Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here a show about things
Speaker 3: falling apart this week. The thing falling apart is the
Speaker 3: US healthcare system science in general, but specifically the healthcare system.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis and today I'm joined by a very
Speaker 3: special returning guest, doctor Kappa Hoode.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 5: Hey, Yes, the thing falling apart is you, the listener.
Speaker 5: So it's very important that you listen up. You were
Speaker 5: going to do anyways, but in particular, you should be
Speaker 5: paying attention here because this is important stuff.
Speaker 3: So in mid May, we got some news in the
Speaker 3: FDA CDC Human Health and Services front. As there's been
Speaker 3: there's been a lot of news in the health front,
Speaker 3: but specifically we're going to be talking about the new
Speaker 3: guidelines for COVID vaccines that the FDA is trying to
Speaker 3: push through in the United States. So the new FDA Commissioner,
Speaker 3: Marty mccaray and the top vaccine regulator of an APRISAD
Speaker 3: have published a quote unquote study you pushed back on
Speaker 3: on the use of the word study in the New
Speaker 3: England Journal of Medicine about the COVID vaccine booster shots. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and are going to be changing the guidelines for how
Speaker 3: these are going to be administered and who has access
Speaker 3: to them, particularly those under the age of sixty five,
Speaker 3: might have a harder time getting the COVID booster that
Speaker 3: they have like the past few years, requiring certain existing
Speaker 3: conditions to qualify. And they have a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: arguments for this. They say they're trying to make this
Speaker 3: more in line with the vaccine guidelines and other countries
Speaker 3: they're proposing for their studies on the necessity of COVID
Speaker 3: vaccines for those under sixty five. Yeah, and for someone
Speaker 3: like me who tries to keep up with COVID boosters
Speaker 3: and you know, doesn't like it getting infected with COVID,
Speaker 3: some of this can seem a little bit both confusing
Speaker 3: and worrying and considering, like the anti vaccine takeover of
Speaker 3: the FDA and like the federal Health services in general,
Speaker 3: it's a frightening move.
Speaker 5: I guess yeah. I think you're right to feel concerned.
Speaker 5: It is something I am a little concerned about for
Speaker 5: a couple of reasons. One, I mean, I just don't
Speaker 5: flatly agree with limiting the use of the vaccines the
Speaker 5: people they're planning to limit it to. I mean, this
Speaker 5: is coming from the medical freedom crowd. I feel like
Speaker 5: people should at least have the bodily autonomy to have
Speaker 5: the vaccine if they want it.
Speaker 4: That's a part of it.
Speaker 5: But I'm actually even more concerned about the bigger sense
Speaker 5: of what this represents. You know, on the surface, making
Speaker 5: some changes is not totally unreasonable to our vaccine policy,
Speaker 5: and we generally reassess our COVID vaccine policy annually, so
Speaker 5: that's not too abnormal. But the thing is, we have
Speaker 5: this whole system set in place to do it in
Speaker 5: a efficient, smart way that is public, and there's a
Speaker 5: process to it. If I can give you a little
Speaker 5: bit of a sense of how it normally runs and
Speaker 5: what's going to happen now, I think it'll explain why
Speaker 5: I might have my concerns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that would be very useful to hear. So normally there.
Speaker 5: Are some clinical trials, there's some studies that happen, some
Speaker 5: real world data, some points that can be looked at,
Speaker 5: and then the FDA uses this advisory committee. Again, these
Speaker 5: advisory committees are not career politicians. They're scientists, their public
Speaker 5: health officials, their doctors, people volunteering their time. I don't
Speaker 5: think they get paid other than maybe food and their expenses,
Speaker 5: but other than that, they're not paid for just this job.
Speaker 5: And what this group. The first group is called the
Speaker 5: VRBPAC and they determine if it's a safe and effective vaccine.
Speaker 5: If it is determined that way, then the FDA grants
Speaker 5: a license and approval. From there. There's another group, the ACIP,
Speaker 5: and that's an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it's
Speaker 5: the same sort of thing. It's a group made up
Speaker 5: of scientists, healthcare professionals, public health professionals, and people will
Speaker 5: come together. They'll determine who should get it, and then
Speaker 5: the CDC director signs off and then it gets out
Speaker 5: there to the world. Now, basically what we have is
Speaker 5: two political pointees, both of which have these massive axes
Speaker 5: to grind on the subject, have some severe chips on
Speaker 5: their shoulder about what's happened so far to them in
Speaker 5: this conversation and this dialogue. Who are going to bypass
Speaker 5: this whole scientific system, who aren't to be looking at
Speaker 5: these questions like what is our growing immunity? Is Annuel
Speaker 5: Booster still warranted? And they're going to take this outside
Speaker 5: of that and basically make the decision. And I find
Speaker 5: that to be very concerning, even past like this, this
Speaker 5: basic premise of like, you know, does this mean that
Speaker 5: my friends or myself I won't be able to at
Speaker 5: the vaccine that I want to get? So I find
Speaker 5: it to be very concerning. And you alluded to that
Speaker 5: article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It did
Speaker 5: not alleviate my concerns.
Speaker 3: One of the guys here, the guy who's heading up
Speaker 3: the vaccine regulations, has compared the US COVID response to
Speaker 3: Nazi Germany. He has boosted anti vaxx claims from Robert F.
Speaker 3: Kennedy Junior.
Speaker 4: And he's blocked me on Twitter. Come on, and truly
Speaker 4: his most heinous offense. How could you block me I'm lovable.
Speaker 3: No. Me and this guy Robert Evans were joking yesterday,
Speaker 3: never heard of it. Vot about how some of your
Speaker 3: like personal nemeses have been have been put into positions
Speaker 3: of like government power, and how you're upset about that,
Speaker 3: And I remarked, oh, first time, because this has unfortunately
Speaker 3: been the trend of our work the past few years.
Speaker 3: These these weird online figures who we've developed personal a
Speaker 3: grievances against for being bad people suddenly now are like
Speaker 3: in the p echelons of power in the US government.
Speaker 4: Hey, I like them, they just don't like me.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's true, but regardless, do you
Speaker 3: have any other notes on mccari and like specifically, Uh.
Speaker 4: You know what I'll say.
Speaker 5: So A big thing about this article that they put
Speaker 5: in there, and what they talk about a lot is
Speaker 5: trying to get more farm companies to do large studies,
Speaker 5: which you know, on the surface totally reasonable. But the
Speaker 5: thing about it is not every problem can be solved
Speaker 5: with what's considered the quote unquote golden standard of studies,
Speaker 5: the double blind randomized control study. Some studies just can't.
Speaker 5: They want to see that these companies are doing these
Speaker 5: studies to say that it's good and safe and beneficial
Speaker 5: for younger people. But there's a couple problems with this, Okay, One,
Speaker 5: I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Like, if we have
Speaker 5: something that works, if we know this vaccine helps, and
Speaker 5: we do CDC studies have shown that these boosters help
Speaker 5: for at least four to six.
Speaker 1: Months, possibly life saving medication.
Speaker 5: Exactly is it ethical to deny somebody that, Like, would
Speaker 5: I want to be a part of that study.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't want to get potentially the placebo. So that's
Speaker 5: part of it. But even beyond that, to do these studies,
Speaker 5: it's lengthy. They are long studies. If you want to
Speaker 5: do it and you want to do it right, it
Speaker 5: takes a while. So by the time they do this,
Speaker 5: by the time they do the study, even if I'm
Speaker 5: being very generous in how long it takes them, by
Speaker 5: the time we get the results, we'll be onto a
Speaker 5: different mutation. We know that this thing mutates, we know
Speaker 5: it's going to change into a different virus, and we
Speaker 5: won't even know if that study that we just spent
Speaker 5: all the time doing works on it. So we have
Speaker 5: other options for studying these things. They're not double blind,
Speaker 5: randomized controlled studies. But we have other studies at work,
Speaker 5: and there are plenty of epidemiologists out there, vaccinologists, people
Speaker 5: who know way more about this than me, and to
Speaker 5: be fair, know more about this than Prasad and McCary.
Speaker 5: They're the ones saying this is not a good idea.
Speaker 5: So I'm like saying, let's listen to them. Let's listen.
Speaker 5: They know what they're talking about. They're smart people. I've
Speaker 5: met some of them. They're great, and it doesn't make
Speaker 5: sense to me on an ethical or practical level to
Speaker 5: do it that way.
Speaker 4: Do you know what doesn't make sense to me? Cave?
Speaker 4: I know? I do? I do? I do? I can
Speaker 4: I say? Kind? I guess you can guess.
Speaker 5: I'm guessing that commercials don't make sense to you, But really,
Speaker 5: at this point in your career, they should make sense.
Speaker 3: I should know by now. But still the concept is
Speaker 3: is a little bizarre. Here they are.
Speaker 4: Okay, we are back.
Speaker 3: I guess let's get into more how this will affect
Speaker 3: the average listener, Like what these things could mean like
Speaker 3: both in I guess the short term and then like
Speaker 3: the long term, if you're trying to plan out your
Speaker 3: you know, your health a journey. What kind of like
Speaker 3: risks you have if you're you know, compromise, what that
Speaker 3: means for you versus if you're magical, perfectly healthy, you know,
Speaker 3: twenty five year olds, Yeah, prancing around with with no issues.
Speaker 4: France and as the kids do. Kids love to prance.
Speaker 5: So in the short term, it's not clear. In a
Speaker 5: month that advisory committee I mentioned the ACIP is going
Speaker 5: to meet, or they're supposed to meet, I don't know
Speaker 5: if it's all going to happen, and they're supposed to
Speaker 5: determine who should get this, so first things first, they
Speaker 5: could they could disagree. It would be the first time
Speaker 5: I've seen it. I've never seen the FDA and the
Speaker 5: ACIP not be in lockstep in this regard. And maybe
Speaker 5: it's happened, but I can't think of it in like,
Speaker 5: I don't know, I don't know what'll happen. That'll be
Speaker 5: a little bit of chaos and it'll be interesting to
Speaker 5: see what happens to that point. But if it goes
Speaker 5: as the FDA now plans, it will limit who can
Speaker 5: potentially get these vaccines if you're not over sixty five,
Speaker 5: if you don't have a what's considered a risk for
Speaker 5: serious disease like asthma, cancer, kidney disease, certain types of
Speaker 5: liver lung disease, diabetes. If you don't have any of
Speaker 5: these things, then it's not clear to me. Will the
Speaker 5: pharmacist not give it to you, Will the pharmacist check
Speaker 5: if you tell them you have one of these things?
Speaker 5: Will insurance cover it? I don't know, and that's really concerning.
Speaker 5: I think the price is going to go up, and
Speaker 5: that does relate to the bigger concern, the long term
Speaker 5: problem in this, which is, I mean, Kennedy has said
Speaker 5: he's not taking away vaccines. Great, he doesn't actually need
Speaker 5: to take away vaccines. He just needs to do things
Speaker 5: like this so that nobody wants to pay for it.
Speaker 5: Nobody wants to go through the process of studying it,
Speaker 5: nobody's going to make them. Insurance companies aren't going to
Speaker 5: pay for it. People aren't gonna end up being able
Speaker 5: to afford it. They're gonna be lesser and fewer of them,
Speaker 5: and they will go away naturally on their own because
Speaker 5: of this. That's really the long term concern that I
Speaker 5: have with this. The short term concern, I mean, I
Speaker 5: don't know, it's going to be interesting, you know, like
Speaker 5: there's certain things on this list that the CDC has,
Speaker 5: Like for example, physical inactivity is on this list.
Speaker 4: I mean, how who could argue with you on that?
Speaker 5: Like, you know, if you tell the pharmacistre having physical inactivity,
Speaker 5: like will they I don't know, will they check that?
Speaker 5: How will they check that? So I don't know what
Speaker 5: will happen in the short term and the long term.
Speaker 5: Definitely big concerns.
Speaker 3: It seems like part of their strategy here is just
Speaker 3: putting as many roadblocks in between you and vaccines that
Speaker 3: could save your life as possible to further whatever like
Speaker 3: conspiracy driven worldview that the people at the top have
Speaker 3: and just like the inhumane side effects that's going to
Speaker 3: have across the entire population.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, I mean to also put this into context, COVID.
Speaker 5: We're in a better situation than we were years ago.
Speaker 5: That's certainly true. But at least from the CDC records alone,
Speaker 5: forty seven thousand Americans died from COVID related diseases last year.
Speaker 5: At least two thirds of that number were directly due
Speaker 5: to COVID, and amongst that there are about two hundred
Speaker 5: and thirty deaths from kids. That is a significant number.
Speaker 5: And at least you can say at least one hundred
Speaker 5: and thirty of those kids were directly related to COVID
Speaker 5: and not from some other problems. So this is significant
Speaker 5: stuff that we're still dealing with. In long COVID can
Speaker 5: affect people. Long COVID can affect all groups. It can
Speaker 5: affect young and old. So it is concerning and it
Speaker 5: bothers me in particular that the group doing this, as
Speaker 5: I said, getting is the medical freedom group, and this
Speaker 5: is this is sort of the exact opposite of this.
Speaker 3: I think this demonstrates how much a medical freedom has
Speaker 3: actually just been a dog whistle for like this conspiracy
Speaker 3: theory driven belief this entire time. Like people clamoring for
Speaker 3: medical freedom don't actually believe in it. They're against trans healthcare,
Speaker 3: they're against vaccines in general. They want to put autistic
Speaker 3: kids into like behavioral like therapy programs to try to
Speaker 3: make them not not autistic. Like it's it's it's not
Speaker 3: actually about medical freedom. It's about it's about advancing a
Speaker 3: very specific conservative and conspiratorial worldview that actually controls what
Speaker 3: other people are allowed to do with their bodies. This
Speaker 3: is like a massive, a massive part of their project,
Speaker 3: and like, I don't know how else you can like
Speaker 3: interpret moves like this which are just going to jeopardize
Speaker 3: people and put them even in more danger.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's going to get worse. We can see
Speaker 5: the effects already. Just today, Moderna withdrew their application for
Speaker 5: a covid flu combo vaccine, a one shot vaccine that
Speaker 5: would have both, and the studies on that so far
Speaker 5: were really good. Actually they showed they looked really promising
Speaker 5: and they're just doing this because you know, okay, now
Speaker 5: do we have to have these double blind control studies
Speaker 5: for this?
Speaker 4: And they know it's going to be a hostile environment.
Speaker 4: And now it's.
Speaker 5: Withdrawn and there's going to be more and more of that.
Speaker 5: Like way way before your time or my time, there
Speaker 5: used to be more pharmaceutical companies making vaccines. There used
Speaker 5: to be a lot more than there are now there's
Speaker 5: only a handful now, but there used to be a lot.
Speaker 5: And then there was like this CBS show about the
Speaker 5: protessis vaccine and it was called like Russian roulette, this
Speaker 5: could give you, like this could end your life. And
Speaker 5: there's like one like made for TV like show about
Speaker 5: it. It wasn't a movie, but it was like a special
Speaker 5: they did, and it raised such concerns that letters started
Speaker 5: pouring in to the network, and they then started pouring
Speaker 5: into Congress and there was a whole hearing and after
Speaker 5: that we had a significant drop off in regards to
Speaker 5: the companies that make these vaccines, and we have a
Speaker 5: few now, and I am worried that this could be
Speaker 5: another sort of inflection point in that in that history,
Speaker 5: in that.
Speaker 4: Arc of vaccines, and we're going to get even fewer now.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's been devastating watching the advancement of the
Speaker 3: HIV vaccine, which seemed like it was nearing completion, gets
Speaker 3: tolled for a number of reasons, including like DEI policies
Speaker 3: getting pushed across these health departments because the HIV vaccine
Speaker 3: research uses, you know, terms like gay and trans and
Speaker 3: it mentioned gender. Yeah, you know, all all that kind
Speaker 3: of stuff, which is which people focused on in the
Speaker 3: first few months. I'm super nervous about the COVID nasal
Speaker 3: vaccine getting basically shelved, and every like new thing we
Speaker 3: see come under the FDA just makes those fears heightened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's pretty rad.
Speaker 3: Not to be too depressing, but that is kind of
Speaker 3: the that is that is the mood of this show
Speaker 3: in some ways. Yeah, like people people can still you know,
Speaker 3: wash hands mask up at this point, people can still
Speaker 3: get the vaccine. But like the way that the way
Speaker 3: that we've been like treating like the widespread health of
Speaker 3: this country has has has already been pretty bad the
Speaker 3: past few years. Yeah, and this is like trying to
Speaker 3: intentionally make it worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it does. It does feel like that sometimes. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I am concerned about it all, but you're all right,
Speaker 5: we still have as of now. I mean, there's still
Speaker 5: some options going forward in terms of vaccines, and hopefully
Speaker 5: we'll continue to have them totally and we'll see how
Speaker 5: this plays out. I am really curious. The next month
Speaker 5: will be very telling when we have that ACIP Advisory
Speaker 5: Committee again. If it's allowed to happen, and they allow
Speaker 5: people like Paul offit, people who are real vaccinologists, people
Speaker 5: who know about vaccines, not just pointed political people, but
Speaker 5: people who actually study this and know it. If they
Speaker 5: come on and they can provide enough pressure, if people
Speaker 5: can support them, then I do think that there is
Speaker 5: there is some hope that the pushback will will help
Speaker 5: us alleviate some of this restriction.
Speaker 3: I hope would the people on the like ACIP panel
Speaker 3: be like political appointees, Do they have the same risk
Speaker 3: of all these other people put in under RFK junior
Speaker 3: where they're very clearly politically there versus like careerists who
Speaker 3: are actually actual experts in the field.
Speaker 5: Well, unless they change it. The ACIP is not set
Speaker 5: up like that. The ACIP is just you know, these
Speaker 5: really great group of independent doctors and scientists, public health
Speaker 5: experts that are using real world data. They're looking at
Speaker 5: how the immunity shifts over time. They're looking at the
Speaker 5: virus and seeing if it's changing. Really volunteers that come
Speaker 5: from the world of science to do so. So as
Speaker 5: of now, they're not. That's not how the group works.
Speaker 5: I don't know if that'll hold. I mean, I don't
Speaker 5: see any reason why they couldn't if they wanted to
Speaker 5: scrap the ACIP get rid of the people on it.
Speaker 5: You know, people who are vaccinologists who are of great
Speaker 5: significance to the community, like you know.
Speaker 4: Peter Hotez or your Paul Offits.
Speaker 5: These scientists who really study and look at these things
Speaker 5: and put in just people who are already in line.
Speaker 5: I mean, unless I'm missing something about it, I don't
Speaker 5: see why they couldn't do that.
Speaker 4: I hope they don't.
Speaker 5: I think there's enough scientific background in Prasad and McCary
Speaker 5: that they would recognize the importance of an independent council.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Well, that's good to know. We don't need to be
Speaker 3: fully doom or pilled on that, but it's a good
Speaker 3: thing to watch out for.
Speaker 4: Do you know what I'm gonna be watching out for, Kava,
Speaker 4: I do, I certainly do.
Speaker 5: You're gonna be listening more than watching, but you're going
Speaker 5: to be listening for some really great ads.
Speaker 3: Okay, Cob, I guess I'd also like to touch on
Speaker 3: this actual piece in the in the in the New
Speaker 3: England Journal of Medicine. Yeah, they're quote unquote to evidence
Speaker 3: based approach to COVID nineteen vaccination, which is more of
Speaker 3: a blog post, right, it is not a study, it is.
Speaker 3: It is a blog post. And specifically they talk about
Speaker 3: how the United States has a much more like severe
Speaker 3: vaccine strategy than other countries in Europe, and they try
Speaker 3: to use this to justify their own beliefs, saying that
Speaker 3: they're trying to bring things in line with the vaccine
Speaker 3: policies in other countries.
Speaker 1: Is this real?
Speaker 3: Is this true? I don't live in Europe. I'm not
Speaker 3: super familiar with the European vaccine guidelines. I don't expect
Speaker 3: you to be an expert either.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: It's really funny though that you mentioned it, because it's
Speaker 5: so funny what they decide to endorse about European policy,
Speaker 5: like will socialized medicine. Most of these European countries have
Speaker 5: socialized medicine. They will have nothing to do with that,
Speaker 5: and then they'll nitpick certain things. So there is some
Speaker 5: truth to the fact that we are doing things differently.
Speaker 5: And again I'm not opposed to looking at that and
Speaker 5: being like, Okay, what are the countries doing, does it work?
Speaker 5: And could we do that? So there is a difference
Speaker 5: are currently until now in the US, it was generally
Speaker 5: recommended for anyone over six months. People weren't being made
Speaker 5: to have this. By the way, again, medical freedom, you know.
Speaker 3: No, I was pretty sure that Joe Biden will send
Speaker 3: a swat team to your house and shoot you unless
Speaker 3: you get the COVID vaccine. That's what I was told
Speaker 3: on the RFKJ and your podcast.
Speaker 5: I mean he is somehow simultaneously a decrepit old man
Speaker 5: who's certainly confused, but somehow able to orchestrate an incredible
Speaker 5: from the depths darkness, deep state espionage. So I guess
Speaker 5: it's possible, and that's how we do it. It's how Canada
Speaker 5: does it. The UK they do do it a little differently.
