Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode, So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm
Speaker 2: joined by Mia Wong. It's a sort of a new week,
Speaker 2: so let's start preparing for what these next few months
Speaker 2: are going to look like. In the wake of Trump's
Speaker 2: election victory last week, so one thing I was thinking
Speaker 2: about after the results kind of rolled in and seeing
Speaker 2: everyone's reactions online, you have a you know, a mix
Speaker 2: of people going full doomer, some people trying to get
Speaker 2: hopped up on opium, some people on copium right, just
Speaker 2: trying to like find any psychological way to survive and
Speaker 2: from kind of the way I like to survive is
Speaker 2: just through information. So this episode, we're gonna get into
Speaker 2: how we see life for trans people under a second
Speaker 2: Trump term based on both what he's done in the
Speaker 2: past what he's promised to do in the future. And
Speaker 2: I know, in like the days after the election, like LGBTQ,
Speaker 2: like crisis hotlines all saw a massive spike in people
Speaker 2: calling in, to the point where some people were even
Speaker 2: unable to reach someone. And like I understand, this is
Speaker 2: a very scary moment in time. And as much as
Speaker 2: it might not be fun to hear about how things
Speaker 2: are all gonna get worse, there's also some misconceptions, and
Speaker 2: I think there's also a degree of power in actually
Speaker 2: being able to reasonably ascertain what things could look like
Speaker 2: instead of just kind of feeling it out and just
Speaker 2: going purely on vibes. So to kind of start, I
Speaker 2: guess I'll mention some things that Trump did in his
Speaker 2: first term that then got undone by Biden, which will
Speaker 2: probably just end up being reinstated. We don't know these
Speaker 2: for sure, but that's like a decent guess. So one
Speaker 2: of the first things Trump did when he got into
Speaker 2: office is he rolled back in Obama era memo directing
Speaker 2: schools to protect trans students from discrimination.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that, by the way, discrimination protection is a
Speaker 3: constant theme in this episode, it's going to get a
Speaker 3: lot worse.
Speaker 2: Trump later went on to ban trans people from serving
Speaker 2: in the military. He also went after trans prisoners, making
Speaker 2: it so that trans people usually would need to be
Speaker 2: housed in prisons and jails according to their assigned sex
Speaker 2: at birth, which is of course a very dangerous situation
Speaker 2: for people incarcerated, specifically trans women.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there is good reason to expect
Speaker 3: that treatment there is going to get worse. There's been
Speaker 3: you know, we'll get into this more later in the episode,
Speaker 3: but there's been a real focus on incarcerated trans people
Speaker 3: getting health care. Yeah, and this is one of the
Speaker 3: things that's kind of ambiguous as to how Trump could
Speaker 3: go about trying to stop these people from getting healthcare.
Speaker 3: So the thing about providing healthcare as people who have
Speaker 3: been incarcerated is that they have to do it. Is
Speaker 3: it is something that is required by the Constitution of
Speaker 3: the United States. The Eighth Amendment holds that there is
Speaker 3: a ban on cruel unusual punishment, and withholding medical care
Speaker 3: is so obviously a form of cruel unusual punishment that
Speaker 3: even staggeringly right wing Supreme courts have been like, no,
Speaker 3: you actually have to give people medical care in prison.
Speaker 3: So this is one that's going to be a little
Speaker 3: bit difficult for him to do. I don't know, he
Speaker 3: might find some way to do it. This is one
Speaker 3: of the ones where there's a real potential for it
Speaker 3: to get worse, and we simply do not know enough
Speaker 3: about what legal strategy is going to be here to
Speaker 3: say for sure.
Speaker 2: But it's also worth mentioning, like people have had to
Speaker 2: fight for access to healthcare in prison, Like it's not
Speaker 2: something that comes easily, Like people have had to sue
Speaker 2: to make sure that they get the health care that
Speaker 2: they are legally required to receive. And we can just
Speaker 2: assume that that process will probably be slightly more difficult
Speaker 2: under a second Trump term like it was under a
Speaker 2: first Chuck term. Then it may kind of currently be now.
Speaker 2: So that's kind of one shift in how things might
Speaker 2: be slightly more challenging.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I want to also mention so that analysis
Speaker 3: and a lot of the analysis, the policy analysis that
Speaker 3: I'm going to be doing going forward, is heavily indebted
Speaker 3: to trans policy expert Corinn Green, who we've had on
Speaker 3: the show a couple of times before. Amazingly, she was
Speaker 3: one of the people who ended up working on compliance
Speaker 3: for that lawsuit where Kamala Harris tried to keep transprisoners
Speaker 3: from getting healthcare, and she came in and had to
Speaker 3: like ensure that the state of California was doing it,
Speaker 3: and they weren't. So that's something that has been fought for,
Speaker 3: and that's something I mean, the trans community is small
Speaker 3: enough that that is the thing that has specifically been
Speaker 3: fought for by people who I consulted to make this episode. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: these these rights have been dearly one and it's going
Speaker 3: to be very hard to protect them. If I'm doing
Speaker 3: something where there's there's something about policy implementation, assume that
Speaker 3: I talked to Krinn about this and that's why it's accurate.
Speaker 4: And while I'm.
Speaker 3: Doing this, I want to plug a couple of the
Speaker 3: projects that she works on. But there's something you can
Speaker 3: do very immediately, right now, before we get into all
Speaker 3: of the terrible stuff that's going to happen, which is
Speaker 3: you can donate to the Trans Income Project, which is
Speaker 3: the project that supports trans people and transsex workers in particular,
Speaker 3: which is a lot of trans people and supports them
Speaker 3: by just giving them direct cash transfers. They use some
Speaker 3: of their work too, but yeah, and direct cash transfers
Speaker 3: are one of the most effective ways that you can
Speaker 3: help trans people. And if you give money to this organization,
Speaker 3: they'll be links in the chat you can help do this.
Speaker 3: So let's get into how things are going to get worse. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: trud administration, Congress, and state legislators have an enormous amount
Speaker 3: of power to make everything worse. We're mostly going to
Speaker 3: be focusing on what Trump and Congress can do.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 4: We'll get into the legislator's a bit at the end.
Speaker 3: So there are a lot of levers of state power
Speaker 3: and sort of policy techniques that Trump can pull here
Speaker 3: to make things worse. We're going to go roughly from
Speaker 3: easiest to hardest to pull off. So the first lever
Speaker 3: is federal funding. Probably the easiest place that this lever
Speaker 3: can get pulled is in the education system. Trump can
Speaker 3: unfortunately fairly easily implement what amounts to a don't say
Speaker 3: trans ban on a federal level by threatening to withhold
Speaker 3: federal funding for any school that doesn't mandate things like
Speaker 3: misgendering and dead nighbing students and banned And this is
Speaker 3: something he's explicitly talked about. Is like banning anyone in classes,
Speaker 3: any teachers from talking about traditioning at all. He's also
Speaker 3: threatened to have teachers who talk to students about being
Speaker 3: trands like investigated by the Department of Justice.
Speaker 4: We'll get more into Department just investigations in a bit.
Speaker 3: He's also used an explicit threat, the same threat of
Speaker 3: cutting state funding to stop schools some letting kids use
Speaker 3: the right bathroom in the locker room. It's also possible
Speaker 3: he will do that through Title nine. But there's a
Speaker 3: lot of ways that he can do this very easily
Speaker 3: that are probably not going to be able to be stopped.
Speaker 3: And this is going to get extremely bad, very quickly.
Speaker 3: Another sort of avenue that he has is I guess
Speaker 3: what you'd call like the High Amendment for trans people.
Speaker 3: So for people who don't know what the High Amendment is,
Speaker 3: the High Amendment is a writer that bans federal spending
Speaker 3: on abortion.
Speaker 4: It's been like modified.
Speaker 3: It's not like the one percent band that he used
Speaker 3: to be because now there's like exceptions for rape and
Speaker 3: incests and stuff life of their parents too. But it
Speaker 3: is a very very effective Republican tool. It's actually also
Speaker 3: Joe Biden helped implement that that's been used to limit
Speaker 3: access to abortion, and we already have seen the start
Speaker 3: of these kind of things even under Biden. There was
Speaker 3: a version of this of a kind of high amendment
Speaker 3: for trans healthcare that was an attempt to get the
Speaker 3: DoD to not be able to spend money on trans healthcare.
Speaker 3: That's already a provision that's been tacked onto one of
Speaker 3: the most recent spending bills that went through because Joe
Speaker 3: Manchin like defected and joined the Republicans to get it
Speaker 3: onto one of the spending omnibuses, and that was again
Speaker 3: just for the Department of Defense. We are very likely
Speaker 3: to see versions of these attached to every single spending
Speaker 3: bill that explicitly say that government funding cannot be used
Speaker 3: for trans health care. It will definitely be used to
Speaker 3: do to say you can't use it for trans healthcare
Speaker 3: for minors. It is possible this will be expanded to adults.
Speaker 4: We don't know.
Speaker 3: It depends how far there's sort of anti trans I
Speaker 3: don't know the derangement goes, but that is a real danger.
Speaker 3: And this can also be expanded to refusing to allow
Speaker 3: Medicare and Medicaid to pay for anything at a clinic
Speaker 3: that does trans healthcare, even if the money isn't funding
Speaker 3: the healthcare. That's also possible. That would be absolutely catastrophic
Speaker 3: for the medical system. Even just a government band that
Speaker 3: prevents things like Medicare and Medicaid and like government health
Speaker 3: care from covering transition in the first place is a disaster.
Speaker 3: But if they go further and prevent clinics who provide
Speaker 3: trans health care from taking Medicare and Medicaid, that's bad
Speaker 3: enough that I think that is in terms of what
Speaker 3: is the thing we most need to be worried about
Speaker 3: right now, I think that's the worst possible thing that
Speaker 3: can happen very quickly, because.
Speaker 2: It could basically pressure medical clinics into refusing to offer
Speaker 2: any kind of gender affirming care because it would threaten
Speaker 2: their just base ability to operate as a medical clinic
Speaker 2: taking Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the thing I talked about a bit
Speaker 3: in our Agenda forty seven episode on this. But this
Speaker 3: is this effectually creates like Sophie's choice for these clinics,
Speaker 3: because it's either you treat trans people who have private insurance, right,
Speaker 3: or you can treat like people who have who are
Speaker 3: a medicare medicaid. So it's like, okay, either either you
Speaker 3: let trans people get fucked or you let like every
Speaker 3: poor person or old person in the US like eat shit.
Speaker 3: So there aren't good options here for that.
Speaker 2: How do we think something like this would be implemented?
Speaker 2: Like is this an executive order or does this have
Speaker 2: to go through Congress?
Speaker 3: So that's the other part about this that's very bad.
Speaker 3: The way that this is being done is these things
Speaker 3: are attaches to what are called writers to spending bills.
Speaker 3: So any spending bill Republicans put in front of the House,
Speaker 3: they will have this like provision in it, right, And
Speaker 3: the really big problem for us is that spending bills
Speaker 3: usually get passed now out of this thing called Senate reconciliation.
Speaker 3: And the thing about Senate reconciliation is that you can't
Speaker 3: fill a buster them, so these can just get rammed
Speaker 3: through really really quickly, and there's not going to be
Speaker 3: enough opposition in the House to stop it either. So
Speaker 3: I mean, some of this stuff probably could be done
Speaker 3: with executive orders, but it's quite possible if you won't
Speaker 3: even need that because it can just be rammed through
Speaker 3: in spending bills.
Speaker 4: Which is a little bit harder to undo. From my understanding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, executive orders can be overturned by the next guy,
Speaker 3: whereas getting these provisions out is going to take a
Speaker 3: long time. Yeah, you know, this is another issue that
Speaker 3: we have. The map for the Democrats retaking the Senate
Speaker 3: is terrible in twenty twenty six and it's bad in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty eight two. So I still don't think this
Speaker 3: is being recorded Friday. I don't think we still actually
Speaker 3: know what their majority in the Senate's going to be.
Speaker 4: But it's a lot.
Speaker 3: And also we know that Joe Manchin is willing to
Speaker 3: vote for stuff like this because he's done it already,
Speaker 3: So this is probably coming quickly. It basically depends on
Speaker 3: how good their policy people are, which who knows. But yeah,
Speaker 3: this is not going to be difficult for them to
Speaker 3: implement and it is going to be extremely damaging.
Speaker 2: Well, that was a lot. Let's take a little bit
Speaker 2: of a break and will we come back, take another
Speaker 2: look into what life could be like under a second
Speaker 2: Trump term.
Speaker 4: We are back.
Speaker 3: So the threat to trans people does not only come
Speaker 3: from Congress and the President. One of the things that's
Speaker 3: almost certainly going to happen very soon is there is
Speaker 3: currently a case about a trans healthcare band from Miners
Speaker 3: and Tennessee in front of the Supreme Court. It's called
Speaker 3: Scrmetti versus us. We are almost certainly going to lose this.
Speaker 3: Not losing this requires a bunch of extremely unlikely things happening,
Speaker 3: and this is very, very bad. What Scrimmetti versus Us
Speaker 3: is probably going to cost us is trans people as
Speaker 3: a group being protected by the fourteenth Amendment. So the
Speaker 3: fourteenth Amendment is supposed to provide everyone equal protection under
Speaker 3: the law. The way this has been interpreted is that
Speaker 3: if you're passing a law that directly targets a group,
Speaker 3: there are certain levels of scrutiny that have to be
Speaker 3: applied to it to see whether or not it's discriminatory
Speaker 3: and can be allowed to proceed. What's probably going to
Speaker 3: happen here is that trans people aren't going to be
Speaker 3: held as protected at all, which means that the fourteenth
Speaker 3: Amendment will not protect us from things that are unbelievably
Speaker 3: obviously discriminatory, like healthcare bands for youth, which is again
Speaker 3: literally the same procedures that are happening for trans children
Speaker 3: are done to sis children. All the time and it's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so this is very obviously discrimination. We're probably going to
Speaker 3: lose it because the Supreme Court is full of a
Speaker 3: bunch of the worst people in the entire world. It
Speaker 3: is technically possible that Gorstch defects and drags someone else
Speaker 3: over and we get a thing that says we have
Speaker 3: intermediate scrutiny. That would be the best win we could
Speaker 3: possibly get on this. It's extremely it's unlikely. We're probably
Speaker 3: going to lose it. And this is also going to
Speaker 3: overturn the landmark case Bostock versus Clayton County, which is
Speaker 3: the one that rules that you can't discriminate against trans
Speaker 3: people based on gener identity.
Speaker 4: Specifically for like employers as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for employees. Is specifically for employers. So what we
Speaker 3: could very well be about to lose. And again, this
Speaker 3: is another thing that's very high likelihood because this case
Speaker 3: is they're ready in front of the Supreme Court, and
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court hates us. We could be about to
Speaker 3: lose employment discrimination protections now. To be fair, and I
Speaker 3: think most trans people who are listening to the show
Speaker 3: know this. I don't know how many SIS people understand this,
Speaker 3: but the level of trans employment discrimination in the workplace
Speaker 3: is unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this isn't really enforced at all. Uh, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: pretty bad.
Speaker 3: It is something that right now is technically possible to you,
Speaker 3: and you're not allowed to just straight up say it.
Speaker 3: But you know, like there is a reason that the
Speaker 3: unemployment rate for trans people is like three times as high. No,
Speaker 3: it's actually I think's yeah, I think it's about three
Speaker 3: times as high as the rate for SIS people. Right,
Speaker 3: we don't have great data. There's some data from the
Speaker 3: Translant Student Survey from twenty twenty two, but the full
Speaker 3: report isn't out yet. But what I will say is
Speaker 3: that the trans level of unemployment unemployment right now in
Speaker 3: the US is very low. The level of unemployment for
Speaker 3: trans people is nineteen thirty six, great depression levels. And
Speaker 3: this is before we lose these these protections. It is
Speaker 3: also worth noting this will not overturn like state level
Speaker 3: of protections, So if you're in a state that like
Speaker 3: has specifically banned it, you will have some more recourse.
Speaker 3: But we're losing fourteenth MEDIT protections on.
Speaker 2: A federal level would basically allow explicit employment discrimination. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if someone's trans.
Speaker 3: It's possible that case goes like marginally better for us
Speaker 3: and that doesn't happen, But it's hard to see how
Speaker 3: that would happen. The lawyers I talked to you will
Speaker 3: say this is this is not a legal opinion, but
Speaker 3: they seem to think that this is how this would go,
Speaker 3: and the policy people seem to think going the same way.
Speaker 3: There's some other things that can happen. Trump has been
Speaker 3: promising We're going to get federal investigations into clinics that
Speaker 3: provide gender affirming care, also into hospitals. You know, there's
Speaker 3: gonna be enormous legal harassment. This has already been happening
Speaker 3: on a sort of lower level, but from sort of
Speaker 3: individual lawsuits and state attorney generals. But this is going
Speaker 3: to be happening with the full backing of the Department
Speaker 3: of Justice. You can look at like what Texas has
Speaker 3: been doing the past four years. Yeah, with them investigating
Speaker 3: not as clinics, but also like parents of trans kids. Yeah, parents,
Speaker 3: like individual health care providers. He was also pledging to
Speaker 3: investigate like the companies that make hormones, So that's bad.
Speaker 3: There's also the Department of Justice has been making some
Speaker 3: incredibly half assed attempts to try to go after some
Speaker 3: of the healthcare bands.
Speaker 4: That's all going to stop. They're just going to give
Speaker 4: all that up.
Speaker 3: There's also a bunch of bills that could be passed
Speaker 3: depending on the Democrats' willingness to filibuster them. So Trump
Speaker 3: has called for a ban of trans people like playing
Speaker 3: sports that correspond with their gender, and that may well
Speaker 3: pass because the Democrats are cowards and the Republicans are
Speaker 3: going to have a large majority in the Senate. Trump
Speaker 3: has also pushed for a ban on gender firming care
Speaker 3: for minors, including Harts homo replacement therapy, which is like
Speaker 3: one of the main ways you transition and puberty blockers.
Speaker 3: That one is less likely to make it through the Senate,
Speaker 3: but it also again depends on how cowardly the Democrats
Speaker 3: are and how much they decide to cave. And this
Speaker 3: is the moment that there is another thing that you
Speaker 3: can do and you should start doing this right now,
Speaker 3: which is this is the moment right now to start
Speaker 3: pressuring your congress person about this, like start calling them,
Speaker 3: start pressuring them, and start making sure that they don't
Speaker 3: fully sort of turn on trans rights. This is just
Speaker 3: something that you can concretely do right now, because these
Speaker 3: people need to understand that there are consequences for turning
Speaker 3: on trans people, because if there aren't consequences, they are
Speaker 3: going to do it now. Trump has also called for
Speaker 3: a ban on recognizing trans people at a federal level
Speaker 3: on like all identification documents things like that also would
Speaker 3: outlaw non binary markings on passports and stuff. That would
Speaker 3: also be really bad. That's also something that probably requires
Speaker 3: a law. And that's again and everything. Call your conresspeople,
Speaker 3: like pressure them now, start doing it now, do not
Speaker 3: wait until he's actually in office.
Speaker 2: And like, all of these issues are things that public
Speaker 2: opinion has been shifting on greatly the past like two years. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these things used to be much more kind of seen
Speaker 2: as like, yeah, this like makes sense, this is like
Speaker 2: a humane and reasonable effort to include a group of
Speaker 2: discriminated people. And now we see in a growing number
Speaker 2: a majority of people pull on this issue do not
Speaker 2: support these measures. They don't support having the ability to
Speaker 2: have your gender marker match your gener identity. They don't
Speaker 2: support your ability to participate in public life. And that
Speaker 2: is the result of an intentional misinformation campaign and essentially
Speaker 2: like a hate crime campaign and a hate speech campaign
Speaker 2: that has been going on for the past like four
Speaker 2: years because Republicans knew that they already lost the battle
Speaker 2: on like regular gay people, so they moved on to
Speaker 2: the next subjugated class. And that's something we've talked about
Speaker 2: for a while. And this is like something that is shifting.
Speaker 2: So you have to actually verbally express to to your
Speaker 2: representatives that this is something that you actually do care about.
