Speaker 1: Al Zone 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 Jay Knappen here a podcast that has been really,
Speaker 3: really fucking bleak basically since Trump took office. So instead
Speaker 3: of doing another episode about how doom Vus is, we
Speaker 3: are taking a I don't know a field trip to
Speaker 3: Argentina to talk about something extremely funny. And that extremely
Speaker 3: funny thing is the Argentinian President, Javier Malai promoting a
Speaker 3: meme coin and maybe going down for it and with
Speaker 3: me to talk about this is really the only person
Speaker 3: I could have on to talk about a crypto thing.
Speaker 3: Who is Molly White And I'm trying to explain who
Speaker 3: Bally White is. My explanation of this is in the
Speaker 3: same way that the great twentieth century marksis theorist C.
Speaker 4: LR.
Speaker 3: James's book Beyond a Boundary is both universally considered to
Speaker 3: be the best book ever written about cricket and also
Speaker 3: literally calling it the thing that it is the best
Speaker 3: book ever written about cricket is like a damning insult
Speaker 3: to how good the actual book is. Molly is like
Speaker 3: probably the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter
Speaker 3: citation needed also does web three is going great, which
Speaker 3: is amazing. Everyone should go listen to it, and Molly,
Speaker 3: welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me. What an intro.
Speaker 3: I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one
Speaker 3: for such a long time. A great book, by the way,
Speaker 3: which everyone should both go subscribe to citation needed and
Speaker 3: also go read Beyond the Boundary because it's great. So God,
Speaker 3: we were talking about this before the show. I had
Speaker 3: planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at
Speaker 3: Sea Pac with Javier Malay like with me Malay's signature chainsaw,
Speaker 3: doing an even weirder version of Malays thinking about like
Speaker 3: cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what a spectacle that was.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute.
Speaker 3: Wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there that was
Speaker 3: only like day one.
Speaker 6: Well that's overdone now you know everyone's doing it. You
Speaker 6: have to do something new.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to get to wander around the stage
Speaker 3: with a chainsaw like he didn't even do the Malay thing,
Speaker 3: which is you have you have like a book of
Speaker 3: regulations or whatever, you cut it with a chainsaws. Oh god.
Speaker 3: So I am very excited to talk about the crypto
Speaker 3: scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and
Speaker 3: I am deeply sorry. I already I apologized before this
Speaker 3: recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain
Speaker 3: who Hoavier Malay is, I have to do the single
Speaker 3: most difficult thing I've ever attend in my like not
Speaker 3: just in my like my history as a podcast, like
Speaker 3: that's obviously trivially true, like by my entire history doing
Speaker 3: theoretical work in general, which is I'm about to attempt
Speaker 3: to explain paronism in under ten minutes on four hours
Speaker 3: of sleep.
Speaker 5: Let's say it.
Speaker 3: Here, we fucking go because because to guess, that's why
Speaker 3: you know, why we have to do this, right, Like,
Speaker 3: Malay is able to take power like basically because he
Speaker 3: he's like one of the first candidates in a long
Speaker 3: time to in Argentina to run as an anti Paronist.
Speaker 3: And that may seem weird because hold on, wait, shouldn't
Speaker 3: there always be like, okay, if you have an ideology,
Speaker 3: shouldn't it shouldn't that the person from like either the
Speaker 3: left right side of the political spectrum, you know, be
Speaker 3: running against an ideology and no, no, up until basically now,
Speaker 3: both the left and the right in Georgina we're both paronists.
Speaker 3: So to get an understanding of what paranism is, we
Speaker 3: need to go back not just to who who I'm
Speaker 3: parone is, and we'll we'll we'll get to Hujuan Peron,
Speaker 3: who's like the guy this ideology is named after, and
Speaker 3: you know, the ideology is based on like this guy
Speaker 3: returning from exile from the military coups. But we have
Speaker 3: to go back to one of the sort of foundational
Speaker 3: parts of the modern Argentinian state, and that element is
Speaker 3: the fact that Argentina has one of the most militant
Speaker 3: workers movements in the entire world and has had it
Speaker 3: for about a century. I was on Margaret's show, it
Speaker 3: could happen here, and Jesus Christ not it could happen here.
Speaker 3: Good Lord, you tell them on.
Speaker 5: Four US you're doing great, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: I haven't even gotten we have not gotten to my
Speaker 3: final analysis of Peronism, where that the closest thing I
Speaker 3: can compare it to is post short cultural revolutions nineteen
Speaker 3: seventies era China. So this is about to get so
Speaker 3: much more unhitched. But a while back I was on
Speaker 3: Margaret Show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff to talk
Speaker 3: about the second Argentinian giant and arcosyndy closed uprising in
Speaker 3: about a span of four years, which was the giant
Speaker 3: anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 3: And this is the second one because the first one
Speaker 3: was the nineteen nineteen general strike, which ends in an
Speaker 3: event called the Tragic Week where everyone sort of gets
Speaker 3: killed by the military. But you know, the fact that
Speaker 3: there's there's two in different parts of the country, enormous
Speaker 3: and arcosndicalist uprisings in a span of about four years
Speaker 3: is a demonstration of the fact that this is one
Speaker 3: of the most billetant working classes in the world, and
Speaker 3: any political movement that is trying to hold power in
Speaker 3: this country is going to have to deal with the
Speaker 3: fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment. Can
Speaker 3: you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake
Speaker 3: up one day and there's a black flag flying over
Speaker 3: your factories because your workers have seized it. And the
Speaker 3: sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is
Speaker 3: even still relevant today is that like the last of
Speaker 3: what you would I guess you could call like the
Speaker 3: classical twentieth century revolutions. So a line of uprising started
Speaker 3: with like the original formation of the workers' councils in
Speaker 3: Russia in nineteen oh five, you know, and that continues
Speaker 3: to do like the occupations of factories and Itallly you
Speaker 3: the two Red Years, and like nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 3: like the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, with the
Speaker 3: revolutions in Hungaria and Algeria, like you know, all like
Speaker 3: through sixty eight, like the factor occupations in France and Italy,
Speaker 3: and like all this whole, this whole lineage of like
Speaker 3: the thing that happens when you do you revolution, as
Speaker 3: workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of
Speaker 3: the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina.
Speaker 3: In two thousand and one, like everywhere else in the world,
Speaker 3: this ship was gone, and then randomly in Argentina in
Speaker 3: two thousand and one, like there's a there's a giant
Speaker 3: one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really
Speaker 3: put down by a sort of left Corona's government agreeing
Speaker 3: to like tell I am have to fuck off, which
Speaker 3: was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in
Speaker 3: the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, Okay,
Speaker 3: if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have
Speaker 3: to deal with this, like what what do you do?
Speaker 3: And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology
Speaker 3: the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism
Speaker 3: under the sea batter of Argentinian nationalists class collaboration, which
Speaker 3: the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand,
Speaker 3: like paroism is, oh god, protoism is simply the weirdest
Speaker 3: ideology ever. I promise we're going to get to the
Speaker 3: fun crypto stuff, but we have to, unfortunately do this,
Speaker 3: We have to do our whole work first, and part
Speaker 3: of this is so Juan Perone, the actual guy who
Speaker 3: who is ideologies based off is an enormously popular president
Speaker 3: in like the late forties and fifties until he gets
Speaker 3: overthrown by military coup and to get a sense of
Speaker 3: again like how weird this guy is. Like, this is
Speaker 3: a guy who when he comes into power a bunch
Speaker 3: of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not
Speaker 3: just you know, obviously like like the famous Nazis fleet Argentina.
Speaker 3: This is the whole meme about that, right, But I
Speaker 3: mean we're talking about guys who do u stat si
Speaker 3: like guys guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand,
Speaker 3: like flee to Argentina and Drena's administration, and when a
Speaker 3: military coup overthrows him, they flee the country. So again,
Speaker 3: like the US back military junta is less pro Nazi
Speaker 3: than this guy is. He is also personal friends with
Speaker 3: Chae Guavara and consider like the Cuban Revolution to be
Speaker 3: like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply
Speaker 3: deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this
Speaker 3: is that, Okay, so you have a military dictatorship through
Speaker 3: like the fifties and the sixties, right, and like the
Speaker 3: entire time there's a tatorship, not the entire night, but
Speaker 3: most of the time this atatorship is happening, right, the
Speaker 3: entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political
Speaker 3: energy onto we want Parone back, because Parona is remembered
Speaker 3: as like the guy who like brought workers rights to
Speaker 3: the country and also like gave women the right to vote,
Speaker 3: and also as you remember it as like a stable
Speaker 3: nationalist right wing government by the rights like everyone on
Speaker 3: like both sides the political spectrum project all of their
Speaker 3: political aspirations into the single figure of Perome, which works
Speaker 3: because he's not in the country, is not not there,
Speaker 3: so you know, and because he's gone, you can project
Speaker 3: anything you want onto him. And this is to a
Speaker 3: large extent the origin of modern populism, right, like the
Speaker 3: you know, modern populism is the projection of all grievances
Speaker 3: onto one guy and then having that come in take
Speaker 3: power do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like
Speaker 3: fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here
Speaker 3: is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is
Speaker 3: very specifically Paronism, because one of the theoreticians of like
Speaker 3: modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is
Speaker 3: my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher and NESTL. Leclough
Speaker 3: and his wife Chantill Moffe, who were like they were like,
Speaker 3: you know, these are these people were like the the
Speaker 3: theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left
Speaker 3: in this sort of euro Communism era and even up
Speaker 3: until like like pot Daemos in Spain twenty eleven, like
Speaker 3: these are the people who are the theoretical force behind
Speaker 3: so much like left electoral stuff in the last like
Speaker 3: fifty years. And it's all from Leclough, who was a
Speaker 3: left paronist. So all of all the dots are going
Speaker 3: on the pin board and while he's gone, he's this
Speaker 3: guy that like from an American perspective, it's like imagine
Speaker 3: that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from twenty sixteen
Speaker 3: were both the same guy, and both sides were just
Speaker 3: trying to get this one guy to come back to
Speaker 3: Argentina like fix everything. So this creates like the left
Speaker 3: and right paronists. And when parn comes back in the
Speaker 3: seventies and like immediately gets elected president again, the right
Speaker 3: Paronis just I mean you literally starts slaughtering to left
Speaker 3: Paronis in the streets, and Parne like backs the right
Speaker 3: Paronists against the left, and you would think this would
Speaker 3: destroy left Paranism, but no, no, Left Paronism was in
Speaker 3: power in Argentina until like Malai's election like a few
Speaker 3: years ago. It's so okay, So like why would you
Speaker 3: still be a left Paronis after Parone like had all
Speaker 3: your boys machine guns in the seventies. Part of the
Speaker 3: reason this works also is that he dies and his
Speaker 3: wife takes power and there's like another military coup, so
Speaker 3: you know, he's not like in power long enough kind
Speaker 3: of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's
Speaker 3: just he's in power just long enough for people to
Speaker 3: remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And
Speaker 3: at this point I could finally attempt to go what's Paronism?
Speaker 3: They're like how many minutes of like, oh god, I
Speaker 3: think I've got over my limit of what is But okay,
Speaker 3: Paron's deal is this right?
Speaker 7: Like so okay?
Speaker 3: Like if you're a pronus, right, and in Perona's state,
Speaker 3: everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of
Speaker 3: the Argentinian state, And so if you're a leftist, you
Speaker 3: focus on the everyone is going to be equal part,
Speaker 3: and this means on the one hand, you know, there
Speaker 3: are there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working
Speaker 3: class that they didn't get under the you know, the
Speaker 3: sort of previous administrations. And under the junta, right, you know,
Speaker 3: you have like massive expansions of workers' rights and nationalizations
Speaker 3: of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have
Speaker 3: this like strategy of national development through like import substitution.
Speaker 3: There's there's like a long strain of like feminist paranism
Speaker 3: from you know his like like him being the administration
Speaker 3: where women got the right to vote. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before
Speaker 3: the power of the Argentinian state part which means like
Speaker 3: permanent class collaboration. And this this is the part of
Speaker 3: the deal that brings the right in is like the
Speaker 3: deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all
Speaker 3: of this stuff, and you set up these really complicated
Speaker 3: patriots networks, and you know, people have jobs and like
Speaker 3: they have a social safety that at least in theory,
Speaker 3: and the trade off is you will never ever again
Speaker 3: attempt to like occupy a factory or and like drive
Speaker 3: these parasites. You run your entire life out of power.
Speaker 3: And the second part of that is this like this hardline,
Speaker 3: unhinged right wing like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against
Speaker 3: for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise
Speaker 3: the comparison to the to the Long Culture seventies Long
Speaker 3: Culture Revolution. We've reached that point of it, so to
Speaker 3: understand like really what this is, right, It's an active
Speaker 3: counterinsurgency that is sort of that is waged by the
Speaker 3: state and waged by a bunch of like parts of
Speaker 3: the social sector to unfold this really dynamic and miilitant
Speaker 3: workers movement into the state in such a way that
Speaker 3: there can still be politics kind of but it won't
Speaker 3: actually be a threat to the ruling class. And my,
Speaker 3: my sort of like closest thing to this is this
Speaker 3: very very weird period in Chinese history between like the
Speaker 3: end of the Short Culture Revolution in like nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: nine and the death of Mao in seventy six, where
Speaker 3: like the most unhinged parts of the Culture Revolution are
Speaker 3: sort of over because Mao has set off, you know,
Speaker 3: so nineteen sixty seven, like Mao sets off this uprising
Speaker 3: in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his
Speaker 3: strategy to game power of the party. The problem is
Speaker 3: that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands
Speaker 3: of the Chinese Communist Party, like like the workers take
Speaker 3: the city, and this is a disaster because they've all
Speaker 3: been reading about the Paris Commune, and I think with
Speaker 3: the Paris comunies that they had like direct elections of people.
Speaker 3: And there's a moment I actually like I found this
Speaker 3: this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to
Speaker 3: Joe and Lai, and Joe and Lai is like, if
Speaker 3: we let these people do direct elections, like it's going
Speaker 3: to lead to anarchism, and Mao is like, oh shit,
Speaker 3: we have to stop this. So what happens is that
Speaker 3: he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red
Speaker 3: Guards and the sort of somebody some like loyal like
Speaker 3: rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the
Speaker 3: remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition
Speaker 3: comprised of everyone on every side of the Cultural revolution, right,
Speaker 3: Like normally the Culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly,
Speaker 3: there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right,
Speaker 3: and he's he's pulled together coalition of a bunch of
Speaker 3: elements of both of them with the explicit thing of
Speaker 3: we are going to end the revolution. And in the
Speaker 3: short run, what this does is it leads to the
Speaker 3: back half of the Culture Revolution that people don't talk
Speaker 3: about very much, which is instead of like everyone dying
Speaker 3: because there are rebels running around, everyone's dying because the
Speaker 3: state is killing everyone to like bring everyone back under control.
Speaker 3: And that's what most of the people die in the
Speaker 3: Culture Revolution are killed, putting the whole thing down. If
Speaker 3: one of trying to understand like what parenism is, right,
Speaker 3: it's this ideology of bringing together all of the different
Speaker 3: sort of disparate political factions in a moment. Right, You're
Speaker 3: bringing together everyone from like the fascist on the right
Speaker 3: to like the socialists on the left, and you're bringing
Speaker 3: them into the banner of this one guy and the
Speaker 3: same And the reason Malo was able to do this
Speaker 3: is because, like he's Mao, right, every single like faction
Speaker 3: on every side of the Culture Revolution, whatever they're trying
Speaker 3: to do, is justifying it in the name of like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is what Mao wants, This is what Parona is doing, right,
Speaker 3: He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way
Speaker 3: that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away
Speaker 3: from like the junta, and forge this permanent political collition.
Speaker 3: And this results in like like the sort of total
Speaker 3: dominance that this ideology has a Roger tim politics means
Speaker 3: that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malai
Speaker 3: takes power is an election between the left and the
Speaker 3: right paranists. And okay, okay, I'm so sorry. This finally
Speaker 3: is the end divide attempt to explain Baronis. But we're
Speaker 3: gonna go to ads when we come back. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am
Speaker 3: so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for serve.
Speaker 8: This.
Speaker 3: This sort of brings us to like how he kind
Speaker 3: of takes power and how you know, there's an economic crisis.
Speaker 3: There's like all this inflation and so he comes in
Speaker 3: on like I don't know, we were talking about this
Speaker 3: beforehands and we're going to talk to you about this.
Speaker 3: Like there's all these really weird parallels between this and
Speaker 3: the American election, where it's like except the inflation in
Speaker 3: Argentina is like real.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we just have this sort of like boogeyman version
Speaker 6: of it. They actually have hyperinflation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we really checked the current inflation rate. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think, I mean it's like several hundred percent right now.
Speaker 3: I think I think it's like three hundred something percent,
Speaker 3: which is actually Lay's entire thing was that he was
Speaker 3: going to stop inflation. It's actually it's way worse under
Speaker 3: him than it was the previous like Parnas administration. Oh
Speaker 3: there's one other thing I forgot about it, which is like,
Speaker 3: you know, why if you're on the left, would you
Speaker 3: take this deal? And this also ties into like how
Speaker 3: this politics?
Speaker 9: How is politics?
Speaker 3: I took over the state, which is that like you know,
Speaker 3: there were people in Argentina like under these Prona's governments
Speaker 3: got things that are like unimaginable here, Like there's one
Speaker 3: that's important to me. And like obviously like it's still
Speaker 3: you're still living under capitalism. A lot of it still sucks.
Speaker 3: But like one of the things that people won under
Speaker 3: these governments was this mandate that one percent of all
Speaker 3: government employees had to be trans which is like unimaginable here,
Speaker 3: like like like even at the height of like you
Speaker 3: know like sort of transacceptance or whatever. Like that's there's
Speaker 3: what like that's that's not that's not a thing. That's
Speaker 3: even like no one even like thinks to ask about that,
Speaker 3: and like yeah, like I don't know, like yeah, like
Speaker 3: I might sell my soul to Juan Perona if it
Speaker 3: meant that, like none of my trans friends ever had
Speaker 3: to sleep in an alley. Again, like I you know,
Speaker 3: but the wheels fall off of this and they put
Speaker 3: the self described and narcro capitalists in power, which is
Speaker 3: this is great and oh god, okay, and this finally
Speaker 3: gets a the fun part of this. I said the
Speaker 3: top of this episode that like he did a meme coin, right,
Speaker 3: can you explain what that is? Because oh god, yeah.
Speaker 6: So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the
Speaker 6: cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that
Speaker 6: this is a token that has no inherent value, which
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, skeptics would argue that that's true
Speaker 6: of all cryptocurrency, but but meme coins very actively embrace
Speaker 6: that fact, and they're often themed around a meme. So,
Speaker 6: you know, a lot of people know of dogecoin, which
Speaker 6: is themed about the you know, around the she but
Speaker 6: you new dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort
Speaker 6: of an idea or a person or you know, just
Speaker 6: sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any
Speaker 6: given moment. And the idea is that you buy in,
Speaker 6: and all of the attention causes more people to buy in,
Speaker 6: and if you're really good at it or really lucky,
Speaker 6: you're one of the first people to buy in, and
Speaker 6: so you buy in at a low price and then
Speaker 6: you sell after everyone else has bought in and pumped
Speaker 6: the price. Hire that's the idea. In reality, it doesn't
Speaker 6: really work that way. It's full of insider trading and
Speaker 6: market manipulation, and it's not sort of a fair game
Speaker 6: where anyone has a chance to be one of those
Speaker 6: early people. But that's sort of the shape of it
Speaker 6: at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra,
Speaker 6: which is the name coin that.
Speaker 5: Mila was convinced I guess to endorse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting thing here too,
Speaker 3: where it's like our government is just like a fucking
Speaker 3: meme coin. Now, Like the thing that is it ConTroll
Speaker 3: of the American state is Doge, the barber of government efficiency,
Speaker 3: which is just the Doge coin meme.
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, we're in sort of a post ironic world
Speaker 6: at this point where crypto and the US government are
Speaker 6: somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention
Speaker 6: that just before Trump took office, he launched his own
Speaker 6: meme coin, which was the Trump Token, followed very shortly
Speaker 6: after by his wife launching the Malania And they did
Speaker 6: what all good meme coins do, which is that they
Speaker 6: spiked in price based on the original interest, and then
Speaker 6: they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price
Speaker 6: came back down, because with meme coins, people lose interest
Speaker 6: and move on to the next one. And you know,
Speaker 6: the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value.
Speaker 3: So yeah, like and that's just interesting thing about it,
Speaker 3: which is like, Okay, this is just a pump them
Speaker 3: dump scheme. Yes, Like, it's just securities fraud. Like I
Speaker 3: we have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing
Speaker 3: securities fraud, and everyone knows that securities fraud. I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's really cynical.
Speaker 6: Like if you actually talk to people who are deep
Speaker 6: into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's
Speaker 6: this broad acceptance that like, oh yeah, yeah, it's totally
Speaker 6: a scam. People are trying to run off with the
Speaker 6: money after they launched these tokens, Like there's all of
Speaker 6: this mark manipulation happening average everyday people, who are you know,
Speaker 6: seeing these stories about people buying in super early and
Speaker 6: then making a million dollars out of thin air like
Speaker 6: that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like
Speaker 6: deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge. Like
Speaker 6: everyone knows this and openly discusses it, and yet there's
Speaker 6: still this active participation in it because the idea is
Speaker 6: that like, Okay, sure it's a scam, but if you
Speaker 6: get in on the scam early enough, you can be
Speaker 6: the scammer and you can be the one who profits
Speaker 6: and you know, screw everybody else. So it's like this
Speaker 6: really deeply rotten, like cynical world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember you talked about this on Jamie's show
Speaker 3: about like how just deeply nihilistic it all is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think you know, I mean, it's not even
Speaker 3: it used to be. You had to do metaphors to
Speaker 3: draw a direct line between this sort of like the
Speaker 3: nihilism of this shit and like the nihilism of putting
Speaker 3: like the lie or like putting Trump and Elon like
Speaker 3: in office. But now it's just I mean, they just
Speaker 3: do the meme coin right, like there's no Yeah, the
Speaker 3: mask is.
Speaker 6: Like fully off of crypto in the memechoin era. I think, like, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's kind of amazing. How during the previous crypto boom
Speaker 6: in like twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there was
Speaker 6: this phrase that everyone was saying, which was wag me,
Speaker 6: which was like we're all going to make it, and
Speaker 6: the idea was like we're all going to get rich together,
Speaker 6: everyone's gonna succeed. And now it's like they've totally like
Speaker 6: you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh,
Speaker 6: I will punch you in the face and steal your
Speaker 6: wallet if I get the moment opportunity, and that is
Speaker 6: like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and like that that is also like
Speaker 3: what Malai has been doing to like everyone in Argentina
Speaker 3: right like his his thing came in is he I mean,
Speaker 3: I got one of the things I remember from like
Speaker 3: the very first days he was in offices, he was
Speaker 3: talking about all this stuff about how they were going
Speaker 3: to take away will for benefits from anyone who was
Speaker 3: arrested at protest. Yeah, and like that didn't start. There's
Speaker 3: been massive protests like basically since the moment he took power.