Speaker 5: They do it for people greater than sixty five. They
Speaker 5: do it for residents and care homes. They do it
Speaker 5: for people greater than six months and high risk and
Speaker 5: people who are greater than twelve years of age but
Speaker 5: are in a house where someone's demo compromised. They do
Speaker 5: it for anyone who's over sixteen who helps care for
Speaker 5: someone who's vulnerable. And they do it for all social
Speaker 5: and healthcare workers. I mean, they have a different system
Speaker 5: in place. They have, as I mentioned, socialized healthcare in general.
Speaker 5: They're very good about their vaccines, so it's hard to tell.
Speaker 5: It's a little bit of apples and oranges. But it's
Speaker 5: funny what they decided to pick and not pick about that.
Speaker 5: And it's also funny why some groups are missing under
Speaker 5: our care, Like a lot of places will vaccinate anyone
Speaker 5: who's overweight. Here they don't consider being overweight a risk
Speaker 5: for COVID, so that it is funny how they're choosing
Speaker 5: their nitpicking certain things that are recommendations common recommendations in
Speaker 5: other countries and not using them here, so they do
Speaker 5: it a little differently in Europe. That is true, and
Speaker 5: again this is the kind of stuff that they're going
Speaker 5: to evaluate every year. The ACIP will evaluate the look
Speaker 5: at the emerging data, to look at the other countries,
Speaker 5: to look at what's being done, and they'll discuss it.
Speaker 5: So it is true, and it does seem reasonable on
Speaker 5: the surface when they say it like that, hey, we're
Speaker 5: just trying to get and they mentioned this in the
Speaker 5: New England Journal of Medicine article, we're just trying to
Speaker 5: get more in line with the rest of the world.
Speaker 5: And that's not really true. It's like they're just picking
Speaker 5: certain things that they want to agree with and ignoring
Speaker 5: all the other stuff about their healthcare system that we
Speaker 5: could benefit from.
Speaker 3: One of the more wide aspects of this, again Glorified
Speaker 3: blog post is talking about how the COVID vaccine booster
Speaker 3: program has actually undermined public trust in vaccinations, which is
Speaker 3: like again, this is like a we're all looking for
Speaker 3: the guy who did this moment wearing the hot dog
Speaker 3: cost you I quote. Even healthcare workers remain hesitant, with
Speaker 3: less than one third participating in twenty twenty three to
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four fall Booster program. There may even be
Speaker 3: a ripple effect. Public trust and vaccination in general has declined,
Speaker 3: resulting in reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital
Speaker 3: immunization programs such as that for these hills mumps and rebella.
Speaker 4: Oh so weird.
Speaker 5: I wonder if it's the people that have been talking
Speaker 5: about how corrupt and terrible the FDA and CDC.
Speaker 4: Are for like the last five six years.
Speaker 3: It's insane that they're like able to like do this
Speaker 3: like it's yeah, I don't.
Speaker 5: I mean, it is an ongoing inside joke amongst people
Speaker 5: in the medical commune unity.
Speaker 4: The hot dog meme guy.
Speaker 5: That's a very common like attribute to these to these
Speaker 5: characters who talk about, you know how how they're clearly
Speaker 5: sowing the seeds of mistrust and then capitalizing off of it.
Speaker 4: I don't know if they even mean to or not.
Speaker 5: And people ask me a lot they're like you know why,
Speaker 5: why are they why why do they do this? And
Speaker 5: I that's a tough one for me. That's your friend,
Speaker 5: Robert Evans. I ask him that every time I'm on
Speaker 5: his podcast, as there's a point in the podcast where
Speaker 5: I earnestly and I don't do this on purpose, where
Speaker 5: I just don't understand, and I need to understand why
Speaker 5: it's being done. And in these cases it's hard, you know. Previously,
Speaker 5: Vne Persod had a podcast that people really like called
Speaker 5: The Plenary Podcast in the medical community. I never listened
Speaker 5: to it because I don't listen to medical podcasts.
Speaker 4: Why would I.
Speaker 5: And what it did basically was it would break down
Speaker 5: like studies and go over them in a very sort
Speaker 5: of skeptical way. And I think it's good as a
Speaker 5: doctor to be skeptical. I think that's a good attribute
Speaker 5: for us to have, and it was useful in many ways.
Speaker 5: But then I don't know if it's audience capture. I
Speaker 5: don't know if it's true belief. I don't know what shifted,
Speaker 5: but it does seem that it was a steady growth
Speaker 5: into this contrarian perspective from the medical community that doesn't
Speaker 5: totally make sense to me, Like they all kind of
Speaker 5: feel like they're Galileo or samulwise, that they had this rare,
Speaker 5: contrarian opinion that made them special and they were attacked for.
Speaker 5: But in my mind, it's not so much that as
Speaker 5: it is. You know, there is a scientific process that
Speaker 5: we have. Galileo followed a scientific process and that's how
Speaker 5: it came to those conclusions. These people, I don't feel
Speaker 5: are following that, and they are strict to their method
Speaker 5: idolatry to what they feel needs to be done, and
Speaker 5: I don't feel like they're listening to the experts in
Speaker 5: the field explained to them why that's not the case.
Speaker 5: That's how every hero probably feels in every situation. But
Speaker 5: they have somehow become the victims in this story, and
Speaker 5: I am very curious to see now that they're in power,
Speaker 5: how that shifts and if they maintain this sort of
Speaker 5: victim mentality.
Speaker 3: Well, how can you be a victim when we have
Speaker 3: beef Tallow back at stake and shake everyone. We did it,
Speaker 3: Beef t We did it, Joe, We're back.
Speaker 4: We sure did. Maga coated coconut oil.
Speaker 1: Now I'll be completely healthy again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, that is so funny to me that be
Speaker 5: I mean like, we could talk about seed oils, we
Speaker 5: could talk about the quote unquote hateful eight, we could
Speaker 5: talk about all that stuff. But it's it's pretty clear
Speaker 5: that oils are better than tallow for your health, and
Speaker 5: beef tallow there's very little, Like there's a little proof
Speaker 5: to prove that it's good for you, and a lot
Speaker 5: of proof to say that animal products are bad for
Speaker 5: your heart. Yeah, so it's it's absurd that that's an
Speaker 5: argument that we're still having at this in twenty twenty now.
Speaker 3: Instead of frying in theef tablet oil, instead, I just
Speaker 3: drink a full eight ounces of grape seed oil every
Speaker 3: morning to wake up. It does wonders for me. It
Speaker 3: just gets the whole body up and run in lubricates
Speaker 3: the whole system.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: I know you can't give medical advice, but do you
Speaker 3: have any advice to give listeners before we close?
Speaker 4: At least people who are like.
Speaker 3: You, afraid of what these changes from rfk's FDA will
Speaker 3: mean for them in their community.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's okay to be concerned about it,
Speaker 5: but I do think there is some time to go.
Speaker 5: There's going to be a lot of people from the
Speaker 5: medical community fighting to try and fight these restrictions on
Speaker 5: the vaccine. So we'll see how that goes. You will
Speaker 5: probably be able to find ways to do it. You
Speaker 5: should talk to your doctor about it because your doctor
Speaker 5: probably can see a risk factor that you don't. If
Speaker 5: you don't see one that automatically fits that list from
Speaker 5: the CDC, your doctor might be able to find one
Speaker 5: that is. And I'm not talking about fraud. I'm talking
Speaker 5: about like real things. Your doctor may be able to
Speaker 5: look through your chart, look through your history, talk to
Speaker 5: you and find a risk factor that you didn't think
Speaker 5: was a risk factor, like, for example, physical inactivity or
Speaker 5: you know, smoking. So there are things that we can
Speaker 5: look for. And as they shift those goalposts, which I'm
Speaker 5: sure they will, we'll also be trying to find ways
Speaker 5: around that as well. And you know, when the ACIP
Speaker 5: comes out, there's going to be a lot of pressure
Speaker 5: on them, and I think we can pressure our Congress
Speaker 5: and we can pressure our representatives to support them at
Speaker 5: least nominally to discuss it, if nothing else, because I
Speaker 5: don't think this is getting talked about that much, So
Speaker 5: I think if we can bring it to the public attention,
Speaker 5: I think we can shift the narrative on vaccines. I
Speaker 5: do believe that the narrative has shifted on covid and
Speaker 5: vaccines in this terrible way, this revisionist way, where everyone
Speaker 5: pretends it's not it wasn't a big deal and that
Speaker 5: we didn't lose millions of people. And I think if
Speaker 5: we can keep that in the public discourse, I think
Speaker 5: that alone will help.
Speaker 4: I think that's important for us to do.
Speaker 5: And that's what people you know on Reddit and people
Speaker 5: on the Internet and Facebook and all that stuff can do,
Speaker 5: is they can help keep this in the public eye
Speaker 5: and fight that incipient I don't if that's the right word.
Speaker 5: Insidious is probably the right word. It's this really subtle
Speaker 5: sort of reconstructing of the narrative of what covid was
Speaker 5: and how important these vaccines are. So that's how people
Speaker 5: can help in the immediate future. And then you know,
Speaker 5: stay tuned, talk to your doctor about vaccines and when
Speaker 5: you can get them, and get them as soon as
Speaker 5: you can. I do think that's a good idea for
Speaker 5: both flu and for COVID boosters when available.
Speaker 3: Cave lovely talking with you as always. Where can people
Speaker 3: hear you talk more on the internet.
Speaker 5: I am on a podcast called The House of Po
Speaker 5: and it is a humor adjacent, fun ish medical podcast.
Speaker 3: I would say it's not adjacent to humor. I would
Speaker 3: say it is on target.
Speaker 4: What we're next door to humor. We next door to humor.
Speaker 4: We speak a little humor, not a ton. But you
Speaker 4: will like the show.
Speaker 5: If you like this, I think you're gonna recognize a
Speaker 5: lot of the same people. Gear, for example, has just
Speaker 5: recently been on an episode, and you know, you'll we'll
Speaker 5: get Gear on again, I hope, and you'll find people
Speaker 5: that you like. There a lot of the same sorts
Speaker 5: of people. We take a skeptical look at medical grifters
Speaker 5: and the wellness community. So a lot of the same
Speaker 5: stuff you love from these shows and the extended behind
Speaker 5: the Bastard universe. You'll also get into I think our
Speaker 5: podcast the House of Pod and find it anywhere The
Speaker 5: House of Pod, the House of Pod.
Speaker 3: The first time I met you online, I was invited
Speaker 3: onto this show. And you know, it was a pretty
Speaker 3: busy year twenty twenty. There's a lot going on for
Speaker 3: me with you know, riots and such, and you know,
Speaker 3: whatever damage was done to my brain via all that
Speaker 3: tear gas and for some reason, and I don't quite
Speaker 3: know why. I wonder if I was just conflating two messages,
Speaker 3: but I thought I agreed to go onto a medieval
Speaker 3: history podcast, not a medical podcast. So as things just started,
Speaker 3: I was a little bit confused, and then I went
Speaker 3: back to reread the message of like, oh no, I
Speaker 3: definitely says medical, and I still don't quite know how
Speaker 3: I did that.
Speaker 4: Like I said, a lot going on that idea. Great,
Speaker 4: whatever it was. Whenever you thought you were doing, you
Speaker 4: did it well.
Speaker 3: But whenever I think of your podcast, I now also
Speaker 3: think about medieval history.
Speaker 4: So there you go. Yeah, hey, okay, that's cool. I'll
Speaker 4: take it.
Speaker 5: I'll think we did do an episode one. I mean
Speaker 5: not every episode is strictly like medical stuff. Like I
Speaker 5: did an episode with these these guys who wrote this
Speaker 5: book on Sparta and the battle with the Persians and
Speaker 5: how this story has been sort of turned into something
Speaker 5: grossly that's not partially because of three hundred and partially
Speaker 5: because of other reasons.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so there is a little bit of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, you would like that episode.
Speaker 1: How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Speaker 5: I don't I think about how the Persians kill the
Speaker 5: lot of them, over them thermophully.
Speaker 4: That brings me a little spark of joy. Okay, good
Speaker 4: to know.
Speaker 5: Just kidding listeners, don't I don't approve of people being murdered.
Speaker 4: I don't. I don't even if they're jerks. Good to
Speaker 4: say this day and age. Thank you so much, Cafe,
Speaker 4: thank you, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Welcome to take it happen here. I'm your host, Na Wong.
Speaker 1: Today is the day before the thirty sixth anniversary of
Speaker 1: the Tianneman Square massacre. We're doing something a little bit different.
Speaker 1: Three years ago I wrote a pair of episodes about Tiannemen,
Speaker 1: democracy and the International Workers Movement, expanding off a piece
Speaker 1: I'd written for laos On a year before that. That
Speaker 1: was a long time ago. The world is a fundamentally
Speaker 1: different place than it was in twenty twenty one. Europe
Speaker 1: has been consumed by war. Whole revolutions rose and fell.
Speaker 1: The fact threat we defeated in the streets, returned to
Speaker 1: power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new,
Speaker 1: uglier and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tianeman,
Speaker 1: to return to one of the great horrors of another
Speaker 1: age to see if we can take anything new from
Speaker 1: the wreckage of the Death of Hope. I'm no longer
Speaker 1: the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes,
Speaker 1: and so today and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were
Speaker 1: really three Tienemens. The first and most famous Tieneman was
Speaker 1: a student protest inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard
Speaker 1: the word Tienemen before this story, you know. The second
Speaker 1: Tienemen was the Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around
Speaker 1: the square, blocks sees and transformed by Beijing's working class.
Speaker 1: If you've heard about this Tienemen at all, it's probably
Speaker 1: in the context of the tanks rolling through them on
Speaker 1: their way to the square. And then there was the
Speaker 1: third Tienemen, the protests in other cities, of which we
Speaker 1: still years after I wrote the original piece. No distressingly
Speaker 1: little about our focus today is on.
Speaker 4: The first two.
Speaker 1: The students of the student protests were a weird ideologue
Speaker 1: go grab back that cannot simply be reduced down to
Speaker 1: the simplistic pro democracy label they've been settled with in
Speaker 1: the three and a half decades since Tienemen. The short
Speaker 1: version is this the students were pissed off about what's
Speaker 1: called reform and Opening not going fast enough, and we
Speaker 1: should talk about what reform and opening actually was. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions
Speaker 1: on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and other people were so
Speaker 1: called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse.
Speaker 1: This was paired with market reforms. I started to bring
Speaker 1: capitalism back to China. This was a shit show in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. If you want to hear about
Speaker 1: the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt peonage about five years
Speaker 1: into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastard's
Speaker 1: episode about the poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening
Speaker 1: is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression,
Speaker 1: golden age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed
Speaker 1: like they could be different. This is not entirely accurate.
Speaker 1: Reform and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian
Speaker 1: crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the One Child Policy,
Speaker 1: a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of
Speaker 1: social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations, and the reimposition of
Speaker 1: patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule
Speaker 1: in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's
Speaker 1: decision making and control over the process of their own labor.
Speaker 1: In these horrors you can see the beginning of the
Speaker 1: fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly already forming.
Speaker 1: The students wanted market reform to go faster, They wanted
Speaker 1: more freedom of speech, They sort of wanted democracy, but
Speaker 1: mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party
Speaker 1: so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market
Speaker 1: reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of
Speaker 1: these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism,
Speaker 1: which holds that the strong central party should take full
Speaker 1: control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It
Speaker 1: was an ideology that survived the death of the protests
Speaker 1: and went on to become a major faction of the
Speaker 1: CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this
Speaker 1: is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman
Speaker 1: comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly
Speaker 1: hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders
Speaker 1: were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones,
Speaker 1: and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal
Speaker 1: of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual.
Speaker 1: The guy they were trying to defend inside the party
Speaker 1: wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded
Speaker 1: failed to occur. But Tianemen, as I mentioned earlier, was
Speaker 1: also the workers, and for most of the protests, the
Speaker 1: students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the
Speaker 1: square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried
Speaker 1: to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and
Speaker 1: relations were in general extremely bad. This raises the question
Speaker 1: what were the workers doing there in the first place.
Speaker 1: There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one
Speaker 1: is that the workers were pissed off at how badly
Speaker 1: the party was treating students in the square. But there
Speaker 1: were other things going on too. The late in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighties in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation. The rapid
Speaker 1: price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed
Speaker 1: a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: marketization was accelerating, and suddenly you had CCP princelings racing
Speaker 1: down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers
Speaker 1: on their bikes, and spending a year's salary gambling at
Speaker 1: the racetrack. And this pissed people off, so they started organizing.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a section from a piece by
Speaker 1: Uron saying about what the workers were doing during the
Speaker 1: struggle to obstruct the military. Workers started to realize the
Speaker 1: power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self
Speaker 1: liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self
Speaker 1: organization ensued. The worker's autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and
Speaker 1: other workers' organizations both within and across the workplace mushroomed.
Speaker 1: The development of organization led to a radicalization of action.
Speaker 1: Workers started organizing self armed quasi militias such as Quote
Speaker 1: Picket Corps and Quote Dared to Die Brigades to monitor
Speaker 1: and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi militias were also
Speaker 1: responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide
Speaker 1: any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Beijing became
Speaker 1: a city self managed by workers. It was reminiscent of
Speaker 1: petrograds self armed workers organized in the months between Russia's
Speaker 1: February and October revolutions. At the same time, Beijing workers
Speaker 1: built many more barricades and fortifications on the street. In
Speaker 1: many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns, A possible general
Speaker 1: strike was put on the table as well. Many workers
Speaker 1: started to build connections between factories to prepare for a
Speaker 1: general strike. This was unaccepsible to the party, and so
Speaker 1: for the third time in seventy years, the CCP fed
Speaker 1: its own working class to the machine guns. On the
Speaker 1: night of June third, the army began to slaughter its
Speaker 1: way to the workers defending the square. It was the
Speaker 1: workers who bore the front of the massacre. Most of
Speaker 1: the casualty and lead of political repression were against members
Speaker 1: of the workers faction. The army soon reached the square itself,
Speaker 1: for the Western press Corps bore witness to what became
Speaker 1: known as the Tianeman Square massacre. This is where you
Speaker 1: get tank Man and the most famous accounts of the massacre.
Speaker 1: By that point it was almost all over. The protests
Speaker 1: were crushed and the Chinese working class died with it.
Speaker 1: But before the last bullet had even been fired, every
Speaker 1: faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives
Speaker 1: about what had just happened. The most common narrative is
Speaker 1: that Tieneman was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, and
Speaker 1: to some extent it's not exactly wrong.
Speaker 4: There were a.
Speaker 1: Lot of other pro democracy movements in this period. You
Speaker 1: see them in Taiwan and Korea. They swept across huge
Speaker 1: swaths of Latin America and eventually spread to places like
Speaker 1: the Philippines. But the real question of the pro democracy
Speaker 1: movements was what kind of democracy. The students at Tieneman,
Speaker 1: to the extent that their democratic principles were sincere and
Speaker 1: not simply cover for a deeply authoritarian version of liberalism
Speaker 1: that demanded rule of law by a new class of
Speaker 1: intellectuals to oversee market reforms. Believed in a narrow conception
Speaker 1: of political democracy. This political democracy operates at the level
Speaker 1: of the state. It's based on free citizens equal before
Speaker 1: the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass
Speaker 1: laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This
Speaker 1: model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate
Speaker 1: economic sphere into which democracy does not extend. The capitalist
Speaker 1: firm or its state owned equivalent remained the absolute dictatorship
Speaker 1: of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive
Speaker 1: wings of the pro democracy movements in Taiwan and South
Speaker 1: Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights
Speaker 1: under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to
Speaker 1: the welfare state, limited protections from the worst physical and
Speaker 1: psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how
Speaker 1: progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship
Speaker 1: of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them,
Speaker 1: democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The
Speaker 1: workers of Tianmen alone disagreed. They stood against not only
Speaker 1: the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but the
Speaker 1: tide of history itself. By applying the principles of the
Speaker 1: pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt,
Speaker 1: rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression,
Speaker 1: Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten
Speaker 1: traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers' self management. This is,
Speaker 1: to a large extent, what Tianmen was actually about. It
Speaker 1: was the culmination of a century and a half long
Speaker 1: war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement
Speaker 1: and essentially every other ideological movement on Earth. The workers's
Speaker 1: movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies
Speaker 1: and republics, social democracies and theocracies, and at Tienemen they
Speaker 1: would lose one final time. That defeat is the origin
Speaker 1: of the modern world. One man rule in the factory,
Speaker 1: in its thousand thousand forms is the author of the
Speaker 1: hell of the twenty first century. And when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to look at the international part of the
Speaker 1: struggle that ended at Tienemen. To fully understand the magnitude
Speaker 1: of Tianemen, we need to go back to the revolutions
Speaker 1: of eighteen forty eight. If you want a detailed accounting
Speaker 1: of eighteen forty eight, go listen to the Revolutions podcast.
Speaker 1: It's great. It's also many many, many, many, many many episodes.
Speaker 1: The short version is that there were a bunch of
Speaker 1: revolutions across Europe in a eighteen forty eight, collectively known
Speaker 1: as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was the first
Speaker 1: wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction.
Speaker 1: Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and Engels fame
Speaker 1: was on the barricades with a rifle fighting in Prussia.
Speaker 1: There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed
Speaker 1: the king, and the question of how far democracy was
Speaker 1: going to go came for the first time to the forefront.
