11: Yeah, not surprising, and yeah, there's always a concern with
Speaker 11: these sorts of you know, doorbell cameras, that the footage
Speaker 11: can be subpoened, right, sure, but that process also takes.
Speaker 4: A long time.
Speaker 11: I think there's a difference between the sort of flock
Speaker 11: style immediate access and subpoenating footage or having to piece
Speaker 11: together fragmented footage in the case of like the Nest
Speaker 11: storage system. But this is this is the current situation
Speaker 11: with with the Ring and Flock deal that fell through.
Speaker 11: Ring does partner with Axon, the bodycam company. Similarly, police
Speaker 11: can send requests to Ring users and they can voluntarily
Speaker 11: send the footage if they choose not to. If police
Speaker 11: really want that footage, they can try to get a
Speaker 11: court order that may or may not succeed, depending on
Speaker 11: the details of that case.
Speaker 17: My question is when you were a CS what were
Speaker 17: they highlighting there? Was it different from this commercial or
Speaker 17: was it a similar campaign?
Speaker 11: It was very similar to this commercial. It was it
Speaker 11: was like a section of the large like Amazon room.
Speaker 11: Like Amazon has a whole suite a suite in this hotel,
Speaker 11: but it's it's it's not like a hotel room. It's
Speaker 11: on the convention floor, but they have like their whole
Speaker 11: whole like kind of ballroom section Amazon Wing and Amazon
Speaker 11: Wing of the convention. Yeah, and this was one of
Speaker 11: the many products. They had a few other surveillance products,
Speaker 11: like a like a security camera tower it's powered by
Speaker 11: solar that can like roll around. Also is planning to
Speaker 11: integrate into these web surveillance networks. But since this ad
Speaker 11: and the negative backlash which led to the Flock deal
Speaker 11: coming through, there still has been reports from four oh
Speaker 11: four media about internal discussions among Ring to use search
Speaker 11: Party for crime to quote unquote stop crime, and they're
Speaker 11: still ongoing discussion on the various ways to apply this technology.
Speaker 11: In an internal email acquired by four oh four, the
Speaker 11: Ring CEO said that search Party could be a tool
Speaker 11: to help quote zero out crime in neighborhoods. The abilities
Speaker 11: of using this to track humans are very known among
Speaker 11: the people at RING.
Speaker 17: I think it's really interesting how quickly this partnership was
Speaker 17: dissolved with the backlash from that Super Bowl ad. It
Speaker 17: seemed to be almost instant. It's pretty quick, which shows
Speaker 17: that once upthing's really bad and you pointed out sometimes
Speaker 17: that can work to stop said bad thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 17: Search party creepy, though like a law enforcement still wants
Speaker 17: to use it potentially be helpful with certain things, maybe,
Speaker 17: but it really just seems like they're trying to do
Speaker 17: like normal people surveillance.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and then putting it with this you heartwarming package
Speaker 11: of helping find lost dogs. If you want to locate
Speaker 11: a lost dog, the most efficient way to do that
Speaker 11: is by having your dog micro trip. That is still
Speaker 11: the most most reliable method. Using this integrated camera network
Speaker 11: as a as a way to coax people into submitting
Speaker 11: into a system like this by waving the lost puppy
Speaker 11: banner is a little bit insid.
Speaker 17: Leave the dogs alone. The dogs don't want to be surveiled.
Speaker 17: My dog doesn't want to be surveilled. She does she
Speaker 17: surveils my house. Stop trying to take the dog's jobs.
Speaker 17: We're gonna go to a quick ad break and we'll
Speaker 17: be back. And we're back. And I just wanted to
Speaker 17: follow up on something that was kind of overlooked from
Speaker 17: the City of the Union, which was, you know, kind
Speaker 17: of a throwaway discussion about IVF, and I just wanted
Speaker 17: to give some information because I think it's worth talking
Speaker 17: about for those of you who don't know, IVF is
Speaker 17: incredibly expensive. According to I looked at the National Bureau
Speaker 17: of Economic Research as well as an article from CNY
Speaker 17: Fertility that says the average coughs of IVF is often
Speaker 17: quoted at twelve thousand dollars, but that is just the
Speaker 17: price quoted by the Fertillity Clinic for like their base package.
Speaker 17: And I have several friends who have gone through this
Speaker 17: and the costs are outrageous. Many other necessary expenses on
Speaker 17: top of that, twelve thousand dollars is around twenty thousand
Speaker 17: dollars and for most folks, on average, IBS doesn't necessarily
Speaker 17: work the first time around. For a lot of people,
Speaker 17: you're spending somewhere between thirty thousand per round to fifty
Speaker 17: to sixty thousand per round. And you know, despite and
Speaker 17: fertility being a medical diagnosis and IBF being the best
Speaker 17: medical treatment for that, A twenty eighteen analysis of the
Speaker 17: IBF insurance market by Mercer found that seventy four percent
Speaker 17: of Americans do not have insurance coverage for IBF, and
Speaker 17: you know, just from speaking with friends, even if they do,
Speaker 17: it's still outrageously expensive. So we're looking at a cost
Speaker 17: of about somewhere between depending on insurance or without insurance.
Speaker 17: And that's not even including the medical costs. That's not
Speaker 17: including the downtime cost of not working. That's not including
Speaker 17: if you're just doing egg retrieval and the cost of storage.
Speaker 17: But these expenses are outrageous and it's been a heated
Speaker 17: topic for many folks in the far right. And just
Speaker 17: for an example, I would like to play a clip
Speaker 17: from Charlie Kirk talking to to Sorry Sorry in advance
Speaker 17: two Girl Twins that you know. I actually when this
Speaker 17: when this video originally dropped, it was a discussion with
Speaker 17: a bunch of my friends, So I kind of think
Speaker 17: it's worth sharing just to see, like how heated of
Speaker 17: a topic it is. Because I want to talk about
Speaker 17: how Donald Trump has addressed it and how that changed.
Speaker 17: So here is an interaction between two girls that were
Speaker 17: IVF babies talking to Charlie Kirk about IVF, and I
Speaker 17: think it's just really interesting to hear that extreme thinking
Speaker 17: from that side. Hi, Charlie.
Speaker 18: Hi, So my name is Paige and this is my
Speaker 18: twin sister ivs wows.