Speaker 3: But you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical,
Speaker 3: very explicit thing of like pitting like everyone in society
Speaker 3: against each other. Like you know, like making this argument
Speaker 3: too is like a crime thic article about this word.
Speaker 3: It's like they, you know, like he's very explicitly making
Speaker 3: this argument. They're like, well, Okay, if you're like a
Speaker 3: private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason
Speaker 3: you're making no money is because wages are too high.
Speaker 3: In the public sector, it's because taxes are too high,
Speaker 3: and if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay
Speaker 3: you more. It's like, yeah, no, but if it fits
Speaker 3: into this sort of like pure nihilism of like, yeah,
Speaker 3: everyone trying to grift each other, and it's i.
Speaker 6: Mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States too,
Speaker 6: where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not
Speaker 6: making enough money because you know, people are stealing your
Speaker 6: tax money and it's going to you know, people who
Speaker 6: don't deserve it, or it's going to these programs to
Speaker 6: fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States
Speaker 6: or you know, it's like very much trying to pit
Speaker 6: everyone against one another so that you don't notice that
Speaker 6: the person who's actually taking the money is the guy
Speaker 6: who launched the meme coin or the people who have
Speaker 6: the insider information.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 6: It's like this very direct mirror of what is happening
Speaker 6: in society, and yet it's like so obvious.
Speaker 3: The problem that we have is like I think people
Speaker 3: do probably recognize that, like everyone who is rich got
Speaker 3: rich by fucking robbing people. But instead of trying to
Speaker 3: do anything about that, the solution that's being positive by
Speaker 3: these people is like, well, instead of you just being
Speaker 3: scammed all the time, like you could be the scam artist.
Speaker 5: You could be the robbery. Yeah, Like that's.
Speaker 3: Like the new scam instead of like, you know, because
Speaker 3: like organizing is fucking hard, right, and like attempting to
Speaker 3: fight these people is really hard. They have all the money,
Speaker 3: they have all the power, they have the police, they
Speaker 3: have the military, and so you get like this shit
Speaker 3: on the other hand, sometimes in backfires because these people
Speaker 3: like are like all in enough on this fucking meme
Speaker 3: cooin shit to like run it. So yeah, let's let's
Speaker 3: talk about this specific mean coin Libra. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So it's kind of a weird example of a meme coin,
Speaker 6: because you know, most meme coins, the idea is like
Speaker 6: this has no intrinsic value, this has no purpose. You
Speaker 6: just gamble on the token price and hope for the best.
Speaker 6: Libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of
Speaker 6: point to it, making it much unlike most of the
Speaker 6: meme coins, but it was still you know, basically a
Speaker 6: meme coin under the hood. But the idea was that like,
Speaker 6: somehow some of the profits from this Libra token we're
Speaker 6: going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something
Speaker 6: like that. There was this sort of like social benefit
Speaker 6: side to it, where which was all very vague and
Speaker 6: like they're very little detail, like you know, you never
Speaker 6: really know what these things what is actually supposed to happen.
Speaker 6: But that was the story, is that like this is
Speaker 6: going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel
Speaker 6: money to their projects and all this.
Speaker 3: It almost feels like an older kind of scam, Like
Speaker 3: it reminds me of like an NFT scam. We're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: they'll they'll be like ah, so we're in the future
Speaker 3: we're going to make a game and you're all going
Speaker 3: to put it. It's like that thing, but they brought
Speaker 3: it back for one last ride.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: It's like the historical, like twenty twenty era crypto scam
Speaker 6: where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap
Speaker 6: of all these things we're going to do, and we're
Speaker 6: going to give you gifts and rewards. And then it's
Speaker 6: like okay, but how is it going to work? And
Speaker 6: they're like, Oh, don't worry about it, we'll tell you later.
Speaker 6: Just give us your money now. And that was kind
Speaker 6: of the idea with the libri coin. But basically the
Speaker 6: team behind it had some folks who were involved in
Speaker 6: something called tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group
Speaker 6: of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle
Speaker 6: to it, who had access to Malay via this sort
Speaker 6: of project that was happening in Argentina where you could
Speaker 6: like pay to come to this conference and Malay was
Speaker 6: going to be there and all this, and so they
Speaker 6: joined forces with some meme coin guys who had a
Speaker 6: lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the
Speaker 6: Malania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched
Speaker 6: by someone who purchased the trademark rights to the Enron company.
Speaker 3: I forgot about that.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, that came back.
Speaker 6: To haunt us, and so they all joined forces and
Speaker 6: launched this meme coin, and they were able to get
Speaker 6: President Mila to promote the meme coin on his Twitter
Speaker 6: account by saying like, here's this Libra project. It's going
Speaker 6: to support Argentinine entrepreneurs. Here's the contract address. Buy in,
Speaker 6: And so everyone got super excited because a president had
Speaker 6: just endorsed a meme coin, and he unfortunately was too
Speaker 6: slow to be the first president to do such a thing,
Speaker 6: with Trump beating him to that particular record.
Speaker 3: But actually, I actually can't believe I blankey on his name,
Speaker 3: the guy Nol Salvador hadn't pulled one yet. Oh yeah, Bukeley,
Speaker 3: I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's probably because he's a real bitcoiner and bitcoin
Speaker 6: maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 5: That would be my guess. But yeah, it is a
Speaker 5: little surprising. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Oh.
Speaker 3: Also, okay, there's another run hinged angle here which I
Speaker 3: want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny. One of
Speaker 3: my good friends, Julie point to bt which is part
Speaker 3: of the thing that's like originally, originally maybe you want
Speaker 3: to do this is that So one of the people
Speaker 3: who was like involved in like this hookup process with
Speaker 3: like the crypto people was this guy named Augustine Lahay
Speaker 3: who's like this very very famous conservative writer and he's
Speaker 3: the guy who like introduced the concept of gender ideology
Speaker 3: to Argentina. So he's like one of and one of
Speaker 3: what lays like big things is like being a turf
Speaker 3: all the time, right, And the guy who like got
Speaker 3: all of these people into turf shit is like the
Speaker 3: guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scamp, and
Speaker 3: he might have to sell him out in order to
Speaker 3: get out of the cryptoscamp bullshit, which is just oh god,
Speaker 3: trans people getting our revenge.
Speaker 5: You love to see it.
Speaker 3: Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad
Speaker 3: break before we get into all of the rest of
Speaker 3: this bullshit. We are back to the main story of
Speaker 3: the really unprecedented access is a ministration has given the
Speaker 3: crypto people. Can you talk a bit about like who
Speaker 3: the like who the people involved in this are, because
Speaker 3: it's a lot of like very very large like players
Speaker 3: in this world.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so, I mean it's still sort of coming out
Speaker 6: like who exactly was involved and to what degree they
Speaker 6: were involved, but it's really starting to look like the
Speaker 6: creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch
Speaker 6: of guys at a group called Kelsey or Ventures that
Speaker 6: has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch
Speaker 6: of these tokens, and that's sort of a family run operation.
Speaker 6: There's a guy named doctor Tom and then his two sons,
Speaker 6: Hayden and Gideon.
Speaker 12: I believe that lady named Kitty Jesus Rice like oh no,
Speaker 12: making these guys in a lab, and you know they're
Speaker 12: they're kind of young guys, like Hayden is like twenty
Speaker 12: eight or something like that, which is you know, typical
Speaker 12: for the crypto world, I guess.
Speaker 6: But yeah, and so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind
Speaker 6: much of the launch, but they're working very closely with
Speaker 6: a bunch of other people in the crypto world. And
Speaker 6: that's something that they sort of have to do with
Speaker 6: these big, splashy token launches, you know, the Trump token.
Speaker 6: I had to do this as well, where you can't
Speaker 6: just show up as like a president and launch a
Speaker 6: meme coin and expect everything will just work, because when
Speaker 6: that many people all try to buy a token at once,
Speaker 6: you know, you need someone on the other end to
Speaker 6: actually be selling the tokens. And you know, there's all
Speaker 6: of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches,
Speaker 6: and so you need people to do the market making,
Speaker 6: and there's the liquidity providers, and there's all these you know,
Speaker 6: projects under the hood that are that are involved. And
Speaker 6: it's beginning to look like a lot of those people
Speaker 6: were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that
Speaker 6: was perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah, I know, propriety around
Speaker 6: mem coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but
Speaker 6: you know, we're there's sort of talks out how one
Speaker 6: of the co founders of a project called Mediora, which
Speaker 6: is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a
Speaker 6: place where people are actually buying these tokens, can.
Speaker 3: You explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it's it's basically sort of what I what
Speaker 6: I suggested, which is that like if you go out
Speaker 6: and launch a token and you don't do any prep
Speaker 6: when someone goes to buy that token there's or sell
Speaker 6: that token there's there's no one on the other side
Speaker 6: of that trade. You need some amount of liquidity in
Speaker 6: the markets when you start off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they're like, there have to be like there
Speaker 3: have to be like actual tokens that you can sell
Speaker 3: to people.
Speaker 6: Just yeah, and if someone, you know, if someone buys
Speaker 6: one of your tokens, they want to be able to
Speaker 6: sell it to someone as well. And so you need
Speaker 6: to be able to sort of absorb that kind of
Speaker 6: trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air.
Speaker 6: These people will exist on both sides of the trade,
Speaker 6: and so there are these projects called liquidity providers where
Speaker 6: you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity
Speaker 6: and they'll step in in that role, and that's sort
Speaker 6: of the market maker end of things. Mediora is a
Speaker 6: little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision,
Speaker 6: which I'm not going to go into too much detail
Speaker 6: about because it's very mind numbing.
Speaker 3: But it's also so funny that like the terms that
Speaker 3: have taken hold for these things like are financial terms,
Speaker 3: and it's like, yeah, it's like like this is not
Speaker 3: liquidity in the sense of like does the US government
Speaker 3: have cash on hand to pay something? This is like
Speaker 3: are there these like stupid little weird program things to
Speaker 3: like move other programs around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's not even.
Speaker 6: Dollars, you know, we're not We're not talking about real
Speaker 6: dollars here. We're talking about like people providing you one
Speaker 6: fake token in exchange for another fake token. But I
Speaker 6: think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms
Speaker 6: to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it
Speaker 6: and cover up the fact that, like, oh and if
Speaker 6: you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all
Speaker 6: the liquidity out of there, you've just made a ton
Speaker 6: of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit
Speaker 6: because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists
Speaker 6: in like traditional finance. But yeah, so there's this Mediora
Speaker 6: project where that liquidity operation all happens, and you know,
Speaker 6: Mediora was deeply sort of involved in some of these
Speaker 6: big token launches like trump token was starting out on Mediora.
Speaker 6: Milania started out there, this Libra token started out there,
Speaker 6: and now it seems like the co founder was like
Speaker 6: very closely connected to this Hayden guy, He even supposedly
Speaker 6: introduced the Milania team to Hayden Davis, the Kelcier guy.
Speaker 6: Sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations
Speaker 6: out there, he was personally involved in a lot of
Speaker 6: this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into
Speaker 6: when it comes to Libratoken and why everything went so wrong.
Speaker 6: And it seems like there is this sort of network
Speaker 6: of people throughout this meme coin world who are running
Speaker 6: these big platforms and who are making connections and all
Speaker 6: of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of
Speaker 6: these big token launches, so that when those people who
Speaker 6: were buying it up early and making all this money,
Speaker 6: it's like, oh, yeah, that's the guy who runs Metiora.
Speaker 6: This happens so much in the crypto world, and I
Speaker 6: should stop being surprised every time it happens. But what
Speaker 6: happened is when the co founder of Metiora stepped down,
Speaker 6: the other co founder, who was like previously not really known,
Speaker 6: stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co founder,
Speaker 6: and he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow,
Speaker 6: the co founder who stepped down, was, you know, he
Speaker 6: thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing
Speaker 6: shady was happening at Metiora et cetera. The other co
Speaker 6: founder who just like came out of the woodwork. He
Speaker 6: runs Jupiter, which is the other it's like the ostensible
Speaker 6: Metiora competitor. It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the
Speaker 6: same people, you know, behind the scenes. And you know,
Speaker 6: some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on
Speaker 6: this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all
Speaker 6: insider trading too. The Metiora guys are insider trading, like
Speaker 6: they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed a
Speaker 6: lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world,
Speaker 6: in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like
Speaker 6: oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins like you
Speaker 6: are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not
Speaker 6: done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly
Speaker 6: also to Malays as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, let's let's get into like Malay's involvements in this.
Speaker 3: Can you give you lamps to the timeline of this,
Speaker 3: because it's so funny.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a little wild, so unlike the Trump token,
Speaker 6: Malay did not launch this token. He was not the
Speaker 6: mastermind behind it. It's not clear how much he really
Speaker 6: knew about the team behind it or what they were doing,
Speaker 6: but he was certainly convinced to endorse this token and
Speaker 6: you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this.
Speaker 6: And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme
Speaker 6: coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to
Speaker 6: find a president, but apparently not now, Like it was
Speaker 6: true it was unusual for them to find a present.
Speaker 6: But you know, there's this whole process with meme coins
Speaker 6: where they try to find influential people to talk about
Speaker 6: them to drive the interest in the token. And so
Speaker 6: they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in
Speaker 6: the crypto world or you know, anyone with some degree
Speaker 6: of a platform to promote a token, and ostensibly they're
Speaker 6: supposed to disclose that they are being paid.
Speaker 5: To promote the token. They rarely do.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is technically illegal, but like rarely rarely enforced
Speaker 6: for for someone to promote a token without disclosure. One
Speaker 6: of the very few cases where it was enforced was
Speaker 6: against Kim Kardashian aivolts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, although that that SIT's all gone now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that was years ago before the SEC was
Speaker 6: bought by the crypto companies and so yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Like I mean they literally like I think, like yesterday
Speaker 3: it was that this Yeah, was it yesterday as we're recording,
Speaker 3: this recording is on Friday? Was it yesterday that the
Speaker 3: the is it the SEC the SEC that dropped the
Speaker 3: case sainst Coinbase.
Speaker 5: SEC and that was today yeah, this morning to day.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I mean we're seeing this everywhere.
Speaker 6: But the SEC has paused a case against Binance, which
Speaker 6: had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort
Speaker 6: of like minor securities law violation.
Speaker 5: Fraud is also actually of the securities law violation.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Those those are all, by the way, a bunch of
Speaker 3: like very very like like by Ins and like Coinbase,
Speaker 3: like the biggest players in like the regular crypto market.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Finance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Speaker 6: Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.
Speaker 6: Coinbase spent over seventy five million dollars on the most
Speaker 6: recent political cycle in the US and now is reaping
Speaker 6: the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped.
Speaker 6: So I would not expect much in the way of
Speaker 6: SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies. Yeah, especially given
Speaker 6: that they have also installed crypto friendly people at the SEC.
Speaker 6: At the CFTC. The CFTC nominee for chair is an
Speaker 6: Andreson Horowitz, guy who is advising them on crypto policy.
Speaker 6: Like it's totally rotten now.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and also with the actual guy running the government
Speaker 3: right now is Elon Musk, who is you know, like
Speaker 3: what are their boys?
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the guy who's ostensibly running the project has
Speaker 6: his own meme coin project, so I suspect he's not
Speaker 6: going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against
Speaker 6: meme cooin operations either.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Good god, it's such a mess.
Speaker 15: Ye.
Speaker 5: Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.
Speaker 3: Oh god.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, so basically, you know, the coin launches, me lay,
Speaker 6: you know, fires off a tweet about how this is
Speaker 6: such a great meme coin, and you know, he he
Speaker 6: gives the token address so you can all go buy it,
Speaker 6: and then very early on it becomes clear that there
Speaker 6: is some degree of insider trading happening. So, you know,
Speaker 6: the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's
Speaker 6: all recorded on a public blockchain.
Speaker 5: People can look.
Speaker 6: At who is doing the early trades and these tokens,
Speaker 6: and it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that
Speaker 6: are that were involved in launching the token, and so
Speaker 6: the ones that are being controlled by the people who
Speaker 6: you know actually created this token and are promoting it,
Speaker 6: are also involved in this early sniping of the token.
Speaker 5: And sniping is when.
Speaker 6: You use crypto trading bots, you know, like automated programs
Speaker 6: to buy up the tokens very early on at low, low,
Speaker 6: low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably
Speaker 6: be expected to go but hit the buy button.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do
Speaker 3: or like, like the reason why you can't buy a
Speaker 3: PS five is that all these trading bots get in
Speaker 3: like immediately exactly.
Speaker 6: It's one hundred percent analogous to that. But in the
Speaker 6: case of these trading bots, you know, often they have
Speaker 6: insider information, they have the contract address before it's public,
Speaker 6: so that they can be like split stack and on
Speaker 6: it to buy these tokens early, and then they usually
Speaker 6: dump them really early too. So you know, if if
Speaker 6: Melea tweets about ameme coin. The price shoots up within
Speaker 6: minutes of this thing launching, and within minutes these snipers
Speaker 6: sell off and they make millions of dollars, often in profits.
Speaker 6: And it is that selling that often causes the price
Speaker 6: to crash right back down again, causing those average people
Speaker 6: who thought that they were early to be the ones
Speaker 6: basically subsidizing the folks who make.
Speaker 5: Millions of dollars off these launches.
Speaker 3: Like it's pupp a dump.
Speaker 16: It's just literally just a puppe dump, Like it's just fraud,
Speaker 16: Like I just right, I don't know, like I just
Speaker 16: this is my my like old like twenty ten cents
Speaker 16: of ethics emerging here, which apparently doesn't exist in the
Speaker 16: sort of bold new world, is like nihilism, Like this
Speaker 16: is just fraud.
Speaker 6: Yeah no, And like people talk about, you know, we
Speaker 6: need cryptoregulations, like you don't need any new regulations. Fraud
Speaker 6: is still fraud, Like stealing from people is illegal. But
Speaker 6: that's like a whole seperate point.
Speaker 3: This entire thing. When everyone was doing this on Wall Street,
Speaker 3: it like crashed the economy a bunch of times. We
Speaker 3: were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to
Speaker 3: do this, But I don't know, capitalism is such that
Speaker 3: you could just buy the governments and now all your
Speaker 3: follow You're like, fraud schemes are legal, right if you
Speaker 3: do it on the blackchain?
Speaker 5: Crime is legal apparently.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But yeah, so you know there's this there's this really
Speaker 6: early scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are
Speaker 6: trading this token. Everyone's calling it a rug pull because
Speaker 6: that's like the cloak wheal term for when someone launches
Speaker 6: a project and then steals all the money. And it
Speaker 6: certainly looks like that's what's happening. And so Melay very
Speaker 6: quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet
Speaker 6: that he made and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically,
Speaker 6: I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really
Speaker 6: know what their project is. I just thought it was this,
Speaker 6: you know, cool thing that was gonna support Argentinian businesses.
Speaker 6: I you know, I renounced all affiliation with it, basically.
Speaker 6: And then he of course like blames his political opponents
Speaker 6: for trying to weaponize this against him, and you know,
Speaker 6: he goes very much shout swinging on people, being like,
Speaker 6: I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to
Speaker 6: come after my reputation.
Speaker 3: Oh the pronus made me do it.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah right, He's like, this is all your fault somehow.
Speaker 6: So anyway, you know, that all happens, and it sort
Speaker 6: of launches the project into chaos because the way that
Speaker 6: the people on the inside are talking about it, and
Speaker 6: huge grain of salt here, because you know, these are
Speaker 6: people who are potentially admitting to their crimes.
Speaker 3: Well it also like these are professional liars, like their
Speaker 3: job is to lie to people for a living, like
Speaker 3: it's and yeah.
Speaker 6: And several of the things that they've said have already
Speaker 6: been proven to be untrue. So like a huge, huge,
Speaker 6: huge grain of salt here. But their story is that, oh,
Speaker 6: we were sniping the token yes, but it's not bad
Speaker 6: because we were doing it to try to protect people
Speaker 6: from the other token snipers who show up on launches
Speaker 6: like this, Like we didn't no.
Speaker 17: No, you know what I said.
Speaker 5: We had to do.
Speaker 3: The scam to save you from the other people who
Speaker 3: were trying to do the same scan.
Speaker 5: You're not even exaggerating. That's literally what they said.
Speaker 3: That's so good.
Speaker 6: And so they come up with this like hair brain
Speaker 6: theory where they're like Okay, if we snipe the tokens early,
Speaker 6: we can stop other token snipers from accumulating these huge
Speaker 6: piles of the tokens and then dumping them and causing
Speaker 6: the whole thing to crash. And so you know, they
Speaker 6: will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally
Speaker 6: wreck the whole you know, chart basically and cause.
Speaker 5: It to go to zero.
Speaker 6: And then we'll take our accumulated pile of tokens and
Speaker 6: like slowly seed it back in to try to stabilize
Speaker 6: the chart. I mean, it's like blatant manipulating market manipulation
Speaker 6: that they're describing, like in defending themselves against allegations that
Speaker 6: they're committing crimes, they're admitting to new crimes.
Speaker 5: It's like this whole thing.
Speaker 6: But that's the story is that they were like, we
Speaker 6: have to do this to protect the chart. And the
Speaker 6: idea was that, like Melay was going to make this
Speaker 6: video promoting the token even more, and at that point
Speaker 6: they were going to put all this money that they
Speaker 6: had taken back into the project. But of course that
Speaker 6: video never came because Meulay had already cut his losses
Speaker 6: and was like, I don't want anything to do with this,
Speaker 6: and so now the guys who launched this token are
Speaker 6: sitting on like, ostensibly one hundred million dollars worth of tokens.
Speaker 6: I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the
Speaker 6: numbers aren't real, and you know, there's really not one
Speaker 6: hundred million dollars.
Speaker 5: Floating around in there.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 6: People again people talk about how this is like a
Speaker 6: four point five billion dollar crypto scam. There was never
Speaker 6: four point five billion dollars in this. It's all fake money.
Speaker 6: But like the it is true that there were people
Speaker 6: who put real money into this. They got totally scammed,
Speaker 6: basically taken for a ride because they thought that they
Speaker 6: might be able to make money on it because the
Speaker 6: President endorsed it, because they thought there was this, you know,
Speaker 6: some legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses.
Speaker 6: They lost their money and it all went to this
Speaker 6: guy Hayden Williams, who is you know, connected to Mela,
Speaker 6: who has some degree of influence with Malay, who claimed
Speaker 6: in text messages.
