Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to It could happen here, and it could.
Speaker 3: My name is Antre Siege. I'm also Antisom on YouTube
Speaker 3: and I'm here once again.
Speaker 4: With James James Stout. People have said I'd never say
Speaker 4: my last name and they can't work out who I am,
Speaker 4: so I guess I'll do that more.
Speaker 5: Welcome James Stout, Thank you so.
Speaker 3: And I mean this is an unfortunately common part enough
Speaker 3: thought for me, but I've been thinking about just how
Speaker 3: totalizing this system feels. And it's like everywhere you're ten,
Speaker 3: you know, walking down the street, look at the city,
Speaker 3: a pollution, Every inch of land there's been claimed by
Speaker 3: the system, every bit of you know, the way you
Speaker 3: live and operate just feels like it's been manipulated and
Speaker 3: controlled in some way. And so that's really what I
Speaker 3: want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of this
Speaker 3: system and how it's used to control, you know, both
Speaker 3: in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure
Speaker 3: of our lives. So I suppose to start off, i'd ask,
Speaker 3: when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shaping
Speaker 3: your choices?
Speaker 4: That's interesting, I mean a lot in the certain ways,
Speaker 4: right Like, like the infrastructure of labor shaped a lot
Speaker 4: of my choices, Like I have to work a lot
Speaker 4: to make ends meet, right like, which means I can't
Speaker 4: do sometimes things I want to do, Like there are
Speaker 4: mutual aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that
Speaker 4: I'm not able to because I have this obligation to
Speaker 4: capital m I guess that's one of them.
Speaker 6: Or just like the.
Speaker 4: Physical infrastructure limiting the people I get to see, right like,
Speaker 4: there are places I love to go out there with
Speaker 4: some really nice vegan places in Tijuana that I don't
Speaker 4: go to as much as i'd like because someone has
Speaker 4: built a giant wall and then another giant wall next
Speaker 4: to it, and then stationed a bunch of people with
Speaker 4: guns to check if I have the right piece of
Speaker 4: paper to go back and forth to somewhere that otherwise
Speaker 4: I could rude my bike to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: really frustrating, and I think that's one of the most
Speaker 3: obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that yeah, set of
Speaker 3: manipulates our lives today. I think on the digital level,
Speaker 3: there's things like just the way that social medias lead out.
Speaker 3: I think it really controls like how much time you
Speaker 3: spend on it, much energy you invest into and of
Speaker 3: course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities with
Speaker 3: they laid out, it tends to affect you know, just
Speaker 3: how often we go out, where we go, what needs
Speaker 3: a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned,
Speaker 3: and how it's been used to control people. That goes
Speaker 3: way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built
Speaker 3: transport infrastructure in like roads and railways and ports with
Speaker 3: the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from the
Speaker 3: colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know,
Speaker 3: the systems we're not designed to say over the mobility
Speaker 3: needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct
Speaker 3: line from the mines and the plantations and the resource
Speaker 3: rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so for the British and perialists and lovers
Speaker 3: of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports,
Speaker 3: and we built bridges, and we built roads, and we
Speaker 3: built really as well. It's the same pattern everywhere. You know,
Speaker 3: in India it was used to move cotton, tea and
Speaker 3: other resources from the interior to the ship and ports.
Speaker 3: In Ghana it was used to move gold and cuckoo.
Speaker 3: But in any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city,
Speaker 3: you know, the actual economic self determination of the people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: in that area, it didn't matter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, very much too.
Speaker 4: I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty, which is an interesting time to be traveling,
Speaker 4: but I remember riding around them. The Kunar Rwanda word
Speaker 4: for dirt road is iqitaka, right, and so that's what
Speaker 4: mostly So we cycled on these dirt.
Speaker 6: Roads and it was lovely.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: We'd go through the village and everyone would come out
Speaker 4: and wave at you, and like the little kids would
Speaker 4: come out and be like what the fuck is this bicycle?
Speaker 4: And it was kind of fun, you know, And then
Speaker 4: we we'd find someone. It's not really set up for
Speaker 4: like restaurants, so you just find someone and pay them
Speaker 4: an amount upon which you agreed and they would give
Speaker 4: you some food.
Speaker 6: And that was a beautiful experience.
Speaker 4: And then there were these roads that they call Chinese
Speaker 4: roads that just go directly from the mind to the
Speaker 4: place where the raw material can be extracted. Because between
Speaker 4: the China was doing a lot of what you could
Speaker 4: generously call foreign direct investment or like neo colonialism in
Speaker 4: lots of places in Africa, right, And it was the
Speaker 4: contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound, Like
Speaker 4: obviously you travel faster on the smooth roads, but like
Speaker 4: you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting
Speaker 4: and sharing that travel with people, which is why I
Speaker 4: do these things in the first place. With just like
Speaker 4: such a profound contrast. I remember it really striking me
Speaker 4: at the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers
Speaker 3: in general have been doing, right, They they wield their
Speaker 3: control over labor to set things up in a way
Speaker 3: that fulfills their interests. Yeah, and then you know, even
Speaker 3: when people key in some sort of nominal independence and
Speaker 3: they inherit these colonial infrastructure grids, or you know, they
Speaker 3: have investments coming in and they have set up they
Speaker 3: have these companies, it's a multinational companies setting up infrastructure.
Speaker 5: It still continues, you know.
Speaker 3: The sort of extractivist and top down nature of the
Speaker 3: way the infrastructure is set up. You know, it doesn't
Speaker 3: reimagine all of them, don't reimagine the logic of what
Speaker 3: came before. You're in part for lack of funding and
Speaker 3: in part for lack of imagination. And so in a
Speaker 3: lot of places, the peripheral regions in these countries are
Speaker 3: still lacking in connectivity. They're still lagging behind the rest
Speaker 3: of the country. They still don't have access to some
Speaker 3: of the basic social services and resources that the urban
Speaker 3: core has because you know, the urban rural divide in
Speaker 3: many ways mimics the corporate free divide on.
Speaker 5: The international stage.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then you have these neo colonial development aid
Speaker 3: programs coming in with the IMF for the World Band,
Speaker 3: and you have even more infrastructure projects. So just repeat
Speaker 3: this extractive pattern under the ban of development. Of course,
Speaker 3: real development will be connecting people encouraging people to participate
Speaker 3: in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure that tends
Speaker 3: to be set up is more so for consolidating state
Speaker 3: power and channeling the movement of people in predictable, survailable ways,
Speaker 3: and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others. So,
Speaker 3: of course infrastructure development has the capacity to help people.
Speaker 3: You know, it can increase accessibility, can make people's lives easier,
Speaker 3: and it can also just manage and contain them and
Speaker 3: varied sources. And we see a lot more examples of
Speaker 3: this sort of infrastructure control when you look at the
Speaker 3: class and racial dynamic within societies. Those sorts of divisions
Speaker 3: and separations and stratifications they of course manifest physically. You know,
Speaker 3: in the US you had literal segregation areas that were
Speaker 3: designated for black people, listening for white people, water fountains
Speaker 3: and neighborhoods and all these different things. You also had
Speaker 3: redlining policies, and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined
Speaker 3: and thus lacked investment, and thus when neglected infrastructurally due
Speaker 3: to that racial and economic inequality, those spaces are now
Speaker 3: right for development in the form of gentrification because the
Speaker 3: property is so cheap, so undervalued, and so the people
Speaker 3: who made something out of that lack are now being
Speaker 3: pushed out. And in South Africa, I mean, up until recently,
Speaker 3: these are partid era policies created townships that were deliberately
Speaker 3: located far from white urban centers, there were lacked and
Speaker 3: services and transit options, and physically reinforced the racial division
Speaker 3: of that society. And even today around the world you
Speaker 3: have human zoning laws and transit access limitations and public
Speaker 3: holes and policies that recreates historical class divisions and racial divisions,
Speaker 3: ethnic divisions. And I'm sure you and your with all
Speaker 3: of the I mean, every time I talked to you
Speaker 3: have like a new travel story to tell. I'm sure
Speaker 3: you've witnessed something like this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was just thinking of how like I was
Speaker 4: thinking of like if we think about the Syrian state
Speaker 4: as a contiguous colony, right, like it's called the Syrian
Speaker 4: Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained
Speaker 4: within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly
Speaker 4: on violence.
Speaker 6: Are Arab people.
Speaker 4: So we think of the parts of the North and
Speaker 4: East Syria majority Kurdish areas as colonized. We can see
Speaker 4: that reflected in the infrastructure.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: Part of that is, as you say, this sort of
Speaker 4: lack of investment. But then also part of it is
Speaker 4: every government funded building, right, Schools, hospitals, the buildings you go.
Speaker 6: In to do the paperwork you have to do to
Speaker 6: exist under the state.
Speaker 4: They're set up like strong points, Like they're designed with
Speaker 4: a big kind of wall and then a big courtyard
Speaker 4: and then thick exteriors like they're designed to be militarily
Speaker 4: defensible against the people they're supposed to serve. Right, Like
Speaker 4: the school is designed to be used as a fucking
Speaker 4: machine gun position. And once you see it, you see
Speaker 4: it everywhere, and you think about the nature of the
Speaker 4: state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, Right,
Speaker 4: it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like
Speaker 4: Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona,
Speaker 4: and you have like the unregulated working class for Raval,
Speaker 4: like this area just next to the Rambler where the
Speaker 4: streets are just fucking small, a winding and crazy and
Speaker 4: there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over
Speaker 4: your head, and it's a very I like to go there.
Speaker 6: It's a place that I enjoy.
Speaker 4: And then you have the ijumpler, which means extension where
Speaker 4: the infrastructure is extremely like it's probably one of the
Speaker 4: earlier grid cities that you would see, right. And the
Speaker 4: idea was that like these these overcrowded kind of what
Speaker 4: were in the nineteen twenties and thirty slums would be
Speaker 4: like where the working class would be kept. And the
Speaker 4: working class, to be clear, were like seen as there
Speaker 4: was a colonial relationship between the boys who are the
Speaker 4: working class in Barcelona because most of the working class
Speaker 4: were not Catalan. They would actually put signs at the
Speaker 4: top of these working class areas saying like Mutia begins here, right,
Speaker 4: these are the Musians and people from Mustia, the people
Speaker 4: from outside of Catalonia, and Catalonia stops here where the
Speaker 4: working class exist. That later reflected in the working class
Speaker 4: self identity, like it came to refer to the Ravala's Chinatown,
Speaker 4: not specifically because of a high concentration of people from
Speaker 4: from the Chinese diaspora, but because they've seen Chicago gangster
Speaker 4: movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were,
Speaker 4: and they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster, like we're
Speaker 4: going to call it Chinatown that you want to come
Speaker 4: in here, will fucking shoot you. Like I thought that
Speaker 4: was really fascinating, like response to the way that they
Speaker 4: have been alienated by infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you when you
Speaker 3: look at the sort of claims that, oh, you know,
Speaker 3: it's just it's just roads, it's just zonating, it's just
Speaker 3: a city grid, it's just an embassy, it's just a
Speaker 3: government office. It's like no, these sorts of spaces, these buildings,
Speaker 3: it's infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and when you
Speaker 3: see that, you can't unsee it because you look at
Speaker 3: the amount of decisions it would have had to have
Speaker 3: gone into, you know, some of the examples you mentioned
Speaker 3: or the examples I mentioned, you know, the design decisions
Speaker 3: and say, okay, we're gonna put this rule would hear
Speaker 3: instead of here, Yeah, we're going to use this material
Speaker 3: instead of this material. Who you employ to build those
Speaker 3: structures that infrastructure also as an impact in the surrounding area.
Speaker 3: Are you employing people within the community, employing people outside?
Speaker 3: What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure, who's maintaining the infrastructure? Yeah,
Speaker 3: what level of surveillance has been implemented, Where are the
Speaker 3: public transportation roots and why they here not there?
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, exactly, Like there's people whose opinions and
Speaker 4: views matter in that process, and there are people who
Speaker 4: are excluded from it.
Speaker 5: Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the authors I tend to go back too
Speaker 3: often is the Vandalists because he critics a lot of
Speaker 3: this stuff, particularly infrastructure's control and tools. Look in Viviality.
Speaker 3: He spoke about how modern transport and urban design have
Speaker 3: been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.
Speaker 3: So you call a lot the usual suspects suburbanization, car
Speaker 3: centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles,
Speaker 3: and he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all
Speaker 3: the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could
Speaker 3: walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're
Speaker 3: going to get a cart, right, you can't choose to
Speaker 3: walk a cycle in that sort of scenario.
Speaker 4: Yeah, someone's going to call the cops that you try
Speaker 4: that in America, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So as a lich sor it, it's really a cultural
Speaker 3: imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting move
Speaker 3: in and it's frustrated. And on the global stage, you
Speaker 3: also see how infrastructure has the capacity to control the
Speaker 3: whole geopolitical board. You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal,
Speaker 3: the Red Sea, the straight Orf home moves, all these
Speaker 3: places have a lot of power militarily, trade wise, phlegmatically
Speaker 3: because they control the flow of oil, or.
Speaker 5: Of goods, or of data.
Speaker 3: Yeah, particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run.
Speaker 3: And so speaking of data, actually the realm of digital
Speaker 3: infrastructures also very insiguous when it comes to control. We
Speaker 3: tend to think of the Internet as that sort of
Speaker 3: ephemeral cloud, right, but the cloud is hosted physically. You know,
Speaker 3: there are sofas, there are fiber optic cables, they are
Speaker 3: data centers, all these things. They're not as obvious as
Speaker 3: roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but they are
Speaker 3: just as if not in some ways even more powerful
Speaker 3: in terms of controlling what people access, how fast they
Speaker 3: access it, under what terms they access it, or because
Speaker 3: it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down, it
Speaker 3: can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that own
Speaker 3: these things. There's a small group of very powerful corporations
Speaker 3: that pretty much dictate how things are running. You know,
Speaker 3: most people they know about China's Great Firewall and how
Speaker 3: it's used to coordin off China from the rest of
Speaker 3: the Internet in some ways. You know, it's sensors to
Speaker 3: websites and switch results, it monitors people's activity, and it
Speaker 3: usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the
Speaker 3: popular global platforms like Google and Facebook. Right, But Google
Speaker 3: and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft. It's not like they're
Speaker 3: any better. You know, they're don't run and things republic
Speaker 3: could so if you will call out what China's doing
Speaker 3: with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I
Speaker 3: don't think that any govement should have any control over
Speaker 3: what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship,
Speaker 3: data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know
Speaker 3: a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies
Speaker 3: deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in
Speaker 3: the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah,
Speaker 3: things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often
Speaker 3: affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you
Speaker 3: know that's that's a fig no no, or you have
Speaker 3: even the manipulation of language, the words people use as
Speaker 3: people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of
Speaker 3: terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive
Speaker 3: and all these other euphemisms which I mean, on a step,
Speaker 3: I don't use any of them, and I despise them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, me too.
Speaker 3: The thing is a lot of people assume that these
Speaker 3: words are censored and all platforms, but they're not. You know,
Speaker 3: they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok
Speaker 3: or limited in one platform. And then if people take
Speaker 3: that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and
Speaker 3: spread it across the rest of the internet, or will
Speaker 3: see it bring it into real life and end up
Speaker 3: saying things like unlive in real life.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, and then you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm
Speaker 4: to determine the way you can express yourself.
Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly, And I mean, TikTok has a lot of
Speaker 3: heat these days because you know, rightfully so, it's very popular,
Speaker 3: it has a lot of influence, and it's you know,
Speaker 3: very bleatantly interventionist with its content in some damage in
Speaker 3: ways but again, the other big cooperations are not immune either.
Speaker 3: I mean Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they played a major role in the sort of attitudes
Speaker 3: that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of
Speaker 3: targeting Hinger community and the subsequent genocide.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I was on a panel with some my Hinder
Speaker 4: people the other day and they are still by physical
Speaker 4: and technical infrastructure, being marginalized. So something myself and my
Speaker 4: Union friends are trying to do is help the Rahinge
Speaker 4: of Podcast initiative start podcasting right such that they can
Speaker 4: share their own voices with the world and their their
Speaker 4: positions and their opinions. It's very important at a time
Speaker 4: when like they're facing marginalization even from revolutionary forces within
Speaker 4: me and and we cannot sustain an Internet connection to
Speaker 4: allow them to do that. We tried to do a
Speaker 4: live panel and it was very hard for you know,
Speaker 4: these guys are running around Cox is bizarre, where tens
Speaker 4: of thousands of Hinga people live in refugee camps trying
Speaker 4: to find connectivity, like just another example of how they
Speaker 4: continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed
Speaker 4: them to be genocided exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because the private cooperations alone and our response, well
Speaker 3: for this is the governm months too. You know, when
Speaker 3: the corporations still tell the gover months to do something,
Speaker 3: the golf months comply. And then when the golf months
Speaker 3: tell the corporations to do stuff, a lot of the time,
Speaker 3: it's also like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially
Speaker 3: since they government has the power in a lot of
Speaker 3: cases to shut down the Internet when things are not
Speaker 3: going their way. You know, they've they used it and
Speaker 3: all of it. Recently, you have the suppression of the
Speaker 3: center in protests, you know, to influence elections or to
Speaker 3: restrict information, substructionalism and communication during crises.
Speaker 5: When you look at.
Speaker 3: All over the world Iran, India, Sudan, Yanma, Uganda, even
Speaker 3: in Gaza. In all these cases, these governments step in
Speaker 3: and they limit or they shut down the Internet entirely
Speaker 3: to prevent the news from getting out. You know, they
Speaker 3: could target either the entire Internet or they target platforms.
Speaker 3: They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter. They justify by saying,
Speaker 3: oh they're going after take news or there's a security threat.
Speaker 5: Yeah it's bullshit, but you know, we could see through that.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's tough because I mean, this is where these are,
Speaker 3: These are the places where people have gathered. These are
Speaker 3: the online town squares, you know, and these these this
Speaker 3: infrastructure is very much centralized. Google controls most of the
Speaker 3: search on the internet. Amazon dominates e commerce and cloud,
Speaker 3: computer and logistics, and Meta controls a lot of people's
Speaker 3: social interactions. You know, I could brag and say, oh, well,
Speaker 3: I'm not on Facebook, but you know, I still use
Speaker 3: What'sapp because everybody else uses WhatsApp. Yeah, And it's it's
Speaker 3: so easy for them, because we're so concentrated on these platforms,
Speaker 3: It's so easy for them to pop at us, to
Speaker 3: flex their their muscles and control the direction of public discourse.
Speaker 3: And I mean it's amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing
Speaker 3: our engagements, exploiting our cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality.
Speaker 5: It's like, what the hell do we do?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And so for the the Opium segment of the podcast,
Speaker 3: I just want to point out that, you know, infrastructure
Speaker 3: can be used to consolidate power and control people, but
Speaker 3: it can also be used to resist and to reticular
Speaker 3: a collective agency. You know, even infrastructure there was originally
Speaker 3: designed to control can be taken under our control. You know,
Speaker 3: around the world, communities have been able to challenge these
Speaker 3: extractive logics to build their own infrastructures on their own terms.
Speaker 3: You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form
Speaker 3: of community built mash networks or alternative Internet local servers.
Speaker 3: You know, you have projects like guifi dot net in Catalonia,
Speaker 3: or you have the NYC Mesh in New York, and
Speaker 3: these are efforts to engage in you know, pay to
Speaker 3: pay and decentralized communications with all the reliance and the
Speaker 3: telecom giants. And then you also, of course physically have
Speaker 3: examples of infrastructure resisting central control, participatory urban planet movements.
Speaker 3: You have gorilla urbanism. You have you know, of course,
Speaker 3: the long and storied history of squatting otherwise known as
Speaker 3: informal settlement. And these informal settlements are hubs of innovation
Speaker 3: and a lot of cases in things like Nai Rubi or
Speaker 3: in Rio Gario. You know, these these slums and favelas,
Speaker 3: they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet,
Speaker 3: hooking up their own water is supply. Yeah, because they
Speaker 3: recognize that this is within their hands, this is within
Speaker 3: their capacity. You know, we don't have to have everything,
Speaker 3: you know, passed on to us from one hye. You know,
Speaker 3: we can you know, sort of claim our own voices
Speaker 3: and design our own spaces. If you're really interested in
Speaker 3: how infrastructure has the capacity to control and really just
Speaker 3: how states sort of see things, I have to of
Speaker 3: course recommend the classic James C. Scott Seeing like a State.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean it's that's a foundational framework to understand
Speaker 3: and how infrastructure is used for social engineering. It's really
Speaker 3: readable as well, so definitely give that a read, and
Speaker 3: you know, think about ways that you can contribute to
Speaker 3: shaping the infrastructure around you. And I don't know, James,
Speaker 3: if you have any stories along this vein you can
Speaker 3: leave us off with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I think of a ton right, Like
Speaker 4: even I think about like when I was a lot younger,
Speaker 4: I lived in a I guess what you could call
Speaker 4: a slum of Leila, like a pretty economically disadvantage to
Speaker 4: part of Kadakus for a little while and like at
Speaker 4: the time, and I've seen it's when I lived in
Speaker 4: Barcelona too, I guess the English word would be info
Speaker 4: shop they normally call them social centers would be the
Speaker 4: Spanish word, or social spaces, and like it was cool
Speaker 4: to this is a city which is established through colonialism, right,
Speaker 4: And there was a brief time before things were terrible
Speaker 4: in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and
Speaker 4: largely it was people trying to make things better, and
Speaker 4: like the state for a time allowed a space for
Speaker 4: that to exist before it stopped allowing a space for
Speaker 4: that to exist, which is where we're at right now, right,
Speaker 4: and very clearly the state right now is very repressive
Speaker 4: in Venezuela, to be clear, Like I didn't want to
Speaker 4: give put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but
Speaker 4: it was actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated, right,
Speaker 4: I was like nineteen.