Speaker 1: Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split
Speaker 1: between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original
Speaker 1: French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but dictatorship in the workplace,
Speaker 1: and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations
Speaker 1: and the question of class itself, and most importantly for
Speaker 1: our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere
Speaker 1: and directly into economics. This prefigure is a split inside
Speaker 1: the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control
Speaker 1: over them that means of production meant that workers would
Speaker 1: control the production process directly through free associations of workers
Speaker 1: direct democratic unions, a position later known as cynicalism or
Speaker 1: workers councils, but more conservative factions of the socialists became
Speaker 1: enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. They watched
Speaker 1: with envy as the industrializing powers of the eighteen sixties
Speaker 1: and eighteen seventies engaged in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, first
Speaker 1: of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities with
Speaker 1: complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began
Speaker 1: to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association
Speaker 1: of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative
Speaker 1: commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed faction began to
Speaker 1: encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home
Speaker 1: to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided
Speaker 1: between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who
Speaker 1: renounced Marxism and revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism
Speaker 1: in the state from within, and Karlo Okotski's orthodox Marxists. Basically,
Speaker 1: the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other,
Speaker 1: agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over
Speaker 1: workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously
Speaker 1: working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its
Speaker 1: own workers, but were still The person who became most
Speaker 1: obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one
Speaker 1: Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out,
Speaker 1: Lenin's obsession with the German postal Service was such that
Speaker 1: he included this passage about the future socialist state in
Speaker 1: his famous State and Revolution, a text written between the
Speaker 1: February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German
Speaker 1: social democrat of the seventies of the last century called
Speaker 1: the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.
Speaker 1: This is very true. At present. The postal service is
Speaker 1: a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.
Speaker 1: Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a
Speaker 1: similar type, to organize the whole national economy on the
Speaker 1: lines of the postal service, so that technicians, foreman, bookkeepers,
Speaker 1: as well as all officials to receive salaries no higher
Speaker 1: than a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control
Speaker 1: of the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's
Speaker 1: idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of
Speaker 1: a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy.
Speaker 1: This would set off a massive series of confrontations with
Speaker 1: the part of the workers movement who wanted workers control
Speaker 1: over the means of production to mean workers making decisions
Speaker 1: overworked themselves and not just working for a different set
Speaker 1: of bureaucrats. The struggle bureaucracy and democracy in the workers
Speaker 1: movement mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the
Speaker 1: capitalist state. By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had
Speaker 1: created variable states within a state in countries like Germany
Speaker 1: and Italy. These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions,
Speaker 1: ranging from as Grape had described, free schools, workers associations,
Speaker 1: friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops,
Speaker 1: neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties,
Speaker 1: ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to
Speaker 1: workers and their families, and served so the workers hoped,
Speaker 1: as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the
Speaker 1: popularity of these democratic workers institutions, Otto von Bismarck created
Speaker 1: bureaucratic state run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare
Speaker 1: services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote, my
Speaker 1: idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say,
Speaker 1: to win them over, to regard the state as a
Speaker 1: social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
Speaker 1: And this works. It was enormously successful. Socialists themselves came
Speaker 1: to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself, and
Speaker 1: when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of
Speaker 1: many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the
Speaker 1: older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had forgotten
Speaker 1: the democratic core of the Rowan ideology, workers themselves never did.
Speaker 1: As the nineteenth century drew to a close and the
Speaker 1: twentieth century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively
Speaker 1: began to form democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils. The most
Speaker 1: famous of these councils, of course, were formed in the
Speaker 1: spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh five. In nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: these councils, called soviets, were originally formed in nineteen oh five,
Speaker 1: out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected
Speaker 1: bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to
Speaker 1: coordinate the general strike. The revolution of nineteen oh five
Speaker 1: was crushed by the Czar, but in nineteen seventeen, the
Speaker 1: Russian working class would once again form workers councils as
Speaker 1: another revolution commenced. This time, the councils would take control
Speaker 1: of production, directly coordinating between various factories and industries, as
Speaker 1: well as serving as a worker's counterpower to the new
Speaker 1: revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of
Speaker 1: open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the
Speaker 1: forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed
Speaker 1: anti democratic alliance of social Democrats, Bolsheviks, capitalists. Between nineteen
Speaker 1: seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine,
Speaker 1: and Ireland and were matched by revolts of syndicalus unions
Speaker 1: in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings wereal crushed in Italy,
Speaker 1: which saw some of the most intense conflict been synicalists
Speaker 1: and the Italian state. The famous occupation of the factories
Speaker 1: was ended not by the Italian government but by the
Speaker 1: Italian Socialist Party in their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This,
Speaker 1: in large part was how fascism won in Italy and
Speaker 1: in Germany. Faced with workers movements on the verge of
Speaker 1: seizing power, social democrats turned on the working class slaughtered
Speaker 1: their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically,
Speaker 1: the worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come
Speaker 1: not at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats,
Speaker 1: but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at
Speaker 1: the workers' councils had put in power. Lenin began to
Speaker 1: undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere
Speaker 1: days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers'
Speaker 1: Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and
Speaker 1: authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated
Speaker 1: trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance
Speaker 1: from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be
Speaker 1: modified before they could be implemented, but while publicly declaring
Speaker 1: his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was
Speaker 1: after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to
Speaker 1: trip away at their power until he finally admitted his
Speaker 1: real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen
Speaker 1: in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government quote,
Speaker 1: unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for
Speaker 1: the success of labor processes that are based on large
Speaker 1: scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands, in the interests
Speaker 1: of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will
Speaker 1: of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously
Speaker 1: one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. But
Speaker 1: to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what
Speaker 1: one man rule in the factory actually entails, the system
Speaker 1: he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule and
Speaker 1: any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would
Speaker 1: be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even fascist rule.
Speaker 1: The movement for Democracy in the Factory now faced four
Speaker 1: implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to
Speaker 1: ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly, and
Speaker 1: as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties, the
Speaker 1: movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a haale
Speaker 1: of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode,
Speaker 1: our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will
Speaker 1: be back. They will do many, many more revolutions, and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what
Speaker 1: the ruling class did to stop them. And then returned
Speaker 1: to the lead up to Tianneman Square to see the
Speaker 1: final stand of the Chinese working class. Welcome to seek
Speaker 1: it happened here. I'm your host, Miya Wong. When we
Speaker 1: last left the story of Tieneman One, Vladimir Ilias Lenin
Speaker 1: had in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction
Speaker 1: of the workers movement that actually wanted democracy to extend
Speaker 1: into the factories. Unfortunately, for the Leninists, no matter how
Speaker 1: many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the
Speaker 1: factory simply refused to die for over one hundred years.
Speaker 1: The development of the mass factory system and the logistical
Speaker 1: infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly, coal mines
Speaker 1: and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an
Speaker 1: especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the
Speaker 1: workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically. As
Speaker 1: the Journal and Notes pointed out, this manifested in a
Speaker 1: series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working
Speaker 1: class and class society, all of which were necessary for
Speaker 1: the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest themselves in
Speaker 1: moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid
Speaker 1: technological expansions of the Second and third Industrial revolutions, workers
Speaker 1: came to see themselves as the creators of the new world.
Speaker 1: This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers movement.
Speaker 1: The producers of this new world should also be its inheritors. Thus,
Speaker 1: the goal of the workers movement was to take control
Speaker 1: of production in itself and manage it for the common
Speaker 1: benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs in and of
Speaker 1: themselves were not unique to the democratic wing of the
Speaker 1: workers movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement
Speaker 1: as a whole, and by this point the workers movement
Speaker 1: was extremely brought, stretching from social democratic trade unionists the
Speaker 1: intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the
Speaker 1: democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation
Speaker 1: of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to
Speaker 1: an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools.
Speaker 1: For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a
Speaker 1: product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working
Speaker 1: class would be found in its productive capacity, not in
Speaker 1: its innate humanity and creativity. Before the democratic wing of
Speaker 1: the workers movement, this solved nothing as long as the
Speaker 1: fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one man
Speaker 1: rule in the factory persisted. Changes and owners of structure
Speaker 1: and health benefits missed the entire point that degradation could
Speaker 1: only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the
Speaker 1: working class, by giving it the class itself control over
Speaker 1: the production process that for so long had controlled them.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty six, Spanish workers decided to take matters
Speaker 1: into their own hands and seized control over their workplace's
Speaker 1: end mass. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known,
Speaker 1: would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic
Speaker 1: worker self management before or since. Everything from public utilities
Speaker 1: to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the
Speaker 1: control of the direct democratic unions, and once the former
Speaker 1: bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set
Speaker 1: about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines,
Speaker 1: pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically the benefit
Speaker 1: of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in
Speaker 1: democratic self management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically,
Speaker 1: social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by
Speaker 1: their own self organization developed a universal health care system
Speaker 1: that dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was
Speaker 1: previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst a violent
Speaker 1: civil war in Spain and under the guise of an
Speaker 1: anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist forces brutally stamped
Speaker 1: out any attempt at democratic self management and returned the
Speaker 1: factories to their owners, before losing the war to the
Speaker 1: fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty
Speaker 1: tolls of promannagerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers' councils and
Speaker 1: mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. Hungary, in particular is an interesting revolution because
Speaker 1: over the years it has been subjected to so much
Speaker 1: of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tienemen, but
Speaker 1: this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as
Speaker 1: a liberal democratic revolution. But if you talk to the
Speaker 1: actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like,
Speaker 1: and this is a direct quote from a member of
Speaker 1: a Hungarian workers council quote, the time when the boss
Speaker 1: decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply
Speaker 1: instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their
Speaker 1: factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and overthrew the government
Speaker 1: before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal
Speaker 1: democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across
Speaker 1: the capitalist world as well, in Italy, in France and Chile,
Speaker 1: communes broke out and colonized Vietnam. They spread everywhere, and
Speaker 1: to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike. The development
Speaker 1: and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts
Speaker 1: provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places
Speaker 1: without established workers movements and the political education effects typical
Speaker 1: of such movements. Was the course of the revolution in Algeria.
Speaker 1: The political education Algerian workers had received was from the
Speaker 1: nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front f l N, which had
Speaker 1: prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The Afalen's ideology
Speaker 1: emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development.
Speaker 1: Upon taking power, however, Ahmed BenBella, Algeria's first president, discovered
Speaker 1: the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already
Speaker 1: been answered for him. Production would be managed by democratic
Speaker 1: workers councils built on the properties seized by Algerian workers
Speaker 1: after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the
Speaker 1: country following independence, left much of their property uninhabited. Then,
Speaker 1: Bello's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and
Speaker 1: publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them. But the
Speaker 1: whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two
Speaker 1: years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one
Speaker 1: man rule in the factory. Still, even by the late seventies,
Speaker 1: it was by no means clear that one man rule
Speaker 1: in the factory would triumph as a political system. Workers
Speaker 1: and students almost took Italy in nineteen seventy seven, and
Speaker 1: the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much
Speaker 1: of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco.
Speaker 1: For a brief fleeting moment in the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: it really looked like they were going to do it.
Speaker 1: The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure
Speaker 1: military repression caused capitalist managery elites to look for ways
Speaker 1: to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts
Speaker 1: without giving up their power. As author and friend of
Speaker 1: the show, Viciostre Wild points out, the instinctive embrace of
Speaker 1: democracy in the factory was only possible so long as
Speaker 1: the factory remained a point of encounter, a kind of
Speaker 1: dark agra that at once both exploited workers and facilitated
Speaker 1: the interactions allowed them to identify with each other as
Speaker 1: a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the
Speaker 1: fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self management would
Speaker 1: take the form of an attack on the shop floor
Speaker 1: as a site of collective identity formation and as a
Speaker 1: space that could be seen in any way as liberatory.
Speaker 1: This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself,
Speaker 1: as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban
Speaker 1: centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from
Speaker 1: each other and turned to homeowners bought off with the
Speaker 1: combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new
Speaker 1: homes would also function as assets.
Speaker 4: The quote unquote.
Speaker 1: Democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory, as
Speaker 1: the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market,
Speaker 1: thus tying remained of organized labor to the fates of
Speaker 1: capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an
Speaker 1: immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to
Speaker 1: promote identification with the corporation itself and not the working
Speaker 1: class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of
Speaker 1: capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics,
Speaker 1: networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a
Speaker 1: world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand,
Speaker 1: capitalists could simply move elsewhere As the total size of
Speaker 1: the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option
Speaker 1: in the left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional
Speaker 1: workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement,
Speaker 1: But in order for the anti democratic counter revolution to succeed,
Speaker 1: it needed somewhere to move their production to somewhere with
Speaker 1: a large, exploitable labor supply. The capitalist class found that
Speaker 1: answer in China in the wake of the CCP's victory
Speaker 1: in the Chinese Civil War in nineteen forty nine. The
Speaker 1: Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that
Speaker 1: existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state owned firms
Speaker 1: virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social
Speaker 1: sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything
Speaker 1: from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food to
Speaker 1: often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece rate system,
Speaker 1: a system in which people were paid per unit they produced,
Speaker 1: which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant
Speaker 1: that in order to get people to work, bosses had
Speaker 1: very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a
Speaker 1: degree of participant patient in the labor process and the
Speaker 1: ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible
Speaker 1: to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this
Speaker 1: problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic,
Speaker 1: semi democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that,
Speaker 1: while raked by the party, ensured that managers would at
Speaker 1: least be somewhat popular. Till the process was strictly managed,
Speaker 1: workers had the ability to criticize the cadra to govern them,
Speaker 1: and combine the work unit's system of folding home and
Speaker 1: social life into the factory system. The product of this
Speaker 1: system was that because there was already a greater degree
Speaker 1: of workers' participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and
Speaker 1: because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands
Speaker 1: for democracy became delinked from the workplace, and it meant
Speaker 1: that the system, at least in the cities worked sort
Speaker 1: of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it
Speaker 1: is time for me to do the culture revolution. Rant
Speaker 1: everyone gets the Culture Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets
Speaker 1: of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood,
Speaker 1: the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds.
Speaker 1: These people were heavily persecuted. And you can make arguments
Speaker 1: about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch
Speaker 1: collaborates with the Japanese imperialists. But this extends to the
Speaker 1: children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and
Speaker 1: that term is extremely loose. I know people whose families
Speaker 1: were declared of black class background, who had quote unquote
Speaker 1: black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because
Speaker 1: her family had made bird feeders before the revolution. It
Speaker 1: was as a system, absolutely nonsense. So what the early
Speaker 1: phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch
Speaker 1: of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new
Speaker 1: system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted
Speaker 1: for stuff that was literally not their fault at all.
Speaker 1: They had no way to control who their parents were now.
Speaker 1: The initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven
Speaker 1: by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party,
Speaker 1: but as things became more and more chaotic and the
Speaker 1: attacks on CCP, Bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled
Speaker 1: nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called
Speaker 1: the January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai
Speaker 1: and drove out the CCP, and this caused what I
Speaker 1: would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now,
Speaker 1: despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had
Speaker 1: to actually deal with a workers controlled city. And I
Speaker 1: found this incredible line from Joe and Lai in a
Speaker 1: meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out
Speaker 1: what to do with this new revolutionary Shanghai quote. When
Speaker 1: asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the
Speaker 1: bottom up, Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism
Speaker 1: is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election
Speaker 1: at the Paris Commune style. And this was obviously a
Speaker 1: problem for now because there was no way for the
Speaker 1: party to maintain its long term control if you know,
Speaker 1: you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of
Speaker 1: the Paris Commium. And so instead we saw a full
Speaker 1: on counter revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers
Speaker 1: and students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the
Speaker 1: stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards,
Speaker 1: was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the
Speaker 1: cultural revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a
Speaker 1: significant amount of time studying the actual death records city
Speaker 1: by city and province by province in the Chinese Archives quote,
Speaker 1: more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local
Speaker 1: annals are due to the actions of authorities in this
Speaker 1: third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted
Speaker 1: for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: onward is to the people, and the culture revolution gets killed.
Speaker 1: And this is the opposite of the way that the
Speaker 1: Culture Revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the
Speaker 1: product of student radicalism gone out of control. It was
Speaker 1: the state slaughtering its way through various rebel factions that
Speaker 1: did most of the killing and the political persecution. And
Speaker 1: this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history. It creates
Speaker 1: a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even
Speaker 1: smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most
Speaker 1: radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state.
Speaker 1: And by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics in China
Speaker 1: that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control
Speaker 1: of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face
Speaker 1: of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more
Speaker 1: intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the working
Speaker 1: class entirely, as danzhel ping unleashed the horrific one child
Speaker 1: policy and in draconian an ultimately successful attempt to established
Speaker 1: the state's patriarchal control over the household and stripped hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they
Speaker 1: had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution. But the beginning
Speaker 1: of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state,
Speaker 1: and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic
Speaker 1: changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg. By
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers' movement globally was on
Speaker 1: its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it
Speaker 1: latched onto a series of other social and political movements,
Speaker 1: most notably pro democracy movement in China. But democratic self
Speaker 1: management and its critique of one man rule in the
Speaker 1: factory was utterly alien to the pro democracy movement, which
Speaker 1: meant that its development by the workers of Ganemen was
Speaker 1: a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of
Speaker 1: democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that
Speaker 1: would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations to the workers' movement.
Speaker 1: One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in
Speaker 1: the factory. Why do a lot of workers agree with
Speaker 1: democracy and freedom in the workshop? Does what the workers
Speaker 1: say count or what the leader says. We later talked
Speaker 1: about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator.
Speaker 1: What one man says goes. If you view the state
Speaker 1: through the factory, it's about the same one man rule.
Speaker 1: Our objective was not very high. We just wanted workers
Speaker 1: to have their own independent organization in work units. It's
Speaker 1: personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs,
Speaker 1: the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought
Speaker 1: to go home at five, but he tells me to
Speaker 1: work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll
Speaker 1: cut my bonuses. This is personal rule. A factory should
Speaker 1: have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs,
Speaker 1: they ought to have a system of rules decided how
Speaker 1: to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon
Speaker 1: by everyone, and then afterwards anyone who violent and we
Speaker 1: punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't have this kind of legal system.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: This is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical
Speaker 1: critique of one man rule in the factory couched in
Speaker 1: the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law. But
Speaker 1: any attempt to actually implement this system, that which workers
Speaker 1: controlled the factories they work in, how long they work,
Speaker 1: and what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization,
Speaker 1: could only end in democratic, self managed workplaces. As Walder
Speaker 1: and jang If pointed out, the workers at the Beijing
Speaker 1: Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or
Speaker 1: no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles.
Speaker 1: This was as pure a workers we've met as any
Speaker 1: in Chinese history, and for one final time, the instinct
Speaker 1: of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory.
Speaker 1: This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the
Speaker 1: army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class
Speaker 1: wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy
Speaker 1: in the factory would be scrubbed from the records that
Speaker 1: the CCP and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring
Speaker 1: the meaning of the events would be lost. What then
Speaker 1: was Tianemen In some sense, it was a transition point
Speaker 1: between two different Chinese working classes. The protests were the
Speaker 1: high water mark of the political mobilization of the old
Speaker 1: industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tienemen mounted
Speaker 1: the final attack of the classical workers movement. Their defeat
Speaker 1: ended the old working class as a political force, and
Speaker 1: they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructure of the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, which crushed the last vestides of workers' autonomy
Speaker 1: in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese
Speaker 1: welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class
Speaker 1: drawn from the rural and semi urban under classes of
Speaker 1: the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities
Speaker 1: to fill the ranks of the two hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: seven million migrant works that today comprise the background of
Speaker 1: China's working class. This new working class, with rural household
Speaker 1: registration in no way into the remaining state owned factories,
Speaker 1: would have none of the benefits of the previous one.
Speaker 1: It would instead face a full raft of capitalist ideology
Speaker 1: baked into every aspect of workplace culture, and a massive
Speaker 1: attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class
Speaker 1: could at least pausit a democratic form of the factory
Speaker 1: to which life could be improved. This new working class's
Speaker 1: greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become
Speaker 1: a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to
Speaker 1: be a temporarily embarrassed petie bourgeoisie. Such ideological selfconceptions are
Speaker 1: inimical to the formation of the classical workers movement, and
Speaker 1: indeed the new Chinese working class has largely failed to
Speaker 1: find the collective identity in the workplace. The situation is
Speaker 1: not unique. The death of the classical workers movement has
Speaker 1: seen the collapse of their demands democratic self management everywhere
Speaker 1: in the face of a working class it refuses to
Speaker 1: cohere itself in the factory. China was just late to
Speaker 1: the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economic
Speaker 1: system has lurned from crisis to crisis for the better
Speaker 1: part of my lifetime, setting off in its wake an
Speaker 1: increasing number of revolutions, even as the darker gore of
Speaker 1: the factory ceased to function as a place to form
Speaker 1: identities for this new working class. If a collective identity
Speaker 1: couldnot be forged in the factory, it would be foraged
Speaker 1: in the street instead, lacking a positive identity to cohere
Speaker 1: itself around workers were only able to mobilize on a
Speaker 1: mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens
Speaker 1: it on a cross sectoral basis. The state, with its
Speaker 1: ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash
Speaker 1: welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant
Speaker 1: fights against the police became the sole basis for new
Speaker 1: collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form
Speaker 1: of mass street movements in almost continuous confrontations with the states.