Speaker 5: That he controls Mela.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, yeah, but what use the N word
Speaker 3: by the way, these two, yeah, like who these people are?
Speaker 3: Like this is this is this is a white guy,
Speaker 3: using the N word like Ica is like whiter than
Speaker 3: I am, and using the N word to say that.
Speaker 5: Not great.
Speaker 6: He said in this text message that was leaked that
Speaker 6: he was sending money to Mela's sister, who is very
Speaker 6: influential and who sort of is Meala's right hand sister,
Speaker 6: you know, sent money to her, and that as a
Speaker 6: result of that, Melee will do anything that I want.
Speaker 6: He'll say what I want, he'll tweet what I want,
Speaker 6: He'll you know, he's my puppet basically. Of course, Mela
Speaker 6: was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like
Speaker 6: there's money trading hims behind the scenes, even though Mela
Speaker 6: was not, you know, behind the token directly. And you know,
Speaker 6: this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal
Speaker 6: for Ula, which is both surprising that like, of all
Speaker 6: things that could have caused a political scandal for Meula,
Speaker 6: there are so many things to choose from, and this
Speaker 6: is what it was. But you know, he's now facing
Speaker 6: these these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud,
Speaker 6: that he should be impeached. Even you know, there's some
Speaker 6: rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some
Speaker 6: sort of impeachment proceedings against him, and it's all gone
Speaker 6: very south, very quickly for him.
Speaker 3: I think, God, it really would be so incredibly funny
Speaker 3: if this is the thing that brings him down. I
Speaker 3: don't know if it will. But also like I don't know,
Speaker 3: this is one of these, like an even bigger way
Speaker 3: than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political
Speaker 3: fucking godsend, like handed down to the opposition, and the
Speaker 3: Democrats aren't don't use it right because you know they're
Speaker 3: the Democrats, right, instead of just like doing instead of
Speaker 3: doing a thing I would do, which is starting literally
Speaker 3: free speech with fucking no cops, no kings, no crashes.
Speaker 3: They're like they're like, no atiuty. But like this is
Speaker 3: like if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration,
Speaker 3: like this is like fucking God like reaching a giant
Speaker 3: hand down and going, hey, have this thing to beat,
Speaker 3: have this stick to beat over the head with.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And you know, to their credit, I feel like
Speaker 6: Argentinian politicians are taking better advantage of this than US
Speaker 6: politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are
Speaker 6: calling for you know, impeachment. There have been you know,
Speaker 6: many lawsuits filed against me Lee, and you know there
Speaker 6: is a judge looking into his degree of connections here.
Speaker 6: Obviously there is you know, some amount of corruption over
Speaker 6: in the Argentinian government and so you know, the degree
Speaker 6: to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat.
Speaker 3: Questionable, let's just say, yeah.
Speaker 6: And you know, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually
Speaker 6: you know, getting the votes to go to trial is
Speaker 6: certainly questionable. But this has been used, you know, in
Speaker 6: a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of Melee,
Speaker 6: which is you.
Speaker 5: Know, worth doing.
Speaker 3: And you know, I say this about paranism, right like
Speaker 3: the thing that the thing about Paronism is that it
Speaker 3: it's like the engine that devours social movements, right like
Speaker 3: anytime social movement comes in, the parnas sort of like
Speaker 3: consume it from the inside. But the thing, the thing
Speaker 3: about the way that like protos and functions is like, okay,
Speaker 3: so they've they've eaten all these social movements, but it's
Speaker 3: not quite like the US where you can just like
Speaker 3: disband it and make it go away, like you actually
Speaker 3: have to still have have the thing that social movement does.
Speaker 3: And that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest,
Speaker 3: like whatever else is it about the paronas, like aren't
Speaker 3: capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets.
Speaker 3: And I'm really interested to see what's going to happen
Speaker 3: like this weekend and over the coming weeks, to see
Speaker 3: if we see another seventeenth giant round of protests, like
Speaker 3: also specifically about this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I'll be curious too.
Speaker 6: It's really interesting to me, like to what degree this
Speaker 6: resonates with three Day people, I guess in Argentina because
Speaker 6: you know, there's there's a lot to complain about with
Speaker 6: the MELA government, and so you know, it's sort of
Speaker 6: fascinating to me that people are latching onto this, and
Speaker 6: you know, it's sort of interesting just to compare with
Speaker 6: the United States, where there's a lot to complain about
Speaker 6: with the Trump administration, and you know, people were complaining
Speaker 6: about the meme coin, but by the time that was,
Speaker 6: you know, partly because it was pre inauguration and so
Speaker 6: Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders and so
Speaker 6: it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of
Speaker 6: blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration, and so
Speaker 6: it didn't get that much traction in sort of the
Speaker 6: longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this
Speaker 6: play out in a different country where you know, Milay
Speaker 6: has been in office for some time now, and you know,
Speaker 6: this has gained at least some degree of a foothold,
Speaker 6: and I'll be curious to see, you know, if that
Speaker 6: endures or not. He's he's sort of trying to play
Speaker 6: it off as like, you know, oh, everyone knows crypto
Speaker 6: is risky. He said something and he tried to do
Speaker 6: this like damage control interview on TV where he said
Speaker 6: that basically, like the people who bought this token knew
Speaker 6: they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet,
Speaker 6: which is a wild thing to say. Christ Yeah, that's
Speaker 6: just a nutty thing to say, but also very in
Speaker 6: character for him. And you know, he said something in
Speaker 6: then an interview to the effect of, like, you know,
Speaker 6: only a couple thousand people lost money, what's the chances
Speaker 6: that those people were even Argentinian, Like we shouldn't even
Speaker 6: care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so,
Speaker 6: you know, it's it's sort of interesting to watch him
Speaker 6: try to downplay this. It's like well, yeah, of course
Speaker 6: people lost money. It's a scam, you know.
Speaker 5: Like yeah, I guess.
Speaker 3: I think part of the reason this is like a
Speaker 3: real issue for him is that like he really truly
Speaker 3: you know, and this is something that like Trump is
Speaker 3: also doing this, like that he but he he like
Speaker 3: really truly went out to like his main base of supporters, yeah,
Speaker 3: and was like I'm just going to take you up
Speaker 3: behind a woodsend shoot you and like take the money
Speaker 3: out of your pocket. And like the way he's like
Speaker 3: systematically fucking all of the people who were supposed to
Speaker 3: be his political base, and like like Trump was also
Speaker 3: doing is but like people sort of like haven't set
Speaker 3: in that this is what's happening, whereas like this rug
Speaker 3: pull thing, it's like this is like the only thing
Speaker 3: that the fucking unhinge right when crypto wrote people care about,
Speaker 3: like this is like the one thing you could possibly
Speaker 3: do to like this the wall.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's really interesting to see like what causes crypto
Speaker 6: people to turn on you, because it did happen in
Speaker 6: a much more limited way with Trump, where you know,
Speaker 6: the US crypto movement I guess that's not the right
Speaker 6: word for it, but the industry or the crypto world
Speaker 6: had really supported Trump very heavily, and you know, they
Speaker 6: had donated to him. But there was also this widespread
Speaker 6: belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going
Speaker 6: to be good for crypto. He was going to cause
Speaker 6: crypto prices to go up, he was gonna to fix
Speaker 6: all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry
Speaker 6: back and all this stuff. And then when Trump came
Speaker 6: out and launched a meme coin, some of his most
Speaker 6: devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it,
Speaker 6: and they really responded in a way that I think
Speaker 6: a lot of people didn't expect, which is, like, I
Speaker 6: can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin. He's supposed
Speaker 6: to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal
Speaker 6: money from his supporters, and so like, there was actually
Speaker 6: this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto
Speaker 6: world in the US as well. And so I think
Speaker 6: that's you know, sort of interesting to see, is that like, Okay,
Speaker 6: you're allowed to do scams and you know, run your
Speaker 6: government in a way that personally benefits you, as long
Speaker 6: as it's not reflecting poorly on us, and it's not
Speaker 6: taking money from us. But as soon as it starts
Speaker 6: to make people, you know, look at scance at meme
Speaker 6: coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts
Speaker 6: to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wonder, I don't know. I'm interested in your
Speaker 3: take on this, Like how much of that is people
Speaker 3: who are in less meme coiny things who are worried
Speaker 3: about like their assets because they said at some point
Speaker 3: like have to be able to cash out.
Speaker 18: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think that's a big part of it. Like there
Speaker 6: are factions in crypto where I sort of referred to
Speaker 6: this earlier when we were talking about Bichayley. But you know,
Speaker 6: there are bitcoiners who believe that bitcoin is the one
Speaker 6: true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam,
Speaker 6: and so they are really upset when these meme coins
Speaker 6: come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on
Speaker 6: Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together. There's
Speaker 6: sort of a step down from that, which is people
Speaker 6: who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin,
Speaker 6: but meme coins are not them. And so there's been
Speaker 6: all this talk recently where they're like, look at all
Speaker 6: these meme cooin scams that are getting in the news.
Speaker 6: You know that there was like the Hawktua meme coin
Speaker 6: that totally like yeah, stole a news cycle for a
Speaker 6: minute there, and they're terrified that, you know, people are
Speaker 6: starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know,
Speaker 6: it's just one and the same. And they're like, people
Speaker 6: are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate
Speaker 6: cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking
Speaker 6: about hactua coin and how they ripped off a bunch
Speaker 6: of people, which like, personally, I think that the reputation
Speaker 6: is perhaps somewhat deserved, but you know, there is this
Speaker 6: belief among some people that like, oh, this is not
Speaker 6: real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a
Speaker 6: bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of
Speaker 6: that in some of the higher places where you know,
Speaker 6: I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the
Speaker 6: Hawktua coin on Capitol Hill, you know, like when they're
Speaker 6: talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds,
Speaker 6: the opposition is like, well, do we want haktua coin everywhere?
Speaker 5: Like is this really what we want?
Speaker 6: And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception
Speaker 6: and the perception in you know, Congress to some extent,
Speaker 6: which I think is what's really scary people, because they've
Speaker 6: just made these huge inroads with you know, all of
Speaker 6: these now crypto friendly politicians and friendly regulators, and now
Speaker 6: crypto is out here making a fool of itself right
Speaker 6: as you know, new legislation or regulation might be installed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this gets me too. I think the thing
Speaker 3: I want to close on, which is, you know, like
Speaker 3: we actually did successfully as a society kill the NFT. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like we took that all the fucker out back at
Speaker 3: staded to death.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 3: And I'm wondering whether you think that like this is
Speaker 3: this is a moment where we can like use this
Speaker 3: as a wedge thing to try to like fucking kill
Speaker 3: this entire industry. And how how vulnerable they are to
Speaker 3: like the negative pr rattlings from.
Speaker 4: All of this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point that,
Speaker 6: like the NFT, even as crypto has had a resurgence,
Speaker 6: you know, Bitcoin crossed one hundred thousand dollars, NFTs are
Speaker 6: like nowhere to be found, you know, Like the NFT
Speaker 6: platforms are struggling there. A couple of them just went
Speaker 6: out of business, and I think it is largely thanks
Speaker 6: to the fact that NFTs became really cringe and you know,
Speaker 6: like everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures, and
Speaker 6: that had like a really devastating impact on this entire
Speaker 6: industry that was supposed to be like the future of
Speaker 6: art or whatever. And so I think there is that
Speaker 6: potential throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would
Speaker 6: not be shocked to see that happen to these memecoin platforms,
Speaker 6: where they sort of lose their novelty value and people
Speaker 6: just see them as big scams and there's really no point.
Speaker 6: But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of
Speaker 6: crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or you know,
Speaker 6: the sort of societal distaste for it, because I mean,
Speaker 6: there are people who have bought bitcoin early, who have
Speaker 6: billions of dollars in crypto. In bitcoin, they are now
Speaker 6: working in the US government. You know, they have like
Speaker 6: very strong control over very powerful institutions, and so there
Speaker 6: is this countervailing force you keep crypto alive at basically
Speaker 6: any cost, and I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate
Speaker 6: to do that, as we're seeing calls for say a
Speaker 6: bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up,
Speaker 6: the idea that like the US government should personally stockpile bitcoin,
Speaker 6: which you know, they make a couple of arguments as
Speaker 6: to why they should do that, which are not very
Speaker 6: convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world.
Speaker 6: But the sort of underlying thread through it is that
Speaker 6: if the US government holds a substantial amount of bitcoin,
Speaker 6: they won't be able to afford to let the bitcoin
Speaker 6: price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the
Speaker 6: cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing
Speaker 6: the attempts to you know, sort of work crypto into
Speaker 6: government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance, you know,
Speaker 6: people trying to get bitcoin e ETFs into you know,
Speaker 6: your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like
Speaker 6: that is really to make it so oh endemic and
Speaker 6: so contagious. I guess to the rest of the financial
Speaker 6: world that it's almost like, you know, this this threat
Speaker 6: that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right,
Speaker 6: if you kill us, we'll kill you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think it's this interesting thing of like, sorry,
Speaker 3: I know, I said we were going to close out,
Speaker 3: Like no, this is fun. There's this interesting way in
Speaker 3: which like this seems like the endgame for the entire
Speaker 3: like tech bubble economy is like you know, like none
Speaker 3: of these fucking companies have everybody able to make money, right,
Speaker 3: none of these fucking companies. But they all they all
Speaker 3: every like fucking like everything from like like fucking Uber
Speaker 3: to like fucking like Google and Amazon like hemorrhaged money.
Speaker 3: Uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops
Speaker 3: and it dies. Right, But like Amazon only really started
Speaker 3: making money, you know, Google was kind of making money,
Speaker 3: Like Amazon only started making money when they started getting
Speaker 3: government contracts for like their cloud computing shit. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: like that like looks like the endgame, Like you know,
Speaker 3: this is this is the thing with like Elon's like
Speaker 3: fucking electric armored vehicle content is like the only thing
Speaker 3: that can keep the bubble going is just pure standing intervention.
Speaker 3: But that also gives me a little bit of hope
Speaker 3: because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble
Speaker 3: economy going for like over like a decade and a
Speaker 3: half now has been really really even under the original
Speaker 3: Trump administration, I mean, and the original administration kind of
Speaker 3: got bailed out by COVID to some extents, Like you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, like the the original Argentinian economic crisis was
Speaker 3: this there's this there's this huge wave of currency collapses
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen where it was sort of contained, like
Speaker 3: the IMF did a bailout in while I was trying
Speaker 3: to do a bailout in Argentina, and it like it
Speaker 3: kind of got contained, but it set off a black
Speaker 3: wave uprisings. But like there's been this like really it's
Speaker 3: just taken this really careful financial management and like all
Speaker 3: of these like like like a trillion dollars of like
Speaker 3: overnight repo purchases like every day from the Treasury to
Speaker 3: like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking industry
Speaker 3: to prevent like the kind of like two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight style collapses. And I think it it takes it's
Speaker 3: taken a really delicate hand, and you know, like I
Speaker 3: don't think it's a good thing. But on their hand,
Speaker 3: like these guys just fire the nuke police, like while
Speaker 3: they were moving a nuke, and I wonder if they
Speaker 3: can actually keep the dance going, or if they're just
Speaker 3: gonna if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy,
Speaker 3: just blow it all up, which might yeah, maybe nuke
Speaker 3: all of these people in the process.
Speaker 5: Maybe.
Speaker 6: I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism,
Speaker 6: I think that one of the most interesting things that
Speaker 6: we're going to be seeing now is that the crypto
Speaker 6: industry has long argued that they have all this potential.
Speaker 6: You know, they are just around the corner from reinventing
Speaker 6: the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the
Speaker 6: only reason that they haven't you know, actually made true
Speaker 6: on that is because of those pesky regulators that are
Speaker 6: stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want.
Speaker 6: And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming
Speaker 6: that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators
Speaker 6: would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators,
Speaker 6: they're in a world where, you know, they basically own
Speaker 6: the regulation there, all of the enforcement cases against them
Speaker 6: are going to go away, you know, the friendliest possible
Speaker 6: regulations are going to be introduced. And now crypto doesn't
Speaker 6: have that excuse anymore, right, they can't just say that
Speaker 6: the reason we don't do anything useful is because these
Speaker 6: stupid regulators won't let us lend you bitcoin or whatever.
Speaker 6: And so I think, you know, there is going to
Speaker 6: be this moment where people are like, okay, so do
Speaker 6: it now, you know, like do the innovation now, And
Speaker 6: it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks
Speaker 6: and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry because
Speaker 6: they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will
Speaker 6: be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take, like, you know,
Speaker 6: the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: My line on this is that like accelerationism as an
Speaker 3: ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's not there's nothing you
Speaker 3: can do to do the acceleration. Yeah right, like or
Speaker 3: the like left accelerationism like Trump and Elon Musk like
Speaker 3: just have their fucking foot hammering the pedal all the
Speaker 3: way down. We are accelerating as fast as we could
Speaker 3: possibly go, and all we have left is to like
Speaker 3: make sure what the fucking acceleration goes our way and
Speaker 3: up theirs.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, but I yeah, I guess, like you know,
Speaker 6: it's me trying to find a light in the darkness.
Speaker 6: You know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at
Speaker 6: least we might see the crypto industry fall apart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I look, look, they might bring down the
Speaker 3: first of arco capitalists president.
Speaker 5: So yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know today Argentina, tomorrow in the world.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, and I think also just like you know, it's
Speaker 6: interesting to see this uprising and sort of broad distaste
Speaker 6: formula and everything that he's doing when everything that he's
Speaker 6: doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his
Speaker 6: affection for Elon Musk, and so you know, to see
Speaker 6: people sort of turn on that is perhaps a little
Speaker 6: bit instructive.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think this is interesting kind of like bounce
Speaker 3: back thing too, because he's like, you know, somebody say
Speaker 3: he's modeling himself on Trump one, like the first trumpministration,
Speaker 3: but he got even weirder with it than like Trump wanted,
Speaker 3: and now Trump modeling itself back. Yeah, like slingshotting. But yeah,
Speaker 3: and and and and and and I don't know, hope, hope,
Speaker 3: hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too, and they also
Speaker 3: get the backlash to it, and we Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: know we we don't all die when they actually set
Speaker 3: a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.
Speaker 5: That would be nice.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, Mollie, thank you so much for coming on the
Speaker 3: show and for talking talking with us about this unhinged bullshit,
Speaker 3: and also just genuinely thank you, thank you for reporting
Speaker 3: on all of the ship because oh my god, it
Speaker 3: is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane.
Speaker 6: I don't pretend I do give in the madness. Yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 6: thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and where where where can people find your work?
Speaker 6: You can find me at citation needed dot news. I
Speaker 6: also a run web three is going just great, which
Speaker 6: is web three is going great?
Speaker 5: Dot com.
Speaker 6: And then I'm on social media everywhere you'll find me
Speaker 6: from either of those websites.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will put links to all of this in
Speaker 3: the description. Thank you again, and yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 3: go make crypto so uncool that these people have a
Speaker 3: terrible day in panic.
Speaker 5: I'll do my best.
Speaker 9: Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here a
Speaker 9: podcast about things falling apart and the people putting them
Speaker 9: back together. And today Garrison and I are joined by
Speaker 9: Hailey and Dan, both Haley and Dan are gender affirming
Speaker 9: care providers in the Northeast, and they both work at
Speaker 9: federally qualit health centers. Welcome to the show, guys.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much and year.
Speaker 9: Okay. So for people who are not familiar, right, maybe
Speaker 9: they've been fortunate enough to have like really good health
Speaker 9: care the whole life, or fortunate enough to not live
Speaker 9: in the United States and have this bizarre like web
Speaker 9: of healthcare provision. Can you explain what a federally qualified
Speaker 9: healthcare center is?
Speaker 4: Sure? You matter?
Speaker 15: If I take this with Hailey, So I would start
Speaker 15: by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot
Speaker 15: if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care.
Speaker 19: Right.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I dismissed with that to start.
Speaker 9: Oh, yeah, I get yeah, I guess good is a
Speaker 9: relative to Yeah. I've relied on federally qualified healthcare center
Speaker 9: for one and it was great.
Speaker 7: They were very nice.
Speaker 9: Actually, my prescriptions cost a lot less now than they
Speaker 9: do with my very expensive Eyheigh insurance.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 15: So, around the nineteen sixties there was the sort of
Speaker 15: free clinic movement that got started, and what grew out
Speaker 15: of that became the federally qualified health center system in
Speaker 15: the United States, So there are roughly sixteen hundred unique
Speaker 15: federally qualified health centers all over the country, and we,
Speaker 15: as a sort of confederated set of health centers all
Speaker 15: across the country, are responsible for treating those most in
Speaker 15: need in the United States, so the Medicaid population, those
Speaker 15: without insurance. We cannot turn anybody away if you do
Speaker 15: not have insurance, people in rural areas where healthcare is
Speaker 15: very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and
Speaker 15: really everybody in between. At the health center that I
Speaker 15: work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is
Speaker 15: pretty typical, although you'll find in states with no Medicaid
Speaker 15: expansion it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But
Speaker 15: we are the nation's safety net healthcare provider, and without us,
Speaker 15: there are roughly one in ten Americans would not get
Speaker 15: their healthcare.
Speaker 9: Jeez, well, I guess people who are not in the
Speaker 9: United States, do you want to go and give us
Speaker 9: a go one minute speedrun of what Medicaid is medicare.
Speaker 15: Sure, So America does not have a nationalized insurance program.
Speaker 15: As we are very frustrated with most of the time.
Speaker 15: It's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job.
Speaker 15: But if you are not fortunate it's not the right word,
Speaker 15: but if you're not fortunate enough to get that. Medicaid
Speaker 15: is the system that gives health insurance to people who
Speaker 15: are living at or below the federal poverty line. With
Speaker 15: the Affordable Care Act or the Acabambacare, that level raised
Speaker 15: a little bit, so you could still get Medicaid if
Speaker 15: you were at above the federal poverty line.
Speaker 7: But this is mostly for the working poor. That's who
Speaker 7: gets Medicaid.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a great system. Let's talk about how this
Speaker 9: has funded them. And you said the US doesn't have
Speaker 9: like a single pair healthcare system, So how are these
Speaker 9: healthcare centers funded right now? Or maybe how were they
Speaker 9: funded like six weeks ago.
Speaker 15: Yeah, So most of the work that we do is
Speaker 15: fee for service. We're not a lot different than a
Speaker 15: lot of other places in that regard. Right, if you
Speaker 15: have Medicaid patients, we are a fee for service program.
Speaker 15: We give provision of care to them on a per
Speaker 15: visit base, same as anywhere else in the country. And
Speaker 15: how that works and we get reimbursed for it. What
Speaker 15: makes FQS different than everywhere else.
Speaker 7: Is two things.