Speaker 6: My Spanish was dog shit. I was hungry all the time.
Speaker 4: It didn't have any food, you know, But it facilitated
Speaker 4: that community taking care of me because the spaces were
Speaker 4: public and people could see if people were falling.
Speaker 6: Through the cracks.
Speaker 4: Right, I think a lot about refugee camps, so obviously
Speaker 4: that somewhere has spent a decent amount of time, right
Speaker 4: both within the US and outside of the US, and
Speaker 4: something I've been thinking about a lot recently, is how
Speaker 4: so many of the people I met on the way
Speaker 4: to the United States and the Dadienne had horrific experiences
Speaker 4: in the Dadianne and afterwards, but they also miss the
Speaker 4: community that they had, Like they also miss the profound
Speaker 4: solidarity of just talking to people the other day who
Speaker 4: were telling me, like when they were hungry in the jungle,
Speaker 4: strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give
Speaker 4: them food.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too,
Speaker 3: this sort of explosion and mutually.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And like refugee camp is a place where you
Speaker 4: do not have privacy for the most part, and that's
Speaker 4: not always great, but it facilitates caring for one another.
Speaker 4: And like, I don't know, I have this recollection from
Speaker 4: seven or eight years ago. Now I'm walking through a
Speaker 4: refugee camp in Mexican and just a very little girl
Speaker 4: from six seven something like that, And I have long hair.
Speaker 4: People can't see me, but she likes to like mess
Speaker 4: with my hand braided shit. And I'm carrying this little girl,
Speaker 4: and like I've been coming for some time, and like
Speaker 4: the sense of community that you felt there amongst like
Speaker 4: a really terrible situation, but like because everyone can see
Speaker 4: you walking down his little walkway, Everyone's like, oh hi,
Speaker 4: how are you? Like you know, the kind of I'm
Speaker 4: trying to work out what they what they need and
Speaker 4: how we can best help. Like I just remember thinking
Speaker 4: like what the fuck is wrong with and then going
Speaker 4: back to the United States, right, and sitting in my
Speaker 4: little house and like, you know, you know, like that,
Speaker 4: like I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be
Speaker 4: close to them, but not many people are. And like
Speaker 4: for most people, you know that they get out of
Speaker 4: the house and go to their car, they drive to
Speaker 4: their work.
Speaker 6: They don't say hi to anyone.
Speaker 4: Like it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in
Speaker 4: those refugee camps were close to the beautiful life that
Speaker 4: we want than we are in these million dollar homes.
Speaker 4: In my house does not cost a million dollars. I
Speaker 4: don't own a house. But the profound alienation that we feel,
Speaker 4: in part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of
Speaker 4: humanity to fall back into caring for one another, to like,
Speaker 4: that's what we do when we are not like physically
Speaker 4: and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both
Speaker 4: both physical and digital, and even emotional that divide us
Speaker 4: from one another. And I've kind of thought about that
Speaker 4: ever since, Like, how do I build a place where
Speaker 4: people have more stability, people have privacy, people have their
Speaker 4: material needs.
Speaker 3: Men, Yeah, does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't want There's some coh hopes and sort of
Speaker 3: plans that I've seen, for example, but don't even really
Speaker 3: factor any much privacy, which.
Speaker 5: I'm not for at all.
Speaker 3: But the one after recreate their their dorm room experience
Speaker 3: or in my case, they are sharing a bedroom the
Speaker 3: entire childhood experience.
Speaker 4: So yeah, we need to have space for people to
Speaker 4: have privacy, but at the same time space for people
Speaker 4: to have community, and like, cities can exist like that,
Speaker 4: Communities can exist like that. They're the theory of the
Speaker 4: Mediterranean public sphere that sometimes comes up where like again
Speaker 4: in working class Barcelona, right, people don't generally have air
Speaker 4: conditioning and it can't get very hot, so you just
Speaker 4: spend a lot of time outside balcony whatever, you know,
Speaker 4: front port if you've got one that creates community, right,
Speaker 4: that creates a public sphere, like a place that is
Speaker 4: it's not quite our home, but it's not controlled by
Speaker 4: someone else either, it's like a community space, and that
Speaker 4: doesn't exist in like I don't live in the suburbs,
Speaker 4: but like suburban America, you know, where everyone has these
Speaker 4: like literal fences around all the shit that they own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that exists the very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, some areas are very much communal and other
Speaker 3: areas like trying desperately to be America.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, it's kind of a mix of both
Speaker 3: wheels there, at the very least from what I'm aware
Speaker 3: of what I can tell people, at least say height
Speaker 3: to the neighbors, though, Yeah, that's that's still like a
Speaker 3: horrifying you know, like.
Speaker 6: Mirrors respecter of not knowing your neighbors.
Speaker 3: Thing that I've heard of America in life that you
Speaker 3: don't even say hi, Yeah, you know, you don't even
Speaker 3: wave at people Like that's yeah.
Speaker 4: No, I'm always in my neighbor's houses and they're always
Speaker 4: at my house. And like I'm a person who owns
Speaker 4: a lot of tools, you know, like different spanners and stuff,
Speaker 4: so like I'm like I will go out of my
Speaker 4: weight to make sure that my neighbors know they can
Speaker 4: borrow my ship and and like that does seem to
Speaker 4: be quite a new experience for people who are like
Speaker 4: new in the neighborhood or what ever.
Speaker 6: But yeah, we should all do that.
Speaker 4: It's such an easy way to fight that alienation and
Speaker 4: the infrastructure that you know, like, yeah, there's a wall
Speaker 4: between where I live and where the person next door lives.
Speaker 4: But yeah I can I can knock on the door
Speaker 4: and say, hey, it looks like you're having some trouble
Speaker 4: with your truck. Do you need a hand or what
Speaker 4: have you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I mean what you're saying is it could
Speaker 3: happen here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you gotta make maybe the good things happen
Speaker 4: here too, because enough of the fucking bad shares.
Speaker 3: Indeed, Laza for me, guys, all power to all the people.
Speaker 9: Please this is it could happen here. The show about
Speaker 9: things for falling apart. One thing falling apart last year.
Speaker 9: I guess the president's mental health seemingly so. And we're
Speaker 9: going to talk about that today and some possible ramifications
Speaker 9: that the current president may be trying to exploit to
Speaker 9: help him out. Robert Evans, Hello, how are you?
Speaker 2: I'm fine? Is something wrong with the president?
Speaker 9: The current one or the old one?
Speaker 2: Any president ever. Has a president ever done wrong?
Speaker 9: I heard some nasty things about mister Clinton.
Speaker 2: Interesting. I woke up today for the first time, so
Speaker 2: this is all new to me.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Just don't look on like the news or the internet
Speaker 9: or anything, and it should be Okay.
Speaker 2: That's good. I'm just going to start reading Wikipedia at
Speaker 2: the A section and see if I get to anything
Speaker 2: bad about a president.
Speaker 9: So since taking office, Trump has actually sort of been
Speaker 9: going soft on old sleepy Joe, not out of the
Speaker 9: goodness of his own heart, right, but to possibly explore
Speaker 9: legal options to get around some of the roadblocks Trump's
Speaker 9: been facing in the judicial branch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 9: Trump's been arguing that Biden himself was mostly absent, especially
Speaker 9: during the later half of his presidency, and a sort
Speaker 9: of like secret cabal of cabinet members, DNC consultants, white
Speaker 9: House staff, and aids were running a shadow presidency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of my constant takes is there are
Speaker 2: no secret cabals. There's a lot of cabals. They're all
Speaker 2: very obvious, very public, very public cabals.
Speaker 9: But this secret cabal of like DNC interns, we're using
Speaker 9: Biden's signature via auto pen to set policy, make judicial appointments,
Speaker 9: and sign orders, all with little to zero awareness from
Speaker 9: poor old six sleepy Joe. In fact, people around Biden
Speaker 9: intentionally covered up his declining health to continue using his
Speaker 9: presidential power for their own progressive agenda.
Speaker 2: If only they'd used it for that, and not just
Speaker 2: to keep getting.
Speaker 9: Paychecks or sending bombs to Israel, or sending bombs to
Speaker 9: Israel many of the other, many of the other things
Speaker 9: that Yeah Biden seemed to preoccupied with. I would have
Speaker 9: play a clip from a month and a half ago
Speaker 9: Donald Trump, current president, explaining this conspiracy of the secret
Speaker 9: Joe Biden cabal.
Speaker 7: I'm sure that he didn't know many of the things. Look,
Speaker 7: he was never for open borders, he was never for
Speaker 7: transgender for everybody. He was never for men playing in
Speaker 7: women's sports. I mean he changed, I mean all of
Speaker 7: these things that changed so radically. I don't think he
Speaker 7: had any idea that what was Frankly, I said it
Speaker 7: during the debate and I say it now. He didn't
Speaker 7: have much of.
Speaker 8: An idea what was going on.
Speaker 6: He shouldn't be.
Speaker 7: I mean, essentially, whoever used the autopen was the president.
Speaker 7: And that is wrong, It's illegal, it's so bad, and
Speaker 7: it's so disrespectful to our country.
Speaker 9: Transgender for everybody, the defining legacy of the Biden era. Sure,
Speaker 9: it's his core policy platform.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I don't know, Like, what do you even
Speaker 2: say at this point? Right, Like, honestly, he's sending troops
Speaker 2: into the second major city, this one the capitol and
Speaker 2: taking over the control of the police force. How much
Speaker 2: is it worth just being like, oh and he said
Speaker 2: another thing that's not true, Like, I know it's important
Speaker 2: to cover all this, but also like, man, I'm tired.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, no, it's it's it's incredibly frustrating because they
Speaker 9: get to deploy these these absurd little lines every once
Speaker 9: in a while and it captures media attention, and the
Speaker 9: physical things that they're doing do not get as much
Speaker 9: like awareness.
Speaker 2: And there's this constant I think misinterpretation as to like
Speaker 2: this is all a distraction from this and this and this,
Speaker 2: and it does sometimes function that way, but this isn't.
Speaker 2: They're not doing this because it's a distraction. They're doing
Speaker 2: this because they also hate this group of people. So
Speaker 2: when I hurt this group of people, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of people they want to hurt, and they want to
Speaker 2: do it in different ways.
Speaker 9: And they're kind of playing a longer game with the
Speaker 9: focus on this quote unquote autopen, and it remains to
Speaker 9: be seen if it's going to be successful or you know,
Speaker 9: pay off for them. But I do want to talk
Speaker 9: about it now since this is on like you know,
Speaker 9: a month, like four of them slowly seeding this into
Speaker 9: popular discourse. It's like a new thing because every once
Speaker 9: in a while, they have to decide what the new
Speaker 9: thing is. Right a few years ago, they decided it
Speaker 9: was trans people. They decided it was DEI, they decided
Speaker 9: it was how the twenty twenty election was stolen. They
Speaker 9: just decide that there's like some major problem, and then
Speaker 9: they repeat it often enough that it becomes like something
Speaker 9: that seemingly a share of voters actually care about. And
Speaker 9: they're trying to make autopen be a thing. And there
Speaker 9: is actual, like possible results of them focusing on this
Speaker 9: as we as we will see. But the autopen fixation
Speaker 9: started this past March when Trump posted a truth on
Speaker 9: truth social claiming that Biden's preemptive partons of members of
Speaker 9: the January sixth Investigation House Committee are quote hereby declared void, vacant,
Speaker 9: and of no further force of effect because of the
Speaker 9: fact that they were done by autopen unquote. Great, this
Speaker 9: is not real. This is not this is not like
Speaker 9: a real thing that he can disclaim on truth social.
Speaker 2: But what's real? You know?
Speaker 9: There is no requirement that pardons even be signed, only
Speaker 9: that they're accepted by a subject. In nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 9: the Uslister General concluded in a memo that quotes, neither
Speaker 9: the Constitution nor any statute prescribes the method by which
Speaker 9: executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced. So he can't
Speaker 9: just do this here. But this was kind of the
Speaker 9: opening of the door for the rest of what we're
Speaker 9: going to talk about this episode. And I guess before
Speaker 9: we get into that, I should talk about what an
Speaker 9: autopen is. An autopen is a tool to automate the
Speaker 9: signing of documents by replicating a signature. And this is
Speaker 9: a machine or a type of machine that's long been
Speaker 9: used in the White House, like Thomas Jefferson bought and
Speaker 9: used an early iteration of such a device shortly after
Speaker 9: was patent in eighteen oh three, Lennon B. Johnson's auto
Speaker 9: pen was photographed in the White House for a National
Speaker 9: Inquiry or recover story titled the Robot that sits in
Speaker 9: for the President. And it's funny that now you get
Speaker 9: Fox News headlines that are basically written very similarly talking
Speaker 9: about how actually a robot or the autopen itself was
Speaker 9: acting as president and that's like a controversy, okay versus
Speaker 9: it was just like a fun news story back in
Speaker 9: the fifties.
Speaker 2: How many of the guys angry about this literally want
Speaker 2: an LLM to be the president? Yes, exactly, that's my question.
Speaker 9: No, at least at least half, at least half the
Speaker 9: other half don't know what an ll ish.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 9: Obama was the first president to openly sign legislation with
Speaker 9: an autopen, including the extension of the Patriot Act in
Speaker 9: twenty eleven while at the G eight summit in France,
Speaker 9: and the constitutionality of the autopen has never been tested
Speaker 9: or explicitly determined in court. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 9: President George W. Bush asked the Justice Department for its
Speaker 9: opinion on the validity of the autopen for signing legislation
Speaker 9: and other official policy documents. The Office of Thegal Council
Speaker 9: found that quote, the President need not personally perform the
Speaker 9: physical act of fixing his signature to a bill he
Speaker 9: approves and decides to sign in order for the bill
Speaker 9: to become law. Rather, the president may sign a bill
Speaker 9: by directing a subordinate to a fix the president's signature
Speaker 9: to such a bill, for example, by autopen unquote, though
Speaker 9: there still is debate whether the president needs to be
Speaker 9: physically present during this process or simply authorize the signing.
Speaker 9: And you know, you have people like Steven Miller in
Speaker 9: this administration who try to find niche little laws or
Speaker 9: statutes to then apply in a way that it was
Speaker 9: probably never designed or we have since these laws inceptions
Speaker 9: have decided not to use the laws in that way
Speaker 9: because that doesn't make sense of our current context. But
Speaker 9: someone like Miller very willing to do such a thing.
Speaker 9: And there could be, for instance, some obscure aspect or
Speaker 9: interpretation of like proxy signature laws that they could try
Speaker 9: to like form course through into their interpretation of like
Speaker 9: Article one, section seven of the Constitution, which might make
Speaker 9: some auto pen signatures in valid. But this is something
Speaker 9: that's like kind of dismissed in a lot of legal
Speaker 9: circles because as like a practical matter, it would be
Speaker 9: disastrous to start rescinding executive actions based on this interpretation,
Speaker 9: because like decades and decades of laws and regulations would
Speaker 9: then fall into question and possibly become void. So lots
Speaker 9: of people just like kind of don't think this is
Speaker 9: like a real question or a real concern, And part
Speaker 9: of me thinks that as well. But as like someone
Speaker 9: like Miller is demonstrated, they're absolutely willing to use like
Speaker 9: niche arguments or precedents to do some pretty like crazy stuff.
Speaker 9: Do you know what is not very crazy?
Speaker 2: Robert paying money to the sponsors of this show.
Speaker 9: It's an extremely reasonable act.
Speaker 2: It's the only sane thing you can do. If you
Speaker 2: do anything else, you are being fifty one fifty, then
Speaker 2: you'll be on an involuntary seventy two hour hold. That's
Speaker 2: the way the law works.
Speaker 9: All right, we are back. So with this Biden autopen thing,
Speaker 9: it's not really about the autopen. The autopen actually is
Speaker 9: not the problem here kind of at all. That's not
Speaker 9: what they're really focusing on. In early June, the Justice
Speaker 9: Department launched an investigation into Biden's alleged use of the autopen,
Speaker 9: with the DOJ Pardon Attorney ed Martin writing in an
Speaker 9: email that this investigation is to determine whether Joe Biden
Speaker 9: was quote competent and whether others were taking advantage of
Speaker 9: him through use of the autopen or other means unquote,
Speaker 9: with a specific focus on the primpt of pardons for
Speaker 9: members of Biden's family and clemency for thirty seven death
Speaker 9: Row inmates who sentences were converted to life in prison.
Speaker 9: So this is the real crux whether Biden was competent
Speaker 9: and whether people were using the autopen without his knowledge.
Speaker 9: And I think the reason why they're there start by
Speaker 9: focusing on these pardons, whether for January sixth investigation committee
Speaker 9: members or for those close to Biden. Like this all
Speaker 9: relates to Trump's campaign promise of retribution.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 9: You can think of Cash Betel's list of deep state
Speaker 9: actors that he wants to investigate, like that was such
Speaker 9: a core part of what Trump campaigned on, and he
Speaker 9: does still seem keen on fulfilling parts of that promise.
Speaker 9: Now Ed Martin, the DOJ pardon attorney investigating this auto
Speaker 9: pen debacle himself, has said that the president's pardon power
Speaker 9: is absolute and that using the autopen is quote not
Speaker 9: necessarily a problem. But I think the core part here
Speaker 9: is that it's not about the autopen itself. It's about
Speaker 9: this secret cabal who are using the auto pen without
Speaker 9: Biden's knowledge. So a few days after this investigation was announced,
Speaker 9: the White House released a public memo from Trump entitled
Speaker 9: reviewing Certain Presidential Actions, which ordered the Attorney General and
Speaker 9: the White House Council to investigate quote whether certain individual
Speaker 9: rules conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state
Speaker 9: and unconstitutionally exercise to the authorities and responsibilities of the president.
Speaker 9: And this document reads like something I would read on
Speaker 9: like a conspiracy theory website five years ago. It's written
Speaker 9: in a very similar style.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 9: President Biden's aides abused the power of presidential signatures through
Speaker 9: the use of an auto pen to conceal Biden's cognitive
Speaker 9: decline and assert article to authority. This conspiracy marks one
Speaker 9: of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.
Speaker 9: The American public was purposely shielded from discovering who wielded
Speaker 9: the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across
Speaker 9: thousands of documents to affect radical policy shifts. Unquote. The
Speaker 9: memo states that Biden's advisors uote unquote tried to hide
Speaker 9: the true extent of his mental decline to quote cover
Speaker 9: up his inability to discharge his duties.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 9: The investigation specifically wants to look into which policy documents
Speaker 9: were signed via auto pen and who ordered the President's
Speaker 9: signature to be a fixed to said documents. One other
Speaker 9: quote from the memo quote the White House issued over
Speaker 9: twelve hundred presidential documents, appointed two hundred and thirty five
Speaker 9: judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and
Speaker 9: commutations than any administration in United States history. Although the
Speaker 9: authority to take these executive actions, along with many others,
Speaker 9: is constitutionally committed to the president, there are serious doubts
Speaker 9: as to the decision making process and even the degree
Speaker 9: of Biden's awareness of these actions being taken in his name.
Speaker 9: Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to
Speaker 9: exercise its presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the
Speaker 9: mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity while taking radical
Speaker 9: executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an
Speaker 9: unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency. A circumstance
Speaker 9: that would have implications for the legality and validity of
Speaker 9: numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name unquote. So though
Speaker 9: the two thousand and five Bush DOJ memo does support
Speaker 9: the use of the autopen to a fix the president's signature,
Speaker 9: obviously it still must be the president who decides to
Speaker 9: sign a document, with the Office of Legal Counsel memo
Speaker 9: state in quote, we do not question the substantial authority
Speaker 9: supporting the view that the president must personally decide whether
Speaker 9: to approve and sign bills. This is pretty obvious, and
Speaker 9: that's why so much of the autopen investigations are around
Speaker 9: Biden's deteriorating mental state and not the auto pen itself.
Speaker 9: It's about trying to prove whether Biden was either not
Speaker 9: mentally capable of sufficiently authorizing a signature to be a
Speaker 9: fixed to certain documents, or was just completely unaware that
Speaker 9: the autopen was signing certain documents with White House advisors
Speaker 9: specifically covering up Biden's mental decline to take advantage of
Speaker 9: his compromise state to personally direct policy. And that's what
Speaker 9: the investigations are going to try to prove. The White
Speaker 9: House is already making repeated assertions that this was the
Speaker 9: case and this question may be finally settled in a
Speaker 9: Trump sympathetic court, and Republicans are currently trying every angle
Speaker 9: of attack on this. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has started
Speaker 9: a Senate investigation, and a House Oversight Committee investigation is
Speaker 9: already up and running. The past month, Kentucky Republican James
Speaker 9: Comer has been subpoena in Biden admin officials to testify
Speaker 9: on the use of the auto pen and Biden's mental
Speaker 9: faculties while in office. Comer's own letters and subpoenas for
Speaker 9: this investigation have been signed with a digital signature, because
Speaker 9: this is such a common practice in Washington and like
Speaker 9: all over the country. Now trying to think of all
Speaker 9: the official documents you signed on your computer right now.