Speaker 19: We have two older sisters that are also IVF. Okay,
Speaker 19: so this is about IVF of course, so I'm particularly
Speaker 19: neutral on the topic. I don't want to have like
Speaker 19: a forced opinion because like my entire family's kind of
Speaker 19: become a product of IVF.
Speaker 20: Are you guys surah too or just IVF just if?
Speaker 19: But I watch your videos and so I've noticed that
Speaker 19: in one of your videos you do mention that you
Speaker 19: are okay with IVF, but you're morally against it.
Speaker 18: Is that true?
Speaker 20: Yeah, it's a little bit deeper than that. But I
Speaker 20: have a lot of problems with IVF albe it while
Speaker 20: acknowledging the fruit. I'm glad you're both alive and so
Speaker 20: that must be celebrated. So it's a very I'll explain
Speaker 20: the difficulty, but please continue, Okay.
Speaker 19: My like part one of my question is just as
Speaker 19: someone who was conceived through IVF, why should I also
Speaker 19: be morally against it?
Speaker 8: Got good question.
Speaker 20: Okay, So as a pro lifer, first and foremost, we
Speaker 20: have to have an issue with the discarded fertilized eggs
Speaker 20: that happen during IV That's why you guys are twins
Speaker 20: is because during your creation process, if I can be
Speaker 20: provocatively blunt with your you lost a lot of your siblings. Yes,
Speaker 20: am I correct, and.
Speaker 19: Saying so for our older sisters, they had six embryos
Speaker 19: in their batch. Two came out, of course, but for
Speaker 19: us there were three and then two came out.
Speaker 20: Yeah, And so that's my first problem is that it
Speaker 20: definitionally is saying like we're going to discard life to
Speaker 20: get to life. I have a problem with that.
Speaker 4: So I do.
Speaker 18: Agree, but in a certain way. Oh sorry, So in
Speaker 18: a certain way, those embryos, like say, they weren't going
Speaker 18: to become anyways, but at least we were trying because
Speaker 18: they were going to be raised in a house where
Speaker 18: we are pro life and we really wanted to be
Speaker 18: able to have kids and cherish that. But by taking
Speaker 18: that loss, they were able to have at least us
Speaker 18: out of the three at least they.
Speaker 1: Could have the one.
Speaker 18: So it's kind of I don't know where I'm going
Speaker 18: with that.
Speaker 20: I understand what you're saying. So there's a pro life
Speaker 20: way to do IVA, which is only implant the eggs
Speaker 20: of which the children that you actually want to raise.
Speaker 20: And so by the way, you have a lower likelihood
Speaker 20: of working because in your case it would be maybe
Speaker 20: two or three. For example. The way that the IVF
Speaker 20: doctor will sell it is like, look, here's six embryos.
Speaker 20: You'll be lucky if one or two implant to the
Speaker 20: uterine wall. Let's see what happens. Now in certain cases,
Speaker 20: four implant to the uterine wall and you get quadruplets, right,
Speaker 20: which is what happens.
Speaker 1: I find that to be a little bit.
Speaker 20: Creepy, to be honest, that a doctor can kind of
Speaker 20: call shots on what life is going to live and
Speaker 20: not live.
Speaker 17: I think you're a little bit creepy.
Speaker 3: Try this guy understand what it is, like, I guess,
Speaker 3: like ideologically obviously, no, but like what how does he
Speaker 3: think that?
Speaker 17: Yeah, so that that was like an extreme side of things. Yeah,
Speaker 17: that opinion of you're killing your siblings and you know that,
Speaker 17: that sort of thing. I just find it the beginning
Speaker 17: of that video. I talked about it with a lot
Speaker 17: of my friends when I first came out. I just
Speaker 17: thought it was so interesting that where he's like, well,
Speaker 17: I'm glad you're alive, but you're immoral? Is such a
Speaker 17: such an unhinged stance. Meanwhile, during the Trump campaign, sorry
Speaker 17: in advance, Donald Trump's voice.
Speaker 4: Trump back to back. I could hazard pay.
Speaker 8: After listening to it for like two hours last night of.
Speaker 17: The Yeah, yeah, Trump deeply pivoted We're going back to
Speaker 17: like about a month before the election in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 17: But he deeply pivoted on IVF after the BioMA Supreme
Speaker 17: Court issued a ruling that effectively halted IVF treatment in
Speaker 17: the state by declaring that frozen embryos are legally considered
Speaker 17: to be children. This decision led to a temporary shot
Speaker 17: down of IVF services at major clinics due to liability risks.
Speaker 17: This is you know, from on Hopkins Public Health website. Yeah,
Speaker 17: and so that started a big discussion and split lots
Speaker 17: of different people on different political sides about the topic.
Speaker 17: But yeah, Trump pivoted an IVF and this is what
Speaker 17: he had to say, Oh, I want to talk about IVF.
Speaker 21: I'm the father of IVF, so I want to hear
Speaker 21: this question.
Speaker 8: What the fuck?
Speaker 17: Yeah. Also during the campaign trail, in an interview with
Speaker 17: NBC News, this is the most important clip of it,
Speaker 17: he said the following, Well, as you.
Speaker 22: Know, I was always for IVF right from the beginning,
Speaker 22: as soon as we heard about it. It's fertilization and
Speaker 22: it's helping women and men and families.
Speaker 7: But it's helping women able to have a baby.
Speaker 22: Some have great difficulty, and a lot of them have
Speaker 22: been very happy with the results, as you know, and
Speaker 22: what we're doing, and we're doing this because we just
Speaker 22: think it's great and we.
Speaker 7: Need great children, beautiful children in our country.
Speaker 22: We actually need them and are going to be under
Speaker 22: the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for
Speaker 22: that treatment.
Speaker 7: So we are paying for that treatment.
Speaker 4: Or we're going to want it or for.
Speaker 7: All Americans that get it, all Americans that need it.
Speaker 22: So we're going to be paying for that treatment, or
Speaker 22: we're going to be mandating that the insurance company pays.
Speaker 4: So either either the government will pay for it or
Speaker 4: the insurance companies.
Speaker 17: Yes, that did not happen. He campaigned on that and
Speaker 17: just giving that false hope to people struggling with infertility
Speaker 17: who can't afford the Like I said, thirty to sixty
Speaker 17: to God knows how much thousands of dollars is pretty sick.