Speaker 1: Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the
Speaker 1: squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced
Speaker 1: by running fights with the police. But this placed the
Speaker 1: new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without the leverage against
Speaker 1: the state the classical workers movement's control over the workplace,
Speaker 1: provided they lack the ability to bring down a government
Speaker 1: firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over
Speaker 1: the last five or six years to carry out general
Speaker 1: strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong and Sudan were
Speaker 1: as Mela Testa predicted in the early twenties, easily defeated
Speaker 1: without the accompanying factory occupations, but with current labor conditions
Speaker 1: exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations. The
Speaker 1: way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce
Speaker 1: democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is
Speaker 1: the greatest legacy of tienemen The workers who assembled outside
Speaker 1: Tieneman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that
Speaker 1: they spoke the language of the old workers movement, they
Speaker 1: stood and fought and died like we do in the streets.
Speaker 1: They were the bridge between the world of the workers
Speaker 1: movements and the world we live in today, and thus
Speaker 1: faced the same revolutionary crisis we face today, the crisis
Speaker 1: of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia and Iran, of Mien
Speaker 1: Maar in Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon
Speaker 1: that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped. The workers of tienemen I, suspect,
Speaker 1: have no answers to give us now, But expecting answers
Speaker 1: from the dead is demanding too much of those past
Speaker 1: and present who died fighting for liberation. All we can
Speaker 1: do now is find our own way, and, with the
Speaker 1: names of the dead on our lips, build the world
Speaker 1: they died fighting for.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where
Speaker 2: anti British discrimination is a way of life?
Speaker 4: James, are we.
Speaker 2: Allowed to say that? Do you remember the training? I
Speaker 2: haven't done yet.
Speaker 4: I was giving that training my full attention throughout the
Speaker 4: duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's
Speaker 4: good various employees for the last half decade or so,
Speaker 4: there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination.
Speaker 4: Yet again, another example victimized.
Speaker 1: Last time I took that training, there was a straight
Speaker 1: up anti Asian racism in it that they didn't address
Speaker 1: at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti
Speaker 1: British racism was fine, like some shit in those videos.
Speaker 4: Which is wild. Okay, there you go. I think that's
Speaker 4: a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her
Speaker 4: wrong in the in the in the video. See I am.
Speaker 3: I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get
Speaker 3: a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's
Speaker 3: it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor
Speaker 3: keeps you from the full might of my wrath frankly
Speaker 3: the greatest.
Speaker 4: There we go. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
Speaker 3: I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stub
Speaker 3: and Robert Evans. This episode we are talking about babies.
Speaker 3: Should there be more?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Hm, we're on a pro natalist kick.
Speaker 2: We're going to have that off putting couple who look
Speaker 2: like vampires but like not any of the good kinds
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 4: Very excited to have those people on. They seem nice.
Speaker 2: But before we do that, we all decided maybe we
Speaker 2: should talk about other pro natalist policies in world history
Speaker 2: and how well they've worked generally.
Speaker 3: We're going to start by talking about what the US
Speaker 3: policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy,
Speaker 3: and then we will discuss how those policies went historically. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so like to start with Trumps. Besides one executive order
Speaker 3: in February supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to
Speaker 3: tackle pro natalist concerns on the policy front, but a
Speaker 3: collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers are vying for the
Speaker 3: president's ear while proposing a multitude of plans to grow
Speaker 3: the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth. The pronatalists
Speaker 3: certainly think that the new administration is at the very
Speaker 3: least ideologically sympathetic, if not in cahoots with their agenda.
Speaker 3: The main inns on the pronatalist front have come from
Speaker 3: the Peter Thiel tech right wing of the White House Right.
Speaker 3: This is like JD. Vance and previously Elon Musk yep.
Speaker 3: Musk has been doom posting for years about how a
Speaker 3: drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large
Speaker 3: scale population collapse, and at an anti abortion rally this
Speaker 3: past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying quote, I want
Speaker 3: more babies in the United States of America. I want
Speaker 3: more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful
Speaker 3: young men and women who are eager to welcome them
Speaker 3: into the world and eager to raise them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you got to like whatever you're listening to
Speaker 1: one of these things. You got to like have a
Speaker 1: little parenthesis anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little
Speaker 1: parentheses there that says white this is this is real
Speaker 1: Nazi shit.
Speaker 3: Like a lot of the stuff that is certainly like
Speaker 3: based on like like great replacement rhetoric that the alt right,
Speaker 3: like Trojan Horst and like pushed forward in like twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: which is now so widely normalized thanks to. I mean, really,
Speaker 3: Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great
Speaker 3: replacement stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Tucker calls into Carlson of course, well, and mus
Speaker 6: Musk's family goes into this, right, like this is the
Speaker 6: kind of thing like his grandparents where were involved in,
Speaker 6: Like it was a little bit less of like the
Speaker 6: standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused
Speaker 6: on like we need to be breeding high IQ white
Speaker 6: people together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you change, but like that that is that is
Speaker 2: what he inherits. He comes by it, honestly, I guess
Speaker 2: you could say.
Speaker 3: Well, and oftentimes pinatal stretoric is also tied in with
Speaker 3: like the tradwife and like loss of traditional family structure
Speaker 3: type stuff.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred
Speaker 3: to our quote unquote broken culture that tax masculinity and
Speaker 3: turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.
Speaker 4: Hey shout out. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've also started referring to women with kids as catless
Speaker 2: child ladies as a result.
Speaker 3: Of this.
Speaker 4: Reactions, I don't know people very negatively.
Speaker 3: A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women
Speaker 3: in the workplace who are not getting married and raising
Speaker 3: kids at home.
Speaker 4: From an early enough age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and some of this writer are cavs rubbed off
Speaker 3: on Trump right, and Trump at Seapack in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: he said, quote, we will support baby booms, and we
Speaker 3: will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.
Speaker 4: I want a baby boom. Cool.
Speaker 3: Trump has floated a five thousand dollars cash quote unquote
Speaker 3: baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling
Speaker 3: this proposal a good idea.
Speaker 2: Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I'm sure that's enough.
Speaker 2: Not quite three months at a lot of pre schools, like,
Speaker 2: not even great pre schools. It's very preschools unbelievably expensive.
Speaker 3: The actual cause, like of a declining birth rate, is
Speaker 3: due to skyrocketing cost of living, so people aren't financially
Speaker 3: stable to have kids in their early twenties anymore, so
Speaker 3: instead they're waiting until their thirties.
Speaker 4: That's part of it at least.
Speaker 3: Yes, if you want people to have kids more, you
Speaker 3: should make the world more affordable. And a five thousand
Speaker 3: dollars baby bonus doesn't actually solve the key issues that
Speaker 3: would cause people to be a worried about, you know,
Speaker 3: trying to like get buried and have kids at a
Speaker 3: young age in a world where that seems kind of
Speaker 3: like unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily, Trump does have a few
Speaker 3: other ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The
Speaker 3: new big, beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House
Speaker 3: will create quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids.
Speaker 3: And here Mega stands for money accounts for growth and
Speaker 3: in for growth and advancement.
Speaker 4: Just fucking stop stop it.
Speaker 3: So when parents are guardians open a new Mega savings
Speaker 3: account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one
Speaker 3: thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 4: That that'll help, great, great. I believe California also does it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: California have something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program,
Speaker 4: which already gives children up to one thousand dollars. And
Speaker 4: I think it's like a college savings account from what
Speaker 4: I understand, Yeah, that's pretty much what this is.
Speaker 3: Although specifically in the for the Magia account, it also
Speaker 3: lists home ownership. Oh cool, because this is like a
Speaker 3: big this is a big part of this pronatalist thing
Speaker 3: is you need to own a home, getting a straight marriage,
Speaker 3: start having kids in your early twenty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly
Speaker 4: like we understand. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The big beautiful bludget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're
Speaker 3: going to plan parent.
Speaker 4: Hut great yeah, let me tell you. One thousand American dollars,
Speaker 4: even with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to
Speaker 4: buy you a home anywhere in the United States.
Speaker 3: Now, the Heritage Foundation's Devasit Center for Life, Religion, and
Speaker 3: Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the
Speaker 3: child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.
Speaker 3: This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three by Republican Representative Brian Slayton of Texas,
Speaker 3: who proposed increasing proper tax cuts for married heterosexual couples
Speaker 3: who have never been divorced and have four or more
Speaker 3: children starting after marriage.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of caveats.
Speaker 2: There, Jesus Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this is
Speaker 2: are we taking issue with this?
Speaker 4: That is some Yeah, this is part of my British
Speaker 4: charity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes
Speaker 4: could get divorced. It is it is. Yeah, it is
Speaker 4: a bill of rights for British guys.
Speaker 3: Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there
Speaker 3: so that you can have your little like tread Christian family.
Speaker 3: But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten
Speaker 3: kids would equal no property taxes at all.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is property tax. You also have to own
Speaker 4: the property to begin with to be paying property tax.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all of these all these people want you to
Speaker 3: be like homeowners with a stay at home life.
Speaker 4: Is like, this is what they want, but they don't
Speaker 4: want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership successible.
Speaker 3: No, this is just like self selecting for like well
Speaker 3: off white Christians, right.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, yeah, hundred percent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Slaton said in a statement quote, with this bill,
Speaker 3: Texas will start saying to couples, get married, stay married,
Speaker 3: and be fruitful and multiply unquote.
Speaker 4: For fuck's sake, it's a disaster.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this
Speaker 1: stuff is too is it's there. This is their sort
Speaker 1: of flailing reaction to like one of the things that
Speaker 1: actually drives like declining birthrates, which is not having teen
Speaker 1: pregnancies like significantly decreases birthrates because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: It turns out a huge part of like white birthrate
Speaker 1: is so high is just direct social coercion. And if
Speaker 1: you stop having that or like you know, the amount
Speaker 1: of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are
Speaker 1: gonna to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies
Speaker 1: like and you know, and so they're trying to do
Speaker 1: all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort
Speaker 1: of like deal with the fact that if you don't
Speaker 1: force people to have children as teenagers, they.
Speaker 2: Who yeah, because life they quickly realized there's things in life,
Speaker 2: like you know, drugs and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll go back to the club.
Speaker 3: In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertilization President.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, and the White House is expected to
Speaker 3: soon release a report on how to expand access and
Speaker 3: affordability of IVF. Now this is where things get sticky
Speaker 3: insert pun. There is hot debate amongst advisors and think
Speaker 3: tanks on the religious ethics of IVF.
Speaker 4: Right, there's no real.
Speaker 3: Consensus among the pronatals voices who are lobbying Trump. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this sort of breaks down into like the new tech
Speaker 3: right versus the more religious Christian family sector of conservatism,
Speaker 3: and Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this,
Speaker 3: but these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage,
Speaker 3: the Heritage Fundation recommends a program use government funds for
Speaker 3: education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women how
Speaker 3: to track their mental cycles using charting courses to both
Speaker 3: help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose
Speaker 3: that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote unquote
Speaker 3: natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage proposed
Speaker 3: to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a
Speaker 3: holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote horn balancing,
Speaker 3: dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those
Speaker 2: some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.
Speaker 2: That's what you get to take. It's a holistic approach
Speaker 2: to you get some raw milk, put a bunch of
Speaker 2: random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated
Speaker 2: supplement company.
Speaker 3: Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying
Speaker 3: causes of infertility as well as you know, out of
Speaker 3: concern for embryo personhood rights for fuck sake, So they
Speaker 3: advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make
Speaker 3: the production of embryo spares.
Speaker 1: Illegal embryo adoption.
Speaker 4: They believe that these are like full like people.
Speaker 3: Now on the other side of the you know, pro natalist, right,
Speaker 3: you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned.
Speaker 3: Simone Collins, a pro natalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate.
Speaker 2: She could still pull it off. Stay in line if
Speaker 2: your vote hasn't been counted.
Speaker 3: People her and her husband are self described quote unquote
Speaker 3: techno Puritans, and she.
Speaker 4: Is the talking super shit.
Speaker 1: Like what.
Speaker 4: God put these people on a boat and send it
Speaker 4: across the Atlantic, Like, can they get scurvy? Have they
Speaker 4: already got? They look a little bit like they may
Speaker 4: already have scurvy. To be fair, they do look like
Speaker 4: they have scurvy. Constantly they deprive them of lime juice
Speaker 4: and save the world from a fucking ground.
Speaker 2: Put him on the next starship and see how far
Speaker 2: up it gets.
Speaker 4: No, they won't get that. Let him try. I support
Speaker 4: the human spirit.
Speaker 3: Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive
Speaker 3: Peter Teele found in social club called a Dialogue Cool Now.
Speaker 3: She has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist,
Speaker 3: and has sent several draft pronadalist executive orders to the
Speaker 3: White House, one of which would award a quote unquote
Speaker 3: National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.
Speaker 4: This is some trijescu shit, Like, I know we're going
Speaker 4: to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims
Speaker 3: to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs,
Speaker 3: which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes,
Speaker 3: so they use IVF to specifically select embryos that they
Speaker 3: think are like naturally predisposed have more desirable traits, including
Speaker 3: high IQs. They have not discussed the exact method, That's
Speaker 3: why it's called special technology.
Speaker 4: They're looking for one with a big head or something,
Speaker 4: So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that
Speaker 4: far along the IVF.
Speaker 3: So that's always pretty fucked up and then I guess finally,
Speaker 3: one of the few things that actually has happened in
Speaker 3: advancement of this ideology was way back like in February,
Speaker 3: Trump's Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who is a father of
Speaker 3: nine and has ten siblings, sent out a memo directing
Speaker 3: his staff to prioritize transportation funds to quote give preference
Speaker 3: to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the
Speaker 3: national average unquote, which would, in ef fact, mean less
Speaker 3: money for urban public transit and instead send it towards
Speaker 3: like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have a higher marriage traits
Speaker 4: at least than like the national average. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 4: sure if.
Speaker 1: Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that.
Speaker 4: Though, No, neither of I that's kind That's what I'm meant,
Speaker 4: That's what I'm That's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel
Speaker 4: Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's
Speaker 4: his whole stick.
Speaker 3: If you look at the full memo, I think this
Speaker 3: is this is just like a dog whistle for like
Speaker 3: white Christians, like that is that is really what he's
Speaker 3: saying sick.
Speaker 4: Anyway, that is what I have for the current the
Speaker 4: current peroneals policies.
Speaker 3: We should go on and ad break and then return
Speaker 3: to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.
Speaker 4: M hmm.
Speaker 7: All right, we are back and we are spinning our globe,
Speaker 7: our big ball of pro natalism, and it is slowing
Speaker 7: down and is landed on Japan, where mir is going
Speaker 7: to explain pronatalist policy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I guess.
Speaker 1: I want to open on a kind of global thing
Speaker 1: which is a concern over like birth rates, for like
Speaker 1: fat just is a really old thing. I mean, it
Speaker 1: predates fascism. Like this is like like if you go
Speaker 1: to like the eighteen seventies, every single person is complaining
Speaker 1: about like, oh my god, the birth rate is the right. Well,
Speaker 1: the white race keeps declining and we're gonna get like
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by the Asiatic Chords. And then you go to
Speaker 1: like the Asiatic Chords and it's like Japan has been
Speaker 1: having the same fucking panic for literally so long. Like
Speaker 1: I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through
Speaker 1: newspaper archives and you just it's you're literally reading the
Speaker 1: same article over and over and over again, going back
Speaker 1: just decades and decades and decades, So like the first
Speaker 1: big modern freak out about birth rates is in like
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have the first big like
Speaker 1: japan birth rate.
Speaker 4: Declining freak out.
Speaker 1: This has been happening longer than like most of the
Speaker 1: people here have been alive.
Speaker 4: I can remember from like my child. It's just been like, oh,
Speaker 4: they're panicking about their birthrates again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So like the running thing with Japanese politics. So
Speaker 1: we're roughly doing these in order of life like most
Speaker 1: to least hinged in terms of like in terms of
Speaker 1: these like natalist policies, Japan I think has an interesting
Speaker 1: series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind
Speaker 1: of pro natalist Paul Walls if they have, they have
Speaker 1: political contradictions in their pro natalist politics and political contradictions
Speaker 1: in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a
Speaker 1: one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the
Speaker 1: one party. This is a party established by a World
Speaker 1: War two Nazi, but that means that they run all
Speaker 1: of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them.
Speaker 1: They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on
Speaker 1: the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is
Speaker 1: like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we
Speaker 1: can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs
Speaker 1: so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're
Speaker 1: going to promote this. And this is sort of one
Speaker 1: of the first places you see this huge intra intraclass
Speaker 1: conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to just
Speaker 1: like send every woman back to the household to raise children,
Speaker 1: and the business people who are like, no, you can't
Speaker 1: do that. We need to exploit these women's labor to
Speaker 1: like make money. And so the fight that starts to
Speaker 1: break out is this fight between like paying for childcare
Speaker 1: leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally that their
Speaker 1: plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the
Speaker 1: daycare stuff.
Speaker 4: That doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Like, none of these things they're going to do does
Speaker 1: jack shit, right.
Speaker 4: Like that's going to be a through line here. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: Like no, none of that stuff works.
Speaker 1: And so like like shinzo Abe, I think is the
Speaker 1: most famous person who spends much of time trying to
Speaker 1: deal with this and like again. So they have started
Speaker 1: worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzawabey rest
Speaker 1: and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to like
Speaker 1: cook something. Right, I'm gonna read this quote from the
Speaker 1: Archives of Clinical Pediatrics shortly after the formation of Abbe's
Speaker 1: second cabinet, the quote. Task Force for Overcoming Popular Relation
Speaker 1: Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three key strategies,
Speaker 1: supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage, pregnancy
Speaker 1: and childbirth. So you can do these are going to
Speaker 1: become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pro
Speaker 1: natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused on
Speaker 1: this sort of social push stuff to like promote the
Speaker 1: traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really
Speaker 1: worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is
Speaker 1: going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce
Speaker 1: the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see
Speaker 1: them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this,
Speaker 1: the one that's actually interesting is reforming work styles. So, like,
Speaker 1: part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone
Speaker 1: in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably
Speaker 1: staggering over work, right. I mean, it's one of these
Speaker 1: things that's like a persistent social crisis. It's that there's
Speaker 1: a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long
Speaker 1: everyone is working all the time. So Shinto Abbe's plan
Speaker 1: for this was to put into place a soft cap
Speaker 1: of you can only work one hundred hours a month
Speaker 1: of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right, Like one
Speaker 1: hundred hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like,
Speaker 1: you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.
Speaker 1: But this is again this problem that he's having, which
Speaker 1: is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe
Speaker 1: like people maybe would have more children if you weren't
Speaker 1: working literally all the time and you weren't just like being.
Speaker 4: Worked to death.
Speaker 1: But that's really bad for Japanese business. And like quote
Speaker 1: unquote Abbey NoMix, which is like Abe sort of you
Speaker 1: know economic plan like relies on maintaining this extremely high
Speaker 1: level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population.
Speaker 1: And it's also based on putting more women into the
Speaker 1: workforce to expand the size of the workforce, to know,
Speaker 1: extract more hours so they can all these people can
Speaker 1: make more money. Right. They were also supposed to do
Speaker 1: free preschool for all children, and this just like didn't happen,
Speaker 1: which over and over again they're like, we're gonna do
Speaker 1: these kind of like these these kind of like okay,
Speaker 1: we'll give we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit,
Speaker 1: but only in order to like have kids, and it
Speaker 1: just doesn't happen. And so you know, this is one
Speaker 1: of Abe's big initiatives. But by the time he's like
Speaker 1: assassinated in twenty twenty two, he what he was uh
Speaker 1: bye by time his political coalition was finally detonated, bye
Speaker 1: by one by one guy with an electric plunderbus.
Speaker 2: My favorite politics.
Speaker 1: Oh god, it's so good. It's so good. We have
Speaker 1: covered this extensively on the show. If you want to
Speaker 1: hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, including
Speaker 1: the day after Kissinger died, go find the episode I
Speaker 1: did right after shinz a wha.
Speaker 4: It was assassinated.
Speaker 2: The Holy Trinity of Great days on the internet. Is
Speaker 2: that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all
Speaker 2: those bills?
Speaker 4: Yes, oh it was amazing. Yeah, people said Biden gave
Speaker 4: us nothing. Bang is on the timeline. Mm hmmm, here
Speaker 4: you go.
Speaker 1: So all right, shinzowape successor is a guy named Fumio
Speaker 1: Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida every
Speaker 1: single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like
Speaker 1: somewhere between twenty and fifteen and twenty billion dollars on
Speaker 1: pronatalist policies and mostly doesn't happen, but Kishita promises that
Speaker 1: he is going to spend twenty four and a half
Speaker 1: billion dollars. A lot of this money is going to
Speaker 1: be just straight up like child allowance. So Japan has
Speaker 1: the system that they've been you know, they've been sort
Speaker 1: of implementing over the course of like all of these
Speaker 1: fucking reforms, which is just like all right, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna like hand you cash. It's still not enough money
Speaker 1: to like substantively change stuff. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different kinds of cash policies. They have cash transfer policies
Speaker 1: that are just straight up like okay, here, you had
Speaker 1: a baby we're gonna give you this amount per month.
