Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
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Speaker 3: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's James today
Speaker 3: and I'm joined again by Kevin McDonald. Kevin is a
Speaker 3: retired officer from the Irish Defense Forces with some special
Speaker 3: forces and peacekeeping experience.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the show, Kevin, Thanks, thanks very much for
Speaker 4: having me. And just as a sort of disclaimer at
Speaker 4: the very start, any views er opinions that I expressed,
Speaker 4: the opinions of a retired senior officer from the Irish
Speaker 4: Defense Forces can't be construed it has been in any
Speaker 4: way the views of the Irish Defense Forces, not indeed
Speaker 4: that of the United Nations. So I just wanted to
Speaker 4: put that was there before we get into it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, not a UN or an Irish Defense Forces spokesperson,
Speaker 3: not that we've had many of those suppose on our show, Kevin,
Speaker 3: we're here today to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 3: situation in Congo and perhaps more specifically like how the
Speaker 3: peacekeeping mission there has it evolved and changed and sort
Speaker 3: of morphed over the years. So maybe just to begin with,
Speaker 3: I can give an idea that like this city of Goma,
Speaker 3: which is the capital of North Kivu Province, has recently
Speaker 3: been captured by M twenty three rebels, would explain who
Speaker 3: they are people who aren't familiar in a minute. It's
Speaker 3: a city of about a million people. I believe they're
Speaker 3: saying around three thousand people have been killed in this operation,
Speaker 3: which is I mean, it's a massive.
Speaker 4: Death toll in a short space of time.
Speaker 3: Very short space of time. Yeah, And some of the
Speaker 3: other stuff I've heard, like at one point there's a
Speaker 3: prison within the city which there was a jail break,
Speaker 3: and they think a hundred of the women who were
Speaker 3: incarcerated there were sexually assaulted and in some cases burned alive.
Speaker 3: After the jail break happened, thousands of Congolese military and
Speaker 3: police have surrendered. A contingent of I believe Romanian private
Speaker 3: military contractors were captured.
Speaker 4: Yes, captured, surrendered either where they went into Rwanda. I
Speaker 4: think about three hundred of them, which is a significant
Speaker 4: amount of mercenaries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, especially when we're talking about Romania, which is
Speaker 3: not a vast country.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Understandably, a lot of things are happening in the US,
Speaker 3: so people may have missed it, and like I think
Speaker 3: people in the US, just due to the nature of
Speaker 3: news being quite naval gazing here, may not be as
Speaker 3: familiar with the conflict in Congo. Like if they know
Speaker 3: about it, it's from Warren zvon Songs or maybe from
Speaker 3: maybe from a couple.
Speaker 4: Of films, Layer's Gone and Money.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's the other one? Roland, the Thompson Ganna. That's
Speaker 3: the Law and the Headless Thompson. That's it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So let's talk then about the various United Nations peacekeeping
Speaker 3: missions in Congo. They've been there since the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: is it on and off?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So the first mission in the Congo was oak
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty and a lot of people would say
Speaker 4: that that was the first UN mission, but as I
Speaker 4: think we discussed the last time, the first yu Went
Speaker 4: mission was full scale war in nineteen fifty in Korea,
Speaker 4: and that mission is still in existence the UNC, the
Speaker 4: United Nations Command, but I suppose speaking about the Congo specifically.
Speaker 4: So in nineteen sixty there was seventeen newly independent states,
Speaker 4: of which fourteen were from Africa. I agreed to a
Speaker 4: call from the UN to establish this mission in the Congo,
Speaker 4: and Ireland answered the call as well, so we deployed.
Speaker 4: It was the first time that we deployed with the UN,
Speaker 4: and we had a battalion there from nineteen sixty to
Speaker 4: I think nineteen sixty whenever the initial deployment ended, and
Speaker 4: it was it was a fairly tough, intense introduction to peace.
Speaker 4: In the early in nineteen sixty there was an engagement
Speaker 4: between an Irish platoon and a large group of Bluba
Speaker 4: tribesmen and there was nine Irish soldiers killed and twenty
Speaker 4: six Blubas killed. And that was the first time that
Speaker 4: Ireland kind of had to deal with that kind of
Speaker 4: death overseas, so it was pretty traumatic. And then in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty one, you've probably seen the film The Siege
Speaker 4: of Jariteville, but it recounts the true story of an
Speaker 4: Irish company under Kamada pack Quendlin. His company was one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty eight roughly strong, and they were attacked
Speaker 4: while they were at mass on a Sunday morning by
Speaker 4: a group of between three and four thousand Catanganese well
Speaker 4: armed soldiers backed up by French and Belgian and South
Speaker 4: African mercenaries. They also had an attack helicopter and they
Speaker 4: had an attack chest.
Speaker 3: I think he had some of the old Rhodesians in
Speaker 3: there as well at that time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah, unfortunately, anything for a fight,
Speaker 4: but the Irish held out for I think over a week,
Speaker 4: and they didn't give up when they ran out of water,
Speaker 4: they didn't give up when they ran out of food.
Speaker 4: It was when they had no bullets left they negotiated
Speaker 4: a surrender thanks to the skill of the officers and
Speaker 4: NCOs and men. Not one fatality on the other side.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, when they came home because they had surrendered, they
Speaker 4: were treated like parias for years. It was seemed like
Speaker 4: a state on the nation. Now if God forbid, they
Speaker 4: had fifty percent casualties that have been treated like heroes.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, And it's only in recent years that they're
Speaker 4: getting the recognition that they should have got back in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 3: That's really interesting. I know they've been treated that way.
Speaker 3: It's quite sad to hear.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's a strange one. And a lot of
Speaker 4: the people that we will say shunning these officers and
Speaker 4: NCOs and men. It's having to serve to overseas. And
Speaker 4: like if the UN they tried once to resupply them
Speaker 4: with ammunition from the year, but it wasn't successful. So
Speaker 4: if the UN had full supported that company, they would
Speaker 4: have held out even longer. But I suppose that's that's
Speaker 4: the way things things go. So that's the first mission
Speaker 4: to the Congo, And I could be corrected. I think
Speaker 4: sixty four sixty five it might have sort of started
Speaker 4: to draw down. Then in nineteen ninety nine, after it
Speaker 4: was the first the second war, the UN established monarch
Speaker 4: monu See and that lasted from nineteen n ninety nine
Speaker 4: until twenty ten when it was renamed and rechanged into MONUSCO.
Speaker 4: And the difference between the two is that MINUSCO is
Speaker 4: what we call an integrated mission. And the three pillars
Speaker 4: of an integrated mission are the restoration of the rule
Speaker 4: of law, the protection of civilians, and the provision for
Speaker 4: long term recovery and democratic governance. So it's combining we'll say,
Speaker 4: the force of a military presence, but also there's special
Speaker 4: advises on justice and police seeing on governance, all that
Speaker 4: sort of stuff which you wouldn't have an emission like UNIFIL,
Speaker 4: which we discussed the last time. Yeah, yeah, which is
Speaker 4: the earlier form of peacekeeping. So the NUSCO was supposed
Speaker 4: to have left the country in twenty twenty four, but
Speaker 4: they were given a i think a one year extension. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And unfortunately with the twenty three rebel advance, the mission
Speaker 4: is relocating most of its staff evacuating others. The difference
Speaker 4: between the two terms is very specific. You relocate within
Speaker 4: the country and you evacuate out of the country. And
Speaker 4: I also note that some of the Hybrid African Union
Speaker 4: peacekeeping operations there was I think thirteen South Africans killed
Speaker 4: and in the initial stages of the of the onslaught
Speaker 4: towards towards going. So that that's kind of where we
Speaker 4: are with the With the I think at the at
Speaker 4: its height within twenty one twenty two, there was probably
Speaker 4: a strength of twenty thousand. But if you think the
Speaker 4: DRC is the second largest country in Africa. It's vast, yeah,
Speaker 4: and the eleventh largest country in the world. Just the
Speaker 4: size of just phenomenal. So you can imagine what the
Speaker 4: Congo and is entire no more than Sudan, but what
Speaker 4: the Congo and its entirety was back in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 4: absolutely huge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's vast. It it encompasses different climates, own different
Speaker 3: ethnic groups as we're seeing right.
Speaker 4: Two hundred main ethnic groups.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's a fascinating place. It's a place
Speaker 3: I've wanted to go for a long time. I spent
Speaker 3: some time on the Congo Rwanda border a few years ago.
Speaker 3: I'm not so far from going er actually like riding
Speaker 3: riding my bike around. And it's a very interesting place
Speaker 3: in terms of what Rwanda is, a very interesting place
Speaker 3: in terms of its relation to its neighbors. I think
Speaker 3: people will probably struggle to conceptualize. I actually saw somebody
Speaker 3: had posted on Twitter, somebody who talks about Syria mostly
Speaker 3: like how on Earth is Rwanda invading Congo? And they
Speaker 3: had like a picture, you know, and the land mass
Speaker 3: of Rwanda. Randa is one of the smaller countries in Africa,
Speaker 3: and Congo is obviously a vast country. Are you come
Speaker 3: toward explaining a little bit of like the Rwandan involvements.
Speaker 4: It's complicated, and it goes back to the cities the
Speaker 4: genocide back in ninety four ninety four, I think, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: and the Two Kivus, North and South Kiva, which is
Speaker 4: on the border with Rwanda, there's a large amount of
Speaker 4: ethnic Tutsis, Congolese Tutsis. Yeah. There, I think what Rwanda
Speaker 4: has always projected force into the Two Kivus and Katanga
Speaker 4: because like literally that that's that's where the money is.
Speaker 4: Of course Rwanda would say they don't, but they are
Speaker 4: actively supporting and emptry industry I don't have. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: most of the twenty three certainly the leadership would be
Speaker 4: ethnic Congolese Putsis. Yeah. So ostensibly I think the raison
Speaker 4: deathstra for romanda involvement was to protect the ethnic Tutsis
Speaker 4: from Hutus that had escaped from the from the genocide.
Speaker 4: So it's complicated, but if you kind of part those
Speaker 4: complications and think of the money trail, it kind of
Speaker 4: leads to the Two Kivus because seventy percent of the
Speaker 4: world's cobalt, I think, is kind of located between the
Speaker 4: Two Kivus. And then you have gold, diamonds, all the
Speaker 4: other sort of rich minerals.
Speaker 3: Yeah, incredible wealth in Congo.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, but I was reading that the estimated deposits
Speaker 4: in eastern Congo it's something like twenty three trillion, Like
Speaker 4: it's it's off the wall stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So it's no wonder it's become the battleground that it
Speaker 4: has essentially since nineteen sixty because in nineteen sixty, after
Speaker 4: getting independence, the Kivu and Katanga wanted to secede back
Speaker 4: by belt and that's kind of what kicked off a
Speaker 4: lot of the conflict in nineteen sixty, and the reverberations
Speaker 4: from that are still are still kind of being felt
Speaker 4: and been exploited because everyone wants to get a piece
Speaker 4: of the action, like all the surrounding countries. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I see. I think it was yesterday that the they're
Speaker 4: planning a meeting. I think it's this week or this
Speaker 4: weekend to try and resolve the conflict. And this time
Speaker 4: they're going to try and include enter twenty three in
Speaker 4: the in the meeting rather than ex Google. I don't
Speaker 4: think that the choice. I mean they're heading down to
Speaker 4: book of use.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean at twenty three have said that they're
Speaker 3: going for sort of the whole country. Now that they're
Speaker 3: not you know, it's not as not a regional or
Speaker 3: like you know, ethnic movement so much as a and
Speaker 3: they will M twenty three would say that they're not
Speaker 3: like per se ethnic separatists, right, Like I think they
Speaker 3: would claim that they're like a liberation of Congo force.
Speaker 3: And then you've Brundy supporting the Congolese government. You know
Speaker 3: that there's all kinds as as you say, like regional
Speaker 3: and international actors because of the wealth in Congo and
Speaker 3: like let's can't go emerge from the DC emerged from
Speaker 3: its colonial past, right, it's always been destabilized by these actors,
Speaker 3: both regional and international, who wanted a piece of that
Speaker 3: mineral wealth. And then they've created and sustained these differences
Speaker 3: which have become I think there's some evidence to suggest
Speaker 3: that like certainly they're like the ethnic differences have become
Speaker 3: more pronounced and more like intransigent I suppose, or like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's become more difficult for those ethnic groups
Speaker 3: to coexist over time due to decades of conflict, right
Speaker 3: and killing, and it's a very difficult situation and it
Speaker 3: leaves people like the civilians living in Goma today in
Speaker 3: a terrible situation where I think this is the fifth
Speaker 3: time that people have attacked Goma, Like it's certainly I
Speaker 3: think the last time was about twenty twelve, was it
Speaker 3: when the last time M twenty three took Goma.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's that's when the which we've probably just
Speaker 4: got slater to the Force and Invention Brigade. Yeah, Goma
Speaker 4: in twenty thirteen in a relatively har space of time. Yeah,
Speaker 4: compared to how long we took to more, they regained
Speaker 4: it very quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I think we break for adverts now. I'd
Speaker 3: like to come back and discuss the Force Intovention Brigade
Speaker 3: because I think it's something that people ought to understand
Speaker 3: when we talk about peacekeeping. And we're back, okay, So yeah,
Speaker 3: you mentioned the Force Intervention Brigade, which is something a
Speaker 3: bit unique within peacekeeping, and there's a lot of like
Speaker 3: when people talk about peacekeeping, they'll be like, oh, why
Speaker 3: aren't they fighting? Why aren't they like going and stopping
Speaker 3: the things? And I understand why people ask that. So
Speaker 3: can you explain a little bit about what the FIB
Speaker 3: was and what it did?
Speaker 4: The concept of the Force Intervention Brigade was I think
Speaker 4: to my knowledge it's the first yew Woe Me mission
Speaker 4: that developed that concept. And they actually changed the mandate
Speaker 4: to include an offense of capability for U and troops
Speaker 4: as opposed to defensive or separation of war in factions.
Speaker 4: This was full on warfighter and what they had figured
Speaker 4: out because the DRC is so big that the footprint,
Speaker 4: even with twenty thousand troops, the footprint on the ground
Speaker 4: was not sufficient to would say, as I said, one
Speaker 4: of the three pillars of an integratedmissions protection of civilians.
Speaker 4: And they were finding that very difficult. So they decided
Speaker 4: to use a concept of protection by projection rather than
Speaker 4: protection by presence. So not alone did they have the
Speaker 4: Forceancry Brigade, they had the joint protection teams and also
Speaker 4: an idea of a rapidly deployable battalion. So the idea
Speaker 4: was that the Port and Diveention Brigade would say, do
Speaker 4: the heavy lifting and then when hotspots that flare up,
Speaker 4: they could choose either the rapidly deployed the battalions or
Speaker 4: the joint protection teams. So the idea is that rather
Speaker 4: than having static positions trying to protect people. They would
Speaker 4: go where the action was. That was the idea. And
Speaker 4: in fairness, the FIB had artillery, martors, snipers, attack helicopters,
Speaker 4: U have these special forces. They retook Gum and I
Speaker 4: don't know the exact timeframe, but I think it was
Speaker 4: less than a month. One of the problems and I
Speaker 4: think we touched on at the last time we spoke,
Speaker 4: and I think this is a specific problem to the
Speaker 4: how the FIB didn't really keep going the way it
Speaker 4: should have is that two of the main TCCs were
Speaker 4: Tanzania and South Africa, and they would have had slightly
Speaker 4: different agendas in terms of who they should and they
Speaker 4: shouldn't attack based on the government's position sorrue true country
Speaker 4: in the countries. Excuse me, I should have said that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sea of acronyms here. I've tried to avoid
Speaker 3: all the these faction acronyms, but yeah, yeah, explain that
Speaker 3: a bit, because when people think of the UN or
Speaker 3: in peacekeepers or troop contributing countries, the only time it
Speaker 3: comes on the news in sort of the global north
Speaker 3: is when people from say Northern Europe or North America
Speaker 3: are part of these UN peacekeeping missions. So they think
Speaker 3: of people British troops, American and Canadian what have you,
Speaker 3: in their blue helmets. Right that the vast bulk of
Speaker 3: TCC's don't come from from Northern Europe, right, they're in Africa.
Speaker 3: The majority of TCC's or other African countries. I think
Speaker 3: I'm right saying it's a majority.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like like here here in in suth Sudan, most
Speaker 4: of the big battalions are Wanda, Nepal, Mongolia, China generally speaking,
Speaker 4: in my experience in the Central African Republic and here
Speaker 4: a lot of the battalions come from Africa, which which
Speaker 4: is fair enough. I mean it's it's their continent. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and they should have they should of a stake in
Speaker 4: trying to faster piece and develop peace and help countries
Speaker 4: in less or more dire situations than they themselves perhaps are.
Speaker 4: So it's I understand your point about about different countries
Speaker 4: being aware of what the UN does based on I take,
Speaker 4: for instance, everyone in Ireland knows about the UN, and
Speaker 4: they know about the Irish and Lebanon, and in Syria
Speaker 4: and in Africa. I'm sure in the United Kingdom, because
Speaker 4: you've got a very small UN footprint. Yeah, Cyprus been one,
Speaker 4: and there's a few of you guys here, generally people
Speaker 4: in the UK, I'm sure you'll be able to enlighten
Speaker 4: me on this. Wouldn't have the exact same intimate knowledge
Speaker 4: or even interest in the UN because basically they don't
Speaker 4: have a big footprint, deployable footprint.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and it's the same with the United States.
Speaker 3: I think it's not something that people think about for
Speaker 3: the most part, and so like that's this question of
Speaker 3: like why doesn't the UN. Certainly I think when people
Speaker 3: saw what happened recently in Lebanon, they were like, why
Speaker 3: are these peacekeepers? You know where you had these peacekeepers
Speaker 3: And we spoke about this in our last episode, right
Speaker 3: being shelled being shot at. You know, the people were
Speaker 3: asking why they weren't out there fighting and there are
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons for that, one being that's not
Speaker 3: what they're there to do. But yeah, when we had
Speaker 3: this Force Intervention Brigade in Congo, they did some good things, right,
Speaker 3: they were able to retake Goma, and for the people
Speaker 3: who lived in Gomer, I'm sure that was very important,
Speaker 3: like that meaningfully improved their lives. But like it also
Speaker 3: comes with these complications that you've addressed, right, Like each
Speaker 3: of those those troop contributing countries, you need everyone to
Speaker 3: be committed to like the same mission, I suppose, and
Speaker 3: like if your government is giving your armed forces one
Speaker 3: mission that differs slightly from that which the whoever's in
Speaker 3: commanded the force into venture brigade hats, then we get friction, right,
Speaker 3: or it's not as efficient as it could be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I'm sure I mentioned just when we
Speaker 4: last spoke. It's one thing developing a robust mandate, But
Speaker 4: if the if the TCCs don't want to have the skills,
Speaker 4: the experience, the training, the equipment, or the will to
Speaker 4: enforce the robust nature of that mandate, well then the
Speaker 4: mandate isn't really worth anything, you know. So it's it's
Speaker 4: kind of like, Yes, the FIB was extremely effected for
Speaker 4: a while until it wasn't. Now whether that was a
Speaker 4: lack of will on the TCCs or on New York
Speaker 4: or mission leadership, I have no idea, but it was
Speaker 4: a great idea and it worked and then it didn't work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Plus the fact that the DOC wanted the mission to
Speaker 4: downsize and eventually leave that added to the should should
Speaker 4: we really invest in something when we're going to pull
Speaker 4: out because the country doesn't want to hear it anymore,
Speaker 4: which is again as a fair point.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, No one wants foreign troops in their country, right,
Speaker 3: you know, walking around, especially you know, engaging their owns.
Speaker 3: It's but I mean, it's interesting. I was watching a
Speaker 3: speaks the current president of the DRC, Felix TOSHISAKEDI. I've
Speaker 3: tried my best to pronounce it correctly. It's not that disrespect.
Speaker 3: He was saying that the international community is bordering on
Speaker 3: complicit in M twenty three's advance because of the failure
Speaker 3: to do anything about it, in a speech he gave
Speaker 3: this week. And it was interesting because it had previously been,
Speaker 3: like you said, for under very understandable reasons, especially in
Speaker 3: the DRC, which has this long and horrible history of colonialism,
Speaker 3: like the terrible things done in the Belgian Congo. We've
Speaker 3: covered those a lot on Bastardsen now the show that
Speaker 3: we do, people can listen to that if they want to.
Speaker 3: But now he's asking for more help, which is also
Speaker 3: understandable because you know, his military is one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand or so, like and a large number
Speaker 3: of that it's not very combat effective forces maybe, and
Speaker 3: they've just been overrun in Gourma, in a big city,
Speaker 3: a city of a million people. So, like, where do
Speaker 3: you think we go from here? What's like, We're at
Speaker 3: a very unique time in world history in which the
Speaker 3: United States is it's doing some things with this foreign policy.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't I won't really mince words about
Speaker 3: anything's terrible. But if we talk about like USAID, right
Speaker 3: I was speaking to people on the Thai Burmese border
Speaker 3: last week who were telling me that USAID has turned
Speaker 3: off life support machines as part of its draw down
Speaker 3: and that people obviously directly died as a result of
Speaker 3: that there. So the US is not necessarily averse to
Speaker 3: having terrible consequences to its whatever it's trying to do
Speaker 3: right now, which I don't really have a good word for.
Speaker 3: So where do we go from here? With the US
Speaker 3: becoming more isolationists.
Speaker 4: Well, let's discuss for a few minutes the alternatives to
Speaker 4: UN peace keep ye, And there's a lot of them
Speaker 4: here in Africa. So you have the South African Development Community,
Speaker 4: the East African community, there was an African Union stroke
Speaker 4: UN hybrid mission and therefore UNIMIT which is closing. There
Speaker 4: was an AU mission in Somalia. There is the Lake
Speaker 4: Chad base in Multinational Task Force, there's the Group of
Speaker 4: Five for the Sahel. Then you had EU four which
Speaker 4: was an EU force in Chad and in Mali and
Speaker 4: subsequently became miner cat in Chad and Minusna and Mali.
Speaker 4: Then you have the EUTM mission in Mali which I
Speaker 4: was part of at one stage, and another one in Socenaria.
Speaker 4: And of course we have our mercenaries, you know, and
Speaker 4: when it emerged that there was over three hundred of
Speaker 4: them allowed into Rwanda, I was reading the report that
Speaker 4: they were getting something like three and a half thousand
Speaker 4: dollars a month, whereas the DRC soldiers were getting maybe
Speaker 4: three hundred dollars a month. Yeah, you know, and these
Speaker 4: guys were brought in to protect the mines because again
Speaker 4: they goes back to money.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, pactal resources, not people. That's a different thing.
Speaker 3: So what if those like those African led peacekeeping missions
Speaker 3: look like like you talked about these various like international
Speaker 3: and regional groups.