Speaker 8: It's particularly weird when I understand this is this thing
Speaker 8: that Lick his party is not united on. But like
Speaker 8: they've gone after not having to pay for other reproductive
Speaker 8: health care right and like specifically I'm talking mostly about
Speaker 8: abortions here, right, Like that insurers or employers would not
Speaker 8: have to pay for it. That that's a demand that
Speaker 8: you constantly hear on the right. Like, I guess this
Speaker 8: is such a strange issue for them, because I guess
Speaker 8: it's one of the few areas where there's still like
Speaker 8: some division where they haven't all just like fallen into
Speaker 8: line on it.
Speaker 17: Right, And right after he was elected, it was in
Speaker 17: the middle of February twenty twenty five, you put on
Speaker 17: an executive order that said, end quote to support American
Speaker 17: families is the policy of my administration to ensure reliable
Speaker 17: access to the IVF treatment, including by easy unnecessary statutory
Speaker 17: or regulatory burdens, to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable. Okay,
Speaker 17: so he's already gone back on the promise from money campaigned,
Speaker 17: but that didn't stop him from doing this.
Speaker 22: We're gonna have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for
Speaker 22: women to hold women between the fertilization where all of
Speaker 22: the other things that we're talking about.
Speaker 6: It's going to be it's going to be grace.
Speaker 7: We're joined today.
Speaker 4: Horrible word, fertilizer.
Speaker 7: I'm I'm still very proud of it.
Speaker 14: I don't care.
Speaker 7: I'll be known as the fertilization President.
Speaker 4: That that's that's not bad.
Speaker 7: That's not good.
Speaker 4: I've I've been called I've been called much worse.
Speaker 8: Wow, yeah, you have, that's it. Yeah, I didn't expect
Speaker 8: that one today.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 17: It's so insane. And then back in last October, they
Speaker 17: put out like one of their like White House fact sheets,
Speaker 17: you know, fact sheet. President J. Trump announces action to
Speaker 17: lower costs and expand access to in vitro fertilization IVF
Speaker 17: and high quality fertility care and for the American Siety
Speaker 17: for Reproductive Medicine. You can read this on the White
Speaker 17: House website, but this summary pretty much covers it. It's
Speaker 17: that the Trump administration's ivfinition contains two king components. The
Speaker 17: first is a drug pricing agreement with far supertical company
Speaker 17: EMD Serrano provides discounts on the list prices of select
Speaker 17: IVF medications. These medications will be offered at a lower
Speaker 17: cost to eligible users through a government operated portal well
Speaker 17: trump rx doc gov and preliminary federal estimates from the
Speaker 17: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services suggest potential savings of
Speaker 17: up to twenty two hundred dollars per treatment cycle for
Speaker 17: medications alone. So trump rx dot gov launched this month
Speaker 17: in February twenty twenty six. It's a government hosted website
Speaker 17: that serves as a facilitator and points Americans to drug
Speaker 17: makers direct to consumer websites where they can make purchases.
Speaker 17: It also provides coupons to use it pharm disease and
Speaker 17: it seems basically like a government version of good rx
Speaker 17: and is very similar to Mark Cuban's Cost plus Drugs,
Speaker 17: which has a lot of the same medications with similar discounts,
Speaker 17: including the same kind of medications for fertility and per ASMR. Again,
Speaker 17: this move alone does not make IVF attainable for most patients.
Speaker 17: Fertility drugs represent only one portion of the overall cost
Speaker 17: of care, and patients without good insurance coverage continue to
Speaker 17: face significant out of poet expensive Trump has repeatedly promised
Speaker 17: to make IVF University successful. This announcement does not fulfill
Speaker 17: that promise. Meaningful progress requires policies censure all Americans who
Speaker 17: need medical assistance to build their families and access that care.
Speaker 4: Also, by the way, you can't use your insurance with
Speaker 4: Trump or X, So yeah, it's an either all.
Speaker 17: It's great to note he specifically brought this up in
Speaker 17: last night's State of the Union during one of his
Speaker 17: what I call it propo. I think back to like
Speaker 17: the Hunger Kise, what I call a propo, which is
Speaker 17: when they like bring people out. I like dates back
Speaker 17: to like Reagan and when they bring people out to
Speaker 17: be like and this person here. But it just was
Speaker 17: such a bizarre thing to bring up. And you know,
Speaker 17: Trump's State of the Union was the longest.
Speaker 8: Of all time, Yeah, I think, sir, and he spent.
Speaker 17: A total of five minutes on healthcare alone, and this
Speaker 17: was part of it.
Speaker 21: And here tonight is the very first customer ever to
Speaker 21: get that big discount, and it is big. Katherine Raider
Speaker 21: for five year She and her husband have struggled with infertility,
Speaker 21: and they turned to IVF. One drug has been costing
Speaker 21: Catherine four thousand dollars to purchase, but a few weeks
Speaker 21: ago she logged onto the Trump rx website and got
Speaker 21: that same drug that costs four thousand dollars, got it
Speaker 21: for under five hundred dollars, a reduction of much more
Speaker 21: actually than three thousand, five hundred dollars. Catherine, We are
Speaker 21: all praying for you, and you're going to be a
Speaker 21: great mom.
Speaker 8: Really creepy, yea, imagine having the president talking about how
Speaker 8: you've been boning, Like, like, what a.
Speaker 4: Fucking how you're having trouble.
Speaker 8: That's a difficult thing for a lot of people to talk, Like,
Speaker 8: I've had friends who've gone through IVF as well. Yeah,
Speaker 8: thing that happens when your ear thirties, But like, it's
Speaker 8: a hard thing for people to talk about, let alone
Speaker 8: to have it talked about in front of the whole
Speaker 8: fucking country.
Speaker 17: Fertility and infertility is such a personal thing, and it's
Speaker 17: really to use that woman pain to promote your drug
Speaker 17: discount website. It's pugg it's repugnant.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and she's still paying five hundred bucks a month,
Speaker 8: like like, that's just a lot of money.
Speaker 17: She's unreal one hundred percent. While that's not as bad
Speaker 17: as five thousand, that's so much money. And it's like,
Speaker 17: while any discounter fertility related drugs is good, this is
Speaker 17: not what was promised. I've still ridiculously unachievable for most people.