Speaker 15: One, we get a special rate that is designated because
Speaker 15: of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more
Speaker 15: complicated patients and to ensure that they are healthy enough
Speaker 15: to keep out of expensive.
Speaker 7: Systems of care like the emergency rooms and things of
Speaker 7: that nature.
Speaker 15: And two is that we have a grant called the
Speaker 15: FED three thirty And this is a sort of like large,
Speaker 15: sort of use it as you need to grant that
Speaker 15: depending on the agency, is anywhere from five to twenty
Speaker 15: five percent of your total annual funds and is meant
Speaker 15: to cover all of the folks who can afford care
Speaker 15: and are uninsured.
Speaker 19: Part of my funding also, I do a lot of
Speaker 19: work with HIV and HIV prevention, so a lot of
Speaker 19: my work is done via Ryan White funding. And there's
Speaker 19: some other kind of separate funding streams that's applicable specifically
Speaker 19: to gender firming care. However, it's all kind of messy
Speaker 19: and tied up in a lot of those other funding
Speaker 19: streams that Dan mentioned, and there's some specific limitations because
Speaker 19: of those funding streams. Again historically because who knows right now,
Speaker 19: but through something called the High Amendment, it means that
Speaker 19: our funding would be at jeopardy if we provided abortion care.
Speaker 19: So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of
Speaker 19: what we do as an FQHT is providing really comprehensive,
Speaker 19: expansive care where kind of some of the few clinics
Speaker 19: that do everything that we do under one roof, But
Speaker 19: there have been some limitations, specifically abortion to that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's more of a a healthcare experience that I'm
Speaker 9: used to with someone from Europe, like going to one
Speaker 9: of these centers and like the American one where you
Speaker 9: get a referral and then yeah, get approves and blah
Speaker 9: blah blah, and like a.
Speaker 19: Lot of the ways that I talk to friends who
Speaker 19: live in other countries, Like, I feel like my role
Speaker 19: is kind of more similar to like a GP as
Speaker 19: a nurse partitioner. There isn't necessarily an equivalent, but I
Speaker 19: feel like a GP is kind of a very similar
Speaker 19: universal way to understand a lot of what I do.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that makes sense. So can you explain Ryan White funding?
Speaker 9: Like where does that come from? Why is it called
Speaker 9: Ryan White?
Speaker 19: So basically Ryan White funding was initiated in I believe
Speaker 19: the early nineties during the AIDS crisis and was a
Speaker 19: large government initiative. It's named after Ryan White, who was
Speaker 19: a patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Ryan White.
Speaker 19: Funding right now is a major source for funding things
Speaker 19: like PREP, which is medication for prevention for HAV as
Speaker 19: well as direct HIV treatment.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so a number of these things, right, gender affirming care,
Speaker 9: preps care for people with HIV, or preventing people from
Speaker 9: getting HIV through pre exposure prophylaxis. That you said, like
Speaker 9: these are things that have been like at the center
Speaker 9: of the culture war for the current government, right, Like
Speaker 9: that they're like the things that they point to is
Speaker 9: you know, whatever they're sort of like impacton's impacts in
Speaker 9: construction of fascism, he talks about moral decline, right, and
Speaker 9: this is their moral decline. That this is what they
Speaker 9: use when they're constructing their kind of we will save
Speaker 9: you narrative. What does that mean for funding? And like,
Speaker 9: what does that mean more importantly for your patients of
Speaker 9: people who come to you for these different types of care.
Speaker 19: I mean, I think it's terrifying. I think I'm more
Speaker 19: on the patient facing side. So a lot of the
Speaker 19: conversations I've been having are just about the uncertainty I'm
Speaker 19: a prescriber for a lot of trans youth adolescents and
Speaker 19: young adults, and so moreover, the uncertainty of just being
Speaker 19: able to you know, get their medication, the stress of
Speaker 19: being publicly named and targeted in this culture war has
Speaker 19: just created a climate of fear. As my job, I
Speaker 19: want to be able to reassure patients that I am
Speaker 19: going to fight for them and do all that I can.
Speaker 1: But it's really scary.
Speaker 19: As Dan mentioned, a lot of our patients don't have
Speaker 19: financial safety net, they don't have a medical safety net.
Speaker 1: We're really the one option for them.
Speaker 19: And if our clinic does not continue to offer this
Speaker 19: type of care, these are our kids who are going
Speaker 19: to go without hormones. I prescribe puberty blockers. My work
Speaker 19: as a gender for maing care provider isn't just blockers
Speaker 19: and hormones, but those are medications that we know are
Speaker 19: life saving. We know that that unfortunately, kids will suicide
Speaker 19: if they don't have access to those medications. And so
Speaker 19: I think, you know, talking about funding, talking about kind
Speaker 19: of these bigger shifts politically, you know, are sayings that unfortunately,
Speaker 19: a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming
Speaker 19: just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out
Speaker 19: support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones
Speaker 19: if we can't prescribe them.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I think it's worth talking about the fact that, like,
Speaker 15: there are so many angles of attack on this. Right,
Speaker 15: there is the one that is just very clearly aimed
Speaker 15: at trans kids, right the EO that specifies like protecting
Speaker 15: children it's nonsense, but that is aimed at ending this
Speaker 15: care everywhere. Now are they going to be able to
Speaker 15: do it everywhere? I don't know, maybe, but not quickly.
Speaker 15: But they can end it for FQHCs all across the
Speaker 15: country by simply making it like the heighth Amendment. If
Speaker 15: we were to perform abortion services at the place that
Speaker 15: I work, then we would lose our FED three thirty
Speaker 15: funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would
Speaker 15: cut our rate in half, and that would devastate the
Speaker 15: business and put us out and mean that we could
Speaker 15: not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of
Speaker 15: other people that we care for besides those kids.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: Then there are also just.
Speaker 15: The doze fuckery that is going to harm all of
Speaker 15: this and may create a lot of the same outcomes right,
Speaker 15: which is they turned off grants kind of just across
Speaker 15: the board. Yes, some of them were targeted on things
Speaker 15: like gender affirming, most of them were just like, it's
Speaker 15: a grant, we're turning it off. And then there was
Speaker 15: the tro but much of that funding has remained frozen.
Speaker 15: We have been told that the system is up and
Speaker 15: running and that they undid what they did, and the
Speaker 15: courts stepped in, and oh, don't we have the courts
Speaker 15: still here in the United States. Isn't that a good thing?
Speaker 15: But they just kept the funding off. Whether because they're
Speaker 15: incompetent or because they're actively defying the law doesn't really matter.
Speaker 15: And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across
Speaker 15: the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics
Speaker 15: and have entirely gone underwater in some cases. And then
Speaker 15: those people are not there to treat the community that
Speaker 15: needs them so badly. And all of these systems are
Speaker 15: grounded in their communities. So when you lose the clinic
Speaker 15: that's in LA that had to close its doors for
Speaker 15: the office that's on one side of town, the people
Speaker 15: there knew that place. It was part of their community.
Speaker 15: Part of their existence is grounded in that community and
Speaker 15: its community's needs, and.
Speaker 7: That's just gone.
Speaker 15: And this puts us in a very difficult position, and
Speaker 15: you know, leadership in the very difficult position of figuring out, well,
Speaker 15: do I worry about these trans youth and the fact
Speaker 15: that they might kill themselves, or do I worry about
Speaker 15: the impact that standing up on principle and saying I
Speaker 15: won't toss them to the wolves might have on the
Speaker 15: rest of the system. And it becomes a very difficult
Speaker 15: sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But
Speaker 15: you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with
Speaker 15: for them too.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's tough. Can you briefly explain, like maybe lay
Speaker 9: out a timeline, because we talked about executive orders there,
Speaker 9: We talked about a tro like there was a large
Speaker 9: number of executive orders right in the last three weeks,
Speaker 9: so like maybe people miss them. Can you explain the
Speaker 9: pertinent executive orders? And then what's a tensat difference training order?
Speaker 15: Yeah, So on Trump's first day in office, on the
Speaker 15: day of his inauguration, so January twentieth, he signs one
Speaker 15: hundred some odd executive orders. The ones that are particularly
Speaker 15: of interest to us in healthcare. Were protecting children against
Speaker 15: chemical and surgical mutilation is the name of it, which
Speaker 15: is a disgusting and vile name.
Speaker 20: Yeah.
Speaker 15: And then protecting women something something something defending women. Yeah,
Speaker 15: defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals, and
Speaker 15: I think will be used after we are under attack
Speaker 15: for trans youth, to come after trans adults in federally
Speaker 15: qualified health centers as well. Those eos led to later
Speaker 15: that week, on Friday, we got emails to every PI,
Speaker 15: which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had,
Speaker 15: that said, because of those two, and there was one
Speaker 15: about DEI, which is also in executive order, you are
Speaker 15: not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in
Speaker 15: service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders.
Speaker 15: So that was the first shot we got, and it
Speaker 15: came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't
Speaker 15: specific right. It didn't specifically say we're going to do X,
Speaker 15: Y or Z, but it was here, here's a threat.
Speaker 15: The following Tuesday, dog is let loose and announces that
Speaker 15: they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that
Speaker 15: is in opposition to those things. If you actually looked
Speaker 15: at the excel file that they released with the actual grants.
Speaker 15: It froze everything. Like it was not just the stuff
Speaker 15: that they felt was in opposition to this, it was
Speaker 15: like everything. We have a ton of grants that were
Speaker 15: on that list at the agency that I work at,
Speaker 15: and boy, oh boy, oh boy, was there a lot
Speaker 15: of panic going around. Wednesday rolls around, and they get
Speaker 15: a judge to come in and sort of put a
Speaker 15: halt on it. And then later that day a press
Speaker 15: secretary says, oh, we're just going to find the memo.
Speaker 15: We're still going to freeze everything, and then the judge
Speaker 15: comes back and puts a temporary straining order. So in theory,
Speaker 15: what that should have meant is that all of that
Speaker 15: grant funding once again flows. And it did not importantly
Speaker 15: too for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take
Speaker 15: in Medicaid portals, and all fifty states went down, so
Speaker 15: we could not get any of those dollars in service
Speaker 15: of what we were doing for twelve hours. But still
Speaker 15: it was this very concerning situation because bedicaid was not
Speaker 15: on their list of things that they were after, and
Speaker 15: yet we couldn't even access it on the state level.
Speaker 15: A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, Hey,
Speaker 15: you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another
Speaker 15: judge issued an order saying that, like, no, for real,
Speaker 15: I meet at this time unfreeze everything. I know some
Speaker 15: of the grants that we had that we couldn't access
Speaker 15: seem to have come back online, but I don't know,
Speaker 15: you know, I think it would be an impossible thing
Speaker 15: to do an accounting of like every single one that
Speaker 15: might have been turned off that might might or might
Speaker 15: not be back on right now. But I am doubtful
Speaker 15: that at this point every single grant across the federal
Speaker 15: agency is potentially available for folks.
Speaker 7: Just seems unlikely to me.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we should pivot to advertisements here. So I'm going
Speaker 9: to do that and then we'll be right back. Okay,
Speaker 9: we are back. So you talked about like these grants
Speaker 9: being turned off or not coming. What does that mean?
Speaker 9: Does that mean people don't get cared? That mean providers
Speaker 9: don't get paid? Does that mean they can't access their prescriptions?
Speaker 9: Like what does it look like if I'm trying to
Speaker 9: access care through one of your clinics?
Speaker 19: So, yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit on
Speaker 19: the prescriber side, because I think, you know, having direct
Speaker 19: contact with someone who works in the administration is really
Speaker 19: the only way that I have really been able to
Speaker 19: get any updates. So as a healthcare provider, it's been
Speaker 19: out our chaos. Basically every day we've gotten different messaging
Speaker 19: around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients,
Speaker 19: can you know, schedule intakes, whether or not we're able
Speaker 19: to prescribe these life saving medications, and no one knows
Speaker 19: exact eactly. Gender firming care is basically healthcare. There's nothing
Speaker 19: that separates it. There's no hardline, there's no clear distinction.
Speaker 19: It is medically indicated, evidence based care. So saying you
Speaker 19: can't do gender firming care, it literally doesn't make any
Speaker 19: sense in terms of, you know, what we do as prescribers.
Speaker 19: And on my end, I've been faced with intimidation. I've
Speaker 19: been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming
Speaker 19: from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because
Speaker 19: they do see this type of care as a liability.
Speaker 19: I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the
Speaker 19: state that I am in that prevents my ability to
Speaker 19: act us to the full extent of my scope. There
Speaker 19: are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing,
Speaker 19: and I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do
Speaker 19: what I believe is best for my patients, which is
Speaker 19: to continue to provide them with a care that they need.
Speaker 1: But it's terrifying, I.
Speaker 15: Think importantly, Haley and I have the event of working
Speaker 15: for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of
Speaker 15: health clinics out there that have a week's worth of
Speaker 15: working capital, right, so if all of a sudden they
Speaker 15: lose access to every grant dollar, it lose access to
Speaker 15: their three thirty. They were scheduled to draw down on
Speaker 15: a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch
Speaker 15: of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet, and
Speaker 15: then they can't. Like in very real ways, that may
Speaker 15: mean that the doors are closed and the place goes
Speaker 15: under and that no one can get care there.
Speaker 7: And there is this real.
Speaker 15: Challenge of you know, how do we decide what is
Speaker 15: the best thing to do. But for me and what
Speaker 15: sort of started working with in our agency at least
Speaker 15: to organize around this, is that like this is an
Speaker 15: anti fascist practice. That is the right medical thing to do,
Speaker 15: it is the right ethical thing to do, but it
Speaker 15: is also our chance to take an anti fascist stance
Speaker 15: against this government, because if we don't stand now for
Speaker 15: the very first group they're coming for, then the next group,
Speaker 15: which is without question trans adults and undocumented people, then
Speaker 15: those groups will fall just as quickly, and then at
Speaker 15: some point we're doing the poem the first they came for,
Speaker 15: the socialist thing, and I just refused to be a
Speaker 15: part of that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, let's talk about what that means then. Like you said,
Speaker 9: it's difficult to get any response from administration right in
Speaker 9: terms what you can do, intens what you can't do,
Speaker 9: how odd stuff, and providers organizing to make sure that
Speaker 9: they're able to keep providing for their patients, So just to.
Speaker 19: Provide also like a little bit of a peek into
Speaker 19: kind of the broader landscape of this. Our clinic is
Speaker 19: not alone in their confusion on how they've been handling this,
Speaker 19: not only sqhcs, but also hospital affiliated clinics, academic medical
Speaker 19: clinics have basically, clinic by clinic, decided on their own
Speaker 19: plan on how to manage this, which is also incredibly confusing.
Speaker 1: For providers and for patients.
Speaker 19: But something that was really heartening was that NYU ling Go,
Speaker 19: and this was in the news recently, they canceled appointments
Speaker 19: for two kids, literally just two kids, which is more
Speaker 19: than enough.
Speaker 1: And it sparked this enormous outcry and protests.
Speaker 19: And so I think there's also, on my end, a
Speaker 19: lot of solidarity building with other providers who are doing
Speaker 19: this work, and a lot of inspiration. There are clinics
Speaker 19: out there, some who are FQHCs like us, who have
Speaker 19: stood firm and they've said our doors are going to
Speaker 19: stay open, We're going to keep providing this care. And
Speaker 19: so I think there are models out there, and I
Speaker 19: think that there are networks of healthcare providers who are
Speaker 19: committed to continue to advocate and just continue to do
Speaker 19: this right because a lot of what we're facing right
Speaker 19: now is intimidation. It's not actual legal.
Speaker 1: Threats as of yet.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging but
Speaker 15: also hugely rewarding.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 15: It became really obvious really early on that both from
Speaker 15: the federal government's perspective as well as from our organization's perspective,
Speaker 15: that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to
Speaker 15: live and die.
Speaker 7: That was the place that served them and their goals
Speaker 7: the most.
Speaker 15: And so how does uncertainty sort of foster Well, people
Speaker 15: don't talk to one another, right, like this is true,
Speaker 15: kind of an organizational sensus across the board. Right, if
Speaker 15: you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary
Speaker 15: doesn't benefit you, it benefits the boss. And so if
Speaker 15: we're not talking to one another about where our lines are,
Speaker 15: who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep
Speaker 15: doing it, or listen to them what we're being told,
Speaker 15: we're not being told that were consulting lawyers, all these
Speaker 15: other kind of things, then we're all just alone in
Speaker 15: the dark kind of you know, trying not to scream
Speaker 15: and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.
Speaker 15: So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there.
Speaker 15: Folks who before anything was going on internally, you know,
Speaker 15: made really bold statements about what they would and would
Speaker 15: not do around this kind of stuff. And now all
Speaker 15: of a sudden, there there's an internal network that's looking
Speaker 15: at well, Okay, so individually we can keep doing this
Speaker 15: care because it's the right thing to do. But as
Speaker 15: a group, if they start coming after us.
Speaker 7: We have a lot more power. There's a lot more
Speaker 7: that we can do.
Speaker 15: And I suspect, and you know, Hayley's getting at this
Speaker 15: point that like, there are probably a network of us
Speaker 15: across the entire country in these kind of settings that
Speaker 15: are not talking amongst ourselves at our workplace, but are
Speaker 15: really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level.
Speaker 15: And I think we have some power that could be
Speaker 15: used there to really make a difference in all of this.
Speaker 15: And I am optimistic that if we talk about this,
Speaker 15: we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating
Speaker 15: openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we
Speaker 15: can work together to prevent this from being the first
Speaker 15: of many dominoes to fall.
Speaker 19: And one thing that's interesting, I think is that with transscare,
Speaker 19: TRANTULSCA is inherently radical. Like Transtall's care is not something
Speaker 19: that came from the kind of medical hierarchy. This is
Speaker 19: by and large a field that was communal. Trans people
Speaker 19: were doing their own trans healthcare before it became kind
Speaker 19: of institutionalized into a lot of these spaces. So I
Speaker 19: think we also have a lot of providers who are
Speaker 19: willing to function up right, like the community and the
Speaker 19: providers are intertwined. And I do think there is a
Speaker 19: real kind of radical bent to this type of work,
Speaker 19: which is why I think a lot of us have
Speaker 19: been so easily able to collectivize and strategize and kind
Speaker 19: of come together.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty small world as well.
Speaker 15: We sat down on a call and talked about, you know,
Speaker 15: what are we going to do? And I made mention
Speaker 15: that like, oh, through my other organizing work, I've got
Speaker 15: a DIY connection for Estra dial. So that's a huge
Speaker 15: thing that will help us if we can't prescribe this anymore,
Speaker 15: if Medicaid stops covering it, Yah, YadA, YadA. I was like,
Speaker 15: but I don't have a you know, a DIY solution
Speaker 15: for tea. If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great.
Speaker 15: And immediately someone's like, oh, yeah, absolutely, I do. It's tested,
Speaker 15: it's a ninety nine point nine percent pure we're ready
Speaker 15: to go. So now, like I wouldn't have done that,
Speaker 15: There was no way for us to know that that
Speaker 15: was the kind of radical work that people were doing.
Speaker 7: If not for coming together on this kind of stuff, Yeah,
Speaker 7: maybe we.
Speaker 9: Should explain like the inherent risks like legally, and then
Speaker 9: then distinction between those two hormones legally, right, like if
Speaker 9: people are unaware.
Speaker 19: Yeah, so you know, as a medical provider again, I
Speaker 19: have to be a little bit careful here. But basically,
Speaker 19: because the stosterone has been used by mostly the cistmail
Speaker 19: community as an anabolic steroid and used you know, and
Speaker 19: somewhat would call like anabolic steroid misuse or steroid use disorder,
Speaker 19: it is a controlled substance. Estradial is not. They're both
Speaker 19: bioidentical hormones. Every human on this planet, their body makes
Speaker 19: estrogen and testosterone E.
Speaker 1: And t estradyle and testosterone.
Speaker 19: However, in the United States, testosterone is considered a controlled substance,
Speaker 19: which makes it a little more tricky for folks to
Speaker 19: access without a prescription and also can put them at
Speaker 19: legal risk if they do so.
Speaker 9: Right, Like there's a built in legal consequence for people
Speaker 9: who are trying to manufacture there or who are trying
Speaker 9: to obtain it, like outside of the sort of prescription system,
Speaker 9: not that there aren't other probably legal threats coming down
Speaker 9: the pipeline, I guess.
Speaker 21: Also, testosterone is yes, it is a controlled substance. It
Speaker 21: does flow in the bodybuilding community. Ye, it's well controlled. Yeah,
Speaker 21: that is also like worth stating, because yes, if you
Speaker 21: go to your average gym.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, you can walk across the borders to Tijuanner
Speaker 9: and see like gas stations have the prices like unleaded premium. Yeah,
Speaker 9: you can get testosterone prices like displayed in the same fashion.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure you're you're huge fans of Joe Rogan.
Speaker 9: So many many.
Speaker 19: Of my other patients who are not trans have been
Speaker 19: influenced to purchase disasterone because of our good friends.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, fascinating self.
Speaker 15: Yeah, which is also gender affirm and care for whatever
Speaker 15: that's worth, like gender a firm in care too.
Speaker 9: Yes they do. It's a lot easier for them right now.
Speaker 9: So let's talk about like what this organizing looks like
Speaker 9: on the ground, right, Like if someone's working, maybe they're
Speaker 9: not in an f QHC, right, Maybe they're working in
Speaker 9: an academic health center. Maybe they're working, you know, in
Speaker 9: one of the many other places where you can access
Speaker 9: gender affirming care in this country, and they are feeling
Speaker 9: like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any
Speaker 9: affirmation or help from their management, and they don't know
Speaker 9: who they can talk to among their colleagues, Like how
Speaker 9: are people connecting? Like what are people talking about? And
Speaker 9: like how can people who are because you know, the
Speaker 9: healthcare system is fast in this country because it duplicates itself.
Speaker 9: It's the nature of American privatized healthcare. Like, how can
Speaker 9: people who want to continue providing care for patients do that?
Speaker 9: How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact
Speaker 9: people who are already organizing, Like, let's talk through that
Speaker 9: nuts and bolts of it.
Speaker 19: I mean, I think there's a lot of national orgs
Speaker 19: out there that are really doing the work. So if
Speaker 19: you're a medical provider, I would highly recommend to join GLAMMA,
Speaker 19: which is a gay lesbian medical association, because they have
Speaker 19: some lawsuits and as a member of GLAMMA, that could
Speaker 19: possibly give you some additional protection. Following other orgs like
Speaker 19: Lambda Legal Stage, which is an organization for an elder gay,
Speaker 19: lesbian and queer folks, people have existed and have built organizations.
Speaker 19: A lot of those are organizations are fighting this on
Speaker 19: a national level, and some of those are more geared
Speaker 19: toward healthcare professionals.
Speaker 1: Like Gleamma, I.