Speaker 4: I think it's it's certainly worth a try because dun
Speaker 4: hasn't the ability, not indeed the money, I presume to
Speaker 4: keep doing these large, big missions. At one stage, the
Speaker 4: three largest missions were MENUSCO, which were discussing MINUSCA and
Speaker 4: the Central African Republic, and MINUSMA, which was in Mali.
Speaker 4: Mali's gone. DRC is on the drawdown. Central African Republic
Speaker 4: is still there, but I've noticed I spent four years there,
Speaker 4: and obviously I have a keen interest in the place,
Speaker 4: but there has been a big increase in anti anti
Speaker 4: French with a Francophone country. Yeah, Antry French and linked
Speaker 4: with a kind of an anti UN sentiment. No, the
Speaker 4: special advisor to the President is from Russia. Vaguer. You
Speaker 4: had a big part to play when I was there.
Speaker 4: The were key players. Yeah. Most likely they're interlinked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and they've done some things which are
Speaker 3: horrific in terms. We've covered that as well with the
Speaker 3: print Derma on the show. I did want to talk
Speaker 3: about this because the US is talking about withdrawing its
Speaker 3: sort of what we call like soft power assets right
Speaker 3: around the world, and I saw, like I forget who
Speaker 3: it was saying, like, oh, let the chips fall where
Speaker 3: they may. It's very obvious where the chips will fall
Speaker 3: in this part of the world. Right, Like when I
Speaker 3: was in Rwanda, every fancy road in Rwanda they call
Speaker 3: them Chinese roads because they go from the mind to
Speaker 3: the airport.
Speaker 4: Ye belt embraces Yep.
Speaker 3: It's as naked a resource extraction project as you'll see
Speaker 3: right now. China also does a soft power thing. They'll
Speaker 3: build hospitals and these. You know, I forget where the
Speaker 3: quote comes from, but like every time the US comes,
Speaker 3: we get a lecture, and every time China comes, we
Speaker 3: get a hospital. This will reorient the way these countries,
Speaker 3: specifically in Africa, associate with the world. Right with the
Speaker 3: US drawdown and the United Nations not capable or willing
Speaker 3: of sort of doing these massive peacekeeping missions. And I
Speaker 3: think for very understandable reasons groups out the EU. You know,
Speaker 3: it's best not to have large deployment to European en
Speaker 3: forces in Africa for reasons that are probably quite obvious.
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, we were likely to see I mean,
Speaker 3: hasn't Wagner rebranded itself as the Africa Core Now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not sure who's running at no, but I'm
Speaker 4: sure the strings are being more closely pulled by by
Speaker 4: Putin as opposed to having very loose control when precaution
Speaker 4: was there. Yeah, yeah, it was given him like a
Speaker 4: standoff capability. Was right, This is just a PMC, nothing
Speaker 4: to do with me. Yeah, But I would imagine after
Speaker 4: his drive to Moscow and a subsequent to my I'm
Speaker 4: sure that whoever is running the Africa core is much
Speaker 4: more tightly controlled by the criminal I would. I would imagine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a britishis India Company kind of model,
Speaker 3: like a sort of proxy colonialism, but very tight. Like
Speaker 3: you say, it's just almost just like a different badge
Speaker 3: on the same thing there. I think this is one
Speaker 3: of the things that won't get talked about in the
Speaker 3: next four years because the US media will talk about
Speaker 3: the US a lot. Again, I mean they always do.
Speaker 3: But I think people should be concerned about this, about
Speaker 3: the future for like multinational peacekeeping in Africa, and more importantly,
Speaker 3: I guess the future for Interlink without the future for
Speaker 3: human rights in Africa. What do you see as like
Speaker 3: meaningful ways that people can advocate for a future for
Speaker 3: Africa which is not just another set of countries extracting
Speaker 3: resources and leaving very little for the people there, Which
Speaker 3: is something that has happened. You know, I'm British best,
Speaker 3: and this has happened by British people for a very
Speaker 3: long time and other European people for a very long time.
Speaker 3: But like that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to
Speaker 3: stop it happening in the future.
Speaker 4: That's a difficult one to answer, because ideally African problems should,
Speaker 4: in my opinion, be solved by African nations. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: that's the reason that the African Union and all these
Speaker 4: other ones that I mentioned I think are an attempt
Speaker 4: to do that. Yeah. And certainly Europe and the US
Speaker 4: shouldn't be dictating how Africans government themselves. They should be
Speaker 4: assisting in good governance, good policing, good judiciary. But it
Speaker 4: kind of goes back to money again, because there's so
Speaker 4: much of a vested interest. I heard a figure that
Speaker 4: twenty three were getting eight hundred thousand dollars a month
Speaker 4: from some of the mines in the Kivus. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: can believe we'll get that kind of money floating around
Speaker 4: a lot of people maybe don't want to sort things out. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and it may suit to leave the mayhem there and
Speaker 4: use all these artisanal miners who are getting paid a
Speaker 4: couple of cents a day and Wonder has just got
Speaker 4: a big contract with the EU in terms of diamonds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that is the thing, right, we can
Speaker 3: tell where this stuff comes from. There is a means
Speaker 3: to try and limit the amount of these resources which
Speaker 3: you can leave conflict zones in a way which benefits
Speaker 3: beligerent parties. It's where the markets for those resources are
Speaker 3: willing to do it, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And everyone has mistaken the point, whether it's the
Speaker 4: overseer of the mind, whether it's the company that owns
Speaker 4: the mind, whether it's the people that move the product
Speaker 4: from Kivu into someone neighboring country, and then ultimately the
Speaker 4: people that buy it commercially in Western Europe or around
Speaker 4: the rest of the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And it's it's not you know, people think
Speaker 3: of diamonds a lot, and I think people that there's
Speaker 3: been a kind of movement to purchase diamonds which you're
Speaker 3: ethically sourced, or to just not use diamonds, to sort
Speaker 3: of move away from them as like a store of value.
Speaker 3: But it's also the parts in your mobile phone, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It's not you know, it's not just like fancy engagement rings.
Speaker 4: Because this is a chain you wanted to be over
Speaker 4: the price for more ethical mining methods most people probably own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the thing, right, and especially when it's out
Speaker 3: of sight, out of mind for most people, even compared
Speaker 3: to you know, we obviously genocide Palestinian people or the
Speaker 3: you know, when we think about these other atrostees, right,
Speaker 3: like those have not remained out of sight out of
Speaker 3: mind because they're visible in people's social media, because you know,
Speaker 3: people in Palestine have phones and they can film, and
Speaker 3: like that's I think meaningfully changed the way. Like I
Speaker 3: wouldn't have thought American people would care about Palestinian people.
Speaker 3: I moved here in two thousand and eight, and you
Speaker 3: wouldn't have found much interest in Palestine.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't have expected them to promote that cleansing of
Speaker 4: Guz Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Know you well, you wouldn't have expected that either. But
Speaker 3: the movement like to support Palestinian people from the grassroots
Speaker 3: and then also the other government doing the exact opposite.
Speaker 3: You know, it's come from the bottom up. It hasn't
Speaker 3: come from like government advocacy. But we don't see that
Speaker 3: as much with certainly this part of Africa, right, Like
Speaker 3: and it's exposed. It's to contro it's coins of like
Speaker 3: people in Congo maybe aren't able to access those global
Speaker 3: networks of like social media and maybe to share their stories,
Speaker 3: you know. And I think it's also a consequence of
Speaker 3: us in the media not reporting at all, you know,
Speaker 3: Like I've for years tried to sell stories about Africa
Speaker 3: to American publications and at best they'll want a story
Speaker 3: about like the people who are starting like social enterprise,
Speaker 3: European North American people starting like social enterprises or like
Speaker 3: sort of beneficial companies. And I understand it's have a role,
Speaker 3: but like, you're not going to persuade me that there
Speaker 3: is a single African person of interest to you, and
Speaker 3: that like it's someone who came from North America, that
Speaker 3: it's the only relevant story to tell in Africa. And
Speaker 3: like I've had this falling out with so many editors
Speaker 3: over the years that like, no, I don't want to
Speaker 3: tell that story. I want to tell a story about
Speaker 3: people from Congo and Congo, about people from Rwanda and Rwanda.
Speaker 4: I live in the town towards the west coast of Ireland,
Speaker 4: and there's a guy from there. What I'll do is
Speaker 4: I'll send you a link. Yeah. Yeah, but he's passionate
Speaker 4: about getting free education in Africa between online courses and
Speaker 4: online libraries. Obviously, the more education you get, the better
Speaker 4: chance you have of having a better life. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I think of some sulf and I'll send an auntie
Speaker 4: and then you can figure out whether it'll be an
Speaker 4: interesting topic or whatever. But I just literally as we were,
Speaker 4: I was thinking of how one guy is trying to
Speaker 4: change conditions for younger people in Africa and trying to
Speaker 4: give it to them for free.
Speaker 3: That's it. Yeah, that's the key is like people doing it.
Speaker 3: One of the things that people did which I thought
Speaker 3: was really great as an example as a model, is
Speaker 3: from October about October the tenth of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: I suppose people weren't going to school or university in Gaza,
Speaker 3: and very quickly there weren't any universities in Gaza because
Speaker 3: they all got bombed. Right, the colleagues of mine in
Speaker 3: academic departments started putting on seminars and lectures that Palestinian people,
Speaker 3: be they displaced or still in Gaza, but with access
Speaker 3: to internet, you know, it's still displaced, but internally displaced
Speaker 3: could attend and continue with their educations. And I thought
Speaker 3: that was a really great, like solidarity based way to
Speaker 3: facilitate access to something that people have had taken away
Speaker 3: from them through no fault they were by state aggression.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, there's a model for that. I mean, colonial
Speaker 3: has done many terrible things, but it's given us a
Speaker 3: common language with a lot of our African friends. You know,
Speaker 3: you speak French and English, you can do quite well.
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, there are things available, and I wish
Speaker 3: people would I don't think people should stop caring about Palestine,
Speaker 3: of course I don't, but I do wish they would
Speaker 3: care more about people in Africa too, because like, they
Speaker 3: don't deserve this any more than anyone else.
Speaker 4: I was born in nineteen sixty when the first mission
Speaker 4: went to the Congo. Yeah, and it's been going on,
Speaker 4: like I'm sixty four, it's been around sixty four years. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so no more than the problem with the Palestinians. I
Speaker 4: think some people, unless you have a specific interest in
Speaker 4: it or feel passionate about it, a lot of people
Speaker 4: just I think true note and to go to the
Speaker 4: next pronouncement from the White House, you know, clickbit. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So I think it's a sad fact, but it's the
Speaker 4: factor I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. And like, you know, if
Speaker 3: there's one thing I'd like to do with my career,
Speaker 3: I'd like to spend more time in that part of
Speaker 3: the world and do more reporting. And I think we
Speaker 3: could do a lot with as a media with just
Speaker 3: explaining how life is for everyday people, because people think
Speaker 3: about Congo in terms of yeah, the M twenty three
Speaker 3: in the conglese government and the who too, militias and
Speaker 3: this and that, but the vast majority of people are
Speaker 3: just trying to get on with their day. You know,
Speaker 3: they want a better future for their children. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you know the fact that your mobile phone it's cheap,
Speaker 3: it's maybe making their children's future worse. And that's something
Speaker 3: that we need to reckon with.
Speaker 4: And E cares.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean this is the thing people
Speaker 3: and talk about electric cars. It's so as weird. It's
Speaker 3: all that stuff come and then even here in America
Speaker 3: right whether the US trying to mind lithium on reservations
Speaker 3: where you know, the land there's little land it's left
Speaker 3: indigenous people to have sovereignty on. It's where it's now
Speaker 3: trying to do this very invasive form of mining. Kevin,
Speaker 3: You've written a book, so would you like to as
Speaker 3: we wind down here, do you want to explain a
Speaker 3: little bit about about your books so that people are
Speaker 3: interested in your life and your time as a peacekeeper
Speaker 3: and an archaeologist.
Speaker 4: Okay, So what started off as a lockdown project when
Speaker 4: COVID hit back in the day, I decided I would
Speaker 4: write an account of my weird of wonderful life for
Speaker 4: my just from my family, and don't you start writing
Speaker 4: as you're no doubt where you start remembering. And suddenly
Speaker 4: I was at something like a hundred thousand words, and
Speaker 4: I thought, right, there might be a book in this.
Speaker 4: And I know, obviously I'm opinionating about my own book naturally,
Speaker 4: but it's not just a book about some random military
Speaker 4: guy waffling on about his military career. I've a separate
Speaker 4: career in mountaineering and kind of a nearly separate career
Speaker 4: in archaeology, So it's it's a mixture of soldiering, mountaineering
Speaker 4: and archaeology. As someone said it to me, it's a
Speaker 4: bit like Chris Bonnington meets Bert Grills meets Indiana Jones,
Speaker 4: which is weird and wonderful way to do so. The
Speaker 4: title of the book is a Lifeless Ordinary, which this
Speaker 4: was a recruiting slogo in the nineteen nineties for the
Speaker 4: for the Irish Defense Forces.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 4: I think. I think I'll sent you the link. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: if not, I'll do it, yeah, immediately. So all your
Speaker 4: viewers can order the book. You can only get it
Speaker 4: online at the publishers. It's not on Amazon unfortunately. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well maybe maybe fell the best given the way tech
Speaker 3: people are playing the US economy. Yeah, you can. You
Speaker 3: can get it online. You can get it sent to
Speaker 3: the United States if you interest date I did. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much for your time, Kevin. You're insights today.
Speaker 3: I know we really appreciate it. Is there anywhere else
Speaker 3: if people want to follow you online? Aside from the book?
Speaker 3: The book is probably the best one. What is probably
Speaker 3: the best way to get in comment? I'm on LinkedIn
Speaker 3: and yeah, the normal stuff. Just google Kevin McDonald and
Speaker 3: I should I should come up. I was resisting for
Speaker 3: years and years, and eventually I googled Kevin McDonald and
Speaker 3: I was surprised at the amount of Kevin McDonald's There
Speaker 3: is a famous American actor writing called Kevin McDonald. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I just as a small party shot when when
Speaker 3: I was in Mali, I was researching the archaeology of
Speaker 3: Mali and the world expert on Melaye archaeology is a professor, naturally,
Speaker 3: Kevin mac donald. So I sent him an am here
Speaker 3: and I said, by the way, I'm also an archaeologist,
Speaker 3: and my name is Kevin McDonald, and he goes my word,
Speaker 3: I'd be in Bangi or in Bamaco in two weeks time.
Speaker 3: Let's meet up.
Speaker 4: So the two Kevin McDonald's, two archaeologists met up in
Speaker 4: Bama cup to discuss archaeology.
Speaker 3: So that's nice when these things kept again.
Speaker 4: Another one of my word and wonderful stories.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, well thanks so much for joining us to you, Kevin,
Speaker 3: So it's nice to hear me.
Speaker 4: You're more than welcome.
Speaker 6: Jims, Hello, welcome to It could Happen Here a podcast
Speaker 6: about things falling apart and the people.
Speaker 7: Trying to put them back together again. I am today's
Speaker 7: guest host, Margaret Kiljoy. Today is one of those episodes
Speaker 7: about people, well trying to put it back together again,
Speaker 7: or I guess really an episode about people trying to
Speaker 7: stop them from making things fall apart, because today I'm
Speaker 7: going to talk a little bit about the fight against
Speaker 7: the Mountain Valley natural Gas pipeline. Last Tuesday, February twenty fifth,
Speaker 7: twenty twenty five, the last criminal trials from the campaign
Speaker 7: to stop the Mountain Valley pipeline were held in Parisburg, Virginia.
Speaker 7: As you might have guessed based on the fact that
Speaker 7: you've never heard of Parisburg, Virginia, it's a tiny town
Speaker 7: nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. It's also the seat of
Speaker 7: Giles County, Virginia, and it the town is home to
Speaker 7: almost three thousand people. It's in the southwest of the state,
Speaker 7: right up against West Virginia. Culture and geography, of course,
Speaker 7: both reject things like state lines. The governments are obsessed
Speaker 7: with them. For ten years, the people of Central Appalachia,
Speaker 7: on both sides of the imaginary line, fought against this
Speaker 7: destructive pipeline. Their campaign tied nonviolent direct action with lawsuits
Speaker 7: and public pressure campaigns, and they very nearly won. It
Speaker 7: took backdoor dealings at the highest level of power to
Speaker 7: force the pipeline's construction, with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin
Speaker 7: holding twenty twenty three's Inflation Reduction Act hostage until President
Speaker 7: Biden personally guaranteed that the pipeline would be constructed, overriding
Speaker 7: all of the courts, activists, and locals who blocked it
Speaker 7: along the way. Essentially, the ostensible Democrat Joe Manchin said, fine,
Speaker 7: I'll vote for your climate bill, but only if you
Speaker 7: fuck over the state that I represent. The pipeline, owned
Speaker 7: by Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, was supposed to be built
Speaker 7: in a year. Thanks to the campaign against it, it
Speaker 7: took six and a half years to build. It was
Speaker 7: intended to cost the company three billion dollars. It costs
Speaker 7: them more than twice that, which is not bad for
Speaker 7: a scrappy movement of mountain people, hippies, and punks. It's
Speaker 7: not bad for a bunch of grandma's and college kids.
Speaker 7: I'll be covering the full campaign in more details soon
Speaker 7: on cool people who did cool stuff. This podcast is
Speaker 7: instead about the trials. Twelve defendants went before the court
Speaker 7: that day, eleven of them facing felonies and serious prison time.
Speaker 7: In the end, none of them were sentenced to time
Speaker 7: behind bars. I am happy to say a friend of
Speaker 7: mine invited me down to cover the trials twelve defendants,
Speaker 7: all in the same day, all in the same courtroom,
Speaker 7: with the same judge. I said, yes, West Virginia is
Speaker 7: a bigger state than its own map would indicate because
Speaker 7: there aren't freeways that run through it, so it takes
Speaker 7: a very long time to get anywhere. So I packed
Speaker 7: up my van and headed down on Monday night. That night,
Speaker 7: sleeping in my van, I had a stress dream about
Speaker 7: court where I'd forgotten to take off my knife before
Speaker 7: going through the metal detectors, and spent a very long
Speaker 7: time talking to various cops about who I was and
Speaker 7: why I was there, before being stuck outside the courthouse
Speaker 7: and a large crowd of protesters surrounded by a large
Speaker 7: crowd of cops. In that dream, someone who wasn't on
Speaker 7: either side stood up to give a speech, but too
Speaker 7: near an open flame in his clothes caught fire. Us
Speaker 7: anarchists again, I'm talking about my dream here. Aus Anarchist
Speaker 7: rushed to help him while the cops stared on with
Speaker 7: blank stairs. We beat out the flames and held his
Speaker 7: burned body while the cops stared on with blank stairs.
Speaker 7: We screamed for someone to call an ambulance while the
Speaker 7: cops stared on with blank stairs. I like when my
Speaker 7: dreams lend themselves to obvious symbolism in this moment where
Speaker 7: the apparatus of the state is content to let all
Speaker 7: of us burn, whether in the fires of fascism or
Speaker 7: the fires of climate change. But I woke up disturbed nonetheless,
Speaker 7: with the sun barely over the horizon. I ate a
Speaker 7: quick breakfast, and I drove the rest of the way
Speaker 7: up to the actual courthouse and the actual trial. Fortunately,
Speaker 7: at the actual thing, no one caught fire. I parked
Speaker 7: on a nearby street and made my way to the courthouse.
Speaker 7: It didn't accidentally bring a pocket knife, which is easy
Speaker 7: for me to do since I usually have three on
Speaker 7: me because I am a totally normal human. I did, though,
Speaker 7: bring an audio recorder, which was equally forbidden in the courtroom.
Speaker 7: I went through the metal detector and surrendered my little
Speaker 7: bag with the Zoom recorder. Later, press came into the
Speaker 7: room and I tried to get my recorder back, but
Speaker 7: I was told that's real media. Without a press badge,
Speaker 7: I don't look much like someone who works for iHeart.
Speaker 7: I settled into a seat and waited for the proceedings.
Speaker 7: Eco defendants and ECO defenders both poured into the tiny,
Speaker 7: dingy courtroom. The ceiling had holes in it, the drywall
Speaker 7: was sagging. Appalachia isn't extracted from region. A place from
Speaker 7: which wealth is gathered, not a place where wealth goes.
Speaker 7: We were reminded repeatedly that the fire code limited occupancy
Speaker 7: of the roomed eighty nine people, and it sure seemed
Speaker 7: like they brought in as many cops as they could
Speaker 7: to limit our numbers. Many more supporters waited outside. Most
Speaker 7: of what I did that day was weight in the courtroom,
Speaker 7: because most of the courtroom drama was happening behind closed
Speaker 7: doors as the prosecutor, the judge, and the aid or
Speaker 7: so defense attorneys all argued and fought over the details
Speaker 7: of plea deals. Most of these characters, judge, prosecutor, and
Speaker 7: lawyers were quite familiar to the people working with the movement.
Speaker 7: This was the last trial of many throughout the ten
Speaker 7: year campaign, which has relied heavily on non violent direct
Speaker 7: action since twenty eighteen. The prosecutor, in particular, a guy
Speaker 7: named Bobby Lilly, was a well known figure. Usually, when
Speaker 7: people say things like the prosecutor was a clown. They're
Speaker 7: speaking figuratively, but Bobby Lilly, the prosecutor, is a balloon
Speaker 7: artist in his free time, and his Facebook is full
Speaker 7: of photos of all of his balloon creations. The rumor
Speaker 7: is that he clowned his way through law school, all right, Which, look,
Speaker 7: if I wasn't predisposed to not like this man because
Speaker 7: he was arguing for the imprisonment of people trying to
Speaker 7: save all life on earth, I would kind of think
Speaker 7: that's cool. But it does mean that there was a
Speaker 7: clown prosecution. And some people who were there to support
Speaker 7: the defendants wore balloon animal hats to mock Bobby Lily,
Speaker 7: though they were forced to leave those hats outside as
Speaker 7: no hats of any kind were allowed in the courtroom.
Speaker 7: Coming in that morning, we expected most of the defendants
Speaker 7: to take non cooperating plea deals they'd already agreed to.
Speaker 7: Non Cooperating plea deals are deals in which the defendant
Speaker 7: refuses to cooperate with the state's investigation of other protesters. Basically,
Speaker 7: this means these are non snitching deals. A few of
Speaker 7: the defendants, though we're ready to take their cases to trial,
Speaker 7: I've decided to largely not use people's names in this reporting.
Speaker 7: Those names are a matter of public record, of course,
Speaker 7: but we are entering unprecedented times, and I don't see
Speaker 7: any particular advantage in making their names more public than
Speaker 7: they already are. But do you know what I do
Speaker 7: want to make public the sweet sweet deals offered by
Speaker 7: our advertisers. I love making those public. Here they are,
Speaker 7: and we're back. The charges against the defendants seem politically motivated.