Speaker 17: He is not the father of IVF And this is
Speaker 17: fraudulent advertising, just a way of like trying to promote
Speaker 17: his like artificial empathy to a wider audience. And it's
Speaker 17: despicable and fertility issues do not need to be played
Speaker 17: with like that. That's what I had on that. It
Speaker 17: was like a very big throwaway comment, but I thought
Speaker 17: it was worth talking about because it's been there's been
Speaker 17: like a linear lead up to what that was, and
Speaker 17: I think it's important to talk about.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 17: Anyways, James, you have more to talk about.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, going back to Congress before the State of
Speaker 8: the Union, Senator bloom Othoal's office published a couple of
Speaker 8: documents from two anonymous whistleblowers which show changes in basic
Speaker 8: training for er er are enforcement removal operations. So they're
Speaker 8: one of the branches of ICE. You also have HSI
Speaker 8: and then like ICE administrative stuff made us at home
Speaker 8: lown security investigations. The EERO are the people who are
Speaker 8: supposed to go out and detain and remove people, right,
Speaker 8: that is what they do. The documents show quote cuts
Speaker 8: of more than a dozen significant practice examinations which potential
Speaker 8: ICE eer officer is no longer must undergo. In fact,
Speaker 8: the cut is sixteen out of a previous total of
Speaker 8: twenty five. So there are now just nine of these
Speaker 8: practically exams, whereas before there were twenty five. The exams
Speaker 8: remove include quote judgment, pistol shooting, determined removability, encounters to
Speaker 8: detention and detention to removal, as well as criminal encounters.
Speaker 8: So these are like exams that would test the knowledge
Speaker 8: of the potential would be ICE agent on these issues.
Speaker 4: Right, So you so you just don't have to know
Speaker 4: that any more?
Speaker 8: Yeah, well you can you do an open book test.
Speaker 8: It's open book multiple choice it is now. Yeah, in
Speaker 8: some cases there isn't a greaded practical exam at all.
Speaker 8: It's just passed fail.
Speaker 4: Open book multiple choice.
Speaker 8: Yeah, to determine your understanding of the law, right or
Speaker 8: becoming and testing. Yeah, I know, right, I guess it's
Speaker 8: a caveat all of this by saying, like the people
Speaker 8: who killed Alex Pretty and Rennie Good were exceptionally well trained.
Speaker 8: They had been trained for a long time. They had
Speaker 8: been in DHS for years and didn't stop the murdering
Speaker 8: Americans industry. I'm not saying that, I'm not Joe bidening this,
Speaker 8: but this is still notable. There is also the wholesale
Speaker 8: removal of some classes. These classes that have been removed
Speaker 8: include the use of force simulation training that's like a
Speaker 8: late they watch a video and they have like a
Speaker 8: laser pistol. That's how they slate use of force there. Well,
Speaker 8: they used to, I guess, also the training on the
Speaker 8: legal structure of the United States government, ERRO authority, and
Speaker 8: use of force. It also shows a huge reduction in
Speaker 8: the overall training, which we also heard from Ryan Schwank
Speaker 8: will get to in a minute, but he was a
Speaker 8: former lawyer with ICE who testified to Congress. Toddlines previously
Speaker 8: told Congress that the FLDC that's a federal law enforcement
Speaker 8: training centers in Georgia had been moving from five eight
Speaker 8: hour days to six twelve hour days. So although the
Speaker 8: number of training days for ICE agents have been cut,
Speaker 8: the number of training hours was the same. They was
Speaker 8: going to get through with their grindset, I guess, but
Speaker 8: the whistleblower documents show that they're still appearing to do
Speaker 8: eight hour days. Like the number of days have been
Speaker 8: cutting out, the number of hours of training in each
Speaker 8: day has remained the same. There are some longer days,
Speaker 8: but mostly those are people who have to make up
Speaker 8: the PT test or like some nights seem to go
Speaker 8: later with practical stuff like first aid and shooting, but
Speaker 8: the bulk of the days continued to be eight hours.
Speaker 8: There are now forty two total days versus seventy five before.
Speaker 8: Some of this was already public actually in certain forums
Speaker 8: and subreddits. Era Officer has been posting about like the
Speaker 8: faster training course for a while. The documents show a
Speaker 8: target of four thousand and seven new officers in fiscal
Speaker 8: year twenty twenty six. They would aim to have commissioned
Speaker 8: four thousand new ice officers by the end of September.
Speaker 8: We also heard from Ryan Schwank who testified to Congress,
Speaker 8: and they published some excerpts in this many which I'm
Speaker 8: just going to include here. A couple of quotations quote,
Speaker 8: I am duty bound to tell you that the ICE
Speaker 8: Basic Immigration Enforcement training program is now deficient, defective, and broken.
Speaker 8: And another quote here. Without reform, I will graduate thousands
Speaker 8: of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty
Speaker 8: and do not know the limits of their authority, and
Speaker 8: do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order. Finally,
Speaker 8: ICE is lying to Congress and the American people about
Speaker 8: the steps it is taking to ensure its ten thousand
Speaker 8: new officers faithfully uphold the Constitution and perform their jobs.
Speaker 8: Schwank was hired in twenty twenty one as a assistant
Speaker 8: Chief Counsel for the ICE Officer Principal Legal Advisor. He
Speaker 8: also serves as a resident attorney at Dilly, which is
Speaker 8: a detention center for families and children, and at some
Speaker 8: point in this past he was a private practice immigration attorney.
Speaker 8: What good lord, this is not like a particularly woke guy,
Speaker 8: I would say, and like none of this is to
Speaker 8: suggest that it would be okay for there to be
Speaker 8: thousands more ICE officers if they were better trained. Still wouldn't,
Speaker 8: but it does show that the state is building a
Speaker 8: force of people who don't know what an unlawful order
Speaker 8: is and what their rights are and what their obligations
Speaker 8: are and what the rights of the people who they
Speaker 8: are detaining are. And talking about the rights of people
Speaker 8: who are being detained, I want to talk about a
Speaker 8: development in the case was the unaccompanied Guatemalan children. People
Speaker 8: remember that over Labor Day, the Trump administration tried to
Speaker 8: deport these children and they tried a number of like
Speaker 8: credit lawyer shit like like just really like silly, like
Speaker 8: I don't know these legal arguments, which which was kind
Speaker 8: of superious to get away with it, and they were
Speaker 8: prevented by a restraining order, right if you remember the
Speaker 8: judge Sparkle Supernannan who was the first judge who issued
Speaker 8: the restraining order. But they did so in the middle
Speaker 8: of the night over Labor Day weekend and sent one
Speaker 8: of their attorneys to the airport to prevent them. Christ yeah,
Speaker 8: truly like last minute stuff. The class for that tro
Speaker 8: and the injunction was quote children from Guatemala who are
Speaker 8: all will be in the custody of defendants. They all
Speaker 8: will be lead to the next part of our story.