Speaker 1: I think it's like ten to fifteen thousand yen which
Speaker 1: hold on, yeah, so it's like like seventy dollars a month,
Speaker 1: which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense
Speaker 1: date research on. They're supposed to have these like counselors
Speaker 1: that like come check in on you and like give
Speaker 1: you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like
Speaker 1: give you a whole bunch of basically like childcare equipment
Speaker 1: stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's
Speaker 1: supposed to come out to about like seven hundred dollars
Speaker 1: ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort
Speaker 1: of plan that they're doing. And then in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: Kishita is replaced by like some other dipshit who you know,
Speaker 1: if he lasts more than like two years, I guess
Speaker 1: I'll tell you his name. But he's you know, attempting
Speaker 1: to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right,
Speaker 1: which is his plan involves a bunch of things like
Speaker 1: childcare subsidy and very importantly like tuition free high school.
Speaker 1: So one of the continuous plans, if you like, if
Speaker 1: you go back to like what I was talking about
Speaker 1: with they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right,
Speaker 1: that never got implemented except in like the last two years,
Speaker 1: like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city,
Speaker 1: because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know,
Speaker 1: the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.
Speaker 4: Sure, I imagine custter living is also really high.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also
Speaker 1: just like you know, if you're working in an urban
Speaker 1: like an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous
Speaker 1: number of hours.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's also this these supposed to be these massive
Speaker 1: like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can
Speaker 1: see these kind of like this this this point where
Speaker 1: they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the
Speaker 1: sort of pro business like okay, fuck, it will pay
Speaker 1: for your child care and also we will raise taxes
Speaker 1: to like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And
Speaker 1: also they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this,
Speaker 1: but they're they're they're trying to set up a system
Speaker 1: where you can get full pay for couples who both
Speaker 1: take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right,
Speaker 1: They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll
Speaker 1: just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.
Speaker 1: They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying
Speaker 1: for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And
Speaker 1: none of this shit has done anything at all, right,
Speaker 1: like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and and and
Speaker 1: if you want to look at like, okay, so, like
Speaker 1: what what's sort of actually happening here?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: A lot some of it is just like over work.
Speaker 1: Some of it is just if people who can have
Speaker 1: children have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just
Speaker 1: decide not to. And so part of this is also
Speaker 1: just like and then this has been one of the
Speaker 1: social pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is
Speaker 1: they've been trying to get people to marry younger, because
Speaker 1: people are marrying later, and thus they are like, you know,
Speaker 1: they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and
Speaker 1: this is not working at all, right, But you can
Speaker 1: look at the series of structural contradictions in their political collision,
Speaker 1: and then you can look at the fact that like, again,
Speaker 1: one of the important ideological things here is that these
Speaker 1: people hate immigrants, right, and they don't.
Speaker 4: They don't want immigrants.
Speaker 1: They want they want like Japanese babies, and so this
Speaker 1: is kind of like if you look at like, Okay,
Speaker 1: why is not of this shit working?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: They're trying all these things to just avoid having more
Speaker 1: immigrants in the country, and none of it is fucking
Speaker 1: working at all. But you know, like, insofar as it's failing,
Speaker 1: it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're
Speaker 1: doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff, and it is
Speaker 1: going to get so much worse when every other country
Speaker 1: tries this.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool, Well you know what else is gonna get
Speaker 2: worse totally.
Speaker 4: The Products and Service says, it's simple of this show.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, all right, we're back.
Speaker 4: It's me And predictably, I suppose I am talking about
Speaker 4: Franco as Spain, so Franti's got Franco attempted to rebuild
Speaker 4: Spain after Civil War, both through explicit eugenics and through
Speaker 4: the nationalization of women's bodies, abortion and contraceptual bands. Abortion
Speaker 4: had been legal, Spain was one of the first countries
Speaker 4: to do that. Right when federally gon Monceni, anarchist minister
Speaker 4: made that legal minister of I guess public health that
Speaker 4: was made illegal. I think it didn't become legally again
Speaker 4: until about twenty ten. In Spain, abortion and and less
Speaker 4: it was like a serious health issue, elective abortion. I guess.
Speaker 4: Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence
Speaker 4: as or weapon, and we can see this as a
Speaker 4: kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right, yeah,
Speaker 4: who is a Francoist general? Right makes a speech in
Speaker 4: July nineteen thirty six, quote, Our valiant legionnaires and regulades
Speaker 4: have shown the red cowards what true men are. And
Speaker 4: they're women as well. This is totally justified because these
Speaker 4: communists and anarchists anarkate free love. At least now they
Speaker 4: will know what real men are, not the militia gaze.
Speaker 4: This is a translation that I'm reading to so people
Speaker 4: can go to the original document. But gays is not
Speaker 4: the word he used. A better translation would be a
Speaker 4: word that begins with f Yeah. Okay, yeah. They will
Speaker 4: not escape, however much. They kick their legs and scream
Speaker 4: like this is a general in their army making explicit
Speaker 4: rape threats. Right, They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the
Speaker 4: Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a
Speaker 4: Cecion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Radcliff
Speaker 4: is written extensively about this. The group very much served
Speaker 4: as kind of the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught
Speaker 4: women from a young age they were inferior and you
Speaker 4: get to men. They had to go through the organization's programs.
Speaker 4: To do anything, any engagement with the state, they had
Speaker 4: to first go through the women's section. Right. If they
Speaker 4: wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a
Speaker 4: driving license, if they wanted to engage with the world
Speaker 4: outside of their homes in any way, they had to
Speaker 4: go through this program, which indoctrinated them that their highest
Speaker 4: calling and only value was to have children. Women's role
Speaker 4: in the Francoist project then, was child bearing a child
Speaker 4: rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here in like
Speaker 4: quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology to justify
Speaker 4: women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology. Right. It's
Speaker 4: great to go to antiques markets in Spain because you
Speaker 4: could always buy like a phrenology head. You can acquire
Speaker 4: like an og one, you know, like better if you
Speaker 4: know the replace to let you could find some find
Speaker 4: the calipers. That's the dream.
Speaker 3: There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shocking hand sclasping me with francoism, and I found
Speaker 2: a lot of uses for those calibers.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenology skulls.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down Yeah.
Speaker 4: But I bet you, I bet you are replicas. I
Speaker 4: bet they're not like o G phrenology skulls.
Speaker 2: There's a market in France im to that just had
Speaker 2: a bunch of monks skulls, like real real, it seems fine.
Speaker 2: There was one that had been turned into a holder
Speaker 2: for a bible, like they'd cut like an L shaped
Speaker 2: cut in the skull of pretty cool. It was like
Speaker 2: three grand you make a courtesy for the Qoran. But
Speaker 2: but like this was a while ago, but seemed like
Speaker 2: a good prod.
Speaker 3: Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums.
Speaker 4: Yeah, using the discount code, it could happen here. You
Speaker 4: can get ten percent off the skull Bible holder, Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's right, Okay. So one of the things they did
Speaker 4: was to increasingly marginalized midwives and instead like have male
Speaker 4: doctors taking control of the child birthing pros because midwives
Speaker 4: would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't
Speaker 4: feel that women belonged to work outside the home. Right.
Speaker 4: A big part of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation
Speaker 4: of an Arco feminism that had been relatively important to
Speaker 4: the Spanish Revolution. Right, the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage
Speaker 4: and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right,
Speaker 4: So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,
Speaker 4: the unions took on the role they would assign women
Speaker 4: I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right, So,
Speaker 4: like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.
Speaker 4: Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union
Speaker 4: had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers
Speaker 4: or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position,
Speaker 4: so that in order to achieve more gender equality within
Speaker 4: that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated.
Speaker 4: It also had its own kind of unique take on
Speaker 4: eugenics that that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't
Speaker 4: really do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that
Speaker 4: doesn't really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw
Speaker 4: leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something
Speaker 4: of a pathogen that spread within society. Welcome mind virus.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's.
Speaker 3: Pulling from the same type of fascist right.
Speaker 4: It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at
Speaker 4: this time, so there was a very very small Jewish
Speaker 4: population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about
Speaker 4: Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et
Speaker 4: cetera as completely antithetical to spanishness, and of course they
Speaker 4: blame us for their national declient right something little fascists
Speaker 4: like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and proNT
Speaker 4: extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan. These
Speaker 4: children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when
Speaker 4: their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the
Speaker 4: parents had been killed. Sometimes it was when the mother
Speaker 4: had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's
Speaker 4: Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was a
Speaker 4: way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women who
Speaker 4: were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way
Speaker 4: to force any woman you want to into an institution.
Speaker 4: These children who were taken from their mothers were often
Speaker 4: trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns
Speaker 4: and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
Speaker 4: BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty
Speaker 4: three at the time and not long married, gave birth
Speaker 4: to what she was told with a healthy baby boy,
Speaker 4: but he was immediately taken away for what were called
Speaker 4: routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who
Speaker 4: was a nurse called in for me that my baby
Speaker 4: had died. She said they would not let her have
Speaker 4: her son's body, nor would they tell her when the
Speaker 4: funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far
Speaker 4: as to keep the body of a dead baby in
Speaker 4: a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers.
Speaker 4: They even dug grave for babies, but many of those
Speaker 4: grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These
Speaker 4: babies were then given or sold to other families and raised,
Speaker 4: and in some cases they lived their whole lives and
Speaker 4: died without ever knowing who their parents were. Right. I remember,
Speaker 4: like I was doing my PhD when the initial research
Speaker 4: into this was being done, And it is fucking horrible
Speaker 4: for people to find this out, right, like, because the
Speaker 4: people who were stolen from their families and in many
Speaker 4: cases are like still alive, right and in most cases
Speaker 4: their birth ctificately exists with say mother unknown. And that
Speaker 4: was a process that existed to protect women who have
Speaker 4: had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
Speaker 4: steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in
Speaker 4: twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who
Speaker 4: was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've
Speaker 4: linked it as an article. There was also like a
Speaker 4: I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where
Speaker 4: one of their reporters had recently had a baby so
Speaker 4: it was able to make an appointment with the obgyn
Speaker 4: who was stealing these babies, and when she confronted him,
Speaker 4: he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing it at her.
Speaker 4: In Jesus, the first incredible country. The reason that they
Speaker 4: did this right was because their fascism was of a
Speaker 4: unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that
Speaker 4: Franco wasn't fascist, you with something worse. They had what's
Speaker 4: called national Catholicism right, which prevented them from doing sterilization
Speaker 4: or abortion. So instead they felt that they could steal
Speaker 4: these children and sort of raise them outside of the
Speaker 4: leftist kind of pathogen.
Speaker 2: I do love just I'm working on the Salazar episodes
Speaker 2: right now. I love how often Iberians are like, we're
Speaker 2: gonna do fascism just but like we're gonna put some
Speaker 2: spins on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're
Speaker 2: gonna do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone,
Speaker 2: we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the
Speaker 2: fact that like that makes us the good colonizers because
Speaker 2: of all the sex assaults. We're not racist, guys, It's fine,
Speaker 2: We're communing.
Speaker 4: God. Iberia Baby Spain is different, as the slogan used
Speaker 4: to go m was a Francoist tourism slogan back in
Speaker 4: the day. Yeah, so the discourse, the quote true Catholic
Speaker 4: womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women. They were
Speaker 4: raised to serve the patia right, the fatherland, with their bodies,
Speaker 4: not their minds. In the Republic, Spain had used secular
Speaker 4: education to fight it's perceived in real backwardness compared to
Speaker 4: the rest of Europe, the Francoist predictive opposite. It returned
Speaker 4: for its inspiration to sixteenth century Catholic texts, and they
Speaker 4: saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a
Speaker 4: risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood.
Speaker 4: In terms of I guess birth rates like they did have.
Speaker 4: You have a post war baby boom rate. You have
Speaker 4: that everywhere that is affected by a large war, Like
Speaker 4: you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this, and
Speaker 4: then birth rates do go up until like the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly and Spain
Speaker 4: is once again in like a sort of not so
Speaker 4: much a birth rate panic. I didn't think, but it
Speaker 4: is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since
Speaker 4: the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates never more
Speaker 4: particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe
Speaker 4: because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to the economy, right,
Speaker 4: which made it harder for people to have more children.
Speaker 4: But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to
Speaker 4: read more on Ninio Strobados, I think there's a TV
Speaker 4: series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm sure you can
Speaker 4: find it wastitles. But someone made a documentary on this
Speaker 4: that was presented in academic conference I did, and if
Speaker 4: I find the link, I will put it in the
Speaker 4: show notes. Hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think it's time to talk about Romania now.
Speaker 2: When it comes to who is the worst at doing
Speaker 2: pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but I feel
Speaker 2: like we got the usane bolt of natalism right here,
Speaker 2: and it's s chi Jescu regime. So we got to
Speaker 2: peel back a little bit here and talk about you know,
Speaker 2: when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind
Speaker 2: of the end of forty seven, early nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: and in the first years of the communist regime, it
Speaker 2: brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all
Speaker 2: tended to bring in the post war period, obviously earlier
Speaker 2: for the USSR. And a lot of these are good actually, right,
Speaker 2: not to deny all the horrible things that were happening.
Speaker 2: But life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for
Speaker 2: a lot of women. This is true in Russia as well.
Speaker 2: Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises,
Speaker 2: And this happened across society, right. A lot of the
Speaker 2: poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right.
Speaker 2: And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically. Rates of
Speaker 2: accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases. And again,
Speaker 2: it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant
Speaker 2: for women.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: And this is all lovely, These are good things, right. However,
Speaker 2: it comes with a problem for a lot of the
Speaker 2: leaders And this is not just true in Romania, but
Speaker 2: we're talking about Romania here. It comes with the problem
Speaker 2: for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party,
Speaker 2: which is that one of the things we see in
Speaker 2: every society when people have more and are doing better
Speaker 2: and live longer, is that they start having less kids, because,
Speaker 2: among other things, all their kids aren't dying.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well,
Speaker 2: like the three of them might live, right, you know,
Speaker 2: I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up them
Speaker 2: and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right,
Speaker 2: And when that stops happening, women are like, well, maybe
Speaker 2: I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right, Like
Speaker 2: if they're all going to live to adults, I don't
Speaker 2: need in children to be adults, right, So birth rates
Speaker 2: start to fall. This freaks out though a lot of
Speaker 2: these these communists, because the kind of communists who are
Speaker 2: like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And Marx
Speaker 2: was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is a
Speaker 2: term that I found for the first time in a
Speaker 2: Journal of Family History article, But it's a term you
Speaker 2: can find other places. And the basic idea is that
Speaker 2: and this is an idea that then it goes back
Speaker 2: to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,
Speaker 2: equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as a
Speaker 2: potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't
Speaker 2: how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates
Speaker 2: falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period
Speaker 2: of time. But this is like a thing that they think,
Speaker 2: right then that like if we don't bump up these
Speaker 2: birth rates we're going to deal with like an actual
Speaker 2: economic disaster. So by the time Nikolaichichesku takes over as
Speaker 2: party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six, the
Speaker 2: problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had
Speaker 2: become a crisis and the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty five point
Speaker 2: six life births per thousand people in Romania, and by
Speaker 2: the time to Chescu takes over, there's about fourteen live
Speaker 2: births per thousand people. Right now, for reference, both of
Speaker 2: those are still higher than the US birth rate. Right now,
Speaker 2: we're at about eleven a little less than eleven live
Speaker 2: births per thousand people in the country. The only reason
Speaker 2: why the US population continues to grow is immigration, but
Speaker 2: that's a topic for another day. Cichescu stated that women
Speaker 2: needed to use their influence to rebuild the family, and
Speaker 2: per that article in the Journal of Family History, Cichescu
Speaker 2: declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the
Speaker 2: family must be combated with determination because they result in
Speaker 2: an increase in the number of divorces in the disintegration
Speaker 2: of the family. And then the neglect of the children's
Speaker 2: education and training for life. And this is something that
Speaker 2: had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the
Speaker 2: family in the society that it existed before. And a
Speaker 2: lot of people are like, well, but you know, we're
Speaker 2: becoming more scientific, you know, we have like women have jobs. Now,
Speaker 2: maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family
Speaker 2: should be are kind of outdated. And he's saying, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: they're not, they're not you need to go back to
Speaker 2: having a shitload of kids, right, And he announces a
Speaker 2: new initiative to increase the population of Romania by thirty
Speaker 2: percent by nineteen ninety so, which I don't know if
Speaker 2: the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's that's a massive change in society. But Chichescu
Speaker 2: isn't a logic thinker guy, right, He's not like running
Speaker 2: the numbers hardcore here. He's just sort of throwing out
Speaker 2: some shit that sounds good. And so to encourage the shift,
Speaker 2: he leashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards
Speaker 2: like pro natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate. The
Speaker 2: first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all
Speaker 2: women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example,
Speaker 2: you can qualify for an abortion if you've had if
Speaker 2: you already have five children under eighteen in the house concurrently.
Speaker 4: Which is nice.
Speaker 2: There's one or two other exceptions based on your age,
Speaker 2: but there aren't many exceptions per an article in PubMed.
Speaker 2: In addition, employed women under age forty five years are
Speaker 2: required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces, and
Speaker 2: any pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over
Speaker 2: twenty five years of age and childless married couples without
Speaker 2: a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty
Speaker 2: percent tax on income. Jesus Women who refuse to have
Speaker 2: children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro natalist policies.
Speaker 2: It has been estimated that forty percent of the seven
Speaker 2: hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty five had
Speaker 2: illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the
Speaker 2: State Security Police to combat this practice. So we're so
Speaker 2: close to this, we are we are not They really
Speaker 2: want to do all of.
Speaker 4: This we're like knocking on the door.
Speaker 2: They are like that is the thing that I really
Speaker 2: want to drive home is that the closest that I
Speaker 2: have found in all of my rings, the closest direct
Speaker 2: graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting
Speaker 2: for US policy is Romania.
Speaker 4: Like and it's also the worst that has ever worked.
Speaker 4: When I was a lot younger, Like when I was sixteen,
Speaker 4: I volunteered in an orphanage venure diverting kids in Romania.
Speaker 4: Jesus fucking Christ. Well, I mean they created a culture
Speaker 4: of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah, we'll be talking
Speaker 4: about that. That shit fucked me up, And yeah, you
Speaker 4: shouldn't send your sixteen year old children to do that,
Speaker 4: to be kod, but like.
Speaker 2: No, and you're you're encountering it after the worst of
Speaker 2: it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize
Speaker 2: the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at
Speaker 2: its worst. So it's worth noting that while women did
Speaker 2: start working at a higher rate after Communist takeover, that
Speaker 2: started to plateau by the time that Chicheski, because obviously,
Speaker 2: like there was still a lot of Communism doesn't get
Speaker 2: rid of men being shitty to women, right, it does
Speaker 2: do things do get a lot better.
Speaker 1: Right, sometimes it empowers shit And at.
Speaker 2: The start, like kind of right around when he announces
Speaker 2: the set of fertility laws, he does try to institute
Speaker 2: a policy with the goal of increasing the number of
Speaker 2: women working at high positions in different state departments. Right,
Speaker 2: there is an initial like we're going to break the
Speaker 2: grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long.
Speaker 2: He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on
Speaker 2: the policy. After his wife, Elena, is made a member
Speaker 2: of the party executive committee. He's like, women have gone
Speaker 2: fired up. Look at my wife. Classic chichesku. Yes, classic
Speaker 2: guy who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So,
Speaker 2: as is always the case with shit like this, women
Speaker 2: were not equally impacted by the abortion ban.
Speaker 4: Largely.
Speaker 2: The impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level
Speaker 2: of wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted
Speaker 2: a deep investigation into all of this immediately after the
Speaker 2: regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro
Speaker 2: natalist pos policies. Members of the urban middle class managed
Speaker 2: somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market.
Speaker 2: Oh I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal,
Speaker 2: with the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain
Speaker 2: medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that
Speaker 2: several years ago, when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion
Speaker 2: had cost him five thousand lay or about fifty dollars
Speaker 2: on the black market, and several women with professional degrees
Speaker 2: reported matter of factly that they had simply refused to
Speaker 2: cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes
Speaker 2: without suffering any reprisals. Nor were the most rural segments
Speaker 2: of the population deeply affected. The Orthodox Christians had long
Speaker 2: shunned birth control and abortion, and others like the ROMA
Speaker 2: had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell
Speaker 2: on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women,
Speaker 2: urban ROMA, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none
Speaker 2: of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations.
Speaker 2: Their options were as limited as they were life threatening.
Speaker 2: Some used a variety of would be aborta fascians. Others
Speaker 2: availed themselves of the services of a back alley abortionist.
Speaker 2: Still others carried to term and the number of deaths,
Speaker 2: the mortality rate for women as a result of this
Speaker 2: did right, Like, there's a lot of hideous stuff there.
Speaker 2: We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, But
Speaker 2: I don't mean to paper over that a lot of
Speaker 2: women died and suffered lasting injury in fertility and a
Speaker 2: number of other things because of different back alley abortions
Speaker 2: and weird drugs that they were given.
Speaker 4: But it's important to.
Speaker 2: Note that women who had money and opposition in the
Speaker 2: social class could still gain access to this shit. And
Speaker 2: that's how it will work here too, right, Like, these
Speaker 2: Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from
Speaker 2: having access to this stuff.