Speaker 7: This isn't to say the defendants might not have walked
Speaker 7: onto pipeline work sites and disrupted activity. There certainly a
Speaker 7: coordinated campaign to do just that, but the charges against
Speaker 7: them were artificially inflated. I was talking to a supporter
Speaker 7: during one of the many long interludes in the proceedings
Speaker 7: who explained to me that nearly everyone on trial that day,
Speaker 7: and a large percentage of all defendants throughout the course
Speaker 7: of the campaign, were charged with felony misuse of a
Speaker 7: motor vehicle aka joy riding. To be clear, no one
Speaker 7: has been accused of hijacking construction equipment and riding it around.
Speaker 7: It's just one of the many charges levied at protesters
Speaker 7: in order to get their bail denied or inflated to
Speaker 7: tie everyone up in legal proceedings for longer, and intimidate
Speaker 7: people into pleting guilty to lesser charges. These are similar
Speaker 7: to the kidnapping charges that a lot of protesters got
Speaker 7: as well, despite that, well, no one was kidnapped during
Speaker 7: the course of the campaign, except, of course, by the state.
Speaker 7: Another supporter explained to me, inflated arges has been part
Speaker 7: of the Mountain Valley Pipeline's legal strategy all along, the
Speaker 7: same as protesters look to tie the pipeline company up
Speaker 7: in court and delay construction, MVP's strategy seems to have
Speaker 7: been to drag out court cases and keep as many
Speaker 7: individual force defenders caught up in legal jeopardy as possible.
Speaker 7: Of course, they shouldn't actually have the means to change
Speaker 7: people's charges. But if the fight against MVP has taught
Speaker 7: us anything it's that the state caves to business interests
Speaker 7: every time. Most defendants from the course of the campaign
Speaker 7: have taken pleas that include suspended sentences so that they
Speaker 7: never do jail time as long as they promise to
Speaker 7: never try to save the world from fossil fuel infrastructure.
Speaker 7: It seems like MVP wants each person who catches charges
Speaker 7: to be out of the fight. But fortunately Frontline's work
Speaker 7: is only a portion of the work involved in defending
Speaker 7: the earth. When someone told me that this was MVP's
Speaker 7: strategy to catch everyone up on charges, I wasn't really
Speaker 7: skeptical because it made sense, but I still had that
Speaker 7: confirmed for me in the courtroom. You see, a few
Speaker 7: lawyers or other legal representatives of MVP were present in
Speaker 7: the courtroom that day, standing at the back of the room,
Speaker 7: seemingly eves dropping on the courtroom.
Speaker 5: Chatter.
Speaker 7: Word on the street was that part of their goal
Speaker 7: was to gather information for the ongoing civil litigation happening
Speaker 7: against environmentalists. But eves dropping goes both ways, and one
Speaker 7: supporter I talked to overheard them talking to each other
Speaker 7: about how they wish they could drag these cases out
Speaker 7: even longer. Once court began, defendants went up one by
Speaker 7: one before the judge. Most entered pleas of not guilty
Speaker 7: with stipulation. This is, in essence, a way to accept
Speaker 7: a plea agreement without actually accepting guilt. So each person
Speaker 7: went up pleaded not guilty with stipulation, and then was
Speaker 7: found guilty by the judge.
Speaker 3: On their lesser charges.
Speaker 7: The process took three to six minutes per defendant.
Speaker 3: I tracked it.
Speaker 7: The defendants were there for arrests stemming from actions that
Speaker 7: happened between October twenty twenty three and March twenty twenty four,
Speaker 7: from three different actions, all on nearby Peters Mountain, a
Speaker 7: mountain which sits on the horizon of Parrisburg, Virginia, and
Speaker 7: which defies the border between Virginia and West Virginia. Most
Speaker 7: of the action from the campaign happened on either Peters
Speaker 7: Mountain or another mountain in another county, Poor Mountain. One
Speaker 7: action in October twenty twenty three, like I said, court
Speaker 7: has been dragged out for a very long time, was
Speaker 7: an action in which one person locked themselves to an
Speaker 7: excavator while others were there in support. The supporters of
Speaker 7: the action were facing felonies too. Some of them a
Speaker 7: while back were re arrested at their own arraignments, given
Speaker 7: additional charges, and put into jail for days. It's not
Speaker 7: hard to imagine why the defendants were nervous in the
Speaker 7: courtroom that day, even though most of them had already
Speaker 7: sorted out their plea agreements ahead of time. The state
Speaker 7: is fickle, condescending, and unpredictable. One of the defendants that
Speaker 7: I talked to told me about their own case. The
Speaker 7: evidence supporting the charges against pretty much everyone was weak,
Speaker 7: but the evidence supporting the charges against this particular person
Speaker 7: were particularly weak. The state kept offering this person plea
Speaker 7: deals before anyone else. Will you be offering the same
Speaker 7: deal to my co defendants, the defendant kept asking. The
Speaker 7: state kept saying no, so the defendant kept refusing the deal.
Speaker 7: That defendant came to court fully expecting to stand trial
Speaker 7: rather than take a better deal than what their co
Speaker 7: defendants were getting. The big story of the day actually
Speaker 7: revolves around that particular point. At least one of the
Speaker 7: defendants who came prepared to stand trial last Tuesday wound
Speaker 7: up being offered much more generous plea agreements at the
Speaker 7: last minute because the state knew its case against them
Speaker 7: was flimsy. Those who accept at non cooperating plea deals
Speaker 7: were hit with suspended sentences, community service, and restitution. The
Speaker 7: details differed from case to case, but in general, people
Speaker 7: were given a year in prison hanging over their heads
Speaker 7: if they're caught breaking the law in the next year,
Speaker 7: and have to spend between fifty and one hundred hours
Speaker 7: doing manual labor for Giles County, Virginia. I've been told
Speaker 7: this can range from something benign like painting murals to
Speaker 7: something intentionally humiliating, like cleaning the toilets.
Speaker 3: At the police station.
Speaker 7: The single biggest issue of contention was restitution. The defendants
Speaker 7: are being ordered to pay for the overtime costs associated
Speaker 7: with arresting them. One defendant, who was I believe, arrested
Speaker 7: at a mom's against the pipeline's action, a woman who
Speaker 7: simply wants her children to grow up in a world
Speaker 7: with a habitable ecosystem, was in court last Tuesday to
Speaker 7: contest the restitution payments. This is, as I understand it,
Speaker 7: the only issue that was not fully resolved that day.
Speaker 7: The case the defense made was one that I found convincing,
Speaker 7: though of course I have a bias in that direction. Essentially,
Speaker 7: the defense's case was that people are not legally on
Speaker 7: the hook for the investigation of their own crime, that
Speaker 7: it would set a very dangerous precedent to have people
Speaker 7: have to pay for the cops's time to arrest them.
Speaker 7: The prosecutor's argument was, and I rudely paraphrase here, yeah,
Speaker 7: but fuck these people in particular that because there was
Speaker 7: a campaign against the MVP, their crimes ought to be
Speaker 7: treated differently, in the same standard of the rule of
Speaker 7: law should not apply to them. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but
Speaker 7: that really was the takeaway that I seem to get.
Speaker 7: The judge said he would need to consider the case
Speaker 7: law on the matter and would not rule on it
Speaker 7: that day. But you know what he would have ruled
Speaker 7: on if he was the judge of this podcast. He
Speaker 7: would have ruled that it is time for advertising.
Speaker 5: And we're back.
Speaker 7: The only case that actually went to trial, as I
Speaker 7: understand it, was for the only misdemeanor case of the day,
Speaker 7: a protester who was accused and convicted later at the
Speaker 7: end of the trial of spending a couple days living
Speaker 7: inside a length of pipe to prevent it from being
Speaker 7: buried in the earth. The full incompetence of the police
Speaker 7: was on display from the state trooper who didn't know
Speaker 7: what the word diameter meant when asked to describe the
Speaker 7: pipeline in question, to the police, who admitted that they
Speaker 7: didn't actually bother watching the entrance to the pipe, so
Speaker 7: they didn't actually see the protester when they emerged from
Speaker 7: the pipe. In court, the cop said the protester came
Speaker 7: up to them to turn themselves in and said, quote, well,
Speaker 7: you're lucky, I'm honest. A large part of the defense's
Speaker 7: case was that the defendant had been denied the right
Speaker 7: to a speedy trial, which seems true to me. Misdemeanors
Speaker 7: in particular are supposed to move through the court system quickly,
Speaker 7: not drag on for a year, because again, it seems
Speaker 7: quite like that MVP has been working from the start
Speaker 7: to drag on court cases as long as possible. All
Speaker 7: the while the trial went on, supporters outside had a
Speaker 7: table set up in the parking lot with homemade food,
Speaker 7: a staple of this movement. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 7: the connections between the front lines and their supporters built
Speaker 7: a very strong movement. Indeed, after the trial, an older
Speaker 7: local man gave a heartfelt thank you to everyone who
Speaker 7: had put their bodies on the line to protect the
Speaker 7: mountains he loves. And I went around and talked to people,
Speaker 7: feeling a bit odd to be there as a stranger
Speaker 7: to the movement and as a journalist. Blocking pipeline construction
Speaker 7: through nonviolent direct action is simple and principle, but complicated
Speaker 7: in the details. The core of it is that you
Speaker 7: leverage your own safety in order to prevent construction crews
Speaker 7: from working. Since your own safety is what you're gambling with,
Speaker 7: it's well not safe the ideas you put your own
Speaker 7: body on the line. In nineteen ninety eight, for example,
Speaker 7: Earth First activist named David Chain died when a lagger
Speaker 7: dropped a tree on him and killed him, and despite
Speaker 7: ample evidence that the lagger in question had been aware
Speaker 7: of the protesters and had been threatening them, no charges
Speaker 7: were pressed against him. In two thousand and three, an
Speaker 7: American anarchist piece worker named Rachel Corey was killed in
Speaker 7: the Gaza Strip when she stood in front of an
Speaker 7: Israeli bulldozer trying to stop the bulldozer from demolishing a
Speaker 7: Palestinian home. Even when you aren't murdered for doing it,
Speaker 7: the work itself is dangerous too. Shortly before I joined
Speaker 7: my first forest defense campaign in the Pacific Northwest, an
Speaker 7: activist named Whorhound had just fallen to her death from
Speaker 7: a tree sit and her absence was a tangible presence
Speaker 7: in every meeting and every forest defense camp for years after.
Speaker 7: So I don't feel like I'm speaking hyperbolically when I
Speaker 7: say that in that courtroom were some of the bravest
Speaker 7: people I've ever met who risked their lives to stop
Speaker 7: a clear and present threat against it. And again genuinely
Speaker 7: believe this is not hyperbolic to say clear and present
Speaker 7: threat against all life on Earth. Climate change could very
Speaker 7: easily destroy every ecosystem on the planet. This fight is
Speaker 7: bigger than Appalachia. These forest defenders at this last trial
Speaker 7: knew that they would likely face felonies where they arrested,
Speaker 7: and they knew that people have died doing this work
Speaker 7: before them. And I don't want to speak to everyone
Speaker 7: involves gender identity, but it seems likely that some of
Speaker 7: them were trans as well, and thus risking spending prison
Speaker 7: time in the wrong prisons, which is a particularly dangerous
Speaker 7: position to be in. I don't say this to try
Speaker 7: to scare people out of joining movements like this. I
Speaker 7: can name people who have died in nonviolent direct action campaigns,
Speaker 7: and occasionally people have served real jail time, But I've
Speaker 7: met thousands and thousands more who have saved wild places,
Speaker 7: who have built lifelong friendships, and who have proven to
Speaker 7: themselves that they are who they hoped they would be.
Speaker 7: I want to end this by reading two statements. One
Speaker 7: was written by one of the defendants and was posted
Speaker 7: onto the Ablachians Against Pipeline's Facebook page on March third.
Speaker 7: You can read the full statement over there if you'd like.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 7: Today we proved that co defendant solidarity works. We were
Speaker 7: able to see how different strategies against a stacked system
Speaker 7: play out. It is in the court's best interest for
Speaker 7: us to take a deal out of fear of trial,
Speaker 7: but today we showed that they are just as afraid
Speaker 7: of an uncertain outcome, and we can use that to
Speaker 7: our advantage when we work together. The people who went
Speaker 7: to trial or pushed it to the brink got objectively
Speaker 7: better outcomes than those who took deals ahead of time,
Speaker 7: and those who took deals often had to struggle with
Speaker 7: changing conditions at trial, but still felt obligated to comply.
Speaker 7: I and another defendant held out, in part out of
Speaker 7: principle for people who had not been offered deals, and
Speaker 7: in part to say fuck you, Bobby Lilly, our prosecutor,
Speaker 7: who is a literal clown. My co defendant and I
Speaker 7: went to bat for another who was not offered a
Speaker 7: deal at first. My co defendant was offered a deal,
Speaker 7: rather nice one at that, but my friend said no.
Speaker 7: The clown blinked. My friend basically went to trial. Technically
Speaker 7: they took a deal, but they basically started a trial.
Speaker 7: Prosecution made a motion to amend charges, but abruptly the
Speaker 7: clown and his cop body left.
Speaker 5: They ran.
Speaker 7: They had no evidence. Another deal, which was even better,
Speaker 7: was offered, and this time I got one too. For me,
Speaker 7: it was good and an agreement. We took our deals.
Speaker 7: The one other person was offered an okay deal, but
Speaker 7: opted to go to trial with eyes open at the
Speaker 7: courts in competence and crushed it. Little Bobby Lilly looked
Speaker 7: even more like a clown. Every deal that was offered
Speaker 7: only got better, especially on the day of the trial.
Speaker 7: You don't have to accept the first deal, or the second,
Speaker 7: or the third or the fourth. And when they try
Speaker 7: to pit us against each other, it is because they
Speaker 7: know we are stronger together. Initially we were charged with conspiracy.
Speaker 7: The real conspiracy is between prosecutors and the judges, between
Speaker 7: the cops and the corporations. It is the conspiracy between
Speaker 7: your landlord and your boss to keep you exhausted and hungry,
Speaker 7: unable to fight back. It is the dictatorship of the
Speaker 7: billionaires to keep us bound to their world where they
Speaker 7: make and break their own rules. This is bigger than
Speaker 7: a forty two inch wide, three hundred and three mile long,
Speaker 7: ticking time bomb running to Appalachia. It is the fact
Speaker 7: that our lives are bought and sold by the large
Speaker 7: land owning class who are able to ram this project
Speaker 7: through under Joe Biden, despite the harm it'll cause, because
Speaker 7: it will make them money as the world burns. Then
Speaker 7: here's another statement from the person who sat inside the pipe,
Speaker 7: and the statement is from last year.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 7: Winning looks so much bigger than just stopping this pipeline.
Speaker 7: It's a win through the community folks continue to build.
Speaker 7: It is a win because of the insane amount of
Speaker 7: skills that people have gathered and shared, no whin because
Speaker 7: whether or not this pipeline ever has gas running through it,
Speaker 7: the legacy of resistance in Appalachia still lives. Extractive industry
Speaker 7: knows that they can't fuck with the communities here without
Speaker 7: going through hell, and we better not let them forget that.
Speaker 7: Many times in my life I have felt consumed by grief,
Speaker 7: grief for all the places this pipeline has destroyed, For
Speaker 7: communities who continue to be ravaged by the state and industry,
Speaker 7: For the senseless violence committed against people and land every day,
Speaker 7: For friends and strangers forced into cages. But what keeps
Speaker 7: me moving is knowing that I feel such grief only
Speaker 7: because I have such deep hope and love for what
Speaker 7: could be and what we have the power to create.
Speaker 7: Find or facilitate radical community. Wherever you call home, Think
Speaker 7: about the things you are willing to sacrifice for people
Speaker 7: near and far. Dream of worlds that feel out of reach,
Speaker 7: because I bet they aren't as far away as it
Speaker 7: may seem as the end of the and so yeah,
Speaker 7: though the criminal trials are over, the civil legal fight
Speaker 7: rages on. MVP is attempting to wield civil courts to
Speaker 7: silence its opposition. And if you want to help support
Speaker 7: that fight, which continues, you can donate to Appalachian Legal
Speaker 7: Defense Fund, which you can find probably by just searching
Speaker 7: for it, but you can also find it by going
Speaker 7: to bit dot l y slash app Legal Defense all
Speaker 7: one word, no dashes.
Speaker 5: Anyway.
Speaker 3: That's it for the episode. I'll talk to you soon. Hello,
Speaker 3: and welcome to the podcast. It's me James. Today we
Speaker 3: have a very special episode in which everyone is a doctor.
Speaker 3: I will believe in discussion, of course, as a doctor
Speaker 3: of modern European history. But I'm joined today by venktash Ramnath,
Speaker 3: who is a practicing pullmanologist, a professor at UC San
Speaker 3: Diego Health, a medical director of several its use in
Speaker 3: royal and urban settings, and also the author of the
Speaker 3: substack be a health architect. Welcome to the Shoving Test.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 8: Great to be here.
Speaker 3: I'm also joined by doctor Carve Hooder, a gastro enterologist
Speaker 3: and the host of our favorite medical podcast, the House
Speaker 3: of Pod. Of the many you listen to, I'm sure yeah,
Speaker 3: what they might call a super user in a medical
Speaker 3: podcast space you listen to more than. Most importantly, Cave
Speaker 3: is of course our friend, our resident doctor with a
Speaker 3: useful doctorate. So what we want to talk about today
Speaker 3: is Medicare and specifically some of the cuts to medicare.
Speaker 3: More broadly, the I don't know, you have to put
Speaker 3: this challenges for people working in healthcare in the Trump administration. Right,
Speaker 3: we addressed specifically gender affirming care in a previous episode,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't start and end there, right, That might
Speaker 3: be the thing that sort of the culture wars have
Speaker 3: been focusing on recently. But I want to talk more
Speaker 3: broadly about the challenges facing healthcare. So, first of all,
Speaker 3: would one of you care to explain medicare for people
Speaker 3: who are not familiar And some listeners might not be
Speaker 3: living in the United States, or they might just not
Speaker 3: have encountered this yet in their life, So could one
Speaker 3: of you explain what this particular sort of type of
Speaker 3: health insurance is and how it's maybe more vulnerable than
Speaker 3: other types to federal government changes.
Speaker 8: I could take a stab at it.
Speaker 9: I'm not a health policy want but I am a
Speaker 9: physician that has to deal with Medicare all the time.
Speaker 9: So Medicare, in sort of general terms, is a type
Speaker 9: of health insurance that is provided by the federal government.
Speaker 9: It is almost exclusively for individuals above the age of
Speaker 9: sixty five, as it dates back to the nineteen sixties
Speaker 9: with Linda Johnson's Great Society Program, and so since that
Speaker 9: time there has been this blanket coverage for any individuals
Speaker 9: above that age, such that all their medical services or products,
Speaker 9: whatever they need for their healthcare is actually covered by
Speaker 9: the government.
Speaker 8: This is the federal government. Now.
Speaker 9: The interesting thing about Medicare is that there are different
Speaker 9: parts to it. There's Part A, which is primarily for
Speaker 9: some essential services and includes hospital care. There's Part B,
Speaker 9: which includes whatever physicians fees go into that healthcare. And
Speaker 9: then there's Part D, which relates to pharmaceutical prices, so
Speaker 9: your drug costs. It's not comprehensive in the sense that
Speaker 9: there's always something more that individuals need, but Beneicare, for
Speaker 9: all intents and purposes, is the sort of standard and.
Speaker 8: It should cover most of individual's needs.
Speaker 9: Now that said, the commercial payers, that is, the other
Speaker 9: insurance companies that are not federally government sponsored, take their
Speaker 9: lead from Medicare. So a lot of the different payment
Speaker 9: rates or coverages and services they all look to what
Speaker 9: the centers of Medicare and Medicaid services dictate as far
Speaker 9: as what is an acceptable reimbursement rate, what are the
Speaker 9: rules around what should be covered and what should not.
Speaker 9: So that's why Medicare is such an important entity for
Speaker 9: the United States.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll add to that.
Speaker 10: They set the lead of importance here too, because if
Speaker 10: we're talking about telemedicine telehealth, how important that is to
Speaker 10: Medicare patients, to everyone in the country at this point,
Speaker 10: then if they are to cut it. If that happens
Speaker 10: is I think we're probably going to discuss. If that
Speaker 10: goes away, then the other private insurance companies are going
Speaker 10: to follow. That's right, could be across the board changes
Speaker 10: led by these changes of medicare.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's talk about those changes. Then, as you
Speaker 3: mentioned right, there's this telemedicine. It's a waiver right that
Speaker 3: has allowed telemedicine to be funded through this for the
Speaker 3: last five years. I suppose it's going to expire by
Speaker 3: the end of this month, which is March twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: If if you're listening later, explain like why telemedicine has
Speaker 3: been such a positive step like in healthcare since if
Speaker 3: you could since twenty twenty and then what we're facing
Speaker 3: if it's no longer funded federally.
Speaker 10: May I'll start this one, but Venkesh definitely want you
Speaker 10: to weigh in on it as well. Does give a little
Speaker 10: background over the past five years that's grown quite a
Speaker 10: bit and it's gone from being kind of this emergency
Speaker 10: stop gap to a real cornerstone of what we consider
Speaker 10: modern healthcare and now it's exceedingly common, like over seventy
Speaker 10: five percent of hospitals in the US connect at a
Speaker 10: distance via video conference or some technology to patients, and
Speaker 10: it's been popular on both sides. It's been popular on
Speaker 10: both sides of the aisle. When it first was done,
Speaker 10: as you mentioned, during COVID, when they said, okay, we're
Speaker 10: gonna peel back some of the restrictions on Medicare coverage
Speaker 10: for these telehealth things, it was considered like a victory,
Speaker 10: like one of the few good things that come out
Speaker 10: of COVID. Both sides liked it. It was popular amongst patients,
Speaker 10: it was popular amongst medical providers. It was good for
Speaker 10: Republicans and Democrats alike. And as you mentioned, it's been
Speaker 10: kept going through being put in some bill or another
Speaker 10: since it was initially put in I think as they
Speaker 10: called in twenty twenty, and it's been put in one
Speaker 10: bill or another to go with a funding. But then
Speaker 10: came this last December when Congress was going through their spending.
Speaker 10: It was only given this three months reprieve, which is
Speaker 10: going to be up as you mentioned, at the end
Speaker 10: of this month. And if it goes away, there's a
Speaker 10: lot of factors will go into a lot of them,
Speaker 10: but there's a lot of people, older patients, you know,
Speaker 10: compromise patients who don't want to come into office, people
Speaker 10: with disabilities, people can't get around that well, people in
Speaker 10: rural areas, which is you know, really how it started.
Speaker 10: People who are going to be hurt all across this country.
Speaker 10: And at this point, the majority of people have had
Speaker 10: at least one experience or more in a year with telemedicine.
Speaker 10: It's become a part of a lot of people's lives.
Speaker 10: And if it goes away, you know, there's still going
Speaker 10: to be health care as it is. I mean, it
Speaker 10: doesn't mean healthcare is going away, but it is going
Speaker 10: to put a tremendous burden on patients and hospitals for
Speaker 10: that matter, across the country.