Speaker 21: Right.
Speaker 8: A lawsuit is now alleging that CBP is flouting the
Speaker 8: injunction by returning children when they first enter custody before
Speaker 8: they're sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. So they
Speaker 8: kind of tried to previously make this argument that like
Speaker 8: they were with Oh, they weren't with ICE, so they
Speaker 8: went with DHS. There with O R. Right, So the
Speaker 8: Office of Refugee Resettlement is a distinct entity. So they'd
Speaker 8: sort of tried this like, oh, there's nothing we can
Speaker 8: do to stop the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and that
Speaker 8: had not worked.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: The suit also alleges that quote defendants are using misinformation, coercion, threats,
Speaker 8: and fear to persuade children to relinquish their rights and
Speaker 8: sign paperwork portedly accepting a form of expedited voluntary return.
Speaker 8: This is common across DHS. Rightly in my reporting on Dearly,
Speaker 8: for instance, Primrose told me that the forms for voluntary
Speaker 8: repatriation are present like all day and all night in
Speaker 8: their room, Like any time it gets too much for you,
Speaker 8: anytime they're too hungry, too tired, to stressed, too scared,
Speaker 8: you could sign that formula on a plane and it's
Speaker 8: all over for You're going back to wherever you fled from.
Speaker 8: Including the case as a claim by an attorney at
Speaker 8: the National Immigrant Justice Center that unaccompanied children have been
Speaker 8: given a document that quote completely misstates or at least
Speaker 8: dramatically misrepresents the immigration laws that apply to unaccompanied immigrant children,
Speaker 8: and it conveys to vulnerable children threats that are quote
Speaker 8: in clear contravention of the entire system implemented to protect
Speaker 8: and promote the safety and best interest of unaccompanied immigrant children.
Speaker 8: This you went to the Trafficking Victims Protection re Authorization
Speaker 8: Act of two thousand and eight. So what this is
Speaker 8: suggesting is that these young people are being provided with
Speaker 8: essentially it's not legal advice, but it's misconstruction the rights
Speaker 8: that they have to be protected, right, and so that
Speaker 8: they are not being advised properly of the protections that
Speaker 8: they have under law. I'm going to keep an eye
Speaker 8: on this one because I think I don't love the
Speaker 8: phrase unaccompanied. Mine is when we talk about this, because
Speaker 8: these children, after and accompanied, there are people who are
Speaker 8: with them, who care for them on their journey here. Right,
Speaker 8: I've seen this firsthand. It just means that their immediate
Speaker 8: family are not with them. But like we saw in
Speaker 8: the State of the Union last night, right, when the
Speaker 8: Trump administration talks about migrants, it wants to talk about
Speaker 8: people who kill children, right, like that is the thing
Speaker 8: that they or hurt children that it's a thing that
Speaker 8: they trusted out a couple of times last night. It
Speaker 8: is not the migrants who are hurting children in this instance,
Speaker 8: it is the government. These children who came here on
Speaker 8: their own to be safe with very few options, right,
Speaker 8: and either their parents couldn't look after them, while their
Speaker 8: parents aren't around anymore. There is not a more sympathetic case, right,
Speaker 8: There's not a clearer example of people we should be
Speaker 8: looking after as a state or a community or a
Speaker 8: nation or whatever. And the fact that they're trying to
Speaker 8: turn these children around and boot them back to the
Speaker 8: dangerous situation they came from is really morally appalling. Will
Speaker 8: keep reporting on it because I think it is like
Speaker 8: a very important thing to shed more light on.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's horrifying. Yeah, just on a basic moral level,
Speaker 3: like being the person whose job it is and the
Speaker 3: apparently doing this job of trying to construct fake legal
Speaker 3: arguments so you can fucking deport children, Like what the fuck? Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just so evil.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's horrible, like they you know, I've spent
Speaker 8: a lot of time with migrants to spend a lot
Speaker 8: of time with migrants with children. I've known plenty of
Speaker 8: children who are traveling without their parents, and the things
Speaker 8: that they go through just to get here are horrific,
Speaker 8: and the things that they're going away from are probably worse.
Speaker 8: And to think that those kids could be booted back
Speaker 8: to the places they fled within seventy two hours of
Speaker 8: arrival before they're transferred to O r R, right after months,
Speaker 8: potentially years, is Yeah, it's genuinely appalling to me. Like,
Speaker 8: few of these things shock me, but they still disgusted me.
Speaker 8: And I really hope that this is something that will
Speaker 8: continue to get coverage, not just here but elsewhere, because like,
Speaker 8: these are the most egregious wrongs that the immigration system does.
Speaker 17: Yeah, let's to take a quick break and the meal
Speaker 17: will be back with some terror park.
Speaker 8: Oh what's that?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 8: Is it? The dulcet tones of someone who isn't Joe's
Speaker 8: Dramma singing the worst clash song.
Speaker 22: Z spot Sorry, Rocky jazz bo Rocky jazz.
Speaker 17: Bo, I love how consistent you are?
Speaker 4: Relent Chance is the worst clash song.
Speaker 8: It really pass me off. Like people they think, oh,
Speaker 8: the clash and then they go No the song that
Speaker 8: they played while they were fucking bombing Iraq in nineteen
Speaker 8: ninety one that made Joyce Drama cry and what she
Speaker 8: hadn't written it? Yeah, uphold listen to other clash songs please.
Speaker 4: Oh God, speaking of clashes. Wow, we have finally learned
Speaker 4: the results of the log awaited Supreme Court case about
Speaker 4: specifically the tariffs that were implemented through the International Emergency
Speaker 4: Economic Powers Act.
Speaker 3: Those have been struck down. So this is the retaliatory tariffs,
Speaker 3: this is the Liberation Day stuff, the ones on Canada
Speaker 3: and Mexico. Some of the tariffs are still in a fact.
Speaker 3: We will get to that in a second, like, for example,
Speaker 3: the illudinum and steel ones, et cetera, et cetera, are
Speaker 3: still in effect. I'm gonna be doing a full episode
Speaker 3: about this case and about what's going on with tariff
Speaker 3: policy now, because it's very convoluted and weird. But what's
Speaker 3: important for our purposes here is that in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways, this is a very narrow ruling in that
Speaker 3: it is just specifically about this one act IEPA, and
Speaker 3: what it specifically, very narrowly says is that IEEPA does
Speaker 3: not give Trump the authority to do teriffs. What it
Speaker 3: doesn't say anything about is his ability to use other acts.