Speaker 2: Otherwise they will look at these like general polls and
Speaker 2: be like, oh, I guess this isn't popular anymore, and
Speaker 2: shift and cave on it. They need to know that
Speaker 2: their constituents actually do care about these things if we
Speaker 2: want these things to not get passed through Congress.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's also worth mentioning that a lot of
Speaker 3: this people just don't know anything about about trans people
Speaker 3: because we're like one percent of the population right now.
Speaker 3: Part of the reason the Republican campaign is working is
Speaker 3: that people are susceptible to being told things about trans
Speaker 3: people and believing them. But that also works for us. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: it goes both ways. Part of what's been going on
Speaker 3: is that, like we haven't had the kind of giant
Speaker 3: advocacy push outside of some trans people. But we have
Speaker 3: no money, we have no resources, and we need there
Speaker 3: to actually be large, widespread and vocal public support because
Speaker 3: otherwise all of the stuff that's happening here is going
Speaker 3: to get even worse. And you know the word when
Speaker 3: we could get very well, the worst case scenario, things
Speaker 3: which are full bands for adults. That's the thing that
Speaker 3: they could pass through Congress, but right now they don't
Speaker 3: have the support for it. Yeah, However, Comma ascarising is
Speaker 3: going to get to there are signs that the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party is deciding to throw us under the bus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not as steadfast on this issue then what we
Speaker 2: would probably prefer.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And on the state level, I guess the important thing
Speaker 3: for the state level is that once we lose Fourteenth
Speaker 3: Amendment protections, it's going to be so much harder for
Speaker 3: there to be legal challenges to any of this. And
Speaker 3: this means we're going to see a proliferation of these
Speaker 3: state level bands on healthcare, even sort of marching ahead
Speaker 3: of where the federal government is.
Speaker 2: Let's have our last break and when we come back.
Speaker 2: We will close the episode by discussing Trump's focus on
Speaker 2: trans issues during his campaign, as well as things that
Speaker 2: you can start doing like right now to get ready
Speaker 2: and prepare for these next four years.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back.
Speaker 2: During the last few months of Trump's campaign, his team
Speaker 2: shifted away from the key issues of the economy and
Speaker 2: immigration in their national election ad efforts, and specifically honed
Speaker 2: in on trans issues as a wedge against Kamala Harris
Speaker 2: and the Democrats in general, the infamous Kamala Is for
Speaker 2: They Them ad being the prime example of this. According
Speaker 2: to a PBS report, from October seventh to October twentieth,
Speaker 2: Trump's campaign and pro Trump groups spent an estimated thirty
Speaker 2: nine million dollars on anti trans ads, and Trump ended
Speaker 2: up spending more money on these ads than on housing, immigration,
Speaker 2: and the economy combined. This was his main focus in
Speaker 2: his final ad push, a specific after the September debate.
Speaker 2: A new report from journalist Casey Parks, using data from
Speaker 2: Ad Impact, shows that Republicans spent nearly two hundred and
Speaker 2: fifteen million dollars on anti trans ads this election cycle.
Speaker 2: And this figure does not include cable or streaming ads.
Speaker 2: This is just network TV. And these anti trans ads
Speaker 2: weren't just focused on the presidential election. Other Republicans in
Speaker 2: various Senate races picked up on the success of these
Speaker 2: anti trans ads and used them in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Now,
Speaker 2: initially some thought that maybe this would be a repeat
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty two, Maybe this extra focus on this
Speaker 2: small group of the population wouldn't lead to kind of
Speaker 2: electoral successes, pointing to how a similar strategy failed during
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty two midterms. But then election day came
Speaker 2: and we saw that there was a degree of success
Speaker 2: or at least these did not hurt them in any
Speaker 2: substantial way, and Republicans won many of the Senate races
Speaker 2: on anti trans campaign messages. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 2: an article in The New York Times called it Trump
Speaker 2: and the Republicans bet big on anti trans ads across
Speaker 2: the country. Quote the kamala is for they them add
Speaker 2: was rated as one of his campaigns more effective in
Speaker 2: September in some Democratic testing. According to results reviewed by
Speaker 2: The Times, Republican strategists said the focus on transunter women
Speaker 2: and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a
Speaker 2: key group of voters the party had hemorrhaged support from
Speaker 2: in recent years, college educated women. One of the things
Speaker 2: you see in the focus groups is that the moms
Speaker 2: get really visibly angry on this issue, said Jim McLaughlin,
Speaker 2: a Republican polster who works for mister Trump and other
Speaker 2: Republican campaigns. Quote it's a fairness issue. They don't want
Speaker 2: their daughters to lose a scholarship and they don't want
Speaker 2: them to get hurt unquote. The enthusiasm for this issue
Speaker 2: kind of lines up with what me, Sophie, and Roberts
Speaker 2: saw at the RNC, where anti trans statements consistently got
Speaker 2: the loudest applause. Though some state level Democrats Representative Steth
Speaker 2: Moulton of Massachusetts and Tom Soulsey of New York, as
Speaker 2: well as some other DNZ advisors, have jumped onto the
Speaker 2: blame game, citing trans issues as if not the reason,
Speaker 2: then a reason Democrats just completely fumble this election, claiming
Speaker 2: that the Democratic Party is far to the left on
Speaker 2: trans issues and the average American. But largely the Dems
Speaker 2: were not out campaigning for trans people like Loud and
Speaker 2: Proud the selection cycle, oh trans issues were intentionally pushed
Speaker 2: off stage at the DNC, and the Harris campaign tried
Speaker 2: their hardest to sidestep this issue, giving vague non answers
Speaker 2: and whether trans people should be able to receive healthcare
Speaker 2: by just stating that her administration would quote unquote follow
Speaker 2: the law and invoking States rights type framing. And I
Speaker 2: see this as just a massive failure to confront an
Speaker 2: issue that Republicans have like slingshot into the spotlight, and
Speaker 2: it shows a failure to do things because it's like
Speaker 2: the right thing to do, not just necessarily for some
Speaker 2: like electoral gain.
Speaker 4: Well even even on a strategic level.
Speaker 3: Right, we saw this with border policy too, right exactly,
Speaker 3: Democrats adopted their Republican's sport policy and then they lost exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's like, yeah, if you just agree or refuse
Speaker 3: to contest them on their core issues, then that's what
Speaker 3: people are going to believe because people have a tendency
Speaker 3: to believe what their elites are telling them. You can't
Speaker 3: defeat these people's ideology by just agreeing with it or
Speaker 3: start stepping out of the way of it.
Speaker 4: That just lets it spread.
Speaker 2: And I think this is going to be proven to
Speaker 2: be like the biggest mistake Democrats made this election cycle,
Speaker 2: like you can't just cede territory to the right based
Speaker 2: on a massive disinformation campaign which is exactly what the
Speaker 2: Democrats did on immigration and crime, and they showed a
Speaker 2: willingness to do that on trans rights. Now, even if
Speaker 2: some of these people that Democrats included claim to not
Speaker 2: like hate trans people individually, that they have allowed questions
Speaker 2: around access to bathrooms, sports and government fund and healthcare
Speaker 2: to be used as a wedge against trans rights as
Speaker 2: a whole, and the ability for trans people to be
Speaker 2: able to exist in public life to close. I think
Speaker 2: we should have just a brief discussion on what people
Speaker 2: can do specifically during these next seventy five days and
Speaker 2: even in the months after, like what people can do
Speaker 2: to prepare for some of the worst aspects of this,
Speaker 2: specifically on the healthcare front. Now, we did a series
Speaker 2: of episodes a few years ago on DIYHRT. There are
Speaker 2: both pharmaceutical and home brewed options for homones that can
Speaker 2: be ordered online. Now since that episode, home brewed distribution
Speaker 2: networks have spread throughout the United States. There's probably one
Speaker 2: already in whatever city is closest to you. Now, access
Speaker 2: to those networks does require a degree of, like in
Speaker 2: person community, and I know that can be challenging. You
Speaker 2: can certainly do organizing online on discord. You can certainly
Speaker 2: find trans people on discord that can help you learn
Speaker 2: where pharmaceutical grade estrogen can be ordered online. But that
Speaker 2: type of online organizing will only get more dangerous under
Speaker 2: a Trump term, especially if the legal status of these
Speaker 2: hormones change. So I will always emphasize the importance of
Speaker 2: in person community. And it might just like learning if
Speaker 2: there's a trans band in the city you're in, going
Speaker 2: to some shows, learning where trans people go, Where trans
Speaker 2: people gather, is their community picnics?
Speaker 4: Is their book fares? Is their zine fares? Like?
Speaker 2: Is there like even gaming conventions? Right, just places that
Speaker 2: there might be a number of trans people gathered and
Speaker 2: talk to them about being trans, talk to them about
Speaker 2: the issues that you're facing. It might take a few
Speaker 2: months to gain trust and become friends, but that's just
Speaker 2: how friendships work anyway, and that can be challenging. And
Speaker 2: there may not be something like this in a city
Speaker 2: super close to you, which is why online connections are useful,
Speaker 2: and sometimes it might require a little bit of travel. Now,
Speaker 2: what we can do, at least right now is stockpile
Speaker 2: things in case things get harder to maintain or produce.
Speaker 2: There's multiple forms of these hormones that can be stored,
Speaker 2: and I do believe that there will be some form
Speaker 2: of home brewed option that will most likely continue to
Speaker 2: exist even if prescribed hormones get restricted. And part of
Speaker 2: why I emphasize kind of doing this in person as well,
Speaker 2: especially if you're a minor, that will just get more
Speaker 2: dangerous to do under a second Trump term. I will
Speaker 2: point people to the website DIYHRT dot wiki. It's currently
Speaker 2: the best information source on dosing testing, how to find
Speaker 2: supplies and options for ordering hormones now, because changing legal
Speaker 2: paperwork on the federal or state level often takes a while.
Speaker 2: If that's something that you want to do, now is
Speaker 2: the time to start. There's still seventy days until Trump
Speaker 2: takes office and some of these changes could start being
Speaker 2: put into effect. You should absolutely apply for a passport now.
Speaker 2: Depending on many variables, it may be advantageous to have
Speaker 2: your legal name and gender marker match whatever you more
Speaker 2: easily pass as, rather than your gender identity. Now I
Speaker 2: understand why this is less than ideal and if you
Speaker 2: think that this might just inhibit your transition progress and
Speaker 2: push you further back into the closet, especially if the
Speaker 2: option of changing your gender marker on federal documents just
Speaker 2: like goes away during the next four years, then people
Speaker 2: should just go ahead and get that stuff changed asap.
Speaker 2: But it's something to reflect on and consider. Lastly, I
Speaker 2: want to mention something about personal safety. Over the course
Speaker 2: of the past week, I've heard from friends around the
Speaker 2: country experiencing a spike in anti queer and misogynistic violence. Chuds,
Speaker 2: frat boys, and just asshole men have been way more
Speaker 2: willing to just to openly harass queer people out in public.
Speaker 2: Some of this I think is just Trump supporters quote
Speaker 2: unquote celebrating the election results. But once Trump takes office,
Speaker 2: I expect this type of harassment to start slowly increasing
Speaker 2: as truds feel like they can get away with more
Speaker 2: just open misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. I know a lot
Speaker 2: of people have been talking about or posting about buying firearms,
Speaker 2: and firearms is one of the last things you should
Speaker 2: buy in a panic. This is a very careful and
Speaker 2: calculated choice for you to make about your own personal safety,
Speaker 2: your own mental health, your own willingness to carry and
Speaker 2: train with the gun. This is its own topic, but
Speaker 2: I do recommend buying and carrying pepper jel for basically
Speaker 2: all queer people and women. It's a great self defense tool.
Speaker 2: It spreads less than pepper spray, so you're going to
Speaker 2: be less likely to just spray yourself. Saber is a
Speaker 2: good brand. Buy it for yourself, buy it for your friends. Uh, Mia,
Speaker 2: do you have anything else you want to add?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, two things. One, people have been asking for book Macrumentation,
Speaker 3: so we're giving them to you.
Speaker 4: We're only given to you to you at the end
Speaker 4: of the episodes. You got to stay around.
Speaker 3: And I think something that's good to read in this
Speaker 3: moment on trans issues is Julius Serrano's book Whipping Girl.
Speaker 3: I've had Julius Runno on the show before. She is
Speaker 3: one of the most important, I mean, honestly like feminist
Speaker 3: theorists of the last of this century. And there's a
Speaker 3: new addition, Whipping Girl, that's come out recently, and it
Speaker 3: is it is one of the fundamental sort of texts
Speaker 3: to understand the experience to transfend people in this country
Speaker 3: and why things have gotten the way that they've gotten.
Speaker 3: So yeah, go go read Whipping Girl. It's spectacular. And
Speaker 3: then I want to plug one more thing that you
Speaker 3: can give money to. So I mean again, another very
Speaker 3: effective way for CIS people to support trans people is
Speaker 3: give them money, because all of us are unbelievably broke
Speaker 3: like all of the time. Another place you can give
Speaker 3: money to is the Trans Justice Funding Project. We'll have
Speaker 3: that in this too. When they base, they give out
Speaker 3: grants to other just like transgroups who are doing organizing
Speaker 3: or doing other kinds of sort of support work, mutual land,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. So that's money that goes directly
Speaker 3: to trans people.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then obviously, as we've said, this is the forces
Speaker 3: people part of the episode. After our after our four
Speaker 3: trans people part, go call your congress people, Go pressure them,
Speaker 3: Go show up to their offices and make it extremely
Speaker 3: that it is unacceptable to write off trans people and
Speaker 3: that they need to be willing to successfully stop these
Speaker 3: writers and successfully do whatever they can to chant out
Speaker 3: the works to make sure that the Republicans cannot pass
Speaker 3: bills that will harm us even more than the things
Speaker 3: that they're already going to do with.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, and you know, along with all of
Speaker 1: their correspondents, I'm looking forward to what we can expect
Speaker 1: from the Trump administration, which is a broad and far
Speaker 1: reaching question given the ambitions that Trump and the others
Speaker 1: who I think will be involved in this new administration
Speaker 1: have already expressed. And the elevator pitch theme of today's
Speaker 1: episode is what's going to happen in Gaza once Trump
Speaker 1: is president again? Will things get better or worse? Obviously
Speaker 1: the expectation is worse. I think that's where certainly the
Speaker 1: safe money goes if you're putting money on this. But
Speaker 1: the short answer to that question is no, one fully
Speaker 1: knows now. The first thing that I did when trying
Speaker 1: to prepare for this episode was tracked down as many
Speaker 1: articles as I could that included interviews with Gazin's about
Speaker 1: their expectations, and those expectations were largely negative, but a
Speaker 1: little more mixed than you might expect. A Reuter's reporter
Speaker 1: interviewed Abu Osama, living in Conunis in the southern Gaza strip.
Speaker 1: He called Trump's election a quote new catastrophe in the
Speaker 1: history of the Palestinian people, adding despite the destruction, death
Speaker 1: and displacement that we have witnessed, what is coming will
Speaker 1: be more difficult. It will be politically devastating. This essentially
Speaker 1: agrees with what a Palistinian from Batel lahis in the
Speaker 1: Northern Gaza Strip, Ahmed Jerad told Al Jazeera quote. Trump
Speaker 1: and Netanyahu are an evil alliance against the Palestinians, and
Speaker 1: our fate will be very difficult, not only in the
Speaker 1: fateful issues, but also in our daily concerns. This is
Speaker 1: a sad day for Palestinians. Trump will endorse Netnah who's
Speaker 1: free hand regarding the possibility of the return of settlements
Speaker 1: to the Gaza Strip and even the displacement of large
Speaker 1: numbers of Palestinians outside it. We hope to return to
Speaker 1: the north, and now all of our hopes have been shattered,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately Jerad's fears here have been immediately proven well founded.
Speaker 1: On November sixth, as the rest of the world reeled
Speaker 1: from Trump's victory, IDF Brigadier General Itzig Kohen told Israeli
Speaker 1: reporters there is no intention of allowing the residents of
Speaker 1: the Northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Humanitarian
Speaker 1: aid would only be allowed to enter through the south.
Speaker 1: His justification was that there are no more civilians in
Speaker 1: the north reporting from the Guardian interviewed several international humanitarian
Speaker 1: law experts, and the members of that likely dying field
Speaker 1: described Israeli actions here as war crimes. The forcible transfer
Speaker 1: of civilian populations and the use of food as a
Speaker 1: weapon are supposed to be banned. Despite this, we can
Speaker 1: safely assume that there will be no serious consequences as
Speaker 1: a result of any of this. Now, the timing of
Speaker 1: this announcement was predominant, and it is not unreasonable to
Speaker 1: suggest that Israel might not have been as bold as
Speaker 1: they're currently being if Harris had won Another Gosen seventy
Speaker 1: year old doctor Zakia Hilal told Al Jazeera it is
Speaker 1: true that American administrations do not differ in supporting Israel,
Speaker 1: but some are more severe and more intense than others,
Speaker 1: like Trump. You can find numerous gosins expressing feelings along
Speaker 1: these lines if you read long enough, But you will
Speaker 1: also find a number who feel like what's coming won't
Speaker 1: be worse, or at least won't be very different from
Speaker 1: what they've already endured. Jehad Malaka, a researcher at the
Speaker 1: Palestinian Planning Center, told Al Jazeera he does not expect
Speaker 1: Trump's administration to be wildly different from Biden's In this regard,
Speaker 1: Trump uses rough tools and Biden and the Democrats resort
Speaker 1: to soft tools, but the politics.
Speaker 4: Are the same.
Speaker 1: Biden did not make any decision in favor of the
Speaker 1: Palestinians and was unable to achieve a ceasefire. He did
Speaker 1: not change the reality of the decisions of his predecessor
Speaker 1: Trump at all. The positions of the two administrations regarding
Speaker 1: Israel are the same and identical, and they put its
Speaker 1: interests above all other considerations. You can also find some
Speaker 1: Gosins who see a sliver of hope in Trump's new administration.
Speaker 1: Reuter spoke with the owner of a grocery store in Gaza,
Speaker 1: Khaled Desuso, who told their reporter, I think Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: if he wins, he promised the Muslim people in America
Speaker 1: to stop the war in Gaza. We hope that happens,
Speaker 1: and it's not necessarily absurd to hope that there may
Speaker 1: be some positive effects here. Trump has said many horrible
Speaker 1: things about Palestinians, obviously, several weeks before the election, he
Speaker 1: had a phone call with net Nyahoo that may have
Speaker 1: been a viihilation of the Logan Act, although laws don't
Speaker 1: really matter anymore. Here's howslate dot Com summarized what happened
Speaker 1: in that call. According to Trump, the Israeli leaders said
Speaker 1: he disregarded President Joe Biden's warning to keep troops out
Speaker 1: of Rafa in southern Gaza, a decision that resulted in
Speaker 1: the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a shootout
Speaker 1: in the area. Trump also said nat Nyahu asked him
Speaker 1: for advice on how to respond to Iran's missile attack
Speaker 1: on Israel, to which Trump said he responded, do whatever
Speaker 1: you have to do. Now, that's a dire sign, and
Speaker 1: it is impossible to imagine that a new Trump regime
Speaker 1: won't restart the sale in shipment of specific munitions that
Speaker 1: Biden banned for export to Israel this July. Biden halted
Speaker 1: the shipment of two thousand pound bombs to the IDF
Speaker 1: because quote, they cannot be used in Gaza or any
Speaker 1: populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage. Now,
Speaker 1: the fact that munitions like this will very likely be
Speaker 1: used is hideous, and I think it's extremely unlikely that
Speaker 1: we do not see an immediate rise in the death toll.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, Israel's extant acts have caused
Speaker 1: great human tragedy and damage. The munitions they have have
Speaker 1: already been responsible for calamitous death and destruction on a
Speaker 1: fairly wide scale. So where's the cause for any optimism
Speaker 1: on this at all? It comes from Trump's own self interest.
Speaker 1: As Khalide Desuso noted, Trump ran promising to end wars.