Speaker 8: Yeah, let me add to that.
Speaker 9: So, you know, telemedicine has been around for a very
Speaker 9: long time, at least technically speaking, right, I mean, you
Speaker 9: can go back to the nineteen seventies. Even when you
Speaker 9: talk about the intensive caeriod, which is where the sickest
Speaker 9: people in the hospital are, there are studies that come
Speaker 9: out of the nineteen seventies. However, Ever, since people have
Speaker 9: had iPhones and been on airbnb and everything else. Since
Speaker 9: two thousand and seven, That inflection point actually had a
Speaker 9: wave of opportunity that washed right into medicine, and as
Speaker 9: Cave is saying, you know, we have such a fragmented
Speaker 9: healthcare system that has you know, folks living in rural areas,
Speaker 9: suburban areas, and urban areas, all of whom are at
Speaker 9: the mercy of what specialists may be. They're contracted at
Speaker 9: any given time for any given specialty. Now telemedicine, as
Speaker 9: it's gotten more and more popular, has kind of leveled
Speaker 9: the playing field. I mean, you can be in a
Speaker 9: rural place like where I'm sitting right now on the
Speaker 9: US Mexico border, or you can be in New York City,
Speaker 9: you know, one of the densest populations, but you may
Speaker 9: might not have access to specialty expertise without telemedicine. With telemedicine,
Speaker 9: you can now have access and I've seen patients love it.
Speaker 9: You can deal with the sickest of the sick, like
Speaker 9: I said, intensive care units, but you can also have
Speaker 9: outpatient experiences. And we've seen a number of different you know,
Speaker 9: commercial opportunities that have leveraged that. But the point is
Speaker 9: that as we're hearing on this, you know, it's become
Speaker 9: sort of a standard operating procedure for how we deliver healthcare.
Speaker 9: And if you just pull the rug out from that,
Speaker 9: there can be some you know, unintended consequences to that
Speaker 9: that are not insignificant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like it makes a lot of sense to
Speaker 3: a lot of people, right, Like I think about my
Speaker 3: own experience with it. I was traveling recently and got
Speaker 3: COVID like a couple of months ago, and there was
Speaker 3: no need for me to go to a clinic and
Speaker 3: be around other people, right, I just needed to contact
Speaker 3: my doctor and get some prescriptions and check in, And like,
Speaker 3: it was so much better that I could do it
Speaker 3: in my pajamas from the bed rather than like having
Speaker 3: to get out. And I'm lucky I have access to
Speaker 3: a car I can drive to to surgery is not
Speaker 3: that far away, have a job that accommodates my schedule.
Speaker 3: But there are million reasons way it might be very
Speaker 3: beneficial to people. So let's talk about you. You mentioned
Speaker 3: this before, but we have commercial insurers, and like people
Speaker 3: might think that this is limited to older folks, or
Speaker 3: it doesn't affect them, or it's something that only impacts
Speaker 3: people who have Medicare. But as you said, Medicare kind
Speaker 3: of sets the standard for what is covered and what
Speaker 3: isn't covered, right, So, can you explain how this might
Speaker 3: end up resulting in it in just a massive like
Speaker 3: a cliff. I've seen it described as a telehealth cliff.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so, I mean basically, the sort of this convoluted
Speaker 9: way that we pay for services is it looks to
Speaker 9: one standard, even though some may argue how did that
Speaker 9: standard come about?
Speaker 8: But regardless of.
Speaker 9: That, Medicare is the central authority that basically tells everyone
Speaker 9: this is what we should be doing, and this is
Speaker 9: how much we should be paying for it. Now, the
Speaker 9: commercial insurers can decide to exceed that if they wish.
Speaker 9: If they say, have an employer who's employees they want
Speaker 9: to have a special contract with, that's that's fine, that's
Speaker 9: not restricted. But the bottom of what is considered a
Speaker 9: reimbursable amount is really set by Medicare, and so they
Speaker 9: move the bottom. And so if you drop the bottom,
Speaker 9: you can pretty much well assured in this. You know,
Speaker 9: in a capitalist you know sort of mentality that the
Speaker 9: costs should go down, right, I mean, why should you
Speaker 9: pay more for something that you don't need to write?
Speaker 8: And we see that we see that every year.
Speaker 9: Okay, every year there's new technology, but the slightly older technology,
Speaker 9: which is again covered by Medicare, they move those reimbursements down.
Speaker 9: So whether it's a sleep study, you know, for someone
Speaker 9: with obstructive sleep apn are difficulty sleeping at night, or
Speaker 9: it's some ophthalmology technology, or it's some ultra sound machine,
Speaker 9: it doesn't really matter what it is. Medicare is always
Speaker 9: trying to minimal cost, which is understandable.
Speaker 8: They want to make it cost.
Speaker 9: Effective, but they are setting the lead so everyone will
Speaker 9: follow what they do. That's kind of the way that
Speaker 9: our system is sort of set up.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, I might just add to that that
Speaker 10: aside from all the things we mentioned about it, how
Speaker 10: you know, it helps people in rural areas, people with
Speaker 10: difficulty getting places are just really busy schedules. It also,
Speaker 10: you know, helps free hospital beds, helps prevent emergency rooms
Speaker 10: from being overwhelmed. It leads to faster testing, it leads
Speaker 10: to a higher number of people that we can see,
Speaker 10: and in terms of its quality, we know it works
Speaker 10: well and about ninety percent of cases of telemedicine to
Speaker 10: get the same outcomes if the patient was there in clinic,
Speaker 10: and that ten percent that's not it's not clear that
Speaker 10: they're getting inferior care in most of those cases. So
Speaker 10: it's an effective treatment, and you could make an argument
Speaker 10: that it is cost effective in some ways too. It's
Speaker 10: particularly clearly for like things of dermatology, pediatrics. These are
Speaker 10: things where it's clearly cost effective to have it. But
Speaker 10: even beyond that, it's not even necessarily I think a
Speaker 10: strong argument that we'll be losing money from it, and
Speaker 10: that cutting it would help us in the long run.
Speaker 10: I feel like if we're being smart about how to
Speaker 10: manage American healthcare system and how to keep it afloat,
Speaker 10: telemedicine is going to be an important part of that
Speaker 10: going forward.
Speaker 9: I want to I do want to add something here,
Speaker 9: and I do want to be careful about the term,
Speaker 9: because telemedicine and telehealth are not only sort of a
Speaker 9: catch all, but they're sort of used interchangeably, right, and
Speaker 9: just like anything, you have to be specific about the term.
Speaker 9: So I think what we're talking about this on this
Speaker 9: podcast is tell amedicine in terms of a two way
Speaker 9: audio visual interface where you can have a direct face
Speaker 9: to face consultation or interaction with a practicing practitioner. Usually
Speaker 9: that's going to be a position, but it may be
Speaker 9: a nurse practitioner or other physician extender we call them.
Speaker 9: But just to be clear, you know, telemedicine also extends
Speaker 9: to other types of devices like wearables. Those things that
Speaker 9: they are either you know, trackers that you can wear
Speaker 9: as your fitbit, or a sleep device you know that
Speaker 9: you can wear around. Those kinds of things are kind
Speaker 9: of put into the telemedicine bucket and it's not clear
Speaker 9: to me at least how that is going to change.
Speaker 9: I think April first is when they face to face
Speaker 9: coverage from a professional fee standpoint that is slated to
Speaker 9: end because they did liberalize it during the COVID pandemic
Speaker 9: and it's been extended I think another year around that,
Speaker 9: and that will definitely change the dynamic here, but it's
Speaker 9: not clear how much of it extends to other types
Speaker 9: of remote physiologic monitoring services and products.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, so something like a glucose monitor or like
Speaker 3: yeah some yeah, which could be catastrophic for people, right
Speaker 3: if they don't get those those funded. Right, We're going
Speaker 3: to take a little break for advertisements here. Maybe you'll
Speaker 3: get an advertisement for a Bluecoast Monitor or even Insolent.
Speaker 5: Could only hope.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'm glad they're taking some of that money
Speaker 3: that they've made me bleed out of my wallet over
Speaker 3: the years and returning it to me in the form
Speaker 3: of podcast advertisements. All right, we're back. Let's talk more
Speaker 3: broadly about I guess the changes in the legislative environment
Speaker 3: for healthcare might be a good way to put it.
Speaker 3: I think if you were an excellent op ed recently
Speaker 3: where you discussed you were one of the many recipients
Speaker 3: of the Tomby five Useful things you did at work
Speaker 3: this week email, I thought you wrote like a really
Speaker 3: good piece about about the varied and critical work that
Speaker 3: you do. Can you talk about, like, what is the
Speaker 3: feeling among healthcare professionals, physicians who have you sort of
Speaker 3: like to speak speak as going into four years of
Speaker 3: possibly vastly reduced government spending and a sort of bizarre
Speaker 3: and haphazard cutting of the federal biocracy that we're seeing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a tough time, certainly, and coming out of
Speaker 9: the pandemic, this is not what really anybody expected. But
Speaker 9: you know, the stresses have been mounting for quite a while, right,
Speaker 9: Healthcare professionals are seeing and feeling more stress at work,
Speaker 9: whether it's you know, the demands of the job meaning
Speaker 9: that there are fewer resources to spend on a heightened
Speaker 9: number of patients with you know, increasingly complex diseases, or
Speaker 9: even just the questions that we are getting from patients.
Speaker 9: A lot of patients now are asking me really financial questions.
Speaker 9: I mean literally, the other day, I had a woman
Speaker 9: who was unfortunately having septic shock and was faced with
Speaker 9: having to amputate her leg, and I was speaking with
Speaker 9: her husband because she was becoming more and more delirious,
Speaker 9: and he was just asking me about, well, I'm going
Speaker 9: to have to sell my house in order to fund
Speaker 9: what might come down the pike as far as being
Speaker 9: at home with services, and I was trying to I
Speaker 9: was trying to kind of get an understanding of how
Speaker 9: he viewed his wife actually going through the thing that
Speaker 9: we're watching in the moment. But it's a preoccupation that
Speaker 9: has taken up a lot of space in the room,
Speaker 9: and it's now coming on to physicians to sort of
Speaker 9: navigate at least some questions and answer those questions around it.
Speaker 9: So that's a long way of saying that, you know,
Speaker 9: physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals are feeling more
Speaker 9: and more stress in a system that's just buckling, right,
Speaker 9: and the last thing anybody needs is to be having
Speaker 9: to do more without really a clear understanding of the
Speaker 9: purpose around it, right, And we are all for a
Speaker 9: cost effectiveness.
Speaker 8: We want that to work.
Speaker 9: We also want to provide care irrespective of someone's religious, political,
Speaker 9: or other beliefs. And yet, you know, we have to
Speaker 9: work within a system that we kind of are not
Speaker 9: really understanding how they're approaching this issue. Are they are
Speaker 9: they with us or against us or somewhere in between.
Speaker 9: It's it's sort of a it's a moving target, and
Speaker 9: so I think that's what's that's what's kind of sandwiched
Speaker 9: a lot of healthcare professionals, and we don't really know
Speaker 9: where to turn for.
Speaker 8: Some of the answers that we ourselves are looking for.
Speaker 10: I would add also, you know, we're seeing this active
Speaker 10: dismantling of the US healthcare infrastructure, and our friends in
Speaker 10: the academic world in particular, it's a very stressful time
Speaker 10: for them. Who knows if their studies are going to
Speaker 10: go through, who knows if they're going to get their
Speaker 10: funding who knows what's going to stay with going to
Speaker 10: go in the next couple of years. There's a lot
Speaker 10: of concern over that, obviously, But even in the medical
Speaker 10: world outside of the academic centers, I know a lot
Speaker 10: of doctors right now are concerned and they're concerned about
Speaker 10: what's going to happen to the state of our scientific
Speaker 10: community that helps us with new advancements in medical technology
Speaker 10: in the coming years. And it seems like, as Ventechia
Speaker 10: was alluding to, we're dismantling all our ability to follow
Speaker 10: to study to really closely track infectious disease in a
Speaker 10: time that is exceedingly dangerous across the world, with rising disease,
Speaker 10: tuberculosis in this country, measles in this country, in Uganda,
Speaker 10: there's ebola again. There's threats all over the world. And
Speaker 10: this is one of the worst times I could think
Speaker 10: of to be in this moment of austerity, and particularly
Speaker 10: because so much of it seems unclear to us why
Speaker 10: why these things are being done, you know, is it
Speaker 10: all because of this ridiculous gender ideology. Do they actually
Speaker 10: think they're saving money with some of these things. It's
Speaker 10: a very unclear time. And of course there are a
Speaker 10: lot of people in the medical world, doctors included, that
Speaker 10: are conservative or Republican voters. Getting into conversations with them
Speaker 10: about this is sort of a tough thing to do because,
Speaker 10: like Fintesha mentioned, they, like a lot of us, want
Speaker 10: to make sure we're doing this in a cost effective manner,
Speaker 10: something we talk about and we have been talking about
Speaker 10: in medicine for a long time, particularly academic medicine, interestingly enough,
Speaker 10: which is really on.
Speaker 3: The cutting board.
Speaker 10: It's academic medicine that usually talks about, you know, trying
Speaker 10: to be cost effective. What tests are we going to order,
Speaker 10: what labs do we need to get, How we doing
Speaker 10: this in the most cost effective way. These are important
Speaker 10: things that are discussed and across the political spectrum in medicine.
Speaker 10: I think there is some concern even amongst some of
Speaker 10: the more right leaning doctors. But again it's hard because
Speaker 10: they've gone this far down the road, it's hard to know,
Speaker 10: you know, when they're going to pull back. What's the
Speaker 10: line in the stand for them about what is maybe
Speaker 10: too far for this administration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and certainly like an area where we're seeing there
Speaker 3: right now is in like public health, right, we don't
Speaker 3: really know, like I'm going to Texas next week, where
Speaker 3: there's currently a measles outbreak. The things that we didn't
Speaker 3: think that we might be seeing in this country again,
Speaker 3: we're seeing again. And like, as you say, it's coming
Speaker 3: at a time when like not just funding is unstable,
Speaker 3: but also like the I guess, like the basics of
Speaker 3: science have been somewhat politicized right to a degree, and
Speaker 3: like people, I don't know if that's something you see
Speaker 3: in your practice, but like certainly, like I was talking
Speaker 3: to a doctor friend who said half their clients are
Speaker 3: now like declining vaccinations as I was there to get,
Speaker 3: you know, every disease that I could get. I have
Speaker 3: a lot of travel vaccinations, so I'm always getting new
Speaker 3: and exciting vaccinations. But I'm making up for some of
Speaker 3: the gap, I guess. But it's it's a really challenging
Speaker 3: time right from that perspective as well, like the culture
Speaker 3: around it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 10: I mean even here in the San Francisco Bay area,
Speaker 10: you know, I've seen more of vaccine hesitation than I
Speaker 10: remember ever seen before in the past.
Speaker 9: It's sort of a vexing question because I think some
Speaker 9: of this is let's be clear, some of this is
Speaker 9: on our messaging, you know, as healthcare professionals. I mean,
Speaker 9: there are more and more articles. In fact, the Wall
Speaker 9: Street Journal piece a couple of weeks ago that was
Speaker 9: saying how patients you know, are increasingly not trusting their
Speaker 9: doctors and there are data to say that we don't
Speaker 9: communicate very well. Right, So there there is that, and
Speaker 9: that's on us. And you know, another op ed piece
Speaker 9: in the Boston Globe by Ashi's Jaw, you know, did
Speaker 9: a mea culpa around some of the things that public
Speaker 9: health we did wrong.
Speaker 8: We got it, we got it.
Speaker 9: Wrong in COVID where we didn't you know, deal with
Speaker 9: some of the doubts and lack of evidentiary base for
Speaker 9: masking and some of these other things that basically hurt
Speaker 9: us in the end. So there's definitely that. However, you know,
Speaker 9: restoring the trust in healthcare professionals is sort of like
Speaker 9: a basic step to anyone getting their healthcare. I mean,
Speaker 9: I think people still go to their doctors. Most people
Speaker 9: still trust their doctor to some degree, and I think
Speaker 9: that that's at least a bright spot in where we are,
Speaker 9: because when we've lost that, I think we're really in trouble.
Speaker 9: I mean that's slipping. But I think that there is
Speaker 9: a way to restore that trust. But it starts so
Speaker 9: that it just starts with a conversation. You know, if
Speaker 9: someone has a vaccine hesitancy or they don't understand what's
Speaker 9: going on, that's the opportunity to open the doors to
Speaker 9: a dialogue. And I think maybe that's, you know, maybe
Speaker 9: that's the starting point for any of this. We all
Speaker 9: want cost effectiveness, we all want you know, transparency. We
Speaker 9: also want to have choices that make sense to us.
Speaker 9: But let's not make it an adversarial confrontation. And I
Speaker 9: think that that goes for both sides. I would add,
Speaker 9: though I agree with you on pretty much all of that.
Speaker 9: I agree that we need to have those conversations, you know,
Speaker 9: if they're difficult. We need to be able to look
Speaker 9: back objectively about things that worked and didn't work. But
Speaker 9: a lot of these sort of mia culpas that have
Speaker 9: come out about like you know, this is where we
Speaker 9: went wrong and why we lost trust, if I'm being honest,
Speaker 9: including that one from Ashi's Yad, has a lot of
Speaker 9: in my opinion, pick me energy, a lot of people
Speaker 9: who are trying to appeal to the incoming administration and
Speaker 9: be like, hey, look, I'm cool too. I'm not always
Speaker 9: about vaccines, and to me, that's just as bad too.
Speaker 9: And I do think we need to have an honest conversation,
Speaker 9: and I do think we need to be clear about
Speaker 9: how we do science.
Speaker 10: Something we need to be able to explain. And you're
Speaker 10: absolutely right, which we didn't do very well is Look,
Speaker 10: we are working with information we have at hand. We're
Speaker 10: doing everything we can may change when it changes, our
Speaker 10: recommendations are going to.
Speaker 4: Change too, And that is tough.
Speaker 10: That is a tough message to get across because people
Speaker 10: don't like nuance like that. People don't like the uncertainty
Speaker 10: of that. People want to know yes or no absolutely,
Speaker 10: and sometimes it's hard. It's hard to find good communicators
Speaker 10: and science to do that. But that you're exactly right
Speaker 10: is incumbent upon us as doctors who have a sub
Speaker 10: stack like yours, of a podcast like mine, who are
Speaker 10: academics who have a reach to students and beyond to
Speaker 10: communicate these things.
Speaker 4: And even though it would be.
Speaker 10: Awesome for the next four years my podcast was just
Speaker 10: about farts and poop, I know I have to do
Speaker 10: a lot of this stuff because I know how important.
Speaker 10: This is now more than ever, So I totally agree
Speaker 10: it's going to start with conversations.
Speaker 3: I think that's a big difference between this is the
Speaker 3: information we have available when were doing our best with it.
Speaker 3: When we get new information, we'll do something different if
Speaker 3: that's what that information points to. And these people are
Speaker 3: acting out of malice to deprive you of your rights
Speaker 3: or you know, which is sometimes what's been suggested by
Speaker 3: some people, and like, I think a good way to
Speaker 3: defeat that, as you say, it's communicating around it. It
Speaker 3: is very sad that, Like when I was doing the
Speaker 3: research for my PhD dissertation, I wrote about First I
Speaker 3: wrote about violence and the Anarchist Builders Union for my masters,
Speaker 3: and then I wrote about public health and popular sport
Speaker 3: in the nineteen thirties in Barcelona, And a lot of
Speaker 3: what you saw anarchists doing in Barcelona in the nineteen
Speaker 3: thirties was talking to people about tuberculosis, educating people about
Speaker 3: tuberculosis and explaining what tuberculosis was and where it came from,
Speaker 3: and like that was in nineteen thirty one, and how.
Speaker 8: Far we've come, baby, wow, wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great. There were some other things from the
Speaker 3: nineteen thirties, which have also made an unwelcome return. Tuberculosis
Speaker 3: is not the only one. There's also the Nazi salute
Speaker 3: in large public gather to the United States, which yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know, and I guess i'd answer for them
Speaker 3: both in the nineteen thirties, and they're the same answers
Speaker 3: that apply now. I think people like people will be
Speaker 3: distressed by this, right, like a lot of people of
Speaker 3: my age and younger. I guess it's folks a bit
Speaker 3: younger than me for the larger part, Like the pandemic
Speaker 3: was a life defining event for a lot of younger folks, right,
Speaker 3: and it was a scary thing. It still is a
Speaker 3: scary thing, Like getting COVID still really sucks. And I
Speaker 3: know people who have long COVID and the thought of
Speaker 3: that is petrifying to me. People will be genuinely anxious
Speaker 3: now right at this potential dismantling of the public health apparatus,
Speaker 3: that rise in vaccine hesitancy, less funding for research, such
Speaker 3: that if we enter another pandemic with some novel infectious disease,
Speaker 3: we won't be able to respond as fast. Right. The
Speaker 3: response to COVID, for the criticisms of it like the
Speaker 3: speed with which we had vaccines was amazing. Some of
Speaker 3: that came from like Vancousca's college that UCSD actually all right,
Speaker 3: like sult I guess which is next door with free parking?
Speaker 8: Which is nice?
Speaker 3: So like, what would you say to people, because this
Speaker 3: is a thing I've seen more and more among folks
Speaker 3: who you know, who are friends of mine, right, is
Speaker 3: like real worry about infectious disease, real concern about new
Speaker 3: variants of COVID or about you know, the bird flu
Speaker 3: is one, right with these other infectious diseases. I saw
Speaker 3: fifty people have died of it as yet unexplained disease
Speaker 3: in Congo recently. What would you say to those people?
Speaker 3: Because they are concerns are somewhat legitimate, Right, Like, if
Speaker 3: we go into another pandemic, we're not going to be
Speaker 3: anywhere near as effective as we were in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: because of all these combination of reasons we've discussed.
Speaker 9: That's a hard question to answer. I would say, let me,
Speaker 9: you know, I think that the COVID pandemic, Yes, there
Speaker 9: are a lot of things that went well. The vaccine
Speaker 9: development was phenomenal, I mean a revolutionary. I mean, who
Speaker 9: would have expected that to happen. However, it also just
Speaker 9: revealed how shattered our public health system really is in
Speaker 9: terms of messaging, even detection, spreading information. Even the vaccine
Speaker 9: distribution was completely chaotic, Right, So so I don't want
Speaker 9: to say that, you know, the public health response during
Speaker 9: COVID was some sort of paragon to be emulated or replicated, right.