Speaker 15: Would say, there's two conversations that we all need to
Speaker 15: be having. Like those external organizations are huge and necessary
Speaker 15: for direction within your own space, you have to talk
Speaker 15: to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk
Speaker 15: to them about risk taking. Talk to them about where
Speaker 15: you will and will not budge on some of these
Speaker 15: kind of things. Talk to them about the value of
Speaker 15: the work that you all do because there's more of
Speaker 15: you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist,
Speaker 15: they're out there, like they have very strong opinions on this,
Speaker 15: I am sure. And then talk to a lawyer. Talk
Speaker 15: to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very
Speaker 15: different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to
Speaker 15: protect the company and its bottom line, and both they
Speaker 15: and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are
Speaker 15: spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone
Speaker 15: with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's
Speaker 15: nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is. And
Speaker 15: then when you start thinking about as an organization, as
Speaker 15: a group, as a set of employees communicating with you know,
Speaker 15: leadership about these kind of things, Know that the law
Speaker 15: is actually not on their side, it's on yours. And
Speaker 15: let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability
Speaker 15: for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number
Speaker 15: of other things that they probably don't want to be
Speaker 15: on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've
Speaker 15: got right now. It seems to have slowed things down
Speaker 15: a little bit internally for us that they've had to
Speaker 15: confront like a very well pointed out legal opinion that
Speaker 15: said that like they were exposing their providers to civil
Speaker 15: lawsuits if they didn't do this, and that the FDCA,
Speaker 15: the Federal Tort Claims Act, didn't protect people under these guides.
Speaker 15: That has been really beneficial to us. The other thing
Speaker 15: I would say is like there's a real union sort
Speaker 15: of feel to a lot of this, and as we
Speaker 15: started coming together, a bunch of us realize, well, we
Speaker 15: all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way,
Speaker 15: But corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of
Speaker 15: like individual sort of arms of companies, like the ones
Speaker 15: that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics
Speaker 15: of the work you do. They are interested in your benefits.
Speaker 15: They are interested in you as a worker but they're
Speaker 15: not interested in like your relationship to the work. And
Speaker 15: so we are approaching this not necessarily as a union,
Speaker 15: but from the perspective that if we need to strike
Speaker 15: on behalf of patients and their access to care, like
Speaker 15: that's a tool in our toolbox, and we don't have
Speaker 15: to do anything more than declare it to strike to
Speaker 15: be protected under the NLRB and some of these various
Speaker 15: different things. And we can do it for political reasons
Speaker 15: instead of for pay reasons, which means we could do
Speaker 15: it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses,
Speaker 15: all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and
Speaker 15: therapists and lcsws, where they break us apart by discipline
Speaker 15: instead of by you know what sort of managerial status
Speaker 15: you are.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good point. I
Speaker 9: read a book recently about how the long shoremen in
Speaker 9: San Francisco stopped weapons going to the Gilol salbad Or
Speaker 9: by striking and refusing to load weapons onto ships, and like,
Speaker 9: that's a union energy we could use right now. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 9: I think people be well advised to, Like I will
Speaker 9: say that they'd be well advised to check with federal
Speaker 9: and local law because like some state legal landscapes can
Speaker 9: be very different. Right. I want to end with like
Speaker 9: people are probably afraid of accessing care, right, Like, like
Speaker 9: people are probably afraid of going to see their providers,
Speaker 9: like understandably, like you said before, like especially kids or
Speaker 9: people under eighteen are like right in the center of
Speaker 9: the President of the United States called out a friend
Speaker 9: of mine personally by name recently. She's a trans athlete,
Speaker 9: and like they're really coming after people. I understand that
Speaker 9: people are afraid, Like what should they know if they're
Speaker 9: concerned about their whole moned supply or they're own puberty blockers?
Speaker 9: Right now, like people are listening, what would you Maybe
Speaker 9: they don't know where their provider stands, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 19: I mean I tell my patients this, But I'm in
Speaker 19: awe of them. They're incredible. And a lot of them
Speaker 19: are nerdy theater kids who love cats and they want
Speaker 19: to just exist. And some of them are also incredible
Speaker 19: outspoken activists. They are just amazing, And I will fight
Speaker 19: with everything that I've got for them, and I really.
Speaker 1: Hope they know that.
Speaker 15: I think one of the mantras I've been given to
Speaker 15: fellow colleagues as well, as to our leadership to like
Speaker 15: get their heads on straight. Is that like pascism is messy, right,
Speaker 15: Like it's a scary messy. There are a lot of
Speaker 15: throwing stuff with the wall and seeing what sticks. But
Speaker 15: the things that in theory are still in place, like
Speaker 15: when and if they fall. We have different problems the
Speaker 15: ones we're facing now, right, So we still have in
Speaker 15: this country protections for your healthcare information.
Speaker 7: So if what you worry about.
Speaker 15: In going to the doctor is that someone will find
Speaker 15: out that your trends and put you on a list, like,
Speaker 15: I can't tell you that's never going to happen, but
Speaker 15: I can tell you that if it happens through your
Speaker 15: healthcare clinic, like, we have significantly changed the threat model
Speaker 15: that we're all living in because HIPPA doesn't matter anymore
Speaker 15: and doesn't exist. Your providers are spending enormous amounts of
Speaker 15: time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document,
Speaker 15: how much of a deal they want to make it,
Speaker 15: whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing
Speaker 15: for you, and what diagnosis is for We are finding
Speaker 15: ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade
Speaker 15: and camouflage over this as we can, but you shouldn't
Speaker 15: not come get care. Your life matters. You being in
Speaker 15: the body that you were meant to have matters. Come
Speaker 15: talk to us, come ask for help. We're here to
Speaker 15: do it, and we're not going to stop until they
Speaker 15: make us. And right now they can't make us, and
Speaker 15: so we're going to keep doing it.
Speaker 19: And the mantra of trans people have always existed. Trans
Speaker 19: people exist, and personally, I'm going to do my best
Speaker 19: to make sure that for every single one of my
Speaker 19: patients that they continue to get what they need.
Speaker 21: However that looks like, then it is good to hear.
Speaker 21: I know a lot of trans people have essentially trauma
Speaker 21: with aspects of the medical community, establishment, whatever, and like
Speaker 21: you know, not not all practitioners maybe as much in
Speaker 21: our camp as maybe you are. And I would encourage
Speaker 21: people if they are, if they're still looking for care
Speaker 21: through like these these sorts of channels, you should you
Speaker 21: should try to find out where other trans people in
Speaker 21: your city are already going. There's certainly like clinics will
Speaker 21: have stuff on their website that indicate that they either
Speaker 21: specialize in this or they offer this as supposed to know,
Speaker 21: maybe just a general general practitioner who may not be
Speaker 21: you know, the greatest in this vein, and like this,
Speaker 21: this still happens. I've I've talked to a lot of
Speaker 21: friends recently who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with
Speaker 21: nurses or doctors, whether they're trying out like different clinics
Speaker 21: or different or different providers, university providers. So it is
Speaker 21: definitely worth doing some research beforehand so you know the
Speaker 21: place you're going is going to be like with you,
Speaker 21: which is just an unfortunate reality also of being trands.
Speaker 21: But that has been the case for a long time
Speaker 21: and it only continues to be a factor when considering care.
Speaker 15: Absolutely, it's really important to ask ask your friends. That's
Speaker 15: really solid advice, in part because whether I like it
Speaker 15: or not, a lot of organizations are taking the stuff
Speaker 15: that says, hey, we treat trans people down off their website,
Speaker 15: off their marketing materials.
Speaker 7: We are not trying to draw that attention.
Speaker 15: It doesn't mean we don't do it, doesn't mean we're
Speaker 15: not skilled and trained and educated and smart and passionate
Speaker 15: about it. It just means we don't really want to
Speaker 15: totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now,
Speaker 15: because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk
Speaker 15: to your friends, talk to people in your community.
Speaker 7: They know us, we know them.
Speaker 15: I have a lot of activism and experience outside of
Speaker 15: my work, and it's amazing how many of those people
Speaker 15: end up being the same people that.
Speaker 7: Are in this conversation because of the way that this
Speaker 7: all works.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 19: Yeah, I was just going to say, I think, unfortunately
Speaker 19: it is the norm. An evidence shows that, like large
Speaker 19: evidence of studies show that trans people are treated pretty
Speaker 19: horribly by the healthcare system, and most of my patients
Speaker 19: have experienced that in some way or another. But like
Speaker 19: I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare
Speaker 19: kind of comes from a DIY community and there's a
Speaker 19: lot of really good community information about, you know, kind
Speaker 19: of who to trust and who you can go to
Speaker 19: in terms of finding an allied provider.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, and that's really good. I think that was
Speaker 9: really great.
Speaker 4: Guy.
Speaker 9: Thank you so much for your time and for your
Speaker 9: words for people. Is there anything else you want to share?
Speaker 9: Or perhaps if people want to support your efforts somehow
Speaker 9: or support people's access to care, that's an organization you
Speaker 9: could direct them to, or maybe like the way people
Speaker 9: coming shout out to you or I know a lot
Speaker 9: of people. There are people in my family who are
Speaker 9: healthcare providers who have substantially changed their outlook on the
Speaker 9: world and politics by how terribly their trans patients have
Speaker 9: been treated. So like, you know, like some of us
Speaker 9: have been organizing for a minute, some of us have
Speaker 9: been organizing for like literally a minute, And like, how
Speaker 9: do those people access these networks? Like how can people
Speaker 9: who are not in healthcare support you and what you're
Speaker 9: doing and reach out?
Speaker 19: The gender liberation movement is incredible. They're doing a lot
Speaker 19: of work, kind of public feasing to really get the
Speaker 19: point across on why this is so essential and also
Speaker 19: why everybody should have the right to their own bodily
Speaker 19: and gender autonomy. I think I mentioned earlier, but Lama,
Speaker 19: if you're on the healthcare side, and you know there
Speaker 19: are also kind of if you're in an academic setting
Speaker 19: looking to wpass the World Professional Association for Transgender how
Speaker 19: kind of going to the experts in this field and
Speaker 19: really following and mirroring what they're doing.
Speaker 15: I think if you're looking as a SIS person who
Speaker 15: gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding, but
Speaker 15: this is the thing that you care about, would encourage
Speaker 15: you to sort of make people get on record about
Speaker 15: this kind of stuff, right, it's been the most distasteful
Speaker 15: piece of all of this is the kind of like
Speaker 15: weasel hiding in all of this. So force them on
Speaker 15: the record, ask them. If they don't tell you, send
Speaker 15: them an email. If they don't know, respond to the email,
Speaker 15: send a follow up email. Like, make people get on
Speaker 15: the record about this so that we know where their
Speaker 15: values are. And if their values don't align with yours,
Speaker 15: take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day,
Speaker 15: helthcare is a business because the United States sucks, and
Speaker 15: so we have to use those dollars in the ways
Speaker 15: that we can, and it matters in a lot of ways.
Speaker 15: I don't know that anyone will care to and I
Speaker 15: certainly don't want to present us as the people with
Speaker 15: all the answers here because we just like are figuring
Speaker 15: this as we go to But you can email us
Speaker 15: at Community Health Resistance at proton dot and maybe let's
Speaker 15: have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people
Speaker 15: in the FQ world who want to do like an
Speaker 15: Amazon or a Starbucks like diy union project where we're
Speaker 15: all working on this together. For the politics rather than
Speaker 15: the pay as the primary sort of reason for it.
Speaker 15: Let's let's let's be a red union and get something going.
Speaker 7: I don't know that we can.
Speaker 15: I don't know that it's the right call, but I
Speaker 15: imagine there's more of us out there feeling this way
Speaker 15: than not.
Speaker 9: So Yeah, and like whatever it is, we're stronger together
Speaker 9: than we are apart. So like talking is how we
Speaker 9: fix this. Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate
Speaker 9: you being so open about this. And yeah, I hope
Speaker 9: that you succeed. You're able to keep taking care of
Speaker 9: people you can.
Speaker 7: We hope so too.
Speaker 10: I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in
Speaker 10: Dallas called White Metropolis, and have co authored an upcoming
Speaker 10: book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The
Speaker 10: Purifying Knife.
Speaker 22: And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who
Speaker 22: covers extremism and far right movements for a variety of publications,
Speaker 22: including The Texas Observer and The Barbed Wire.
Speaker 10: School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically
Speaker 10: spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and
Speaker 10: other tedious topics, but Beginning in twenty twenty, Christopher Ruffo,
Speaker 10: a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the right wing
Speaker 10: Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 10: launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have
Speaker 10: become communists and doctrination centers. Rufo falsely claimed that public
Speaker 10: school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called critical
Speaker 10: race theory or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race
Speaker 10: theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in
Speaker 10: American politics, law, and culture that anti discrimination laws typically fail.
Speaker 10: While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs,
Speaker 10: it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where
Speaker 10: the outrage has been directed.
Speaker 22: That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums
Speaker 22: across the nation due to its large population and purchasing
Speaker 22: power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather,
Speaker 22: it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel,
Speaker 22: something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets
Speaker 22: in twenty twenty one. The goal is to have the
Speaker 22: public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think
Speaker 22: critical race theory, Rufo wrote, we have decodified the term,
Speaker 22: and will you codify it to annex the entire range
Speaker 22: of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans?
Speaker 7: End quote?
Speaker 22: On Fox News, Newsmax and other right wing media outlets,
Speaker 22: Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing,
Speaker 22: and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash
Speaker 22: white children into hating themselves and goading black children into
Speaker 22: hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had
Speaker 22: launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.
Speaker 23: In a foundational paper called Whiteness's Property, the critical race
Speaker 23: theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing
Speaker 23: land and well from the rich and redistributing it along
Speaker 23: racial lines.
Speaker 10: Rufa's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial
Speaker 10: CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already
Speaker 10: felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings,
Speaker 10: remote learning, and mass mandates, now convinced that their children
Speaker 10: were being taught to scapego white people for all the
Speaker 10: country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at.
Speaker 9: Local school boards.
Speaker 10: Reuters reported on one meaning that turned violent in Loudon County, Virginia.
Speaker 24: What had been planned as a typical school board meeting
Speaker 24: in Virginia's wealthy Louden County this week devolved into pandemonium,
Speaker 24: with hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the
Speaker 24: school system of teaching their kids that racism in America
Speaker 24: is structural and systemic, something the school board denies is
Speaker 24: part of the curriculum. Things got so heated that the
Speaker 24: board members eventually walked out, leaving the police to deal
Speaker 24: with the unruly crowd.
Speaker 3: Two people left in handcuffs.
Speaker 24: First Louden Counties school Board has been roiled for months
Speaker 24: by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a
Speaker 24: school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in
Speaker 24: US law and institutions, and that legacies of slavery and
Speaker 24: segregation have created an uneven playing field for black Americans.
Speaker 24: The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public
Speaker 24: schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives, who, like
Speaker 24: many in Louden, say it is being used to indoctrin
Speaker 24: eight children that America is a racist country.
Speaker 4: Critical race theory is anti white, and it's not American.
Speaker 22: Those within a year for historical rhymes may find this
Speaker 22: outcry familiar. Resistance to racial integration and the Civil rights
Speaker 22: era movements drue similar accusations of being hostile to whites
Speaker 22: and being a product of anti American communism, and those
Speaker 22: with experienced teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of
Speaker 22: ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrinaisation. A common joke posted by
Speaker 22: teachers online is that quote, if we could indoctrinate students,
Speaker 22: students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop
Speaker 22: panic over CRT expanding to include anti LGBTQ sentiment as well,
Speaker 22: with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed
Speaker 22: squarely in the crosshairs of a well funded national hate
Speaker 22: machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's
Speaker 22: a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the
Speaker 22: school board meeting of my hometown school district, grape Vine, Kullyville,
Speaker 22: from August twenty twenty two and bryce simple truths.
Speaker 16: There's only two genders and boys should go to boys rooms,
Speaker 16: girls should go to girls bressrooms.
Speaker 13: And guess what teachers should be forced to use your freaking.
Speaker 7: Made up fantasy pronouns.
Speaker 9: Find like hell, hold the line against the LGBT mafia
Speaker 9: and their.
Speaker 3: Dang pedo fans.
Speaker 14: Keith winning, you know what, keep the winnan, keep the
Speaker 14: monkey cocks.
Speaker 9: How's that working?
Speaker 3: That king rings so much? Will can come?
Speaker 20: You know what?
Speaker 2: We're gonna keck come so hard?
Speaker 3: The only thing these will cards have to figure out is.
Speaker 9: Spoilers all their face, back bone, thighs.
Speaker 7: Wow, it's all.
Speaker 22: As absurd as all this may seem, there was something
Speaker 22: to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As
Speaker 22: of twenty twenty, the United States had become more culturally diverse,
Speaker 22: racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before,
Speaker 22: and our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's
Speaker 22: also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the
Speaker 22: advances of the Civil Rights era and beyond, schools in
Speaker 22: the United States have often been the centers of ideologically
Speaker 22: motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages
Speaker 22: the right.
Speaker 25: In fact, it's usually been the opposite.
Speaker 22: For most of its history, American public schools have effectively
Speaker 22: advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In
Speaker 22: this episode, we're going to look at what has actually
Speaker 22: been taught in American schools over the years, with a
Speaker 22: particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about
Speaker 22: American history depends on where you live and how Christian
Speaker 22: supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in
Speaker 22: much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.
Speaker 10: Textbooks before the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties Civil rights
Speaker 10: era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. Schoolbooks in the South,
Speaker 10: for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a
Speaker 10: noble loss cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see
Speaker 10: in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids
Speaker 10: were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before
Speaker 10: the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country
Speaker 10: into Civil war, and this too steeped into the public
Speaker 10: imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail starring Van Heflin.
Speaker 4: The Time is Coming when the rest of us are
Speaker 4: going to wipe you and you're kind off the face
Speaker 4: of the earth.
Speaker 10: According to the miss promoted first in schools, then echoed
Speaker 10: in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if
Speaker 10: only white slave owning Southerners had been left alone to
Speaker 10: figure it out themselves. Screenplaywriters, how often echoed what they
Speaker 10: heard in the classroom.
Speaker 9: Is we see?
Speaker 10: In this scene from the nineteen forty film Santa Fe Trail,
Speaker 10: here Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who
Speaker 10: tried to start a slave rebellion Harper's Ferry, Virginia in
Speaker 10: eighteen fifty nine. Massey portrays them as a thoroughly crazed maniac,
Speaker 10: while Aero Flynn depicts future Confederate General J. E. B.
Speaker 10: Stewart as sweetly rational.
Speaker 18: Half the people in America believe in your theory, a
Speaker 18: lot of them, even Condonia methods that'll guarantee you a
Speaker 18: public trial, not.
Speaker 25: On trial, but the nation itself.
Speaker 8: Are you too stupid and blinded by a uniform to
Speaker 8: see what I see? A dark and evil curse laying
Speaker 8: all over this land. A kind will sin against God
Speaker 8: can only be wiped out in blood.
Speaker 18: But why in blood. The people of Virginia are considered
Speaker 18: a resolution to abolished slavery for a long time. They
Speaker 18: sensed that the tomorrow wrong and the rest of the
Speaker 18: South will follow Virginia's example. All I ask is time.
Speaker 22: From the eighteen eighties until the nineteen sixties, school books
Speaker 22: depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at
Speaker 22: the time, the Reconstruction period from eighteen sixty five to
Speaker 22: eighteen seventy seven, as a time of rampant corruption. These
Speaker 22: books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and
Speaker 22: expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.
Speaker 10: American school children furthermore learned from their teachers that so
Speaker 10: called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes
Speaker 10: dictatorship was the better option. The nineteen twenty four textbook
Speaker 10: Are World Today and Yesterday, a History of Modern Civilization,
Speaker 10: published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy,
Speaker 10: had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The
Speaker 10: authors told the impressionable high school students the following about
Speaker 10: the world's first fascist leader.
Speaker 26: Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men
Speaker 26: and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country.
Speaker 26: He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and
Speaker 26: downing the Communists by violence. Nevertheless, he has done much
Speaker 26: to do away with strikes and to re establish conditions
Speaker 26: as they were before the economic demoralization of World War
Speaker 26: One set in Again.
Speaker 22: School books reinforced an American culture in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 22: that responded to the horrors of World War One, labor unrest,
Speaker 22: and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more
Speaker 22: intolerant but also more anti democratic.
Speaker 27: All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of
Speaker 27: a thriving country and a VIAU leader Beluche stripped down
Speaker 27: for the camera book side by side with the peasants
Speaker 27: and wrestled wild animals, never mind that this one had
Speaker 27: no teeth. Nonetheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide,
Speaker 27: including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi. Here he
Speaker 27: speaks to as many supporters among Italian Americans.
Speaker 20: I tell it the Italians of America who I want
Speaker 20: to make America greed.
Speaker 10: Another textbook published in nineteen thirty five, The Record of
Speaker 10: America told Stins that the so called Founding Fathers like
Speaker 10: Alexander Hamilton were not big believers in democracy, an attitude
Speaker 10: the authors seemed to endorse. As the Record of the
Speaker 10: America put.
Speaker 26: It, the Founders had little faith in the ability of
Speaker 26: people as a whole to maintain self control and wisdom
Speaker 26: in government. They had no confidence in the man without property.
Speaker 26: A man who had failed to accumulate property would be
Speaker 26: regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a
Speaker 26: voice in the government of others. The Constitution was written
Speaker 26: to retain power in the hands of those who released
Speaker 26: radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical
Speaker 26: mob action.
Speaker 22: After the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties civil rights movements.
Speaker 22: History textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery,
Speaker 22: the heroism of African American abolitionists like Surgeon or truth
Speaker 22: in Frederick Douglas, and the evils of the Ku Klux
Speaker 22: Klan with clarity. But the backlash was swift, particularly after
Speaker 22: the election of the first African American President, Barack Obama
Speaker 22: and the rise of the High Conservative Tea Party in response.
Speaker 22: In twenty ten, TEA Party supporters took control of the
Speaker 22: Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school
Speaker 22: book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist
Speaker 22: past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.
Speaker 10: In twenty fifteen, Ronnie Dean Baron got a text from
Speaker 10: her son, Kobe, who was glancing at a ninth grade
Speaker 10: geography textbook published by McGraw hill signed him by his
Speaker 10: high school in Perilyn, Texas, near Houston. He sent her
Speaker 10: a video highlighting a map in its shocking caption. Soon
Speaker 10: Burn posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported,
Speaker 10: spread outrage across the nation.
Speaker 28: A video post on Ronnie dan Buren's Facebook page, I'm
Speaker 28: going to.
Speaker 5: Show you the book and then there's just an interesting.
Speaker 28: Section, went viral. Her video has been viewed more than
Speaker 28: one point eight million times and has forty eight thousand shares.