Speaker 1: This means he does have some vested interest, even if
Speaker 1: only in his own ego, in forcing NETANYAHUO to draw
Speaker 1: things to a close in short order. And there is
Speaker 1: indeed reporting that Trump has told net Nyahu to wrap
Speaker 1: things up by January so that he can take office
Speaker 1: with an end to the conflict and ideally use that
Speaker 1: as a way to kind of bolster his early popularity
Speaker 1: and gain some political capital for the other sweeping changes
Speaker 1: he wants to make.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: The fact that Trump is pushing net Nyahu on ending
Speaker 1: things in January doesn't mean a sudden, peaceful ceasefire. For
Speaker 1: one thing, nothing is going to happen in the months
Speaker 1: between then and now to reduce the level of bloodshed,
Speaker 1: and almost every likely theoretical ends with Israel massively escalating
Speaker 1: violence and using new, more destructive weapons before bringing an
Speaker 1: end to their campaign. But it does mean that Trump
Speaker 1: might be able to pressure bb to bring things to
Speaker 1: an end. There's a good article on this in the BBC.
Speaker 1: No guarantees Trump will give net Yahoo all he wants now.
Speaker 1: In that piece, Mid East correspondent Lucy Williamson writes, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's first term in office was exemplary as far as
Speaker 1: Israel is concerned. Said Michael Oran, a former Israeli ambassador
Speaker 1: to the United States, The hope is that he'll revisit that.
Speaker 1: We have to be very clear sighted about who Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is and what he stands for. Firstly, he said,
Speaker 1: the former president doesn't like wars, seeing them as expensive.
Speaker 1: Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.
Speaker 1: He's also not a big fan of israel settlements in
Speaker 1: the occupied West Bank, has set Ambassador Oran, and has
Speaker 1: opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts
Speaker 1: of it. Both of these policies could put him in
Speaker 1: conflict with far right parties in Netanyahu's current governing coalition,
Speaker 1: who have threatened to bring down the government if the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister pursues policies they reject. Michael Orrin believes net
Speaker 1: Nyaho will need to take a different approach with the
Speaker 1: incoming president. If Donald Trump comes to office in January
Speaker 1: and says, Okay, you have a week to finish the war,
Speaker 1: net Yahoo is going to have to respect that. And
Speaker 1: we'll continue talking about what this means. But first, here's samants.
Speaker 1: So it is possible that we will see a quick
Speaker 1: end to the violence in January, and perhaps a quicker
Speaker 1: one than we would have seen under Harris. That's the
Speaker 1: best case scenario and not necessarily the likeliest one, and
Speaker 1: I should re emphasize here that best case scenario still
Speaker 1: means that we will probably see a massive escalation in
Speaker 1: violence as the IDF seeks to force more people out
Speaker 1: of northern Gaza and in the conflict, with a large
Speaker 1: slice of Gaza permanently wrenched from Palestinian control and handed
Speaker 1: over to Israeli settlers, there is no version of what
Speaker 1: comes next that is not a calamity to the Palestinian people. Now,
Speaker 1: the signs from within the Israeli government on what a
Speaker 1: new Trump administration means for them are certainly bullish, you
Speaker 1: could say, and reading these tea leaves provides very little
Speaker 1: fuel for optimism. It Mar ben Vere, the Minister of
Speaker 1: National Security, posted yes with several less's and an emoji
Speaker 1: of a flexed bicep in a post on social media.
Speaker 1: When the first good return started coming in for Trump
Speaker 1: on the day of the election itself, and a sign
Speaker 1: of confidence in the coming results, bib netanyahuo fired his
Speaker 1: Defense minister Jove Gallant, who had been his primary point
Speaker 1: of contact with the Biden administration, and it's harder to
Speaker 1: imagine a much more direct sign of what he wants
Speaker 1: to do than that.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: I've struggled to present the sweep of possible results of this,
Speaker 1: and it bears reiterating that the bulk of predictions from
Speaker 1: Gazans who are plugged into the politics of the region
Speaker 1: are incredibly negative. Ahmed Fayad, an independent researcher in Israeli
Speaker 1: affairs who currently resides in central Gaza, told Al Jazeera
Speaker 1: that he felt Trump's influence would be entirely negative, adding
Speaker 1: that Trump was a quote more dominating figure than Biden,
Speaker 1: and his influence would allow net Nyahu to quote conquer
Speaker 1: Gaza quote amidst the weakened Palestinian front and absence of
Speaker 1: any Arab unity and solidarity, the whole Palestinian cause faces
Speaker 1: its worst threat yet. Now what does bear watching is
Speaker 1: the degree to which Biebe might face threats from his
Speaker 1: own right flank. Netniahu himself is almost certainly on the
Speaker 1: side of doing what will please his patron Trump all
Speaker 1: the more, and that would be forcing a quick, violent
Speaker 1: end to the fighting and taking Northern Gaza as the
Speaker 1: spoils of war. But this might bring him into conflict
Speaker 1: with radicals on his own side, who can't be placated
Speaker 1: by anything but what they would see as total victory.
Speaker 1: In the event net Nyahu feels pushed, it is not
Speaker 1: impossible that he will wind up in conflict with Trump.
Speaker 1: This has happened before, as BB's sense of self preservation
Speaker 1: led him to take actions that enraged Trump. The best
Speaker 1: example of this took place in the immediate aftermath of
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty election. If you want to think back
Speaker 1: to those happier days, b B was again the first
Speaker 1: world leader to call and offer Biden congratulations on his victory,
Speaker 1: as he was with Trump. This is a habit for
Speaker 1: the man, who, among other things, is an expert at
Speaker 1: toadying for favor with US leaders. Trump was livid, and
Speaker 1: he spoke out about this, telling Israeli journalist Barak Ravid
Speaker 1: that he believed that he had saved Israel from destruction,
Speaker 1: and in response, net Nyahoo had stabbed him in the back.
Speaker 1: I'm to quote now from an article in the BBC
Speaker 1: six Mister Trump accused mister net Yahoo of congratulating too
Speaker 1: quickly mister Trump's successor Joe Biden on winning the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty US election. Mister Trump disputed the election result, though
Speaker 1: his claims were never upheld. The first person who congratulated
Speaker 1: Joe Biden was Bebe, the man that I did more
Speaker 1: for than any other person I dealt with. Bibe could
Speaker 1: have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake. He
Speaker 1: was very early, mister Trump said, like earlier than most.
Speaker 1: I haven't spoken to him since.
Speaker 4: Fuck him.
Speaker 1: I actually don't know that he said fuck The actual
Speaker 1: text of the article says expletive him. But I'm assuming
Speaker 1: he said fuck him. I think that's probably a fair
Speaker 1: assumption for me to make. Now, some evidence does suggest
Speaker 1: that Trump and Bebe don't personally get along, as that
Speaker 1: quote I just read implies, certainly not to the degree
Speaker 1: that net Yahou and Biden once did once. I should
Speaker 1: say this may hinge partly on the fact that Trump
Speaker 1: really only believes in himself and his own benefit, whereas
Speaker 1: Joe Biden was a strong and committed bl in Israel
Speaker 1: and was willing to take actions against his own political
Speaker 1: self interest in furtherance of that belief. And we've all
Speaker 1: seen where those actions got him. Just last December, Trump
Speaker 1: attacked Netnyahoo at an early campaign rally in New York,
Speaker 1: saying bb had quote let us down by pulling Israeli
Speaker 1: support for the operation that killed Iranian General Cossam Solomani
Speaker 1: at the last minute. He also criticized the Israeli leader
Speaker 1: for not being prepared for Hermas's October seventh attack. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear here that these divisions between
Speaker 1: both men are blisteringly unlikely to mean anything that approaches
Speaker 1: relief for the Palestinian people, at least in the near term.
Speaker 1: The immediate and probably long term future of Gaza is
Speaker 1: much bleaker today than it was a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: The Guardian recently published an article interviewing former CIA director
Speaker 1: and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He predicted Trump would give
Speaker 1: Bibe a blank check for aggression which might invite the
Speaker 1: possibility of open war with Iran. Now that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that can lead one to panic, especially when
Speaker 1: you assume a guy like Panetta is privy to a
Speaker 1: lot of inside information. We may not be, but I'm
Speaker 1: actually not really sure that he is. I don't see
Speaker 1: any evidence from this article that Panetta is speaking from
Speaker 1: direct personal knowledge about extant plans to carry out an attack. Instead,
Speaker 1: he quoted Trump's description of the call that Trump had
Speaker 1: had with BB before the election, telling net, yahou do
Speaker 1: whatever you have to do. So Leon may just be
Speaker 1: working from the same information the rest of us have
Speaker 1: and coming to a somewhat different conclusion. I'm not as
Speaker 1: sure as he is about an imminent attack on Iran
Speaker 1: because Trump campaigned heavily on ending wars, and while I
Speaker 1: don't credit Trump is a particularly honest man, I do
Speaker 1: think he sees his personal benefit right now in being
Speaker 1: able to portray himself as a peacemaker, in part because
Speaker 1: he has so much domestically he wants to do, and
Speaker 1: so much else internationally he wants to do. Right, Expending
Speaker 1: a bunch of political capital d with the kinds of
Speaker 1: protests and unrest and even anger from his base that
Speaker 1: a war with Iran would mean, especially once it gets
Speaker 1: bogged down in the kind of violence that would come
Speaker 1: with that, He may not and likely doesn't see that
Speaker 1: as being of benefit to him. Now, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it will never happen. It doesn't mean his calculus won't change.
Speaker 1: I do foresee some situations in which Trump might decide
Speaker 1: that his personal benefit is in there being a wider
Speaker 1: ground conflict with Iran that US forces get drawn into.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll talk a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: the possibilities around this, and we're getting outside of the
Speaker 1: realm of kind of established fact at this point, but
Speaker 1: I do think it's worth considering some of this. But
Speaker 1: first consider these ads. So, when we talk about the
Speaker 1: possibility of a ground conflict with Iran starting between Israel
Speaker 1: and ira but almost inevitably drawing in more US forces,
Speaker 1: the known unknowns and unknown knowns in this situation are
Speaker 1: pretty staggering. If I let myself analyze every possibility, my
Speaker 1: mind can go to some dark places. Trump sees war
Speaker 1: with Iran as a negative, now, I'm quite sure, But
Speaker 1: how would he feel about it in the wake of, say,
Speaker 1: a Musk centered plan to in the Federal Reserve and
Speaker 1: tank the dollar in the wake of the changes that
Speaker 1: all of his immigration policies would make on the price
Speaker 1: of food, the Pression era levels of inflation and unemployment
Speaker 1: returning to the United States, and the attendant social unrest
Speaker 1: that that would cause. If Americans find themselves on the
Speaker 1: verge of food rights, perhaps Trump would gamble on war
Speaker 1: being the best distraction he could manage. It's certainly not impossible. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know how useful it is to bury myself
Speaker 1: in theoreticals and probabilities. The known threats are dire enough,
Speaker 1: and they demand full time awareness in order to attempt
Speaker 1: to counter and endure. So instead of spiraling, I'm going
Speaker 1: to leave you today with the words of another Gazan,
Speaker 1: Mohammed R.
Speaker 5: Mausch.
Speaker 1: He's a journalist who wrote an article for MSNBC right
Speaker 1: after the election titled My family and I Survived the
Speaker 1: War in Gaza. We know Trump's America won't save us,
Speaker 1: and here's Mohammed for us. The election of Donald Trump
Speaker 1: isn't just a blip on the political radar or a
Speaker 1: shift in foreign policy. It's a challenge to sustain existence.
Speaker 1: While the world seems intent on erasing us. It's about
Speaker 1: surviving seventy seven years under occupation and over a year
Speaker 1: of ongoing genocide, the very genocide I barely survived last December,
Speaker 1: when my family and I, including my elderly parents and
Speaker 1: three year old son, were buried under the rubble of
Speaker 1: what was once our home after it was struck by
Speaker 1: an Israeli fired US missile. The date December seventh, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. Our bones were crushed between layers of concrete
Speaker 1: and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark,
Speaker 1: buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece.
Speaker 1: The trauma of that night, in both its physical and
Speaker 1: emotional toll, of my son's small, fragile hand and clinging
Speaker 1: to mind, comes back to me now as Trump prepares
Speaker 1: to take power once more. I've seen how American political
Speaker 1: leader's toy with the idea of change. How they dress
Speaker 1: up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice,
Speaker 1: yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised
Speaker 1: hope and change we could believe in, yet we got
Speaker 1: more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging and
Speaker 1: yielding support for Israel, leaving US to live through even
Speaker 1: more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris's niceties included no concrete
Speaker 1: promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue
Speaker 1: financial support for Israel, and Trump's blundness as he promises
Speaker 1: to come back swinging reminds us not to hold out.
Speaker 4: Hope for change.
Speaker 1: So, you know, not much optimism here, but I do
Speaker 1: really recommend reading that article that MSNBC published. You know,
Speaker 1: it's bleak, but important, especially given the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: we may be soon entering a world where it would
Speaker 1: be harder for people like Muhammad to express their feelings
Speaker 1: and their truth to an audience. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: unlikely that a clamp down is coming on some of
Speaker 1: these things. It's hard to say how extensive it will be,
Speaker 1: but there's a threat that Israel and their backers see,
Speaker 1: and the way that public sympathy has built so quickly
Speaker 1: for Gaza in a way that wasn't present with a
Speaker 1: lot of previous stages of violence between Israel and Gaza.
Speaker 1: Right now, this is the result of a lot of
Speaker 1: videos spreading on social media. It's the result on voices
Speaker 1: from Gaza getting out and getting to people in a
Speaker 1: way they really hadn't before. And so one thing that
Speaker 1: does worry me greatly when I think about what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in Gaza under President Trump is not just
Speaker 1: what's going to happen to the people living there right now,
Speaker 1: but what's going to happen to their ability to tell
Speaker 1: their story to get information out to the rest of us.
Speaker 1: That is very much an open question at this moment,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly one that should be on your lips,
Speaker 1: and it's one that we will be investigating here at
Speaker 1: Cool Zone as long as we're able to continue doing
Speaker 1: that until next time. I'm Robert Evans. We'll be back
Speaker 1: tomorrow and every other day reporting on you know the world.
Speaker 3: Welcome to It Happened Here, a podcast that's about trade policy.
Speaker 4: Now I'm your host, Bia Wong.
Speaker 3: This is amazingly going to be the fun one of
Speaker 3: all of these episodes.
Speaker 4: It's about working tariffs. So it's gonna be a long week.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, That was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis,
Speaker 3: the one the only.
Speaker 2: Yes, Hello, I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff
Speaker 2: here and it could happen here. One of my favorite
Speaker 2: favorite topics I guess now, all.
Speaker 4: Right, Garash, we're putting you on the spot. What is
Speaker 4: a tariff? It's basically googling tariff.
Speaker 2: No, A tariff is when Trump says China's bad, so
Speaker 2: he makes China pay extra money to sell their goods
Speaker 2: to Americans, and luckily China pays for all of it,
Speaker 2: and the American consumer gets off with a boosting economy.
Speaker 4: That's at least what I've heard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So unfortunately for every one I don't know, I guess,
Speaker 3: I guess there's some acceleration this who are probably really
Speaker 3: excited about this most certainly. The way this actually works is, okay,
Speaker 3: so the government sets up a tariff, and that means
Speaker 3: if anyone is bringing a good into the US, they
Speaker 3: have to pay the tariff on it, and that money
Speaker 3: goes to the government. So, okay, There's been a long
Speaker 3: history of tariffs in the US. This is a huge
Speaker 3: domestic policy think, particularly in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: Be fucking boring.
Speaker 3: The incredibly short version of it is that the thing
Speaker 3: about tariffs is that, especially like tariffs on a specific sector,
Speaker 3: is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing kind
Speaker 3: of mostly, and they're bad for anyone trying to buy
Speaker 3: that good because it's now more expensive. So Trump's plan,
Speaker 3: and we're going to get into a bit more detail
Speaker 3: about this, because there's parts of Trump's tariff plan that
Speaker 3: everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that
Speaker 3: I don't know why they've forgotten about. But the basic
Speaker 3: plan is to impose something like a ten to twenty
Speaker 3: percent tariff on all goods that enter the US from anywhere.
Speaker 3: There's specifically one for Mexico, but the numbers on what
Speaker 3: the Mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's like twenty five percent. There's one where it's
Speaker 3: like two hundred and fifty percent. Of course, two interchangeable percentages. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then for China, it's supposed to be a tariff
Speaker 3: of somewhere between sixty sixty percent is the most commonly
Speaker 3: sided number. But he's also set one hundred percent.
Speaker 4: Tariff once again and basically the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so you know, part of what we, unfortunately
Speaker 3: the rest of us who live in the normal world,
Speaker 3: have to do is figure out what is actually going
Speaker 3: to happen if we get, for example, twenty percent tariffs
Speaker 3: on all goods entering the US. And a sixty percent
Speaker 3: tariff on goods from China. So the first thing you
Speaker 3: need to understand. I think most people kind of get
Speaker 3: this now. But the thing about a tariff is that
Speaker 3: you pay for it. So the way that it works
Speaker 3: in general is that this is just an additional cost
Speaker 3: for the company that's doing it, that's doing the like
Speaker 3: moving the good around, right, and so they are almost
Speaker 3: always going to just pass that cost directly on to you. Obviously,
Speaker 3: sometimes we've talked about pricing the way that pricing works
Speaker 3: a lot on this show. Companies tend not to want
Speaker 3: to raise prices, largely because of their effects on consumer
Speaker 3: happiness and brand loyalty and stuff like that. So sometimes
Speaker 3: people will just eat shit on it. But if you're
Speaker 3: talking about a sixty percent tariff, like you, the sixty
Speaker 3: percent tariff is going to be paid for by you.
Speaker 2: So that means that anytime we buy something that's either
Speaker 2: from Mexico or China or any of the other countries,
Speaker 2: that this will be applied to the easiest way for
Speaker 2: these for these companies to get around the tariff is
Speaker 2: just to pass off the cost of the consumer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's actually worse than that because and This
Speaker 3: is something I don't think people really understand when you
Speaker 3: think about global trade, right people tend to think about
Speaker 3: trade as something that happens between countries, and this is
Speaker 3: something that was an old you know dreamlike the anti
Speaker 3: globalization movement.
Speaker 4: People sort of understood this.
Speaker 3: And kind of don't now. Trade doesn't actually really happen
Speaker 3: between countries. Most trade is one company, an international company,
Speaker 3: moving a resource from one country to another. Right So,
Speaker 3: like trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse
Speaker 3: in one country to warehouse in a second country.
Speaker 4: Right now.
Speaker 3: I've seen a lot of people, and this ranges from
Speaker 3: like very very serious sort of you know, news sources
Speaker 3: and economists trying to sort of just directly model what
Speaker 3: the price increases are going to be. I've seen people
Speaker 3: be like, oh, your shirts are going to cost sixty
Speaker 3: percent more, or video games will stop existing because they're
Speaker 3: too expensive, and who gives a shit? Why are we
Speaker 3: even trying to do sectoral modeling of the impacts of this.
Speaker 3: If you try to impose a sixty to one hundred
Speaker 3: percent tariff on goods from China and a twenty percent
Speaker 3: tariff on all goes into the country, the economy will collapse.
Speaker 3: I don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't
Speaker 3: fucking happen. We're going to get into it a second.
Speaker 3: I guess the reason why people are pretending this is
Speaker 3: happening because the way they're doing the modeling kind of
Speaker 3: assumes that it won't, which is baffling, incomprehensible nonsense.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's especially amusing because the seemingly biggest issue
Speaker 2: this year around politics has been inflation, which has impacted
Speaker 2: every country around the globe. The US is actually whether
Speaker 2: that decently well, although there's been a catastrophic failure in
Speaker 2: communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from people
Speaker 2: on how they're still struggling with rising inflation. But still
Speaker 2: a big reason why Trump was elected is because he
Speaker 2: simply is not Joe Bideneh, and he's not from the
Speaker 2: Biden Harris administration, and there's this perception that he will
Speaker 2: be able to fix the economy, he will be able
Speaker 2: to get around inflation lower prices, when seemingly his main
Speaker 2: economic proposal will lead to what's probably going to be
Speaker 2: an economic collapse if it happens in the brutality of
Speaker 2: which he proposes.