Speaker 9: So that said, though, absolutely, I mean, you know, how
Speaker 9: are we going to handle a new era of this
Speaker 9: what if you know, scenario where we don't know what
Speaker 9: virus is coming next. I mean, I'm seeing these days,
Speaker 9: I'm even seeing viruses that never caused the kind of
Speaker 9: respiratory failure in the past, they're doing it now, whether
Speaker 9: it's RSV, the respiratory syensitial virus, or even non COVID coronavirus,
Speaker 9: which should just give you a cold the sniffles, and
Speaker 9: yet it's causing devastating, you know, pneumonias. So we're in
Speaker 9: a new era and you know, antibiotic resistance is not
Speaker 9: getting any less problematic. So what do we do in
Speaker 9: this era? Well, I think awareness is the first thing. Okay,
Speaker 9: awareness around Yes, I mean, these diseases are transmitted from
Speaker 9: person to person you know, we all know somebody who
Speaker 9: doesn't want to take a vaccine. I mean, I don't
Speaker 9: think there's that's a surprise to say we know of
Speaker 9: somebody or directly or maybe one degree of separation, right,
Speaker 9: And I think you need to have those community conversations.
Speaker 9: You need to have one on one conversations. Yes, it's
Speaker 9: going to be uncomfortable, but we got to talk about
Speaker 9: it and talk to your healthcare provider about it. I mean, yes,
Speaker 9: you can look up stuff on TikTok. Yes, you can
Speaker 9: look up stuff on Google or you name your online resource.
Speaker 9: But you want to have a person that can actually
Speaker 9: understand from years of living and living and breathing this stuff,
Speaker 9: and also who listens to you as a human being
Speaker 9: in the same community or somewhere nearabouts right to put
Speaker 9: together what the science says in some sort of meaningful
Speaker 9: way to you, uh, and not some anonymous you know
Speaker 9: resource that may or may not have all the you know,
Speaker 9: all the data their fingertips, you know. So so I
Speaker 9: guess it still goes back to how does anyone find
Speaker 9: reliable information? Where do you go when you've got questions?
Speaker 9: Most people want a human being who's lived and breathed
Speaker 9: this with experience to help them navigate. I I certainly
Speaker 9: see that not just as a doctor, but as a friend,
Speaker 9: as a family member. I mean constantly, you know, they're
Speaker 9: asking me these things, and I would suggest that you
Speaker 9: know your audience may have connections both personally but also
Speaker 9: professionally to those.
Speaker 8: Folks that can help them navigate.
Speaker 10: You know, and to answer your question from my perspective,
Speaker 10: is a challenge. I I think people should be concerned.
Speaker 10: In fact, I just did two parter with one of
Speaker 10: the world's best virologists talking about the possible bird flu
Speaker 10: pandemic that could arise and all the threats that are
Speaker 10: out there, and so I do think there are some
Speaker 10: really significant, serious risks to be worried about. However, I'm
Speaker 10: never gonna say there's nothing that can be done about it.
Speaker 10: There's plenty that can still be done about it. I
Speaker 10: still maintain hope in the medical community for what we're
Speaker 10: able to do and what we're able to accomplish, And
Speaker 10: to echo what I think both of you guys have
Speaker 10: said or would at least agree with, there's a lot
Speaker 10: of changes that we can make locally amongst our small
Speaker 10: sphere of influence and then growing out from there in
Speaker 10: terms of getting vaccinated, in terms of wearing masks when needed,
Speaker 10: or at least looking at the data with an open
Speaker 10: mind and sharing good resources. Because one thing that the
Speaker 10: younger population is good about, and what some of the
Speaker 10: people you're mentioning, James, is they're good at detecting online
Speaker 10: and that's a skill that needs to be honed for
Speaker 10: medical literacy as well, and I'm hopeful that that's going
Speaker 10: to continue to improve. Maybe stupid optimism, but I do
Speaker 10: believe the younger generation is going to continue to be
Speaker 10: better at that than the older generation, and I think
Speaker 10: that will help battle a lot of the misinformation that's
Speaker 10: out there. But there are things that they can do
Speaker 10: in fact, for getting back to the telehealthing. For example,
Speaker 10: talking about telemedicine slash telehealth as vnteche sort of broke
Speaker 10: down in terms of it being cut at the end
Speaker 10: of the month. There are people that are really pushing
Speaker 10: against that, including Rocana, who's here a legislator here in
Speaker 10: California who's proposed a new bill. I haven't been able
Speaker 10: to see any of the details of it, but there
Speaker 10: are a lot, including Amazon. By the way, Amazon is
Speaker 10: one of like three hundred and fifty companies that have
Speaker 10: written a letter to the to Congress to help push
Speaker 10: for this funding. So if you can call a congres
Speaker 10: if you can do that, if you can keep bothering
Speaker 10: them telling them how important it is, I think those
Speaker 10: are things that can help. So I think that's a
Speaker 10: good place to start.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really get piece of advice.
Speaker 9: If I could just follow up with that. I think
Speaker 9: part of what will help with the support for some
Speaker 9: of these programs is to take you know, take us
Speaker 9: take a few minutes to think about what the other
Speaker 9: side is worried about, right. I mean, we all know
Speaker 9: about the excesses of certain online bad actors. Who are
Speaker 9: they use telemedicine to promote you know, ADHD medications or
Speaker 9: other types of psychotropic medications, which was not it was
Speaker 9: not supported, and it actually caused harm. Right, So so
Speaker 9: there are things out there that are excesses and somewhat harmful.
Speaker 9: And if we could as a community sort of help
Speaker 9: frame the approach to dealing with some of those things
Speaker 9: and preventing some of those problems, then I think some
Speaker 9: of the support will kind of sort of shortself. I
Speaker 9: think the worry is if you open up the floodgates
Speaker 9: too wide, you know, human nature being what it is,
Speaker 9: it's going to encourage bad behavior. Not that anybody wants that,
Speaker 9: but there is something to be said about some scrutiny. Right,
Speaker 9: So if we're the ones, and I completely support the
Speaker 9: use of tell medicine, but I also want to be
Speaker 9: careful about how to promote its thoughtful and safe use
Speaker 9: and wed that in the proposal and not just leave
Speaker 9: it for others to figure out.
Speaker 8: That I think would potentially.
Speaker 9: Change the conversation around while you just want this and
Speaker 9: we're not going to give it to you, like the
Speaker 9: standoff will will subside when you try to work it,
Speaker 9: work a partnership out as opposed to a give it
Speaker 9: to me or else kind of scenario.
Speaker 10: I don't disagree with that, but I also think you're
Speaker 10: giving those more credit than I would, which is to
Speaker 10: say that they actually, really, they really would focus and
Speaker 10: listen to I think what they've just done is literally,
Speaker 10: you know, take a chainsaw and cut away at major
Speaker 10: federal funding and then kind of seeing what was really
Speaker 10: bad about that and what wasn't and being like, oh, Okay,
Speaker 10: maybe we do need people in charge of nuclear security.
Speaker 10: Oh maybe this is popular, We'll put it back. You know,
Speaker 10: I kind of think that they're not taking as much
Speaker 10: attention or care. But I also do agree that the
Speaker 10: point is is valid. I mean, sure, is there fraud
Speaker 10: in some telemedicine? Yeah, I'm sure, probably small, very small percentage.
Speaker 10: But if we can specify its use, if we can
Speaker 10: be better about that, I agree, I'm all for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially right now. I was just thinking, as you're
Speaker 3: talking about, like how important is people that accessing reproductive
Speaker 3: healthcare and being able to access reproductive healthcare wherever they are,
Speaker 3: and like how much more difficult that would be, right
Speaker 3: if people didn't have ten of medicine appointments. So I
Speaker 3: think we've spoken about before on the show. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure there are some school cases. I'm sure there
Speaker 3: are a bunch of CIS gender guys getting gender affirming
Speaker 3: hormonal care through telemedicine who probably could go without and
Speaker 3: be Okay, guys, I'd like to wrap up there, but
Speaker 3: I want to give you a chance both to You
Speaker 3: talked a lot about like science communication, So where can
Speaker 3: people find you online? Where can they see you communicating
Speaker 3: your medical knowledge?
Speaker 9: Okay, Well, so I thanks James, I have a substack.
Speaker 9: It's called Be a Health Architect. You can book me
Speaker 9: up at Be a Health Architect, and you know, I
Speaker 9: have a conversation there around an issue that certainly affects
Speaker 9: me and those around me, which is physician burnout, but
Speaker 9: in the larger sphere of healthcare professionals, it really touches
Speaker 9: everybody in healthcare. So that's where I'm posting actively. I'm
Speaker 9: also sharing that, you know, through various other avenues such
Speaker 9: as X and Blue Sky and other places, so you
Speaker 9: can you can find me there.
Speaker 8: Look forward to seeing you there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I would also recommend Vintesha's substack if you're in the
Speaker 10: medical field in particular, I think you'll appreciate it. A
Speaker 10: focus on burnout is as important as it's ever been,
Speaker 10: if not much much more. I mean, we were talking
Speaker 10: about burnout and moral injury in doctors before COVID, and
Speaker 10: now you know, down a couple of years down the road,
Speaker 10: it's only worse. So I think it's really important and
Speaker 10: I do recommend it, or you know, check out his
Speaker 10: latest article in the Los Angeles Times. As you mentioned before.
Speaker 10: As for me, find me on Blue Sky at Cave MD.
Speaker 10: But more importantly, just listen to the podcast The House
Speaker 10: of Pod. If you are a fan of this show,
Speaker 10: I think you're going to like The House of Pod
Speaker 10: if you haven't already given it a try.
Speaker 5: It's a lot of the same people that you hear.
Speaker 10: On this show. On the House of Pod. James included
Speaker 10: he's going to be coming back to talk about the
Speaker 10: measles and with an author of a new book down
Speaker 10: there about the measles outbreak. And you know, we take
Speaker 10: a look at grifters, medical grifters, We take a look
Speaker 10: at some people that would be considered medical contrarians. We
Speaker 10: take a look at some of the quackery in medicine
Speaker 10: as well. So I think you'll appreciate this show. If
Speaker 10: you like the whole behind the Bastards verse, I think
Speaker 10: you'll get into the House of Podso, so check us
Speaker 10: out where you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great, Thank you so much for joining us. Guys,
Speaker 3: really appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Thanks, thank you.
Speaker 5: Welcome to and it could happen here Special Report. I'm
Speaker 5: Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout and Sophie right
Speaker 5: when you're in so exactly, we are here to discuss
Speaker 5: Trump's first Joint Session speech of his second term. This
Speaker 5: is basically the equivalent of a state of the Union,
Speaker 5: except it's too early to really give a good state
Speaker 5: of the Union, even though this month has felt kind
Speaker 5: of like a year. So we are doing a special
Speaker 5: report here in addition to our regular executive Disorder episode,
Speaker 5: because there is just so much to talk about that
Speaker 5: we cannot fit it all in our regular ed pause
Speaker 5: pause for effect. Okay, guess it was us speaking of
Speaker 5: This was the longest Wow Session speech in American history,
Speaker 5: and man, it felt like it lasted forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say, and boy, howdy did it
Speaker 1: feel never ending?
Speaker 5: It went on so long.
Speaker 3: Not a great feat of ar tree. Really.
Speaker 5: I was supposed to watch some yawie with a friend
Speaker 5: last night and they came over and I was like, haha,
Speaker 5: I gotcha. Actually I have to watch this this speech first.
Speaker 5: Don't worry. Usually it's only like an hour or so. Two.
Speaker 1: I did the exact same Two hours later, I did
Speaker 1: the exact same scam to my friend Sarah. She was like,
Speaker 1: you know, I seriously love you, right because this is horrible, horrible.
Speaker 5: Two hours later, it finally ends and they're like, Okay,
Speaker 5: we can finally watch yawee, right, I'm like, no, no, no,
Speaker 5: I have to watch the Democratic response speech. Don't worry.
Speaker 5: It should be shorter, and thankfully it was. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 5: let's let's just start by talking about like the beginning
Speaker 5: of this speech, or rather with the general overview of
Speaker 5: this speech was. This was not a leaning across the
Speaker 5: aisle speech, right, This wasn't trying to unite the country. No,
Speaker 5: it was not, but you know, just cater to core
Speaker 5: like mega supporters and new issues at the center of
Speaker 5: the modern right wing media machine. The version of the
Speaker 5: speech I watched on ABC frequently cut to Matt Walsh
Speaker 5: and Ben Shapiro sitting together overlooking Congress as they were
Speaker 5: special guests of the President and the First Lady.
Speaker 1: Yes, magic, they did they did this. They did this
Speaker 1: on CNN. I switched back and forth between a couple
Speaker 1: of channels. I noted this to our team. But when
Speaker 1: I first looked up, like what time the speech was starting,
Speaker 1: I turned on my TV and went to see it
Speaker 1: in and I happened upon the them talking about if
Speaker 1: Dems should not applaud or if they should heckle, and
Speaker 1: some motherfucker I don't care about said that Gems should
Speaker 1: find places to applaud him to show unity.
Speaker 5: Cool.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, mm hmm, that's always worked well.
Speaker 1: Dems should find places to applaud him, to.
Speaker 5: Draw to the king, the king for ruining the government,
Speaker 5: firing all the workers. Give him a clap. Why don't you, Sorry, James,
Speaker 5: I realized that got a little insensitive.
Speaker 3: Wow, yeah, Garrison, this is why we have to watch
Speaker 3: those videos where the bad actors talk about how they do.
Speaker 1: Not anymore talking about our workplace harassment videos.
Speaker 5: EI is over, James, No more of those videos here
Speaker 5: in the freeze state of Georgia. That's illegal.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, here in California, I have approximately seventy five little
Speaker 3: little red bells and I log into my work day.
Speaker 5: But like a single time, early in the speech, Trump
Speaker 5: asked Democrats why not join us in celebrating America. After
Speaker 5: he complained, I could cure any disease, and these people
Speaker 5: sitting right here, the Democrats, they would not cheer. I
Speaker 5: could cure any disease, and these people wouldn't cheer.
Speaker 1: No, No, that was weird. I mean, like some Dems
Speaker 1: didn't even show up. They had the subcab of wearing
Speaker 1: certain they did the same performative bullshit they always do.
Speaker 1: And they had what I can only describe as like
Speaker 1: church paddles the status statistic signs on it.
Speaker 5: They weren't.
Speaker 1: They weren't even like I mean, like come.
Speaker 5: On, like a good description. But no, some Dems did
Speaker 5: not show up in protest. Others were black, kind of.
Speaker 4: Like in mourning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who cares.
Speaker 5: Of the women's caucus were pink, very cool, very feminist,
Speaker 5: and others were the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Sure
Speaker 5: that will help, but you know, Trump just pointed towards
Speaker 5: the Democrat side of the chamber throughout the night and
Speaker 5: just referred to them as the radical left lunatics. Like this,
Speaker 5: this was not across the aisle speed.
Speaker 1: No, it wasn't.
Speaker 5: This was this was, if anything, emphasizing the divisions within
Speaker 5: the country.
Speaker 1: One of the things that happened before the speech even
Speaker 1: started was like he drove in with Milania and Elon.
Speaker 5: First lady and first bitch boy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, first buddy, Garrison, first buddy is the official term.
Speaker 1: First buddy. Yeah, I don't know, but like you know,
Speaker 1: Trump starts off the.
Speaker 5: Speech with America is back, and like.
Speaker 1: How far back are we talking? Because you're not wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like eighteen sixty four, I think it's the it's
Speaker 3: the goal.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is the same phrase that that Biden
Speaker 5: opened his first speech with as well. I think Biden
Speaker 5: was referring to, like we are back to pre Trump America,
Speaker 5: and now Trump is using this phrase to refer to
Speaker 5: like this like mythical America. Right sure, but no. Trump
Speaker 5: took the stage to USA chance throughout yeah, thout the rotunda.
Speaker 6: That was.
Speaker 3: You know, I grew up watching the Houses of Parliament,
Speaker 3: so I'm used to like the boomers getting unruly, but
Speaker 3: this was something else.
Speaker 1: They're just so fairal it's weird.
Speaker 5: So cheesy. The speech was outlining like a new golden
Speaker 5: age of America and the renewal of the American dream.
Speaker 5: Trump talked about how he has accomplished in forty three
Speaker 5: days more than most administrations do in four to eight years,
Speaker 5: and that we're just getting started.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 5: He referred to this wide popular mandate a quote, a
Speaker 5: mandate like this has not been seen in many decades,
Speaker 5: referring to like winning all swing states, winning the electoral
Speaker 5: and the popular vote, and reference to this mandate kind
Speaker 5: of sparked the big boo, big like disruption of the.
Speaker 1: Night, specifically when he started saying we won the popular vote.
Speaker 3: Which like it's heavily disputed, Like, I.
Speaker 5: Don't know, I don't think that that's not specifically what
Speaker 5: mister Green was talking about.
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily talking about when he specifically was saying
Speaker 1: that's when the crowd had their biggest they did reaction
Speaker 1: of the night, which like weird in my opinion.
Speaker 3: It's great. It's the thing that Democrats are doing now,
Speaker 3: which is trying to be like the Republicans but lib
Speaker 3: like kind of just I suppose.
Speaker 1: But not really because they didn't follow fucking through.
Speaker 5: Without any like strength, like without any actual like momentum.
Speaker 3: Right, like we saw like the sort of blue and
Speaker 3: non attempts at election denial like after the election, and
Speaker 3: like I don't think that's what they were doing here, agreed.
Speaker 3: They gave off this like yeah, this very ineffectual kind
Speaker 3: of a half fast attempt at booing. And then aside
Speaker 3: from Green, they they'll just sit down and wave their
Speaker 3: ping pong things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so representative of Al Green from Texas old man
Speaker 5: with Caine.
Speaker 3: It's a good cane. It's got a gold handle, like
Speaker 3: I thought.
Speaker 1: It was snazzy.
Speaker 3: I thought, I mean, it's a sort of cane you
Speaker 3: normally see a sword coming out of if I'm.
Speaker 5: Mind, Yeah, that would have been cooler. That would have
Speaker 5: been cooler. But instead he doesn't waves the cane around
Speaker 5: talking about how this mandate doesn't mean that there's a
Speaker 5: mandate to like, you know, cut medicaid, cut medicare. That
Speaker 5: was specifically what he was talking about. Television mics did
Speaker 5: not really pick that up.
Speaker 3: No, and a lot of reporting didn't either, which was shitty.
Speaker 3: I thought, like, yeah, a lot of reporting just mentioned
Speaker 3: that he had shouted and not what he had shouted about,
Speaker 3: which I think is like, really, when you like, you see,
Speaker 3: what the media is doing is serving as like the
Speaker 3: propaganderam of a certain class of people when they're more
Speaker 3: upset that he was shouting than that he was protesting
Speaker 3: the fact that people are going to lose their healthcare
Speaker 3: and probably die because of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like Trump started like yelling over these protests.
Speaker 5: There was like a brief maybe like like you know,
Speaker 5: minute or so, like yelling match in the chamber. Mike
Speaker 5: Johnson was like what do I do here? Eventually, you know,
Speaker 5: Mike Johnson threatens mister Green gives warning and eventually directs
Speaker 5: the Sergeant of Arms to restore order and remove him
Speaker 5: from the chambers. Not a regular scene in American politics,
Speaker 5: but a scene that you might be more familiar with
Speaker 5: in overseas politics, and specifically in democracies that are in trouble.
Speaker 5: You'll have more and more scenes like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can't get any smoke grenades like you see
Speaker 3: in Serbia.
Speaker 5: You know it's still twenty twenty five, James, we still
Speaker 5: have three more.
Speaker 3: Three more years, three more years soon to break out
Speaker 3: the ass off smoke grenades.
Speaker 5: Whether or not this is like, you know, performative or cringe,
Speaker 5: it's like it's something that demonstrates, Hey, like this, this
Speaker 5: actually isn't normal, more than holding up a cheesy sign
Speaker 5: next to Trump reading this is not normal, which is
Speaker 5: some others did in protest. This actually is treating it
Speaker 5: like a serious situation, and more Democrats should have done this.
Speaker 5: They should have staggered their protests throughout the entirety of
Speaker 5: the speech, continually disrupting it, making this speech basically unable
Speaker 5: to end. Pushing this past midnight, having an endless procession
Speaker 5: of people having to be escorted out, you should force
Speaker 5: Congress to censure half of the sit in Congress people like,
Speaker 5: if this really is like an actual existential threat to
Speaker 5: our democracy, if Trump represents right now a genuine constitutional crisis,
Speaker 5: which he does, he is ignoring the courts, the people
Speaker 5: in Congress should fucking act like it.
Speaker 1: They should have gone literally, single file, one by one.
Speaker 5: Stagger it every like three minutes so that he just
Speaker 5: is unable to finish the speech. Have Mike Johnson do
Speaker 5: this every time because he was thrown. He was thrown,
Speaker 5: and they should have continued to do this. The fact
Speaker 5: that no one else did is pretty disappointing.
Speaker 3: You could see Ants was very uncomfortable as well, Like.
Speaker 5: He didn't have that nervous smile for most of well.
Speaker 3: He normally does when he's confronted with a human being.
Speaker 5: But later on the speech, after Trump talked about you know,
Speaker 5: trans women in sports and the price of eggs, you
Speaker 5: had you had a group of Democrats wearing resist t
Speaker 5: shirts walk out of the speech in protest, and like
Speaker 5: that's so much more pathetic than actually like standing up
Speaker 5: and talking about how this guy is ignoring the courts
Speaker 5: and is actually breaking the constitution. Like that's what they
Speaker 5: should have all been doing instead of wearing resist lim
Speaker 5: merch performatively.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you could ran on, you know, to go parodying this,
Speaker 3: but you actually couldn't because they would just do that
Speaker 3: next time, Like if they really think this is the last,
Speaker 3: the last joint session of Congress, the ever going to
Speaker 3: have They sure didn't act like it or whatever.
Speaker 5: But this is going to be the first ad break
Speaker 5: in a series of two mid episode ad breaks that
Speaker 5: we are playing on this show. So here's the ads.
Speaker 5: All right, we are back. I hope you pick up
Speaker 5: your new ad break themed T shirts to walk around
Speaker 5: in protest of capitalism.
Speaker 3: Yep, not made by unions.
Speaker 5: All right, let's talk about transgenderism. One of the first
Speaker 5: topics Trump discussed at length was the anti trans culture war,
Speaker 5: declaring that the government will be woke no longer.
Speaker 3: Oh God, that fully fucking sent me. I've forgotten about that.
Speaker 3: It's just so. As the drunk old man at pub.
Speaker 5: He bragged about about signing an executive order establishing that
Speaker 5: there's only two genders, as well as an order preventing
Speaker 5: quote unquote men from playing in women's sports. He first
Speaker 5: pointed out to someone in the audience who was a
Speaker 5: former volleyball player who got hurt by a volleyball and
Speaker 5: then decided to quit the sport. And they now blame
Speaker 5: this on the fact that a trendswoman was allegedly responsible
Speaker 5: for probably spiking the volleyball, which yes, is painful.