Speaker 28: To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have
Speaker 28: to turn through the pages of her son's geography textbook.
Speaker 3: The immigration in the United States can be divided in
Speaker 3: four district periods.
Speaker 28: Kobe, who's in the ninth grade, at Perlin High School
Speaker 28: was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook,
Speaker 28: a comment that referenced African slaves as workers.
Speaker 19: As if we worked our way up in America, as
Speaker 19: if we came here by choice for a better life.
Speaker 22: The offensive caption read, in full quote, the Atlantic slave
Speaker 22: trade between the fifteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds brought
Speaker 22: millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States
Speaker 22: to work on agricultural plantations. The publisher of the book,
Speaker 22: simply titled World Geography later apologized for the euphemism, noting
Speaker 22: that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both
Speaker 22: into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.
Speaker 22: The company said it would revise the digital version of
Speaker 22: the text and future print versions, but it was unclear
Speaker 22: at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.
Speaker 10: The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw hill had given the
Speaker 10: Stay of Texas what it wanted, rather than anything like
Speaker 10: critical race theory. The State Board of Education twenty ten
Speaker 10: adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools known
Speaker 10: as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that imposed a whitewash
Speaker 10: of American slavery, raised doubts about human cause climate change,
Speaker 10: and imposed other right wing content. To be sold in
Speaker 10: Texas school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.
Speaker 22: Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts
Speaker 22: that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state
Speaker 22: and serve four year terms, while the governor appoints the
Speaker 22: chair of the board. Since the beginning of the twenty
Speaker 22: first century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists.
Speaker 22: As a twenty thirteen PBS report notts.
Speaker 17: Don McLeroy has three jobs and he loves them all.
Speaker 17: Good Morning, doctor mclroy's offices.
Speaker 20: Job number one, dentist, Job number two Sunday school teacher,
Speaker 20: and job number three member of the Texas State Board
Speaker 20: of Education, a seat he's held for the last twelve years.
Speaker 17: But it's that third job which has put this dentist
Speaker 17: and Sunday school teacher from Brian, Texas into a national
Speaker 17: debate over what kids are taught in school. Critics have
Speaker 17: accused McLeroy of injecting his religious conservative beliefs into the curriculum.
Speaker 17: About every ten years, the board revises the textbook standards
Speaker 17: for different subjects. Any books bought by the state must
Speaker 17: conform to these guidelines. The last big battle was over
Speaker 17: the science standards. This year he's tackling social studies.
Speaker 10: The demand's Texas makes of texts book publishers matter, as
Speaker 10: PBS reported a decade ago.
Speaker 17: According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit
Speaker 17: Texas's standards because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks.
Speaker 17: That means the choices made here could determine books that
Speaker 17: other states will buy, and that's led to a school
Speaker 17: fight that has the entire country looking on.
Speaker 10: This is how Kobe Burn ended up with the World
Speaker 10: Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves.
Speaker 10: Kathy Miller of the anti censorship group Texas Freedom Network
Speaker 10: said quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas.
Speaker 10: We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and
Speaker 10: so flawed that's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those
Speaker 10: serious about education aren't laughing.
Speaker 9: However.
Speaker 10: In twenty eighteen, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the
Speaker 10: first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party,
Speaker 10: from the list of major historical figures Texas students must
Speaker 10: learn about, a decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.
Speaker 10: In twenty ten, that board mandated that textbooks depict the
Speaker 10: Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and
Speaker 10: not slavery, a choice that was later modified in twenty
Speaker 10: eighteen to return slavery as the primary cause, but still
Speaker 10: maintained that quote states rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.
Speaker 10: Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools and
Speaker 10: the Jim crow Eric quote had similar buildings, buses, and
Speaker 10: teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of these separate
Speaker 10: but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included cartoon
Speaker 10: in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks
Speaker 10: if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.
Speaker 22: Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy
Speaker 22: about whether human activity has led to climate change and
Speaker 22: to quote consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution,
Speaker 22: even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels
Speaker 22: trinking climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution
Speaker 22: is nearly unanimous.
Speaker 10: Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based
Speaker 10: on which state they attend schools. A New York Times
Speaker 10: comparison textbooks used in California, Texas show that both versions
Speaker 10: of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of
Speaker 10: Rights in reference to the Second Amendment. However, the California
Speaker 10: textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation
Speaker 10: of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the
Speaker 10: same book replaces US commentary with a quote blank white space.
Speaker 10: As The New York Times.
Speaker 22: Reported, Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African
Speaker 22: American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students
Speaker 22: are told that quote. Some dismissed the quality of the
Speaker 22: literature produced by.
Speaker 7: The Harlem Renaissance, as.
Speaker 10: The New York Times reported, The California version of the
Speaker 10: history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena
Speaker 10: whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and
Speaker 10: moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbooks said this.
Speaker 26: Some people wished to escape the crime and the congestion
Speaker 26: of the city. Movement of some white people from cities
Speaker 26: to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away
Speaker 26: from more culturally diverse neighborhoods. Others believed the suburbs offered
Speaker 26: better and more affordable living.
Speaker 10: The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence
Speaker 10: referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but
Speaker 10: left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what
Speaker 10: students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World
Speaker 10: War Two. The Texas State Board also specifically asked one
Speaker 10: textbook publisher demphasized how many clergies signed the Declaration of
Speaker 10: Independence and to underscore the disposed importance of religion to
Speaker 10: the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense
Speaker 10: lobbying by Texas Christian nationalist David Barton.
Speaker 22: Barton, a seventy year old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas,
Speaker 22: which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth,
Speaker 22: has become a major influence on the Republican Party and
Speaker 22: its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star state,
Speaker 22: but across the nation. While reporting on the Conservative Political
Speaker 22: Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a
Speaker 22: copy of one of Barton's books, he calls himself a historian,
Speaker 22: although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious
Speaker 22: education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one
Speaker 22: time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in
Speaker 22: his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in nineteen eighty eight
Speaker 22: as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He
Speaker 22: declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf
Speaker 22: Hitler committed, and said that the lack of cure for
Speaker 22: AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote your
Speaker 22: sexual choice is not a God given right, he said
Speaker 22: on one occasion.
Speaker 10: In nineteen eighty eight, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit.
Speaker 10: The organization says dedicated to quote educating the nation concerning
Speaker 10: the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans
Speaker 10: have been deceived about the true meaning of the First
Speaker 10: Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress
Speaker 10: shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.
Speaker 10: The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick
Speaker 10: a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also
Speaker 10: argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation
Speaker 10: between church and state should operate only in one direction,
Speaker 10: that the government should not interfere with a religion, but
Speaker 10: that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in
Speaker 10: an interview, so.
Speaker 29: We've got to get away from from being scared to
Speaker 29: say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do
Speaker 29: is define it the right way, define it the historical way.
Speaker 29: We can't let the left steal three hundred years of heritage.
Speaker 29: We can't let them wipe out three hundred core cases,
Speaker 29: wipe out what dozens of presents and governors have said
Speaker 29: simply because they don't like the term. We are a
Speaker 29: Christian nation. We have been a Christian nation, and that
Speaker 29: doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic,
Speaker 29: we're not coercive. We believe in free choice. We don't
Speaker 29: believe in any of the others. And that's what we've
Speaker 29: got to get back to doing. We don't need to
Speaker 29: be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we
Speaker 29: believe we have a Christian nation.
Speaker 22: The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and
Speaker 22: he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the
Speaker 22: generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, agreed
Speaker 22: with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 22: that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson
Speaker 22: successfully established separation of church and state in his home
Speaker 22: state of Virginia in seventeen eighty six when it adopted
Speaker 22: the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment,
Speaker 22: adopted in seventeen eighty nine, also banned Congress from quote
Speaker 22: establishing a religion, and most states embraced, to varying degrees,
Speaker 22: the doctrine of church state separation.
Speaker 10: There were some states that objected to this notion. The
Speaker 10: state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted
Speaker 10: the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish.
Speaker 7: Religion, but states could.
Speaker 10: Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the
Speaker 10: Congregationalist Church, respectively until eighteen eighteen. In eighteen thirty three,
Speaker 10: for decades, some states had so called quote jew laws
Speaker 10: that prohibited non Christians from holding office or had similar
Speaker 10: bands on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and
Speaker 10: fell by the wayside by the end of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 10: The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in eighteen sixty eight placed the
Speaker 10: same limits on state power. There are plaed on the
Speaker 10: federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld
Speaker 10: in the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case. Ever since
Speaker 10: versus Board of Education.
Speaker 22: Artin has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own
Speaker 22: alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately one hundred
Speaker 22: thousand primary documents written before eighteen twelve. Based on that
Speaker 22: selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
Speaker 22: and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation,
Speaker 22: and that American law should be based on the Bible.
Speaker 10: Art believes that not just the Bible, but also the
Speaker 10: original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery such
Speaker 10: as the Three Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God.
Speaker 10: He asserts, again with no evidence and without defining terms,
Speaker 10: that fifty two of the fifty five signers of the
Speaker 10: Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote orthodox or
Speaker 10: evenangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't
Speaker 10: speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who
Speaker 10: saw God not as a deity, invested in the daily
Speaker 10: lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put
Speaker 10: the gears the universe together, wound it up, and let
Speaker 10: it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in
Speaker 10: history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben
Speaker 10: Franklin proposed opening the first session the seventeen eighty seven
Speaker 10: Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down,
Speaker 10: with only four approving Franklin's motion, and a gathering that
Speaker 10: as many as fifty five attended on any given day.
Speaker 22: In their letters, many of the Founding Fathers scoffed at
Speaker 22: the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its
Speaker 22: myriad translations. As John Adams said of the Bible.
Speaker 25: In an age when fraud, forgery, and perjury were considered
Speaker 25: as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators, and theologians,
Speaker 25: what may not be suspected.
Speaker 22: Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Styles that Jesus was
Speaker 22: a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that
Speaker 22: Christ was the son of God. Franklin questioned whether the
Speaker 22: depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as describing
Speaker 22: the Gospels could be trusted.
Speaker 25: As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of
Speaker 25: morals and his religion as he left them to us
Speaker 25: the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.
Speaker 25: But I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and
Speaker 25: I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in
Speaker 25: England as to his divinity, though it is a question
Speaker 25: I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.
Speaker 22: And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believe that the American
Speaker 22: government should be based on Christian values, was even more
Speaker 22: blunt about a central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his
Speaker 22: virgin birth.
Speaker 25: Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth, of
Speaker 25: a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind, who set out
Speaker 25: without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was
Speaker 25: punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the
Speaker 25: Roman law.
Speaker 10: Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements
Speaker 10: attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been
Speaker 10: able to find. He cherry picks evidence to Bolster's claims
Speaker 10: about the founder's religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up
Speaker 10: a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church
Speaker 10: services in the US Capital. More reputable scholars argue that
Speaker 10: while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at
Speaker 10: the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially.
Speaker 10: What's more, Jefferson and was far from an orthodox Christian
Speaker 10: or the sort of Christian that dominates conservativism today. He
Speaker 10: edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
Speaker 10: commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a
Speaker 10: condensed version of Jesus's teachings from the Bible that excludes
Speaker 10: all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural,
Speaker 10: the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.
Speaker 10: These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's twenty
Speaker 10: twenty two New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies,
Speaker 10: Exposing the Myths You Always believed about Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 22: For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States
Speaker 22: as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson. In his
Speaker 22: seventeen eighty five book notes on the State of Virginia.
Speaker 25: The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only
Speaker 25: as are injurious to others. But it does mean no
Speaker 25: injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty
Speaker 25: gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor
Speaker 25: breaks my leg.
Speaker 22: Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some
Speaker 22: of Barton's fellow Christian Conservatives. The History News Network website
Speaker 22: derided the book as quote the least credible history book
Speaker 22: in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's
Speaker 22: book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it
Speaker 22: had quote lost confidence in the book's details. Yet, in
Speaker 22: spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing
Speaker 22: company eventually released a new version.
Speaker 10: In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton
Speaker 10: is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast,
Speaker 10: Barton claimed that Republican US House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted
Speaker 10: with him about staffing at the Capitol. Johnson made his
Speaker 10: speech at a wall Builder's event, telling the audience that
Speaker 10: the theocratic evangelists had quote a profound influence on me,
Speaker 10: my work, my life, and everything I do.
Speaker 22: Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed
Speaker 22: public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas
Speaker 22: governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be
Speaker 22: ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed
Speaker 22: those lesson plans.
Speaker 10: Huckabee has long produced so called history videos for school
Speaker 10: children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that United
Speaker 10: States has a unique relationship with God, such as a
Speaker 10: series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God,
Speaker 10: which portrays a revolutionary war soldier and George Washington suggesting
Speaker 10: God was on their side.
Speaker 30: We will bring the plagues upon our British oppressors, just
Speaker 30: as Moses did in ancient Egypt, and we will win
Speaker 30: the same freedom.
Speaker 3: We fight for the idea that we can make something
Speaker 3: great here. Spirit compels us forward, and the.
Speaker 4: Times of writers upon us.
Speaker 22: This video series may not be shown to kindergarteners in Texas,
Speaker 22: but the lessons in the Huckabee design curriculum clearly favor
Speaker 22: a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The
Speaker 22: Scripture field lessons are not required by state law, but
Speaker 22: the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars
Speaker 22: per student for teaching Huckaby's product. This is an attractive
Speaker 22: offer to the many school districts in Texas that are
Speaker 22: currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.
Speaker 10: Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over
Speaker 10: the last decade. One of his political action committees played
Speaker 10: a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the
Speaker 10: United States Senate. He has close allies with Texas Lieutenant
Speaker 10: Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors
Speaker 10: and other states. Patrick said this at a twenty twenty
Speaker 10: two Conservative political Action convention in Dallas about who he
Speaker 10: thinks wrote the US Constitution.
Speaker 13: We were a nation founded upon not the words of
Speaker 13: our founders, but the words of God. Because he wrote
Speaker 13: the Constitution, he empowered them.
Speaker 29: We were a Christian state, and we've been blessed because
Speaker 29: of that.
Speaker 25: For so many years.
Speaker 22: In twenty ten, the Texas State School Board for the
Speaker 22: first time required that textbook publishers portray a particular Biblical
Speaker 22: figure as an honorary founding father. This supposed founder was
Speaker 22: famously portrayed in the nineteen fifty six box office smash
Speaker 22: by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five term
Speaker 22: president of the National Rifle Association.
Speaker 4: Woo unto the you're Israel, you have sinned a great
Speaker 4: sin in the sight of God. You are not worthy
Speaker 4: to receive these Ten Commandments.
Speaker 10: In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers
Speaker 10: are required to tell Stin that Moses, the prophet depicted
Speaker 10: in Judeo Christian scripture as well as the Qur'an as
Speaker 10: leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence
Speaker 10: on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence,
Speaker 10: the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June twenty
Speaker 10: twenty four which requires every public school classroom in the
Speaker 10: state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments
Speaker 10: for the Book of Exodus, derived from Protestant translations of
Speaker 10: the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an
Speaker 10: injunction barring enforcement.
Speaker 9: Of the law.
Speaker 22: With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get
Speaker 22: a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required
Speaker 22: every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments
Speaker 22: at least sixteen inches wide and twenty inches tall, and,
Speaker 22: as the law put it, quote, in a size and
Speaker 22: typeface that is legible to a person with average vision
Speaker 22: from anywhere in the classroom.
Speaker 7: The bill passed the state.
Speaker 22: Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when didn't come
Speaker 22: before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline.
Speaker 22: As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue
Speaker 22: his crusade in the coming months.
Speaker 30: Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force
Speaker 30: public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Speaker 30: That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session,
Speaker 30: but missed a key deadline and died in the House.
Speaker 30: Louisiana just passed a similar law this week, the Lieutenant
Speaker 30: governor posting on x saying, quote, Texas would have and
Speaker 30: should have been the first state in the nation to
Speaker 30: put the Ten Commandments back in our schools end quote.
Speaker 30: The Lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during
Speaker 30: the next legislative session.
Speaker 22: Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major
Speaker 22: world religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be
Speaker 22: posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state
Speaker 22: government violating the First Amendment. Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained
Speaker 22: by such laws like those signed by Louisiana or Governor
Speaker 22: Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.
Speaker 13: There are three references to religion in the Constitution. All
Speaker 13: three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away
Speaker 13: from the state. There is no religious tests required for
Speaker 13: office forms, a remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The
Speaker 13: First Amendment says there will be no national religion established
Speaker 13: by the national government. Says that we will not interfere
Speaker 13: with your private right to worship or not worship as
Speaker 13: you see fit.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 13: That is what the Constitution says. And so Landry says
Speaker 13: he wanted to put this up because Moses was the
Speaker 13: first lawgiver.
Speaker 5: He's not.
Speaker 13: The Code of Hamerabi predates Moses by four centuries or something.
Speaker 13: But also, if you want to look at the real
Speaker 13: law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls.
Speaker 13: Let's students read what the real law of this country
Speaker 13: has to say about the proper role of religion in politics.
Speaker 10: The history of posting Ten Commandments signs or plaques are
Speaker 10: building such monuments public spaces over the last seventy years
Speaker 10: has an origin that might shock many right wing cultural
Speaker 10: warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism. As Cruise points
Speaker 10: out in this book One Nation Under God, How Corporate
Speaker 10: America invented Christian America. The three hour, forty minute epic
Speaker 10: movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wild
Speaker 10: audiences with its twenty five thousand member cast and advanced
Speaker 10: special effects. When it was released in nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 10: the movie grossed more than eighty five million dollars. The
Speaker 10: film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director Cecil B.
Speaker 10: De Mel hated the New Deal and testified to the
Speaker 10: House un American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence
Speaker 10: over unions, including those in Hollywood, that drove up the
Speaker 10: cost of filmmaking.
Speaker 22: The film can be read as a metaphor about the
Speaker 22: Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union
Speaker 22: and the freedom loving Hebrews standing out for the United States.
Speaker 22: At the beginning of the movie, Demil appears and calls
Speaker 22: the movie quote the story of the Birth of Freedom,
Speaker 22: the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism
Speaker 22: and ironically, the anti semitism of a country that had
Speaker 22: not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadel tells
Speaker 22: a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments.
Speaker 22: According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's
Speaker 22: wife became pregnant. Demill then told Heston that if his
Speaker 22: wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be
Speaker 22: cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth
Speaker 22: to a son, Demill sent her a telegram saying congratulations,
Speaker 22: He's got the part.
Speaker 10: Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode appeared in the film
Speaker 10: in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who
Speaker 10: broke the thirteen year informal NFL ban on African American
Speaker 10: players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in
Speaker 10: nineteen forty six, stro played both an Ethiopian king and
Speaker 10: the enslaved attendant of Moses's adopted Egyptian mother. Demill thought
Speaker 10: that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby
Speaker 10: was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they
Speaker 10: wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and
Speaker 10: a slave because of the racist belief that all black
Speaker 10: people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt
Speaker 10: and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light skinned cast,
Speaker 10: even though Demill's mother was Jewish. The only Jewish actor
Speaker 10: to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who
Speaker 10: earlier became famous playing gangsters, and who won de Mill's favor,
Speaker 10: perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House
Speaker 10: on American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunts. Thus,
Speaker 10: the one prominent Jewish face in The Ten Commandments was
Speaker 10: cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan who
Speaker 10: continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves
Speaker 10: to return to their Egyptian masters.
Speaker 3: You take too much upon yourself.
Speaker 1: We will not live by your commandments.
Speaker 30: We're free.
Speaker 4: There is no freedom without the law.
Speaker 3: Who's law?
Speaker 5: Most you yours?
Speaker 4: Did you call those tabolists to become a prince over us?
Speaker 22: As Cruz documents? When the Ten Commandments film was initially released,
Speaker 22: the Mill came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He
Speaker 22: teamed up with a conservative anti communist organization, the Fraternal
Speaker 22: Order of the Eagles, to establish ten Commandment monuments across
Speaker 22: the country around the time that Southern States erected new
Speaker 22: Confederate monuments to protest desegregation. Ten Commandment monuments appeared at
Speaker 22: the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall,
Speaker 22: and near the US Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly
Speaker 22: one hundred and fifty such monuments were erected across the country.
Speaker 22: Momentum stalled during the Civil Rights era, to the extent
Speaker 22: that in Alabama, State Justice Roy Moore suffered ridicule when
Speaker 22: he placed without authorization, a self funded five thousand, two
Speaker 22: hundred and eighty pound monument in the rotunda of a
Speaker 22: judicial building housing State Supreme Court in two thousand and one.
Speaker 22: The monument was ordered removed two years later, but once
Speaker 22: fringe figures like more have moved closer to the American
Speaker 22: political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton,
Speaker 22: Lieutenant Governor Patrick and their allies.
Speaker 10: The contemporary of session with festooning public spaces with religious
Speaker 10: artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as
Speaker 10: with religious zeal men like anti CRT crusader Christopher Rufo,
Speaker 10: along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the
Speaker 10: world that made The Ten Commandments film, a world in
Speaker 10: which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark skinned
Speaker 10: people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as
Speaker 10: an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history
Speaker 10: of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide. And now once again, advocates
Speaker 10: of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.
Speaker 14: The time has come to reclaim our once great educational
Speaker 14: institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.
Speaker 14: Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's
Speaker 14: called accreditation for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to
Speaker 14: ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers,
Speaker 14: but they have failed totally. When I return to the
Speaker 14: White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that
Speaker 14: have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs
Speaker 14: and lunatics.
Speaker 22: On January twenty ninth of this year, Trump issued an
Speaker 22: executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any
Speaker 22: public school that allegedly imprints quote anti American subversive, harmful,
Speaker 22: and false ideologies on our nation's children. This can include
Speaker 22: teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to students, or
Speaker 22: educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia,
Speaker 22: or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide
Speaker 22: quote unquote patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton and others
Speaker 22: who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of
Speaker 22: indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning
Speaker 22: history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days
Speaker 22: of the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, when textbook
Speaker 22: writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place,
Speaker 22: and those willing to die to end slavery were painted
Speaker 22: as the bad guys.
Speaker 10: In the Civil Rights era, black and brown parents boycotted
Speaker 10: public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their
Speaker 10: own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history,
Speaker 10: and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who
Speaker 10: want their children receive an honest accounting of the nation's
Speaker 10: past will do well to learn from these pretas sessers
Speaker 10: and to disrupt the meetings of right wing school boards
Speaker 10: as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned
Speaker 10: into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This
Speaker 10: is Michael Phillips and.
Speaker 22: This is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Freoff for reading
Speaker 22: passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes
Speaker 22: from the founding fathers.