Speaker 3: And there's another element of this right when I say
Speaker 3: that the likely result of Trump actually trying to implement
Speaker 3: his tariff policy is a global economic collapse. There's another
Speaker 3: part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten. And
Speaker 3: I don't know why they've forgotten this. I guess it's
Speaker 3: because nobody actually reads any of the things that Trump
Speaker 3: puts out on his website.
Speaker 2: Which is true. No one actually reads that stuff. It's nuts,
Speaker 2: especially his own supporters. Yeah, a majority of his own
Speaker 2: supporters do not pay attention to like Daily News.
Speaker 3: Yes, and now I remember this because I did an
Speaker 3: episode about these tariffs like six months ago. And one
Speaker 3: of the things about this, he has a thing called
Speaker 3: Agenda forty seven, right, which is his agenda for what
Speaker 3: he's going to do when he takes.
Speaker 4: Power, which no one has cared about.
Speaker 2: And now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals
Speaker 2: from like fucking two years ago with the headline breaking
Speaker 2: news Trump announces a new plan. They're like, no, he has.
Speaker 4: This, This a our old plans.
Speaker 2: This stuff is like two years old. He's been openly
Speaker 2: talking about all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Frages, And one of the important parts of this,
Speaker 3: I'm just gonna read this quote because it is a
Speaker 3: part of this has been ignored by every single fucking
Speaker 3: analysis I've seen from like fucking the Center for American Progress,
Speaker 3: who obviously we're gonna screw this up to like Stamford's labs,
Speaker 3: Like everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored
Speaker 3: this part, which is quote as one of his top
Speaker 3: economic priorities. President Trump will stop the flow of American
Speaker 3: jobs overseas by passing the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. Under
Speaker 3: the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff
Speaker 3: on American made goods that is higher than the tariff
Speaker 3: imposed by the US, President Trump will have the authority
Speaker 3: to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. Okay,
Speaker 3: So what this would do again is that any country
Speaker 3: that has a tariff already or imposes a tariff, And
Speaker 3: this is important if we get into a trade war
Speaker 3: where countries start imposing tariffs on each other in retaliation
Speaker 3: for their other terrorists, which is what happens when he
Speaker 3: did this trade war, which in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: That means that we're also going to impose a tariff,
Speaker 3: which means that the tariff rates don't stay at ten
Speaker 3: to twenty percent. They cyclically spiral upwards.
Speaker 2: That's just like an escalating series of terrorifts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thing is right, the policy process that
Speaker 3: they have on his page are like, well, okay, we're
Speaker 3: gonna do this, do like a presidential act, right, But
Speaker 3: the thing is the president actually has really, really, under
Speaker 3: a number of different acts, has extremely wide discretionary authority
Speaker 3: to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort
Speaker 3: of like cobble together some kind of bullshit excuse for it.
Speaker 3: And at that point you're relying on the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: to stop literally anything that Trump does, like don't give
Speaker 3: a shit.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe someone will like go up to like can Clarence
Speaker 3: Thomas and go like, hey, if we do this like
Speaker 3: importing new like windshield wipers for your RV is going
Speaker 3: to cost ten million dollars more or whatever, But like
Speaker 3: there's no shot of this stuff getting stuff. And the
Speaker 3: thing is right, the reciprocal tariff stuff. He could just
Speaker 3: do this through his existing teriff authority. He doesn't Actually
Speaker 3: you need to pass something through Congress. W should actually
Speaker 3: be I think tricky for him, but he doesn't need.
Speaker 2: To do you know what we need to do right now,
Speaker 2: Thomia just badly, badly put to a bunch of companies
Speaker 2: that are going to be absolutely fucking viscerated if this
Speaker 2: goes through.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump stands for anti capitalist action. He's going to
Speaker 2: destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can. Okay,
Speaker 2: we are back Mia. Let's hear how Trump is going
Speaker 2: to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of
Speaker 2: escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy and in doing so,
Speaker 2: but about the opportunity for Marxist to size power and
Speaker 2: change the world economic system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm going to read another quote from that
Speaker 3: same agenda forty seven thing quote. For example, food items
Speaker 3: like cereals, your other preparatory goods are tariffed at thirty
Speaker 3: two point nine percent by India and nineteen point five
Speaker 3: percent by China, and only three point one percent by
Speaker 3: the US. India applies a tariff of twenty five point
Speaker 3: three percent on transportation equipment, while the US only terrorists
Speaker 3: goes at two point nine percent. Now, those exact numbers
Speaker 3: are debatable, but it doesn't matter because these these are
Speaker 3: going to be vibes based ones based on how pissed
Speaker 3: off Trump is at a country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as Trump is usually a vibes based guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: especially when it comes to the economy, especially when it
Speaker 2: comes to like these numbers he's pulling out like between
Speaker 2: sixty to one hundred percent. He doesn't know what any
Speaker 2: of those numbers means. He's just thinking of a number
Speaker 2: and saying it out loud.
Speaker 3: And the thing about all of these things, right, even
Speaker 3: just the base twenty percent, or let's let's go to
Speaker 3: the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a ten
Speaker 3: percent tariff on all goods and a sixty percent tariff
Speaker 3: on Chinese goods. Right, that in and of itself blows
Speaker 3: a smoking crater in the world economy. And none of
Speaker 3: the assessments that you will read are talking about this.
Speaker 3: One of the things that they will mention that is true,
Speaker 3: but they're not, you know, getting to the importance of
Speaker 3: is that this affects stuff that's made in the US.
Speaker 3: Because the thing about things that are made in the
Speaker 3: US is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere,
Speaker 3: because that's how international supply chains work.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, even though we have through tariffs and moved
Speaker 2: all manufacturing of Toyota into the United states. You're saying
Speaker 2: that still some of the materials are not all solely
Speaker 2: made him produced within the country, and it actually requires
Speaker 2: unfeign trade.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and part of the problem I think of, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: so if you logically think out the conclusions of what
Speaker 3: that means.
Speaker 2: Right, first mistake Abia that you're trying to solve this
Speaker 2: problem through logic.
Speaker 3: Well, but here's the thing, right, Obviously Trump is not
Speaker 3: going to think through this, right, But I kind of
Speaker 3: expect people who are like writing about this for a
Speaker 3: living to do mildly better than this.
Speaker 2: And possibly some of the people that he like hires
Speaker 2: onto his cabinet and team.
Speaker 6: Maybe, but we'll.
Speaker 3: Say, no, I'm not talking about like his critics. Oh sure, sure,
Speaker 3: one of the numbers will see all the time. The
Speaker 3: Center for American Progress has this line of how the
Speaker 3: terrofts will function his attacks that cost the America consume
Speaker 3: for like seventeen hundred dollars a year.
Speaker 2: Right, which was the line that Kamala used pretty often. Yeah,
Speaker 2: framing as tariffs as like a sales tax.
Speaker 4: This is fucking horseshit.
Speaker 3: The only way you can think that the net effect
Speaker 3: of this would just be a seventeen hundred dollars tax
Speaker 3: is if you don't understand how the economy works at all. Right,
Speaker 3: So I went through and read this, and the way
Speaker 3: that they model it is just by like they find
Speaker 3: the like net dollar value of imported goods and then
Speaker 3: apply a tax to it, and then try to figure
Speaker 3: out like how much of those goods that the average
Speaker 3: person would buy in a year, and then increase the price.
Speaker 4: But and this is the thing that's very important.
Speaker 3: At the end of the analysis, right right at the
Speaker 3: very end, there's a little section where they say that
Speaker 3: they assumed this would have no other effects on the economy.
Speaker 3: This is unbelievably fucking stupid. Can I emphasize enough? Can
Speaker 3: you explain why that doesn't make any sense?
Speaker 7: So?
Speaker 3: Okay, So here's the thing. Right, prices go up. Now
Speaker 3: people can buy less things. What does that do to
Speaker 3: the economy, Well, it slows its growth rate. Right, Companies
Speaker 3: start to go out of business. And we're gonna get
Speaker 3: me into more of the ways that this plays out
Speaker 3: in a second. Right, But a bunch of people in
Speaker 3: a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly
Speaker 3: the reduction and consumer demand means that there's a fucking
Speaker 3: reduction necessary production, and this has cyclical effects throughout the
Speaker 3: entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs.
Speaker 3: And also, you know, the thing about those people who
Speaker 3: lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand
Speaker 3: because those people are now even less able to afford
Speaker 3: the stuff that's been increased by inflation prices, and this
Speaker 3: this spirals through the entire world economy.
Speaker 4: In order to.
Speaker 3: Understand what exactly this is going to do, I think
Speaker 3: we need to understand why, you know, because like if
Speaker 3: Kamala Harris, I don't know if it makes any difference
Speaker 3: in the election, but Kamala Harris walks of the stage
Speaker 3: and says this is going to cost you seventeen hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: She does not walk on the stage and say this
Speaker 3: is going to cause an economic collapse, right, And I
Speaker 3: think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into
Speaker 3: this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works
Speaker 3: at all, in a way that's even worse than it
Speaker 3: was even in like the twenty tens. Like in the
Speaker 3: twenty tens, I think people sort of had a vague
Speaker 3: understanding the thing that was happening to the economy was uberization,
Speaker 3: whatever you call it, was the expansion of gigwork. Right,
Speaker 3: there was sort of an understanding and a focus on
Speaker 3: the very sort of low level parts of the economy,
Speaker 3: like what are you a poor person doing for your job?
Speaker 4: Right? How does how does your income work?
Speaker 3: And not purely on these sort of like high finance
Speaker 3: or in the case in the case of what's been
Speaker 3: happening here, everyone has been unbelievably completely focused on like
Speaker 3: the Chips Act and like state led industrialization and all
Speaker 3: that stuff is fucking bullshit. It's it basically hasn't done
Speaker 3: anything yet, it's not going to do anything for like
Speaker 3: a decade, and it's not mostly what's going on in
Speaker 3: the economy. I've been holding my tongue on this for years,
Speaker 3: but the people who have been writing about the economy
Speaker 3: don't understand how the fuck it works because they've been
Speaker 3: completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this
Speaker 3: new era of state capitalism and no like the actual
Speaker 3: thing that's been happening in the economy. And I think
Speaker 3: if you are like a person who buys stuff, you
Speaker 3: probably understand this. But for some reason this has never
Speaker 3: made it to like economists or like people who fucking
Speaker 3: write about the economy for a lot. Thing is consumer
Speaker 3: to manufacturer sales. So this is stuff like Temu, This
Speaker 3: is stuff like shean who and I mean invented. It's
Speaker 3: a strong word, but they're one of the first people
Speaker 3: who sort of popularized this model, right, And this is
Speaker 3: the thing where you have a platform that lets people
Speaker 3: like nominally buy directly from the factories or from you know,
Speaker 3: the people who are producing fruit, right, and these factories
Speaker 3: aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods
Speaker 3: or like analytics tells them to order it, so they
Speaker 3: don't have a lot of the problems that other kind
Speaker 3: of like distribution models have. You have a bunch of
Speaker 3: good sitting in a warehouse, like you just don't have
Speaker 3: that because you don't start production until your sort of
Speaker 3: orders come in, your analytics come in. And the theory
Speaker 3: here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman.
Speaker 3: But of course a new kind of middleman emerged, and
Speaker 3: that is the drop shipper.
Speaker 4: God.
Speaker 3: So the drop shipper is just someone using the consumer
Speaker 3: to manufacturer pipeline. Right that the platforms that are supposed
Speaker 3: to let you the consumer sort of just like buy
Speaker 3: directly from the thing and cut out mailmen. It's just
Speaker 3: someone doing that but then turning around and selling you
Speaker 3: the result. And this has become just utterly fucking ubiquitous
Speaker 3: in the American economy. It's it's sort of like an
Speaker 3: integral part of the American scam economy now too, as
Speaker 3: the American economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and
Speaker 3: consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of
Speaker 3: like people trying to capitalize on like some fucking meme
Speaker 3: or some political thing. You know, you have all these
Speaker 3: people doing like drop ship t shirts right where they
Speaker 3: can immediately come in and.
Speaker 4: Ye sell all of this stuff.
Speaker 2: These like short lived like trend meme based either like
Speaker 2: fashion or even like goods. You know, you can talk
Speaker 2: about like the amount of like content creator merch that
Speaker 2: is all funneled through these like drop shipping companies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's it's also what's been it's a thing
Speaker 3: that's enabled like fast fashion to function in.
Speaker 4: The way that it is right now, right absolutely.
Speaker 3: And this has become what consumption is in large swaths
Speaker 3: of the world is from this sort of like direct
Speaker 3: to consumer drop shipping shit, right. Yeah, Now, the thing
Speaker 3: about about these drop shipping things is that their profit
Speaker 3: margins are really really low. They don't make that much money,
Speaker 3: and in fact, a lot of these things like hemorrhage
Speaker 3: money until they've basically you know, they do the thing
Speaker 3: that Amazon did, right, where like you lose money for
Speaker 3: a million years, but then eventually you have enough market
Speaker 3: chourney you start making money again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you make it so all your competitors basically
Speaker 2: can't function because you have prices that are so low.
Speaker 2: And then when you're the only one in the game
Speaker 2: with a sizeable power influence, you can raise prices and
Speaker 2: then you make tons of money. Also the Uber model,
Speaker 2: although Uber still is improfitable. Yeah, well so yeah, Uber
Speaker 2: will never make any money.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: But the other thing here that's important is that, you know,
Speaker 3: so the margins of a company like Temu, right, which
Speaker 3: is like probably the biggest of these sort of companies now,
Speaker 3: are low. But Temu technically has tech money, Like they
Speaker 3: have money to back them up, right, you know, who
Speaker 3: doesn't have an unbelievable amount of just like capital sitting
Speaker 3: around that they could just instantly pull from if suddenly
Speaker 3: there is I don't know, a sixty percent fucking price shock.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing you know,
Speaker 3: like tiny manufacturing firms that these drop shipping things use
Speaker 3: to produce all their stuff.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: That infrastructure is very fragile. It's it's margins are very bad.
Speaker 3: And oh guess what happens to that shit if you
Speaker 3: impose sixty percent terrafs on it?
Speaker 4: Right, it just shuts down because that's the easiest option, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, and presumably I think one of
Speaker 3: the other parts of this would be part of the
Speaker 3: reason this has been happening is that all of this
Speaker 3: office are being imported like under terriff loopholes. But like
Speaker 3: that loopholes not hard to close, right, What terraf loopoles
Speaker 3: are you referring to? Oh yeah, so I talked about
Speaker 3: this in the ten episode. Those loopholes on American terriffs
Speaker 3: were like, if you're if you're bringing stuff into the
Speaker 3: country that's below a certain value, it has to be
Speaker 3: above like a six hundred dollars something to like trigger
Speaker 3: a threshold, okay, to like activate the teriffs applying to it.
Speaker 3: So people just ship a bunch of like one billion
Speaker 3: boxes individually that are like five hundred and ninety nine
Speaker 3: dollars to go under the thing.
Speaker 2: So you're saying I can still maybe buy my new
Speaker 2: Sonic the Hedgehog PS five game, though, that should be fine.
Speaker 4: I'll be totally good. Oh god, okay.
Speaker 3: So the other part of this that's important, right, So
Speaker 3: this is the kind of I don't know of news
Speaker 3: the right word, but this is the kind of recent
Speaker 3: part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right,
Speaker 3: that gets just liquefied if these terrorists go through. These
Speaker 3: are enormous companies that you know are going to just
Speaker 3: eat shit, and those companies eating shit have these sort
Speaker 3: of effects we talked about earlier, right, which is it
Speaker 3: caused people to get fired, it causes growth collapses, it
Speaker 3: causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy things, and
Speaker 3: then also like demand decreases because people can't buy things.
Speaker 3: But this is like the new school supply chain stuff.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Temu's a product of really the last six or seven years,
Speaker 3: and it really only functions the way it does now
Speaker 3: in the lasts about four but the previous two eras
Speaker 3: of supply some logistics, right, which is sort of wal
Speaker 3: Mart and Amazon are both also almost completely dependent on
Speaker 3: Chinese supply chains.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a good JD super article which is they're
Speaker 3: like a business intelligence website, right, you know, talks about
Speaker 3: how Walmart imports seventy percent of all of it's goods
Speaker 3: from China.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that track seventy percent seven zero, right.
Speaker 3: And the reason that it works like this is because
Speaker 3: Walmart's entire business model, all of their supply chains, all
Speaker 3: of their logistics, everything that they do, right was was
Speaker 3: designed basically hand in hand to be integrated into Chinese
Speaker 3: economic production.
Speaker 4: And you can't just move that shit instantly, right.
Speaker 3: And this is also true of something like Amazon, right
Speaker 3: where Amazon, like sixty three percent of independent sellers on
Speaker 3: Amazon this is from the same source are Chinese.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: So what you're dealing with is vast parts of the
Speaker 3: American economy, right, The parts of the American economy that
Speaker 3: you interface to buy things are based on goods that
Speaker 3: are suddenly going to have like sixty to one hundred
Speaker 3: percent tariff stapled onto them. Now, the thing that people
Speaker 3: have been talking about as the like, oh well, here's
Speaker 3: the thing that will happen instead instead like, instead of
Speaker 3: the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this
Speaker 3: have happens, which is just that the economic bubble we're
Speaker 3: in pops and everything s to go to shit. People
Speaker 3: have been like, oh, well, this will just accelerate the
Speaker 3: shift of production of goods out from China. And like
Speaker 3: I've been talking about this for like a fuck decade, right,
Speaker 3: Like the journal Chwung is something that I talk about
Speaker 3: a lot that I record on. People really has been
Speaker 3: talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages.
Speaker 3: So people have been trying to move production out of
Speaker 3: China for ages. I mean, like one of the first
Speaker 3: big attempts to do this was in twenty eleven when
Speaker 3: there is there's a series of riots in China, and
Speaker 3: people tried to move production of goods out of China
Speaker 3: and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they
Speaker 3: couldn't do it was because you have to find a
Speaker 3: country that has both like a relatively skilled and educated
Speaker 3: labor force and also has the infrastructure to be able
Speaker 3: to like match Chinese production. And so they we're talking
Speaker 3: about things like they have to have like a functioning
Speaker 3: electrical grid that is stable enough for.
Speaker 4: Production to function.
Speaker 3: And this rules out an enormous number of countries and
Speaker 3: it's just really really hard. And yeah, like Chinese capital
Speaker 3: has been moving away from its sort of old centers
Speaker 3: and the prop of delta to.
Speaker 4: Places like Vietnam.
Speaker 3: Right, but and this is the fucking big one, right,
Speaker 3: A lot of a lot of what's been happening for
Speaker 3: people have been talking about this thing called quote quote
Speaker 3: unquote decoupling, which is which is this the separation of
Speaker 3: the US and Chinese economy so that they're not like it,
Speaker 3: they're trying with each other. People think this is good
Speaker 3: for ideological reasons, or they think it's just something that's happening,
Speaker 3: and it's not. It's not happening. You know what else
Speaker 3: isn't happening. It's us not plugging these products and services.
Speaker 2: I think we do legally have to plug them. So
Speaker 2: here they are. Here's the plugs for the products and services.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 3: Now, now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to
Speaker 3: buy these products and services, let's let's talk at at
Speaker 3: bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit.
Speaker 5: One.
Speaker 3: And I've been to something I've been saying on the
Speaker 3: show for years, like people have this sort of fantasy
Speaker 3: that what's happening is that, Okay, instead of making your
Speaker 3: thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And
Speaker 3: this means that American companies no longer have the supply
Speaker 3: chains running through China. That's not what's happening at all.