Speaker 1: For playing sport the way that everyone else plays sport.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for trying to win.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in a team of volleyball context. So yes, this
Speaker 5: was the first kind of of these political props that
Speaker 5: Trump brought along to kind of point out and demonstrate
Speaker 5: some of the things that he was talking about. Frankly,
Speaker 5: it just seems like this person was not a very
Speaker 5: good volleyball player. But the next example Trump pointed to,
Speaker 5: I think James can speak better on But Trump said
Speaker 5: that essentially there was quote unquote a man who beat
Speaker 5: a woman in a race by five hours, to the
Speaker 5: shock of the audience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So look, it was shocked listeners to hear that
Speaker 3: most of what he said it's wrong. He directly referenced
Speaker 3: a friend of mine. He was referring to Austin Cillips,
Speaker 3: who is a woman. She's a trans woman, she's a
Speaker 3: very good cyclist. The reason she was doing the race,
Speaker 3: which see Arizona trail race. It's an eight hundred mile
Speaker 3: ultra endurance race like I used to do these kind
Speaker 3: of things. The reason she was doing it is because
Speaker 3: of a UCI Union Cyclic International that governing bodies stopped
Speaker 3: trans women competing, right, so she did these races which
Speaker 3: were not sanctioned by them. She did get the record.
Speaker 3: The previous holder of the record was a CIS man.
Speaker 3: That CIS man had previously beaten. A CIS woman got
Speaker 3: Leo Wilcox. It's interesting that in this particular discipline, actually
Speaker 3: like SIS, women have been doing as well as it's
Speaker 3: not better than men like Lee. Wilcox owns nearly all
Speaker 3: the long distance records in the United States. She's a
Speaker 3: phenomenal athlete. The idea that there's some inherent biological advantages
Speaker 3: it's particularly nonsense in this sphere of cycling. But the
Speaker 3: reason that she was five hours ahead is because this
Speaker 3: race is eight hundred miles long, like those those records
Speaker 3: are broken by that kind of period, not all the time,
Speaker 3: but when you have athletes like Austin coming from the
Speaker 3: higher paying areas of the sport into this which has
Speaker 3: been a much less well a much smaller area of
Speaker 3: the sport, you're going to see these records getting broken,
Speaker 3: and again she broke a record that was held by assistude.
Speaker 5: Crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I mean, like the level of like propaganda and lie.
Speaker 1: I mean, my mom watched the speech and she was like,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem possible. And I was like, because it's
Speaker 1: all bullshit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just the second time he's picked on Austin
Speaker 3: and obviously it pisces me off. You could read her
Speaker 3: rop ed in The Guardian where she wrote about this
Speaker 3: the last time he cited her and his executive order,
Speaker 3: and I would encourage you to so.
Speaker 5: After this initial dive into the trans topic, Trump followed
Speaker 5: up by talking about how egg prices are out of
Speaker 5: control take a shot, which happened about fifteen minutes into
Speaker 5: the speech. But near the end of the speech, Trump
Speaker 5: returned to the trends topic, pointing to the anti trans
Speaker 5: activist mom named January Little John No Comment whose kid
Speaker 5: secretly used they then pronouns at school, with Trump discussing
Speaker 5: how wrong it is for schools to secretly transition students
Speaker 5: and like this actually just isn't true. Surprise, surprise, the
Speaker 5: parents in this case knew that their kid wanted to
Speaker 5: use a different name and pronouns at school, and actually
Speaker 5: were the ones to inform the school of this, according
Speaker 5: to school emails obtained by CNN. Not that this matters.
Speaker 5: And I will say during this clip when when the
Speaker 5: camera cuts towards his mom, like all of the people
Speaker 5: that were used as political props that were cut to,
Speaker 5: they all had the most bizarre look on their face,
Speaker 5: like completely blank, like soulis not even like get really
Speaker 5: excited this this woman who who's you know, kind of
Speaker 5: a one of also the faces of like Florida's don't
Speaker 5: say gay bill just yeah, completely like blank expression because
Speaker 5: this thing that the president's talking about is just a
Speaker 5: flat out lie. And like you know it, you lost
Speaker 5: a federal lawsuit over this lie. But here you are
Speaker 5: on national TV now, the prop of the president.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on national TV, in front of both hanswers of Congress,
Speaker 3: attacking your own kid, yep, for trying to be here.
Speaker 3: They want to be a subject on which you lost
Speaker 3: a lawsuit.
Speaker 5: Like and then Trump directly asked Congress to pass a
Speaker 5: bill banning trans health care for children, saying wokeness is gone,
Speaker 5: our country will be woke.
Speaker 1: No longer whatever, such a loser.
Speaker 5: The next topic was Elon Musk's doge Trump essentially just
Speaker 5: read out a list that mischaracterized aid programs or scientific
Speaker 5: research grants, talking about how Health and Human Services paid
Speaker 5: for housing for displaced immigrants in the United States, money
Speaker 5: for Middle East Sesame Street for making mice transgender, and
Speaker 5: LGBTQ education in Africa, as well as DEI in Burma,
Speaker 5: which I will now pivot to James again to fill
Speaker 5: in some context here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm aware of this scholarship because I'm aware
Speaker 3: of the people within the Simpil disobedience movement who are
Speaker 3: talking to the State Department about it, and they begged
Speaker 3: for it not to be a DEI thing because they
Speaker 3: could see this happening. Right. It's the Lincoln Scholarship program
Speaker 3: our linked to it in the show notes. But it
Speaker 3: exists to empower people in Burma write with technical skills
Speaker 3: and to rise up young leaders in Burma. And it's
Speaker 3: not a DEI program, but for some reason it was
Speaker 3: categorized as such. Right. It talks about respecting diversity because,
Speaker 3: as long term listeners will know Meanmar is an extremely
Speaker 3: diverse country, right, with more than fifty ethnic groups and
Speaker 3: hundreds of languages spoken, So that's why it talks about
Speaker 3: respecting diversity. This is one of the few things the
Speaker 3: United States has done for the people of Myanmar, after
Speaker 3: pumping up their economy, pumping up real estate, and then
Speaker 3: doing nothing when the military seized power there and started
Speaker 3: to brutally repress the people. And the US is also
Speaker 3: I should add, at this point holding a billion dollars
Speaker 3: of the Burmese people's money that it froze when the
Speaker 3: coup happened, and if it doesn't want to give them
Speaker 3: these scholarships, could give them back their money, but I'm
Speaker 3: sure it won't. I know this one pisces me off
Speaker 3: in particular because obviously I'm very invested in the course
Speaker 3: of the people of mem and they are my friends.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this is very emblematic of the way Trump
Speaker 5: and Elon talked about a bunch of these aid programs.
Speaker 5: How like, you know, HIV prevention programs will be LGBTQ
Speaker 5: usaid money, right, Like they find a way to mischaracterize
Speaker 5: it in the most like culture war way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, talking about public health programs as circumcisions, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly right. They'll try to find every single like
Speaker 5: health or education program and turn it into some like
Speaker 5: LGBTQ or DEI culture or issue. Trump claimed on stage
Speaker 5: that they've found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud. Now.
Speaker 5: The doge website previously listed one hundred and five billion
Speaker 5: dollars in like found savings, but this very week the
Speaker 5: website scrubbed the five of the highest dollar value receipts
Speaker 5: after journalists found massive errors in Elon's estimated count, and
Speaker 5: now it's while of receipts totals around it eight billion,
Speaker 5: though that might also be an overestimate according to some journalists.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 5: Trump also talked about alleged Social Security fraud, claiming that
Speaker 5: millions and millions of dead people are getting Social Security.
Speaker 5: Like this just isn't true.
Speaker 1: The math is not mathing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this has been their thing for a while, right,
Speaker 3: Dead people are voting. Dead people are getting Social Security.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Trump's own Social Security administrator has like said as much.
Speaker 5: The super old people in the database simply don't have
Speaker 5: death and details logged, but they are not receiving payments.
Speaker 5: There is improper payments in the Social Security system, usually
Speaker 5: around one percent. Mostly that's over payments or entertainments to
Speaker 5: people who are actually alive, and there is a system
Speaker 5: for resolving those already in place, because social Security is
Speaker 5: a pretty old system that we've had for quite a while.
Speaker 5: And like, I don't know, like Trump's skirted by a
Speaker 5: lot of economy issues, and the way he did so
Speaker 5: was just by repeatedly claiming that doge and like, cutting
Speaker 5: this fraud will magically fix the economy, right, Like, this
Speaker 5: is how he wants to frame this. Eggs are too
Speaker 5: much money, all of these things, and he has no
Speaker 5: actual solution to it. So instead, We're going to fix
Speaker 5: the economy through doge, through finding all this fraud, and
Speaker 5: somehow we will locate this like pot of gold hidden
Speaker 5: somewhere that will magically make our economy better. And this
Speaker 5: is his solution because he doesn't have any real solution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I should have pointed out that Lincoln Scholarships were
Speaker 3: in fact a Trump They started in twenty nineteen, this
Speaker 3: round of them.
Speaker 5: So like, good job, cut of your own fraud, Donald.
Speaker 3: Do you know what else started in the first Trump era?
Speaker 3: Garrison Advertising advertisements was I believe Trump's first executive order.
Speaker 3: He established the podcasting advertising industry, which you know supports
Speaker 3: us to this day today is the backbone of the
Speaker 3: American economy.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean that's actually unfortunately more true than it should be.
Speaker 3: You know, if anyone wants to buy any colloidal silver.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, okay, we are back on top of
Speaker 5: trains issues. The other, I would say most cited element
Speaker 5: in this speech was the border. Trump reference to the
Speaker 5: Lake and Riley Act, which requires DHS to detain illegal
Speaker 5: immigrants who've admitted to were charged with or convicted of
Speaker 5: theft related crimes or any crime related to serious bodily injury.
Speaker 3: They're not necessarily illegal. They could just be undocumented people.
Speaker 3: They could be asylum seekers.
Speaker 5: Correct, correct, Yes, that is a good point.
Speaker 1: I just want to note it was incredible the amount
Speaker 1: of sad looking children and or family members that he
Speaker 1: had as his propaganda prop people.
Speaker 5: He had a lot of props for this speech, a.
Speaker 1: Lot of props for his speech. I had Fred watch
Speaker 1: with me, and she just kept going, how did he
Speaker 1: find like these people?
Speaker 5: These people have been figures of his campaign for years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I explain that. I explained that. Yeah, he's brought
Speaker 1: these same individual jewels out. As Garrett's mentioned over and
Speaker 1: over and over again, and use same thing.
Speaker 5: With Fox News with one American News, like their entire
Speaker 5: life revolves around being political props.
Speaker 1: It's an industry, right, there was nothing new here.
Speaker 5: Trump signed an executive order on stage to rename a
Speaker 5: wildlife preserve. In this like anti immigrant propaganda move, he
Speaker 5: called for mandatory death penalty for anyone who kills a
Speaker 5: police officer and asked Congress to sign that into law,
Speaker 5: which is mostly like an anti immigrant dog whistle, essentially
Speaker 5: trying to find a way to kill immigrants who are
Speaker 5: like charged with the death of a police officer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They proposed the same thing for people smuggling drugs
Speaker 3: in the United States, like effectively charging them as if
Speaker 3: they were going to give all the drugs to one
Speaker 3: person to murder them and therefore giving them the death penalty.
Speaker 5: Now that he wants to label all these people terrorists
Speaker 5: or you know, has labeled these groups terrorists, it gives
Speaker 5: the like the government a lot more leeway to do
Speaker 5: stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, proving membership of those groups would be
Speaker 3: a chat.
Speaker 5: Sure, I mean, so is proving membership to Antifa.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Yeah, we haven't seen how they can. Well,
Speaker 3: we've somewhat seen how they're going to try in the
Speaker 3: latter case, but none in the former. I guess we'll see,
Speaker 3: I'm sure at some point in the next year or two.
Speaker 5: But like Trump said that, like previously, America has quote
Speaker 5: unquote buckled under migrant occupation, but now we are achieving
Speaker 5: the great liberation of America. That's the sort of language
Speaker 5: he was using for this section.
Speaker 3: And he said how they rule from mental asylums and prisons.
Speaker 5: Very standard campaign rhetoric that he's used for years now.
Speaker 3: If you're new to this podcast, you can go back.
Speaker 3: You can search the word hacumber or border, and you
Speaker 3: can listen to interviews with probably hundreds of migrants. You
Speaker 3: can listen to my title forty two series, you can
Speaker 3: listen to my Darien series, and you can joy for
Speaker 3: yourself if these people are criminal or bad or mentally unwell.
Speaker 5: The economy had a very minimal focus compared to border
Speaker 5: or trans issues. He really skirted over the tariffs thing
Speaker 5: as fast as possible, briefly talked about the federal funder
Speaker 5: Freeze bragged about terminating the green new scam, something that
Speaker 5: has never existed. Yeah, talking about withdrawing from the Preparis
Speaker 5: climate Accords again, as well as the corrupt World Health
Speaker 5: Organization and the and the anti American un War Crime Council.
Speaker 5: Very cool, bragged about ending climate restrictions, you know, drill, baby, drill,
Speaker 5: going after rare earth minerals, talked about no tax on
Speaker 5: tips over time and benefits for seniors, and then briefly
Speaker 5: discussed that on April second, he will be enacting reciprocal
Speaker 5: tariffs just completely across the board for all nations. And
Speaker 5: he did warn farmers there is going to be an
Speaker 5: adjustment period. Quote, there will be a little disturbance unquote.
Speaker 3: Certainly when you adjust to not having a job that
Speaker 3: pays you any money anymore.
Speaker 5: Crashing the economy will have a bit of an adjustment period.
Speaker 5: It will be a bit of a little disturbance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, just like he just kept going through
Speaker 1: these obvious, ridiculous claims and making Trump side comment stupidity,
Speaker 1: like calling the Middle East a bad neighborhood and.
Speaker 5: That's my street joke.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just incredible. And James, our colleague Molly Conger
Speaker 1: had a good point.
Speaker 3: She did, Yeah, of her many good points. Trump said
Speaker 3: that people had never heard of Lesotho. At the same time,
Speaker 3: pronouncing it in a way that one would only know
Speaker 3: if one had heard it pronounced rather than seen it
Speaker 3: written on the page. Very very funny, south Ownd. He
Speaker 3: also said something about Liberia like implying like I would
Speaker 3: encourage people to understand the history of Liberia if they
Speaker 3: think the US does an Liberia a thing or two.
Speaker 5: One of the last focuses of the speech was national security,
Speaker 5: promising a Golden Dome missile defense system, which Trump has
Speaker 5: previously talked about at previous twenty twenty four campaign events.
Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with gold, sessed with gold with dome.
Speaker 3: Garrison didn't even crack for those listening.
Speaker 5: Once again, got him now once again. He announced that
Speaker 5: his administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, saying we
Speaker 5: have Mark Rubio in charge. Good luck Marco. If something
Speaker 5: goes wrong, we know who to play right.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 5: His comments on Greenland were specifically odd, saying Greenland, we
Speaker 5: strongly support your right to determine your own future, and
Speaker 5: if you choose, we welcome you into the United States
Speaker 5: of America. But the full quote about Greenland was very odd.
Speaker 5: He said, quote, we need Greenland for national security and
Speaker 5: even international security, so weird, and we're working with everybody
Speaker 5: involved to try to get it. But we need it
Speaker 5: really for international for world security, and I think we're
Speaker 5: gonna get it. One way or another, We're gonna get it.
Speaker 5: It's a very small population, but a very very large
Speaker 5: piece of land and very very important for military security.
Speaker 5: Unquote okay, yeah, very odd, very odd comments.
Speaker 3: Whole collection of English language.
Speaker 5: Would he is He is continuing to say that one
Speaker 5: way or another he will take Greenland. I think his
Speaker 5: focus on it for national security is particularly interesting. I
Speaker 5: think this has something to do with trying to make
Speaker 5: the US and Russia these like two massive like world
Speaker 5: powers that both have like you know, Arctic land at
Speaker 5: their disposal, considering climate change or you know, a variety
Speaker 5: of issues. But I think that this does move towards
Speaker 5: this like quasi like Douganism of like this like multipolar
Speaker 5: world that that Putin certainly wants, and Trump is kind
Speaker 5: of signaling that, you know, through the influence of Bannon,
Speaker 5: he's also moving towards with like Putin and trumpet like
Speaker 5: you know, the two people who control the world. Speaking
Speaker 5: of Trump didn't talk about receiving a letter from President's
Speaker 5: Lensky asking to return to the neotiating table, and bragged
Speaker 5: about freeing another weed smoking teacher in a Russian jail,
Speaker 5: returning him home to America. And oddly enough, Trump met
Speaker 5: with the mother of this teacher in Butler, Pennsylvania right
Speaker 5: before he got shot, which led him to point towards
Speaker 5: the comparatour family, again, pronouncing it in a completely new
Speaker 5: and different way. All of the members of the family
Speaker 5: seemed very not thrilled to be there, completely blank expressions, quite.
Speaker 1: Odd, extremely weird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so this is where he ended the speech, was
Speaker 5: talking about, you know, getting shot, and then kind of
Speaker 5: went on a very long, ten minute, almost gptesque ramble
Speaker 5: about like America. I didn't take any notes on it
Speaker 5: because it just sounded like word salad. But there is
Speaker 5: a few other mislanious things from the speech I do
Speaker 5: want to mention before we close out. Trump bragged about
Speaker 5: stopping all government censorship and having brought back free speech
Speaker 5: to America, saying it's back, which is you know, a
Speaker 5: slightly humorous amidst reports of grants being pulled for using
Speaker 5: quote unquote the bad words, wrong words, as well as
Speaker 5: a truth social post a truth made earlier today Wednesday,
Speaker 5: saying all federal funding will stop for any college, school,
Speaker 5: or university that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned
Speaker 5: or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.
Speaker 5: American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.
Speaker 5: No masks. So in one moment, you can celebrate bringing
Speaker 5: back free speech, and in the other you can call
Speaker 5: for deporting people who protest or imprisoning students are protesting
Speaker 5: on their own university campuses. Very very typical Trump doubles
Speaker 5: speak type stuff.
Speaker 1: He talked about bringing the people back to the office
Speaker 1: like these are all like normal Trump.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, and these are things that have happened already.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Most of the half of this beach was celebrating things
Speaker 5: that he's already done. The other half was like asking
Speaker 5: Congress to help him do more things Mixed in with
Speaker 5: these weird propaganda moves like making this thirteen year old
Speaker 5: brain cancer survivor in honorary Secret Service agent and admitting
Speaker 5: this very square looking teenager into West Point. Who by
Speaker 5: the way, this this teenager has the most cop phenotype
Speaker 5: I've ever seen before. It's crazy, It's I was shocked, like, whoa,
Speaker 5: they found him the cop phenotype. There he is, which
Speaker 5: was which is two? Two more of these weird props.
Speaker 3: It's like in the cave in Plato, everything else is
Speaker 3: just a reflection of this cop kid. Every other coult
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 5: It's so odd because like Trump spent this speech talking
Speaker 5: about how, you know, like we're bringing back a merit
Speaker 5: based hiring. We have we have quote ended the tyranny
Speaker 5: of dei across government, private sector, and military, as he
Speaker 5: then just did two DEI hires on stage. But you
Speaker 5: know whom I who am I to say? So that's
Speaker 5: kind of all I had to say on the Trump speech.
Speaker 5: Right now, I will briefly, very briefly talk about the
Speaker 5: Democratic response. The Democratic response was done by Senator Slatkin
Speaker 5: from Michigan, who opened by saying America wants change, but
Speaker 5: there's a responsible way to make change in an irresponsible way,
Speaker 5: trying to paint DOGE as like this very irresponsible and
Speaker 5: brash way to achieve efficiencies, something that we all obviously
Speaker 5: want the government to move more towards. She warned about
Speaker 5: how Trump's actions may result in our recession, warned about
Speaker 5: losing Social Security Medicare and VA benefits, quoted Musk, who
Speaker 5: recently called social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,
Speaker 5: and attacked Musk and the twenty year old DOGE members
Speaker 5: for using their own servers to access your sensitive data.
Speaker 5: Sluckin spent a lot of the rebuttal praising Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 5: Odd for a Democrat. I would say, I don't know why, strange,
Speaker 5: don't know why you as the opposition party, are continuing
Speaker 5: to base your politics on praising Bush and Reagan. Very
Speaker 5: cool position party bros, very fun stuff. She also said,
Speaker 5: I've lived and worked in many countries. I've seen democracies
Speaker 5: flicker out. I've seen what life is like when a
Speaker 5: government is rigged. Like yeah, I bet you have the
Speaker 5: former CIA agent. She also mentioned doom scrolling, so that
Speaker 5: that really shows how the Democrats have the finger on
Speaker 5: the pulse here when when doom scrolling is mentioned as
Speaker 5: something not to do, saying, instead, you should hold your
Speaker 5: elected officials, including me, accountable, Watch how they're voting, go
Speaker 5: to town halls, demand they take action and organize. Pick
Speaker 5: up one issue you're passionate about and engage. Doom Scrolling
Speaker 5: doesn't count. Join a group that cares about your issue
Speaker 5: and act. If you can't find one, start one. And
Speaker 5: that was that was the bulk of the ten minute
Speaker 5: Democratic response. Oh boy, what a what a what a
Speaker 5: fun what a fun day in American politics?
Speaker 3: That was Yep.
Speaker 5: Any final thoughts, James Sophie.
Speaker 1: Like this speech. This episode is running long. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I rarely don't have any final thoughts other than.
Speaker 5: Bad, bad, bad, bad bad. The Democrats are unwilling to
Speaker 5: do anything actually serious. Once again, the attempts that quot
Speaker 5: unquote fact checking the speech are also incredibly pathetic to
Speaker 5: look at.
Speaker 3: Truly.
Speaker 5: There's this New York Times fact check which I will
Speaker 5: close on just because it made me and the rest
Speaker 5: of our group chat very upset, which outlined this long
Speaker 5: paragraph from Trump saying over the past four years, twenty
Speaker 5: one million people poured into the United States, many of
Speaker 5: whom were murderers, human traffickers, gang members, and other criminals
Speaker 5: from the streets of dangerous cities and all throughout the world.
Speaker 5: Because of Joe Biden's insane and very dangerous open border policies,
Speaker 5: they are now strongly embedded in our country. But we
Speaker 5: are getting them out and getting them out fast and
Speaker 5: the fact check for this very like false claim is
Speaker 5: quote fast is a relative term. This statement is misleading.
Speaker 5: It's just oh, it only focuses on the ending sentence
Speaker 5: saying that we're getting these immigrants out and we're getting
Speaker 5: them out fast. It ignores calling many of these twenty
Speaker 5: one million people human traffickers, gang members, and criminals. Does
Speaker 5: not say that we never have had open border policy.
Speaker 5: Like it's crazy, even like the liberal fact checking is
Speaker 5: completely pathetic and toothless, and like fact ticking doesn't work,
Speaker 5: it's not useful anyway. That's why I'm not spending this
Speaker 5: whole episode fact checking Trump's claims. But the fact that
Speaker 5: you're gonna parrot this insane anti immigrant rhetoric and only
Speaker 5: fact chuck Trump saying that we're going to get these
Speaker 5: immigrants out of our country fast, calling it a relative term.