Speaker 7: Of course, thanks to you for listening.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to it could happen here. This is
Speaker 2: Robert Evans, and I have an episode for you. It's
Speaker 2: also an article I wrote for our substack, Shatter Zone,
Speaker 2: So I'm just going to get into that. Since February fifth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, atum has been circulating among democratic parties, staffers,
Speaker 2: and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Jarvin and
Speaker 2: the Silicon Valley led coup to end US democracy. The
Speaker 2: document is titled the Imminent Neo Reactionary Threat to the
Speaker 2: American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief
Speaker 2: was quote iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan
Speaker 2: and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous
Speaker 2: due to concerns about being targeted. The full document is here.
Speaker 2: The table of contents is split into three main areas,
Speaker 2: one the new shape of threats to the American Republic,
Speaker 2: two understanding recent events in the context of threats to
Speaker 2: the American Republic, and three a list of appendices. The
Speaker 2: title of the actual file when I received it was
Speaker 2: Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim
Speaker 2: as quote explaining the nature of the current political crisis
Speaker 2: to journalists who are attempting to inform the public. However,
Speaker 2: I spoke with two sources who are members of these
Speaker 2: groups and received the document. They told me that, to
Speaker 2: their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists,
Speaker 2: but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers,
Speaker 2: people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks. One
Speaker 2: source I interviewed explained it is a thing for think
Speaker 2: tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists
Speaker 2: or congress see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks
Speaker 2: the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this
Speaker 2: is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down. The paper opens by
Speaker 2: acknowledging the scope of the executive power grap being perpetuated
Speaker 2: under President Trump, and that is stabilization wrought by Elon
Speaker 2: Musk and his doge team. It then notes the threat
Speaker 2: is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power
Speaker 2: grap It states that Musk is tied to a quote
Speaker 2: broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel
Speaker 2: and Mark Andresen Curtis. Yarvin is labeled as a thought
Speaker 2: leader in this group quote called the neo reactionaries. I'll
Speaker 2: stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough
Speaker 2: for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it.
Speaker 2: Musk probably would not label himself a neo reactionary, and
Speaker 2: he doesn't have much of a history with Jarvin. Peter
Speaker 2: Teeal does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than
Speaker 2: mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that
Speaker 2: Teal and Andreas and find Yarvin useful because of his
Speaker 2: success and spreading to a lot of young techy kids
Speaker 2: the idea that tech CEOs should run the world. Musk,
Speaker 2: I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the
Speaker 2: neo reactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers
Speaker 2: Jarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the
Speaker 2: independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions.
Speaker 2: This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger
Speaker 2: of the neo reactionaries and Musk to regular people. But
Speaker 2: I also think it's a mistake to credit Jarvin with
Speaker 2: more power than he holds. The document refers to him
Speaker 2: as the leader of the neo reactionary movement, and I
Speaker 2: think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about
Speaker 2: how all of this works. That said, the document does
Speaker 2: do a pretty good job of summing up the threat
Speaker 2: that we face. Quote. The neo reactionaries have openly stated
Speaker 2: their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional
Speaker 2: order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate
Speaker 2: state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become
Speaker 2: subjects owned by the state state slaves in Yarvin's terms,
Speaker 2: because everything rots when it has no owner. Human beings included.
Speaker 2: That last quote is also one of Jarvin's. From here,
Speaker 2: the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting
Speaker 2: to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote
Speaker 2: nervous system of the state. Another Jarvin quote These would
Speaker 2: be the data and communications systems that DOSE is trying
Speaker 2: to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of
Speaker 2: this docum document make a call to action. Quote the
Speaker 2: most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown nineteen seventy seven, India
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two, Brazil twenty twenty three, Poland have been
Speaker 2: accomplished by radically large, tent cross ideological coalitions with little
Speaker 2: in common accept a desire for the continuation of a
Speaker 2: constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American
Speaker 2: democracy is dire enough that such a broad tent approach
Speaker 2: focused on Musk and his associates may be required. And
Speaker 2: I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part
Speaker 2: of the whole document for me. For one thing, I
Speaker 2: believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment,
Speaker 2: a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add
Speaker 2: to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts the original,
Speaker 2: which is France from nineteen thirty four to nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2: So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has
Speaker 2: started to grow within D and C policy circles in
Speaker 2: the people around them. The source who sent me this document.
Speaker 2: In the first described themselves as a member of quote
Speaker 2: a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high
Speaker 2: ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They
Speaker 2: noted that these are normally quote very milk toast lib spaces,
Speaker 2: but quote they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed
Speaker 2: for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to
Speaker 2: with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote I've suspected
Speaker 2: for a while a lot more things in D and
Speaker 2: C stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In
Speaker 2: other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within
Speaker 2: the DNC, and people they know have made statements to
Speaker 2: that effect. They were worried that these quote GOP moles
Speaker 2: might reveal their identity, but more so, they were worried
Speaker 2: that these moles might have planted the document itself and
Speaker 2: put false information inside it with the goal of provoking
Speaker 2: a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans.
Speaker 2: I do think this caveat is worthwhile it's certainly not impossible.
Speaker 2: I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has
Speaker 2: Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But
Speaker 2: I should note that when it comes to the actual
Speaker 2: accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to
Speaker 2: take issue with. I've spent more time than most people
Speaker 2: studying Curtis Jarvin and the neo reactionaries. I would not
Speaker 2: describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but
Speaker 2: I do have a good base of knowledge here, and
Speaker 2: nothing that I've read in this document struck me as
Speaker 2: obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem
Speaker 2: hysteric or unreasonable. So I asked my sources if over
Speaker 2: the last month they'd seen more people talking about Jarvin
Speaker 2: in their daily lives within sort of the circles that
Speaker 2: they work in and around, because again, they communicate with
Speaker 2: a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said, respectively, No,
Speaker 2: and quote. That's kind of one of the odd things,
Speaker 2: to be frank, this guy Jarvin is being brought to
Speaker 2: big events in DC. He's been referenced by Bannon Advance.
Speaker 2: I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths,
Speaker 2: but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some
Speaker 2: of fears that I had late last year about Jarvin
Speaker 2: and the neo reactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some
Speaker 2: time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with
Speaker 2: him largely, a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with
Speaker 2: money had become much more influential among Trump and his
Speaker 2: tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards
Speaker 2: because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention
Speaker 2: to the subject. I really had kind of a gut
Speaker 2: feeling that this was going to become much more relevant
Speaker 2: very soon, which is why I picked it as the
Speaker 2: topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's
Speaker 2: by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had
Speaker 2: on the show so far, and I hope that that
Speaker 2: would help kind of get we were talking about out
Speaker 2: to a wider audience, and it did. The episodes did
Speaker 2: very well between YouTube and our downloads in the podcast
Speaker 2: were probably at something like a million listens for them
Speaker 2: at this point. Listener base is a mix of leftists
Speaker 2: and progressive liberals. Right their interests are not representative of
Speaker 2: the Democratic Party at large. It is noteworthy and perhaps
Speaker 2: even important that influential individuals in the policy space with
Speaker 2: connections to democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization,
Speaker 2: have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about
Speaker 2: Jarvin as a threat, and that's what this document represents.
Speaker 2: It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about
Speaker 2: the danger and the fact that a clock is currently
Speaker 2: ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote. If
Speaker 2: non governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained,
Speaker 2: and or unaccountable actors gain access to key digital infrastructure,
Speaker 2: they could seize control of critical functions of government in
Speaker 2: ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. And
Speaker 2: speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for
Speaker 2: our sponsors.
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 2: So to continue from this document, there's a section next
Speaker 2: titled national security, and the focus shifts from Jarvin and
Speaker 2: his neo reactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote poses
Speaker 2: a uniquely significant security risk. This, in its argument, is
Speaker 2: because Musk and Doge espouse quote anti constitutional ideologies and
Speaker 2: quote are under the influence of America's principle foreign adversaries
Speaker 2: China and Russia. It goes on at some length about
Speaker 2: Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see
Speaker 2: his actions as very much consistent with those of a
Speaker 2: man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people
Speaker 2: speaking to an audience that is largely you know, when
Speaker 2: it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on
Speaker 2: the centrist side of things in the policy space, and
Speaker 2: otherwise largely lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians.
Speaker 2: I understand why you focus on the China and Russia
Speaker 2: of it all with them, But when it comes to
Speaker 2: both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of
Speaker 2: people to care, I really don't think that's the right
Speaker 2: strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus
Speaker 2: popular messaging around how this all empowers quote America's principle
Speaker 2: foreign adversaries, because most Americans don't really think that way
Speaker 2: or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger
Speaker 2: issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not,
Speaker 2: in fact the Russian or Chinese governments, it's himself, and
Speaker 2: he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat
Speaker 2: to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government.
Speaker 2: I think that's undeniable, and I think again, it's an
Speaker 2: error not to frame it that way. The next section
Speaker 2: of the paper lays out the definition of a coup quote.
Speaker 2: In essence, a coup is a number one rapid seizure
Speaker 2: of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power
Speaker 2: by two seizing critical government infrastructure, and three weaponizing it
Speaker 2: to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them. The
Speaker 2: unelected actors then use this power to four remake the
Speaker 2: rules of the political game in a way that cannot
Speaker 2: easily be checked or undone through democratic processes. Now it
Speaker 2: argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now.
Speaker 2: One thing I found compelling is the way at which
Speaker 2: this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now,
Speaker 2: and how it can and will be used by the
Speaker 2: new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep
Speaker 2: the present legal system quote without canceling elections. For example,
Speaker 2: cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new
Speaker 2: levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to
Speaker 2: unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis
Speaker 2: of their shareholder power shielded from public view. I think
Speaker 2: that's a real thing to be concerned with. I also
Speaker 2: think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project. Now,
Speaker 2: next we have a summary of the neo Reactionary Agenda,
Speaker 2: which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elde
Speaker 2: currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs,
Speaker 2: Blaji Shrinivasan, and JD.
Speaker 7: Vance.
Speaker 2: Also name dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land,
Speaker 2: who is in fact referenced twice in this paper. He
Speaker 2: is quoted directly as having said in his paper the
Speaker 2: Dark Enlightenment quote for the hardcore neo reactionaries, democracy is
Speaker 2: not merely doomed. It is doom itself fleeing it approaches
Speaker 2: an ultimate imperative. Land has had a huge impact on
Speaker 2: a lot of these guys, although he's not really a
Speaker 2: Jarvin like figure in he's not this kind of guy
Speaker 2: who sees himself as or I think, really wants to
Speaker 2: be a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy
Speaker 2: from behind the scenes. He's really someone stating what he
Speaker 2: believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about
Speaker 2: our presentest historical moment that happened to comport with a
Speaker 2: lot of the things that these guys believe now. The
Speaker 2: author's next layout Jarvin's concept of the Butterfly Revolution, which
Speaker 2: is based on an essay he wrote in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two in which he laid out how a full reboot
Speaker 2: of the US government could be accomplished.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: Jarvin's seven part Butterfly Revolution has been roughly summarized as follows.
Speaker 2: Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform
Speaker 2: of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once
Speaker 2: he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees.
Speaker 2: Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency.
Speaker 2: Number four, co opt Congress. Number five, centralize the police,
Speaker 2: federalize the national Guard, create a national police force that
Speaker 2: absorbs local ones.
Speaker 7: Number six.
Speaker 2: Shut down the elites, the media, and the universities who
Speaker 2: make up the cathedral. Number seven. Get people on the
Speaker 2: streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency.
Speaker 2: And obviously all of that we've seen Trump and his
Speaker 2: people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right,
Speaker 2: And that's in fact what the next chunk of the
Speaker 2: document is Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the
Speaker 2: Trump administration and DOJE activity, and they show how it
Speaker 2: comports with the Butterfly Revolution blueprint. Now, we've all lived
Speaker 2: that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize
Speaker 2: their arguments here. So the document ends with a section
Speaker 2: on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as
Speaker 2: quote government contracts which fund many of Musk's companies at present,
Speaker 2: and the next is Greenland and Mars quote. A core
Speaker 2: tenant of neo reactionary ideology is the replacement of nation
Speaker 2: states with network states, but states require territory. Technocracy Inc,
Speaker 2: a predecessor to the neo reactionary movement, whose one time
Speaker 2: director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American Technate
Speaker 2: where the entire continent of North America would be united
Speaker 2: under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter teelbacked
Speaker 2: network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements
Speaker 2: about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of
Speaker 2: a territorial project. Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors
Speaker 2: primarily seem to fear, as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now,
Speaker 2: I think most of this is pretty credible. Although I
Speaker 2: feel differently about musk talk about colonizing Mars. I think
Speaker 2: that's been more about pr than anything. I do think
Speaker 2: there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think
Speaker 2: that that's something feasible on any kind of close end
Speaker 2: time frame, that we start building persistent colonies on Mars.
Speaker 2: I think the science suggests that if that ever happens,
Speaker 2: it won't be anytime soon, and I think he knows that.
Speaker 2: I think he's largely understands hype well and how to
Speaker 2: use it, and Mars has been an easy way for
Speaker 2: him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say
Speaker 2: the document is fairly thorough, and it's layout of the
Speaker 2: neo reactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted
Speaker 2: to end US democracy. It includes a section that lists
Speaker 2: several of the earliest known DOGE employees, and it quotes
Speaker 2: extensively from Jarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land. The
Speaker 2: paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment
Speaker 2: to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all powerful
Speaker 2: executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who
Speaker 2: rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts
Speaker 2: and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial. After laying
Speaker 2: out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises
Speaker 2: that quote Section three articulates what Congress and other actors
Speaker 2: can do in order to stop this threat. However, the
Speaker 2: document in its present form does not include any Section
Speaker 2: three or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other
Speaker 2: actors might carry out in order to stop the present
Speaker 2: assault on democracy. And perhaps there's a later version of
Speaker 2: the document that I don't have access to that includes that,
Speaker 2: perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out.
Speaker 2: I have to say and heart as I find the
Speaker 2: way in which this document talks about the threat that
Speaker 2: we're facing, and the fact that I think it's overall
Speaker 2: good that people in positions of influence and around the
Speaker 2: DNC are talking about this stuff. It's also kind of
Speaker 2: perfect that at the end they're like, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: don't worry, We've included some tips on how to defeat
Speaker 2: these guys, and then they just don't. You know, if
Speaker 2: the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier,
Speaker 2: but unfortunately it is pretty dire.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: If you want to take a look at the full
Speaker 2: document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've
Speaker 2: read to you now, but it is really worth reading,
Speaker 2: especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin
Speaker 2: guy or the neo reactionarys and you kind of want
Speaker 2: to know how this all fits together with what Musk
Speaker 2: is doing in more detail, if you go to my
Speaker 2: substack at shatter Zone, the most recent article is the
Speaker 2: text of this and I include a couple of different
Speaker 2: points links to the full document which I have uploaded
Speaker 2: to scribed, and you can read the whole thing if
Speaker 2: you want. It is not been altered since I have
Speaker 2: received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting
Speaker 2: out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode.
Speaker 2: We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks,
Speaker 2: I don't know, keep an eye on this shit.
Speaker 4: Bye.
Speaker 3: This is it could happen here.
Speaker 21: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 21: White House, Yes, the crumbling world and what it means
Speaker 21: for me and you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined
Speaker 21: by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes, this week we're
Speaker 21: covering the week of February ninth, nineteen to February twenty sixth.
Speaker 9: Boy, if you thought we had ed before, do we
Speaker 9: have ed now? We still haven't got that Haym sponsorship,
Speaker 9: but will yeah crying.
Speaker 2: We're going to keep working at it. I'm also looking
Speaker 2: to get us a penis pump sponsorship. Speaking of penis pumps,
Speaker 2: let's talk about the Germans. So Germany had its election
Speaker 2: very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way
Speaker 2: their government works is that periodically governments can't continue being governments,
Speaker 2: and so they have to have a very sudden election.
Speaker 25: I'm not going to.
Speaker 2: Explain it much more than that, but the actual results
Speaker 2: of the election were pretty interesting, right. The primary winner
Speaker 2: was off Day AfD Alternative for Germany would be kind
Speaker 2: of the mostest English translation of the name of the party.
Speaker 2: This is a far right party. It is primarily popular
Speaker 2: in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after
Speaker 2: years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons it has always been on the
Speaker 2: political fringe is that German parties, both centrists conservatives and
Speaker 2: the left have had a tacit agreement since the end
Speaker 2: of World War Two called the Cordon sanitaire. It's not
Speaker 2: just Germany, this is the thing that used to be
Speaker 2: present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of
Speaker 2: the cordon sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because
Speaker 2: these are parliamentary democracies, right, so usually no one party
Speaker 2: has fifty percent or more of the vote. So you know,
Speaker 2: a party with twenty and a party with fifteen and
Speaker 2: a party with eight and they form a coalition government.
Speaker 2: And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is
Speaker 2: still the normal we'll talk about that is that you
Speaker 2: don't coalition with AfD, which is a part of why
Speaker 2: that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept
Speaker 2: them from being a major force in German politics until
Speaker 2: you know, over the last eight or so years they
Speaker 2: have grown substantially to the point where in this recent
Speaker 2: election they doubled their support from around ten percent to
Speaker 2: a little over twenty percent. This makes them they're not
Speaker 2: the largest single block in the German in the Reichstag,
Speaker 2: they're number two though, right they are number two, I believe,
Speaker 2: which sucks.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the CDU is still significantly larger, although not like
Speaker 2: overwhelmingly larger, to be clear. So basically, right now, the CDU,
Speaker 2: which is the centrist party and it's kind of like
Speaker 2: center right, a little center right, has two hundred and
Speaker 2: eight seats in the Reichstag. AfD has one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty two, the Social Democrats have one hundred and twenty,
Speaker 2: the Greens have eighty five, and the Left Party has
Speaker 2: sixty four. So AfD is a minority in the government
Speaker 2: compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AfD,
Speaker 2: but the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem,
Speaker 2: especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern.
Speaker 2: Right now, this most recent election had unusually high voter
Speaker 2: turnout twenty twenty one election, seventy six percent of the
Speaker 2: country or so voted. More than eighty two percent of
Speaker 2: the country voted in this most recent election. So the
Speaker 2: fact that like you have record high turnout and AfD
Speaker 2: doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now, it's not one
Speaker 2: hundred percent bad news because one of the other stories
Speaker 2: here is the new Left Party, well not super new,
Speaker 2: but the Left Party, which is kind of came out
Speaker 2: of East Germany's Communist Party massively increased their support too,
Speaker 2: and they actually for the first time, like very significantly
Speaker 2: increased their share of the vote, which had been under
Speaker 2: this kind of five percent threshold before and is now
Speaker 2: at about eight point eight percent. So they went up
Speaker 2: by an amount. Actually it's not like as much as
Speaker 2: AfD went up, but like in terms of a percentage
Speaker 2: of their prior vote, it's a similar increase. So there's
Speaker 2: another party that had significant gains in this and it's
Speaker 2: kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is
Speaker 2: you could say they do a little bit of like
Speaker 2: a Red Brown Alliance kind of thing, where there's some
Speaker 2: like left wing messaging in what they're saying with they're
Speaker 2: also like super anti immigrant and they're not, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not kind of like to the extent that the
Speaker 2: AfD is. But when they came on to the scene,
Speaker 2: they were expected by some people to pull votes away
Speaker 2: from the AfD this selection, and that's really not what happened.
Speaker 2: And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled
Speaker 2: were from Social Democrats and the left parties, so that
Speaker 2: was one of the you know, it's because the way
Speaker 2: the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system.
Speaker 2: This didn't like hand the whole election to off day again.
Speaker 2: This is the benefit of a system like the Germans had,
Speaker 2: which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a
Speaker 2: lot harder or a right.
Speaker 7: Wing dictator to get in again.
Speaker 2: But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been
Speaker 2: happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to
Speaker 2: try to win over far right votes by kind of
Speaker 2: mixing in Well, okay, what if we did some sort
Speaker 2: of you know, liberal lefty policies, but we also got
Speaker 2: really racist. You don't take votes from the far right,
Speaker 2: but you do wind up pulling the worst people from
Speaker 2: the left. Yeah, and yeah, I guess that's kind of
Speaker 2: like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although
Speaker 2: it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things
Speaker 2: that's kind of I don't know, positive may not be
Speaker 2: the right. Wait, but interesting to me is if you
Speaker 2: looked at the twenty twenty one election maps of the
Speaker 2: strongest party by constituency in the twenty twenty one election,
Speaker 2: and I've found a good article German election results explaining
Speaker 2: graphics on DW dot com. If you just google that,
Speaker 2: you'll find it. In twenty twenty one. Off Day obviously,
Speaker 2: like the whole northeast was you know, their territory, but
Speaker 2: they also had strong inroads into the northwest parts of
Speaker 2: the country, right, you know, primarily like rural areas and
Speaker 2: the like. But like there was a there was a
Speaker 2: lot of red on that map in the northwest portion
Speaker 2: of Germany. In the new election, that's all black, which
Speaker 2: is the CDU right, Which means while off Day's representation
Speaker 2: in the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially,
Speaker 2: their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized. Yeah, would
Speaker 2: be in a fair way of saying it, which is
Speaker 2: which is interesting to me, hard to say too much,
Speaker 2: Like does that mean, you know, I think some of
Speaker 2: what has happened here, because it's important both to note
Speaker 2: that this is bad. It's bad that the Nazis doubled
Speaker 2: their share of the vote, but also it was expected
Speaker 2: to be a little worse than it was. You know,
Speaker 2: there's some evidence that after jd Vance made his speech
Speaker 2: introducing AfD, their pollings started to like freeze a little bit,
Speaker 2: and it may be the fact because a lot of
Speaker 2: older voters came in and they seem to have primarily
Speaker 2: gone with the CDU, with this sort of center right party.
Speaker 2: So one story here is you can maybe look at
Speaker 2: it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who
Speaker 2: are also old enough to really not like the idea
Speaker 2: of the AfD, came out and voted for, you know,
Speaker 2: the center right party in order to kind of cut
Speaker 2: off their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of
Speaker 2: a lot less optimistic, is that AfD is most popular
Speaker 2: among people under thirty who don't view it as an
Speaker 2: extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.
Speaker 21: And AfD won the majority of like working class, unemployed
Speaker 21: and male votes.
Speaker 9: Yes, yes, pretty substantially.
Speaker 25: Yes, they did.
Speaker 2: Extremely well with young men an unemployed young men in particular,
Speaker 2: and that's all deeply concerning. So, you know, there's a
Speaker 2: few things going on here, all of which are very
Speaker 2: interesting to me. But the power off Day continues to
Speaker 2: have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. That said,
Speaker 2: there's also some evidence here that the situation in the
Speaker 2: United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting
Speaker 2: populace to attempt to stop off Day and kind of
Speaker 2: one of the positive things that came out is prior
Speaker 2: to this election, there was a lot of talk about
Speaker 2: whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with
Speaker 2: the AfD and thus into the Cordon Sanitaire, And to
Speaker 2: make a long story short, they're not going to do that.