Speaker 9: Metadata from a subpoena cover letter sent to former Senior
Speaker 9: Advisor to the First Lady Anthony Bernal showed the document
Speaker 9: was authored and signed by someone named Benzene, an Oversight
Speaker 9: Committee staffer, not James Comer. Because again, this is pretty regular.
Speaker 9: Even the investigators are doing this process themselves while doing
Speaker 9: the investigation. Part of the reason why the Republicans are
Speaker 9: trying to make this a continuing story and not just
Speaker 9: about you know, the pardons is because as like Biden
Speaker 9: appointee judges began blocking Trump's executive orders, the focus on
Speaker 9: the autopen turned from just pardons towards use of the
Speaker 9: autopen to nominate federal judges. And this is where things
Speaker 9: get a lot more slippery. Last month, Fox News asked
Speaker 9: House Overseec Committee Chairman James Comer if not just pardons
Speaker 9: may be found to be null and void because of
Speaker 9: the results of this investigation, but possibly also judicial appointments.
Speaker 10: Biden made two hundred and twenty eight judicial appointments, including
Speaker 10: forty five Appeals Court and one hundred and eighty seven
Speaker 10: District Court judges, and most importantly, Biden appointed Justice Kachanji
Speaker 10: Brown Jackson, the Court's most long winded justice who couldn't
Speaker 10: even define what a woman is. Mister Chairman, you mentioned
Speaker 10: that you're looking at some of the pardons that were
Speaker 10: done under President Biden and the use of the autopen,
Speaker 10: doctor Fauci being one of them, talking about whether they
Speaker 10: were legitimate or not. Are you also looking into Biden's
Speaker 10: judicial appointments as well.
Speaker 11: Absolutely everything that was signed with the autopan, especially in
Speaker 11: the last year of the Biden presidency. This is when
Speaker 11: all the books that are being written, all the tell
Speaker 11: all interviews that are being recorded from his former disgruntled
Speaker 11: staffers and stafferds who are trying to preserve the reputation
Speaker 11: for future employment. They're all saying that Joe Biden was
Speaker 11: in a deep mental decline and that he was protected
Speaker 11: by a very small inner circle. We brought a few
Speaker 11: of those people in the inner circle and asked them
Speaker 11: simple questions like were you ever told to lie about
Speaker 11: the president's health? And they couldn't answer that question. They
Speaker 11: had to plead the fifth to avoid self incrimination. This
Speaker 11: raises an issue whether these pardons, whether these judicial appointments,
Speaker 11: and whether these executive orders are legal. I believe that
Speaker 11: if this investigation keeps going in the way that it's going,
Speaker 11: that's going to a very serious concerns about whether or
Speaker 11: not Joe Biden even you what was going on around him,
Speaker 11: much less whether he authorized the use of his signature
Speaker 11: on all of this stuff. I think all of these
Speaker 11: are in jeopardy of being declared null and void in
Speaker 11: a court of law, and that's a big deal for
Speaker 11: the Trump administration, because so much of what Trump is
Speaker 11: up against in court now with these liberal, biased Biden
Speaker 11: appointed judges is the fact that they're using and citing
Speaker 11: some of these executive orders as reason to throw out
Speaker 11: President Trump's agenda and President Trump's executive orders. So they
Speaker 11: tried to trump proof the the administration on the way
Speaker 11: out the door. And the problem that got now is
Speaker 11: the American people realize that Joe Biden wasn't the one
Speaker 11: calling the shots, and he may very well have not
Speaker 11: even been mentally fit to make decisions to authorize the
Speaker 11: use of his autopin if he even authorized it. So
Speaker 11: this is going to play out in a court of law.
Speaker 11: I think our investigation is going to be a substantial
Speaker 11: part of evidence in it, and that's why we're doing
Speaker 11: the investigation.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, that's that's the rub right there. That's exactly
Speaker 2: what they want, right is to completely peel back the
Speaker 2: last administration or two of judges and make it just
Speaker 2: be all their people, a whole justice system that they
Speaker 2: completely control.
Speaker 9: If they could recall like two hundred and thirty federal judges, yeah,
Speaker 9: and fill in two hundred and thirty more like Trump
Speaker 9: appointed judges, that would clear out so much of the
Speaker 9: legal roadblocks that they're currently fac there.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 9: And that is the real crux of their focus on
Speaker 9: this issue. That's why they're trying to like insert this
Speaker 9: into reality. And they're throwing this autopen story like everywhere.
Speaker 9: Even the Epstein files, which don't exist, were concocted by
Speaker 9: the ever suspicious autopath.
Speaker 7: It's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion.
Speaker 6: I can say this.
Speaker 7: Those files were run by the worst come on earth.
Speaker 7: They were run by Comy, they were run by Garland,
Speaker 7: they were run by Biden and all of the people
Speaker 7: that actually ran the government, including the autopen.
Speaker 9: Whatever the current big news story is, they're going to
Speaker 9: try to shove the auto pen in there because that's
Speaker 9: how they operate, that's how they craft reality. Okay, we
Speaker 9: are back. So needless to say, Biden and his advisors
Speaker 9: have denied all of this. And it's a little tricky
Speaker 9: because part of what makes this story slightly compelling for
Speaker 9: Trump's team is that obviously Biden's mental health was in
Speaker 9: decline for the past few years of his presidency. We
Speaker 9: all saw that happen. That like a accepted part of
Speaker 9: our country's history. Now we all saw the debate, and
Speaker 9: so much of their argument for this is resting on
Speaker 9: how much everyone understands that you have a whole bunch
Speaker 9: of former White House staff writing books on this topic now.
Speaker 9: So with that aspect in mind, they still have to
Speaker 9: defend the use of the autopen and Biden's competency and
Speaker 9: awareness of all of the decisions being made to do this.
Speaker 9: Last month, had his first interview with The New York
Speaker 9: Times since like twenty twenty one, where he discussed how
Speaker 9: he gave oral authorization for all of the pardons, with
Speaker 9: the autopen operation specifically being managed by the Staff Secretary
Speaker 9: Stephene Feldman. He said, quote I made every decision. Biden
Speaker 9: said that the White House used the autopen specifically for
Speaker 9: the last batch of pardons. Biden said that they used
Speaker 9: the autopen because of the high number of pardon warrants
Speaker 9: issued totaling around four thousand, which affected three categories of
Speaker 9: federal convicts, people serving home confinement, non violent drug offenders,
Speaker 9: and people on death row. He did not choose or
Speaker 9: prove like every single name on that list, but claims
Speaker 9: to have determined the criteria and categories, saying, quote I
Speaker 9: was deeply involved I laid out a strategy how I
Speaker 9: want to go about these dealing with pardons and commutations.
Speaker 9: I pulled the team in to say, this is how
Speaker 9: I want to get it done generically and then specifically unquote.
Speaker 9: In preparation for the final months of the Biden presidency,
Speaker 9: his White House counsel wrote an email to staff in
Speaker 9: like November of twenty twenty four, laying with the process
Speaker 9: four reviewing pardons, the last step being quote the president
Speaker 9: makes the final decision on the final pardon and or
Speaker 9: the commutation slate unquote. At this point, around a dozen
Speaker 9: people have been subpoenaed and are giving testimony, and investigation
Speaker 9: is looking through emails from the time, specifically starting with
Speaker 9: these pardons, because I think that's the only way they
Speaker 9: have to like investigate this right now. It's easier to
Speaker 9: investigate the pardons from the last three months the presidency
Speaker 9: than just all of the documents as signed over the
Speaker 9: course of like four years, or even just two years
Speaker 9: if you look at like the past two years of
Speaker 9: his presidency. So specifically, they're focusing on the final pardons
Speaker 9: as like a way in to figure out the process
Speaker 9: for how the autopen was functioning and who was using it,
Speaker 9: and they may try to extend that process out to
Speaker 9: things like judicial appointments over time. I think trying to
Speaker 9: rescind the appointment of someone like a Supreme Court justice
Speaker 9: very unlikely because obviously Biden had awareness that that was
Speaker 9: going on, but they might try to pull more fucky
Speaker 9: shit with the circuit court appointments or that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: I don't think this is like the most important story
Speaker 9: facing the country right now. Obviously the stuff going on
Speaker 9: in Washington, DC and many other aspects of how the
Speaker 9: Trump administration is operating with ice and with trans people
Speaker 9: affects people more immediately. But I've been specifically trying to
Speaker 9: pull information on how they're crafting this narrative around the
Speaker 9: autopen ever since he made that first truth back in March,
Speaker 9: because I saw this as a ongoing reality crafting project
Speaker 9: which might accumulate in something actually meaningful over time. And
Speaker 9: none of these investigations have released their findings yet, and
Speaker 9: they're not expected to for at least a few more
Speaker 9: weeks to months. But it's something that I think is
Speaker 9: worth keeping an eye on right now, especially considering you know,
Speaker 9: Miller and others, and like the Heritage foundations focus on
Speaker 9: trying to find niche loopholes in which executive power can
Speaker 9: be really exercised. And if one of the ways to
Speaker 9: remove some of the roadblocks towards this president's executive power
Speaker 9: is to undermine the executive power of a previous administration,
Speaker 9: it would be the first time we see that strategy
Speaker 9: actually enacted. And it sounds like kind of cartoonish, but
Speaker 9: that's so much of what they're currently doing is pushing
Speaker 9: everything to that extreme, trying to test all of these
Speaker 9: more niche theories that you see people talking about in
Speaker 9: the past, Like around twenty eleven, when Obama first signed
Speaker 9: legislation with the autopen, you had a whole bunch of
Speaker 9: libertarians complaining that this is unconstitutional because he wasn't physically
Speaker 9: present when the document was being signed, and so you
Speaker 9: have like think pieces on that at the time that
Speaker 9: then kind of get memory hold, and now you're going
Speaker 9: to see some of those justifications back again and actually
Speaker 9: try to test them out in court, especially if you
Speaker 9: have a Justice Department investigation, you have an Attorney General
Speaker 9: investigation of a cent an investigation, and a House investigation.
Speaker 9: If one of those can stumble onto or develop or
Speaker 9: invent some compelling argument. We will actually see versions of
Speaker 9: this complaint be tested in a way that we never
Speaker 9: have before, because it would be like disastrous to the
Speaker 9: functional aspect of this state. If you determine that all
Speaker 9: presidential documents signed via autopen are not ballid unless presents
Speaker 9: in the room, that would be a massive domino tipping
Speaker 9: over which you know, most reasonable people who work in government,
Speaker 9: like elder statesmen, are not going to want to do
Speaker 9: that because that sounds like a fucking nightmare, like legally speaking,
Speaker 9: and it would be like disastrous, like it would destroy
Speaker 9: some fundamental aspects of the government. But right now, destroying
Speaker 9: aspects of government is kind of the point. That's what
Speaker 9: we saw with Doge, That's what we saw during the
Speaker 9: first few months of the presidency, using this kind of
Speaker 9: tech startup thought process behind running a government. You have
Speaker 9: to break things first so that you can rebuild it
Speaker 9: in a way that suits you better. And if that
Speaker 9: means stripping away two hundred federal judges to put in
Speaker 9: two hundred of your own, that would have massive benefits
Speaker 9: for them. And I think that's part of why they're
Speaker 9: having this focus right now. Oh yeah, that's kind of
Speaker 9: all I have on that, So once you have some
Speaker 9: closing thoughts.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, of course this is the game as
Speaker 2: laid out in not just Project twenty twenty five, but
Speaker 2: what the right has been talking about my entire life. Like,
Speaker 2: none of this should be surprising if you've been paying attention.
Speaker 2: The only reason why some people are surprised is that
Speaker 2: there's folks in the democratic hierarchy who have been saying
Speaker 2: for years, this isn't really what conservatives want. This is
Speaker 2: just a fringe, right, there is no fringe anymore. They'll
Speaker 2: never actually do this. They can't do this. The system
Speaker 2: doesn't work that way. There's just been this belief that
Speaker 2: this can't happen, right, it can't happen, or that like
Speaker 2: if it did, obviously you know the cops will stop them,
Speaker 2: the FBI will stop them, the army will stop them.
Speaker 2: And there's a reason why they've went out of their
Speaker 2: way to gain control of all of those organizations before
Speaker 2: doing this. So yeah, I mean, you cannot. We can
Speaker 2: either pretend that someone's going to stop them and you
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about it, or just accept that
Speaker 2: we are where we are and there may be some
Speaker 2: unprecedented things that need to be done. Yep, that's all
Speaker 2: I'll say. Legally, that's all I should say.
Speaker 9: That's the episode. Bye bye everyone, Okay, cool.
Speaker 6: Hello, and welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: It's me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be
Speaker 4: joined by a friend of the show, Kyle Cassada.
Speaker 6: How you doing, Carl, Oh, I'm doing great.
Speaker 12: And when I hear a friend of the show with
Speaker 12: any of you all are you James, It's a real
Speaker 12: honor to me. So I'm honored to be your friend
Speaker 12: and a friend of the show. So I'm glad to
Speaker 12: be here.
Speaker 6: No, thank you. We always appreciate you being here and
Speaker 6: everything you do within range. Kyle.
Speaker 4: We're not here to talk about gunstaf today Italy, which
Speaker 4: is nice in a way, because we're here to talk
Speaker 4: about something which is also very important right in terms
Speaker 4: of keeping people safe, and that is activism against like
Speaker 4: corporate destruction of our environment. We're here to talk about
Speaker 4: something called Project Blue specifically. Can you explain to listeners
Speaker 4: who are not familiar folks who maybe you haven't heard
Speaker 4: about it, what Project Blue was proposed to be.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's not dead either, we'll talk about that more.
Speaker 12: But the Project Blue was a was we'll see a
Speaker 12: two hundred and ninety acre data center project put that
Speaker 12: in scope, two hundred and ninety acres WHO data center
Speaker 12: south of Tucson through a company called Biel Infrastructure that
Speaker 12: through people's hard work, came to find out it was
Speaker 12: for Amazon. But a two hundred and ninety acre AI
Speaker 12: data center south of Tucson, Yeah, that is vast.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to think of a like, I can't think
Speaker 4: of a comparison for two hundred ninety eight is, but
Speaker 4: that that is a huge amount of like computing power, right,
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 12: It's hard to fathom that kind of space when you
Speaker 12: think about it. Yeah, there are maps of what this
Speaker 12: proposed data center's footprint is.
Speaker 6: And if you take the.
Speaker 12: Rough rectangle of it and place it over Tucson proper,
Speaker 12: the city of Tucson, that's they propose it to be
Speaker 12: just south of it pretty much envelops and it consumes
Speaker 12: the entire downtown of Tucson in multiple neighborhoods. That's how
Speaker 12: big this is. And it's one data center.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what was the data center is supposed to do?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 4: What if people aren't familiar, right, what is the data
Speaker 4: center to do? What do they do with the big computer?
Speaker 12: Okay, So for people that aren't really into the tech
Speaker 12: sector of things, a data center is essentially think of
Speaker 12: something besides of a bigger than a mall that has
Speaker 12: nothing but giant computer data banks in it. So it's
Speaker 12: a giant place where you would think of your old
Speaker 12: mainframes in the old days. It's not mainframes anymore, but
Speaker 12: like it's racks and racks and racks of computing power
Speaker 12: and connectivity to the Internet for the purposes of whatever
Speaker 12: Amazon would want to do with this. So if you
Speaker 12: go to use Amazon's infrastructure or use their AI, that
Speaker 12: buzzphrase it now is everywhere the computers that do those
Speaker 12: things or those requests or decide what products they want
Speaker 12: to market to you through their algorithm. That's what these
Speaker 12: data centers do. So it's essentially an entire city.
Speaker 6: Of just machines. Yeah, but tech.
Speaker 12: Cropolis is an interesting way to put it. It's not
Speaker 12: a netcropo, it's a tech croppler.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 12: So imagine a few people maintaining an entire city of.
Speaker 4: Machines, right and actively participating in like undermining the value
Speaker 4: of labor for everyone else with this AI shit.
Speaker 12: Well, that's part of this project we're going to get
Speaker 12: into a minute is one of the things they like
Speaker 12: to propose is that it's going to bring jobs, but
Speaker 12: only at the.
Speaker 6: Beginning, and we'll talk about that more. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, let's talk about like people in Tucson did
Speaker 4: not want this data center, right, Like there was a
Speaker 4: broad based and well organized opposition to it. So perhaps
Speaker 4: we should explain like why why? I mean, I guess
Speaker 4: people listen this podcast are inclined to think data center bad.
Speaker 4: But can you explain the impact that this would have
Speaker 4: had on the city and the turning area?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 12: Yeah, absolutely, So it's very interesting to me to think about.
Speaker 12: So these data centers of this accord are if you
Speaker 12: if you're interested in this topic and start googling, you're
Speaker 12: going to find that this is, of course not the
Speaker 12: first large or mega data center that's been implemented across
Speaker 12: this country. Because anunder that are in Texas and they
Speaker 12: are belching large amounts of pollution and to the environment.
Speaker 12: Cities nearby get absolutely destroyed by it. Typically they're brought
Speaker 12: in through some sort of tax incentives by the local
Speaker 12: city council or local county, and so that's exactly what
Speaker 12: was happening here with Tucson. So the local city council
Speaker 12: was pretty friendly to the idea. They were talking to
Speaker 12: this beal infrastructure to bring in Project Blue, they were
Speaker 12: giving tax cuts, they were giving all these incentives to
Speaker 12: bring this gigantic, megalithic thing into just south of town.
Speaker 12: And part of the insidiousness of this is that this
Speaker 12: was going to go forward until someone noticed it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was just.
Speaker 12: Going to happen all of a sudden one day, this
Speaker 12: thing is there, right, but it was noticed, And I
Speaker 12: don't honestly know exactly how it.
Speaker 6: Got noticed, but it got noticed.
Speaker 12: And one of the things I really find interesting, historically speaking,
Speaker 12: is how certain places and cultures resonate over time with
Speaker 12: historical events from the past. Tucson historically is an interesting
Speaker 12: place in terms of its environmental activism. There's a number
Speaker 12: of things that happened in Tucson. In the nineteen sixty
Speaker 12: There were groups that were actively fighting the spread of
Speaker 12: highways highway infrastructure, so they were anti freeway, and their
Speaker 12: reasoning and rationale was it that freeways were the arterial
Speaker 12: infrastructure that allowed for the destructive spread of tracklum developments.
Speaker 12: So the way to help one way is to prevent
Speaker 12: the destruction of the local environment and the spread of
Speaker 12: a city was to diminish its freeway footprint. And I
Speaker 12: think you can see this is true if you look
Speaker 12: at any big city now like Phoenix is essentially a
Speaker 12: hive city, and all of the growth comes because of freeways, right.
Speaker 4: Because people can get to work or whatever quickly, and
Speaker 4: so you get commuter suburbs.
Speaker 12: One thing that's always was interesting when I was doing
Speaker 12: more work in infosec, when people talk this does make sense.
Speaker 12: By the way, this is going to sound off topic.
Speaker 12: I was talking to the information security architect for McDonald's
Speaker 12: and we were working with them on putting together a
Speaker 12: This is why this is interesting me as a data
Speaker 12: center thing I used to do a lot as work.
Speaker 12: They were talking about putting in a very secure and
Speaker 12: encrypted data center for the purposes of protecting their intellectual property.
Speaker 12: And I was talking to this guy. I was like,
Speaker 12: what is this like your recipes or what is it
Speaker 12: you it's a McDonald's protects Yeah, And this was wild. No,
Speaker 12: they don't care about the recipes. They were protecting their
Speaker 12: software that determines where they should buy the next piece
Speaker 12: of real estate to put a McDonald's. McDonald's actually a
Speaker 12: real estate company. And I have seen this in real
Speaker 12: time with my life because I've lived in a very
Speaker 12: remote part of the Arizona Desert the frontier for lack
Speaker 12: of a better term, of Arizona for a long time.
Speaker 12: And the first thing that popped up in this one
Speaker 12: little area in the middle of.
Speaker 6: Nowhere was a McDonald's.
Speaker 12: And now everywhere you see a McDonald's show up someplace
Speaker 12: that seems a little weird, give it a few years
Speaker 12: and it's suddenly the epicenter of a new tract one development.
Speaker 4: Oh it's like they have some unique algorithm to determine.
Speaker 12: They figure that out, and the McDonald's are the first
Speaker 12: thing they come't usually a gas station in a McDonald's,
Speaker 12: and it essentially just looks like, oh, this is the
Speaker 12: place to stop, take a leak and buy a burden.