Speaker 4: They'll be restricting poor people. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now, the first thing I should know about this
Speaker 2: whole raft of policies Toichescu introduced is that they did
Speaker 2: not work. That Journal of Family History article that I've
Speaker 2: quoted from a couple of times. Here ran the numbers
Speaker 2: to try to analyze how well did this, like, how
Speaker 2: did these policies correspond to birth rates in Romania? And
Speaker 2: it is true that after the first major laws were
Speaker 2: pushed in sixty seven and sixty eight. There was a
Speaker 2: brief surge in birth rates, but that very quickly and
Speaker 2: had completely disappeared. By the nineteen seventies, things were back
Speaker 2: to baseline. So in nineteen seventy four, Toichescu launches another
Speaker 2: push to increase birth rates, and again they briefly increase
Speaker 2: and then fall a year or two later. This process
Speaker 2: plays out a couple times throughout the administration, and one
Speaker 2: of the things that's important to note is that the
Speaker 2: increase that happens after every new sort of like focus
Speaker 2: on birth rates is less each time, Right, it gets
Speaker 2: less effective every time. Now, the analysis in that paper
Speaker 2: concluded the birth rate would only rise when the state
Speaker 2: applied direct pressures on the population. Otherwise it dropped, right,
Speaker 2: because this just doesn't work, Like, you're not fundamentally changing anything,
Speaker 2: and none of these incentives because they're expensive, and in
Speaker 2: Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide
Speaker 2: much of the way of incentives, right, but they never
Speaker 2: are going to work. Like, as we went over earlier,
Speaker 2: the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal
Speaker 2: with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch
Speaker 2: of fucking kids, and none of the people in charge
Speaker 2: of the Republican Party have any interest in making life
Speaker 2: affordable for people who are not rich.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: The situation that this led to by the time that
Speaker 2: Chicheske regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic
Speaker 2: because there had been surges in births, right, in births
Speaker 2: of kids to parents who because the people who can't
Speaker 2: get away from this tend to be the poor, could
Speaker 2: not take care of these kids right. And there was
Speaker 2: also a surge in kids as a result of the
Speaker 2: general surge in birth rate, but also as a result
Speaker 2: of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania,
Speaker 2: a lot of kids who had different physical and mental
Speaker 2: disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their
Speaker 2: parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children
Speaker 2: in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that
Speaker 2: had been set up in Romania, And there were like
Speaker 2: posters that were going around that were part of the
Speaker 2: pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have
Speaker 2: a kid you can't take care of or that's not
Speaker 2: like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle
Speaker 2: it better than you, So like, who cares have another
Speaker 2: kid and we'll just drop it off with us if
Speaker 2: you can't take care of them, right Like that was
Speaker 2: literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again
Speaker 2: like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.
Speaker 1: Oohar fucking Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that hell sinky article I found quoted from a
Speaker 2: different piece of western news media, like a team of
Speaker 2: journalists that went to a town called the dell lefter
Speaker 2: Chichescu fell. And this is how that article opens. On
Speaker 2: the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed
Speaker 2: toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and close stuffy rooms.
Speaker 2: Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and
Speaker 2: bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on
Speaker 2: crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear
Speaker 2: bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory
Speaker 2: animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons,
Speaker 2: suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day,
Speaker 2: several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets from
Speaker 2: one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.
Speaker 2: Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
Speaker 2: of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton
Speaker 2: stirves turned onto its and groans, Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's worse.
Speaker 2: This is not the worst like this like Helsinki article
Speaker 2: goes into like how in the homes for the handicapped,
Speaker 2: the children are just ignored. They can go months without
Speaker 2: any real human contact within the bare men of being fed.
Speaker 2: There's no one watching these kids like this is some
Speaker 2: of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of
Speaker 2: children I've ever heard of.
Speaker 4: A lot of children die.
Speaker 2: AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I
Speaker 2: really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions. If
Speaker 2: you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll
Speaker 2: recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up
Speaker 2: from now because we're already going long enough. But there's
Speaker 2: the Romanian Orphans are Adults Now, an article in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic that's the title. You should check that out, and
Speaker 2: then Chichescu's Children and The Guardian. Both of those articles
Speaker 2: do a good job of providing additional context and horror
Speaker 2: on this, But I think it's important to note that
Speaker 2: what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to
Speaker 2: the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst
Speaker 2: this has ever got.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior's policies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for
Speaker 3: me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that stuff is grim. It's some of the
Speaker 4: worst shit. Yeah. Yeah, oh boy, I remember that the time,
Speaker 4: there was like concern if the kids were really nonverbal, yeah,
Speaker 4: like or they just had never been talked to. Oh
Speaker 4: my god, because right, they've been institutionalized from such a
Speaker 4: year Like I was there probably about twelve years after
Speaker 4: the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
Speaker 4: in their teens, I guess, oh my god. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had
Speaker 4: never really been able to play outside very much, and
Speaker 4: it was fucking yeah. Yeah, that shit will fuck you up. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's a good museum. I'll see if I can find
Speaker 4: bradio Is, because if they've maintained one of the old
Speaker 4: orphanmagic as it was like with the eye and cribs
Speaker 4: and shit, and they have like projections on the walls
Speaker 4: the kids rocking and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that shit is disturbing. Like I uh, I wouldn't read
Speaker 4: any of those articles before getting to bed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, this has been it could happen here.
Speaker 3: All right, bye, this is it could happen here. Executive
Speaker 3: Disorder our weekly news class covering what's happening in the
Speaker 3: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by Mia Wong, Jamestowte, and
Speaker 3: Robert Evans. Yes, Taco Trump sweeps the nation, Musk is
Speaker 3: out with Steve Miller's wife, Liberation Day, tariffs or fought
Speaker 3: in court. This episode covering the week of May twenty
Speaker 3: eighth to June four.
Speaker 2: So much good stuff this week also a terrorist attack
Speaker 2: not good. But before we get into that, I want
Speaker 2: to let you guys know I watched the movie Mountainhead,
Speaker 2: and then I had a dream starring all of you
Speaker 2: in the movie mountain Head, and it went a lot
Speaker 2: better since we were just skiing and enjoying the woods.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 2: I didn't know nobody launched an AI that destroyed civilization.
Speaker 2: Steve Carell wasn't there. Actually, I wouldn't mind hanging out
Speaker 2: with Steve Carell, but not the Steve Carrell from that
Speaker 2: movie anyway. Interesting movie.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, interesting dream too, bet it sounds of it. Wow.
Speaker 1: Thanks for that that quick Robert film review.
Speaker 4: Thanks for sharing, Bud. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I guess side piece of news that we weren't focusing
Speaker 3: on like much today, but we will do a piece
Speaker 3: on in the future is Trump has coud a deal
Speaker 3: with Palenteer to create an extensive new database that compiles
Speaker 3: information on everybody in the country. This covers bank number,
Speaker 3: is student debt, medical claims, disability status. I think this
Speaker 3: summer myself for a few other people on this episode. Well,
Speaker 3: we'll work together on an episode just about surveillance, like Flock,
Speaker 3: Gideon Foundry. These these surveillance systems that are getting like
Speaker 3: spread all across the country. So we will do a
Speaker 3: whole episode on that in the future. But let's start
Speaker 3: with that and then pivots to Robert Evans to discuss terrorism.
Speaker 2: I hardly know herorism. Someone else should continue the episode now, No, this.
Speaker 4: Is your this is your going back. Sorry, that was
Speaker 4: a perfect segue nobody's bailing you out of this ship.
Speaker 4: We're fine.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, all right, pull let me pull up
Speaker 2: the right the proper doc because I did this on
Speaker 2: my Chescu doc because we recorded both of those episodes today.
Speaker 4: What a hotwarming day you've had, Robot.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, chi Chescu, a guy fire bombing, a rally
Speaker 2: in Denver. It's it's all been really good stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: mostly mostly chill.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 2: So on June second, there was a rally in Boulder,
Speaker 2: Colorado for a group that was protesting for hostages that
Speaker 2: were taken by Hamas on October seventh. There's like, I
Speaker 2: think fifty somewhere around fifty who are still unaccounted for
Speaker 2: for varying reasons. And that was that was what approach
Speaker 2: was for. And there was like there was like a
Speaker 2: gathering and they were supposed to be doing like a run,
Speaker 2: right in order to raise awareness about the hostages.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's that's the event that happened on the second
Speaker 2: and a man approached during that gathering, Mohammed Sabri Soloman,
Speaker 2: and he started throwing molotov cocktails. Every story I have
Speaker 2: gives slightly different numbers for how many molotovs he had
Speaker 2: prepared and how many he had when he was taken.
Speaker 2: Like an AP news story said that he had sixteen
Speaker 2: unused molotovs that were covered by law enforcement after the attack,
Speaker 2: but I think CNN said fourteen, Yeah, fourteen unlit molotovs,
Speaker 2: So it's kind of clear to be.
Speaker 4: How many they were.
Speaker 2: But he threw a number of these at the group
Speaker 2: of demonstrators. He also had what's described in most of
Speaker 2: the articles I find as an improvised flamethrower. And so
Speaker 2: you know, when I heard that, my first question was,
Speaker 2: like a makeshift flamethrower.
Speaker 4: Sorry, it was the exact term the police used.
Speaker 2: And when I first heard that, I was like, well,
Speaker 2: that could mean a lot of things they could literally
Speaker 2: just do. Like he had like a cand of like
Speaker 2: spray that's that's flammable that he like looked a lighter.
Speaker 4: Up to it have link steeredrow.
Speaker 2: No, it was apparently like a fertilizer or pesticide sprayer
Speaker 2: type deal that he had fuel in. Right, So it
Speaker 2: actually was a makeshift flamethrower he was attempting, but he
Speaker 2: did not use it on the demonstrators. He did burn
Speaker 2: himself pretty badly. He had like body armor on that
Speaker 2: he took off after he like, basically what seems to
Speaker 2: have happened is he throws something like half a dozen
Speaker 2: firebombs at this crowd, and he injures a number of people,
Speaker 2: several of them quite severely. There's at least last I checked,
Speaker 2: six people who are still in the hospital, one in
Speaker 2: critical condition, although that may have changed since we recorded
Speaker 2: this podcast. The victims who were wounded range in age
Speaker 2: from fifty two to eighty eight. And yeah, so he
Speaker 2: hurts a number of people with these molotops, and then
Speaker 2: the way he described it, he like felt like he
Speaker 2: couldn't continue going through with the attack. He had been
Speaker 2: planning this thing for more than a year, we know,
Speaker 2: or at least that's what he claimed. And he basically
Speaker 2: said that, like, yeah, once I actually started it, I
Speaker 2: found it very difficult to continue. So it seems like
Speaker 2: he kind of like didn't go as far with this
Speaker 2: thing as he could have, because it turns out, lighting
Speaker 2: people on fire, even when you're very angry, is something
Speaker 2: that most people cannot bring themselves to do past a
Speaker 2: certain point. He is on video screaming Palestinas free, and
Speaker 2: he stated to the authorities that when he'd been planning
Speaker 2: this for a year. His goal was to kill Zionists.
Speaker 2: So you know, this is very it's very clear, like
Speaker 2: what this is motivated by, right, Like what his motivation was.
Speaker 2: His background is interesting. I guess you'd say he and
Speaker 2: his family come from Egypt, and yeah, he attended like
Speaker 2: high school in Egypt and later moved to Kuwait. He
Speaker 2: has a history of like it seems like he kind
Speaker 2: of got politically active during the Arab Spring. He posted
Speaker 2: a bunch of pictures of Mohammed Morsey, the leader of
Speaker 2: the Muslim Brotherhood who served as Egypt's president from twenty
Speaker 2: twelve to twenty thirteen. He protested against the military coup
Speaker 2: that removed Morsey from power, and he and his family
Speaker 2: entered the United States in August of twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: as a non immigrant visitor, and in twenty twenty three
Speaker 2: he received a two year work authorization, which expired in March.
Speaker 2: He had tried to come to the US in two
Speaker 2: thousand and five. His primary goal in coming here in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two was to get his daughter, primarily into
Speaker 2: a good medical school. He moved there with his wife
Speaker 2: and his kids. His daughter was on the process of graduating.
Speaker 2: They had been living in Kuwait, but for a variety
Speaker 2: of weak reasons, especially the fact that they were not
Speaker 2: st She was like, I'm not going to be able
Speaker 2: to go into medicine in Kuwait. His daughter seems to
Speaker 2: be a very gifted medical student, and so they moved
Speaker 2: here and she got into a medical school. And in fact,
Speaker 2: he seems to have waited to carry out his attack
Speaker 2: until her graduation, like he wanted her to be started
Speaker 2: on her path to becoming a doctor before he carried
Speaker 2: out this attack. I think, both in the hope that
Speaker 2: it would protect her and she wouldn't get forced out
Speaker 2: of the country, which we'll talk about in a little bit,
Speaker 2: and I think probably just because easier to dad and
Speaker 2: he wanted to see her graduate, right. But then he
Speaker 2: carries out this attack. His family does not seem to
Speaker 2: have known. He basically left some messages for them as
Speaker 2: he left to carry it out. His wife took his
Speaker 2: phone into the authorities, which I read as her being like,
Speaker 2: I'm at this point trying to do whatever I can
Speaker 2: to make the government less likely to prosecute the rest
Speaker 2: of my family. Like he's a writer, right, Like he
Speaker 2: like like I can't be concerned about him. Right, I've
Speaker 2: got kids, you know.
Speaker 4: Like potential trying to stop anything else happening. If he
Speaker 4: was you know, like maybe he had other people who'd
Speaker 4: been playing this with who are planning other things.
Speaker 2: Right, she doesn't know did he build a bomb?
Speaker 4: Right, she has no idea. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I should also note here that when he was planning
Speaker 2: this attack, he initially planned to do a shooting. He
Speaker 2: took a concealed carry class, or at least he told
Speaker 2: investigators he took a concealed carry class.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: He could be lying about some of this. This is
Speaker 4: what the police are reported.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he took a concealed carry class. But he
Speaker 2: was not able to buy a gun. The AP News
Speaker 2: article says was denied because he's not a legal US citizen.
Speaker 2: You don't have to be a citizen to buy a gun. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's not correct, But you do have to be in
Speaker 2: the country legally, right, Like you do not have to
Speaker 2: be a citizen to purchase guns in this country, but
Speaker 2: you do have to be illegal.
Speaker 4: I think you have to be a resident, like certain
Speaker 4: visa categories. There's a number of ways to get a gun.
Speaker 2: Whim not a citizen, but he was not able to yeah,
Speaker 2: and thank goodness, right, Like it's horrifying, Like obviously burning
Speaker 2: people is horrifying. Like the injuries that these people suffered
Speaker 2: are pretty are deeply like there's no pleasant burn injury.
Speaker 4: But people would have.
Speaker 2: Just died if he'd shot them, right, Like, Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: just the reality of the situation.
Speaker 4: That's already happened in Boulder once, like Bulder had a
Speaker 4: mass shooting at a supermarket right now, so long ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's the that's that's the bones of what
Speaker 2: happened here now.
Speaker 3: I mean, having this like less than a week after
Speaker 3: the Embassy shooting is pretty notable.
Speaker 4: Not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaks to the contagion way these kinds of things spread.
Speaker 4: Right exactly.
Speaker 3: Mean las last week we talked about how like this
Speaker 3: displays into like media that only benefits the actions at
Speaker 3: Israel's continuing to take and how much a media attention
Speaker 3: was going towards the shooting and like the immediate aftermath.
Speaker 3: And something that I found a little bit interesting is
Speaker 3: how fast that story kind of went away, which which
Speaker 3: I wasn't really expecting. I thought it would it would
Speaker 3: they would be you know, relevant for a little bit longer.
Speaker 3: People try to keep it relevant for a little bit longer.
Speaker 3: I think part of the reason why maybe it went
Speaker 3: away faster than what we thought is so that it
Speaker 3: would not encourage like copycat attacks, and that still seems
Speaker 3: to happen to a degree. And I mean it's sounds
Speaker 3: like this guy was planning something for a little bit long, yess.
Speaker 3: But certainly having that other shooting in a close time
Speaker 3: proximity is notable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the unfortunate reality is that, like, I'm
Speaker 2: sure there's someone else, multiple other people who have been
Speaker 2: planning for different periods of time, other kinds of attacks,
Speaker 2: and we will continue to see stuff like this happen.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Some of this is when something as terrible as the
Speaker 2: jatocide happening in Gaza is happening on a small screen
Speaker 2: in front of your face, and you are consuming hours
Speaker 2: of the curated worst footage of it every day. People
Speaker 2: are going to react, and they're not always going to
Speaker 2: react in the most like thoughtful way. Sometimes they're going
Speaker 2: to make a bunch of fucking fire bombs and attack
Speaker 2: a group of people who there's not really any argument
Speaker 2: that these particular groups of people.
Speaker 4: Had any at any influence, any any material consequence.
Speaker 2: Any power in the Israeli government, but.
Speaker 4: One of them's a Holocaust survivor, and.
Speaker 2: People are going to take irrational, terrible action that's just
Speaker 2: going to happen, you know, breaks people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, kind of prolonged vicarious trauma especially is not good
Speaker 4: for you.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of this loan Wolf attack is
Speaker 3: almost a way that people like cope with themselves after
Speaker 3: watching this thing unfold on your screen, right, and then
Speaker 3: as a response.
Speaker 2: I have to do something, is what he said, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm never gonna be able to live with myself.
Speaker 4: I do something.
Speaker 3: And then as a response, you use the violence of
Speaker 3: a gun to carve your name into history.
Speaker 4: And yeah, as someone who did something, I did something. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is this is something and you know it's.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's bad, like it just has it's just
Speaker 2: some number of people. This is how they're they're going
Speaker 2: to react, and to an extent I don't know, I
Speaker 2: don't know how you seek to stop this. You know,
Speaker 2: the authorities have have like confirmed this guy was not
Speaker 2: on anyone's watch list. I'm sure neither will the next
Speaker 2: guy or gal who does something right like this is
Speaker 2: the world quite quite frankly, this is in part the
Speaker 2: world the Internet has made, right, Yeah, not that, not
Speaker 2: that it would be good if horrifying footage of the
Speaker 2: genocide and Gaza wasn't getting out to people. But like,
Speaker 2: this isn't the first time we have watched a series
Speaker 2: of attacks carried out and copy attacks and copycat attacks
Speaker 2: like carried out and spread as a result of things
Speaker 2: that are spreading in digital media, right, Like this is
Speaker 2: a This is like a thing that's happened over and
Speaker 2: over again. This is just kind of how the internet
Speaker 2: and radical violence works well.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things where like, you know,
Speaker 1: there is a clear way to end the violence, which
Speaker 1: is to end the genocide, which is the other benefit
Speaker 1: of ending the genocide. But these people have no interest
Speaker 1: in that.
Speaker 2: No, these people, and I don't I don't know how
Speaker 2: to write like like like I don't like if you're asking, like, well,
Speaker 2: how do we end the genocide? Where like I guess
Speaker 2: you could get the entire international community to stop trading
Speaker 2: or selling weapons to Israel and also blockade the country,
Speaker 2: but like, well, then how do we do that?
Speaker 4: They're not god a right, Like I can't I can't
Speaker 4: make them.
Speaker 2: I can't make the US shoot down Israeli missiles or aircraft,
Speaker 2: Like I don't have the ability to like yell our
Speaker 2: government into doing that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's how do you write as a person potentially
Speaker 4: a person who's isolating. I don't know, man, If this
Speaker 4: person isn't part of a community, right, I hasn't found community?
Speaker 4: Like processing that trauma and feeling like you have to
Speaker 4: do something, some people's brains will break in a way
Speaker 4: that leads to violence. Yeah, I want to talk about
Speaker 4: state violence now, if that's okay, because I think, look,
Speaker 4: what he did was fucked up and wrong, and no
Speaker 4: one should obviously be firebombing Holocaust survival. I think that's
Speaker 4: something we can agree on. What has happened to his
Speaker 4: family is also wrong, right, like it you shouldn't be
Speaker 4: punished for being related to someone who did a bad thing.
Speaker 4: And oh god, and this is yeah, this is also horrifying. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the whole thing is a story of like collateral damage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the White House on four twelve PM on
Speaker 4: the third of June, tweeted zeated just In Colon the
Speaker 4: wife and five children of illegal alien Mohammed Solomon, the
Speaker 4: suspect in the anti Semitic fire bombing of Jewish Americans
Speaker 4: have been captured, captured and are now in ice custody
Speaker 4: for expedited removal. Next part is in block capitals. They
Speaker 4: could be deported as early as tonight. This is heartbreaking,
Speaker 4: right again, Like we've talked about habeas before, but the
Speaker 4: foundation of everything that legal systems based on English common
Speaker 4: law hold is you have to have evidence that the
Speaker 4: person did something wrong, not that they're related to the
Speaker 4: person who did something wrong. Right. You know, Robert and
Speaker 4: I are both intimately familiar at least you know. I've
Speaker 4: received calls from young people in Burma who we've interviewed,
Speaker 4: whose families have been captured because of their participation in
Speaker 4: the revolution, and like, yeah, this is not a part
Speaker 4: of you. I should be going down. I want to
Speaker 4: explain very briefly what expedited removal is, because I have
Speaker 4: seen some shit that suggests maybe folks don't understand it.
Speaker 4: That's fine, It's complicated. So expetitive removal is supposed to
Speaker 4: be reserved for people who arrive at a land border
Speaker 4: port of entry or EWI. EWIE is an acronym entering
Speaker 4: without inspection that means entering between imports of entry right
Speaker 4: over the wall. Under the wall over the beach. What
Speaker 4: have you? Right entering without going through a port of
Speaker 4: entry and they're supposed to have been here for less
Speaker 4: than two years. The Trump administration has been massively expanding
Speaker 4: the use of expected to removal recently. Why they're doing
Speaker 4: this is because in an expected to removal proceeding, lower
Speaker 4: level immigration officials can remove people without them seeing a judge.