Speaker 5: And this is the reason that this statement is misleading.
Speaker 5: This completely shows how Democrats like completely lost any momentum
Speaker 5: on the immigration topic. Same thing with the trans topic.
Speaker 5: They're actually unwilling to push back on changing popular sentiment
Speaker 5: because they're automatically agreeing with the actual conceit. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 5: that got me upset, and then I watched Tiawei and
Speaker 5: then went to that. So there we go.
Speaker 3: Do you go ya yaie? Garrison?
Speaker 5: Anyways, this is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our
Speaker 5: weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 5: crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison
Speaker 5: Davis today. I'm joined by Bauford Evans, Nia Wong, James Stokes,
Speaker 5: and Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 2: Tragically, we all have ed. All right, I got it
Speaker 2: out of the way. We can continue the episode.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: This episode, we are covering the week of February twenty
Speaker 5: seven to March five, Number Go Down, Public Humiliation ritual
Speaker 5: of Vladimir Zelensky, and the age of US global supremacy
Speaker 5: is over.
Speaker 11: Welcome to the end of the American Empire. It sucks
Speaker 11: way more than I thought it would.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh huh, well, I mean, look, some of us
Speaker 2: have been saying this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just tragedy that is fast, and then it's
Speaker 3: whatever the fuck is happening now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're we have crossed the tragedy farce horizon.
Speaker 3: We're well beyond.
Speaker 2: We're well beyond anything marks could of anticipating.
Speaker 3: We're going we don't need foss.
Speaker 5: Like I am upset about how Landy and everything is
Speaker 5: becoming Like I feel like you have to be almost
Speaker 5: forced into being an accelerationist now, like there is no
Speaker 5: other way out.
Speaker 3: Did you watch the Democrats last night, Garrison.
Speaker 5: It's like this non consensual acceleration as well. Yeah, yeah that,
Speaker 5: like people spent years trying to resist this. Accelerationists push
Speaker 5: that even now I'm seeing like analysts like embrace, like,
Speaker 5: I guess we have to be accelerationists now, which is
Speaker 5: very bizarre to see.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I've been saying there is no more ideology called accelerationism.
Speaker 11: There is just acceleration of what you do about it.
Speaker 11: So funhole, we've gotten there into Yeah, speaking of let's
Speaker 11: start with talking about Ukraine, a place which accelerated, and
Speaker 11: that Oval office meeting that happened last Friday. That was
Speaker 11: a little bit odd.
Speaker 4: Wasn't it.
Speaker 1: Folks Hearson say thank you, thank you.
Speaker 5: Yes, I realize I've been under your employee for for
Speaker 5: four years now. I've said thank you many.
Speaker 1: Times each of you. Thank me. No, I'm kidding Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Wow, So Sophie has gone mad with power?
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, I'm going to go call the EU because
Speaker 3: Sophie has asked.
Speaker 5: Me, yes, So I don't know. I'm sure people saw
Speaker 5: like a two minute clip or something. I watched the
Speaker 5: full ten minute section, which is much more crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And like in Trump's push to get like this Ceaspire deal,
Speaker 5: Zelensky's hesitation has been because Putin has broken multiple Ceasepire deals,
Speaker 5: so how can we be sure that he will respect
Speaker 5: this one? And that's kind of what jump starts this
Speaker 5: extra combative exchange between Trump, Zelinsky, and eventually little boy JD.
Speaker 5: I don't know, Robert and James, you your war understanders.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what it says when I go into my hobe.
Speaker 2: The increasing story, and this affects Ukraine, but is not
Speaker 2: just limited to it. The story of the next several
Speaker 2: years is going to be the mass rearmament of Europe
Speaker 2: and almost certain nuclear proliferation. France, who has I think
Speaker 2: two hundred and ninety five nuclear warheads and extremely advanced
Speaker 2: first strike capability as well as a first strike doctrine
Speaker 2: is under Macron has just made a statement that he's
Speaker 2: willing to have France be the nuclear shield for the
Speaker 2: rest of Europe. The UK also has enough nukes to
Speaker 2: kill way more people than actually live there. Unfortunately, their
Speaker 2: nuclear defense system and reaction system is very tied into
Speaker 2: the US one. I expect you will see them sever
Speaker 2: it from the United States as the United States becomes
Speaker 2: more and more of a geopolitical adversary to England and
Speaker 2: to everywhere else in Europe. I think you are going
Speaker 2: to see more smaller states in Europe get the bomb.
Speaker 2: I think in general, I'm shocked if in four years
Speaker 2: there's not at least another four or five states that
Speaker 2: have gained access to the bomb. Yeah, because the overarching
Speaker 2: international lesson from Ukraine has never ever, ever, ever, ever
Speaker 2: ever give up a nuke and get one at all costs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fantasy the European national anthem whenobe because if it's
Speaker 3: not love, it's the bomb that will bring us together. Yep, Garrison,
Speaker 3: great one. I don't like that that.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying this because it's it's good, but it's
Speaker 2: also literally like if I was in charge of European security,
Speaker 2: that's where you had priority would be let's get as
Speaker 2: many fucking nukes out here as we can.
Speaker 3: I think we should say that, like this is how
Speaker 3: US diplomacy happens. This sort of shouting at and humiliating
Speaker 3: non US leaders is what the US does. The difference
Speaker 3: here is that Trump did it in front of the
Speaker 3: entire White House, press corps and TV cameras, Yes, in
Speaker 3: the Oval Office, for everyone to see. Yeah, and it
Speaker 3: doesn't give Zelenski a place to back down. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: he's a leader of a country that is at war.
Speaker 3: He needs to show strength and like certainly sort of
Speaker 3: with the current understanding of leadership, he needs to show strength,
Speaker 3: and to show strength, he doesn't have many places to
Speaker 3: go when he's been humiliated like that, right.
Speaker 5: Well, and like you know, Trump was yelling about you know,
Speaker 5: world War three and then and then and advanced China thing.
Speaker 5: He's particularly incoherent with his with his little like thank
Speaker 5: you speech. And I think Robert, I think I think
Speaker 5: you pointed out to me earlier, like why Vance jumped
Speaker 5: in on this the way he did, in like a
Speaker 5: way to establish dominance when Vance and Trump have very
Speaker 5: little cards to play because this is the guy who
Speaker 5: has been like at war for years now, and like
Speaker 5: they need to feel superior to that. And that's why
Speaker 5: it's a public humiliation ritual, because that's the only method
Speaker 5: they had yet right now.
Speaker 2: No, because there's nothing really like they play act at masculinity,
Speaker 2: and their fan especially Trump's base, really like feeds into that.
Speaker 2: But they definitely also have that deep secure insecurity that
Speaker 2: because of aspects of our culture and media. I think
Speaker 2: most men who have never been to war have a
Speaker 2: little bit of that. I don't think it's a natural
Speaker 2: thing for men, but I think it's a natural thing
Speaker 2: in our society. I think it is extremely common, verging
Speaker 2: on universal. I went to war in part because of
Speaker 2: that derangement. And by the way, war doesn't do anything
Speaker 2: to make you better. Yeah, but what it does do,
Speaker 2: what it has done for Zelensky and why he acted
Speaker 2: the way he is, is that like he's he's literally
Speaker 2: been in the position of his entire family and him
Speaker 2: having Ak forty seven shoved into their hands because a
Speaker 2: Russian kill team was in the city gunning for him
Speaker 2: and his family as bombs fell all around. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's just he's I think he just has too much pride. Sorry,
Speaker 2: pride's even the wrong thing He's learned over the course
Speaker 2: of fighting this war. When you are up against a
Speaker 2: strong man, you can't back down.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, you just keep getting pushed back further and
Speaker 3: further if you do that.
Speaker 2: Because he wouldn't have gotten anything if he had like
Speaker 2: sat there and been nice and let them make fun
Speaker 2: of him, and like, like the the ending would be
Speaker 2: the same. They'd made up their minds prior to that meeting.
Speaker 3: Right, and like the one of the things that Zelenski
Speaker 3: has going for him, and like there's a lot that
Speaker 3: he doesn't have going from. He's not a coward, and
Speaker 3: like no people have noticed that he's not a coward,
Speaker 3: and that has brought him some of the support and
Speaker 3: like it has allowed him to remain in that position
Speaker 3: of leadership a relatively uncontested right. They haven't been able
Speaker 3: to have elections. This is something that the Ukrainian opposition
Speaker 3: have also kind of consented to. It's not like he's
Speaker 3: he's being a dictator here, as Trump is alleged, but
Speaker 3: like his personal bravery and willingness to confront these strong
Speaker 3: men is something that like people draw strength from in Ukraine,
Speaker 3: and he can't afford to let that go.
Speaker 5: He actually was fairly submissive in this exchange. He was
Speaker 5: letting Trump talk way over him. Zelenski did not raise
Speaker 5: his voice. I don't. I frankly, I don't understand how
Speaker 5: people have even deluded themselves into thinking this makes this
Speaker 5: like Zelenski look bad or like he wasn't proper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he handled it like a grown up would handle it,
Speaker 3: Like he tried to point out what you're saying it's wrong.
Speaker 5: This was clearly like a coordinated trap from like the
Speaker 5: entire White House team, from like the press corps. Yes,
Speaker 5: like talking about like why he doesn't wear a suit,
Speaker 5: and like someone like Rubio, like a neocon that has
Speaker 5: more of this like geopolitics focus, Like he was like
Speaker 5: literally like syncing into the couch as this was happening,
Speaker 5: Like like Rubio was not thrilled at this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, because Rubio he has no personal pride
Speaker 2: or backbone, so he is willing to try and remake
Speaker 2: himself as a Trumper. But in his actual heart and soul,
Speaker 2: he's a Reagan Republican.
Speaker 5: He totally sure, or maybe at least a Bush Republican.
Speaker 5: Definitely Bush. And yeah, I don't know. Like Zelenski was
Speaker 5: literally kicked out of the White House on Friday, he's
Speaker 5: now trying to find a way back into the negotiating table.
Speaker 5: On Monday, the United States suspended all military aid to
Speaker 5: Ukraine after Trump has continued to inflate the numbers in
Speaker 5: regards to the amount of military aid we have sent
Speaker 5: to Ukraine, often by a magnitude of two hundred billion
Speaker 5: dollars and I don't like this was one of the
Speaker 5: first things that me and Robert noticed at the RNC,
Speaker 5: like how much Ukraine was like a top issue for them,
Speaker 5: Like people wouldn't shut up about Ukraine. And it took
Speaker 5: us a few days to like acclimate, be like okay,
Speaker 5: like why are they talking about it in this way?
Speaker 5: Like it was. It was very odd and Robert did
Speaker 5: a deep dive on that last year with front of
Speaker 5: the pod Rudy Giuliani Garrison.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to update you have been talking with
Speaker 2: Rudy about the album that you and I wanted to
Speaker 2: drop with him, and he is on board, so we
Speaker 2: will be moving forward with that this spring.
Speaker 5: That's exciting a little taste for all you listeners. And
Speaker 5: I like this. This is very much a part, in
Speaker 5: my mind, a part of Bannon's push for like this
Speaker 5: quasi douganism, this idea of a multipope polar world of
Speaker 5: Trump and putin with putin expanding power into Europe, while
Speaker 5: Trump tries to see his control over more parts of
Speaker 5: North and Central America, you know, taking the Panama Canal
Speaker 5: eventually Canada and Greenland, you know, and like both people
Speaker 5: want to you know, more more Arctic land that will
Speaker 5: be useful considering climate change. And Russia already has their
Speaker 5: fair share. So that's why, you know, Greenland is so
Speaker 5: essential for national security, like Trump talked about endlessly in
Speaker 5: his joint session speech, I guess, uh miya, do you
Speaker 5: want to add something about this mineral thing before we
Speaker 5: go to break?
Speaker 11: Yeah, So I think I think one of the important
Speaker 11: things here is that this is this is the definitive
Speaker 11: break point, Like this is the moment that people are
Speaker 11: going to point to and they look back on the
Speaker 11: moment the old American empire died and that empire, you know,
Speaker 11: the sort of post World War two international order thing.
Speaker 11: Right the way, the way, the way the US maintained
Speaker 11: is ueopolitical and economic power was by a network and
Speaker 11: system of alliances with a bunch of the you know,
Speaker 11: with their allies and sort of in places like Japan,
Speaker 11: but also you know, across Western Europe, they maintained this
Speaker 11: series of economic and political alliances that was able to
Speaker 11: win the Cold War. I you know, make make the
Speaker 11: US like the world's low and superpower. But in order
Speaker 11: for it to function, the US has to like maintain
Speaker 11: the alliance system even as it's doing imperial power protection
Speaker 11: and use its allies.
Speaker 2: Well, and like the US is power primarily has always
Speaker 2: come from the fact that like or at least in
Speaker 2: this century, has been from the fact that we are
Speaker 2: the center of the global economy.
Speaker 11: Yeah, right, And and the second part of it has
Speaker 11: been has been its ability to wield power in international institutions, right, yeah,
Speaker 11: you know, the US seizing control of the IMF and
Speaker 11: the World Bank, and and you know, using sort of
Speaker 11: trade like trade doctrine to to sort of empower itself.
Speaker 11: And this is all fucking gone. The US is alienating
Speaker 11: like everyone in the fucking globe basically except for except
Speaker 11: for Russia. And you know, now we're entering this really
Speaker 11: kind of Argentina maybe well well well well we'll see,
Speaker 11: we'll see how long that government holds just like okay, yeah,
Speaker 11: but you know, like and the thing that it's pivoting
Speaker 11: to now, right is the stuff that used to be
Speaker 11: the there'd be a sort of like coalition thing, and
Speaker 11: and American corporations would do this stuff behind the scenes.
Speaker 11: Is now just unbelievably explicit. The US is just straight
Speaker 11: up openly doing resource colonialism, like they're straight up they're
Speaker 11: demanding that Ukraine exchange its mineral resources for protection, like
Speaker 11: it is straight up a protection racket.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The proposed way that it works.
Speaker 11: Is that there's going to be like a quote unquote
Speaker 11: development fund controlled by the US and Ukraine like jointly.
Speaker 11: But I mean it's it's just gonna control by the US.
Speaker 11: I don't know why people are pretending that Ukraine is
Speaker 11: going to like have a say in this. I'm going
Speaker 11: to read from the proposed agreement. We don't know what
Speaker 11: the text of the final agreement is going to be.
Speaker 11: Zelenski has recently expressed that he's willing to sign it,
Speaker 11: but we don't know exactly what's going to look like.
Speaker 11: Here's here's the quote for the document that we had.
Speaker 11: The Government of Ukraine will contribute to the fund fifty
Speaker 11: percent of all revenues earned from the future modestization of
Speaker 11: all relevant Ukrainian government owned natural resource assets, whether owned
Speaker 11: directly or indirectly by the Ukrainian governments defined as deposits
Speaker 11: of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas and other extractable minerals,
Speaker 11: and other infrastructure relevant to natural resource assets such as
Speaker 11: liquefied natural gas terminals and port infrastructure, as agreed by
Speaker 11: both participants, as maybe further described in the fund agreements.
Speaker 11: Another quote, the funds investment process will be designed so
Speaker 11: as to invest in projects in Ukraine and intract investments
Speaker 11: to increase the development, processing, and monetization of all public
Speaker 11: and private Ukrainian assets, including but not limited to, deposits
Speaker 11: of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, et cetera, et cetera, ports,
Speaker 11: and state owned enterprises, as may be further described in
Speaker 11: the fund agreements. So what they're talking about here is
Speaker 11: not just like seizing control of Ukrainian mineral reasearchs. They're
Speaker 11: talking about like privatizing the Ukrainian state and selling it
Speaker 11: off and taking the profits from that. They are talking
Speaker 11: about seizing ports, which I have seen no media coverage of.
Speaker 5: I do not know why it is any agreement. You
Speaker 5: can just read it there.
Speaker 11: I I, notably on the show, am not like I
Speaker 11: am well known as not a China supporter. But I
Speaker 11: deeply remember for five years everyone losing their fucking minds
Speaker 11: about China doing this exact same fucking thing with port
Speaker 11: lease agreements, and they was just doing it now. And
Speaker 11: this is just what the new international order is going
Speaker 11: to be. It's the US just very very openly instead
Speaker 11: of instead of working through allies, instead of working through
Speaker 11: sort of like reshime shamed operations. It's just the US
Speaker 11: going to be going like, okay, like you are all
Speaker 11: going to die unless you give us all your money.
Speaker 5: Speaking of giving us all your money.
Speaker 3: Wow, hell yeah, that's right, magnificent.
Speaker 1: That was art.
Speaker 5: Here's some ads. All right, all right, we are back, Robert.
Speaker 5: You want to talk about Syria?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Syria. I hardly know you.
Speaker 2: Okay. Anyway, I was sent to a document by my
Speaker 2: good friend Joey Aub from the Fire This Time podcast
Speaker 2: if sorry, The Fire in These Times podcast. Joey's great.
Speaker 2: It's a document that the US is sending out to
Speaker 2: NGOs around the world. This one was sent to an
Speaker 2: NGO doing humanitarian work in Syria, and it's basically, you
Speaker 2: have to fill this out in order to have a
Speaker 2: chance of retaining the funding that has been paused right now, right,
Speaker 2: So it's part of the USAID pause. If you want
Speaker 2: to get that money, you have to fill this out
Speaker 2: and basically prove that you are in line with the
Speaker 2: new executive orders and policies of the United States government.
Speaker 2: There's a bunch of questions on here that you have
Speaker 2: to answer. A lot of them are yes, no, and
Speaker 2: some many of them are just like normal shit.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Does your organization have a current risk management frameworker policy?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: If yes, please describe the framework or policy right, not
Speaker 2: extreme or anything like that. You have to say that
Speaker 2: you're not working with cartels, narco human traffickers. But then
Speaker 2: you have to say you have not quote organized groups
Speaker 2: that promote mass migration in the last ten years, which
Speaker 2: is interesting, and when you're dealing with like war torn
Speaker 2: areas that are helping like refugees escape is clearly going
Speaker 2: to be damaging to a lot of NGOs that have
Speaker 2: done very good work to save people.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No.
Speaker 2: Number five is does your organization encourage free speech and
Speaker 2: encourage open debate and free sharing of information?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: And then right under that, does your organization have a
Speaker 2: clear policy of prohibiting any collaboratoration, funding, or support for
Speaker 2: entities that advocate or implement policies contrary to US government interests.
Speaker 2: So free speech unless it's not stuff that we like, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that kind of always been the way to be fair.
Speaker 2: Now kind of the most I mean not kind of
Speaker 2: by a wide margin. The most fucked up thing about
Speaker 2: this is that it then goes down again right after
Speaker 2: the free speech thing. First off, I should note number eleven,
Speaker 2: after the free speech question, can you confirm your organization
Speaker 2: does not work with entities that associated with communist, socialist
Speaker 2: or totalitarian parties? And then below that is a basically
Speaker 2: a question of like whether or not, and they frame
Speaker 2: it as like, does this project take appropriate measures to
Speaker 2: protect women and to defend against gender ideology? Is to
Speaker 2: find in the below executive order, and then it links
Speaker 2: to the Defending Women from gender ideology extremism and Restoring
Speaker 2: Biological Truth to the Federal Government executive Order. And then
Speaker 2: it asks does the project take appropriate measures to protect
Speaker 2: children and links to the same executive order. So it
Speaker 2: is basically saying your organization has to support effectively like
Speaker 2: transphobic policies in Syria in order to continue to get
Speaker 2: US money, right, and the fact that that is numer
Speaker 2: one a requirement for aid organizations receiving aid worldwide now
Speaker 2: is deeply harmful. And it's also just like Syria was
Speaker 2: already transphobic, like the Syrian governments not really pro trans
Speaker 2: but the fact that this is just being like, this
Speaker 2: is going to be like across the board, Yes, everywhere,
Speaker 2: This is going to be everywhere in the world. If
Speaker 2: we want to get US funds to save human life,
Speaker 2: to stop the spread of diseases, you have to officially
Speaker 2: embrace transphobic policies. That's that's the stance of the United
Speaker 2: States government that that matters more than stopping the spread
Speaker 2: of a bowlet in the congo.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, this is like particularly worrying for you know,
Speaker 5: HIV preventative measures across the world as well. Most of
Speaker 5: the language that's used there has been heavily targeted. We're
Speaker 5: just gonna get a whole bunch of people sick and
Speaker 5: die yep, because of these actions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, until it starts getting people sick and dead in
Speaker 3: this country. But we probably won't stop then.
Speaker 5: Probably not. James, I p pivot to you on our
Speaker 5: semi regular border update.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's me the border guy. I was down at
Speaker 3: the United States border this weekend, the one with Mexico
Speaker 3: and not the Canada one. And when I got back
Speaker 3: from the border, I saw an announcement from the Pentagon
Speaker 3: which announced the deployment of a strike A Brigade combat
Speaker 3: team and an aviation battalion. So what's the strike A
Speaker 3: Brigade Combat team, you ask. Normally they are like four
Speaker 3: four hundred soldiers. In this case are sending twenty four
Speaker 3: hundred soldiers from the fourth Infantry Division based in four
Speaker 3: Cartson in Colorado. Strike up gad combat teams are based
Speaker 3: around strikers. Strikers. They are armored fighting vehicles with eight wheels.
Speaker 3: They're pretty cool.
Speaker 4: H Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've hung out in a couple.
Speaker 2: A lot of them have fully automatic grenade lodgers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they have decent air conditioning, you know, big.
Speaker 3: Vehicle outside, small vehicle inside, as with all military vehicles.
Speaker 3: Great when you're six foot three like me, but famously
Speaker 3: not really something you can use for like policing the border.
Speaker 2: No, Honestly, a lot of arguments as to whether or
Speaker 2: not they were good at their stated role in warfare.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bradley's have been having to
Speaker 3: come back in Ukraine. The striker is not so much.
Speaker 3: What they're not good at is moving through incredibly rugged
Speaker 3: mountainous train that stuff. Where I was on Saturday.
Speaker 2: This is something Chuds don't understand, because a popular thing
Speaker 2: among Chuds is to take their Toyota Tundras or their
Speaker 2: f one to fifties or their Jeep Gladiators and send
Speaker 2: them down to this company in Florida that adds an
Speaker 2: extra axle in two more wheels so that they have
Speaker 2: six wheels, because they think it makes truck go better.
Speaker 3: Why it ruins everything. It's a horrible wet thing to
Speaker 3: do to a tract. I know the people at Jeep
Speaker 3: have actually been thinking about how to make Jeep that
Speaker 3: for quite a while. Actually very amusingly. The place I
Speaker 3: was down at the border this weekend, there's a very
Speaker 3: rugged road that you drive down and then you get
Speaker 3: off and you hike. And I remember a few years
Speaker 3: ago a guy fresh minty fresh tid hundress straight off
Speaker 3: the lot. And I've just negotiated this in a nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties Erra Toyot to pick up with my friends standing
Speaker 3: in the back to counterbalance and add weight as we go.