Speaker 3: On the financial front, where you have is actually increasing
Speaker 3: integration as as China attempts to sort of like you know,
Speaker 3: has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types
Speaker 3: of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to
Speaker 3: actually come in and invest and put capital in China. Right,
Speaker 3: the second thing that's happening is a lot of these
Speaker 3: supposedly like we're cutting China out of the supply chain things,
Speaker 3: have been a bunch of Chinese companies starts starting to
Speaker 3: set up production in Mexico. Now, the thing about that, right,
Speaker 3: if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea for
Speaker 3: getting us out of these tariffs, remember that Trump was
Speaker 3: talking about two hundred percent tariffs on Mexico, and that's
Speaker 3: the country that's supposed to like fucking get us out
Speaker 3: of this mess by like, oh, we'll be fine because
Speaker 3: like production will to shift away from China to like
Speaker 3: to where like a lot of the assumptions I was
Speaker 3: reading was like people were talking about, oh, the production
Speaker 3: will like twenty five percent of production will like.
Speaker 4: Shift to Canada. It's like, no, it won't do.
Speaker 3: Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do They're like,
Speaker 3: what are you talking about, Like.
Speaker 4: Canada doesn't have the population to do that. No, it doesn't.
Speaker 3: This is this sort of problem, right, you know, on
Speaker 3: the one hand, you know, China has been de industrializing
Speaker 3: for like a decade and a half now, right, and
Speaker 3: kind of slowly, but the percentage of the population that's
Speaker 3: working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and
Speaker 3: years and years and years. But the problem is that
Speaker 3: when you move production out of a place, you actually
Speaker 3: have to have a second place to produce it, and
Speaker 3: there just haven't been right, Like you It's it's pretty
Speaker 3: easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right,
Speaker 3: Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been has
Speaker 3: been moving to places like.
Speaker 4: Bangladesh and Vietnam for a while.
Speaker 3: But once you start getting into the stuff that China
Speaker 3: produces like the most of right, which is things like
Speaker 3: fucking cell phones, sort of mid tier commodity production that
Speaker 3: gets way way, way, way way harder.
Speaker 4: No, but the Chips Act will save us.
Speaker 3: Me.
Speaker 4: I heard it from everyone on the television. I just
Speaker 4: got this.
Speaker 3: This is the sort of thing about this, right is
Speaker 3: if you look, if you read the analysis that people
Speaker 3: are doing of this, they just sort of assume that
Speaker 3: you can just like, oh well, like naturally a bunch
Speaker 3: of the consumption that Americans are doing will stay the
Speaker 3: same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in China.
Speaker 3: It's like, okay, like where where are you finding these
Speaker 3: goods from? Like what production facilities are you just like
Speaker 3: suddenly that have just been like sitting there fallow are
Speaker 3: just suddenly gonna like a PEERI out of nowhere.
Speaker 4: And the answer is like, that's not going to happen.
Speaker 4: And it's not.
Speaker 3: It's not going to happen, partially because they don't exist.
Speaker 3: Partially because again, the immediate consequence of this is a
Speaker 3: massive economic labs. China's economy has already been slowing for
Speaker 3: the like basically, I mean it's been slowing since like
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight.
Speaker 4: Really wow, I see.
Speaker 3: Has an eleven kind of but it's especially been slowing
Speaker 3: in the past two or three years because of sort
Speaker 3: of COVID restriction stuff and also just a kind of
Speaker 3: lackluster rate of returns on their own, like they had
Speaker 3: their own version of the two thousand and eight housing bubble,
Speaker 3: and that's annihilated and unbelievable amount of money because it
Speaker 3: turns out investing in real estate doesn't work as is
Speaker 3: basis for your economy. But like that's the thing, right,
Speaker 3: if the Chinese economy fucking goes down, right, that's like
Speaker 3: that's seventeen percent of the world's GDP. Seventeen yeah, of
Speaker 3: the total GDP, right, And it's like the economy isn't
Speaker 3: national in a way where you can have an economic
Speaker 3: collapse in another country, in just a country that's that
Speaker 3: large and ignore it. And the thing I want to
Speaker 3: close on, and the reason we know that this is
Speaker 3: true is that it is actually possible kind of to
Speaker 3: restart america domestic manufacturing.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Reagan was able to do it in the eighties. And
Speaker 3: Reagan did it through this thing called the Plaza Accords
Speaker 3: where he basically he didn't literally put the prime ministers
Speaker 3: of Japan and West Germany at gunpoint, but he basically
Speaker 3: put them at gunpoint and forced them to increase the
Speaker 3: value of their currencies so that the US currency would devalue,
Speaker 3: which would admit which makes it like a more competitive
Speaker 3: export economy. And this actually brought back American manufacturing for
Speaker 3: a while until it had to all be reversed under
Speaker 3: the Clinton administration and the Reverse Plaza Accords, because the
Speaker 3: problem was when you sort of nuke to the zero
Speaker 3: sum manufacturing of a country like Japan, their fucking economy
Speaker 3: didn't work anymore. And in order to sort of bail
Speaker 3: out the Japanese economy and stop just a sort of
Speaker 3: world running economic collapse, I would have just like tore
Speaker 3: the absolute shit out of the economy. The US had
Speaker 3: to fucking reincrease the value of its currency and lose
Speaker 3: its whole domestic production base. Right You can't actually increase
Speaker 3: a production base in the world right now without decreasing
Speaker 3: it somewhere else, and that has sort of staggering, ripple
Speaker 3: economic effects for the entire global economy, which is why
Speaker 3: even if Trust's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause
Speaker 3: an economic collapse by like the direct effect on American consumers,
Speaker 3: it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on
Speaker 3: fucking people in China.
Speaker 2: So well, Mia, I think you might be overreacting here
Speaker 2: a little bit because at least food will be available, obviously,
Speaker 2: and I learned this on X My main source for
Speaker 2: news is that agriculture almost all done in the States,
Speaker 2: so we should be fine, Like, we'll still be able
Speaker 2: to eat food, right, I say, staring.
Speaker 3: No to the voice, No, you can't, because, unfortunately, think
Speaker 3: about American agricultures, it's all fucking mechanized agriculture. The thing
Speaker 3: about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part,
Speaker 3: and that's all fucking produced either in other countries or
Speaker 3: the John Deere fucking like tractor factories in the US
Speaker 3: are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that
Speaker 3: are made overseas.
Speaker 4: So also, we do import a great deal of food,
Speaker 4: well we do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even just talking about the food that we produce here, right, like,
Speaker 3: that's also gonna be fun.
Speaker 2: I wonder, I wonder where your strawberries in November are
Speaker 2: coming from. I think the other thing to keep in
Speaker 2: mind here is that this is only one aspect of
Speaker 2: how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies
Speaker 2: could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of vanish, and farms
Speaker 2: and other processing plants just to go out of business
Speaker 2: due to a lack of workers. And even some people
Speaker 2: on Trump's team have started to acknowledge this, mostly Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: who has opened said that Trump's term will involve some
Speaker 2: quote temporary hardship, so between tariffs and mass deportations. Like
Speaker 2: even people on his team know that this is going
Speaker 2: to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not.
Speaker 4: The like forever term.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yet he was still elected as the economically
Speaker 2: viable candidate.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think the last part we should say, and
Speaker 3: this is it's not that you can't like fucking obliterate
Speaker 3: a giant portion of the American economy and still come
Speaker 3: out extremely popular because you've crushed the American working class
Speaker 3: like that That's what Reagan did, right, Like Reagan and
Speaker 3: the Vulgar Shocks did this enormous, I mean, just put
Speaker 3: a crater in the American economy and in Reagan's first term,
Speaker 3: like the skyrocketing unemployment, just like real, real sort of
Speaker 3: economic devastation. But the thing about the vulgar shock was
Speaker 3: that the way he blew up the economy was really
Speaker 3: really good for people who like fucking owned assets, like
Speaker 3: people who who like owned bonds, like people like people.
Speaker 4: Who held other people's debt.
Speaker 2: He was great for those people, and like the burgeoning
Speaker 2: investment economy, which now kind of dominates our entire economic system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was incredible for those people. And so
Speaker 4: it was fine.
Speaker 3: But think about this economic collapse, that this is also
Speaker 3: going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a
Speaker 3: bunch of extremely wealthy and influential capitalists. So including by
Speaker 3: the way, Elon Musk, who's tesla's are produced in China,
Speaker 3: Like he has a gigafactory. He's a gigafactory in shing John.
Speaker 3: So we'll see if Trump actually is able to implement
Speaker 3: this stuff. I think he's able to on a policy level,
Speaker 3: it's just politically, can he actually do these tariffs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's unclear. It's also unclear what exact numbers he's
Speaker 2: gonna run with. A ten percent tariff will still be bad,
Speaker 2: but it's nothing compared to one hundred percent tariff. I
Speaker 2: think Trump by and large just says whatever comes into
Speaker 2: his head without thinking through the actual logistical ends of
Speaker 2: what he's saying. And I think most Trump's supporters do
Speaker 2: not take him literally as a person, at least they
Speaker 2: don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time.
Speaker 2: They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we'll have to see how this actually plays out.
Speaker 3: If it does play out in the ways that Trump
Speaker 3: has said that it is going to play out, it
Speaker 3: is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways
Speaker 3: that absolutely suck. So, yeah, that's that's happening here in
Speaker 3: the future. Maybe that's the name of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Right, So stock up on your PS fives now before
Speaker 2: they get harder to buy, and it'll be fine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there'll be nothing else bad that happens to the economy
Speaker 2: as long as you have your PS fives.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: People always want fucking books to the end of episodes,
Speaker 3: so I'm just putting books at the end of episodes.
Speaker 3: This is my plugging Chwang Chu a n G'll help.
Speaker 3: We'll put it in the description. It's a bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff about Chinese economics. Mostly it's the sort of economic
Speaker 3: history of visionally the socialist period and the transition to capitalism.
Speaker 3: But it also has a bunch of very very good stuff.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to understand the Chinese economy. And so if
Speaker 3: you want to be about ten years ahead of like
Speaker 3: guys who write for the econ hoymist if you read Schwang,
Speaker 3: you will end up being like ten years ahead of
Speaker 3: those guys.
Speaker 4: So yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 6: All right, welcome to it could happen here. And what
Speaker 6: it is today is me James and Mia Wong Hi, Mia, Hello, Hi.
Speaker 6: What we're here to talk to you about today is
Speaker 6: something else, which, despite my positive tone of voice, is
Speaker 6: sad and depressing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's just a lot of that, and like we
Speaker 6: don't want you to be too sad. It doesn't bear
Speaker 6: moping around, you know, like we've got time to get
Speaker 6: organized and that's what we should be doing. And also
Speaker 6: like just get out and go outside and see your
Speaker 6: friends and do things that bring you joy, Like we'll
Speaker 6: work out how to get through it. So you know, like, yep,
Speaker 6: I think it's really easy. And I found myself doing
Speaker 6: this stay at home and be sad, but don't like
Speaker 6: I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday,
Speaker 6: and I feel so much better. So I would advise you
Speaker 6: to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That
Speaker 6: would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking,
Speaker 6: I would I would skip this one and listen to
Speaker 6: the birds and uh, you know, enjoy the outdoors.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you know, if if you want the
Speaker 3: ideological framing event, the ideological framing of it is that
Speaker 3: morale is a charade of struggle. Yes, and it is
Speaker 3: very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible.
Speaker 6: So, yeah, we got four years. We can't be being
Speaker 6: moping around like we will get through it. We will
Speaker 6: find ways to make it better. And part of the
Speaker 6: way we do that, yeah, is keeping Amarell up and
Speaker 6: doing things that bring us joy. Thing that brings me
Speaker 6: joy is talking about roch Java, the Autonomous Administration of
Speaker 6: North and East Syria, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 6: that today. We're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy in
Speaker 6: his second term. So his previous foreign policy was a
Speaker 6: pretty mixed bag, and he bombed the shit out of
Speaker 6: the Islamic State, right cool. Based he also bombed the
Speaker 6: shit out of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi civilians. Not
Speaker 6: so cool. Also, we should note, not so different from
Speaker 6: every other president this century. Bombing civilians has been pretty
Speaker 6: much the through line of American foreign policy in that
Speaker 6: part of the world for a very long time, in
Speaker 6: particular in the Trump administration. I want to talk about
Speaker 6: there was a single US strike cell called Talent Annvil.
Speaker 6: I think they were mainly like CAG guys from what
Speaker 6: I read, so Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys
Speaker 6: who were making these decisions. They hired a office building
Speaker 6: in Syria, and these guys were constantly looking at drone
Speaker 6: feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes
Speaker 6: on various targets. Right, I'm not sure if they had
Speaker 6: the CAAG guys in the watching computers. I'm not entirely sure,
Speaker 6: and like, well he didn't have someone else who knows,
Speaker 6: But this strike sale dropped more than one hundred and
Speaker 6: twenty thousand bonds, and Jesus Christ, yeah, yeah, the amount
Speaker 6: of ordinance we dropped on Syria, it is insane. It
Speaker 6: circumvented procedures are in place to prevent Philian deaths. In
Speaker 6: order to do so, they had embedded lawyers who were
Speaker 6: supposed to approve the strikes. But these lawyers tried to
Speaker 6: raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless.
Speaker 6: They weren't hitting things that were actual targets, and they
Speaker 6: sort of ran into an organizational brick wall. At some point,
Speaker 6: pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 6: which it's not usual.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that'd be pretty fucked for a fighter pilot
Speaker 3: to be like, No, I don't think I've ever.
Speaker 4: Heard of that before.
Speaker 6: No, So I found this out in uh well, I
Speaker 6: think it was the New York Times. In New York Times,
Speaker 6: a pretty good investigation which we linked in our sources.
Speaker 6: And yeah, it's like a throwaway line, but I would
Speaker 6: love to hear more about that. It could have been
Speaker 6: a drone pilot, which is slightly different, gig. I guess
Speaker 6: you know, if you're seeing north of Las Vegas there
Speaker 6: fling a drone, kind of a different scene. So in
Speaker 6: the battle to defeat the Islamic State, thousands of innucent
Speaker 6: people lost their lives. As we reached the end of
Speaker 6: that battle, Donald Trump, who's president at the time, personally
Speaker 6: called erda one, who's the president of Circuit at the time.
Speaker 6: Right in late twenty eighteen, Trump asked the one, if
Speaker 6: we withdraw a soldiers, can you clean up ISIS. That's
Speaker 6: the quote, According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters,
Speaker 6: at One replied that Turkish forces were capable of a mission. Quote,
Speaker 6: then you do it, Trump told him, and US as
Speaker 6: National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was also on the
Speaker 6: call to quote start work for withdrawal of US troops
Speaker 6: from Syria. What this resulted in was US troops putting
Speaker 6: out from some locations in Syria right local people threw
Speaker 6: tomatoes at them. Even worse than the tomatoes were the
Speaker 6: fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey,
Speaker 6: of course, free reign to attack the Autonomous Administration North Nessyria,
Speaker 6: which it did in twenty eighteen it did again in
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen. Those two operations to claim considerable ground in
Speaker 6: Syria cost countless civilian lives. Continue to perpetrate human rights
Speaker 6: abuses to rehabilitate people from ISIS and other Jahadi groups
Speaker 6: as Turkish free Syrian Army, and they kill some people
Speaker 6: who were people I care about, and I continue to
Speaker 6: care about the cause of Rajava or Autonomous Administration in
Speaker 6: North Nessyria very deeply. And it really fucking sucks to
Speaker 6: think about the potential of the US abandoning those people. Again,
Speaker 6: not that Biden has done very much. Yeah. Now, I
Speaker 6: think this anecdote, right of what Trump does with one
Speaker 6: tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy,
Speaker 6: which is he really sees it as very transactional, which
Speaker 6: is not different from everything else he does. I guess
Speaker 6: like he's a very transactional person, and he seems really
Speaker 6: only to be concerned about what he can get out
Speaker 6: of it. So like in this case, I guess he
Speaker 6: wants to say he bought US troops home from Syria,
Speaker 6: like he's anti war. This is one of his things,
Speaker 6: he says now, right, but he's prepared to also in
Speaker 6: the case of the bombing, Right, he's not so concerned
Speaker 6: with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that
Speaker 6: he'd he was the one who defeated isis right? A
Speaker 6: bomber couldn't do it. He did it, and he did
Speaker 6: it on a pile of civilian remains, and also using
Speaker 6: chiefly the Syrian Democratic Forces, right, not US forces. There
Speaker 6: were US forces on the ground. They were engaged in combat,
Speaker 6: but in minuscule numbers compared to SDF, who lost fifteen
Speaker 6: thousand of their children in a battle against ISIS. And
Speaker 6: I think Trump would be very willing to admit that
Speaker 6: he's transactional, right, Like, that's kind of his brand, is
Speaker 6: like America first and fuck everyone else. So I think
Speaker 6: he'll probably be similar in this term.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: He will act unilaterally, He'll pivot whenever the fuck he
Speaker 6: feels like it. He will continue with his affection for
Speaker 6: strong men and dict caters all around the world. But
Speaker 6: a lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term,
Speaker 6: and I think it's illustrative for us to think about
Speaker 6: how he will engage with things that have changed. So
Speaker 6: what has changed. There's a much larger conflict between Russia
Speaker 6: and Ukraine now, and that conflict has been seen massive
Speaker 6: and overt support both from the USA and for the
Speaker 6: rest of NATO. There's been a revolution in Memma. I
Speaker 6: suppose he doesn't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really doubt maybe some of the like weird
Speaker 3: pro coup meaning from the right guard to him, Yeah, perhaps.
Speaker 6: Or like, I mean, the parallels between the COO and
Speaker 6: Memma and January sixth are pretty obvious, right, Okay, Look,
Speaker 6: if January sixth to the landing, it lived a lot
Speaker 6: like that, except that it was a military party, not
Speaker 6: just a political party. The Islamic State doesn't exist as
Speaker 6: a territory identity, but it very much does exist as
Speaker 6: a terrorist group, which continues to and has actually increased
Speaker 6: its activity this month with sleeper cells continued, suicide bombing
Speaker 6: has continued, and the SDF continue with their anti ISIS operations.
Speaker 6: Without US support, those would be harder. And so we
Speaker 6: have to ask, I guess on what Trump's going to
Speaker 6: do with these things? And I want to look at
Speaker 6: a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said
Speaker 6: on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on
Speaker 6: the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed
Speaker 6: so far. We're recording this on Tuesday to twelfth, so
Speaker 6: if someone gets appointed before you hear this, that's why
Speaker 6: we've missed them out. So I guess to start with
Speaker 6: Trump's foreign policy, we should talk about his number one
Speaker 6: like peer competitor, which is China in his eyes right,
Speaker 6: not a big China appreciator. So I looked at his
Speaker 6: campaign website for this, which really has some just incredible
Speaker 6: use of capital letters. He just fucking does what he wants.
Speaker 6: It's wild to see. So chiefly one of the things
Speaker 6: that he's been on about for a while now is
Speaker 6: tariffs on Chinese made goods, right, as means the feign policy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we just we talked about this last episode.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you will have heard about tariffs at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So as we've previously mentioned, right, he's talked about these tariffs.
Speaker 6: These tariffs would cost a lot of money, and they
Speaker 6: would increase the cost of you going shopping.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they would probably destroy vast whilest of the
Speaker 3: global economy. Yes, both the Chinese and the American economy, Yes,
Speaker 3: sort of implode. And then all these countries in Africa
Speaker 3: and you know, me and lar for instance, exports a
Speaker 3: lot of these rare earth metals to China, right, and
Speaker 3: a lot of countries in Africa do too. Aside from
Speaker 3: the economic sort of aggression, it stands on, Taiwan is weird,
Speaker 3: which is normally where we would like expect to see
Speaker 3: the most like physical friction between US and China.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: Mike Pompeo has pressed for the USA to formally recognize
Speaker 6: Taiwan before, which would be a step you know, there'd
Speaker 6: be a pretty big swing. Trump, on the other hand,
Speaker 6: seems to want Taiwan to pay the United States for
Speaker 6: being its ally right now, Yeah, then this is like
Speaker 6: one of his big.
Speaker 4: Sort of foreign poles super principles, is.
Speaker 3: Like trying to get people to pay him for stuff
Speaker 3: because that's sort of the only way his brain works.