Speaker 4: Those people can still make a credible fear claim, which
Speaker 4: has to be assessed by an asylum officer and then
Speaker 4: approved by a judge. But this is a lot harder
Speaker 4: right than then going through the asylum process, and they
Speaker 4: have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. I guess I think
Speaker 4: it's a reasonable fear frame. I think incredible fear is
Speaker 4: a highest standard for another removal praceeding that they are
Speaker 4: likely to be tortured by the government or with the
Speaker 4: acquiescence of their government if they're sent home. Right, its
Speaker 4: use had previously peaked with one hundred and ninety seven
Speaker 4: cases in twenty thirteen that was under a Bama right
Speaker 4: and surprisingly didn't see people writing about it. Then it
Speaker 4: was used even more extensively by the Biden administration, especially
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four, with Biden passed his asylum ban
Speaker 4: right by executive order. The first Trump administration did use it.
Speaker 4: They used it in a more broad range of cases,
Speaker 4: but they didn't use it in as many cases as
Speaker 4: either the Obama or the Biden administration. Right expertited removal
Speaker 4: is supposed to be for the most serious cases, for
Speaker 4: things where the person is a threat or a danger,
Speaker 4: or for other reasons need to be removed quickly. It
Speaker 4: was never designed. It was passed in I think in
Speaker 4: the early two thousands to first decade of this century.
Speaker 4: It was never supposed to be used like this, right, Robert,
Speaker 4: you mentioned these people had entered the United States in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, I think.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty two, and then he got a visa two
Speaker 2: year visa to work. In twenty twenty three, the entered
Speaker 2: on a tourist visa.
Speaker 4: Essentially, Yeah, they're not within that two year window. Right
Speaker 4: to the extent that that matters, I don't know. So
Speaker 4: they will now, having done nothing wrong in the case
Speaker 4: of his wife, having attempted to cooperate with law enforcement
Speaker 4: to stop her husband or anyone with him hurting anyone else,
Speaker 4: they will be detained in the nice detention center. They
Speaker 4: will have to make a claim of credible fear right.
Speaker 4: They will have to say it is dangerous for you
Speaker 4: to send us back. I presume that citizenship is Egyptian,
Speaker 4: so I presume they will be sent there. That's a
Speaker 4: very high hurdle for them to clear. And I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm sure that there are national immigration nonprofits who are
Speaker 4: willing to fight their case because the abuse of expert
Speaker 4: to removal in the last two years, to be very clear,
Speaker 4: by dedministration as well, has seriously undermined the due process
Speaker 4: rights of migrants. But this is still a further step,
Speaker 4: at a significant step in removing those So I'm going
Speaker 4: to follow this case. I'm sure i'll update you on
Speaker 4: it next week. I also just want to note that
Speaker 4: this has dominated a news cycle. Yesterday, twenty seven people
Speaker 4: were killed in Gaza attempting to obtain humanitarian aid. The
Speaker 4: IDF is still denying that. I don't really care that
Speaker 4: the Red Cross, as well as health authorities in gard
Speaker 4: they have confound that twenty seven people were killed en
Speaker 4: route to one of the humanitarians or the humanitarian aid
Speaker 4: distribution point where they've concentrated it. In the sudden end
Speaker 4: of the Guard the Trip. We will have an episode
Speaker 4: on Palestine next week. I don't want one person's kind
Speaker 4: of stupid action to overshadow the killing of many more
Speaker 4: people and that tragic loss of life. Right so, I
Speaker 4: don't think that we won't be covering that. We will.
Speaker 4: What we will also be doing is pivoting to advertisements
Speaker 4: right now.
Speaker 9: That's right, baby, Let me let me maybe get up
Speaker 9: my guacamole.
Speaker 4: Fucking algorithms of it?
Speaker 1: How could it becomes a joker?
Speaker 4: Is that the pivot to the Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, yeah, oh god, okay, let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: Taco Trump.
Speaker 3: Who oh yeah, finally, finally, get out your hot, get
Speaker 3: out your block, let's go Taco Trump party.
Speaker 4: If you're doing getting full DNC style, pick a slightly
Speaker 4: racist Mexican costume or somethink I guess, like so many many.
Speaker 1: Years ago, I was, I was a professional StarCraft two fan,
Speaker 1: and this meant that I was exposed a gunguan style
Speaker 1: a full two weeks before everyone else. And this was
Speaker 1: my experience with Taco because I started hearing this from
Speaker 1: like financial news outlets, and like my friend Vicky was
Speaker 1: sending me things. They're like, yeah, they came up with
Speaker 1: this thing, they're calling it taco, and then like four
Speaker 1: days later, all of the like regular news outlet's caught
Speaker 1: up to it. And I didn't want to say ship
Speaker 1: in the nation.
Speaker 4: May I liked it before it was cool.
Speaker 1: So Taco is this like unbelievable delusion that the finance
Speaker 1: people have had to like like program into their brains
Speaker 1: in order to like keep themselves from believing their own
Speaker 1: eyes about what's happening with the economy. So Taco stands
Speaker 1: for Trump always chickens out. And it's these people's belief
Speaker 1: that Trump will like always inevitably in the end back.
Speaker 4: Down from the terrace.
Speaker 1: And I've been seeing this a lot, right, Like I'm
Speaker 1: seeing this some people who are like who's analysis I respect?
Speaker 1: Who are talking about how like, yeah, the structural conditions
Speaker 1: of the economy are saus the Trump will always be
Speaker 1: forced to like roll the terariffs back. And then it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: like the fifty percent deal tariff, what did you affect
Speaker 1: like today?
Speaker 3: Right Like I I don't know, I'm gonna get some kumi. Oh,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna get some coriander. We're gonna mix that up.
Speaker 1: Oh god, Yo, this is a financial thing, right, This
Speaker 1: is the thing that like all the day traders like
Speaker 1: have to convince themselves in order to keep the stock
Speaker 1: marketing going.
Speaker 4: Yeah that like, no, no, no, it's gonna be fine.
Speaker 3: This is a magic spell that's being like waved over
Speaker 3: the economy to keep it kind of holding together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, whooh, it's gonna be fine. Ignore the
Speaker 1: thirty percent tariffs, So all Chinese goods, ignore the terriffs
Speaker 1: of the Yeah, fifty percent steel turf.
Speaker 2: Today, you might say, these economists are saying to Reef,
Speaker 2: we don't like it.
Speaker 10: Sorry, locking jazz bomb, rocket jazz Bot, Sorry, locking, locking
Speaker 10: jazz bomb, rocky jazz Bob.
Speaker 2: God, we had to make up for it. Garrison wouldn't
Speaker 2: let us last time.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know the royalties are getting
Speaker 4: too much.
Speaker 3: I took an entire week's pay cut so that we
Speaker 3: could pay back the royalty.
Speaker 2: Now, now, the good news is everybody we did manage
Speaker 2: to work out a new healthcare plan for everybody. It
Speaker 2: is the next time you need to go to a doctor,
Speaker 2: there will be an unmarked car with a loaded thirty
Speaker 2: eight special in the glove box. So it is a
Speaker 2: step up from United Healthcare. We we've actually significantly improved things,
Speaker 2: that's true.
Speaker 4: And I'm actually taking to pay for a year so
Speaker 4: we can do a a white riot, which is just
Speaker 4: white genocide. It's about the genocide of the of the
Speaker 4: ball people.
Speaker 1: Real and so okay, speaking of United Health one of
Speaker 1: these tarriffs that all these people have convinced themselves is
Speaker 1: not going to happen is the pharmaceutical tariffs, which are
Speaker 1: still like coming, right. But what sort of happened with
Speaker 1: this taco shit, right is the Democrats were like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I have found a way to criticize Trump.
Speaker 4: That is racist. They're all just calling him like that.
Speaker 3: Also does it actually critique his policies like they're they're
Speaker 3: calling him taco and Trump in relation to like the
Speaker 3: negotiations with Iran.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, shit that he should chicken out of it.
Speaker 4: It's good if he doesn't do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Like I'm watching them do like like fucking
Speaker 1: Chuck Schumer is out here tweeting about how Biden deported
Speaker 1: more people than Trump did, and like the thing that
Speaker 1: this reminds me of the most is like the Chavez
Speaker 1: era of Venezuelan opposition, where every single year they would
Speaker 1: haul some dipshit out and their platform was like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do Travizel better than and every single year they
Speaker 1: would lose by forty points. And it's like the Democrats
Speaker 1: are like those guys, those people are real fucking winners.
Speaker 1: We're going to adopt every single one of his platforms
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna run on he's not doing it
Speaker 1: well enough, and then we're gonna get fucking annihilated in
Speaker 1: every single election until like democratic process itself simply ceases
Speaker 1: to exist and this will be good.
Speaker 4: For us somehow. This is just it's pure cope.
Speaker 1: Like the entire our entire economy is being supported by
Speaker 1: the just collective delusion that these people have built. But
Speaker 1: they fucked up right. And the thing about Taco and
Speaker 1: think I remember from like the first time I heard
Speaker 1: about this, it was like, if this gets out, these
Speaker 1: people are fucked because Trump is going to see this
Speaker 1: and it is going to piss him off and he's
Speaker 1: going to like like now that it's like the democratic thing,
Speaker 1: it's like no, no, no, Like the next the next
Speaker 1: series of terrorists is scheduled to come off. Is I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure that China won in like the beginning of
Speaker 1: July could have.
Speaker 4: The math wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I hate math, I prob but I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure that's the next one.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's this is the thing that I'm
Speaker 3: still like questioning about, and like we've talked talk abouts before,
Speaker 3: is like one of those thirty d deadlines for tariffs
Speaker 3: on Canada and Mexico expired. Yeah, he just forgot about
Speaker 3: that one and no one was keeping count or they
Speaker 3: were like distracted, like I think specifically they were putting
Speaker 3: in some like European Union like tariffs like like that
Speaker 3: day and then just nothing like happy Yeah, And like
Speaker 3: I am wondering how much of that is, Like he's
Speaker 3: just gonna announce tariffs, put them on hold, and then
Speaker 3: just forget about them, but still announce new different tariffs
Speaker 3: in the future that may cover some of the same stuff.
Speaker 4: Well, so here's the thing. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I some of these you remember, something doesn't because so
Speaker 1: so the steel tariff doubled from twenty five to fifty, right,
Speaker 1: and that one of the.
Speaker 4: Rolling date ones.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think it's it's like there are some
Speaker 1: that he like cares about and there are some that
Speaker 1: he kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3: I mean I feel the same way when I'm getting
Speaker 3: tacos like pork tacos, No, thank you, fish tacos.
Speaker 4: Maybe I don't. I don't endor Scarceon's opinion on tacos.
Speaker 1: This, this taco Trump shit is like I long for
Speaker 1: the days of orn Man bad dr was better than this.
Speaker 1: This is this is the worst it's ever been, Like,
Speaker 1: oh god, get give me comedians cutting his head off
Speaker 1: live on stage again, Like sure.
Speaker 4: Yes, that was fine.
Speaker 1: This is just like, what what are we doing here?
Speaker 4: Oh my god?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's really tough because cilantro prices are
Speaker 3: gonna spike to these tariffs too, so I mean we
Speaker 3: can't even call them talk about.
Speaker 2: It's okay, you know, Garrett Garrison, that's actually just good politics,
Speaker 2: right because some people have some people have a disability
Speaker 2: where they can't test taste cilantro.
Speaker 4: Not a disability.
Speaker 3: Associated with pre statements. I will not be canceled by this.
Speaker 3: I do not buy the cilantro gene. I don't think
Speaker 3: it's real.
Speaker 1: But you don't think the cilantro Oh my god, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't think.
Speaker 4: It's a gene.
Speaker 2: It's just I don't think people without the cilant with
Speaker 2: the cilantro tastes bad gene. I don't know if we'd
Speaker 2: call them people right, if it tastes like soapid.
Speaker 4: I just don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Talk talks with China have been breaking down. Both sides
Speaker 1: have been in each other of violating the agreement they
Speaker 1: had come to to roll the tariffs back, which they'd
Speaker 1: like both have. I believe both sides on that. Actually, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again this comes to like the actual fundamental structural
Speaker 1: problem of this, which is that and I think this
Speaker 1: is why a lot of people think that everything will
Speaker 1: sort of eventually go back to normal and I'll try
Speaker 1: to just sort of like bluster like I did the
Speaker 1: first time. Is that like, Okay, again, Trump's actual goal here,
Speaker 1: which is to not have a trade deficit with China,
Speaker 1: is unachievable, right, There's nothing that can actually be done
Speaker 1: in order to do that, and there's no good way
Speaker 1: to claim victory either.
Speaker 4: And so what we're sort of escalating.
Speaker 1: Towards is July, like the one hundred and thirty percent
Speaker 1: of teriff sort of like coming coming.
Speaker 4: Back into effect.
Speaker 1: So people are building up I think this, like I
Speaker 1: don't know the sort of like psychological wall to the
Speaker 1: fact that this could happen again, and the fact that
Speaker 1: like these negotiations are breaking down, I think is just
Speaker 1: making it increasingly likely that it is just going.
Speaker 4: To explode again.
Speaker 1: The steel tariffs also are just a shit show for
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of different manufacturing sectors. It's very bad
Speaker 1: for US auto industry. There's already been a report on
Speaker 1: the effect of twenty five percent steel tariff has had
Speaker 1: on like on the construction industry. This has been tied
Speaker 1: into sort of like, oh yeah, the US is like
Speaker 1: not replenishing its housing stock because you.
Speaker 4: Know, but it's it's fucked.
Speaker 1: It's real bad. I don't I don't have a I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't have a better thing to say
Speaker 1: about it than that, and that it's going to continue
Speaker 1: to get worse and at some points, probably the taco
Speaker 1: is going to be fucking over and people are going
Speaker 1: to realize that he's going to do this, and especially
Speaker 1: now they just pissed him off.
Speaker 4: Oh god, yeah, well what will they do then with
Speaker 4: their giant inflatable chicken.
Speaker 1: This is this is.
Speaker 4: The biggest limbrain stuff I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: I am I am living in a world where like
Speaker 1: a group chat that I make on signal when I
Speaker 1: was a manic last year has had more policy effect
Speaker 1: on like like preserving trans healthcare in that fucking budget
Speaker 1: build in the entire Democratic Party and they are spending
Speaker 1: their money fucking like holding out chicken, fucking chicken inflatable.
Speaker 2: Now, don't don't listen to me a Democrats. For just
Speaker 2: twenty million dollars, I will guarantee you the youth vote.
Speaker 2: Not a guarantee.
Speaker 3: I propose that we renamed this segment from tariff talk
Speaker 3: to Mia Molay the next I don't know twenty.
Speaker 2: Episots garrison as a Canadian?
Speaker 4: Are you allowed to use that word?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go on to that break.
Speaker 3: Before I lose my job. Okay, we are back. James
Speaker 3: stout me. What's been going on?
Speaker 4: Hey everyone, James, it's Thursday night here and I'm just
Speaker 4: recording a little pickup to update you that the Trump
Speaker 4: administration has issued another travel ban. This travel ban bans
Speaker 4: travel or bans all new visas for people from twelve countries.
Speaker 4: One of those is Myanmar, and travelers further restricted for
Speaker 4: seven other countries. There are exemptions people who are already
Speaker 4: in the country with a valid visa. There are exemptions
Speaker 4: for Afghan people have an SIV especial immigrant visa. There
Speaker 4: are other smaller exemptions for the Olympic Games and sporting
Speaker 4: events for example. We will do a whole episode on
Speaker 4: this because we need longer than we have to explain it.
Speaker 4: But I just wanted to make people aware that we
Speaker 4: are tracking that, planning on getting something out about it,
Speaker 4: but we don't have enough space in this episode or
Speaker 4: time to edit to address it in full. Today, Well,
Speaker 4: some things have been happening Garrison here in sunny San Diego.
Speaker 1: With from what I hear actually great tagos.
Speaker 4: Yes, tacos are actually very good in San Diego. Yes, oh,
Speaker 4: excellent tacos. Some of the best tacos in southern California.
Speaker 4: Which you saying something, Come and visit us, eat our tacos.
Speaker 2: Across the border, get some extended release Mexican tramadol. Let
Speaker 2: me know where you were anyway, continued jam.
Speaker 4: Or tacos whatever you want to want to get across
Speaker 4: the border. So ICE agents raided Buonafortetta, which is pizza
Speaker 4: place in South Park. I used to stay like just
Speaker 4: above here. I would get late night pizza there all
Speaker 4: the time when my job was riding my bike and
Speaker 4: my hobby was drinking at Hamilton's Rip, which was a
Speaker 4: craft bn next door. In this bungled raid, they entered
Speaker 4: drin in a late afternoon and the evening of Friday,
Speaker 4: and ice agents soon found themselves surrounded by an angry
Speaker 4: crowd at local people, patrons from the Vegan Small Plates
Speaker 4: cocktail place across the across the street, and the brewery
Speaker 4: it's now South Park Brewing, as well as folks from
Speaker 4: the neighborhood. Right, this is one of those neighborhoods that
Speaker 4: like South Park of the concept was kind of invented
Speaker 4: by real estate agents so that it wouldn't seem like
Speaker 4: Golden Hill or Bankers Hill, and it would have like
Speaker 4: a more upmarket branding. So you have these very nice
Speaker 4: bars and restaurants, but then you also have like a
Speaker 4: laundromaut on the corner, and like a like a food market,
Speaker 4: like a non chain supermarket that serves a primarily Latino
Speaker 4: clan tel. I would imagine it's one of these very
Speaker 4: sort of like class diverse neighborhoods, I guess. But people
Speaker 4: came out en mass. They surrounded these vehicles right, they
Speaker 4: were chanting let them go. ITTSI agents decided to defuse
Speaker 4: the situation by throwing flash banks and then leaving with
Speaker 4: four employees. I should add here that, as KPBS put it, quote,
Speaker 4: flashbanks were thrown, which is a cowardly use of the
Speaker 4: passive voice to obscure culpability.
Speaker 3: I think flash bangs spontaneously were deployed, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, who can say, Garrison, maybe the people at
Speaker 4: the Death Metal Vegan restaurant bought the flash bangs.
Speaker 3: Well, and I also do want to say I have
Speaker 3: gotten word from some exclusive sources that these were actually
Speaker 3: secret militia members asperating as ICE agents.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's just fucking address it because it's very silly.
Speaker 2: The understandable degree of it is that like.
Speaker 4: They are dressing like Proud Voice.
Speaker 2: They look exactly like Proud Boys in Portland in twenty nineteen, right,
Speaker 2: Like they are indistinguishable visually.
Speaker 3: Their uniform standards have like kind of gone away. They
Speaker 3: seem like they don't have standards anymore. Yes, and now
Speaker 3: they are just dressing like how Proud Voices and three
Speaker 3: Percenters used to dress.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, like I think this kind of conspiracy theory
Speaker 4: stems from the initial MISI identification of the ginger ice
Speaker 4: agent who smashed someone's window as Michael Meyer a ka
Speaker 4: Lewis Arthur, who's the one of the veterans on patrol leaders.
Speaker 4: He was live streaming in Oklahoma at the time that
Speaker 4: that rate happened. It's not him, Yeah, it's just two
Speaker 4: people who are ginger that that is possible that there
Speaker 4: are lots of them. Then I've seen this in multiple
Speaker 4: other cases, often from the kind of more lib sky
Speaker 4: people you see on Blue Sky right, who seem unable
Speaker 4: to comprehend the fact that no, they are cops and
Speaker 4: they are doing evil and cops do evil shit, cops
Speaker 4: can do bad things.
Speaker 3: And now, yeah, cops are more likely, especially immigration officers,
Speaker 3: do not have their names on their kit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's something that we saw like in Portland and
Speaker 3: twenty twenty and it was incredibly worrying. And now it's
Speaker 3: spreading all around the entire country to the point where
Speaker 3: most most like people enacting these raids are both hiding
Speaker 3: their identities and also obscuring what agencies they are actually
Speaker 3: like from, which is why people are like concerned that
Speaker 3: you like, what if these guys aren't even from the government.
Speaker 3: What if these are just like some kind of right
Speaker 3: wing militia, And yeah, with a little bit of checking
Speaker 3: you can usually tell that they are in fact from
Speaker 3: usually dhs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the California one was somewhat ridiculous, right,
Speaker 4: There is not an exemption to the California assault weapons
Speaker 4: ban for militias. These guys had guns, which would have
Speaker 4: been about four felonies each. Yees saying people don't do
Speaker 4: felony things they do, but you'd have to be a
Speaker 4: bit of a tool to just stand on the street
Speaker 4: with your felony select fire MPX.
Speaker 2: Part of this is a very and a lot of
Speaker 2: leftists fell for this too, But this is fundament mentally
Speaker 2: rooted in a liberal delusion, which is that the danger
Speaker 2: is unaccountable groups of civilians with guns, not the police.
Speaker 4: The danger is the cops. The danger has always been
Speaker 4: the cops. Yes, we need to push back on this, right,
Speaker 4: Like the prow Boys are not like the be all
Speaker 4: and end all of eve when I'm but they're.