Speaker 12: But no, they buy all the land around it, and
Speaker 12: then they start selling or leasing that to other businesses
Speaker 12: as the growth happens. That's a big part of how
Speaker 12: the McDonald's corporation makes its main money. Fascinating, Yeah, and
Speaker 12: so aligned with you put a freeway. When you see
Speaker 12: a freeway suddenly show up in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 12: Someone has a goal to put a giant tract home
Speaker 12: development out there and sprawl that city a little more so. Anyways,
Speaker 12: going back to the original topic, these people in Tucson
Speaker 12: in the sixties were anti freeway and they actively changed
Speaker 12: the way Tucson grew. And I think it's one of
Speaker 12: the major reasons Tucson, if you've ever been to Tucson
Speaker 12: versus Phoenix, is a very different, culturally different vibe of Phoenix.
Speaker 13: One.
Speaker 12: It doesn't sprawl the same, yeah, and it still has
Speaker 12: stuff that isn't strip malls. It actually has locally owned businesses,
Speaker 12: It actually has some community resources, not all of its
Speaker 12: tract home and strip malls. And I think a lot
Speaker 12: of that is because of that freeway activism. Also, you
Speaker 12: look back into Tucson's past, love them or hate them,
Speaker 12: or somewhere in between. The somewhat infamous author Edward Abbey
Speaker 12: lived in Tucson and wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang and
Speaker 12: wrote a lot of environmental activism. He had a lot
Speaker 12: of views that were kind of deplorable, but when it
Speaker 12: came to climate and when it came to the environment,
Speaker 12: he was pretty on point. And his work spawned an
Speaker 12: organization called Earth First, which was one of the not
Speaker 12: the first, but one of the most famous direct we're
Speaker 12: talking direct action climate activist or Clyde. You know, they
Speaker 12: were the ones that were destroying bulldozers, driving them off cliffs,
Speaker 12: some burning down Ski Shelle's like pretty wild stuff because
Speaker 12: they believed there was no retreat in defensive Mother Earth.
Speaker 12: He's a quote, but anyways, he was Tucson. Earth First
Speaker 12: birthed in Tucson, and then Earth First was a victim
Speaker 12: of the green scare and many of them are still
Speaker 12: in prison for their work. But they did have an effect.
Speaker 12: Whether you agree with that sort of direct activism or not,
Speaker 12: they had an effect. But here we are, it's been
Speaker 12: many years after those big main activities and all that
Speaker 12: stuff became quiet. You don't really think of like direct
Speaker 12: action activism when it comes to the environment like you
Speaker 12: did back in the eighties and nineties. But when this
Speaker 12: data center popped up, groups started showing up in Tucson
Speaker 12: that really felt very earth first e I'm not talking
Speaker 12: direct action like firebombs, but their speech, the way they
Speaker 12: were organizing, coming to city council meetings and not just
Speaker 12: showing up to speak but disrupting the meetings, like causing
Speaker 12: a scene, and their work so far and I will
Speaker 12: mention some of them later in this topic have actually
Speaker 12: sort of forced the hand of this city council to
Speaker 12: deny the project. And so looking back, you're like, it's
Speaker 12: interesting to see the residents of things like those old
Speaker 12: freeway activists and Edward Abbey and Earth First it's still there.
Speaker 12: Tucson still has that, and you see that coming up
Speaker 12: now in regards to this data center project and other
Speaker 12: things that are starting to happen.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I love Tucson and spent a lot of time in
Speaker 4: Tucson for years and ye as years, and there is
Speaker 4: a feeling of like it's got this like DIY community
Speaker 4: feeling that you do not experience. And people think two
Speaker 4: sons in Phoenix, are they just smaller version of the same,
Speaker 4: But they're incredibly different.
Speaker 12: Oh no, yeah, it's hard to describe the difference. You
Speaker 12: have to go to both.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, oh, you could not go to Phoenix. You
Speaker 4: can go almost anywhere else in the US and experience
Speaker 4: the same thing as Phoenix, Right, it's incredibly generic as
Speaker 4: the city.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, the Phoenix is an old place too.
Speaker 12: Now as old as too soon, but the very core
Speaker 12: the downtown of Phoenix still has something. However, Phoenix was
Speaker 12: never good about preserving any of its historicity or historical content,
Speaker 12: and so they never saw a building old enough or
Speaker 12: cool enough that they didn't care about bulldozing it and
Speaker 12: putting up a Walgreens. Yeah, and so Phoenix is as
Speaker 12: I forgot what documentary it was, but it was like
Speaker 12: what you just described so many American cities. You drive
Speaker 12: to it and it's just like this, like constantly looping
Speaker 12: revolving piece of film of Walgreen, McDonald's nail salon, super cuts, Chili's,
Speaker 12: rinse and repeat, and it just every ten miles. It's
Speaker 12: the same thing Dutch Brother's coffee. It just never ends.
Speaker 12: And Tucson is not yet like that. It still has
Speaker 12: still has a soul.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there are special places in Phoenix who say, like
Speaker 4: Guadaloupe is cool. When my yagie friends live said this
Speaker 4: is nice, Sarah, I like getting there. Let's take a
Speaker 4: little break and talk about how Tucson and Posts is
Speaker 4: data center.
Speaker 12: So there are a number of groups that came togethers
Speaker 12: if you can't track everything all at once, because it's
Speaker 12: not possible to human being. But the one I've been
Speaker 12: keeping eye on and communicating with is called No Desert
Speaker 12: Data Center. They have a presence on the web. They're
Speaker 12: all over social media Facebook, Instagram, and for me at least,
Speaker 12: And this is not to exclude anyone. If if you're
Speaker 12: one of the primary people or groups that we're working
Speaker 12: against this and you heard this, please do not feel
Speaker 12: like I'm excluding you. This is just the group that
Speaker 12: I landed up connecting with and following. So but they
Speaker 12: are also doing a good job of aggregating others too.
Speaker 12: So almost all of their posts have like a bunch
Speaker 12: of other groups tagged in it. So if you were
Speaker 12: to look up the No Desert Data Center folks, you're
Speaker 12: going to find a.
Speaker 6: Lot of them.
Speaker 12: But they had some amazing artwork.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 12: One of the things that I think is really important
Speaker 12: in activism is getting the attention of the local community.
Speaker 6: Artwork will do that.
Speaker 12: So if they're this incredible poster that's like says no
Speaker 12: drop for data and it's a water drop with a
Speaker 12: rattlesnake and havalina and a solaro and they had a
Speaker 12: rattlesnake wrapped around a rain drop, Like really good stuff.
Speaker 6: That catches your eye.
Speaker 12: So they were doing that, but they were also getting
Speaker 12: people together. They were having meetings, planning sessions before city
Speaker 12: council meetings, getting people together, doing the artwork there, rallying
Speaker 12: the troops, for lack of a better term, building morale.
Speaker 12: You don't have activism without morale. And then they were
Speaker 12: showing up and showing up in numbers. There's videos on
Speaker 12: Instagram on their feet alone, where one of these city
Speaker 12: council meetings had over one thousand twosonians in it with
Speaker 12: and posters. And they weren't just sitting there quietly waiting
Speaker 12: for their thirty seconds to speak. They were disruptive, they
Speaker 12: were loud, and they were not going to not be heard.
Speaker 12: So that type of activism in this instance very clearly
Speaker 12: is the reason that this happened. Because if you read
Speaker 12: the writings of a number of the city council members,
Speaker 12: they were very sympathetic to the data center. One of
Speaker 12: them was talking about like, this is the wrong thing
Speaker 12: to do. If we block the data center, they're just
Speaker 12: going to build it anyway, and it's better for us
Speaker 12: to be involved because then we can help tune it
Speaker 12: to be better for the community. No no, no, no, no,
Speaker 12: you're just whitewashing a horrible thing. And so this group
Speaker 12: and other groups called them out on that immediately. Nice,
Speaker 12: So like, no, that's not it. So I think I'm
Speaker 12: answering your question. But it groups like this, Yeah, throwing
Speaker 12: up in large numbers, being loud, not only online but
Speaker 12: in person.
Speaker 6: That forced their hand. That's craz show. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's people actually being willing to get out of
Speaker 4: the tweets into the streets, so to speak, to like
Speaker 4: actually show up in this case of these meetings. But
Speaker 4: it doesn't have to just be meetings, right, it could
Speaker 4: be anywhere. I guess Luis should just talk about like Tucson.
Speaker 4: It's from an audhum word. It means dark corner, but
Speaker 4: it is not a cool place. It is cool in
Speaker 4: the Phoenix. Actually, let's hot that, like this data center
Speaker 4: would have consumed a massive amount of energy I presumed,
Speaker 4: like just keeping the computers cooled, right, and a massive
Speaker 4: amount of water.
Speaker 6: To do that.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, So when you start talking about heat, for example,
Speaker 12: I think it's worth I know we don't have infinite
Speaker 12: time here on this podcast, but it's worth noting for
Speaker 12: people that are not familiar with the concept of heat islands.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Heat islands are where you build so much metropolitan infrastructure,
Speaker 12: including asphalt and concrete, with no botboards, heat or cooling.
Speaker 12: You really don't like Phoenix was built without thinking about that.
Speaker 12: They're thinking about it now, but it wasn't built thinking
Speaker 12: about it when it sprawled, and it was continually was sprawl. Yeah,
Speaker 12: Phoenix was always a little harder than TuS just because
Speaker 12: of like you know, gigra apphical reasons. But now Phoenix
Speaker 12: is measurably and demonstrably hotter because it never cools off.
Speaker 6: And that's a heat island.
Speaker 12: So what happens is during the day, all of that
Speaker 12: I'll create, all that asphalt, all those things heat up,
Speaker 12: and it'll get to at moments like just this last week,
Speaker 12: one hundred and eighteen, one hundred and twenty degree in
Speaker 12: the middle of the day. But because the heat island
Speaker 12: hasn't been architected well and has no green space to
Speaker 12: deal with this, at night, it's still one hundred and
Speaker 12: five Jesus See, it never gets below one hundred and
Speaker 12: So the problem with heat, like obviously one hundred and
Speaker 12: twenty degrees can kill you. But the problem with the
Speaker 12: heat is that as you never get a chance to
Speaker 12: cool off. Heat over time is more dangerous to human
Speaker 12: to all living organisms. If you get a break, that's
Speaker 12: what keeps you alive. So it can be one hundred
Speaker 12: and twenty during the day, but if it's seventy five
Speaker 12: at night, that gives you a moment to heal and
Speaker 12: recuperate for the next day's heat. Phoenix is one of
Speaker 12: not the worst, believe it or not, but one of
Speaker 12: the worst versions of a heat island, and they are
Speaker 12: actively working to make that better. But it's kind of
Speaker 12: hard to undo what's been done. Yeah, Tucson, once again,
Speaker 12: because the sprawl is diminished by activism of the past,
Speaker 12: did not become the heat island Phoenix does. So while
Speaker 12: it might be one hundred and thirteen during the day,
Speaker 12: it might get down to eighty at night. Yeah, and
Speaker 12: that really is a big difference for not only sustainability,
Speaker 12: but for the health and safety of everyone that lives there.
Speaker 12: One of the things that I find is interesting is
Speaker 12: the justification for these data centers is because Arizona is
Speaker 12: seen as a place that doesn't have significant natural disaster risk.
Speaker 12: But one of the things that's being left out of
Speaker 12: the conversation I don't know why this is the case.
Speaker 12: Is that heat and heat islands are a natural disaster.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they kill people.
Speaker 12: If the power were to go out in Phoenix at
Speaker 12: the wrong time of year, the death toll is hard
Speaker 12: to fathom.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without air conditioning, it's unsurvivable in those
Speaker 6: temperatures fifty for older people, people medically conditioned to what
Speaker 6: have you.
Speaker 12: Anyone at risk, the unhoused is one example, of course,
Speaker 12: which they don't even do proper metrics and measuring of
Speaker 12: because our society doesn't care like it should. However, outside
Speaker 12: of that, you said people that are at risk, anyone
Speaker 12: that has any sort of illness, the young, the elderly,
Speaker 12: anyone like that. They have to live in their air
Speaker 12: conditioned spaceship to survive.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it would have taken it, like you say,
Speaker 4: a huge amount of cooling just to keep this data center.
Speaker 12: Well, that's where this gets so fascinating when they start
Speaker 12: proposing these because like, oh, let's be realistic, right, Arizona
Speaker 12: is probably low risk for a dramatic earthquake or a hurricane.
Speaker 6: That's fair.
Speaker 12: Yeah, However, it is not a low risk for a
Speaker 12: heat casualty event, which is going on every year and
Speaker 12: getting worse, yeah, with climate change. And so these data centers,
Speaker 12: the one in twoson that was proposed, would have consumed
Speaker 12: and the numbers fluctuate, and the course the numbers you
Speaker 12: get from the Amazon crew versus others will be a
Speaker 12: little different. But as best as I can tell, the
Speaker 12: power consumption of this one data center was essentially the
Speaker 12: equivalent of that of metropolitan Tucson. Pieces yeah, so you
Speaker 12: double the power load of the entire city for this
Speaker 12: data center. And the cooling system there's two different ways
Speaker 12: to cool there's quote unquote air cooled and water cooled.
Speaker 12: They can tell you whatever they want. The reality is
Speaker 12: they're probably not going to be affected with air cooled
Speaker 12: in this environment, so it's going to be water cooled.
Speaker 12: And the data on that also seems to be the
Speaker 12: water consumption of this was not only equal, maybe worse
Speaker 12: than that of Tucson itself. Looking at this site right now,
Speaker 12: water positivity claim for the initial two years, but the
Speaker 12: initial estimate was six hundred and twenty two million gallons. Whoa, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 12: with a seven hundred milliwat expected demand, it's crazy. And
Speaker 12: so what happens is not only does the city council
Speaker 12: just see dollar signs in their eyes? Local electrical infrastructure
Speaker 12: TEP the two soon electrical or other data center places
Speaker 12: where data centers are located suddenly do things like stop
Speaker 12: worrying about any form of arbon positivity, or they get
Speaker 12: rid of all their carbon goals so that they can
Speaker 12: build and work with people like this, Because if you
Speaker 12: double the power consumption of a region overnight for a
Speaker 12: data center, yeah, think of the waste that you're going
Speaker 12: to produce to do that, right, Yeah, And suddenly how
Speaker 12: do you produce that power. You're not going to have
Speaker 12: a nuclear plant pop up tomorrow, so you're going to
Speaker 12: do other things like burn more coal. Yeah, and so
Speaker 12: your carbon and carbon positivity or attempt to move away
Speaker 12: from carbon waste, they just throw that out the door
Speaker 12: so they can have these lucrative, juicy contracts with these
Speaker 12: data centers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that is I mean, it's just on the
Speaker 4: face of it. When I heard of it, I was
Speaker 4: just like, why are they doing this in the one
Speaker 4: of the hottest places you know, in the region. But
Speaker 4: I guess yeah, they don't see heat as a threat.
Speaker 4: Having spent a lot of time in the desert there
Speaker 4: I can tell you it is a threat to human life.
Speaker 4: So as of last week, right, the council has refused
Speaker 4: it permission to be built in Tucson.
Speaker 12: Due to intense external pressure. Yeah, they did vote against it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, so that's like it's a victory. I guess
Speaker 4: it's a victory in a battle, but it's not the
Speaker 4: end of the war.
Speaker 6: Oh No.
Speaker 12: That's the problem with all this is that these companies
Speaker 12: and these folks will never stop.
Speaker 6: So I just saw an.
Speaker 12: Article in fact that two days ago, yes, this project
Speaker 12: was voted down. However they're coming back with just another
Speaker 12: proposal to do it a slightly different way. And so
Speaker 12: each time they just reiterate and change it. It's just
Speaker 12: a new battle, right, so they will change the words
Speaker 12: however they want to make it sound until these people
Speaker 12: will vote yes for it. So like Nikki Lee, which
Speaker 12: is the ward for a councilwoman, was the one that
Speaker 12: was arguing against essentially saying that we should approve the
Speaker 12: projects so we can have better control of it, and
Speaker 12: the activists said against that. But it's just they're just
Speaker 12: going to keep changing the tune until the activists get
Speaker 12: essentially worn out. On top of that, this is not
Speaker 12: the only data center being proposed in Arizona. There are
Speaker 12: currently three of them under proposal. So there's this one
Speaker 12: in Tucson and two of them in Panall County. The
Speaker 12: one in Panall County starts off at the small size
Speaker 12: of three hundred acres, but it's proposed to go to
Speaker 12: three thousand acres. Jesus, They want to build a ultimately
Speaker 12: a three thousand acre data center that sprawls essentially from
Speaker 12: southern Phoenix across the entire north south breath of Pennall County,
Speaker 12: on the west side of the I ten southwest of Elois,
Speaker 12: extending through significant what are indigenous or what were indigenous lands,
Speaker 12: destroying whatever cultural remains are there. But imagine if this
Speaker 12: two hundred and ninety acre data center was going to
Speaker 12: equal the power consumption and water consumption of Tucson. What
Speaker 12: is a three thousand acre data center going to do.
Speaker 6: Yeah? Yeah, that's insane. That's just us.
Speaker 12: And that one is currently still in its early phases.
Speaker 12: That one is called the Laosa Project. The CEO of
Speaker 12: this company is named cool Deep Verma. Okay, Verma Vrma,
Speaker 12: I'm not afectioner, that's the right pronunciation. But in another
Speaker 12: example of tech bro narcissism. He's calling this Verma Land,
Speaker 12: and his company is called Verma Land. It's like the
Speaker 12: most awful version of Disneyland. We're not even bringing you rides.
Speaker 12: We're just gonna drink your water belt heat into the sky,
Speaker 12: destroy your desert so you can have a disturbing psychological
Speaker 12: parasocial relationship with an ai avatar. And we're gonna do
Speaker 12: it at your expense. Verma Land, isn't that lovely?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Man, I've seen that's weird. They already owned a lot
Speaker 4: of land of the iten I think.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm.
Speaker 12: Yeah, No, they've been They've been purchasing land throughout Arizona
Speaker 12: and sitting on it. But this is where the three
Speaker 12: thousand acres come from. Is Verma Land.
Speaker 4: Jesus, Yeah, that is this doesn't mind boggling leave vast
Speaker 4: data center. So I guess like this is one you know,
Speaker 4: as you say, this will either move someone else. So
Speaker 4: there will be other struggles right like the For instance,
Speaker 4: the United States is waving many of the waivers, including
Speaker 4: ones that protect indigenous human remains, to build its border
Speaker 4: infrastructure right now. Actually a lot of the border infrastructure
Speaker 4: is coming out of the U of a tech park
Speaker 4: in Tucson. Rights, that's where a lot of these companies
Speaker 4: have the headquarters, right, the people who make the border
Speaker 4: surveillance infrastructure. What can we learn from this struggle in Tuson.
Speaker 4: If we're not in Tucson, we might not even be
Speaker 4: in the US. Because there are some unique things about Tuson, Right,
Speaker 4: It has this history of activism, and it's always been
Speaker 4: I don't want to use weird in a Rogatree way,
Speaker 4: but it hasn't conformed to like the neo liberal capital
Speaker 4: model of a city. But I don't think it's unique.
Speaker 4: There were things I think that anyone can take from
Speaker 4: this victory and the continued opposition, Right, So what can
Speaker 4: we learn from it?
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, No, I think that that's a fair way
Speaker 12: to put it in. And I think that speaking of
Speaker 12: like the reverberance of the history of the area and
Speaker 12: the types of movements that came out of there, as
Speaker 12: we mentioned already earlier, make Tucson unique in regards to
Speaker 12: it being at least culturally more ready than someplace to
Speaker 12: have this struggle. However, if they do succeed and completely
Speaker 12: stop Project Blue and the two hundred and ninety acre
Speaker 12: data center near Tucson has stopped. It's not going to
Speaker 12: stop there. We see three more data centers being proposed
Speaker 12: in Arizona proper, the three thousand acre dream site that
Speaker 12: I've mentioned already is they're just going to keep changing
Speaker 12: and moving and trying to do it somewhere else. The
Speaker 12: reality of this is that when we look back at
Speaker 12: the workers' rights movement right there was the IWW the
Speaker 12: Industrial Workers of the World. The thing is Tucson winning
Speaker 12: one fight against this data center only is a microcosm
Speaker 12: of the greater macrocosm of the consumption of these tech
Speaker 12: bros and tech industry people who do not care about
Speaker 12: the climate, do not care about you, do not care
Speaker 12: about the community, do not care about the water they consume,
Speaker 12: and they will destroy everything in their path for profit.
Speaker 12: We know that that is what this form of data
Speaker 12: capitalism is. And so Tucson's lesson is everyone has to
Speaker 12: be this And I agree with you that Tucson isn't
Speaker 12: unique in that there are other places that will have
Speaker 12: the fight, But this is truthfully everyone's fight, because the
Speaker 12: amount of pollution that would be belched out of this
Speaker 12: data center or the ones being proposed in Arizona affects everyone.
Speaker 12: The reality of climate change is, in my opinion, indisputable.
Speaker 12: We're seeing it every year. It's worse, and it is
Speaker 12: human induced or a large degree, unlike some people want
Speaker 12: to deny. Yeah, and having your AI avatar on the
Speaker 12: Internet is not in the interests of humanity as a whole.
Speaker 12: So we have to work on this on a much
Speaker 12: large It's a global issue.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it is not.