Speaker 3: And we're gonna talk about that in a second. Okay
Speaker 3: to do tariffs, And it also doesn't say anything. And
Speaker 3: I think this is actually very important about the completely
Speaker 3: unhinged state of emergencies that he's been declaring in order
Speaker 3: to be able.
Speaker 4: To use IEPA.
Speaker 3: And that's also good to be very important in a
Speaker 3: little bit because because there's no ruling on that, he's
Speaker 3: probably going to be able to do some of this
Speaker 3: stuff with other tariffs. So basically, immediately after this ruling,
Speaker 3: Trump imposed a ten percent tariff across the board, using
Speaker 3: Section one twenty two of the Trade Act in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four, he says, so he implements it at ten percent,
Speaker 3: and then the next day he says it's going to
Speaker 3: be fifteen percent. The current rate as of data of
Speaker 3: recording on Wednesday, the one that's actually being assessed at
Speaker 3: customs is ten percent. Because he hasn't signed an executive
Speaker 3: order to actually lift the fifteen percent. It's all very weird,
Speaker 3: it's all very sort of extremely chaotic. So right now
Speaker 3: the fifteen percent hasn't gone through. But I want to
Speaker 3: talk about this Section one twenty two thing that he's
Speaker 3: using right now, because this is a significantly less broad
Speaker 3: authority than the authority he was claiming before. Okay, first off,
Speaker 3: it's worth noting that Section one twenty two has literally
Speaker 3: never been used to enforce tariffs before for reasons we'll
Speaker 3: get into in a second. Because it's very weird, and
Speaker 3: it's also going to be very, very difficult to do
Speaker 3: the kind of Calvin Ball tariff policy Trump wasn't implementing,
Speaker 3: where he just sort of says a thing and a
Speaker 3: tariff appears. So the thing about one twenty two is
Speaker 3: that instead of the thing that Trump was doing before,
Speaker 3: where he was just tweeting out a tariff rate for
Speaker 3: an individual country because he was mad at them, section
Speaker 3: one twenty two it only allows you to set a
Speaker 3: flat tariff rate for every country in the world, and
Speaker 3: the maximum tariff rate is capped at fifteen percent. The
Speaker 3: other thing that's notable about this is that Section one
Speaker 3: twenty two tariffs also need to be approved by Congress
Speaker 3: after one hundred and fifty days, at least in theory.
Speaker 3: The Cato Institute interestingly is arguing that Trump theoretically could
Speaker 3: just extend it for another one hundred and fifty days
Speaker 3: after the first one. But this, this would be a
Speaker 3: huge mesa because there's no way he can win a
Speaker 3: terror vote in Congress. There's just absolutely no way. Now,
Speaker 3: the other important aspect of this that's very weird, that
Speaker 3: I think is going to become a very large sort
Speaker 3: of point of discussion in the coming weeks is that
Speaker 3: section one twenty two. So I've read this section. It
Speaker 3: says specifically, quote it can only be used to levy
Speaker 3: tariff's quote whenever fundamental international payment problems require special import
Speaker 3: measures to restrict imports one to deal with large and
Speaker 3: serious United States balance of payment deficits.
Speaker 1: Now that's vague.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, Well but here's the thing though, here's
Speaker 3: the thing. So I tried to write a version of
Speaker 3: this where I tried to explain ballot to payments and
Speaker 3: what a balance payment deficit is. I'm going to do
Speaker 3: that in the other episode. It's too convoluted. But what's
Speaker 3: really important about this is that Trump has been complaining
Speaker 3: about trade deficits, and the state of emergency is over
Speaker 3: trade deficit. A trade deficit is not a balance of
Speaker 3: payment deficit. Balance of payments is an accounting identity that
Speaker 3: has to do with like it's literally like the sum
Speaker 3: of all exchanges between everyone in the US and everyone
Speaker 3: outside of the US. So you by definition can't have
Speaker 3: a deficit in it because it's the accounting identity attracks
Speaker 3: both sides, right, So if someone in the US is
Speaker 3: sending money to someone, it tracks both the fact that
Speaker 3: the used person set the money and the fact that
Speaker 3: the other person got the money. So you can't have
Speaker 3: a deficit because it's always one to one because it's
Speaker 3: it's tracking both, right.
Speaker 17: So you're saying the limit does not exist.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's on hinge, And like you know, and specifically for.
Speaker 4: The US, it is. It is possible to get into
Speaker 4: trouble with balance of payments if you can't just print
Speaker 4: your currency, Like if your currency is on the gold standard,
Speaker 4: you couldn't here, you get in trouble here. Now, a
Speaker 4: notable thing about the United States is that we are
Speaker 4: not on the gold Standard, so we literally even if
Speaker 4: you use definitions of ballants of payment where you could
Speaker 4: theoretically have one of these problem, the US cannot have
Speaker 4: a balance of payments crisis. It cannot. It definitionally cannot
Speaker 4: have one of these.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 3: And the thing about this, right, you're gonna hear a
Speaker 3: lot of people talking about how the US is a
Speaker 3: balance of payments crisis. If the US was having an
Speaker 3: actual serious balance of payments deficit right now, there would
Speaker 3: be riots in the streets.
Speaker 4: That's not an exaggeration. This is normally what happens. Normally.
Speaker 3: Balance of payments crises are a country owes a bunch
Speaker 3: of money and they straight up do not have enough
Speaker 3: US dollars to pay that off. And when that happens,
Speaker 3: things happen, like suddenly there's like five hundred person lines
Speaker 3: outside of every gas station because there's not enough money
Speaker 3: to import gas, right, like you can't import food. It's like,
Speaker 3: like that is what happens when there's balance of payments crises. Right,
Speaker 3: This is like Sri Lanka in twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 3: like that's the kind of thing where you get a
Speaker 3: balance of payments crisis and people burn down the presidential
Speaker 3: mansion like we don't have one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is not happening. So there's already becoming an.
Speaker 3: Attempt to be like, oh, the US is a balance
Speaker 3: of payments deficit, there's a crisis. No, no, no, no, no, no nonsense, gibberish.