Speaker 3: But I remember this was NATO a lot, whereas this
Speaker 3: whole line on NATO that like NATO should be like
Speaker 3: paying us because people like you're not spaying it off
Speaker 3: on defense, so we're like paying all the defense budgets.
Speaker 3: This is like one of his kind of Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: been his hobby horse. Yeah, like floats around at his brain,
Speaker 3: sort of colliding with its walls. Yeah, empty space. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like a pink bung ball.
Speaker 6: Ironically, like in the time that Trump's been out of
Speaker 6: of is Russian aggression has led NATO members to spend
Speaker 6: more on defense, yeah, rather than Donald Trump lambasting them.
Speaker 6: So one of his big things is that Taiwan should
Speaker 6: pay the United States. But it would seem very unlikely
Speaker 6: that he if he's not going to abandon Taiwan, I
Speaker 6: think because it gives him a place to grand stand
Speaker 6: on China.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also, like you know, I mean, one of
Speaker 3: the things about Trump is that one of the best
Speaker 3: ways to sort of influence him.
Speaker 4: Is just get a world leader in a room with
Speaker 4: him alone. Yes.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, well fortunately for us, Trump does not speak Chinese
Speaker 3: and she doesn't seem to like him very much.
Speaker 6: So yeah, yes, we won't be here. We won't be
Speaker 6: joining the PSC anytime soon. China, along with Russia right
Speaker 6: to countries we've spoken about most of both make big
Speaker 6: plays in Africa. Russia has rebranded what was Wagner as
Speaker 6: the Africa Cores, and they're sort of providing support to
Speaker 6: regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise. Yeah, they
Speaker 6: are like sort of classic mercenary shit, like it's your state,
Speaker 6: illegitimate and does it lack the capacity to do the
Speaker 6: violence it needs to maintain itself? Don't worry. Here are
Speaker 6: some heres, some psychopaths from Russia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's just a lot of people, I think
Speaker 3: because like a lot of these sort of governments will
Speaker 3: kind of like do their like like put a red
Speaker 3: Bereton and start doing their anti imperial as cosplay and
Speaker 3: then you like read the like the fine print of
Speaker 3: the contracts they've signed with like Africa Korra, thing that
Speaker 3: like you expect to be spelled like Africa and Core
Speaker 3: with a K like Kalo rps like and it's like,
Speaker 3: oh okay, so, like they've signed away a bunch of
Speaker 3: the country's mineral rights and like they've signed away a
Speaker 3: bunch of these specific minds to these mercenary groups. It's like,
Speaker 3: oh okay, so this is like awesome. This is also
Speaker 3: just imperialism. It's just new management.
Speaker 6: Yeah exactly, Yeah, it's just different imperialism. And then China
Speaker 6: has big plays in Africa too, Like I've personally seen
Speaker 6: a lot of Chinese owned minds in Africa, Chinese roads
Speaker 6: in Africa. China does also like offer infrastructure. Chinese does
Speaker 6: a kind of quid pro quo. It doesn't come in
Speaker 6: like with the violence like Russia does. It comes in
Speaker 6: with that will build your hospital if we can have
Speaker 6: all your natural resources. US policy in Africa is pretty
Speaker 6: much to stop those two countries getting too much influence.
Speaker 6: The Biden administration is as many liberals are right, like,
Speaker 6: there's actually not that much difference between what Biden and
Speaker 6: Trump will do in Africa. The difference is Biden is
Speaker 6: smart enough not to say it. Trump's ability to do
Speaker 6: anything useful in Africa is going to be masked by
Speaker 6: his massive racism, Like when he says things like shitthhole countries,
Speaker 6: it becomes a lot harder for the US to do
Speaker 6: anything in Africa that isn't tinged by that, right, Like
Speaker 6: that doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious.
Speaker 6: US politicians rarely talk about Africa, they rarely campaign on
Speaker 6: what they were going to do in Africa, and so
Speaker 6: pretty much the only things we're going to hear from
Speaker 6: Donal Trump at Africa, I would imagine, are going to
Speaker 6: be when he lets his racism out. Yeah, that will
Speaker 6: have results for like US credibility. Also, my guess is.
Speaker 3: We see intensifications of sort of US drone strikes, particularly
Speaker 3: in the Horn, and we see like like all of
Speaker 3: the stuff that Biden is doing, but worse and killing
Speaker 3: even more people.
Speaker 6: Somehow, Yeah, I would imagine that we will see these
Speaker 6: more aggressive throne strike especially against like Islamist groups in Africa.
Speaker 6: That US has special forces deployments in a few places
Speaker 6: in Africa, which will probably maintain I would imagine, Like,
Speaker 6: I don't think those are things that Trump would He
Speaker 6: wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them, I guess, And
Speaker 6: it may not even know about them. So yeah, I
Speaker 6: think we will see little change in Africa would be
Speaker 6: my guess.
Speaker 4: Mildly worse.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I talk of mildly worse. Mere The thing
Speaker 6: that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to
Speaker 6: pivot to advertisements, which we must do now.
Speaker 3: That was that was a great one, holding out on
Speaker 3: you for three years, the good ad pivots.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, there it is. That's what we've got for you.
Speaker 6: All right, we're back. So I want to talk about Europe.
Speaker 6: As you've heard in the Tariff's episode, right, he wants
Speaker 6: to put tariffs on European goods. European Union is going
Speaker 6: to slap tariffs right back on American goods. That doesn't
Speaker 6: really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA
Speaker 6: very very hard. One thing that the USA might stop
Speaker 6: exporting is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear Trump
Speaker 6: he called Olensky the greatest salesman on Earth, but it
Speaker 6: was also claimed that he can personally end the war
Speaker 6: in twenty four hours. I don't think that means that
Speaker 6: he will be deploying himself to the down bas a
Speaker 6: like a gun dam, but he claimed he can do
Speaker 6: this with his negotiating skills, this seems unlikely. To put
Speaker 6: it mildly, I don't think that it would be possible
Speaker 6: to end this war in twenty four hours if both
Speaker 6: sides declared peace right now, getting communications to their frontline
Speaker 6: troops would be a challenge in twenty four hours in
Speaker 6: some places. Yeah. So the way I interpret this, and
Speaker 6: I may be wrong here, is that he is likely
Speaker 6: to leverage the support that the United States gives to
Speaker 6: Ukraine in order to force Zelensky into an unfavorable settlement,
Speaker 6: which would achieve his goal of a being able to
Speaker 6: say he stopped giving American money to Ukraine, which has
Speaker 6: been a big talking point for the Like every time
Speaker 6: you sat with the Western North Carolina right after the
Speaker 6: hurricane or these Republicans sort of talking points were like, oh, well,
Speaker 6: all the money is in Ukraine, so we can't have
Speaker 6: fucking MREs for people in Western North Carolina, Like FEMA
Speaker 6: has no money because we sent Ukraine some memphors. This
Speaker 6: is very silly, right, This is it's not a zero
Speaker 6: sum game. It's not really a reasonable critique, but it's
Speaker 6: one that Trump has kind of managed to stick in
Speaker 6: the culture was his base seems to see the money
Speaker 6: going to Ukraine is directly coming from things that would
Speaker 6: otherwise be going to them, which he would benefit from
Speaker 6: it if he could bring this war to a close,
Speaker 6: right jd Vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between
Speaker 6: Russia and Ukraine, which yeah, he's going to minister the
Speaker 6: DMZ like yeah, like this did we really want this?
Speaker 6: Are we going to have troops out like we do
Speaker 6: in South Korea? For you know when was a career
Speaker 6: around the nineteen fifty seventy years, right, And I don't
Speaker 6: think that's really really.
Speaker 3: What they The thing what DMC is no one actually
Speaker 3: likes them. No, this sucks, It sucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're awful.
Speaker 6: It's just a bit of land that you can yeat
Speaker 6: weapons over each other. Like especially in link modern warfare,
Speaker 6: they're not that effective at stopping to be bull fighting. Right,
Speaker 6: But very funny that North's career will be two for
Speaker 6: two on DMZs in wars it has been involved with
Speaker 6: huge dubb for them. He essentially seems to be advocating
Speaker 6: for exactly the peace settlement that Putin has proposed and
Speaker 6: that has been rejected multiple times. Several sources I've seen
Speaker 6: suggest that Trump has spoken to Putin quite a few
Speaker 6: times since leaving office. This has planned for Ukraine certainly
Speaker 6: seems closer to the Russian one than the Ukrainian one,
Speaker 6: the Ukrainian one being stop invading us and go home,
Speaker 6: and the Russian one being, well, we'll just keep all
Speaker 6: the stuff we've taken so far and then add a
Speaker 6: buffer zone in between, and Ukraine can keep whatever's left
Speaker 6: of its country. Right. What's interesting to me is what
Speaker 6: other than NATO members will do in the event of
Speaker 6: the US reducing its AID. I would suspect that they
Speaker 6: will try and step up and meet that gap. It
Speaker 6: might also result in the US put certain restrictions on
Speaker 6: its AID.
Speaker 4: Right, how it can be used, where it can be
Speaker 4: used crucially.
Speaker 6: Right, they don't like Ukraine using things to attack in
Speaker 6: Russia proper. They don't mind am using them to attack
Speaker 6: Russian forces, but not within Russia. I did see a
Speaker 6: picture yesterday of a I think it was three guys
Speaker 6: from Rogue I think it's called, which is a unit
Speaker 6: within the International Legion who had been killed within Russia.
Speaker 6: And they had a lot of like eighty fours and
Speaker 6: things like that, right, like US anti tank weapons, but
Speaker 6: the United States doesn't want Ukraine using the long range
Speaker 6: artillery and stuff it's given it to yeat projectiles at Moscow.
Speaker 6: I can see a situation where if the US draws
Speaker 6: down some bit aid, European allies of Ukraine might not
Speaker 6: play some of those restrictions on their aid. That could
Speaker 6: lead to some interesting complications for Russia. Right if Ukraine
Speaker 6: is more effective, like if they get more aid from
Speaker 6: Europe and Europe doesn't place restrictions on the aid, they
Speaker 6: could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going
Speaker 6: to be good for Putin and it's probably not going
Speaker 6: to be good for like bringing I mean, unless they
Speaker 6: can deal some really crippling blows. It might not be
Speaker 6: good for bringing the war to an end. But maybe
Speaker 6: it will. Maybe they've done some pretty effective things with
Speaker 6: not a huge amount so far.
Speaker 4: I don't know. Maybe they get lucky on a strike
Speaker 4: on the Kremlin or something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, just the one like I mean, yeah, I'm
Speaker 6: sure that would be their strategy if they wouldn't have
Speaker 6: they didn't have restrictions, would be to just keep pounding
Speaker 6: places they think Putin might be.
Speaker 3: This is the history of Russian warfare. Dumber things that
Speaker 3: have happened and have lost Russia wars. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: a lot dumber than that. So yeah, I don't think
Speaker 3: that Ukraine will be screwed if the US pulls out.
Speaker 3: I do think it will be a lot harder for them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And you know, if that's something, there are a
Speaker 6: lot of US sits and still fighting in Ukraine. Would
Speaker 6: be pretty devastating to abandon Ukraine. And I think also
Speaker 6: just from the sort of stopping Russian aggression standpoint, it's
Speaker 6: much better to stop it here than somewhere else. But yeah,
Speaker 6: we will see. I guess European countries are really ramping
Speaker 6: up their defense, but right now the US is like
Speaker 6: the heart of the military industrial complex and Europe really
Speaker 6: can't keep up with the US production. Of course, the
Speaker 6: US being the heart of the military industrial complex does
Speaker 6: mean that a lot of Trump donors will probably be
Speaker 6: able to leave ridge of their donations to his campaign,
Speaker 6: and so we might not see as much of a
Speaker 6: drawdown of Bay to Ukraine as we're worrying about here.
Speaker 6: May talking of launching things from a long distance at
Speaker 6: a very small target, I would like to launch these
Speaker 6: advertisements from iHeart mean the advertising department directly to your ears, Heiger.
Speaker 4: It's all so bad.
Speaker 3: As we were recording this, it's come out that the
Speaker 3: new Secretary of Defense is going to be Pete Hegseth,
Speaker 3: who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs
Speaker 3: are real.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this guy who has not washed his hands in
Speaker 6: ten years.
Speaker 4: Great. I mean at least he might die of COVID. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say he made it. Wow. Sorry that
Speaker 6: that that hair is really something. Oh that's not good
Speaker 6: at all. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Wait what On June fourteenth, twenty fifteen, hag Seth accidentally
Speaker 8: hit a west poind juror with an act a live
Speaker 8: cube like, oh, I think it was incredible.
Speaker 6: Let's have that link pulled up. Alright, this video is unavailable,
Speaker 6: all right, No, we're finding this video that nothing disappears
Speaker 6: from the internet. All right, here we go. No, my god,
Speaker 6: this is just clown ship. Like I need to write. Listen,
Speaker 6: if you were hit in the dick and balls by
Speaker 6: an act thrown by future Defense secretary, please contact cool
Speaker 6: Zone Media. iHeartMedia dot com. I hope the VA is
Speaker 6: paying for this man's benefits.
Speaker 9: It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen someone do. Like,
Speaker 9: in the course of reporting for this show. Yeah, it's amazing,
Speaker 9: like very funny. Again, please contact us. I hope you're okay.
Speaker 9: Service related injury. Yeah, so that's that's peak.
Speaker 6: Hegg Seth, right, future sec def also former reservist who
Speaker 6: who deployed to Guantanamo as an Indiant try platoon leader
Speaker 6: at Guantanamo. I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in
Speaker 6: twenty twelve, and previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He
Speaker 6: did voluntary two voluntary deployments or he's in two locations
Speaker 6: in IRAQII. So he's hit the greatest hits of US
Speaker 6: foreign policy in the last twenty years. I guess he's
Speaker 6: made his career as a Fox News pundit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's just like a right wing gooul.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean in the last Trump administration when he
Speaker 6: was punditing, he advised Trump had been considering pardoning several
Speaker 6: war criminals and did pardon several war criminals. Right, and
Speaker 6: Hexseth was one of the people who A he talked
Speaker 6: about on Fox News, well he was advising Trump to
Speaker 6: do it, and B he was advising Trump to do it.
Speaker 6: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can read up about the Trump partons of
Speaker 4: war criminals.
Speaker 3: It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in
Speaker 3: by his own Special Forces unit, Like do you know
Speaker 3: how bad?
Speaker 4: How like fucking hideous?
Speaker 3: The shit you have to do is for like for
Speaker 3: like your own guys in a special Forces unit to
Speaker 3: be like, holy.
Speaker 4: Shit, we have to stop this guy. Yeah, Like it's awful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean if you should look up Clint Laurance's
Speaker 6: stuff as well, like l O I NC if you're
Speaker 6: interested in this stuff. He was convicted I think of
Speaker 6: two murder accounts for ordering his soldiers to fire and
Speaker 6: unarmed people. And then yeah, the other one was a
Speaker 6: Green Beret named Matt Goltschin who was also charged with
Speaker 6: the murder of someone in Afghanistan, someone who had been
Speaker 6: making IDs. So like, I think we can see where
Speaker 6: this guy is going. We've just found this out as
Speaker 6: well as we're recording for context. Like that's quite troubling. Yeah.
Speaker 6: His other two foreign policy appointments that I've seen so
Speaker 6: far have been less so look, i'd say less so.
Speaker 6: Marco Rubio is a third right, Like, I think we
Speaker 6: all know that I share very little with Marco Rubio
Speaker 6: on Turkey and Rajaba. He is good. He is not
Speaker 6: a fan of Verta one. He's in contact with Googlanists.
Speaker 6: He kind of puts Turkey in the in the bricks
Speaker 6: box is a good yeah, which which leads us to
Speaker 6: the very funny idea of Marco Rubio ordering a drone
Speaker 6: strike on airicc Adams.
Speaker 3: I mean, well, here's the thing though, Good's dead now,
Speaker 3: so so like there's like a secession crisis of like
Speaker 3: who's gonna.
Speaker 6: Have the goodinist anti pope Mark Rubio. Yeah, that could
Speaker 6: be very good for Rajava at least right the big
Speaker 6: concern among those of us who carry deeply about Rajava
Speaker 6: has been that Trump will abandon them as he did
Speaker 6: in the past. Right, And so I guess we're looking
Speaker 6: for glimmers of hope. And I think Rubio kind of, oddly,
Speaker 6: weirdly was one. Compared to I was expecting more of
Speaker 6: the hegths, like Fox News commentator type people in foreign
Speaker 6: policy positions, because Trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy,
Speaker 6: and like it's an area where he can kind of
Speaker 6: give something to those kind of like insane far right
Speaker 6: commentator types. He all also did appoint Mark Waltz. I
Speaker 6: think could be Wolls He's one of the first special
Speaker 6: Army special forces guys serving Congress, maybe the first as
Speaker 6: a national security advisor. Walls is a member of the
Speaker 6: Kurdish Caucus in Congress, so again positive for his JA there.
Speaker 6: Talking of Army special forces, there's one more insane Trump
Speaker 6: foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss, and that
Speaker 6: is his desire to use the United States Army in Mexico.
Speaker 6: I'm just going to read from his campaign website here.
Speaker 6: President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as
Speaker 6: he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval
Speaker 6: embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict
Speaker 6: maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, and designate cartels
Speaker 6: as foreign terrorist organizations and choke off the access to
Speaker 6: the global financial system. President Trump will get the full
Speaker 6: cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels or else
Speaker 6: expose every bribe and kick back allows these criminal networks
Speaker 6: to preserve their rain. He will ask Congress to ensure
Speaker 6: that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty.
Speaker 6: There's a lot there. The way that Donald Trump helped
Speaker 6: defeat ISIS was exclusively by bombing things and with some
Speaker 6: small contributions from US grand troops, but we don't really
Speaker 6: have a partner force in Mexico like that, and I think,
Speaker 6: especially with the new administration in Mexico and especially with
Speaker 6: Trump proposing one hundred percent tariffs on Mexican goods, we're
Speaker 6: unlikely to find one. Which leaves the very strange kind
Speaker 6: of prospect of US troops carrying out like unapproved, undeconflicted
Speaker 6: hits on Mexican nationals in Mexico, which like it's an
Speaker 6: act of war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you are.
Speaker 6: Invading Mexico, is what you're doing. I should point out
Speaker 6: that the Bortac under Biden did shoot one Mexican national
Speaker 6: this year, who was he was holding up migrants with
Speaker 6: a gun. He's rubbing with a gun. It wasn't It's
Speaker 6: a place where I've been dozens of times where they
Speaker 6: shot here and they didn't seem to be much fuffle
Speaker 6: about that. But that is not invading Mexico.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like if they're invading Mexico, like you knows, as
Speaker 3: close as American Mexican sort of security cooperation has been
Speaker 3: and as many people as that's killed from the Mexican side,
Speaker 3: like that's oh boy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like it remains to be seen how much of
Speaker 6: this actually happens. Right, Mexico has a new president, the
Speaker 6: United States has a new president. They're not exactly politically
Speaker 6: fellow travelers, I'll say that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean, I will say, like Armlow and
Speaker 3: Trump got along like decently. Well, yeah, largely off of
Speaker 3: Omblows like anti immigrant policies, but I don't know if
Speaker 3: that's going to work with China bomb.
Speaker 6: Like and like in the final year of Armlow, like
Speaker 6: they definitely they did a lot to help Biden within
Speaker 6: effectively enforcing US border policy by deporting people's South people
Speaker 6: I spoke to me the Darien series have been sent
Speaker 6: so off again this week. But Biden's had actually some
Speaker 6: pretty high profile cartel arrests right within Cineloa cartel. He's
Speaker 6: destabilized that cartel, but has happened within the US. They
Speaker 6: didn't send teams into into Mexico, and the way that
Speaker 6: the US has traditionally got hold of cartel leaders before
Speaker 6: is going to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with
Speaker 6: Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then
Speaker 6: extraducted them to the US trial and that doesn't seem
Speaker 6: to be what Trump is proposing. But again, like the
Speaker 6: bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I have some vague memory that he, like last time,
Speaker 3: he wanted to like send Special Forces guys to do this,
Speaker 3: and his advisors were like, what the fuck are you
Speaker 3: talking about. We can't send Yeah, like people in New Mexico.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Look, just to be real, those organizations have reached inside
Speaker 6: the United States and that would be an extremely messy situation. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and like the way this would have to be done, right, Like,
Speaker 6: I don't think you can do this with drone strikes.