Speaker 12: It is not a local issue, That's what I'm trying
Speaker 12: to say. And these data companies like Amazon, like Google,
Speaker 12: like Apple, although this isn't Apple in this instance, but
Speaker 12: all of them. Yeah, they have the power, if not
Speaker 12: more of power than that of a nation state.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Like I think if my friend's in the
Speaker 4: Marshall Islands, right, this small nation state, but one nonetheless, right,
Speaker 4: they will have maybe thirty or forty years before the
Speaker 4: islands around inhabitable due to the rise of the sea level.
Speaker 4: And like their response has been a to double down
Speaker 4: on community and supporting each other.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: They also did things like if you go in between
Speaker 4: the islands on an Atoll and the Marshal Islands, den
Speaker 4: really used like a Higgins boat, a landing craft from
Speaker 4: World War Two, Right, But they also have these solar
Speaker 4: power canoes now to reduce their footprint. They're a tiny,
Speaker 4: tiny fraction, I know, a single percent of the word
Speaker 4: CO two footprint. And so what happens in Tucson will
Speaker 4: affect them, right, and what they do cannot alone help
Speaker 4: them survive, right, And they've appealed to the world's solidarity,
Speaker 4: made a whole podcast about this, and the world has
Speaker 4: not shown up for them. Right, So, like I think people,
Speaker 4: you're right, like, this is a global struggle. It's one
Speaker 4: that you know. It doesn't stop in Tuson, doesn't stop
Speaker 4: in Eloy, doesn't stop in Phoenix, like it stops when
Speaker 4: these data centers, which are antithetical to our survival of
Speaker 4: a species, stop being built for shit that we don't need.
Speaker 12: This is touching on a point that always that frustrates
Speaker 12: me frequently when we talk to people who are at
Speaker 12: least on the right side minded in terms of being
Speaker 12: concerned about our future, and they do the thing right,
Speaker 12: they'll do their recycling, or they'll put up a solar
Speaker 12: panel and all those things. Sure, but and this isn't
Speaker 12: to say that the individuals shouldn't do the ethical and
Speaker 12: moral thing that they can do when they can do it. Absolutely.
Speaker 12: Can you recycle, sure, do it. Can you put up
Speaker 12: a solar panel? Absolutely do that. But the real truth
Speaker 12: and reality of climate change and the destruction of our
Speaker 12: environment and this planet that we all inhabit, it's not
Speaker 12: the individual, it's the corporations is at a nation state
Speaker 12: level and a corporate level that is going to destroy
Speaker 12: our small Biosphere one. Ironically, biosphere is we'll talk about
Speaker 12: the experiment is near Tucson. Actually Biosphere two was a
Speaker 12: little experiment that was a self contained nineteen eighties thing
Speaker 12: where these scientists essentially encapsulated themselves in air tight bubbles
Speaker 12: to see if they could live with the CO two
Speaker 12: production that they were creating within it. The truth was
Speaker 12: they couldn't. The ocean turned to algae and they would
Speaker 12: have died. So they learned Biosphere two wasn't going to work.
Speaker 12: But we have bios for one, and the individual doing
Speaker 12: the solar panels or recycling. That's a good thing, and
Speaker 12: that's moral, but that's great, it's something we should do
Speaker 12: if we can. But it's us we have to act
Speaker 12: against the truly destructive forces, and it's the corporations and
Speaker 12: the nation states that are belching destruction into our planet,
Speaker 12: not the individual recycling or not recycling as a soda can.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, And I think it's one of the greatest
Speaker 4: like frauds editor cannots, these corporations amants to put off,
Speaker 4: is to have people attribute blame for climate change to
Speaker 4: the person not recycling that can, not the corporation.
Speaker 12: Yeah. You know, the political spectrum is always challenging, and
Speaker 12: I'm not trying to like point at any one thing,
Speaker 12: but this is where I think we all have our failings, right,
Speaker 12: and I think this is where like progressive space fails often.
Speaker 6: Which is you'll see tone.
Speaker 12: Policing, and you'll see recycling, and you'll see solar panels.
Speaker 12: But the reality is that isn't really doing shit. It
Speaker 12: just isn't in the grand scheme of the numbers. It
Speaker 12: isn't it that data center. Stopping that data center is
Speaker 12: an actual victory. That's something that needs to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 12: and those things need to stop. That kind of stuff
Speaker 12: across the board, not just in Tucson, not just in Arizona,
Speaker 12: but everywhere needs to be a thing where everyone comes
Speaker 12: together and realizes that these people are consuming the very
Speaker 12: planet that we need to live on. You see Elon
Speaker 12: Musk talking about going to Mars. We got with the
Speaker 12: human race has to go to Mars because a meteor
Speaker 12: might hit the Earth. No, your company is what hit
Speaker 12: the earth, my friend, You're the one destroying the Earth,
Speaker 12: not that meteor.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, it's not external.
Speaker 4: And they like the you know, it's it's coming from within, right,
Speaker 4: And it is if you say, like it did the
Speaker 4: species level threat to us?
Speaker 12: The calls literally coming from inside the house.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But we should
Speaker 4: also celebrate these victories and lemp in them. Right, So
Speaker 4: if people are interested in learning more about the struggling
Speaker 4: in Tucson, perhaps they're they're living in Phoenix and they're
Speaker 4: just now learning about vermaaland right or these other AI projects,
Speaker 4: Like why can they find out more about this? How
Speaker 4: can they involve themselves?
Speaker 12: Yeah, so I want to first of all, I don't
Speaker 12: I hope that I didn't come across as saying like
Speaker 12: this is hopeless.
Speaker 6: I don't think it is.
Speaker 12: Like when you see the actions of like what made
Speaker 12: two soon unique now and we saw the actions of
Speaker 12: what Earth the Thirst was able to achieve through their
Speaker 12: decades of work which they did achieve a lot. It
Speaker 12: resonates still to this day. The planet is a better
Speaker 12: place because those people paid a price to do what
Speaker 12: they did. And that's just something that never stops, is
Speaker 12: what it boils down to. Yeah, these companies, these people
Speaker 12: will never stop trying to destroy our home for their profit.
Speaker 6: So that's the point I was trying to make.
Speaker 12: And so this was a success and we should celebrate that.
Speaker 12: Like you said, the one I want to reference is
Speaker 12: No Desert Datacenter dot Com. Again, I want to very
Speaker 12: much point out they are not the only ones. Many
Speaker 12: people came together. They're the one I have really been
Speaker 12: paying attention to. If you go to No Desert Datacenter
Speaker 12: dot com, they have links to all their socials Instagram,
Speaker 12: Blue Sky, Facebook, and if you go to any of those,
Speaker 12: their Instagram is particularly active and has some great motivational
Speaker 12: art on it. I will tell you that they will
Speaker 12: also link you to a number of other.
Speaker 6: Organizations at the same time.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so if you're interested in this particular issue of
Speaker 12: these data centers in Arizona, I would reference you to that.
Speaker 12: You can go to their link tree, which is also
Speaker 12: linked from their Instagram and that'll connect you to a
Speaker 12: number of other organizations that are working on this right
Speaker 12: now and to their merit the Project Blue. They succeeded
Speaker 12: at least delaying Project Blue, hopefully stopping it. Yeah, and
Speaker 12: the next post they put up was about the data
Speaker 12: center in Eloy, so they understand that this is broader
Speaker 12: in scope than just one desert.
Speaker 6: Yeah, data center. That's great.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's like it was in the movie There Will
Speaker 12: be Blood if you ever saw that. There's an amazing line.
Speaker 12: Of course, I drink your milkshake if you drink the
Speaker 12: water south of Tucson or don't. Yeah, but then put
Speaker 12: a data center just north of Tucson. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 12: It's the same watershed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, right, it's the same same problem.
Speaker 12: So no desert datacenter dot com And that'll get you
Speaker 12: to a bunch of different links and a bunch of
Speaker 12: updates about what's going on with this.
Speaker 4: Perfect and god, if people want to follow your weg
Speaker 4: I mean, you have a presence on the internet.
Speaker 6: Where can people find you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, my project is not necessarily about the desert
Speaker 12: data center, but I'm definitely obviously very sympathetic and part
Speaker 12: of that too, just not on my project. I'm in
Speaker 12: Range TV, So if you want to find all my work,
Speaker 12: you can find it by just easily going to Enrange
Speaker 12: dot tv and there's a link on there called watch
Speaker 12: and that'll get you to all my socials. I distribute
Speaker 12: my video content. Decentralized YouTube is the is the line
Speaker 12: in the room must be realistic. But I have my
Speaker 12: content in multiple different places. The easiest way to find
Speaker 12: all of them is range dot tv and you'll find my.
Speaker 6: Socials there too, which is Facebook and Blue Sky and
Speaker 6: all that.
Speaker 12: And of course my topic is more about firearms history
Speaker 12: and civil rights and how they intersect. But if our
Speaker 12: ability to breathe and drink water isn't human rights, I
Speaker 12: don't know what it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think that's how we should see these things.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for your time, Kyle. That was great, James,
Speaker 4: thank you for having me.
Speaker 12: I appreciate it's always a real treat to be on
Speaker 12: any of the shows here, and I love all the
Speaker 12: work you all are doing, and together hopefully we can
Speaker 12: I don't know how to put it, stop these corporate
Speaker 12: maggots from eating our not yet corpse of an earth.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Then I think it's like I guess I'll finish up
Speaker 4: by saying like, it doesn't matter if we confronting fascism.
Speaker 6: It doesn't matter if we're confronting this destruction of our planet. Right.
Speaker 4: The only way through this is together, and the only
Speaker 4: way that we defeat this is through building stronger communities
Speaker 4: to show up for one another. And that's something that
Speaker 4: you have documented extensively in the historical parts of your channel.
Speaker 4: So I think there is a connection that I hope
Speaker 4: people can see there.
Speaker 12: Yeah, community defense is also protecting our planets so we
Speaker 12: can live on it. Yeah, I agree with that, and
Speaker 12: we have to do that together. Thousands of people showing
Speaker 12: up to city council meeting at Tucson is a glimmer
Speaker 12: of light in this moment, and hopefully we can see
Speaker 12: more of them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, thanks Cap.
Speaker 8: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things
Speaker 8: falling apart this week featuring an entire three sentences about
Speaker 8: putting it back together again. I am your host, Bio Wung,
Speaker 8: and today we are gathered here to talk about tariffs.
Speaker 8: Oh boy, it has been a massive two weeks of
Speaker 8: tariff news, the most important aspect of which has been
Speaker 8: finally getting a resolution to what was going on with
Speaker 8: the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose
Speaker 8: at the beginning of his time in office. On July
Speaker 8: thirty first, we finally actually found out what those terrorists
Speaker 8: are going to look like, and what those terrorists are
Speaker 8: going to look like is PRISTI ann Effectively, what happened
Speaker 8: is that roughly, if the US runs a trade deficit
Speaker 8: with you, you get a fifteen percent tariff, and you
Speaker 8: get a ten percent tariff if we run a trade
Speaker 8: surplus with you. Now there's a bunch of other individual rates.
Speaker 8: We'll get to some of them in a second, but
Speaker 8: it's worth emphasizing that this this doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 8: So okay, before we get into the structural effects of this,
Speaker 8: I want to sort of look at what the nominal
Speaker 8: stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're
Speaker 8: at odds with each other. And this is the point
Speaker 8: where we're turned to later. Part of the justification for
Speaker 8: the tariffs is that, Okay, they're trying to use tariffs
Speaker 8: to replace the income tax. That's nonsense, it's gibberish. You
Speaker 8: literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the
Speaker 8: income tax. But okay, that's the thing that they want
Speaker 8: to do. The other nominal justification, and this is what's
Speaker 8: being used in negotiations and is the thing that is
Speaker 8: causing individual tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up.
Speaker 8: Is that Trump is pissed off that the US runs
Speaker 8: trade deficits with countries. And again, like this is basically nonsense.
Speaker 8: The US pays for things in its own currency. We
Speaker 8: don't actually need other places currency. It doesn't matter if
Speaker 8: you run trade deficits. I really hate that Rand Paul
Speaker 8: is right when he said I run a trade deficit
Speaker 8: with my grocery store. But like, that's how the American
Speaker 8: Empire is supposed to work. These people do not care
Speaker 8: that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work.
Speaker 8: They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that
Speaker 8: has ever existed in the entirety of human history, and
Speaker 8: they see numbers on a chart which says we pay
Speaker 8: them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it.
Speaker 8: But again, okay, if that's a state of justification, right,
Speaker 8: then why are you imposing a terra fun countries? We
Speaker 8: have a trade ser plus two that doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 8: and the difference between them is only five percent, So
Speaker 8: what are we doing here? It's nonsense, like our trade
Speaker 8: policy is being run by people who don't understand how
Speaker 8: any of this works and are operating off of, you know,
Speaker 8: effectively just pure anger and rage. So I'm going to
Speaker 8: talk about a few of the really really high rates.
Speaker 8: We're not going to focus on much on the thirty
Speaker 8: percent South Africa, for example, but oh boy, so Syria
Speaker 8: is at forty one percent, which is absolutely fucking hideous.
Speaker 8: Syria is a country that I don't know anyone who
Speaker 8: listens to this show is aware of the extent to
Speaker 8: which Syria has been devastated by the civil war, and
Speaker 8: this is an incredible blow to their economy. Laus and
Speaker 8: Me and Mar are also being terriffed at forty percent.
Speaker 8: And we promised in the executive disorder to explain how
Speaker 8: Trump recognizing the junta so Joe Biden had refused to
Speaker 8: recognize me and Mar's like military coup government. As long
Speaker 8: time listeners of this show are aware, there is a
Speaker 8: military coup in in memr There is a large gale
Speaker 8: revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government. My co host
Speaker 8: James Stout and Robert Evans have done a lot of
Speaker 8: very good reporting on this that you can go find.
Speaker 8: You should find is some of the best journalism that
Speaker 8: I've ever encountered. But the US's official position has been
Speaker 8: that we don't recognize the coup government because it is,
Speaker 8: and this is true, a coup government. But Trump just
Speaker 8: sent the junta a letter of that says you're tariff
Speaker 8: to forty percent. And the thing about this is the
Speaker 8: junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah, Like that means
Speaker 8: you recognize us, right, because you're sending us official fucking
Speaker 8: notices of shit. So you're recognizing US as the legitimate
Speaker 8: government of me and mar And so the junta is
Speaker 8: like thrilled by this. There's some evidence of like the
Speaker 8: US lifting sanctions on them after. It's kind of messy,
Speaker 8: but yeah, great. Somehow, in the attempts to sort of
Speaker 8: just like squeeze every last drop out of all of
Speaker 8: these countries, we have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship.
Speaker 8: Hate that back to the more direct tariff stuff. The
Speaker 8: tariff's on Laos is also going to be devastating for
Speaker 8: Lahosian economy, which is a lot of the economies in
Speaker 8: Southeast Asia are pretty heavily export driven, and it's one
Speaker 8: of the places where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place.
Speaker 8: After the sort of increase in labor prices and increase
Speaker 8: in resistance from the labor movement in China kind of
Speaker 8: pushed all of that capital down the make Coung River delta.
Speaker 8: This is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos.
Speaker 8: And you know, this is something I want to keep
Speaker 8: emphasizing over and over again that these turf teriffs, people
Speaker 8: they hurt the most are workers in places like Laos,
Speaker 8: in places like Syria. Right, Hugoid should just be absolutely
Speaker 8: fucking devastated by it. Now, let's also talk Switzerland, which
Speaker 8: was the other country that had a terriff at like
Speaker 8: forty percent. This one is genuinely really funny, which is
Speaker 8: that it seems to largely be driven by Trump being
Speaker 8: pissed off of the trade deficit, which is like, compared
Speaker 8: to like the scale of the US economy, the trade
Speaker 8: deficit is like zero dollars. But the funniest part of
Speaker 8: this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by
Speaker 8: gold imports. Now, this is extremely funny because If you
Speaker 8: know anything about the American right, you know that a
Speaker 8: lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially
Speaker 8: when they were sort of building their operations, a huge
Speaker 8: source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold.
Speaker 8: This was the original Alex Jones grift, right. I think
Speaker 8: he still does it a little bit now, before he
Speaker 8: sort of pivoted in supplements. You would partner with like
Speaker 8: gold salesman and like silvia salesman. This and this has
Speaker 8: always been a huge source of these people's money. Now
Speaker 8: there's there's been a little bit of decrease in the
Speaker 8: prominence of gold as a thing. Actually, there's a very
Speaker 8: good Folding Ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Idris Elba
Speaker 8: Weird Gold promotion documentary which talks about the ways in
Speaker 8: which gold has been sort of threatened by bitcoin and
Speaker 8: well mostly bitgcoin. But it's like cryptocurrency in general is
Speaker 8: like the scam. You're trying to sell all of these
Speaker 8: sort of weird prepper and like hardline quote unquote sound
Speaker 8: money libertarian y types. But it is very funny that
Speaker 8: this is in effect a self reinforcing cycle, because the
Speaker 8: thing about the price of gold is that it is
Speaker 8: largely determined by how fucked the rest of the economy
Speaker 8: is gold. People who are trying to sell gold are
Speaker 8: trying to sell you on the fact that the economy
Speaker 8: is about to fucking explode. But this is a cyclical effect,
Speaker 8: right where these teriff rates go up and the economy explodes,
Speaker 8: and so people buy more gold from Switzerland, at which
Speaker 8: point are trade balanced with Switzerland gets worse.
Speaker 2: It works, it worse, so any all.
Speaker 8: Other like Swiss watches are another sort of major source
Speaker 8: of export currency, so offf which are again all worn
Speaker 8: by all these fucking maga grifters with their like fucking
Speaker 8: ten thousand dollars watches or whatever, So that one is
Speaker 8: just funny. Trump has also announced and this has not
Speaker 8: gone into effect yet, who fucking knows when if it
Speaker 8: goes into effect, But I think it's worth talking about,
Speaker 8: which is that Trump has been talking about putting a
Speaker 8: one hundred percent tariff on semiconductors unless you invest in
Speaker 8: the US. So Apple sort of in response to this,
Speaker 8: pledged one hundred million dollars in investment in the US
Speaker 8: to build chips. And I think it's also worth looking
Speaker 8: at the ideological underpinnings of this, because a huge part
Speaker 8: of this thing is something that you've been seeing increasingly
Speaker 8: on the right, is this dream of making domestic iPhones.
Speaker 8: And if you look at the people in the tech sector, right,
Speaker 8: the sort of tech billionaires you run all this stuff,
Speaker 8: they're openly fantasizing about like, oh, these like soft weak
Speaker 8: liberals are going to be forced to like work in
Speaker 8: the factories and put iPhones together or whatever. And it's
Speaker 8: worth emphasizing that this is just not possible, right, And
Speaker 8: this is true of a significant number of the things
Speaker 8: that they want these tariffs to do. They're just not
Speaker 8: possible results of the policy levers they're pulling. A couple
Speaker 8: of months ago, I described a sort of similar policy
Speaker 8: thing to this as like they are attempting to scream
Speaker 8: at the moon in order to control the tides. It's like,
Speaker 8: it doesn't work. It's not the right lever. It literally
Speaker 8: can't do what you think it's going to do. And
Speaker 8: it's worth going into why, which is that we can't
Speaker 8: make iPhones here because we don't have the migrant labor
Speaker 8: force to do it. And a lot of you may
Speaker 8: be thinking, oh, well, the US has a lot of
Speaker 8: migrant workers. No, you don't understand China, which is where
Speaker 8: most of these things are built. Even with the tariffs,
Speaker 8: like a lot of you know that there were some
Speaker 8: downcycling of plants, that stuff has mostly been upcycled. Again,
Speaker 8: China has three hundred million migrant workers. That is almost
Speaker 8: the entire population of the United States. Right, we are
Speaker 8: talking about individual plants with two hundred thousand workers. That
Speaker 8: is the low end estimate. By the way of those numbers,
Speaker 8: we don't actually have very good numbers on how big
Speaker 8: some of these fox Con facilities are. The low end
Speaker 8: estimate is two hundred thousand. Right, And again this is
Speaker 8: just in time production. So okay, what does that actually mean? Right?
Speaker 8: This means that the production cycles work on a lot
Speaker 8: of For example, the way that UPS works, right, We're like,
Speaker 8: you have a bunch of people who are effectively seasonal
Speaker 8: or part time workers who only come in when demand increases.
Speaker 8: So for UPS, right, and it's actually a relatively similar
Speaker 8: schedule to the way it works in China. But it's
Speaker 8: like there's these massive surges around the holidays with apples,
Speaker 8: it's more like September November roughly, But it's in order
Speaker 8: to like massively be able to ramp up production in
Speaker 8: time for you know, the sort of like massive holiday
Speaker 8: increase of orders. Right, But in order to do this,
Speaker 8: you need to have a production apparatus where you have
Speaker 8: two hundred thousand workers there, but you can also get
Speaker 8: rid of most of them and they can support themselves
Speaker 8: doing other stuff for the rest of the year, and
Speaker 8: then you have to be able to bring them back
Speaker 8: in during peak season. We just do not have the
Speaker 8: populations to replicate this, right, even if you're trying to
Speaker 8: replace it with prison labor. The thing about the American
Speaker 8: prison system is that it's decentralized, right. This is actually
Speaker 8: a key element of how the US economy is structured.