Speaker 2: They're looking to coalition with the Social Democrats, which is
Speaker 2: a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one
Speaker 2: will do that in the future. And unfortunately a majority
Speaker 2: of German voters suspect AfD will be in a coalition
Speaker 2: by twenty thirty, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's
Speaker 2: as good as things get right now. And that's what
Speaker 2: I got to say about Germany.
Speaker 21: Yeah, I mean, and people frame these results is like
Speaker 21: slightly better than expected, slightly. Previous pulling showed AfD being
Speaker 21: being slightly better in results, and that dipped for vance
Speaker 21: and Musk started really trying to push AfD, both in
Speaker 21: person and digitally, so you saw a slight dip there.
Speaker 2: Yes, And this is the other thing that's kind of
Speaker 2: worth noting that kind of like red Brown Party, in
Speaker 2: addition to being kind of pro social programs, anti immigration,
Speaker 2: they're also very anti United States.
Speaker 9: Okay, so uh, that may explain some of that too. Yeah,
Speaker 9: it does seem like things are changing a lot. And
Speaker 9: one of the things that we've seen, like les we've
Speaker 9: spoken aboutfore, like not just in Germany, being Canada, was that,
Speaker 9: like people hate Musk and Trump so much in the
Speaker 9: rest of the world that like their endorsement could be
Speaker 9: something of a kiss of death electorally.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 21: Yeah, Like the Conservative Party in Canada has been growing
Speaker 21: pretty exponentially in terms of like popular support the past
Speaker 21: few years as the Liberals have like tanked, and now
Speaker 21: those trends that actually started to reverse. The Canadian like
Speaker 21: Liberal polling is up ten points, the Conservative pulling is down.
Speaker 21: Conservatives might not even be able to control Parliament in
Speaker 21: the next election as they were like expected to. And
Speaker 21: it'll be interesting to see like if this if this
Speaker 21: anti like far right United States trend continues to more
Speaker 21: countries beyond like Germany in Canada. But I'm still still eagerly,
Speaker 21: eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.
Speaker 2: And this is part of the story that is really
Speaker 2: interesting right now. Where we've talked a lot about the
Speaker 2: transnational fascist coalition. You know the fact that Trump and
Speaker 2: his people have had the quasi dictator of Hungary, you know,
Speaker 2: over at mar A Lago, and have repeatedly cited him
Speaker 2: as an inspiration for how to take and centralized power.
Speaker 2: You know how close Polsonyaro was in the last Trump administration.
Speaker 2: Like you know, obviously the Republican parties increasing closeness and
Speaker 2: embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right
Speaker 2: now is people like countries that had been heading in
Speaker 2: a very more authoritarian right wing direction turning around in
Speaker 2: part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away
Speaker 2: from kind of the international right wing movement, as Poland
Speaker 2: being the best example right whereland. Polish politics have changed
Speaker 2: substantially in the last several years, and a big part
Speaker 2: of that is the war in Ukraine and a lot
Speaker 2: there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise
Speaker 2: would have been more on board for a lot of
Speaker 2: the social conservative shit who are like, well, but all
Speaker 2: these fuckers are pro Russia and we're pulling it, like no.
Speaker 21: All right, let's go on a break and return to
Speaker 21: talk more about the crumbling world. And you said, yeah,
Speaker 21: all right, we are back I'm gonna throw to James
Speaker 21: to do a segment on USAID.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we are back. And before I talk about USAD,
Speaker 9: I do want to talk about something else that has
Speaker 9: been advertised along with whatever products and services support this show.
Speaker 9: That is the Gold Card. So the Gold Card if
Speaker 9: You're not Familiar, is something that Trump floated this week
Speaker 9: to replace the EB five investor visa. Trump suggested that
Speaker 9: the Gold Card it would require a five million dollar
Speaker 9: investment investment. I think it's just a charge, right, You're
Speaker 9: just giving the money to the United States government, and
Speaker 9: in return you will receive a Green card plus privileges,
Speaker 9: and it will be not a green but a Gold card.
Speaker 25: So that's great.
Speaker 9: That is the EB five vs Or if You're not
Speaker 9: familiar required you Since twenty twenty two, it's been one
Speaker 9: million and fifty thousand dollars investment and the creation of
Speaker 9: ten jobs. So it had some kind of like it
Speaker 9: trickled down economics. It's not a real thing. It's a
Speaker 9: lie that they tell you, but it had some idea
Speaker 9: that these rich people would create jobs in the US
Speaker 9: people who are less wealthy. The Gold card seems to
Speaker 9: not have that. You just have to be rich right.
Speaker 9: So that's a that's an interesting change to the immigration system.
Speaker 9: The other thing I want to talk about today is
Speaker 9: a United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.
Speaker 9: It's been a target of like the anti work right
Speaker 9: for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph
Speaker 9: Nia would have called soft power, right, their power to persuade,
Speaker 9: the power to influence outcomes around the world with things
Speaker 9: other than tanks and bonds.
Speaker 2: Oh and again, if your power is soft right now,
Speaker 2: you might consider trying Hymns or one of our other sponsors.
Speaker 9: Gyms is not a sponsor. Sorry, Jams, we needed to
Speaker 9: do that, but I have been diverted by returning to
Speaker 9: my topic. Yeah, the agency has been massively impacted by
Speaker 9: DOGE and Trump administration cuts right. The Trump administration suspended
Speaker 9: all foreign aid in January via executive order on the
Speaker 9: twentieth of January in order to assess if it was
Speaker 9: quote serving US interests. The State Department then issued guidance
Speaker 9: that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut
Speaker 9: nearly basically all USAI the expensive on the thirteenth of
Speaker 9: this month, that's February if you're listening. Later, A judges
Speaker 9: shoed a temporary restraining order. This TIERRO didn't really stop
Speaker 9: them from doing what they were doing, because it told
Speaker 9: them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State
Speaker 9: Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are
Speaker 9: already in the contract so that the contracts will have
Speaker 9: some kind of kill clause, right, and that they claim
Speaker 9: that they're implementing that, so they think they've found a
Speaker 9: fun work around. Rather than talking extensively about court battles,
Speaker 9: I want to talk about what this means. These are
Speaker 9: cuts made by the richest man in the world that
Speaker 9: have had a direct, tangible, and devastating impact on the
Speaker 9: poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, eighty percent of
Speaker 9: emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to
Speaker 9: two million people will go without food. Local groups organizer
Speaker 9: kitchens are running out of money. The way this works
Speaker 9: is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about
Speaker 9: continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means, because
Speaker 9: in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending
Speaker 9: them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed
Speaker 9: to sending them food as an in kind donation. Right,
Speaker 9: whatever he communicated, these people are not getting food an
Speaker 9: as a result, the people who run these mutual aid
Speaker 9: kitchens it's a mutual aid coalition of Sudan are facing
Speaker 9: the horrible decision of having to turn people away it
Speaker 9: or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On
Speaker 9: the border between Thailand and Myanmay, a place where Robert
Speaker 9: and I have been to report, I've heard that people
Speaker 9: are having babies right now outside a lot of clinics
Speaker 9: and life support machines have been removed for it, so
Speaker 9: people who were relying on those life support machines obviously, and.
Speaker 2: At least one person has died, yeah.
Speaker 9: And I'm sure many many more people than that have done.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean that's just what's reported. Like it's a lot
Speaker 2: of most of what happens there does not get out.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I will try in not too long to be there
Speaker 9: and report on that. But it's pretty devastating right now
Speaker 9: that Robert and I have met the people who run
Speaker 9: some of these clinics, and they are some of the
Speaker 9: most incredible people doing amazing work. And yeah, they relied
Speaker 9: on USAA funding, as lots of other places do, and
Speaker 9: that's not happening now. The State Department has exempted quote
Speaker 9: life saving humanitarian assistance programs from the cuts, but no
Speaker 9: one really knows what that means.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 9: The order reads, quote life saving humanitarian assistance applies to
Speaker 9: core life saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance,
Speaker 9: as well as supplies and reasonable administrative cost as necessary
Speaker 9: to deliver such assistance. As I mentioned before, the mutual
Speaker 9: AIDS who are in coalition was receiving financial assistant to
Speaker 9: help it provision itself, right, which is much better than
Speaker 9: the US going through all the infrastructure spending of being
Speaker 9: able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors.
Speaker 9: Other contractors implementing partners of USAID are still owed money
Speaker 9: for work that they completed before January, before the stop
Speaker 9: Work Order stopped payment to them. For work to begin
Speaker 9: again on any of these contracts, they need the contract
Speaker 9: officer to sign up on it, and it's at a
Speaker 9: lunclear exactly how many of these contract offices are still
Speaker 9: employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts, So
Speaker 9: essentially USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition
Speaker 9: to this, in this country, four hundred and ninety million
Speaker 9: dollars worth of US grown food, which is in the
Speaker 9: USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food,
Speaker 9: is currently at risk of spoilage according to USAID. So
Speaker 9: it's not just that people are starving, it's that we
Speaker 9: are allowing food to go bad here while people starve
Speaker 9: in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just
Speaker 9: really briefly hear plug the Mutual AIDS Sudan Coalition. If
Speaker 9: you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly,
Speaker 9: and it's Mutual AIDS Sudan Dorg. If you'd like to
Speaker 9: do that. It'll be in the show notes too if
Speaker 9: you're driving or whatever.
Speaker 21: And there is like ongoing legal fights over this issue.
Speaker 21: On Tuesday, February twenty fifth, another ordered the Trump administration
Speaker 21: to resume hundreds of million dollars of funding towards USAID,
Speaker 21: and there's no indication Trump's going to follow that order.
Speaker 21: They're already planning to appeal again. They have already appealed before.
Speaker 21: And like we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges,
Speaker 21: fine loopholes, fine workarounds, and Musk and Trump continue to
Speaker 21: just openly float like defying the order of the Court.
Speaker 21: Representative Andy Ogles introduced articles have appeachment against a specific
Speaker 21: quote unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere. They don't
Speaker 21: have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen.
Speaker 9: It's a frontal assault on the separation of powers. It's
Speaker 9: what he's proposed, right, And like they don't have their
Speaker 9: numbers yet.
Speaker 21: Yes, well, and then they have openly floated just like
Speaker 21: defying orders because they are they're interpreting the actions of
Speaker 21: the judges as like themselves, unlawful. But must have himself
Speaker 21: called to impeach judges who violate the law. And I
Speaker 21: believe his his most recent pinned pinned x posts reads
Speaker 21: quote if any judge anywhere can block every presidential action everywhere,
Speaker 21: we do not have a democracy. We have a tyranny
Speaker 21: of the judiciary.
Speaker 2: So what a great legal mind shit we were saying,
Speaker 2: and back in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 9: So this, this will continue.
Speaker 21: I mean, I'm really really waiting for a final showdown
Speaker 21: between Trump Elon and you know, maybe the Supreme Court,
Speaker 21: and you know, seeing seeing if they will actively defy
Speaker 21: a ruling from the Supreme Court, if they indeed rule
Speaker 21: against Trump and Musque. But until then, I feel like
Speaker 21: we're just kind of all chugging along as the Trump administration,
Speaker 21: you know, very very unconstitutionally defies the authority of the Court.
Speaker 21: In some related news, last week, President Trump signed in
Speaker 21: executive order stating that the president can change law erroneously,
Speaker 21: citing Article two, which only calls for the presidents to
Speaker 21: quote faithfully execute the law.
Speaker 9: I'm to quote from the.
Speaker 21: Order, the President and the Attorney General, subject to the
Speaker 21: President's of supervision and control, will interpret the law for
Speaker 21: the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.
Speaker 21: The next section is titled reigning in independent Agencies. It
Speaker 21: reads the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and
Speaker 21: Securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the
Speaker 21: American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and
Speaker 21: regulations without the review of the democratically elected president. They
Speaker 21: also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting
Speaker 21: the President. Voters and the President can now hold all
Speaker 21: federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions,
Speaker 21: as the Constitution demands, unquote. This is absurd. This is
Speaker 21: like extreme, seemly dangerous, one of the most like blatant
Speaker 21: like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon.
Speaker 21: Like this is gonna get litigated, but this is crazy.
Speaker 21: The the fact that that we have that we have
Speaker 21: a president saying that he has the ability to interpret
Speaker 21: the law something that specifically he cannot do. That's why,
Speaker 21: that's why we have three branches of government, just like
Speaker 21: openly openly claiming that power is like very worrying. Again,
Speaker 21: like I feel like every episode on Executive Disorder I
Speaker 21: say that, you know, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned,
Speaker 21: but that does continue to be the case.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it is very concerning. I don't know what more
Speaker 9: to say, because it's mad, like we're watching a coup
Speaker 9: happen on the timeline while everyone just continues to go
Speaker 9: shopping and stuff like it's it's it's pretty weird.
Speaker 21: Speaking speaking of shopping, I just got a fantastic Swedish
Speaker 21: M ninety feel jacket. It looks great, it fits tight.
Speaker 9: I'm very happy, incredible. Garrison's becoming a mill sup.
Speaker 21: We will go on break once again to come back
Speaker 21: to talk about the Navy and the FBI.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back.
Speaker 21: Let's now talk about the Navy, arguably one of the
Speaker 21: gayer branches of the military, besides the besides the drone operators.
Speaker 2: Oh you're you're really missing out on the Marine. As
Speaker 2: multiple Marine veterans have told me, the US Marine Corps
Speaker 2: is the gayest place I've ever been. The Marines are
Speaker 2: like part of the Navy, right, come on, they are,
Speaker 2: they are, they are, and they hate it when you say.
Speaker 21: Oh, well, wait, wait, go cry about Daddy Trump.
Speaker 5: I don't care.
Speaker 25: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 7: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 21: So meanwhile, there's a shakeups in the Navy and the
Speaker 21: Marines relating to Trump's anti trans executive orders. And we
Speaker 21: have obtained an al NAVE memo directed to all Navy
Speaker 21: units and Marine Corps from February twenty fifth that outlines
Speaker 21: the Department of Navy's guidance on how to implement the
Speaker 21: anti trans executive orders. Now, this includes ending programs and
Speaker 21: policies related to quote unquote gender ideology all across the Navy,
Speaker 21: as well as only using assigned sex at birth on
Speaker 21: official documentation. I will quote from the statement quote don
Speaker 21: entities will review policies for quote unquote intimate single sex
Speaker 21: spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are
Speaker 21: designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships,
Speaker 21: and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department
Speaker 21: of Navy unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms
Speaker 21: and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff
Speaker 21: that Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's
Speaker 21: been signing. But we are slowly getting more and more
Speaker 21: of these implementation guides getting sent around to various department
Speaker 21: and James.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and like, just to clarify that to people, most
Speaker 9: of these bases are pretty full, right, These are pretty
Speaker 9: crowded places. So this will mean women sharing rooms with
Speaker 9: young marines, right. This will meet them sharing non stalled
Speaker 9: bathrooms with young sailors and marines, right. This will force
Speaker 9: them into very confined spaces together on board ships. Like
Speaker 9: this isn't like some kind of sort of minor inconvenience
Speaker 9: or whatever like this, this will put these people a
Speaker 9: demonstrable risk for assault, for bullying, which is a serious
Speaker 9: thing and an issue in lots of militaries, including the
Speaker 9: US one. But like and many of these people, I
Speaker 9: should add, like have had that they're like post surgery, right,
Speaker 9: and not that it matters hugely, but they're people who
Speaker 9: might pass as women or men, and they're now forced
Speaker 9: to live according to their gender assigned at birth. Pretty
Speaker 9: fucked up.
Speaker 3: It's not great.
Speaker 21: I'm going to wait before I do reporting on the
Speaker 21: implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot
Speaker 21: of articles in the Guardian and a few trans journalists
Speaker 21: have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables
Speaker 21: regarding the issuing of visas to people who are trans Specifically,
Speaker 21: I think the main cable that we've seen allows the
Speaker 21: continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what
Speaker 21: the the the case officer or like the whoever whoever
Speaker 21: is like handling the actual these information whatever they determined
Speaker 21: to be the assigned gender at birth to be. Yeah,
Speaker 21: that's that's how it would get issued. But I'm going
Speaker 21: to wait to report on kind of the rest of
Speaker 21: the nitty gritty details, because there is conflicting information from
Speaker 21: like from like these like policy wonks, lawyers and journalists
Speaker 21: themselves who are trying to figure out kind of what
Speaker 21: the full implications of those cables are, but we are
Speaker 21: aware of them. We've been talking about them in our chat.
Speaker 21: Yes they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to
Speaker 21: like overblow the scope of some of these things just
Speaker 21: to like induce panic when really this is all kind
Speaker 21: of vary in line with Trump's earlier orders to only
Speaker 21: have male and female documentation that matches a signed gender
Speaker 21: at birth.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I would say. Also, like, if you are soldier,
Speaker 9: sailor em and a person marine whatever, and like these
Speaker 9: these gexty voters are affecting you, you can email us
Speaker 9: at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me. I know
Speaker 9: trans folks tend to serve at a higher rate than
Speaker 9: cisgender folks, so its a good number of people who
Speaker 9: will be affected by this. And like, for whatever it's worth,
Speaker 9: if you want to talk to us, you can reach
Speaker 9: out to us.
Speaker 21: I'm also going to note we obtain information on the
Speaker 21: Department of Defense removing travel coverage for abortion. On January eighteenth,
Speaker 21: the Department of Defense Travel Management Office Room of Dissection
Speaker 21: from their joint travel Regulations that outlined travel allowances for
Speaker 21: quote non covered reproductive healthcare quote meaning like abortion and
Speaker 21: assisted reproductive technology like IVF. Now this change was directly
Speaker 21: in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the High Amendment,
Speaker 21: which Mia has talked about lots before on the show.
Speaker 21: And then on February fourth, they actually re established coverage
Speaker 21: for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion
Speaker 21: was not re established, so.
Speaker 9: That means travel cover for abortion related medical care reproduct
Speaker 9: health care is no longer there. Correct. Correct.
Speaker 21: For our last main story, I'd like to talk a
Speaker 21: little bit about updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 21: Trump goon rap producer and children's book author Cash Patel
Speaker 21: has been confirmed as FBI director, and Patel is joined
Speaker 21: by far right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan po Gino,
Speaker 21: who has been appointed deputy director.
Speaker 2: Ah God, and I look, I gotta say it. I'm
Speaker 2: just glad there's an adult in the room now, you know.
Speaker 2: This is thank God again.
Speaker 21: Like I don't want to just be talking about how how,
Speaker 21: you know, kooky everything is in this new administration.
Speaker 3: But this is wild yet.
Speaker 2: This is no, no, no, Garrison. I disagree, and that's
Speaker 2: because I have professional solidarity. Anything that's good for podcasters
Speaker 2: in general, you know, is good for the country's.
Speaker 9: So not great, not great.
Speaker 21: Last week, Patel told senior officials he wants to relocate
Speaker 21: upwards of fifteen hundred employees from DC to fuel offices
Speaker 21: around the country, and in a statement on last Friday,
Speaker 21: which is February twenty first, Patel said, quote, anyone that
Speaker 21: wishes to do harm to our way of life and
Speaker 21: our citizens here and abroad will face the full wrath
Speaker 21: of the dj and the FBI. If you seek to
Speaker 21: hide in any corner of this country or planet, we
Speaker 21: will put on the world's largest man hunt, and we
Speaker 21: will find you, and we will decide your end state unquote.
Speaker 21: Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the
Speaker 21: Bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from
Speaker 21: far right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous
Speaker 21: BLM Antifa. In related news, on Tuesday, a far right
Speaker 21: extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the
Speaker 21: National counter Terrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces
Speaker 21: and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American first
Speaker 21: populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and
Speaker 21: Patriot Prayer. Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up
Speaker 21: to Antifa and Kent himself employed a proud Boy to
Speaker 21: consult on a failed congressional campaign in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 21: Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts
Speaker 21: to target Antifa. And this is like all amidst a
Speaker 21: report from The Guardian suggesting that the Nazi cocelerationist group
Speaker 21: the Base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and
Speaker 21: recruitment efforts inside the United States. That's good, so not
Speaker 21: cool stuff happening, read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I
Speaker 21: guess i'll close unless we have any other thoughts on
Speaker 21: Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director.
Speaker 9: What are you supposed to say? All right?
Speaker 2: I mean, I do think it's funny that because of
Speaker 2: the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have
Speaker 2: been statements by people in the administration that like, there
Speaker 2: aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're
Speaker 2: giving them all government jobs.
Speaker 9: Well, that's more hymns advertising dollars for.
Speaker 7: Us, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: I feel like this is going to be huge for US.
Speaker 21: I would like to close on three more funny news
Speaker 21: moments from the past week. On Musk danced around with
Speaker 21: a chainsaw at sea pack while multiple of his ex
Speaker 21: wives and baby Mama's pleaded for him on Twitter to
Speaker 21: respond to emergencies regarding his children, including that including that
Speaker 21: weird far right journalist and Babylon Bee contributor who's who's
Speaker 21: had an increasing spat with Musk and I now I
Speaker 21: believe has filed for complete custody of their child.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, I mean that's good luck. I guess, like,
Speaker 9: I guess good luck. I can't think of a worse
Speaker 9: situation to be and than Elon Musk being one of
Speaker 9: your legal parents. So like, for the sake of that child,
Speaker 9: I hope that she succeeds.
Speaker 21: Tesla stock is down nearly thirty percent this month. There's
Speaker 21: been a real pressure on him because people in Europe
Speaker 21: are refusing to buy Tesla's in a boycott, you know,
Speaker 21: upset at him for doing the whole Nazi salute and
Speaker 21: being a Nazi thing. And finally, in some very sad news,
Speaker 21: a crypto trader killed himself live on a Twitter space
Speaker 21: in order to start a sorry sorry on an x
Speaker 21: space in order to start a meme coin. How do
Speaker 21: we feel about this, folks? I know it's a dark
Speaker 21: time for our community.
Speaker 9: They did start the meme coin.
Speaker 3: Multiple meme cooins actually were started.
Speaker 9: So well, well done for the people cashing in on
Speaker 9: the guy shooting himself in the head and then bleeding
Speaker 9: out for thirty minutes on stream. You are vampires, I
Speaker 9: don't know, not the cool kind. No, yeah, not the
Speaker 9: not the cool kind, the evil kind, vultures. Vultures can
Speaker 9: be cool as well. I guess it depends.
Speaker 21: Yeah, well, I think that's it for us. We reported
Speaker 21: the news again.
Speaker 25: 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 11: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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