Speaker 6: That you have to do this with boots on the ground,
Speaker 6: and that's going to be contrary to what he's promised
Speaker 6: to do, which is not risk more US soldiers' lives.
Speaker 6: Who knows what this will actually look like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my guess is you will find a way to
Speaker 3: get the maxim umousivilians killed.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah, we would himself. Yeah, it's that's probably
Speaker 4: would be the result of this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly. And I think as you sort of wein
Speaker 6: this down, like civilian deaths are probably going to increase. Right,
Speaker 6: He's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things.
Speaker 6: He doesn't see that the problem. The second thing the
Speaker 6: US will lose is what Joseph Nay called soft power, right,
Speaker 6: which is like the power to influence people without projecting force,
Speaker 6: cultural power, cultural capitals. Body. You might have called it
Speaker 6: really getting heavy on the university shit at the back
Speaker 6: half of this episode. The US lost a lot of
Speaker 6: that in the first Trump term, right, and it will
Speaker 6: lose more of it in the second Trump term. Some
Speaker 6: of that is, you know, the the US maybe shouldn't
Speaker 6: be influencing, and the US has had some pretty malign
Speaker 6: influence around the world. You can listen to a song
Speaker 6: called Washington Bullet to learn more about it. But it
Speaker 6: will mean that, like there will be a space for
Speaker 6: other bad actors, right, Russia, China, You know that le
Speaker 6: Russia has not shown itself to be any more concerned
Speaker 6: with human rights, and probably less so than than the
Speaker 6: United States went in in and it's time in Syria, right,
Speaker 6: it's been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people. The
Speaker 6: Russian cooperation with your side regime. We do not need
Speaker 6: more of that around the world. The Wagners to Africa
Speaker 6: Core deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of
Speaker 6: human rights, and this will open more spaces for that.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I mean it doesn't look great this secretive appointment.
Speaker 6: Maybe we'll learn more about that in the coming days,
Speaker 6: but that doesn't look great. There are some bright spots
Speaker 6: for a Java. I guess there's some glimmers of hope there,
Speaker 6: which is a nice thing. Trump's policy on Gaza fits
Speaker 6: with this general model of like he wants to end conflicts,
Speaker 6: and the way he sees of doing that is doing
Speaker 6: away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties. And
Speaker 6: so the way that he went after isis was to
Speaker 6: just say bomb them all. I can see him doing
Speaker 6: the same thing in Gaza, right, just saying like he
Speaker 6: wants to claim that he bought an end to the
Speaker 6: war and he doesn't care how many bodies he's standing
Speaker 6: on when he says that. Yeah, same thing in Lebanon, obviously.
Speaker 6: So yeah, these are not great things. These are things
Speaker 6: that we will have to deal with for decades to come,
Speaker 6: whatever happens. And I guess the way that you can
Speaker 6: do something here like why a little glimmer of hope,
Speaker 6: It's like you can reach out to people all around
Speaker 6: the world and let them know that, like, even if
Speaker 6: America's foreign policy is shit, you're not. I have sat
Speaker 6: in ro Java and I have seen them taking the
Speaker 6: children to the hospitals, and I've watched the US soldiers
Speaker 6: sit in their bases and do nothing, and like it
Speaker 6: didn't help. Really I didn't. I wasn't able to do
Speaker 6: very much. I couldn't even give blood. But I was
Speaker 6: able to be there with them, and maybe they're meant something,
Speaker 6: and like you can, you can do little things to
Speaker 6: show your solidarity around the world because there won't be
Speaker 6: much of it coming from the government.
Speaker 7: What have y'all welcome to It already happened here because
Speaker 7: this was the goal of this show, was to tell
Speaker 7: you that things was probably going to happen here, and
Speaker 7: then it did.
Speaker 5: I am not one of the normal hosts, as you
Speaker 5: can tell.
Speaker 7: I am your your friendly cousin that shows up every
Speaker 7: once in a while during the holidays. And if your
Speaker 7: cousins are anything like my cousins, which means we're immediately
Speaker 7: going to get in trouble because parents are gonna blame
Speaker 7: you since I'm the cousin, because it's not my fault,
Speaker 7: because I'm the guest.
Speaker 5: Anyway, we want.
Speaker 7: To talk about some stuff that, like, in some senses,
Speaker 7: is a bit absurd to talk about, because like the
Speaker 7: American understanding of pan ethnic terms and demographics are.
Speaker 4: Just oh god, sir, yes, it.
Speaker 5: Just don't make sense.
Speaker 7: Like nobody in the group identifies as what the group
Speaker 7: is called, but that's still the group, right.
Speaker 5: I recommend a book called white Fish Don't Exist. It's
Speaker 5: a great book.
Speaker 7: I'm here with the brilliant, brilliant meta wong.
Speaker 4: What's up, miya, It's it's all happening. It's it's all
Speaker 4: happening here.
Speaker 3: It sucks, but at least I'm getting great interests, the
Speaker 3: best what I've ever gotten.
Speaker 5: Best best interest.
Speaker 7: That's what I come for, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 7: Like I come for us to be able to have
Speaker 7: pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here. You
Speaker 7: know what I'm saying, So you get to have like
Speaker 7: pancakes for breakfast, and you know, stand in your pajamas longer,
Speaker 7: like it's great when your cousins are here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yea.
Speaker 5: Anyway, so let's do this.
Speaker 7: We want to talk about Well, the thing is, like
Speaker 7: I don't know if y'all have admitted. I admitted this
Speaker 7: on our show that like we kind of had to
Speaker 7: have all hands on deck discussion here as to like, Okay,
Speaker 7: let's get to our organized like, let's figure out what
Speaker 7: we're going to say as a network and kind of
Speaker 7: brainstorm things to talk about, because I'm pretty sure like
Speaker 7: a lot of us are still like wait, what the fuck?
Speaker 7: I'm sorry what like, you know, and us holding down
Speaker 7: the DEI section of cool Zoe, you know, we are
Speaker 7: the diversity, equity and inclusion over here. Figured you know,
Speaker 7: there were some things that were super shocking around some
Speaker 7: of the data that was coming back from the exit polls.
Speaker 7: As we thought about like okay, so who actually voted
Speaker 7: for who.
Speaker 5: And how much?
Speaker 7: And so we kind of wanted to talk about the
Speaker 7: Asian vote, right yep, which is again from the intro,
Speaker 7: it's an absurd category to.
Speaker 4: Say that, yeah, totally, Yeah.
Speaker 7: The Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as
Speaker 7: a category.
Speaker 5: And yeah, just.
Speaker 7: Where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some
Speaker 7: of the numbers that were in some way shocking. I
Speaker 7: will say, as far as holding down the black man section,
Speaker 7: I am very proud of us for eventually coming back home,
Speaker 7: right and voting in the upper eighty percent for the
Speaker 7: black woman, you know, which was encouraging. Now, granted our
Speaker 7: number of how many of us voted shrike immensely, you know,
Speaker 7: But either way, we just wanted to talk about those things.
Speaker 7: And I think one caveat for me, I would say,
Speaker 7: and then I'll turn it over. I think Mia, like
Speaker 7: you know, you can take it on from there. Is
Speaker 7: I am, in fact a black man, So I think
Speaker 7: I can speak from a certain level of experience. Obviously
Speaker 7: not the experience of every human, right, but I can
Speaker 7: speak from a certain level of experience. Now as we
Speaker 7: talk about the Latino vote, I am, in fact, news flash,
Speaker 7: not Latino. You know what I'm saying. My wife is
Speaker 7: from East LA. But obviously proximity is not the same
Speaker 7: as being a member of so keep that in mind
Speaker 7: as we discuss these things.
Speaker 5: So let me turn it over to turn it over
Speaker 5: to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know this is one of these you're
Speaker 3: talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here, right,
Speaker 3: And like one of the things about the way this
Speaker 3: is aggregated is that so Asian Americans as a whole
Speaker 3: went about five percent to the right in this election,
Speaker 3: but that doesn't capture what was going on, because every
Speaker 3: part of the demographics were just sort of flying in
Speaker 3: every direction, and unfortunately, most of the actual right wing
Speaker 3: pull was very specifically from my people, which is to say,
Speaker 3: Chinese Americans who went right.
Speaker 4: In staggering numbers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know, I'm not really surprised by because
Speaker 3: this has just been the way that sort of specifically
Speaker 3: Chinese American communities have been shifting for the past I
Speaker 3: mean really like eight years, but particularly intensifying since twenty twenty. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so if you look at sort of where these
Speaker 3: things happened, the biggest ones were New York and LA,
Speaker 3: and you know, places like Seattle had some shifts, But
Speaker 3: I think New York in particular, UK and LA in
Speaker 3: particular are important for this because a huge part of
Speaker 3: the reason that this happened was the sort of crime
Speaker 3: panic stuff. Yeah, and the crime padic didn't one hundred
Speaker 3: percent start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the
Speaker 3: earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the
Speaker 3: sort of trajectory of this is that in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: you have this sort of like whole stop Asian hate campaign, right,
Speaker 3: and you know, yeah, you have all this race like
Speaker 3: sort of like racist like ascitement.
Speaker 4: Of violence, and you get sort of two responses to it.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: There's the kind of like liberal ish response, which is
Speaker 3: stop Asian hate, but it's kind of vacuous and doesn't
Speaker 3: doesn't really have any political content at all. It's kind
Speaker 3: of vaguely anti Trump, but like there's not much there.
Speaker 3: And then there's the right ring response. And the right
Speaker 3: ring response is just okay, like there, we're just gonna blame.
Speaker 4: Black people for this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's like fucking horseshit. It's like, no, it
Speaker 3: was almost everyone which is getting killed by white people,
Speaker 3: because that's almost all the way racial violence works in
Speaker 3: this country, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But unfortunately, you know, this was an area where the
Speaker 3: left kind of just did nothing. And if you look
Speaker 3: at left response, you know, there's there's there's some people
Speaker 3: who did stuff, right there is you know, like some
Speaker 3: sex worker orgs like Red Canary Song did some great work.
Speaker 3: But most of the rest of the American left saw
Speaker 3: this and was like, Okay, the thing that matters here,
Speaker 3: and the actual problem with anti Asian violence is that
Speaker 3: people are criticizing the Chinese government too much and that's
Speaker 3: what's causing this, and so we need to defend the CCP.
Speaker 3: And this is just politically, this is fucking radioactive to like, yeah,
Speaker 3: eighty ninety percent of like fucking Nasian Americans because like, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a sort of sort of combinations of factors, right.
Speaker 3: You have on the one hand, us sort of immigrant
Speaker 3: communities where most of this shit doesn't work because you're
Speaker 3: dealing with people who were like, I don't know, we're
Speaker 3: fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to
Speaker 3: like do Malthusian fucking population control.
Speaker 5: Have no love for the CCP none whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right, and then this this is all this
Speaker 3: is too reductive, even with Cubans. But it's like this
Speaker 3: isn't something where you could just sort of brush this
Speaker 3: away with like, oh, all of these people were like
Speaker 3: reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like, no,
Speaker 3: like a lot of these people came here very recently,
Speaker 3: and there are you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities.
Speaker 4: There's people from Shingjen here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and all of those people, like all of the
Speaker 3: sort of pro CCP shit is radioactive and that's what
Speaker 3: was coming out of the American left. And the same
Speaker 3: thing with like sort of with with the Hong Kong
Speaker 3: movement right where there was like, you know, there was
Speaker 3: this really broad consensus amongst sort of American social democracy.
Speaker 3: You know, you're sort of like people who were like
Speaker 3: marginally she left of Birnie right, that stuff was all
Speaker 3: CIA stuff and it was bad, and that you should
Speaker 3: support the CCP, you know. I mean there are some
Speaker 3: tenet organizers, you do good work. We've had on the show, right, like,
Speaker 3: there are there are people trying to organize the communities,
Speaker 3: but like the mainstream left was just like fuck it,
Speaker 3: we don't care, we don't give a shit about you.
Speaker 3: Like the important thing about you being killed is that
Speaker 3: we can defend this fucking state that we like. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so what happened to the stop Asian hate thing
Speaker 3: is that it got folded into the crime panic because
Speaker 3: the product of this was both the sort of right
Speaker 3: wing we're going to give you anti black racism as
Speaker 3: you're like, this is this is going to be your
Speaker 3: solution quote unquote to this, yeah, and the sort of
Speaker 3: stop Asian hate, like mainstream sort of liberal thing both
Speaker 3: just fed directly into carcuralism. And you know, so you
Speaker 3: started like it turned into this rallying cry for like
Speaker 3: hate crime bills, and then like increasing police presences and
Speaker 3: you know, like the fucking cops were like all over
Speaker 3: the place of this shit was happening, and you know,
Speaker 3: didn't do anything because they're cops, right. Like all of
Speaker 3: this fed into it went sort of seamlessly into the
Speaker 3: crime panic, where you could just feed all of these
Speaker 3: people of the sort of memory of the fear and
Speaker 3: the anger over like Asian people getting killed, and you
Speaker 3: could just lump that in with crime.
Speaker 4: And then these communities also.
Speaker 3: And when I say these communities, it's it's kind of
Speaker 3: important here to do like class breakdowns here too, because
Speaker 3: the big part of what's happening here is an alignment
Speaker 3: that I think, like if the Republicans could be like
Speaker 3: fifteen percent less racist or figure out how to channel
Speaker 3: the racism against one target at a time, a lot
Speaker 3: of these people would have fucking fled right in the
Speaker 3: first place.
Speaker 5: Because yes, yes, so I was gonna say, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's like it's like rich people, professionals and like small
Speaker 3: business owners. It's like, well, yeah, of course those people
Speaker 3: are like unbelievably sort of turbo hardline reactionarias. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: those are the guys who are like shooting at people
Speaker 3: from the rooftops and fucking LA and ID two.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But these same people in China, like in Taiwan, in
Speaker 3: Hong Kong, like, these are people that if you were
Speaker 3: on the left you would just be fighting every day.
Speaker 3: But you know, they kind of had been lumped into
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party because of the just unbelievable racism from
Speaker 3: the Republicans, and now the sort of crime panic stuff
Speaker 3: has finally given them this thing where the Republican deal
Speaker 3: is basically like okay, if you're okay with sort of
Speaker 3: being anti black with us, if you're okay with massive
Speaker 3: expansions of police presence, you're okay with us running on
Speaker 3: that right and also on anti homeless politics. That's been
Speaker 3: a huge, extremely effective thing Chicili among business owners.
Speaker 4: And I remember, God, I think I've.
Speaker 3: Told the story on air, but back when I was
Speaker 3: in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I
Speaker 3: used to like, you know, it was an extra a
Speaker 3: bunch of shops, and so you could sort of you
Speaker 3: could get bakery food and you could go sit at
Speaker 3: these benches, and I came back to them in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty and the benches literally had had a thing drilled
Speaker 3: into the table threatening to arrest you if you sat
Speaker 3: at them for too long a right, and this is
Speaker 3: this is.
Speaker 4: Like twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know that the sort of anti homelessness
Speaker 3: stuff had started really really early there, and it's just hideous.
Speaker 3: And you know, these places of going to the right,
Speaker 3: they're electing Republicans and they're doing it because this kind
Speaker 3: of like Asian American petitqueourgeois like small business class and
Speaker 3: some of the sort of richer tech people, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera, are swinging really really hard to the right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Man, that actually connected so many dots for me. Like,
Speaker 7: first of all, like even to like the anti homeless thing,
Speaker 7: like you know, you start seeing that weird middle of.
Speaker 5: The bench arm rail yep.
Speaker 7: You know, like, well it's like that's so you won't
Speaker 7: lay on it, you know, That's that's why you did this.
Speaker 7: But like I hope what I'm about to say is
Speaker 7: not a trope, you know what I'm saying. It's just
Speaker 7: it's because of like the proximity that I've had with
Speaker 7: the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino.
Speaker 7: You know, all the DJs I've all worked with, all
Speaker 7: these just hip hop. At some point in the nineties,
Speaker 7: the Filipinos took over. Yeah, I'm saying, so like that's
Speaker 7: been a lot of ways our community. But I found that,
Speaker 7: you know, the like proper Asian in the jungle Asian
Speaker 7: thing where it's like pending on your relationship with the
Speaker 7: United States is almost even. And if you identify as Asient,
Speaker 7: because you sit down ten Filipinos, like half of them
Speaker 7: going to say a Pacific islander, you know, the other
Speaker 7: have gonna say to Asian. The other have is gonna
Speaker 7: say the Asian Pacific Islander. And then and then my
Speaker 7: lord Cambodia right next to them, who are all in
Speaker 7: Long Beach and their crips, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: So like that sort.
Speaker 7: Of world like they were with us, you know, as
Speaker 7: far as like they were just a part of our community,
Speaker 7: whereas the sort of northern kind of proper Asian world,
Speaker 7: like it's cities is like Alhambra, Monti Roy Park, this
Speaker 7: is very California stuff. But they stuck to themselves, you know,
Speaker 7: and they they saw a lot of the American things
Speaker 7: like this is pragmatic, like we're here to win, like
Speaker 7: you know, like so when you started having the Asian
Speaker 7: hate thing, like it's almost like now that you say it,
Speaker 7: it's like we just tied that community up into a
Speaker 7: bow and then handed them to the right, because this
Speaker 7: all happened at the same time as like the the
Speaker 7: anti affirmative action you know.
Speaker 3: Although I do want to say in the anti affirmative
Speaker 3: action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on
Speaker 3: with that. Asian Americans as a whole and as subgroups
Speaker 3: support affirmative action.
Speaker 4: Yes, very consistently.
Speaker 3: Every time they're polls, there's like sixty percent support for it, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: but there's like forty percent of these fucking dipshits who
Speaker 3: are like, yes, I don't know, you know, I'm like
Speaker 3: my sort of like classic age response to this is
Speaker 3: like I fucking did it.
Speaker 4: I was a terrible student. I fuck I got into
Speaker 4: the University of Chicago.
Speaker 3: Like you didn't take a fucking study harder, Like you're
Speaker 3: you're not the reason the reason you're not getting into
Speaker 3: these universities isn't because like black people are being allowed
Speaker 3: in it's because you suck, like fucking skill issue.
Speaker 4: What the fuck is wrong with really?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like like there's there was this like class yeah,
Speaker 3: you know the sort of class.
Speaker 7: And I was gonna get to is this class distinction
Speaker 7: in the sense that from a black perspective, it was like, Yo,
Speaker 7: we rallied for y'all over the like stop Asian hate thing,
Speaker 7: you know what I mean. And then to come back
Speaker 7: around and see this again from a class perspective because
Speaker 7: kind of the same thing. And in a lot of
Speaker 7: ways in the black community, because the reasoning, as you
Speaker 7: say that, that's why I say it all makes sense.
Speaker 7: The reasoning is the same, like the system is not
Speaker 7: for me, so I'm just gonna get mine, Damn the community,
Speaker 7: you know what I'm saying, Like, I'm just gonna go
Speaker 7: get mine, you know. And so in the again in
Speaker 7: the black community, for those that swung right, it was
Speaker 7: just like like in some senses, they're like, well, why no,
Speaker 7: y'all are fucking racists, like you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: So I'd like as far as like the rights, like
Speaker 7: I know you are with the left, it was more
Speaker 7: like you're just gaslighting me yea. So well, if you're
Speaker 7: just gonna gaslight me and I already know that you
Speaker 7: hate me, well fuck it, I'm just gonna get mine,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 5: And that becomes the thing.
Speaker 7: But as a community, like you said, you know, in
Speaker 7: the same way as far as like the beef between
Speaker 7: like the you know, the historical la riots like Chinese
Speaker 7: and Korean communities. While their parents were on this on
Speaker 7: the roofs of their of their shops shooting at us,
Speaker 7: they kids was breaking into the city.