Speaker 8: Prisons are one of the sort of three major sources
Speaker 8: of jobs in rural areas. The other two are like
Speaker 8: Walmart style service jobs, which replaced anything else that was
Speaker 8: in the economy, and the military basis, which is part
Speaker 8: of why you know, like like this is part of
Speaker 8: why rural politics of console reactionary, because like, okay, so
Speaker 8: if your options in the economy are soldier, prison guard,
Speaker 8: service labor, you're gonna generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit.
Speaker 8: But again, even even though the American prison system has
Speaker 8: a really high population. These people are really spread out,
Speaker 8: and iPhone production requires sort of like mass centralization, right,
Speaker 8: that's the only way to get these things to work. Plus,
Speaker 8: the workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled
Speaker 8: enough to be able to do this shit. And this
Speaker 8: is a capacity that's built up in China over the
Speaker 8: course of like decades, right, And we don't really have
Speaker 8: this now that people have tried moving this production to
Speaker 8: other places like Vietnam, for example, the teriff rates there
Speaker 8: are also making this extremely difficult, but it's been really
Speaker 8: really hard to replace. And the other issue, and this
Speaker 8: is a technological issue, not just a sort of issue
Speaker 8: of the systemic elements of the population of China. The
Speaker 8: infrastructure to build microchips in the US doesn't exist. And
Speaker 8: it's not just that the infrastructure to build the chips
Speaker 8: doesn't exist. It's actually way worse than that. And this
Speaker 8: is why all of the attempts and the Biden administration
Speaker 8: has put an enormous amount of money into this. The
Speaker 8: Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of money
Speaker 8: specifically into the microchip angle, and none of them may
Speaker 8: have been able to do it. And part of it's
Speaker 8: technological problem. But part of it is that the machines
Speaker 8: that you need to make the chips don't exist, right,
Speaker 8: But the machines you need to make the machines that
Speaker 8: make the chips also don't exist. And the machines you
Speaker 8: need to make the machines that make the machines that
Speaker 8: make the chips also don't exist. We are so far
Speaker 8: up the supply chain, right, And this is one of
Speaker 8: the you know, one of the things, the thing that
Speaker 8: they're trying to do through sort of like pure politics,
Speaker 8: right through like just like the pure exertion of state power,
Speaker 8: is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply
Speaker 8: chain has worked. And the way the supply chain has
Speaker 8: worked is by intense specialization in very very very small areas. Right,
Speaker 8: So Taiwan, for example, becomes the only place basically that
Speaker 8: can manufacture these chips, and that intense specification means that
Speaker 8: like the machines, that the machines that they that are
Speaker 8: used to build this thing are only made by like
Speaker 8: one company in social land, and like machines to make
Speaker 8: those machines, like who the fuck knows where they're built.
Speaker 8: And this is the thing where the technology involves has
Speaker 8: become so complicated and the laborers become so specialized that
Speaker 8: you're dealing with machines that like just straight up not
Speaker 8: many people in the world know how to use, and
Speaker 8: not on the people in the world know how to create,
Speaker 8: and so we're so far up the supply chain, right,
Speaker 8: And this is also if you want to look at
Speaker 8: like what the impact of these terrorists are going to be, right,
Speaker 8: because these supply chains are so specialized, you know, can
Speaker 8: you can think of these supply chains as like incredibly
Speaker 8: complicated machines, right, and any sort of like little rock
Speaker 8: that you throw into the machine, or do you know,
Speaker 8: you throw sand into the machine and suddenly the ball
Speaker 8: bearing doesn't work at quite the right efficiency, and so
Speaker 8: things just start breaking down across the entire supply chain.
Speaker 8: And they think that they can just replicate all of
Speaker 8: this with just like pure tariffs and like throwing money
Speaker 8: at it, and no, you can't. These are these are
Speaker 8: actual structural things of how the economy works. Now, do
Speaker 8: you know what else is a structural element of how
Speaker 8: the economy works? Idiots? These products and services and the
Speaker 8: fact that they fund this podcast. Woo, we are so
Speaker 8: back now one of the other kind of terriffts I
Speaker 8: think I've been calling I guess like defiance tariffs. One
Speaker 8: of the things that Tromp administration has been doing is
Speaker 8: threatening to impose a fifty percent teriff on anyone who
Speaker 8: buys oil from Russia. India has been threatened with this.
Speaker 8: India's current terrif rate is twenty five percent. They're right
Speaker 8: now threatening with another twenty five percent against in the
Speaker 8: fifty percent. It's sort of unclear exactly who's going to
Speaker 8: back down here. More interestingly, and we've talked a little
Speaker 8: bit about this, Brazil, there is a fifty percent turf
Speaker 8: teriff on Brazil again for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which
Speaker 8: is very funny because this has managed to piss off
Speaker 8: the entire sort of political sphere in Brazil to the
Speaker 8: extent that like Bolsonaro has had to come out and
Speaker 8: announce this because Bolsonaro was getting fucking torn to shreds
Speaker 8: by the Brazilian right for being basically a trader, sort
Speaker 8: of lapdog of the US as they're sort of, you know,
Speaker 8: imposing this direct attack on Brazil through this fifty percent tariff. Right,
Speaker 8: it's backfire so spectacularly that like Lula, who was floundering,
Speaker 8: is now writing this incredible wave of sort of anti
Speaker 8: American Brazilian nationalism from both the left and the right.
Speaker 8: So Lula, who is who is again in a pretty
Speaker 8: strong political position because of this, has refused to do
Speaker 8: direct talk to the US because he was like, absolutely
Speaker 8: not fuck this. Here's a quote from Reuters. We had
Speaker 8: already pardoned the US intervention in the nineteen sixty four coup,
Speaker 8: said Lula, who got his political start as a union
Speaker 8: leader protesting against the military government that followed a US
Speaker 8: backed ouster of a democratically elected president. Quote. But this
Speaker 8: is now not a small intervention. It's the president of
Speaker 8: the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a
Speaker 8: sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable. Now. Again, as I
Speaker 8: said in the ed, there's a lot of things now
Speaker 8: that are worth looking at here. Right, we have, on
Speaker 8: the one hand, this direct connection from Lula from you know,
Speaker 8: the sort of subtle CIA backing of military coup stuff
Speaker 8: which happens under the table. To you know this just
Speaker 8: like the president of the United States is telling you
Speaker 8: how to run your country. And that is a substantive shift,
Speaker 8: even if like the CIA overthrowing your government like has
Speaker 8: more of a direct political impact on it. Right. The
Speaker 8: thing about the thing about the way American power worked
Speaker 8: was that it was mostly supposed to be under the table,
Speaker 8: and it's not now. It's just it's just out there
Speaker 8: in the open. Right. The premise that the US governments,
Speaker 8: like the president of the United States, should just be
Speaker 8: able to tell another country what to do is the
Speaker 8: fucking premise of American imperialism. And now they're just saying
Speaker 8: it out loud. And it's also worth noting that it's
Speaker 8: not like Lula is some kind of like anti American
Speaker 8: radical right like Lula worked really well in his first
Speaker 8: term in office, which works w Bush, but again because
Speaker 8: of the way that the political wins have shifted here,
Speaker 8: right to the extent that like Bulsonaro has had to
Speaker 8: condemn an attempt to get him released from prison, which
Speaker 8: is so funny because he's doing this. He is, he is,
Speaker 8: he is pushing very hard. Now there hasn't really been
Speaker 8: a response yet for Lula's like call for organized terror
Speaker 8: resistance from China and India and Bricks. I don't know
Speaker 8: if there's going to be. It's worth talking a little
Speaker 8: bit about what Bricks actually is here, So bricks stands
Speaker 8: for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It was originally
Speaker 8: like an asset class designed by some guys at Goldman
Speaker 8: Sachs who were you know, trying to like classify the
Speaker 8: assets of this kind of like developing economy thing. It
Speaker 8: was like, you know, you can buy bonds and these
Speaker 8: things and maybe you can classify their asset rates together,
Speaker 8: and has kind of become a political alliance. But you know,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of people who will attempt to sell
Speaker 8: you on bricks being the sort of like leftist anti
Speaker 8: imperial alliance, you know, and as a sort of socialist thing.
Speaker 8: And like I will simply ask, right, who is doing
Speaker 8: the socialism here? Right? Is it a butcher of Gujarat?
Speaker 8: Is it she quote we must oppose welfarerism jimping? Is
Speaker 8: it Vladimir? We will show Ukraine true decommunization putin? Is
Speaker 8: it the African National Congress of selling your country to
Speaker 8: Bank of America? Is it the butcher of Haiti?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 8: What are we doing here? Right? Like this is not
Speaker 8: actually a substantively anti American political alliance. India is a
Speaker 8: close American ally. South Africa is a close American ally,
Speaker 8: none of this really makes any sense. It's not a
Speaker 8: substantive political alliance. Really, people periodically make noise about it
Speaker 8: trying to be a substantive political alliance. But like I mean,
Speaker 8: like India and China are periodically like at war or
Speaker 8: like almost at war with each other over the border. Right,
Speaker 8: these are a bunch of countries that absolutely fucking hate
Speaker 8: each other. It's never been a coherent political project. Lula
Speaker 8: is trying to turn it into one, but like I
Speaker 8: fucking I don't think that's gonna work. So, you know,
Speaker 8: that's sort of what's been going on on the front
Speaker 8: to sort of national resistance. But Lula does have, you know,
Speaker 8: a kind of very very large and powerful political force
Speaker 8: behind him domestically to resist this. We'll see what happens
Speaker 8: going forward. It's also worth noting that China has been
Speaker 8: negotiating with the US, and their tariff increases we're supposed
Speaker 8: to go into effect have been delayed for another ninety days.
Speaker 8: So we're stuck in this holding pattern again. But let's
Speaker 8: talk about what this means for the economy, right, And
Speaker 8: I think the very short term answer is that I
Speaker 8: don't think anyone really knows right, Like, the actual macro
Speaker 8: effects of this are things that we've only just started
Speaker 8: to see. No one's ever really tried to model this
Speaker 8: out because there's no reason why it whatever happened, you know,
Speaker 8: And you're starting to see things behind the scenes, like
Speaker 8: medical supplies being incredibly difficult to acquire. You're starting to
Speaker 8: see a bunch of very very weird items and supply
Speaker 8: chains become increasingly difficult to find. But again, the supply
Speaker 8: chains are going to break down in ways that we
Speaker 8: just don't really understand. What is going to happen, and
Speaker 8: what has started to happen is inflation is increasing. I
Speaker 8: want to sort of again review our kind of inflation theory, right,
Speaker 8: which is largely derived from our friends's strange matter sort
Speaker 8: of supply chain theory of inflation. Their uses of inflation
Speaker 8: is that, like, it's not set by just supply and demand.
Speaker 8: It's set by cost plus markup. Because you know, price
Speaker 8: is not set by like an autonomous thing called the market.
Speaker 8: Price is set by like a guy with like a
Speaker 8: price gun. Right, It's directly set by people. And the
Speaker 8: way that those people set the price is you know
Speaker 8: the cost of acquiring the item, plus and markup for
Speaker 8: their profit. Now, one of the sort of fundamental like
Speaker 8: insights here is that price is sort of sticky until
Speaker 8: it isn't, right, which is that like, okay, So the
Speaker 8: actual thing that controls price is sort of like how
Speaker 8: pissed off consumers get at price increases, but also comma
Speaker 8: that is also very very much tied to brand, right,
Speaker 8: And if you raise your prices and consumers get pissed,
Speaker 8: you even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 8: mean those people will come back, right. So you know
Speaker 8: a lot of times when they're when when there's price increases,
Speaker 8: companies try to eat it. And that's and that's been
Speaker 8: what's happening with a lot of these things right where
Speaker 8: at each point in the supply chain, people are you know,
Speaker 8: people are having to sort of pay for the tariff parts, right,
Speaker 8: And when someone has to pay for the tariff, they
Speaker 8: increase their prices that they sell it to the next
Speaker 8: person in the supply chain. The next person's supply chain
Speaker 8: increases their prices right now, So the way that these
Speaker 8: terriffs play out, right is that each person in the
Speaker 8: supply chain is doing costless markup, but their costs are
Speaker 8: going up. So your options are either you sell it
Speaker 8: at the same price and you reduce the amount of
Speaker 8: markup you're getting, which is just reducing the raw profit
Speaker 8: you're taking in, or you raise your prices. And these
Speaker 8: things are trying to not raise their prices, and part
Speaker 8: of this is from direct political pressure right like Trump
Speaker 8: has been threatening companies to not raise their prices from
Speaker 8: the tariffs. But prices are starting to increase. And as
Speaker 8: this goes on, and as more and more teriffs come
Speaker 8: into effect, that it becomes more and more difficult to
Speaker 8: evade the tariffs. The prices are going to keep increasing
Speaker 8: because they're driven by these supply chain price increases. So
Speaker 8: you know, cost is going to go up. It is
Speaker 8: going to have absolutely devastating impacts on workers across the world,
Speaker 8: primarily not in the US, but the workers who are
Speaker 8: in these export oriented economies are going to have to
Speaker 8: deal with just the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse.
Speaker 8: You know what, who else hopefully doesn't have to deal
Speaker 8: with the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse. It
Speaker 8: is the products and services to support this podcast. We
Speaker 8: are back now. The thing I want to close this
Speaker 8: episode on is not actually a look at the economy
Speaker 8: because I think, you know, we kind of don't know
Speaker 8: exactly what's going to happen with the economy other than bad.
Speaker 8: But there is something that I think we can look
Speaker 8: at that's been broadly ignored or miscovered, which is what
Speaker 8: these tariffs say about the nature of the state. And
Speaker 8: I think what's happening is that we're seeing a fundamental
Speaker 8: change in the way that the state functions from the
Speaker 8: previous sort of neoliberal regime to this like just really
Speaker 8: openly fascist one. And I think the most clear example
Speaker 8: of this isn't necessarily the terriffs, so they are a
Speaker 8: pretty clear example. It's this extremely weird like extortion agreement
Speaker 8: reached between Trump, AMD, and Nvidia. I'm going to read
Speaker 8: this from CBS quote. US chip makers in Nvidia and
Speaker 8: AMD will pay the US government fifteen percent of revenue
Speaker 8: generated by sales of their AI chips in China. A
Speaker 8: White House official confirmed to CBS News this is just
Speaker 8: a shakedown, right, you know. This is part of a
Speaker 8: negotiating process by which originally AMD and Video were going
Speaker 8: to be banned for selling the reiships to China, and
Speaker 8: in order to be allowed to sell these ships to China,
Speaker 8: Trump was like, okay, if you want to do that,
Speaker 8: give us like thirty percent of your revenue, when they
Speaker 8: were like, okay, what if we did fifteen percent? Right,
Speaker 8: this is just a shakedown, and you know it's been
Speaker 8: described as such all over the press, but they're missing
Speaker 8: something fundamental here, which is that the state fundamentally is
Speaker 8: just a shakedown.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 8: The analysis of Trump isn't from the sort of critical
Speaker 8: press has been to view it as corruption. And it
Speaker 8: is absolutely corrupt, right, like, no question about this. It
Speaker 8: is unbelievably corrupt. Like we have people just giving the
Speaker 8: president blocks of fucking gold with an iPhone embedded into them. Right,
Speaker 8: it's it's hideous open corruption. But analysis that looks at
Speaker 8: the Trump administration as corruption of an ideal type, right,
Speaker 8: that looks at it as the transformation of the state
Speaker 8: into something that it fundamentally isn't. That kind of analysis
Speaker 8: is just wrong. The state has always and has always
Speaker 8: only been the localized monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Right,
Speaker 8: That's all it is. That's always ever been. Everything we
Speaker 8: know about the state today, right from the legal system
Speaker 8: to education, to roads, to environmental regulation to the welfare state,
Speaker 8: are all just functions that were tacked on to the
Speaker 8: core monopoly on violence, either as part of a carrot
Speaker 8: and state gambit to maintain control of population or simply
Speaker 8: as a concession to popular force. You can just have
Speaker 8: a state that is a bunch of guys with guns
Speaker 8: who rule purely by fiat and have control over an area.
Speaker 8: That is a state. Everything else that we think of
Speaker 8: as being part of a state is tacked on, and
Speaker 8: trump Ism as a political force has simply reverted the
Speaker 8: state back to a pure mode of extraction. Right, the
Speaker 8: state is men with guns who take shit from you
Speaker 8: to pay for those guns. And it becomes it was
Speaker 8: breasthtakingly clear that this is, you know, how the state
Speaker 8: is functioning Tree and Trump administration, because the Trump administration
Speaker 8: has been slashing benefits while handing tax breaks and giant
Speaker 8: government contracts worth billions of dollars to the tech elite.
Speaker 8: And they've been spending tens of billions of dollars, you know,
Speaker 8: to hand to the men's with guns and to recruit
Speaker 8: new men with guns for the mass deportation regime. Right,
Speaker 8: this is just a pure version of the state as
Speaker 8: an extraction regime, as a regime that fucking takes money
Speaker 8: for you at gunpoint to buy more men with guns,
Speaker 8: so it can take more money from you. Trump Ism
Speaker 8: imagines that you can collect this money to pay for
Speaker 8: the apparatus of violence and terror from just pure extortion
Speaker 8: of foreigners in the working class, you know, And we
Speaker 8: talked about this a bit at the beginning, right, this
Speaker 8: is part of why they want to do tariffs, is
Speaker 8: they think to replace the income tax. You know, the
Speaker 8: income tax is just like absolutely despised by the extra
Speaker 8: state elements of the ruling class because rich people hate
Speaker 8: paying taxes. But there just isn't enough capital to run
Speaker 8: a state life that with unemploying some kind of like
Speaker 8: MMTS money printing, which has alienated a huge part of
Speaker 8: from sosterity coalition because his quote unquote deficit reduction stuff
Speaker 8: hasn't actually produced the deficit. So the people who like
Speaker 8: really really care about that shit ideologically are pissed. But
Speaker 8: also on a fundamental level, this is already how most
Speaker 8: city governments operate, right. They are enormous police budgets extracted
Speaker 8: at gunpoint, either from the city council directly or directly
Speaker 8: from the working class from fees and fines and tickets
Speaker 8: like just leveled at working class people directly. And this
Speaker 8: is something that is a little different from how previous
Speaker 8: regimes of neoliberalism has functions, because those previous regimes of
Speaker 8: neoliberalism did a lot of these same things, but they
Speaker 8: were run through regimes of debt extraction. Right. It was
Speaker 8: you know, it was the imf right coming into your
Speaker 8: country and being like, okay, if you want to pay
Speaker 8: back this these loans that this dictator took out, right,
Speaker 8: you're going to have to like sell your entire fucking
Speaker 8: working class into pe andage so that your entire economy
Speaker 8: is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back.
Speaker 8: But again, that was debt extraction, base and finance based.
Speaker 8: Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight
Speaker 8: up set give me all your money if you want
Speaker 8: to live. But this is not a particularly smart strategy.
Speaker 8: There's a reason that the state takes on other guises
Speaker 8: than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet. Right,
Speaker 8: A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime
Speaker 8: where the violence is just out in the open, invites
Speaker 8: more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime or
Speaker 8: a regime that operates through more principles. All regimes of accumulation,
Speaker 8: of dispossession of resources taken by violence to produce more
Speaker 8: violence come to an end. Brick by brick and stone
Speaker 8: by stone. Trumpism too will be torn to the ground
Speaker 8: by the hands of the people who it thought it
Speaker 8: could exploit.
Speaker 14: Forever this has been, it could happen here.
Speaker 2: Welcome back everyone to electile dysfunction.
Speaker 9: Electile. That's a new one.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, Yes. The podcast about Why President Bad, also
Speaker 2: Why World Bad, also Why America Bad. I'm Robert Evans
Speaker 2: introducer extraordinaire with me today. Garrison, Davis, Mio, Wong, James.
Speaker 9: Stout Eventually special segment from James Stout later in the episode.
Speaker 2: Yes, later, he is being held in custody by the FTC.
Speaker 8: That's not true.
Speaker 9: You cannot say that because that is something that actually
Speaker 9: could happen over time.
Speaker 8: So unfortunately he is not.
Speaker 2: That's why I made it be the FTC. Garrison.
Speaker 8: People will believe us, I don't. People will believe I
Speaker 8: can get arrested by the FTC any day now.
Speaker 2: We could get arrested for the FTC any day now.
Speaker 2: Thanks to the ads that I've been reading for British petroleum,
Speaker 2: even though I exclusively use American petroleum.
Speaker 9: This episode recovering the week of August seven to August.
Speaker 6: Thirteen, yep.
Speaker 4: For note.
Speaker 9: Yes, it's just so we were. I think it's important
Speaker 9: to keep up because, Yeah, if people refer back to
Speaker 9: these episodes, it's good to know what week we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't usually remember what day it is, so yeah,
Speaker 2: good to do that, good to remember what day it
Speaker 2: is Meyah, you want to start us off?
Speaker 8: Yeah, need I need to issue a correction about Sesame Street.
Speaker 8: I was wrong about Sesame C's structure. Where got a
Speaker 8: very street message from someone who works on the show
Speaker 8: about the way I talked about it being stripped for parts.
Speaker 8: Sesame Street was never actually like ran by PBS. It
Speaker 8: was ran by its own independent nonprofit entity, Sesame Workshop,
Speaker 8: I believe, Yeah, yes, not yeah, I'll called sesme Workshop.