Speaker 3: You're gonna hear this a lot. It's complete nonsense, and
Speaker 3: it's it's one of the things that makes me look
Speaker 3: at this and go, Okay, this is the immediate one
Speaker 3: that he picks. But like, this is not gonna survive
Speaker 3: in court because the specific line here where it says
Speaker 3: fundamental international payment problems, like we don't have fundamental international
Speaker 3: payment problems, like we paid all of this gets paid
Speaker 3: every year.
Speaker 4: It's it's funny.
Speaker 3: In the executive order it says the US sometimes has
Speaker 3: international payment problems, and no, it doesn't. It has never
Speaker 3: had international payment problems like on any kind of real scale.
Speaker 3: The closest thing you can do is look back at
Speaker 3: periods when the US was again on the gold standards,
Speaker 3: and even then we were fined like it's it's it's
Speaker 3: complete gibberish. I'm pissed about this. I'm annoyed that I
Speaker 3: have to go back to balance of payment stuff. But
Speaker 3: this so this is probably not going to hold up
Speaker 3: when the inevitable next lawsuit goes under. However, Comma, there
Speaker 3: are a couple of other trade authorities that he can
Speaker 3: use that they've been talking about using and some of
Speaker 3: them have been used already. So broadly, we've been talking
Speaker 3: about like two kinds of tariffs on this show. We've
Speaker 3: been talking about the tariffs that are on a specific country,
Speaker 3: and those are the ones that are basically gone. We'll
Speaker 3: get to the one exception to that in a second.
Speaker 3: And then there's been the ones that are on goods.
Speaker 3: So if you remember, like though, there was a there
Speaker 3: was a tariff recently on like vanity cabinets stuff.
Speaker 8: Like yeah, yeah, I do remember that one. Yeah, really
Speaker 8: weird niche thing.
Speaker 4: Oh jampitions. Wait wait, wait till I talk about what
Speaker 4: the legal authority of tariffs on kitchen cabinets was.
Speaker 8: There's a special constitutional exemption for those.
Speaker 4: It's so bad.
Speaker 3: Okay, So so this this is this is the section
Speaker 3: two thirty two of the Trade Act next seventy four.
Speaker 3: These are these specific tariffs and these ones are supposed
Speaker 3: to be tariffs on goods in response to threats to
Speaker 3: national security.
Speaker 8: So it's yeah, hang on, join the DUTs for me.
Speaker 4: The price of I pointed cabinets are too low threat
Speaker 4: to national security.
Speaker 3: It's funny because okay, this is the one that legal
Speaker 3: experts think actually can potentially survive challenges because it's national security.
Speaker 3: But it's like, okay, like I get our Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: The fact that this ruling was six to three is
Speaker 3: frankly ridiculous, given that again, Trump was pretending he had
Speaker 3: legal authority to issue tariffs in a bill that literally
Speaker 3: never says the word tariff. It had never been used
Speaker 3: to raise a tariff before. Okay, So like Supreme Court
Speaker 3: was like, okay, well that's nonsense. And even I, who
Speaker 3: was extremely cynical about the Supreme Court, do not think
Speaker 3: that you can compellingly argue in front of a court,
Speaker 3: and this probably won't even go to the Supreme Court,
Speaker 3: like that you can compellingly argue that is, it is
Speaker 3: part of the national security interest of the United States
Speaker 3: that American cabinet makers mildly out compete foreign cabinet Yeah.
Speaker 8: Wow, yeah, that's a weird one. I mean, yeah, national
Speaker 8: security and like terrorism, the magic Woods when it comes
Speaker 8: to the Constitution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but in this case, okay, like really seriously, with
Speaker 3: a stream it's gonna walk up there and go national security, right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they've done some wild stuff in the court. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: it was interesting to what like you say, you were
Speaker 8: saying like how much they'll get past the court. It
Speaker 8: was interesting to watch the Supreme Court justices in the
Speaker 8: State of the Union just like, oh yeah, just grimacing
Speaker 8: through it. Yep, yep, he was so.
Speaker 4: Mad at them.
Speaker 17: They're usually pretty stoic, but there was a serious grimace
Speaker 17: action going yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and there was no attempt to hide that particular face, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 17: I don't know if we've ever had a sitting president
Speaker 17: like school the Supreme Court in a State of the
Speaker 17: Union in that way.
Speaker 4: I think maybe it is possible AFTR did it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I was gonna say, I can see the.
Speaker 3: FTR did try to pack the court at Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was at least funnier.
Speaker 8: Or at least back in the day when they used
Speaker 8: to like fight on the floor of contrast like something
Speaker 8: back then.
Speaker 17: Those are the days.
Speaker 3: So there's there's one more trade thing I think we're
Speaker 3: talking about here in terms in terms of of where
Speaker 3: more terif aulready can come from, and that's section three
Speaker 3: oh one of that same TERR Effact. And this is
Speaker 3: the one where so a lot of the tariffs on
Speaker 3: China are actually still in effect because a lot of
Speaker 3: those tariffs are actually from the first Trump administration and
Speaker 3: then Biden continued them because it's yeah.
Speaker 4: They hate China. I quite seriously do not have a better.
Speaker 15: That.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but section three oh one is specifically for quote
Speaker 3: unfair trade practices.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, like unfair. It's such a strange word to
Speaker 8: use in legislation, right, like what what do we what
Speaker 8: do we mean by that?
Speaker 3: Well, so like in the original context, it was like
Speaker 3: supposed to be an anti protectionist thing, okay, but it's
Speaker 3: also like, yeah, people are like, oh my god, it's
Speaker 3: unfair of that, Like the Chinese companies get money from
Speaker 3: the governments, and I'm like, all of you get fucking
Speaker 3: money from the government all the time.