Speaker 3: I offered the spot for this guy he says, no,
Speaker 3: he doesn't need it because it's a tid immediately destroys. Excellent.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, very beautiful. Love to see.
Speaker 5: These strikers are doing pretty good as well, we're hearing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we're excited to see the strike. Perfect perfect
Speaker 3: vehicle for the terrade. The other vehicles that we're going
Speaker 3: to see are UH sixty black Hawks and Shnooks from
Speaker 3: the General Support Aviation Battalion who are deploying alongside them.
Speaker 3: They are also about eleven hundred soldiers from sustainment units, right,
Speaker 3: people who facilitate the in this case, infantry and aviation deployment.
Speaker 3: There's some public affairs soldiers, there's people with logistics, people
Speaker 3: who are going to help make this deployment happen. Right
Speaker 3: In the press release, NORTHCOM that's the North American Command
Speaker 3: of the United States Military, New United States Army said
Speaker 3: to us, carried out by a second striker. A gade
Speaker 3: combat team will include detection and monitoring, administrative support, transportation support, warehousing,
Speaker 3: logistics support, vehicle maintenance, and engineering support. Personnel will not
Speaker 3: conduct or be involved in interdiction or deportation operations. This
Speaker 3: is the the Possycommatatis thing. Right, that they're not directly
Speaker 3: going to be doing cop stuff. It's going to be
Speaker 3: helping border patrol do cop stuff supposedly, But this is
Speaker 3: still very different to the previous deployment. We saw that
Speaker 3: the previous deployments were of like engineers and military police. Right,
Speaker 3: So the engineers and the marine cor engineers, what they
Speaker 3: seem to do is get up every day and put
Speaker 3: razor wire on fence and then wait for someone to
Speaker 3: take photographs and put razor war on fence again, right, And.
Speaker 2: Marines love putting razor wire up. It's not the job
Speaker 2: that everyone hates the most.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, everyone le's razor wire. Handling razor wire is
Speaker 3: famously fine.
Speaker 8: Easy.
Speaker 2: Does it get you horribly?
Speaker 3: Cut the fuck out? Yeah, it's just what you're signed
Speaker 3: up to do. I think what are the MP's doing
Speaker 3: that they will be facilitating CBP operations. I'm guessing like singing,
Speaker 3: like helping with intelligence that kind of stuff. Probably anti
Speaker 3: drone stuff. There's been a lot of talk about drones.
Speaker 3: I have not seen any small drones. Most of the
Speaker 3: areas where I go in the border of federal wilderness
Speaker 3: or state wilderness, so drones aren't allowed there any way.
Speaker 3: But I've never seen one. What makes this different is
Speaker 3: that these are infantry soldiers, right, Like, this is a
Speaker 3: concentration of troops. Everyone in the military that kills people,
Speaker 3: that helps people kill people. These are the killing people,
Speaker 3: guys and girls and well and a closeted they thems. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you're a close to day them in a military,
Speaker 3: best of luck to you. That's what makes it different. Right.
Speaker 3: This is a significant concentration of troops on the border
Speaker 3: with one of our allies. This is coming as the
Speaker 3: United States has used drone over flights to pass information
Speaker 3: to Mexican authorities that resulted in the arrest of cartel
Speaker 3: personnel in Sinaloa. Right. So it is a significant change,
Speaker 3: and I imagine, based on what I've heard from sources,
Speaker 3: that we will see more of this. Right, the US's
Speaker 3: deployable infantry troops will be coming to the border. It
Speaker 3: means that we might soon be seeing foot patrols, right,
Speaker 3: soldiers on foot walking through the mountains to the border,
Speaker 3: because we ain't going to see striker mounted patrols out
Speaker 3: there if they want to keep their strikers. They're adding
Speaker 3: more helicopter assets, right, which can both move people to
Speaker 3: more remote areas and do more surveillance. Surveillance, I would assume, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, like when a hiker was shot down at
Speaker 3: the border a few weeks ago, and I was out
Speaker 3: there very quickly thereafter, and they used a UH sixty first. Well,
Speaker 3: actually didn't evacuate the person in the UA sixty. They
Speaker 3: went in the UA sixty of acted them in a
Speaker 3: uicopter and then another military black hawk's kind of flying
Speaker 3: over after that, and I'm guessing that was just to
Speaker 3: kind of provide cover for the like the first responders
Speaker 3: right who were going there to I think in that case,
Speaker 3: they're investigating the scene. The person had been evacuated, but
Speaker 3: there are very remote areas of the border which probably
Speaker 3: our best access by helicopter, and so that's what they
Speaker 3: will be doing. But this does represent a significant concentration
Speaker 3: of combat troops on the border with that ally, which
Speaker 3: is not a normal thing to do.
Speaker 11: And it's worth bearing in mind that as we're doing
Speaker 11: troop build US in the Mexican border, there are a
Speaker 11: lot of people in the Trump administration who want to
Speaker 11: do just full on cross border US military operations in Mexico.
Speaker 11: They want to do invasions, They want to do like
Speaker 11: what what they think of as like hell actions.
Speaker 3: So yeah, sort of support for like drone strikes right now,
Speaker 3: which the terrorist designation does kind of pave a road to.
Speaker 3: But obviously it's worth noting for those not familiar that
Speaker 3: Mexico is a different country and you don't just get
Speaker 3: to drone strike other countries. That's an active war.
Speaker 5: Well, and speaking of they them's in the military, I
Speaker 5: will do a quick follow up before we go on break.
Speaker 5: We mentioned last week about efforts from the Navy to
Speaker 5: house trans naval.
Speaker 3: Members sailors.
Speaker 5: I guess I guess they kind of all are sailors,
Speaker 5: aren't they, But basically, how's them with people matching their
Speaker 5: assigned gender at birth, same thing with access to intimate
Speaker 5: spaces like bathrooms. This has escalated further to now a
Speaker 5: general quasi ban of trans people from the military altogether,
Speaker 5: with a few implementation paths towards this a form of
Speaker 5: like don't ask, don't tell. We will report on this
Speaker 5: more in the future as a part of a larger
Speaker 5: piece on the lavender scare currently happening across the government.
Speaker 5: But that that did happen literally like a few hours
Speaker 5: after we record it we got word that they are
Speaker 5: seeking to just band trans people from the military altogether. Anyway,
Speaker 5: we will go on break and return to talk tar Us.
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 2: Hey, I wanted to note something I was unaware of
Speaker 2: because I have not changed my friend's name and my phone,
Speaker 2: but Joey now goes by a ya ayub. I apologize
Speaker 2: for the error there, but James corrected me.
Speaker 3: So we're good team. What makes a dream work?
Speaker 2: And never changing people's names in my phone makes well?
Speaker 1: Actually, I usually I was gonna say, I'm impressed you
Speaker 1: have a name saved in.
Speaker 2: Your LEAs is a friend, so I actually have their
Speaker 2: name saved in my phone. Ninety percent of the texts
Speaker 2: coming at me at any given time is just a
Speaker 2: series of unlabeled phone numbers, and it's chaos. I'm just
Speaker 2: guessing that people are who someone I should be in
Speaker 2: contact with.
Speaker 5: That's absurd. Well, there's no tariffs or butts about it.
Speaker 5: But the economy is it a bad spot? No, I
Speaker 5: was gonna do.
Speaker 11: I was gonna do speaking of absurd but no, no,
Speaker 11: even worse.
Speaker 1: Worser Gar said.
Speaker 2: You know what, Gear, I'm proud of you. That's almost
Speaker 2: as good as my rock. The kas bad joke.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well I don't want to do tariff talk. No,
Speaker 5: but where do we do it? Anyways, So.
Speaker 11: After those horrors we got, we have other horrors question mark.
Speaker 11: So on Tuesday, Trump's tariffs on Canada and Mexico and
Speaker 11: also an additional ten percent tariff on China went into effect.
Speaker 11: So these are twenty five percent across the board tariffs.
Speaker 11: There's some I think there are only like ten percent
Speaker 11: on Canadian oil, Canadian energy, Yeah, yeah, like energy stuff.
Speaker 11: Weirdly that's not also applied to Mexico, even though we
Speaker 11: there's a shit ton of oil.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 11: And at sort of the last moment, if there was
Speaker 11: a kind of he got called by all three of
Speaker 11: the heads of the big three auto manufacturers who were like,
Speaker 11: if you don't exclude auto tariffs, we're all gonna die.
Speaker 11: So he's he's like pushed tariffs out for one month.
Speaker 11: They're suspended on automotive imports. We still don't know what
Speaker 11: the fuck that actually means, because it's unclear whether he
Speaker 11: just means like cars and trucks or whether it also
Speaker 11: glues auto parts deeply unclear. There's also all tariff alune
Speaker 11: women steel imports. He announced that a tariff on in
Speaker 11: the speech, the copp rolem we knew about I don't
Speaker 11: think we knew about the illune women steel imports, which
Speaker 11: are new, which are also going to be sort of catastrophic.
Speaker 11: I want to read this amazing CM quote from CNBC.
Speaker 11: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Trump's tariff will cause
Speaker 11: quote higher prices, but he maintained that only some products
Speaker 11: would be affected and that price hikes would be temporary.
Speaker 5: Famously, price hikes are only temporary. Hold on, hold on,
Speaker 5: it gets better. We got to the good part.
Speaker 11: Yet, Lutnick consisted that those rising prices should not be
Speaker 11: considered inflation. Okay, as the President said last night, there's
Speaker 11: going to be a short period where there'd be some
Speaker 11: higher prices on certain products, the cabinet secretary said on
Speaker 11: Fox News, it's not inflation. That's nonsense, certain products for
Speaker 11: a short period of time. He said, Now, now the
Speaker 11: definition of inflation, and I kind of have it's enough,
Speaker 11: is prices going up?
Speaker 5: So great? Great stuff here.
Speaker 11: There's also you know, as this has been unfolding, there
Speaker 11: are been reciprocal tariffs from Canada. The first round of
Speaker 11: negotiation between Trump and Trudeau basically went nowhere. Canada's putting
Speaker 11: tariffs on and this is true of both Canada and China,
Speaker 11: who have both done reciprocal tariffs. They've been more limited,
Speaker 11: They're only targeting sort of specific sectors. Well, the Chinese
Speaker 11: rates are lower. China's Yeah, rates are really a ton
Speaker 11: of fifteen percent, the big one from China. And I'm
Speaker 11: very confused about this whole the way everyone's talking about this,
Speaker 11: because everyone only seems to be talking about Canada and
Speaker 11: Mexico and these, even though the terriff rate on China
Speaker 11: is now up to twenty percent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he did it out of two steps, right like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: he slid under the Rada.
Speaker 11: You know obviously, Like yeah, okay, So like the US
Speaker 11: and Mexico and the US and Canada have the two
Speaker 11: largest trading relationships on Earth. However, Comma, the Chinese reciprocal
Speaker 11: tariffs are really going to hurt because one of the
Speaker 11: big things that they're targeting is US soybean exports. Now,
Speaker 11: we do twelve billion dollars of soybean exports per year.
Speaker 11: This matters enormously though. It has an outsized impact regardless
Speaker 11: of sort of the dollar amounts here because Midwest farming,
Speaker 11: huge parts of it is based on yearly rotations between
Speaker 11: soybeans and corn to maintain soil quality. Right, like the
Speaker 11: farm like that I grew up near, Like this is
Speaker 11: what they did, right, this is this a massive portion
Speaker 11: of mid West and agriculture functions off of this.
Speaker 2: Well, it's just also just like soybeans and corn are
Speaker 2: like primarily what human beings grow. Yeah yeah, and rice
Speaker 2: like those are really the big three.
Speaker 5: You can't you can't eat that corn, but yeah, look.
Speaker 3: You don't, but it's part of your foods.
Speaker 5: Eventually it becomes definitly yeah, yeah, it's corn syrup and ship.
Speaker 3: But yeah, well corn syrup.
Speaker 2: And also it's you know what the animals be yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: when they feeded to cattle and chickens.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and so this this is going to have a
Speaker 11: massive disruption on American agriculture. Trump has also been talking
Speaker 11: about imposing attacks on all American agricultural exports. Is some
Speaker 11: sort of weird like American autarchy thing. So interest the
Speaker 11: thing people are calling this a teriff, This is not
Speaker 11: a tariff. You don't impose tariffs on something that you
Speaker 11: are exporting to How this works, You know, like you
Speaker 11: can go back to a basic Hey, division of powers.
Speaker 11: Congress has the power of taxation. Wait, how is he
Speaker 11: doing who knows? I don't know where We're so far
Speaker 11: beyond that. But like the thing that he's hinting at
Speaker 11: here right, like if he really is trying to sort
Speaker 11: of like prevent all US agricultural exports, this is apocalyptic. Yeah,
Speaker 11: and it's also worth noting this thing has also been
Speaker 11: lost in the news.
Speaker 5: But he's been talking about this. He's been talking about.
Speaker 11: Doing these tariffs to the EU twenty five percent across
Speaker 11: the bard terriffs of the EU. Now what I think
Speaker 11: is important. So the markets today on Wednesday have been
Speaker 11: going back up. They immediately tanked like Tuesday. This week
Speaker 11: was nasty like Monday, Tuesday was red. And what's happening
Speaker 11: here is that none of this shit, None of the analysts,
Speaker 11: none of the people getting paid like fucking thirty million
Speaker 11: dollars you do financial analysts?
Speaker 5: What other the fuck?
Speaker 11: Like, none of these people, none of them thought this
Speaker 11: these terrorists were actually going to happen. They all just assumed,
Speaker 11: but they were, Oh, he's not actually going to do it,
Speaker 11: He's not actually going to do it. This it's just negotiations. No, no,
Speaker 11: he's doing it, and he was going to do it.
Speaker 11: They probably will be like sector bisecondor negotiations to get
Speaker 11: temporary lifts on them. But none of this shit was
Speaker 11: priced in. None of the financial animalsts, like no one
Speaker 11: was doing business planning or whatever, like none of the
Speaker 11: ship was supposed to be real, you know. And what's
Speaker 11: happening right now is sort of like they're latching on
Speaker 11: to this thing with some of the auto terifts being
Speaker 11: lifted for a month again one month, not and not
Speaker 11: an actual lift, but one month. They're latching onto this
Speaker 11: and they're going, Okay, maybe we can sort of reverse this.
Speaker 11: But this is the first moment that the financial markets
Speaker 11: have actually had to grapple with the fact that Trump
Speaker 11: is going to do all of the shit he says
Speaker 11: he's going to do. And like, like that afternoon, Bloomberg
Speaker 11: had a guy on like calling Trump a dictator and
Speaker 11: saying he wasn't gonna have elections. We are beginning to
Speaker 11: see capital flight from the US, where investors are like
Speaker 11: are openly talking about like pulling their fucking money out
Speaker 11: of this country and pulling into somewhere else because it's
Speaker 11: no longer stable, and this is something that you know,
Speaker 11: I think the next dam will be when the US
Speaker 11: is like credit rating gets downgraded. But we're starting to
Speaker 11: see the damn break on the financial class and all
Speaker 11: of these analysts and like people on Wall Street realizing
Speaker 11: that no, he is going to continue to throw bombs
Speaker 11: at the entire world economy in order to sort of
Speaker 11: carry out He's like, I want to be like the
Speaker 11: fucking big man empire guy.
Speaker 5: I like Trudeau. I had a call with Trump on Wednesday,
Speaker 5: basically going, hey, what's what the fuck man? I thought
Speaker 5: I thought we had a deal, and Trump was like, well,
Speaker 5: I'm not seeing much progress on the whole Fentanel thing.
Speaker 5: And Trudeau's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 5: And Trump then basically pointed towards him not being satisfied
Speaker 5: until there's a new Canadian government, like he is not
Speaker 5: going to want to lift these until Trudeau is out
Speaker 5: of office and ask Trudeau when the next Canadian election,
Speaker 5: is hinting towards the fact that he just is going
Speaker 5: to refuse to seriously negotiate with Trudeau and will wait
Speaker 5: until whoever the next guy is. Meanwhile, you haven't post
Speaker 5: from the Chinese embassy in the US, saying if war
Speaker 5: is what the US wants, be it a terraff war,
Speaker 5: a trade war, or any other type of war, We're
Speaker 5: ready to fight till the end.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I will say, I will say the guys they
Speaker 11: put on the embassy pr coms are dipshits, Like those
Speaker 11: are not the guys running the Chinese government. Those are
Speaker 11: like the fucking clowns they put at these administrative posts
Speaker 11: to like scream about wolf.
Speaker 5: Warriors or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 11: The reporting I've seen from inside the Chinese government is
Speaker 11: that they also were like what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 11: And they're they're trying to figure out like okay, like
Speaker 11: how do you negotiate with this guy? Yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 11: they're having real issues because like for all, for all
Speaker 11: of the Chinese government does like this is a government
Speaker 11: of capitalists.
Speaker 5: They want to make money, and.
Speaker 11: They're looking at a guy who is willing to just
Speaker 11: blow the entire thing up.
Speaker 2: Here's my pitch for what we should do with China, right,
Speaker 2: you know, China has this border conflict with India that
Speaker 2: could endo the world, but usually just involves two groups
Speaker 2: of people with spears that were originally made in the
Speaker 2: thirteenth century having Felanx fights in the mountains. Yep, we
Speaker 2: should just send over a couple of thousand marines and
Speaker 2: do that with China. Get it all out of our systems,
Speaker 2: this whole all this war talk. Just have a couple
Speaker 2: thousand dudes, have a big old speared fight. We filmed
Speaker 2: The Son of a Bitch. We get some drones, we
Speaker 2: bring in, Maybe we bring in Tarantino. He'd be great
Speaker 2: to film the fucker.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: We really just have a good time with it, and
Speaker 2: then we just go back to not not doing stuff
Speaker 2: like this.
Speaker 4: Look.
Speaker 11: I think if we get us and trying to compete
Speaker 11: each other in the against each other in the US
Speaker 11: Special Forces Games, and we show this to Donald Trump
Speaker 11: and we have the Chinese government take like a stage
Speaker 11: loss or something, we could solve most of our problems.
Speaker 2: You can just edit it to be whoever like for
Speaker 2: both countries. Right, have an America version and a China version.
Speaker 3: We already do this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So the last sort of serious thing that I want
Speaker 11: to talk about here is that this, especially the stuff
Speaker 11: he's talking about with you, but also with sort of Canada,
Speaker 11: this has broken the sort of international coalition that all
Speaker 11: of these people have been setting up for a really
Speaker 11: long time, right, this whole sort of coalition of all
Speaker 11: the sort of world's right wing governments like coming together
Speaker 11: in this national thing, and like they're really fucked now.
Speaker 11: Like the Canadian right was just like about to take power,
Speaker 11: and they might not now. And even if they you
Speaker 11: take power, they're gonna have to like deal with the
Speaker 11: fact that they've all been like fucking maniac Trump supporters
Speaker 11: this whole time, and Trump has just been like fucking
Speaker 11: their entire country. And like these people are now talking
Speaker 11: about like again like shutting off power to the US.
Speaker 5: And this is happening.
Speaker 11: All over the world with all of these fascist parties
Speaker 11: who've been allied with the US right, they are now
Speaker 11: having to grapple with the fact that the US.
Speaker 5: Is just gonna it's just gonna fuck them.
Speaker 11: Weirdly, the thing it reminds me a lot is like
Speaker 11: the situation you've got at the end of the seventies
Speaker 11: in East Asia with the communists. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 11: so we have three nominally communist governments on the border
Speaker 11: with each other. Right you have China, you have Cabodia,
Speaker 11: and you have Vietnam and I guess you have flows
Speaker 11: and then in those three governments, instead of like forming
Speaker 11: a united block, like all go to war with each other.
Speaker 11: And that's like sort of what we're seeing with the
Speaker 11: fascist right now is like because Trump has decided to
Speaker 11: just be like fuck it, like we're just gonna do
Speaker 11: tariffs on everyone it has, it is really starting to
Speaker 11: tearrist coalition apart and hopefully this rolls back a bunch
Speaker 11: of their gains everywhere else in the world.
Speaker 5: And yeah, they suply chit. And I think Trump is
Speaker 5: using for leverage hair beyond even tariffs, like a cutting
Speaker 5: out Canada from the Five Eyes Intelligence Group, halting intel
Speaker 5: sharing with Ukraine, very very like drastic steps in terms
Speaker 5: of like national security and intel sharing.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just deeply clear that what's happening is
Speaker 2: we're ending every single thing the US used to do
Speaker 2: that Trump does not see as a direct financial benefit,
Speaker 2: and largely aligning ourselves with Russia against every state that
Speaker 2: does not have the physical power to stop us.
Speaker 5: Yep, well that does it for us today. I know
Speaker 5: on Tuesday night, Trump did a speech to a joint
Speaker 5: session of Congress. We have a whole episode on that
Speaker 5: that released yesterday because there was just so much to
Speaker 5: talk about. So if you want to hear our thoughts
Speaker 5: on that, you can check out yesterday's episode on his
Speaker 5: congressional speech, Full of Somebody. A summary, yes, because the
Speaker 5: speech was very long, focused a lot on trans people,
Speaker 5: focused a lot on the border, talked about national security,
Speaker 5: really skipped over the economy because yeah, no, guys are great,
Speaker 5: because that's not really going too good. Keep shooting holes
Speaker 5: of it. Let's skip it over. That focused more on
Speaker 5: trans people as the single greatest threat facing this country.
Speaker 5: But yes, if you want to hear about that, check
Speaker 5: out yesterday's episode on the it could happen here feed.
Speaker 1: The shortest summary possible speech bad.
Speaker 5: Speech bad, Yeah, speech bad. The era of Woke is
Speaker 5: over would be the other summary I give.
Speaker 3: The era of woke is over. Where you're employed, if
Speaker 3: the era of Wok has ended your employment and you'd
Speaker 3: like to reach out to us, you can using our
Speaker 3: proton mail address. That doesn't mean that it's not like.
Speaker 3: If you're not using proton then it's not end to
Speaker 3: end encrypted. If you are, then it's encrypted, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't mean it's necessarily totally safe. So you need to
Speaker 3: do what you think is best. It is cool Zone
Speaker 3: tips at proton dot me. If you don't work for government,
Speaker 3: but you do work for Elon Musk in another capacity,
Speaker 3: it would also be very funny to hear from you
Speaker 3: about what that is like. So yeah, cool Zone tips
Speaker 3: at proton dot.
Speaker 5: Me increasingly relevant considering that Social Security layofs have started
Speaker 5: and they're now seeking to cut possibly upprints of fifty
Speaker 5: percent of the Social Security workforce.
Speaker 3: And the irs. So I'm sure that's going to work
Speaker 3: out great for government revenues.
Speaker 5: I'm sure everything will be fine and America will be
Speaker 5: back on top in no time.
Speaker 3: It is back. America is back.
Speaker 5: I learned that last night we reported the news.
Speaker 1: Yes, we certainly did.
Speaker 3: 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.
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