Speaker 8: And so the episodes that were being streamed on HBO
Speaker 8: Max and I think they're now they've now moved to
Speaker 8: like Netflix. Those episodes all did still air on PBS, however,
Speaker 8: Comma the only aired nine months later. But yeah, I
Speaker 8: want to be clear about that. And then Garrison, do
Speaker 8: you want to talk about PBS kind of not existing anymore.
Speaker 9: Well, PBS may still find a way to exist, but
Speaker 9: specifically the Corporation for her Public Broadcasting, which helps facilitate
Speaker 9: the you know, the funding and the structure and the
Speaker 9: operation of things like PBS and your local MPR, after
Speaker 9: being defunded by the Trump administration, is now going to
Speaker 9: shut down completely.
Speaker 8: So yeah, and that's and that's a lot of the
Speaker 8: how a lot of the funding for rural networks particularly
Speaker 8: was able to function. If your PBS network is like
Speaker 8: mostly not funded by that, or they can find other
Speaker 8: funding sources, it can survive, but real bad.
Speaker 9: It's pretty disastrous for public media yep. And like NPR
Speaker 9: specifically and all of its local affiliates are some of
Speaker 9: the best like local news journalism across the country, and
Speaker 9: this is going to be a big hurdle to get
Speaker 9: over with the loss of a of like a giant
Speaker 9: in the not just like the like national media space,
Speaker 9: but like for journalism and as well as children's educational content.
Speaker 8: And it's you know, and it's worth messing to you
Speaker 8: like this is one of the lasts as sort of
Speaker 8: local media and local radio and local newspapers have been
Speaker 8: carved out and got out of business and destroyed a
Speaker 8: venture capital firms. NPR was like one of the last
Speaker 8: local journalism outlets left in a lot of places, especially
Speaker 8: in rural areas, and that's just getting worse. So we
Speaker 8: hate that. Yeah, this has been the Sesame Street correction.
Speaker 8: I deeply apologize to the cast and crew and production
Speaker 8: staff of Sesame Street.
Speaker 2: Yes, sorry, particularly to Grover. Not sorry to Elmo. No
Speaker 2: apologies down, we saw what Almo was tweeting. I'm on
Speaker 2: Larry David's side of that beat.
Speaker 9: For our first main story this week, Let's talk DC.
Speaker 9: On Monday, Trump declared it was a liberation day for
Speaker 9: the District of Columbia to quote unquote take our capital
Speaker 9: back and officially in voked section seven four zero of
Speaker 9: the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to place the
Speaker 9: DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and order
Speaker 9: the Secretary of Defense to mobilize the DC National Guard
Speaker 9: to quote address the epidemic of crime in our nation's capital.
Speaker 9: Along with this announcement, Trump police a presidential memorandum reading,
Speaker 9: in part quote, the local government of the District of
Speaker 9: Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in
Speaker 9: the city. The mobilization and duration of duty shall remain
Speaker 9: in effect until I determine that conditions of law and
Speaker 9: order have been restored in the district of Columbia. Robert
Speaker 9: who in the past have you heard talk about federalizing
Speaker 9: the police?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I mean just a Coppola. Guys. There's this
Speaker 2: dude Hitler who you know, worked with a guy named
Speaker 2: Hermann Gering and Heinrich Himmler to do that back in
Speaker 2: the past. But that was in Germany, you know, a
Speaker 2: country totally different from the United States, almost three four
Speaker 2: countries away from US, so not really not really relevant
Speaker 2: at all to anything happening here.
Speaker 8: And we can all resassured it can't happen here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're not Germans. We have a lot of Germans,
Speaker 2: but we're not Germans.
Speaker 9: This is part of Jarvin's writing on how to take
Speaker 9: over the government, centralizing the police as one of the
Speaker 9: key steps nationalizing local law enforcement, putting um under federal control.
Speaker 9: And here is another version of an acting such a policy,
Speaker 9: mainly citing this crime epidemic in DC, though according to
Speaker 9: DC Metropolitan Police and their own crime figures, violent offenses
Speaker 9: which peaked in twenty twenty three fell to their lowest
Speaker 9: in twenty twenty four, lowest time in over thirty years,
Speaker 9: and now in twenty twenty five, I've continued to fall
Speaker 9: even lower than that, though. Trump claims that these stats,
Speaker 9: just like the just like the Bureau of Labor stats,
Speaker 9: are all made up. We're all fake.
Speaker 8: We'll get to that.
Speaker 9: These aren't. These aren't real stats, and they're they're they're
Speaker 9: assuming that there's there's been fake fake statisticians who have
Speaker 9: been covering up the real, the real crime wave happening
Speaker 9: across DC and even across the country. Trump cited three
Speaker 9: incidents leading to the federalization of DC police won the
Speaker 9: assassination of two Israeli MC staffers in May, a fatal
Speaker 9: shooting of a Congressional intern in June, and most recently,
Speaker 9: an alleged violent car jacking of the DOGE staffer known
Speaker 9: as Big Balls and a possible future recipient of the
Speaker 9: Presidential Medal of Honor.
Speaker 8: Or or Freedom.
Speaker 2: One of the medal. Yeah, well, you know, big Balls.
Speaker 9: Frankly, it might have some military credentials based on how
Speaker 9: he survived this latest uh, this this latest violent encounter.
Speaker 9: Who's to say this is.
Speaker 2: Salt from a platoon of Romanians.
Speaker 8: Yeah, quite quite. Frankly, I feel like we're only about
Speaker 8: six to eight months out from him getting like commissioned
Speaker 8: as a lieutenant and then them giving him the actual
Speaker 8: medal of honor.
Speaker 2: I'm saying, where I go for his courageous service getting
Speaker 2: beaten up by two fifteen year olds.
Speaker 9: So this latest incident with mister Balls I think is
Speaker 9: his official title at DOT. We're now the Social Security Administration.
Speaker 8: Not related to Ed Bolls.
Speaker 2: Different balls, but very different guys.
Speaker 9: This latest incident with mister Balls seemed to tip Trump
Speaker 9: over though this is something that he has lofted for
Speaker 9: months and months he's been wanting to do this. On
Speaker 9: Tuesday night, forty three arrests were made in DC in
Speaker 9: relation to the federal seizure of police, and fifty officers
Speaker 9: were part of this operation, half from DC Metro Police,
Speaker 9: which are now federalized. So far, only thirty National Guard
Speaker 9: troops have been deployed, but around eight hundred are on
Speaker 9: the way. On Wednesday, Trump discussed extending his control of
Speaker 9: DC police past the thirty day limit.
Speaker 8: Thank you, mister President.
Speaker 10: Your federalization of the police has a thirty day limit.
Speaker 13: Unless Congress acts to extend it.
Speaker 10: Are you talking to Congress about extending it or do
Speaker 10: you believe thirty days is sufficient.
Speaker 7: Well, if it's a national emergency, we can do it
Speaker 7: without Congress. But we expect to be to Congress before
Speaker 7: Congress very quickly. And again we think the Democrats will
Speaker 7: not do anything to stop crime, but we think the
Speaker 7: Republicans will do it almost unanimously. So we're going to
Speaker 7: need a crime bill that we're going to be putting
Speaker 7: in and it's going to pertain initially to DC. It's
Speaker 7: almost we're going to use it as a very positive example,
Speaker 7: and we're going to be asking for extensions on that,
Speaker 7: long term extensions, because you can't have thirty days. Thirty
Speaker 7: days is that's by the time you do it. We're
Speaker 7: going to have this in good shape. And don't forget
Speaker 7: in the border. Everyone said it would take years and
Speaker 7: you'd have to go back to Congress.
Speaker 6: I never went to Congress for anything.
Speaker 7: I just said close the border, and he closed the
Speaker 7: border and that was the end of it. I didn't
Speaker 7: go back to Congress. And we're going to do this
Speaker 7: very quickly, but we're going to want extensions. I don't
Speaker 7: want to call a national emergency if I have to,
Speaker 7: I will, but I think the Republicans in Congress will
Speaker 7: approve this pretty much unanimously.
Speaker 8: Don't like that.
Speaker 9: No, it's pretty dictatorial on like a space level quote.
Speaker 9: If it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress.
Speaker 8: It's very Palpatine emergency powers coded.
Speaker 9: And I'm not sure if Lucas was pulling on any
Speaker 9: real world examples for Star Wars the prequels, or if
Speaker 9: he was just pulling all that shit out of his ass.
Speaker 9: Who knows. It seems pretty fanciful. Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath
Speaker 9: told his former co workers on Fox News that it's
Speaker 9: unnoe how long DC will be under this militarized occupation.
Speaker 13: He's got the guts to say, I'm going to federalize
Speaker 13: the police that are that don't work. I'm going to
Speaker 13: bring in the National Guard, I'm going to bring in
Speaker 13: federal marshals. I'm going to bring in the park police.
Speaker 12: What is the cost money?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 6: It cost money?
Speaker 12: And the question is are you there for a year?
Speaker 12: Are you there for six months?
Speaker 6: And when the troops pull out?
Speaker 12: What happened?
Speaker 6: I would call this conditions based.
Speaker 13: I would say it's a situation where we're here to
Speaker 13: support law enforcement. Uh and the more we can free
Speaker 13: them up to do their job, the more effective they
Speaker 13: can be, the more we can work it. I mean,
Speaker 13: this isn't my realm, but the justice system to make
Speaker 13: sure people who are arrested are actually locked up. That's
Speaker 13: why the president's talking about cash list, bear bail, and
Speaker 13: sanctuary cities. If you're illegal here in DC, that's going
Speaker 13: to be a problem. So all of these things that
Speaker 13: apply to law and order are are front and center
Speaker 13: for us. And I don't know, weeks, months, what will
Speaker 13: it take. That's the President's call, but we're going to
Speaker 13: be there for him to execute as swiftly as possible.
Speaker 9: The conditions based.
Speaker 8: It's real, like Warren Rock vibes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of those these days. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of mission accomplished coming out of the Trump administration too,
Speaker 2: because they've learned that, like there's no consequence in just
Speaker 2: saying like, yeah, we close the border and we won
Speaker 2: the borders won You know, it's done. No one's going
Speaker 2: to get to their base with a counter opinion that matters.
Speaker 9: As bad as things are in DC right now, this
Speaker 9: is just the start of what they want to do.
Speaker 9: Trump seeks to make a quote a quod example of DC,
Speaker 9: but soon wants to go further and attempt this in
Speaker 9: other cities, first naming places like Chicago and Los Angeles,
Speaker 9: and then later New York, Baltimore and Oakland.
Speaker 7: We have other cities that are very bad. New York
Speaker 7: has a problem, and then you have, of course Baltimore
Speaker 7: and Oakland. We don't even mentioned that anymore. There's so
Speaker 7: they're so far gone. We're not gonna let it happen.
Speaker 7: We're not gonna lose our cities over this, and this
Speaker 7: will go further. We're starting very strongly with DC and
Speaker 7: we're going to clean it up real quick, pretty quickly.
Speaker 7: As they say.
Speaker 9: We're not going to lose our cities over this, that
Speaker 9: gets into like the core part of their framing. This,
Speaker 9: this idea that homeless people and criminals cough cough, black
Speaker 9: people are making us lose, like lose our cities. They're
Speaker 9: so far gone and this is necessary for such reasons.
Speaker 9: And like you can look at that pretty clearly. And
Speaker 9: he's naming like Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, New York like it's
Speaker 9: it's it's not it's not very masked here. Yeah, I
Speaker 9: talked with DC resident bridget Todd this morning. We should
Speaker 9: have an episode with her perspective coming out early next week,
Speaker 9: I think Sunday night.
Speaker 2: I wrote an episode early this year laying out, you know,
Speaker 2: some of my predictions for the year, and this along
Speaker 2: with weird terrorism, we're two of like my big ones. Right,
Speaker 2: that that DC, in particular, he would be attempting to
Speaker 2: fill with soldiers and probably invoke the Insurrection Act.
Speaker 9: No.
Speaker 2: One thing that I have been surprised on is that
Speaker 2: they really do seem kind of hesitant to go full
Speaker 2: in on the Insurrection Act. And obviously I didn't expect
Speaker 2: LA to get troops deployed in it before DC, but
Speaker 2: just based on what they were saying, like after the election,
Speaker 2: kind of as he was preparing to take office, it
Speaker 2: was very clear that they were looking at DC as
Speaker 2: a focus, in part because they had, you know, during
Speaker 2: his last term as well. Right, this is not entirely unprecedented,
Speaker 2: but his desire to specifically not just take away any
Speaker 2: sort of autonomy that the city has and put it
Speaker 2: under direct federal control, but to see troops in the
Speaker 2: streets and federal agents in the streets is not surprising.
Speaker 2: It's something that like, it's not even should be I
Speaker 2: honestly shouldn't even call it a prediction. It's just something
Speaker 2: he's been repeatedly saying he's going to do. So the
Speaker 2: fact that it's happening now, you know, the only thing
Speaker 2: that's surprising to me is that it happened in la
Speaker 2: first right, and that they really do seem to have
Speaker 2: and who knows, you know, this could change by the
Speaker 2: time the episode airs, but they do seem to have
Speaker 2: something of a I don't know if a block is
Speaker 2: the right way to phrase it, but they don't seem
Speaker 2: yet willing to go for the Insurrection Act. That still
Speaker 2: seems to be a bridge too far for some reason.
Speaker 2: I'm not one hundred percent sure why.
Speaker 8: I think I think they're worried about like massive backlash
Speaker 8: to it, like they're really unpopular.
Speaker 2: And right, I mean, they also just don't need to Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's a fair point.
Speaker 9: Gar they have this like Section seven forty to call on,
Speaker 9: and if Trump's going to try to get Congress to
Speaker 9: pass a new crime bill that can allow them to
Speaker 9: do this kind of stuff without having to use the
Speaker 9: Insurrection Act. So I think it's more of like a
Speaker 9: matter of necessity, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Just maybe just a risk they don't think they need
Speaker 2: to take.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and like who knows what type of weird shit
Speaker 9: they would try to push into a crime bill, including
Speaker 9: like exceptions for almost any city to have their police
Speaker 9: force be fetualized.
Speaker 8: I think the interesting part of this to me is
Speaker 8: also so that like it feels like a lot of
Speaker 8: what their politics is is like the spectacle of making
Speaker 8: it look like there's power there versus like actually doing
Speaker 8: the thing, because like you can't actually hold DC with
Speaker 8: eight hundred National guardsmen, and like you know, if you
Speaker 8: look at what happened in LA, they kind of like
Speaker 8: declared victory, but then the actual thing they came there
Speaker 8: to do, which was like do this like unpresented mass
Speaker 8: deportation with they did some of it, and then they
Speaker 8: got right out of the city. And so I think,
Speaker 8: I don't know, I think I think there's a kind
Speaker 8: of apocalyptic framing of this where it's like, Okay, well
Speaker 8: it's over, they can just do this. But also it
Speaker 8: has not been going well for them, and like was
Speaker 8: it from DC the video of the guy of the
Speaker 8: guy just like throwing a sandwich at the National Guard
Speaker 8: throwing a subway sandwich. Yes, yeah, right, like actual regular
Speaker 8: people really don't like them. And I think I think
Speaker 8: we're just going to see escalating resistance as more than
Speaker 8: like fucking eighty guys get deployed there. And I don't know,
Speaker 8: it's unclear to me whether they can actually just like
Speaker 8: maintain this or if they're just gonna say, like we
Speaker 8: did it Joe in like thirty days and pull out right.
Speaker 9: That's kind of what some of the rhetoric looks like,
Speaker 9: is that they're going to try to arrest as many
Speaker 9: homeless people as they can, put them in jails, lock
Speaker 9: them up into hospitals, like the executive order that we
Speaker 9: mentioned a few weeks ago, Yeah, and like scare teenagers,
Speaker 9: and that's most of what they want out of this,
Speaker 9: and they're going to make a big show of it,
Speaker 9: and then they'll yeah, declare that the city is now safe,
Speaker 9: and then they'll use the legitimate crime stats showing crime
Speaker 9: falling and be like, look, we proved it. So that
Speaker 9: I think that is probably what it will what it
Speaker 9: will turn out to be. But if they try to
Speaker 9: push forward to a new crime bill like Trump is mentioning,
Speaker 9: or call it a national emergency to help strengthen his
Speaker 9: own powers. I think that's indications that this could have
Speaker 9: some longer lasting results. Let's go on and ad break
Speaker 9: and return to talk terrif I suppose.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that and we're back.
Speaker 2: And obviously the big tariff news this week, as we'll
Speaker 2: get to, well, one of the pieces of big tariff
Speaker 2: news is that Trump has ordered another extension of the
Speaker 2: kind of delay before enacting tariffs against China. You might
Speaker 2: say Trump looked at his tariffs against China and decided
Speaker 2: tariff he no like it.
Speaker 16: Sorry live jazz right, jazz Bob, Sorry lot jazzy jazz bo.
Speaker 2: Okay, that was min true talk tariffs, honestly.
Speaker 8: Okay, So this is kind of a light tariff news week.
Speaker 8: There isn't that much also because if you want to
Speaker 8: hear me talking about tarriffs for like forty five fucking minutes,
Speaker 8: go listen to the episode on when.
Speaker 2: You just did a tariff episode. I just really wanted
Speaker 2: to lead into the tariff thing that way.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: No, there is actually a very important piece of tariff
Speaker 9: news today. Arizona iced Tea is considering raising prices for
Speaker 9: the first time in over thirty years due to Trump's
Speaker 9: fifty percent aluminum tariffs.
Speaker 2: All right, everyone, get off the call right now. It
Speaker 2: is time to riot, find it building, burn it down. No,
Speaker 2: this is this is not a drill.
Speaker 9: Not acceptable. Arizona iced tea has been the shining beacon
Speaker 9: resisting inflation for decades. The proof proof that inflation is
Speaker 9: fake is on every Arizona iced tea can. And if
Speaker 9: Trump's gonna take it away from us, burn the whole
Speaker 9: system down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 9: I want CEO handing out cans to throw at your
Speaker 9: at your local government of choice to defend the ninety
Speaker 9: nine cent can. It's one of the most important aspects
Speaker 9: of American culture.
Speaker 2: It's the only thing left of the American dream. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's the one last piece of the American dream. Is
Speaker 2: a ninety nine cent can of Arizona iced tea. That's
Speaker 2: all we have left.
Speaker 9: Fifty percent aluminium tariffs will not take this away from
Speaker 9: US aluminium.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, just just move past it. May forget it.
Speaker 2: It's it's Canadian.
Speaker 8: Where are you going on? Okay? This is actually a
Speaker 8: good way to pivot into the just complete mess at
Speaker 8: the buer of labor statistics. So one of the things
Speaker 8: that Trump has been really harping on is so the
Speaker 8: buer of labor Satistics published a jobs report and it
Speaker 8: was bad. And Trump has been absolutely furious about this
Speaker 8: ever since. And we will actually come back to I
Speaker 8: think we will literally come back to the Arizona Cans
Speaker 8: after this, thank God. But coma however, good lord, the
Speaker 8: people they are trying to put an office right now.
Speaker 8: I so long ago, in the galaxy far far away,
Speaker 8: I made an argument that the Trump regime is built
Speaker 8: on peer stupidity, that there is no plan at all.
Speaker 8: There is only you know, a raviting mall of the
Speaker 8: oblivion of reason that obliterates all attempts to comprehend it
Speaker 8: and leaves only the words, yes, they really are that stupid.
Speaker 8: And this argument was about a guy named Stephan Miron,
Speaker 8: who was Trump's share of the Council of Economic Advisors,
Speaker 8: and his plan to like make other countries pay taxes
Speaker 8: on holding US bonds, a thing that is just unequivocally
Speaker 8: good for the United States. And you know this is
Speaker 8: a plan. You can go back and listen to that
Speaker 8: episode from a few months ago. This is a plan
Speaker 8: so monumentally stupid that the only way I can think
Speaker 8: of describing it was like yelling at the moon to
Speaker 8: stop the tides. Anyways, Trump is trying to get that
Speaker 8: guy appointed to be one of the board members of
Speaker 8: the of the Federal Reserve. And the staggering thing about
Speaker 8: that isn't just that he's doing this. It's not like
Speaker 8: this is not the guy who's in the news right
Speaker 8: now for being unbelievably stupid and getting appointed to an
Speaker 8: extremely important structural agency of the American economy. Because they
Speaker 8: are trying to appoint senior economists at the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 8: E J and Tony as the head of the Bureau
Speaker 8: of Labor Statistics after they fired the last head for
Speaker 8: like releasing the job support Right, this guy, Okay, I
Speaker 8: make fun of economists for being dumb as shit all
Speaker 8: the time. He might legitimately be the stupidest economist I
Speaker 8: have ever seen. Just on blue Sky, like the day
Speaker 8: this was announced, right, I saw someone dunking on him
Speaker 8: for drawing a chart where he doesn't seem to understand
Speaker 8: that people retire and that when they retire they're not
Speaker 8: in the labor force anymore. Where he was doing this
Speaker 8: trend line that was based on the assumption that like
Speaker 8: people wouldn't retire. There are so many just incredibly basic
Speaker 8: economics since he doesn't understand. There's a post that I saw.