Speaker 2: That's sure, of course, I've like, I've had my hand
Speaker 2: broken by one. I don't like them, but I'm not
Speaker 2: as scared of them as I am of just the
Speaker 2: cops like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we need to push back on this because it
Speaker 4: fundamentally misidentifies the problem. And until these people wake up
Speaker 4: and realize that they're they'll going to respond in the
Speaker 4: correct manner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean, like, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that you can point out here is is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of police in Nazi Germany, and
Speaker 1: the moment that they started carrying out the orders of
Speaker 1: the Nazi government, they became Nazis.
Speaker 4: Like that's that's.
Speaker 1: Just how this works, right, You'll get a pull a like, oh,
Speaker 1: I was just a whimart police guy, just enforcing the
Speaker 1: laws of the of the Nazi government. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you are, sir, you are a Nazi, and you are
Speaker 1: a Nazi because you are an agent of the Nazi state,
Speaker 1: not because you were like you know, you were like
Speaker 1: necessarily in some perimilitary or whatever, like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a member of the party.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like that that's what happens when you work for
Speaker 1: a fascist state. So you're now a fascist.
Speaker 4: So in documents I've reviewed, I claimed that nineteen employees
Speaker 4: at a restaurant were using falsified green cards. They were
Speaker 4: acting on a tip from November twenty twenty and then
Speaker 4: they received a follow up tip in late January twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five. The tip claim that many of the staff
Speaker 4: at Buonaforta Jetta were undocumented, that the owner made them
Speaker 4: work long shifts and verbally abused them. I have seen
Speaker 4: no evidence that this is true beyond that claim. I've
Speaker 4: been to and past that restaurant hundreds of times. I've
Speaker 4: never seen anyone who looks sad to be there. But
Speaker 4: it doesn't mean that's not happening. But I've seen nothing
Speaker 4: to lead me to believe that it is beyond this claim. Right,
Speaker 4: HSI had been in communication with bonafort Jetta's lawyer since
Speaker 4: February and they had been cooperating. Right Like one offort
Speaker 4: had given them these documents, which they claim were fake
Speaker 4: green cards. They applied for this warrant, which they got
Speaker 4: an exceedingly broad warrant. One of the things that allow
Speaker 4: was for everyone inside to be detained and fingerprinted if necessary,
Speaker 4: even people who are not accused of any immigration offense, right,
Speaker 4: people who are United States citizens. The warrant also detailed
Speaker 4: that they had been surveiling the location. City councilman Shani
Speaker 4: La Riviera called the HSI agent terrorists. In a social
Speaker 4: media post, Bill Malougan got sad about this. Stephen Miller
Speaker 4: quote tweeted Bill Milligan getting sad about this. Top Luria
Speaker 4: came out with three paragraphs of total bullshit and continued
Speaker 4: to unabatteredly support stripping our city of all its socially
Speaker 4: beneficial services in order to direct a fire hose of
Speaker 4: our money to the cops, one of whom earned four
Speaker 4: hundred and thirty thousand dollars in twenty twenty three. Jesus
Speaker 4: what yep? Yeah, San Diego's highest paid public officials of
Speaker 4: cops by oh my god. Yeah, we are becoming a
Speaker 4: police department with a city attached because of Todd Gloria,
Speaker 4: someone who ran in twenty twenty on a reform agenda, right,
Speaker 4: who owns himself two hundred and fifty thousand much less.
Speaker 3: That's that's that's an unhit football coach takes, which is
Speaker 3: I thought that the Portland police were paid too much.
Speaker 4: That's that's wild. Yeah. Yeah, this person worked and alleged
Speaker 4: three thousand hours of overtime.
Speaker 3: I believe it's like what scrolling scrolling TikTok in your car, Like,
Speaker 3: come on.
Speaker 2: Keeping an eye, keeping an eye on kids.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you can't you you can't be three thousand hours.
Speaker 4: I mean someone could do three thousand divided by fifty
Speaker 4: fifty two weeks a year or whatever. Like it's it's
Speaker 4: it's an unfathomable amount of overtime.
Speaker 1: It's it's just fifty eight hours a week.
Speaker 4: Whoa, yeah, so that's full time plus one and a
Speaker 4: half full time jobs, hard worker. There's a KPBS article
Speaker 4: on it. I'll linking multiple police officers I guess in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four are on track to earn over four
Speaker 4: hundred thousand dollars with the bulckit coming from overtime pay.
Speaker 4: San Diego never gets enough attention for being a complete
Speaker 4: shit show of a city, right Like and Ron by
Speaker 4: the Sea is the best way I've heard it described, right, Like,
Speaker 4: our city consistently has massive corruption in scandals and nothing happens.
Speaker 2: It's it's a problem when it a place.
Speaker 4: Is that nice?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like that's really the fundamental issue is like people were like, hey,
Speaker 2: do you hear about that fucked up thing the meritd Yeah,
Speaker 2: but like look at the look at the beach.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that's yeah, that's literally the csis of
Speaker 4: under the Perfect Son. Yeah, she's a book that should be, uh,
Speaker 4: should be obligatory if you want to move to San Diego. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think it's one of the one of the earlier
Speaker 4: Mike Davis books. But against San Diego, a place where
Speaker 4: the politics are bad. It's also what happens when everyone
Speaker 4: votes them no matter what. Right.
Speaker 2: Also, people, in general, if you want to understand why
Speaker 2: Southern California be like a do read read Mike Davis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, in general, just read Mike Davis.
Speaker 2: Actually, wherever you are read some Mike Davis.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: I seem to have used I want to get into
Speaker 4: this because I think this is an important issue that
Speaker 4: hasn't been raised any coverage. I see I seem to
Speaker 4: have used AB sixty driver's licenses to identify the people
Speaker 4: in Bonnafort Chetta, or at least use California DMV documents
Speaker 4: of some kind.
Speaker 1: Jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So there's this misunderstanding. People think that if you
Speaker 4: have a driver's license in California, that information isn't accessible
Speaker 4: to immigration, and that's not true. AB sixty licenses. So
Speaker 4: that's Assembly Bill sixty, right, California piece of law allow
Speaker 4: people to get a license without having legal immigration status.
Speaker 4: This is a good thing. It means undocumented people are
Speaker 4: less likely to drive unlicensed and uninsured, right, and therefore
Speaker 4: it means that people are likely to stay at the
Speaker 4: scene of car accidents, and people who getting car accident
Speaker 4: to likely covered insurance. Right, I've been hit by an
Speaker 4: unsure driver. It fucking sucks. Oh. DHS cannot access information
Speaker 4: on whose license is an AB sixty license, but they
Speaker 4: can access through a variety of databases and mechanisms other
Speaker 4: DMV data, which may include things like photographs, addresses, or
Speaker 4: thumb prints. So in this case, they were able to
Speaker 4: look at the fake green card and then look at
Speaker 4: other data, both in federal and local databases, from various things.
Speaker 4: And some of these people had overstayed visas their claiming
Speaker 4: right be like, Okay, well we found a guy with
Speaker 4: this name and this date of birth, but the person
Speaker 4: hasn't minisued a green card, that that's their claim right,
Speaker 4: and the same with the driver's license database. So obviously,
Speaker 4: just to finish up on that thought, I guess this
Speaker 4: disincentivizes people from doing the thing which I've just said
Speaker 4: is good, which is getting a driver's license. Right. It disincentivizes.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm seeing things from students right now being
Speaker 4: afraid of going to their own graduations, being afraid of
Speaker 4: having their parents at their own graduation. Right like two
Speaker 4: blocks from a school, fucking chicken do not she's on
Speaker 4: top of the fence. Sorry, I'm just going to leave this.
Speaker 4: You're gonna fucking get out?
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, please chicken break.
Speaker 1: I really, I really truly thought that that was part
Speaker 1: of the sentence, and I was trying to process in
Speaker 1: my brain.
Speaker 4: What the fighting was going on.
Speaker 1: That's like, yeah, all.
Speaker 4: Right, we're back. Did you none commanded? Did you pick
Speaker 4: up the chicken?
Speaker 1: Ye?
Speaker 4: Could you say that you were kind of a chicken jockey? Everyone?
Speaker 2: No? No, just another thirty seconds of silence, everybody, let's
Speaker 2: really give that it's due.
Speaker 4: Anyone got a gong that we could find? No? No,
Speaker 4: all right, pouring one out for Garrison. So right now,
Speaker 4: both Bonifort Jetta locations are closed. They go Fundme for
Speaker 4: the impacted employees and their families has already hit twice
Speaker 4: its goal one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. As I've said,
Speaker 4: there have been on sef gestions which, as far as
Speaker 4: I'm were unfounded that a restaurant forced and documented employees
Speaker 4: to work long hours. That doesn't matter, right, even if
Speaker 4: they did, you shouldn't be punishing the people who are being,
Speaker 4: in theory abused, right. I don't understand how you get
Speaker 4: to that logic. And even if that is the case,
Speaker 4: like having ice available on call to deport your employees
Speaker 4: only plays into the hands of abusive bosses who don't
Speaker 4: want to pay people, right, they can just call ice instead.
Speaker 4: This is a tactic that's been used for decades and
Speaker 4: into migrants. So yeah, that's all I got. Good times,
Speaker 4: good times in San Diego.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, We're going to talk about this more in
Speaker 1: another episode. There was also a rage in Minneapolis that
Speaker 1: you know, there's like through the agents out multi agency
Speaker 1: raid and like a hundred people just showed up and
Speaker 1: got them the fuck off.
Speaker 4: And they didn't end up arresting anybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, well, so I think they wrest some
Speaker 1: all the protesters, but like they didn't end up attaining anything.
Speaker 4: They did not detain the people they were going after,
Speaker 4: they stopt them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's there's this there's this great line that
Speaker 1: fucking every single person from Minneapolis who I know now
Speaker 1: is quoting where one of the people who got interviewed
Speaker 1: in Sahan Journal said, that's Minnieappolis.
Speaker 4: Baby.
Speaker 1: We pull up, so you too could pull up and
Speaker 1: stop the fucking you see for cowards, you can stop
Speaker 1: them now. Speaking of incredible cowardice. One of the things
Speaker 1: that's been happening on a sort of another immigration front
Speaker 1: is the US's attempt to revoke student visas for Chinese
Speaker 1: international students. We don't actually know what this means yet
Speaker 1: and what's going to look like. All they've said is
Speaker 1: that they're working to aggressively to revoke visas. As a
Speaker 1: direct quote from them, and this this is this was
Speaker 1: from uh Marco Rubio on fucking whatever social media app
Speaker 1: and you also say, quote, we will revise visa criteria
Speaker 1: to a hand scrutiny of all future visa applications from
Speaker 1: the People's of Public of China and Hong Kong. So
Speaker 1: uh fucking rip all of the Hong Kong liberals who
Speaker 1: supported Trump.
Speaker 4: Yeah, bad shit.
Speaker 1: No one knows exactly what this is going to mean.
Speaker 1: I've seen speculation that this could be a full ban.
Speaker 1: I that's what Stephen Miller has wanted for a long time.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's going to happen. They've been
Speaker 1: talking about like quote unquote critical fields like stems stuff.
Speaker 1: It could also be a you know, the ceific language
Speaker 1: they're using is like anyone who's linked to the Communist Party.
Speaker 1: That's a lot and what's that mean?
Speaker 4: Yet? Who the fuck knows?
Speaker 1: Right, Like, you know, like there's some of these people
Speaker 1: are the kids of like Chinese companies partaty members, but
Speaker 1: like there are that's like seven percent of the population
Speaker 1: of China, right, Like that's a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: then linked can be fucking anything, right Like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: so no one is entirely sure what this means yet.
Speaker 1: I my guess is that it's going to be combined
Speaker 1: with the other horrible thing I been doing right now,
Speaker 1: which that they've suspended visits like consular visits to get
Speaker 1: student visas while they try to figure out how to
Speaker 1: like do this like implement this new social media policy
Speaker 1: where they want to just effectively. What it looks like
Speaker 1: they want to do is just like if you've posted
Speaker 1: about Palestine, they deny your student visa. That seems like
Speaker 1: the thing that they're trying to put in place, Yet
Speaker 1: they haven't yet My guess is that these two are
Speaker 1: going to end up being linked and they're gonna and
Speaker 1: that that's gonna be what they're doing. It could also
Speaker 1: just be some sort of large scale of rollback of
Speaker 1: student visas for Chinese international students here, Chinese and national
Speaker 1: students have been targeted under so many goddamn administrations now,
Speaker 1: it's fucking horrible.
Speaker 4: These are just like people.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because when you read media accounts of this,
Speaker 1: a lot of them will be like, well, people aren't
Speaker 1: that Like, we're not that scared.
Speaker 4: That's okay.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, no, you you are talking to the
Speaker 1: people who are stupid enough to talk to an American journalist. Right,
Speaker 1: most people just say no because they're genuine. Is like
Speaker 1: creating an atmosphere or fucking terror where people don't want
Speaker 1: to people don't want to speak out about it. And
Speaker 1: this and this has been something that's been used to
Speaker 1: like great grad student unions, you know, like just over
Speaker 1: the years, this has been a kind of repression.
Speaker 4: It's very useful.
Speaker 1: This is also I think part of their of just
Speaker 1: the broader war against higher education because a lot of
Speaker 1: Chinese international students like come in on full tuition, so
Speaker 1: they're paying for a large percentage of like a bunch
Speaker 1: of university budgets.
Speaker 4: But yeah, we will, we will.
Speaker 1: We will keep you informed as to what this actually
Speaker 1: looks like. That's what we know about it for now.
Speaker 1: It fucking sucks.
Speaker 3: Let's end with some semi good news. I guess we
Speaker 3: will return into my horribly named segment Stinky Musk. Oh god, hey,
Speaker 3: this is Gaere from the future, just cutting in here
Speaker 3: at the beginning because help well hint. The twenty four
Speaker 3: hours after we were recorded this initial segment, there has
Speaker 3: been substantial developments in the Elon Musdonald Trump breakup story.
Speaker 4: It is getting quite ugly out there, folks.
Speaker 3: The girls are fighting Diva down jd Vance is high
Speaker 3: in the closet as the parents are screaming down the hallway.
Speaker 3: It is getting quite ugly. Trump's gotten rid of the
Speaker 3: electric vehicle mandate and is threatening to terminate Elon's government
Speaker 3: subsidies and contracts. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is talking about how
Speaker 3: Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, like duh, Like
Speaker 3: we don't already know this, but for some reason, this
Speaker 3: is blowing the minds of people like Alex Jones, who
Speaker 3: are now crashing out on the timeline, huge, huge shakeups
Speaker 3: in the mega world, with some people trying to cope
Speaker 3: claiming that this is a five D Chess move and
Speaker 3: that Elon and Trump are gonna come back together in
Speaker 3: the end, which is completely absurd. This is a huge
Speaker 3: shift in the power balance in the New Right. We
Speaker 3: will be doing a whole new piece in the near
Speaker 3: future on the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story and
Speaker 3: how it will affect the Republican Party. But the following segment,
Speaker 3: which we recorded on Wednesday, will essentially outline how we
Speaker 3: got right up to this point, all of these slow
Speaker 3: microaggressions and fractures that led to this much more explosive breakup.
Speaker 3: So enjoy that and keep your ears peeled for a
Speaker 3: future piece on Elon Musk Donald Trump's messy situation ship. So,
Speaker 3: Elan Musk donald Trump are now officially in their messy
Speaker 3: breakup phase where they're both trying to kind of play
Speaker 3: it cool, but resentment is clearly bubbling.
Speaker 4: So after report surface.
Speaker 3: Tobu the growing rifts between Musk and Trump, the White
Speaker 3: House gave Musk a one last farewell hurrah on Friday,
Speaker 3: May thirtieth, wear Musk sporting a black eye and a
Speaker 3: T shirt reading the Doge Father, was gifted a gold
Speaker 3: key to the White House by Donald Trump. A day later,
Speaker 3: Trump withdrew the nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman as
Speaker 3: NASA administrator, so as Musk's Special Government employee designation expired,
Speaker 3: nothing was renewed. They did not try to push him
Speaker 3: through as an more permanent advisor. He is essentially getting
Speaker 3: the soft boot. According to Axios, Musk had asked the
Speaker 3: White House about staying on as an advisor past the
Speaker 3: one hundred and thirty day Special Government employee threshold, but
Speaker 3: that was denied. Now, Musk has been reportedly disillusioned by
Speaker 3: the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through
Speaker 3: some of his Doge cuts, along with the growing frustration
Speaker 3: regarding the Liberation Day tariffs which affect his businesses. To
Speaker 3: add to the tension, according to The New York Times,
Speaker 3: Musk has been upset that Trump has been negotiating deals
Speaker 3: with Open AI instead of Musk's own competitor, Grock god.
Speaker 3: In late May, Musk posted on x the everything app
Speaker 3: quote back to spending twenty four to seven at work,
Speaker 3: I must be super focused on x slash XAI and tesla.
Speaker 4: Well, to be fair, Garrison, have you seen ch gpt
Speaker 4: ever speaking in the style of Jajjar Binks in such
Speaker 4: a convincin you know that is true? Right there? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Not well talking about the plight of the boors.
Speaker 3: So as Musk was preparing to exit the White House,
Speaker 3: he began airing his beef with the new big beautiful
Speaker 3: budget bill.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: I think a bill can be big or it can
Speaker 3: be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both,
Speaker 3: telling CBS News quote, I was disappointed to see the
Speaker 3: massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not
Speaker 3: just decreases it, and undermines the work that the Doge
Speaker 3: team is doing unquote. After this, Steven Miller started subtweeting
Speaker 3: Musk on x the Everything app outlining the different types
Speaker 3: of cuts that Doge can make versus reconciliation bills can make,
Speaker 3: and defend it the big Beautiful bill, calling it quote
Speaker 3: the single largest welfare reform in American history, along with
Speaker 3: the largest tax cut reform in American history, the most
Speaker 3: aggressive energy expiration in American history, and the strongest border
Speaker 3: bill in American history, all while reducing the deficit unquote,
Speaker 3: which it does not reduce the deficit. But now that
Speaker 3: Musk's White House exit has been more solidified, Musk's animosity
Speaker 3: towards Trump's main palsy bill has just skyrocketed, posting on
Speaker 3: June third on x Everything app, I'm sorry, but I
Speaker 3: just can't stay it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork filled
Speaker 3: congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.
Speaker 1: Shame on those who voted for it. You know you
Speaker 1: did wrong.
Speaker 3: You know it. Similarly, Stephen Miller has also been crashing
Speaker 3: out on the Timeline, attempting to defend the bill and
Speaker 3: push back on Musk's attacks in a flurry of tweets,
Speaker 3: and one of which reads, quote the big beautiful budshet
Speaker 3: bill will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale,
Speaker 3: and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the
Speaker 3: United States. For that reason alone, is the most essential
Speaker 3: piece of legislation currently under construction in the entire Western
Speaker 3: world in generations. Wow, now Steven seems pretty worked out,
Speaker 3: And I think this could actually have to do not
Speaker 3: just about Musk's tweets, but also maybe about Steven's own
Speaker 3: personal life, because yeah, Steven's animosity could relate to the
Speaker 3: fact that Musk seems to be stealing Stephen Miller's own
Speaker 3: life Katie Miller.
Speaker 1: Katie Miller was working in a top position.
Speaker 3: At DOME as a special government employee, and now that
Speaker 3: her designation has also expired, she is leaving the government
Speaker 3: to continue working with Musk full time, including arranging Musk's
Speaker 3: own interview appearances. It is not looking great, folks. The
Speaker 3: cockchair is getting warmed. I am not thrilled about Elon
Speaker 3: Musk possibly having a baby with Stephen Miller's life.
Speaker 4: This is really dark timeline stuff. I think all of
Speaker 4: them should be doing better, different different.
Speaker 3: I certainly can critique the way polyamory functions in, you know,
Speaker 3: and leftist anarchist faces.
Speaker 4: This is the most toxic.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This this is a night of wrong wives too, and
Speaker 1: hopefully it ends up for all of these motherfuckers like
Speaker 1: it did for him Buck.
Speaker 4: So yeah fu.
Speaker 3: Stephen Miller went on TV last week to like talk
Speaker 3: about how much he cares about his family.
Speaker 2: It's it's such it's such good timing.
Speaker 4: It's really dark for him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you marry Stephen Miller, it's because you're you're
Speaker 2: both the same kind of evil, and if that's the
Speaker 2: kind of person you are, Elon Musk is going to
Speaker 2: give you more opportunities to be the kind of evil
Speaker 2: you want to be.
Speaker 4: It's right, It's just obvious.
Speaker 3: Like this is like I I can't just tell if
Speaker 3: Musk is an upgrade or a lateral move from Stephen Miller.
Speaker 4: It's really tough to say. Yeah, this is very funny,
Speaker 4: but yeah, that is.
Speaker 3: This is one of the you know, last bits in
Speaker 3: the White House Elon musk saga. He really tried to
Speaker 3: like push forward this this this doge retire all government employees' agenda,
Speaker 3: and it ran into way more roadblocks than what he
Speaker 3: was expecting. And he seems really upset about that. And
Speaker 3: now he has to return to the private sector to
Speaker 3: save his failing businesses, which have only started to fail
Speaker 3: more now that he damaged an already kind of a troubling.
Speaker 4: Reputation the past few months. Yeah. So, yeah, that is
Speaker 4: the update on Elon Musk. Awesome, Well, everybody, we reported
Speaker 4: the news. I love reporting the news and that you
Speaker 4: did it. Goodbye, 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 1: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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