Speaker 8: What are you talkt like yeah, and like they're talking
Speaker 8: about it like it's unfair that the wages are lower
Speaker 8: in certain countries, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's just like do you look at this,
Speaker 3: And it's like, Okay, the US, the entire US agriculture industry,
Speaker 3: like all of the corn grown in this country is
Speaker 3: grown because they pass an ag bill every single year
Speaker 3: that does subsidies that are literally illegal for like any
Speaker 3: other country to have because I specifically got agreements carved
Speaker 3: out of the free trade statutes. Yeah, it's it's absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 3: But you know, this is the one that he's been
Speaker 3: able to sort of use so far. So I think
Speaker 3: this is going to be the one that's going to
Speaker 3: be leaned on once the Trump people sort of remember
Speaker 3: they have it. But the problem with using three oh
Speaker 3: one is that there's actual bureaucrat accepts you have to do,
Speaker 3: like you have to like convene a bunch of trade authorities,
Speaker 3: and you have to have like a specific anti competitive practice. Okay,
Speaker 3: So this is also I think going to be very
Speaker 3: vulnerable to legal challenges, except probably on China, because you
Speaker 3: actually have to go through and designate what the legal
Speaker 3: practices are, and I mean usually the process six months,
Speaker 3: even when you're moving quickly. So there's also I guess
Speaker 3: what I would call the sort of like the secret
Speaker 3: dark mode option where they just start doing the nightmare
Speaker 3: or stuff.
Speaker 4: This is something that I think it was hazlit.
Speaker 3: One of Trump's officials talked about this last year is
Speaker 3: potentially using the Smooth Harley Tariff Act.
Speaker 8: Like the nineteen thirties as like.
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, yeah, the one the one that is very
Speaker 3: famous for exacerbating the Great Depression.
Speaker 8: Yeah, then what I lend about in high school.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: It's also the other thing about this, right is this
Speaker 3: Act is not on the books anymore. Okay, because also okay,
Speaker 3: so I've seen a conflicting explanation to this.
Speaker 4: Some people are just confused.
Speaker 3: I think the explanation of it that I've seen is
Speaker 3: that it was superseded by sections of the nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: four Trade Act.
Speaker 4: Okay, So it's not even clear if this is in effect.
Speaker 3: But this is in theory, like the sort of like
Speaker 3: dark maga, like we're reaching into the bag and pulling
Speaker 3: trade authority out of something button they could reach for.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, we'd take done before with like title forty
Speaker 8: two and stuff. Right yeah, the title thirty two is
Speaker 8: to stop people with tuberculosis, like back in the day.
Speaker 8: That was the idea behind it, and they pulled it
Speaker 8: out in twenty twenty, right and then Biden just like this,
Speaker 8: Harris kept it for much longer than trap.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I think I think this is and this is
Speaker 3: I think actually a very significant moment for the Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: And I think sexul Bank independence will eventually become this
Speaker 3: if and when this gets this gets to the courts.
Speaker 11: Yea.
Speaker 3: But tariffs are sort of the the red line for
Speaker 3: a couple of the Supreme Court justices who normally sided
Speaker 3: with Trump, just specifically because A. I mean, it just
Speaker 3: says in the Constitution that tariffs are specifically a thing
Speaker 3: that Congress does. So you can't just be like, oh,
Speaker 3: they gave me the power to do this unless they like.
Speaker 4: Explicitly said it.
Speaker 3: But then b it's it's this is this is the
Speaker 3: financial redline, right like, this is this this is the
Speaker 3: point at which you're fucking with the money. So this
Speaker 3: is the point where the Supreme Court was like, you know,
Speaker 3: we've we've let you just make up laws in a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of other cases, but this is this is
Speaker 3: the actual limit of it when it comes to authority
Speaker 3: that really significantly like destroys the American economy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like the economy has more rights send people do.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, this is the way that it's always been. I
Speaker 3: also want to mention one closing thing on the terriffs
Speaker 3: is that the Supreme Court didn't answer the question of
Speaker 3: if people are going to get their money back and
Speaker 3: how the refunds are going to work. Sure didn't, Nope,
Speaker 3: And I think it's because they couln't get agreement on
Speaker 3: it because this ruling is kind of a mess in
Speaker 3: that it's like this like weird fractured coalition of justices
Speaker 3: or like parts of them agree on part of it,
Speaker 3: and there's like parts of the opinion that are agreed
Speaker 3: by to by a plurality of the corp and not
Speaker 3: a majority. It's it's very weird. But yeah, they have
Speaker 3: no idea how this is gonna work. There's already lawsuits
Speaker 3: going on to get the money back that have been
Speaker 3: in place already, so presumably some kind of redispensations going
Speaker 3: to happen. It's going to be unbelievably chaotic, Okay, but
Speaker 3: we will we will keep you updated on how American
Speaker 3: trade negotiations go.
Speaker 17: Yeah, okay, we reported the news. Yeah, put a trans
Speaker 17: girl on your couch.
Speaker 3: Oh actually, okay, I have one also really bleak update
Speaker 3: on put a Transgirl on your couch, which is we
Speaker 3: actually got numbers, well they're technically not the first numbers
Speaker 3: we've gotten, but we got actual good numbers on the
Speaker 3: number of trans people who've moved, we've like fled their state,
Speaker 3: like just from mid twenty twenty four to mid twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five. The statistics suggests that it's it's ten percent
Speaker 3: of all trans people, which is four hundred thousand people.
Speaker 3: I think that's likely an undercount, and that's just the
Speaker 3: first half of twenty twenty five. Yeah, that is a
Speaker 3: humanitarian crisis, Like this is an internal migration crisis, right,
Speaker 3: the view that these are internally these have become internally
Speaker 3: displaced people. Yes, and yeah it's hideous and the least
Speaker 3: that we can do at this moment is putting trans
Speaker 3: people in your couch because the violence of there fleeting
Speaker 3: is intensifying.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a lot of people actually reached out to our email.
Speaker 8: Our email is cool Zone Tips and proton dot me.
Speaker 8: And that's mostly for things that you know that we
Speaker 8: should report on, not for just like general episode ideas.
Speaker 8: If you're trying to be be a source for so
Speaker 8: I have some tip of something that you become aware
Speaker 8: of this and being reported. It's not for like Robbie
Speaker 8: should do this episode on Bastards.
Speaker 4: It's not.
Speaker 8: I just want to emphasize once again that it is not.
Speaker 17: There is a if you want to do that, go
Speaker 17: to the Bastards up read it. There is a section
Speaker 17: for that. Thank you.
Speaker 8: But a lot of people had reached out to be like,
Speaker 8: I want to do this, but I don't know of anyone,
Speaker 8: and obviously I don't want to be like posting online
Speaker 8: like transfolks come to my house, because that seems like
Speaker 8: weird to behavior. So that's something we will try and
Speaker 8: aggress like in a more general kind of mutual aid focused. Yeah,
Speaker 8: series of episodes that will work on but those people,
Speaker 8: it is good that you are trying to do something.
Speaker 17: Yeah, we reported the news.
Speaker 1: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 17: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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