Speaker 8: This is the first one. That was the second one
Speaker 8: that I saw, the first one that I saw, And
Speaker 8: it's really funny because this is like in the New
Speaker 8: York Times now, but I just like saw this on
Speaker 8: Blue Sky. Was this post by this economist's name Joey Paulitano,
Speaker 8: who said, quote an economist's so dumb. I had to
Speaker 8: explain to him how the price index works. Will now
Speaker 8: lead the BLS.
Speaker 6: Kill me good.
Speaker 8: So he was doing his thing where he was like
Speaker 8: posting the price indexs and being like, prices aren't going up.
Speaker 8: But the thing about the import price index is that
Speaker 8: it calculates price is pre tariffs. Okay, so of course
Speaker 8: they wouldn't go up because they're not calculating the tariffs.
Speaker 8: And he was posting this as like, no, see, the
Speaker 8: terrorists don't do inflation. H he is he's being chosen
Speaker 8: for this position because he is just like a rigid
Speaker 8: ideologue of the Trump administration, right, but he's also he's
Speaker 8: so fucking stupid that things are happening. I have never
Speaker 8: seen with right wing economisy before where other right wing
Speaker 8: economists are going like, this guy can't be allowed to
Speaker 8: take office. He's going to fuck everything up because he's
Speaker 8: too dumb. Like I am watching economists at the Manhattan Institute,
Speaker 8: which is an organization that was literally found in by
Speaker 8: Reagan's director of the CIA, William Casey, right like that.
Speaker 8: The Mahattan Institute is a right wing institute, right like again,
Speaker 8: this is this is this is an organization founded by
Speaker 8: Ronald fucking Reagan's CIA director. And I am watching those
Speaker 8: people go, this guy is too stupid to be put
Speaker 8: in office. Please don't put him there. This is unprecedented.
Speaker 8: I've never seen right wing economists break rank on the
Speaker 8: sort of like affirmative action program they all have for
Speaker 8: like really really underachieving right wing shithead economists. It's astonishing
Speaker 8: and so and the reason he's being brought in, and
Speaker 8: this is also the reason he was like the chief
Speaker 8: economist of the Herrer's Foundation, is that he has been
Speaker 8: calling for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Speaker 8: and also thinks that again like like Trump does it,
Speaker 8: they've been like cooking the books to make democrats look
Speaker 8: good and Republicans look bad. And so if he gets
Speaker 8: appointed and this is also like goes to the Senate,
Speaker 8: but him being appointed here effectively signals the end of
Speaker 8: independent economic data from the federal governments, hooray, which is
Speaker 8: a just catastrophic, Like every single part of the governments,
Speaker 8: every policy organization, every like every every single element, every corporation,
Speaker 8: every element of the entire US economic system relies on
Speaker 8: this data being nonpartisan and accurate. And it's obviously like, yeah,
Speaker 8: all like all data is political, but like it being
Speaker 8: like reasonably accurate is like the defining thing about the
Speaker 8: US economy is that this data is there and functions
Speaker 8: and this is what everyone based their decisions off of.
Speaker 8: And he very much looks like he wants to just
Speaker 8: end that. And I want to close by noting that're
Speaker 8: like one of you know, at the very end of
Speaker 8: the Soviet Union, right, one of the things that was
Speaker 8: taken as like the giant signal that things were going
Speaker 8: to shit there was that like their leadership by like
Speaker 8: the like the mid late eighties was deploying satellites specifically
Speaker 8: so they could use satellite imagery to check the output
Speaker 8: of their own factories because there their control of the
Speaker 8: economic statistics had become so like just annihilated right by
Speaker 8: just like mass falsification, their loss of control over the
Speaker 8: standards that their measuring regime was seen as like, this
Speaker 8: is the regime falling apart. And we are like eight
Speaker 8: months out from Google doing that shit, right, Like, we
Speaker 8: are not very far out from companies doing a thing
Speaker 8: you have to do with like remote provinces in China
Speaker 8: where the fault were, Like there's data falsification of Like okay,
Speaker 8: we're like using satellite data to like measure freight loads
Speaker 8: and like measure electrical consumption and like figuring out what
Speaker 8: factories are open at night to figure out how much
Speaker 8: that's You know that that is something that is very
Speaker 8: much in our future. I'm only kind of joking about
Speaker 8: the satellite shit. I think we probably will live to
Speaker 8: see that, assuming this thing goes through, assuming they remember
Speaker 8: how to launch satellites. Well it won't. It won't be them,
Speaker 8: It'll be it'll be like corporations doing this. Oh sure, sure, yeah,
Speaker 8: like you using the row satellite grads and.
Speaker 9: I mean I can, I can, I can see the
Speaker 9: uh yeah, the Blue Origin satellites launching. To keep track
Speaker 9: on to keep track of Amazon's efficiency.
Speaker 8: Yea yeah, oh good lord. Yeah. I want to close
Speaker 8: on like one final brief note, which I've said this before,
Speaker 8: but I want to say it again. This is the
Speaker 8: exact thing that but like one is. One of the
Speaker 8: big things that brought down the military keatorship in Brazil
Speaker 8: was that they were lying about inflation data. You know,
Speaker 8: the thing about inflation is that you can just see
Speaker 8: the price of the Arizona can go up.
Speaker 2: Just like you can see Huey Dewey and who we
Speaker 2: expand and our favorite inflation fetish pornography. They don't give
Speaker 2: me Hazard pay for this. They really should Hazard. I
Speaker 2: feel like this is a bonus.
Speaker 8: Oh I guess this is also mentioned. Part of the
Speaker 8: reason they're trying to put this like absolute clown on
Speaker 8: the board of the Federal Reserve is that they want
Speaker 8: to replace the chairman of the Federal Reserve so that
Speaker 8: Trump can just directly set interest rates. That's a looming
Speaker 8: crisis that is coming.
Speaker 9: Trump is threatening to sue the head of the Federal
Speaker 9: Reserve right now. Oh yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, he
Speaker 9: is yep.
Speaker 2: He sharees, which is a fast It's gonna be amazing precedent.
Speaker 2: I am excited.
Speaker 8: Oh, it's it's astonishing. I don't know. It's been very
Speaker 8: funny because a lot of the kind of internal publications
Speaker 8: from like the banks about this have been like, ah,
Speaker 8: if you're a Boostero and Powell, it's not that big
Speaker 8: of a deal. Like the banks can like autonomously said
Speaker 8: interest race technically without the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 8: And it's like, Okay, I don't think you understand how
Speaker 8: bad this is going to get. So we're still we're
Speaker 8: still in cope. I don't know what we'll report to
Speaker 8: you back on the show when all of that enormous
Speaker 8: clusterfug blows up.
Speaker 9: Yay, before we go and break again, I'd like to
Speaker 9: have an update for one of the stories we talked
Speaker 9: about last week, the Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois and
Speaker 9: then later to California to brick orm to stop or
Speaker 9: delay a redistricting vote in Texas. And now Texas Democrats
Speaker 9: are to come back home, possibly as soon as this weekend. Yes,
Speaker 9: after Governor Greg Abbott ended the special session to redraw
Speaker 9: the congressional map, which would add five new Republican House
Speaker 9: seats with some Democrats expected to return very soon. Nothing
Speaker 9: stops Abbot from just calling another special session once the
Speaker 9: Democrats return. In fact, he has said that that's exactly
Speaker 9: what he's gonna do.
Speaker 2: He's definitely going to do that, Yes, and add in.
Speaker 9: New legislation to convince some of them to stay. So
Speaker 9: we will see that they can just leave the state
Speaker 9: again if they want to. H unclear, if unclear if
Speaker 9: they will. I mean, other states are threatening retaliatory redistricting,
Speaker 9: specifically the governors of New York and California. This is
Speaker 9: going to be a really annoying mess with different with
Speaker 9: different states all redrawing their maps just to create some
Speaker 9: kind of congressional balance. Of Florida also threatening to do
Speaker 9: the same. So we will we will see how this
Speaker 9: develops over time. But yeah, Texas Dems may be home
Speaker 9: sooner than expected.
Speaker 8: It's so cool that on the one hand you have
Speaker 8: the Republicans creating the image of tyranny and then expanding
Speaker 8: their actual power, and then you have the Democrats doing
Speaker 8: the image of resistance and then giving in.
Speaker 9: I mean, they're not really giving in yet. Yeah, we'll see,
Speaker 9: we'll see, but they are going home because this session
Speaker 9: is ended. Yeah, What still remains to be seen is
Speaker 9: if they will flee the state a second time, like
Speaker 9: a week later.
Speaker 8: Yeah, which who knows. I have little faith in that,
Speaker 8: but we'll see.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm not sure at this point. Yeah, but I
Speaker 9: thought we should include that small update there, and now
Speaker 9: we should include a secondary ad break. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 9: In other news. Last week, on Friday, a mass shooting
Speaker 9: was targeted against the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The
Speaker 9: thirty year old shooter broke into his father's safe to retree.
Speaker 9: Five firearms were then used in the attack. The shooting
Speaker 9: started at a CBS across from the CDC main entrance.
Speaker 9: Shooter then fired upon six buildings on the CDC campus,
Speaker 9: with the total of five hundred rounds being fired during
Speaker 9: the incident, with two hundred shots hitting CDC buildings. One
Speaker 9: Decab County Police officer was killed. The shooter later shot
Speaker 9: and killed himself. Police were contacted several weeks before the
Speaker 9: shooting by unknown individuals due to quote recently verbalized thoughts
Speaker 9: of suicide. According to the GBI director Chris Hosey, this
Speaker 9: was about the soon to become shooter. Police found written
Speaker 9: documents from the shooter expressing distrust in the COVID nineteen vaccine.
Speaker 9: Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Josey said the shooter quote
Speaker 9: wanted to make the PUBLICBLIC aware of his discontent with
Speaker 9: and distrust of the vaccine unquote, with sources who knew
Speaker 9: him telling ABC News he blamed the vaccine for making
Speaker 9: him sick and depressed. The CDC director sent a letter
Speaker 9: to its ten thousand employees earlier this week saying, quote
Speaker 9: the dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led
Speaker 9: to deadly consequences unquote. The Monday after the shooting, RFK
Speaker 9: Junior oh No, who recently defunded mRNA Vaccines, visited the
Speaker 9: CDC campus to express condolences for the family of the
Speaker 9: officer killed, as well as to quote offers support to
Speaker 9: all of the CDC employees who are a part of
Speaker 9: a shining star health agency around the world to quote
Speaker 9: from an interview he gave with SCRIPTS News. When Kennedy
Speaker 9: was asked what would be done to stop the spread
Speaker 9: of vaccine misinformation to prevent future incidents like this shooting,
Speaker 9: Kennedy said, quote people can ask questions without being penalized
Speaker 9: and quote we don't know enough about what the motive
Speaker 9: was of this individual unquote hate that. That's all pretty
Speaker 9: pretty disgusting seeing narratives that RFK Junior has promoted for
Speaker 9: his own profit for years yep being used to justify
Speaker 9: as shooting targeting the CDC headquarters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's you know, it's kind of unclear exactly
Speaker 2: what because it seems like he was shooting at the buildings.
Speaker 2: He fired at least two hundred rounds, roughly two hundred
Speaker 2: rounds into the buildings, about five hundred rounds fighter total.
Speaker 2: But I've seen people say that means he was like
Speaker 2: shot five hundred He did not a lot of those
Speaker 2: rounds are the police. No, that's the toast of them
Speaker 2: or the police. You know, two or three hundred rounds
Speaker 2: would not at all be odd for how many police
Speaker 2: would fire in response to a guy like this who
Speaker 2: is just bag dumping, you know, into a building. It's
Speaker 2: unclear to me did he see people through the windows
Speaker 2: and was he trying to hit them or was he
Speaker 2: just shooting at the buildings to make a statement. The
Speaker 2: fact that he did shoot and kill a police PAE officer,
Speaker 2: presumably with intent, makes it more likely that maybe he
Speaker 2: was trying to hit people inside the building. I don't
Speaker 2: know how much it's worth splitting hairs here, but I
Speaker 2: am like it is kind of unclear to me. Was
Speaker 2: his goal more to make a statement or was he
Speaker 2: hoping to like rack up a body count of CDC
Speaker 2: employees and this was just as close as he could get.
Speaker 2: I don't think we really know. Maybe we probably never will.
Speaker 9: It seems he had trouble accessing or getting close to
Speaker 9: some buildings on the CDC campus. This was mostly done
Speaker 9: from the CVS, which he at a certain point, according
Speaker 9: to police reports, he could not get out of. He
Speaker 9: was locked inside the CVS what and tried to exit
Speaker 9: by shooting like the windows and doors, and was unable
Speaker 9: to and then killed himself inside.
Speaker 8: Huh jeez.
Speaker 9: So it is a kind of odd situation. We don't
Speaker 9: have a clear idea yet because this just happened a
Speaker 9: few days ago. We don't have a clear idea yet
Speaker 9: of like the exact on the ground situation, just these
Speaker 9: kind of general general facts about which buildings were hit
Speaker 9: and how many shots were fired. And then the anti
Speaker 9: VAXX opinions and writing found allegedly in his home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so We'll say more will come out about this
Speaker 2: in time, but I mean the basics are pretty clear,
Speaker 2: which is that this is the natural extension of decades
Speaker 2: of anti vaccine rhetoric and specifically the last several years
Speaker 2: of OURFK relentlessly attacking the CDC.
Speaker 9: Now the piece of news this week that I should mention,
Speaker 9: though frankly, we don't have much to stay on this
Speaker 9: because it's unclear this will actually turn into anything real
Speaker 9: or not. But later this fall, the Supreme Court will
Speaker 9: consider whether to take a case that could overturn the
Speaker 9: national ruling on gay marriage. This specific case that they
Speaker 9: would be considering has not done very well in all
Speaker 9: lower federal courts, which is why it's been appealed to
Speaker 9: this level. The legal justifications used for the First Amendment
Speaker 9: have not made much progress in federal appeals courts so far.
Speaker 9: If the case does get chosen, it would be primarily
Speaker 9: for like ideological reasons based on specific new Supreme Court justices.
Speaker 9: But it is still unclear if this will get accepted,
Speaker 9: and I'm thinking not super likely. I don't think this
Speaker 9: is something that we need to have tons of panic
Speaker 9: about at the moment.
Speaker 8: So something that I mean, I don't know if panic's
Speaker 8: the right word, but did actually happen and is very bad?
Speaker 13: Is that?
Speaker 8: So Trump issued in the Executive Order a while back
Speaker 8: about like getting rid of collective bargaining rights for a
Speaker 8: bunch of different kinds of government employees, like nominally under
Speaker 8: the auspices of national security. There'd been a whole bunch
Speaker 8: of court cases kind of winding the way through the courts,
Speaker 8: but last week, the VA became the first government agency
Speaker 8: to actually do it. They just straight up got rid
Speaker 8: of the union contracts for three hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 8: thousand workers. Like three hundred and seventy seven thousand workers
Speaker 8: is an astonishing number of workers to just straight up
Speaker 8: the union doesn't exist the next day, Yeah right, they
Speaker 8: just their contract sharp being recognized. This in and of
Speaker 8: itself is really stunning, and also the lack of response
Speaker 8: by the union movement, especially considering the number of people involved.
Speaker 8: It's just been like strongly worded statements and encouragements for
Speaker 8: the Democrats to pass a bill through Congress to recognize
Speaker 8: collective bargaining rights, which speaks really really ill of the
Speaker 8: broader labor movement that like, again, they just took away
Speaker 8: the unions of almost four hundred thousand people, and Organized
Speaker 8: Labor's collective response was just to kind of shrug. So
Speaker 8: that's really fucking bleak. It's probably going to be spreading
Speaker 8: to more agencies as this plays out. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 8: I don't know. And even the language unions of using
Speaker 8: it talk about it. They're like, oh, this is union
Speaker 8: busting for speaking out against anti worker policies, and it's like, no,
Speaker 8: it's union busting because they literally got rid of the
Speaker 8: unions of three hundred and seventy seven thousand people. What
Speaker 8: are we doing here? I don't know. I'm gonna have
Speaker 8: more on this as I guess more word from union sources.
Speaker 8: There's a staggering lack of information about this and people
Speaker 8: are being slow to respond, but I want to mention
Speaker 8: it here because it's devastating and hideous and yeah, it's
Speaker 8: real fucking bad.
Speaker 9: Before we close this episode, James Stout has a special
Speaker 9: report on immigration and information about a fundraiser.
Speaker 4: James, all right, So immigration report. With the change of
Speaker 4: the month, children across the country are returning to schools.
Speaker 4: This means that ICE agents are also returning to enforcement
Speaker 4: at schools, not just ICE agents as we know, other
Speaker 4: federal agents' board patrol ATFDA, etc. Are all taking part
Speaker 4: in immigration enforcement now they're no longer restrained by the
Speaker 4: sensitive Places doctrine, which previously stopped them from doing enforcement
Speaker 4: at schools and churches and other places where it's generally
Speaker 4: considered not worth it because doing so obviously provides a
Speaker 4: massive disincentive for family to take their children to school.
Speaker 4: In this instance, in Chula Vista, second largest city in
Speaker 4: the County of San Diego, ice detained a parent a
Speaker 4: block away from a school, leaving two young children in
Speaker 4: the car. Like most schools in the area, Tula Vista
Speaker 4: Elementary School District will not allow ice on campus without
Speaker 4: a warrant unless there's an active emergency. Just to explain
Speaker 4: that active emergency thing a bit I guess, for instance,
Speaker 4: in Uvalde, because all the local cops were cowards and
Speaker 4: stood outside, it was actually a border patrol team or
Speaker 4: attacked specifically who killed the shooter there, So that would
Speaker 4: be an example of when immigration agents might enter a
Speaker 4: campus during an active emergency. In Los Angeles, a fifteen
Speaker 4: year old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed,
Speaker 4: and detained by federal agents at gunpoint. He was accompanying
Speaker 4: a relative who was reaistering at the school, and he
Speaker 4: was in the car with his grandmother. The agents, who
Speaker 4: appeared to be bored patrol from videos i've seen, release
Speaker 4: the boy after intervention by school staff and left live
Speaker 4: ammunition on the sidewalk. For some reason, these look like
Speaker 4: five five six rounds from the pictures I've seen, I'm
Speaker 4: guessing it's just terrible weapons handling procedures here. It appears
Speaker 4: that this boy was not the person they were looking for,
Speaker 4: but nonetheless they've obviously horrifically traumatized this young man for
Speaker 4: no good reason. In response, LA Unified School District is
Speaker 4: ramping up safety patrols. These include volunteers, teachers, and school cops. Apparently, obviously,
Speaker 4: school cops cannot directly prevent immigration enforcement officers from doing
Speaker 4: immigration enforcement, but they can notify people of their presence,
Speaker 4: and they're trying to have safe zones around schools so
Speaker 4: that people can either safety walk to school or safety
Speaker 4: drop their kids off. They're also changing their bus programs.
Speaker 4: Buses are part of school district's property right, so just
Speaker 4: as ice could not enter a school without a warrant,
Speaker 4: nor could they enter that bus without a warrant, and
Speaker 4: it would be within the training of the bus driver
Speaker 4: to deny them access if they did not have a warrant.
Speaker 4: So the bus would potentially be a much safer way
Speaker 4: for people to get to school that are having their
Speaker 4: parents drive them. And so what la USD is doing
Speaker 4: is expanding their bus programs in LA. I've seen a
Speaker 4: lot of information on this in the resource guide that
Speaker 4: was published by the LA Office of Immigration Affairs.
Speaker 6: So now is a good time to remind everyone that
Speaker 6: San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria defunded the San Diego.
Speaker 4: Office of Immigrant Affairs because he refuses to stop giving
Speaker 4: the Cobs a fire hose of our money.
Speaker 6: This has left migrants in one of America's largest border
Speaker 6: cities even more vulnerable.
Speaker 4: We're also doing a fundraiser this week. We're going to
Speaker 4: fund raised for Bouquet again. I'm going to go see
Speaker 4: her later this week. I know she has hearings coming up. Bouquette,
Speaker 4: for those who do not remember, is an Alevy Kurdish woman.
Speaker 4: Because of her ethnicity and religion, she wasn't safe in
Speaker 4: Turkey and she came to the USA to ask for refuge.
Speaker 4: She's been in San Diego for six months right now,
Speaker 4: and she is trying trying to raise money for her
Speaker 4: asylum case. And she can't work because she doesn't have
Speaker 4: a work permit, and she has cancer, which is obviously
Speaker 4: something which is very difficult for her to manage alongside
Speaker 4: the massive stress of immigration enforcement. Right now, she needs
Speaker 4: to raise seven thousand dollars to pay her lawyer. I'm
Speaker 4: looking at the GoFundMe as I record this and it
Speaker 4: is at one thousand, nine hundred and forty one dollars.
Speaker 4: If you would like to help, you can go to
Speaker 4: www dot GoFundMe dot com, slash f slash urgent, hyphen help,
Speaker 4: hyphen four, hyphen bouquette, b uk e t s hyphen asylum,
Speaker 4: hyphen case, or you can just go down as a
Speaker 4: show notes and click the link. We really appreciate all
Speaker 4: the support you guys have given.
Speaker 9: Thank you to James for that.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess that's our week. We reported the news.
Speaker 5: 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 6: It could happen.
Speaker 1: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.