Speaker 5: They was with us like that, breaking it to the
Speaker 5: same story.
Speaker 4: We'll just break it into you know.
Speaker 7: So that that class distinction was something that made us
Speaker 7: kind of be like, bro, like, don't you understand You'll
Speaker 7: never be one of them, They'll never really love you, you know.
Speaker 7: And I feel like even that sort of like appeal
Speaker 7: would lurch this group even further to be like, don't
Speaker 7: tell me who you are, don't tell me where they're
Speaker 7: They're giving me what I need, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 7: like I never thought about tying all that together and
Speaker 7: being that it being like a specific a Chinese lurching.
Speaker 5: Wow. I never thought of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And okay, you know you know what else sells
Speaker 3: products that are from China.
Speaker 4: It's these products and services support the podcast.
Speaker 7: We sell products from China.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 3: So I think that there's one more thing I want
Speaker 3: to make sure I get to about the Chinese American
Speaker 3: stuff before we move on. And that's one of the
Speaker 3: things you kind of brought up earlier, was the insolarity,
Speaker 3: because part of what's going on here too is that
Speaker 3: there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who you know,
Speaker 3: you get communities there speaking like they're uspeaking like Kenzanese
Speaker 3: or Mandarin, and in a lot of cases, it's like
Speaker 3: you'll get these very very small, tight knit communities with
Speaker 3: people who are speaking like the provincial dialect that's like
Speaker 3: semi incomprehensible to other people, right, because it's like effectively.
Speaker 4: Its own language.
Speaker 3: And one of the problems here, and this is one
Speaker 3: of the places where the left shit the bed like
Speaker 3: wasn't doing a good organizing, right, And the consequence of
Speaker 3: this is that in these a lot of the things
Speaker 3: that we're getting put out in these spaces, the media
Speaker 3: is all unbelievably right wing. Yeah, right, there's Miles Guah
Speaker 3: who whatever, God like twelve years from now, when I
Speaker 3: finished the lab Leak episode, which is gonna be He's
Speaker 3: gonna be a big part of this was he was
Speaker 3: this Chinese billionaire who defected to the US and came
Speaker 3: here and ran one trillion scams and is currently going
Speaker 3: to prison for Like, yeah, I'm pretty sure he was
Speaker 3: the guy who's boat Steve Bannon was on when Steve
Speaker 3: Bannon got arrested by the Post office cops.
Speaker 5: So like this varsity level bad guy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was here.
Speaker 3: He was issuing passports from like a fake government in
Speaker 3: exile that he set up. He's running every scam in
Speaker 3: the entire world. But he's also you know, he's also
Speaker 3: one of the people. He started the whole lab Leak
Speaker 3: thing and he so he was flooding the like all
Speaker 3: all the sort of traininge language media with this hardline
Speaker 3: right wing sort of pro Republican, hardline anti China stuff.
Speaker 3: And then you have a very similar thing coming from
Speaker 3: the Falling Gong, who are everywhere in any every China town,
Speaker 3: there's Fallen Gong guys everywhere. They're posters, there are people,
Speaker 3: so they are cult. They run shan Yu. They run
Speaker 3: a newspaper called The Epak Times, which is just a
Speaker 3: pure fascist propaganda outlet, and those things kind of just
Speaker 3: like devoured the entire Chinese language media ecosystem. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't good before because like there are also a bunch
Speaker 3: of other weird right wing groups. Like part of the
Speaker 3: problem here too is it's possible for in sort of
Speaker 3: Asian American community for you to have two people who,
Speaker 3: in by American standards, have identical politics, right, they're identically
Speaker 3: right wing on things like racial politics, and they're like
Speaker 3: edi crime stuff, you know, who are incredibly sexist and
Speaker 3: like humblophobic, but they absolutely fucking hate each other because
Speaker 3: one of them is a pro CCP Chinese nationalist and
Speaker 3: one of them is an anti CCP Chinese nationalists.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: But this kind of like you know, what's been able
Speaker 3: to kind of weld that shit together is is this
Speaker 3: sort of like republican anti black off on crime campaign
Speaker 3: combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, it's Shad's rebellion all over again.
Speaker 5: Like just that at least you're not them, yeah, you know.
Speaker 7: And and yeah, like the simplicity of that right wing
Speaker 7: message of just like here's all your problems all your problems.
Speaker 5: Are those fools, and I'll just get rid of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we can solve this with more cops and
Speaker 4: Donald Trump. We just solved war.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, man.
Speaker 7: So form my end, I looked at the black and
Speaker 7: Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty
Speaker 7: quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story and
Speaker 7: also because you know, we did an episode with Garrison
Speaker 7: Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters.
Speaker 7: And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact
Speaker 7: of like the frans fer anand thought of like, okay,
Speaker 7: what is what is liberation?
Speaker 5: Like what is freedom?
Speaker 7: And is it you know, my ability to flourish without
Speaker 7: any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering?
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: So like, in other words, it's like this, this plantation
Speaker 7: would be better if I ran the big house rather
Speaker 7: than being like, burn the fucking big house down because
Speaker 7: there shouldn't be slavery, you know I'm saying, So like
Speaker 7: that sort of approach to a gain and the reality
Speaker 7: of why know, the system's not for me in a
Speaker 7: lot of ways. That's what's interesting about the understanding of it.
Speaker 7: So when you would look at somebody like a black person,
Speaker 7: like why would you vote for this racist man? And
Speaker 7: it's like, well, the same reason I would vote for
Speaker 7: every other racist man, you know what I'm saying, Like, which,
Speaker 7: find me one that ain't you know, so, like that
Speaker 7: attitude is already there, so you know, obviously all of
Speaker 7: us would push back and say that, like, well, you
Speaker 7: choosing yourself is also a vote against yourself and is
Speaker 7: destroying your community. Clearly, it's never worked at some point,
Speaker 7: you know, which I'm sure y'all can relate to. It's
Speaker 7: like I feel two ways when I see like black people,
Speaker 7: specifically black men, sit at this table, because I'm like,
Speaker 7: I can imagine the first joke that you kind of
Speaker 7: let slide that was like, I was kind of weird,
Speaker 7: but I don't know, it's no big deal. I'll get
Speaker 7: over it. Maybe maybe they didn't mean it, you know.
Speaker 7: And then that joke gets more and more intense, and
Speaker 7: then all of a sudden, you sitting in a room
Speaker 7: and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets and that
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico's a track, you know what I'm saying. It's
Speaker 7: like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting
Speaker 7: and just being like all lighten up, and at some
Speaker 7: point somebody said something to you and you made a
Speaker 7: face and they went, dude, just it's a joke, man,
Speaker 7: it's a joke. Come on, bro, you know me, You
Speaker 7: know me, right, you've had that. You know what I'm saying,
Speaker 7: and I know that happened a year ago, and now
Speaker 7: look at you. You know, so like eventually, the point
Speaker 7: I'm making is like, at some point you are going
Speaker 7: to have to lay down all of your identifying factors
Speaker 7: to be able to stay at this table.
Speaker 5: And I hope that. I hope that thirty year fixed
Speaker 5: mortgage was worth it.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: So the black story is that it's like, what is
Speaker 7: going to get us the financial or get me specifically
Speaker 7: minds the financial freedom that the Democrats kept promising but
Speaker 7: never get to us. But that's, like I said, that's
Speaker 7: a much less interesting story, in my opinion, than the
Speaker 7: Latino vote, which we.
Speaker 5: Could talk about after this break.
Speaker 7: All right, so we're back now, sixty four percent right
Speaker 7: of air quotes, Latinos voted right wing this year. Now
Speaker 7: I feel like this, well I don't feel like I
Speaker 7: know this needs a lot of unpacking, because first of all,
Speaker 7: what the hell is the Latino, right is the first
Speaker 7: question that you have to ask. And essentially I find
Speaker 7: I figure, I think I've come to the fact that
Speaker 7: what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain,
Speaker 7: so in some way you kind of speak somewhat Spanish,
Speaker 7: unless it's Brazil, in which case you were colonized by
Speaker 7: the Portuguese. Right, So it's like, you don't even know
Speaker 7: what you mean, Like y'all don't even know.
Speaker 4: What you mean.
Speaker 3: It's sort of it's agree that, like one of our
Speaker 3: primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like
Speaker 3: Maoists and like Vietnamese Merxist Leninist that fell apart immediately
Speaker 3: the moment that China invade Vietnam. And that's only our
Speaker 3: second most incoherent democratic category.
Speaker 5: It's completely incoherent.
Speaker 7: Right, So you have exactly you have my wife, my
Speaker 7: life partner, who is born in la but she is
Speaker 7: a first gen she grew up in southern Mexico.
Speaker 5: She is first gen Mexican.
Speaker 7: But she's like, I identify as indigenous and it's and
Speaker 7: it's true. She is like even when we did the
Speaker 7: DNA test, if you believe in that stuff. She's like,
Speaker 7: but you could just look at her and I'm like,
Speaker 7: you're incing, Like you know what I'm saying. Just I'm
Speaker 7: just you're looking at her, and she's like, yeah, you're right,
Speaker 7: Like we are overwhelmingly vast majority of her DNA is indigenous.
Speaker 7: So for her, if you check a demographic box, it's
Speaker 7: like are you Are you Hispanic? She's like, why would
Speaker 7: I identify with the colonizer? So no, I'm not Hispanic,
Speaker 7: Like they're the colonizer. Right. Whereas you ask a Puerto
Speaker 7: Rican or a Cuban or Dominican, they say Hispanic, but
Speaker 7: they just mean it differently. One because the island was
Speaker 7: called Hispanola, y I'm saying, so like they just mean
Speaker 7: something totally different. And Dominicans as black as hell, yo said,
Speaker 7: And then what about a Cuban. The way that they
Speaker 7: relate to America is also incredibly different, especially because of
Speaker 7: like you know, I'm pretty sure y'all y'all room knows,
Speaker 7: is if you could touch dry ground, right, And that
Speaker 7: really just had to do with the fact that we
Speaker 7: just ain't fuck with Castro. So the way that they
Speaker 7: relate to even immigration is completely different. Because if you
Speaker 7: could make it to the Soy, if you go back
Speaker 7: to Florida, you're a citizen. So they just didn't go
Speaker 7: through the same things that people from Central and South
Speaker 7: America went through to be able to become a citizen.
Speaker 7: And on top of all that, California, Arizona and Texas
Speaker 7: is Mexico. So like so some of them a and immigrants.
Speaker 7: They was here, like the border move we didn't cross
Speaker 7: the border, the border across US. So you put all
Speaker 7: that together mixed with a group of people who might
Speaker 7: be ninth generation Mexican that people that don't speak Spanish,
Speaker 7: they're no samples as you call it, like, well't even
Speaker 7: speak Spanish. You know what I'm saying that, Like you
Speaker 7: love all these people who speak so many different languages
Speaker 7: and have so many different understandings of who they are,
Speaker 7: and you just call them Latino and then you get
Speaker 7: this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity
Speaker 7: of it, then then we could talk about the actual
Speaker 7: Like what actually happened here and what you find are
Speaker 7: two things that are seem so reductive. But as you
Speaker 7: look at the exit polls and even like interviews that
Speaker 7: I that I personally conducted. If you set aside the
Speaker 7: person that has been just cooked by just the right
Speaker 7: wing information, like set that person aside, that is just
Speaker 7: you've just your brain's been cooked.
Speaker 5: Like you set that aside, and you look at this.
Speaker 7: There are two very reductive things that just continue to
Speaker 7: just be true. One is, Latin America is very religious.
Speaker 7: It's still Catholic, and machismo is a big part of
Speaker 7: their culture. And it just it seems so reductive, but
Speaker 7: it's but it's what happened. You know, this is still
Speaker 7: a very patriarchal culture. And you know, as anecdotal and
Speaker 7: as running joke as it is that like if you
Speaker 7: have a Latina daughter and she's bringing because again they're
Speaker 7: very traditional. That's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things.
Speaker 7: It's like you bring a boy over your grandma, all
Speaker 7: your theas are watching you make him a plate. You
Speaker 7: have to go over there and make him a plate
Speaker 7: and sit it in front of him or you going
Speaker 7: to be judged. This is just the culture, you know,
Speaker 7: so it's no surprise that that is not going to
Speaker 7: play into how you vote.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that
Speaker 7: like this actually like really blew my mind. And a
Speaker 7: couple interviews I had I wanted to talk to specifically
Speaker 7: Latina women, because I was like, it just seemed as
Speaker 7: though there was just a triple layer of shit you'd
Speaker 7: have to swallow to be able to go this route, right,
Speaker 7: And my main question was like, what was the non
Speaker 7: negotiable and was there a line that Trump and by extension,
Speaker 7: the Republican Party could cross, like's the where's the line?
Speaker 5: What is the too far line? Right?
Speaker 7: And they landed on a few things. It was crazy, like,
Speaker 7: after talking to three different women, they all kind of
Speaker 7: landed on the same things.
Speaker 5: It was abortion, right.
Speaker 7: They were like, at the end of the day, this
Speaker 7: is untenable, and to which I pushed back where I
Speaker 7: was like, well, Trump's not anti abortion. And what they
Speaker 7: all said was like, we could deal with the sixteen
Speaker 7: week like I could deal with the sixteen week thing, obviously,
Speaker 7: because again they are women and they're not completely pilled.
Speaker 7: They're like, we understand that there are situations that happened
Speaker 7: right that just are untenable.
Speaker 5: And then the next thing that they said was.
Speaker 7: Like, which was the part that like really just kept
Speaker 7: putting my brain in a pretzel, was we are really
Speaker 7: big on anti sex trafficking and the the idea for
Speaker 7: us on this knowing that like, okay, so the right
Speaker 7: wing stole that, like they don't believe it. They stole
Speaker 7: that concept and they wrapped everything around it, right. But
Speaker 7: one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for Hillary
Speaker 7: because she heard rumors about child stuff, and she's I
Speaker 7: mean she's referring to pizzagate, you.
Speaker 4: Know, yeah, yeah, it's just cute shit.
Speaker 7: Of which I was able to push back to be like,
Speaker 7: well that was, you know, it was debunked, like, and
Speaker 7: she was like, I just don't want to I just
Speaker 7: don't like I just don't like how they move. I
Speaker 7: don't trust Bill and how he behaved in the Oval office.
Speaker 5: And it's like you're looking around, like are.
Speaker 4: You They were both of that played like I'm like.
Speaker 7: She even said she was like but the Epstein thing,
Speaker 7: and I'm like, well, they're all I don't.
Speaker 5: I don't understand.
Speaker 7: I don't understand how you don't see this connection, right,
Speaker 7: and to which they both said, oh, no, we see it.
Speaker 5: You're again.
Speaker 7: Find me someone that's not nasty, is their answer. Find
Speaker 7: me someone that's not corrupt, Find me someone that's not nasty.
Speaker 7: At least he's going to save the babies, was the thing.
Speaker 7: And then the next question I had about them was
Speaker 7: the anti immigration thing, the borders, right, and we're talking
Speaker 7: to people who are one in two, some of them
Speaker 7: three generations removed.
Speaker 5: And one of one of them gave me an example.
Speaker 7: Of a family members in law who got deported fifty
Speaker 7: years old, got deported from something they did when they
Speaker 7: were nineteen. It's like it's tough, like this was a
Speaker 7: hard working man who's done his best, who you know,
Speaker 7: has has done everything they could and it's got it.
Speaker 7: So I asked her, like, yo, do you think that
Speaker 7: so do you think that that's unfair? No, she was like,
Speaker 7: our family waited in line, Our family did everything they
Speaker 7: needed to do. We fought. We came to this same thing.
Speaker 7: We came to this country because we believed in the
Speaker 7: dream and we fought for it, you know, and we
Speaker 7: and we did it right, you know obviously like with
Speaker 7: the Mexican like sort of like work ethic of like
Speaker 7: no excuses, just work. We can't stand for no cheaters.
Speaker 7: We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to
Speaker 7: work for yours right, And we come here. There's no
Speaker 7: cuts in front of the lines. There's no shortcuts. You
Speaker 7: do the work right, and if you cheat, you go
Speaker 7: to the back of the line.
Speaker 5: That's just what it is. So she's like, like, he's
Speaker 5: talking about criminals.
Speaker 7: I'm not a criminal. He's talking about criminals. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 7: that's not me. I'm a hard working citizen, you know.
Speaker 7: So that sort of mindset, and then she said, at
Speaker 7: the end of the day.
Speaker 5: We came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know.
Speaker 7: And if I put in the work, if my family
Speaker 7: puts into work, we succeed. That's what this country's for.
Speaker 7: You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating
Speaker 7: the system is fucking it up for all of us.
Speaker 7: And so that sort of like I can swallow the
Speaker 7: racist shit because I don't give a fuck about you anyway,
Speaker 7: because I already know you don't give a fuck about me.
Speaker 7: I'm just here to get mine. So for them, at
Speaker 7: least according to the way they're explaining it, is like
Speaker 7: the prejudice line is not a line they worried about.
Speaker 5: That's something I've already accepted, you know.
Speaker 7: But what is a line is oddly enough, treatment of
Speaker 7: women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish.
Speaker 7: And then lastly for the men, it's what we know,
Speaker 7: like just the Mano spheares cooked our kids.
Speaker 5: It just cook them, you know.
Speaker 7: And it dovetailed so well into the Latino machismo and
Speaker 7: even on the black shit. Like I knew we were
Speaker 7: in trouble when the hood niggas was talking, was running
Speaker 7: around here saying they was gonna vote for Trump because
Speaker 7: it's because they understand it. It's like you either get
Speaker 7: on or get out. Like I'm here, I'm gonna get
Speaker 7: with my You either form me or against me.
Speaker 5: This is what we're doing. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: Right, I'm gonna let you be you know, as as
Speaker 7: derogatory as this is, like, I'm gonna let you be
Speaker 7: a man. You go fight what you gonna fight. And
Speaker 7: the Democrats are gonna turn your sons and the daughters.
Speaker 7: I don't rob like that's the that's the thought.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying. It's like, okay, well well
Speaker 5: fuck it, let's just get ours. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: That simplicity of a message.
Speaker 7: It just resonated while you have which didn't bother me,
Speaker 7: but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like
Speaker 7: somebody's uncle.
Speaker 5: Basically like you.
Speaker 7: Young niggas need to turn pull up your pants, stop
Speaker 7: acting like thugs, and get in line.
Speaker 4: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: It's like, all right, okay, uh you know, to me,
Speaker 7: I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're
Speaker 7: somebody's uncle, like you are that oh you of course
Speaker 7: that's how you talk, you know. But the street dudes,
Speaker 7: it's like, look, man, I don't need this, Like I
Speaker 7: don't need this Harvard grad like pretty ass like rich
Speaker 7: nigga to tell me what it's like. You was never
Speaker 7: out You weren't out here, you weren't in the trenches.
Speaker 7: You know what I'm saying. Like you're a millionaire. I
Speaker 7: don't like you. You barely want to oh because you
Speaker 7: can hoop? Oh so you like basketball? You one of us,
Speaker 7: you know what I'm saying. So I just think that
Speaker 7: that like you've already got yours, so let me get mine.
Speaker 7: Is like, at the end of the day, was so
Speaker 7: appealing to this particular demographic and it just made sense.
Speaker 5: So that's why they voted that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think there's there's sort of like angles
Speaker 4: of this two that connect with what was going on
Speaker 4: with the Datian Americas, so partially also the religion angle
Speaker 4: is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also
Speaker 4: isn't talked about enough with Asian Americans, like particularly Chinese Americans.
Speaker 4: There's a whole bunch of how do I explain this
Speaker 4: in a way that.
Speaker 3: You know, the sort of like zeal of a convert shit,
Speaker 3: where like the first generation converts are the most nuts. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's like a huge portion of like Chinese Christians
Speaker 3: or these like first generation evangelical converts, and so you
Speaker 3: get these just like really terrifying, like ferociously right wing
Speaker 3: stuff that there's just kind of like just kind of
Speaker 3: eats everything around it. And I think the second part
Speaker 3: is I think it's an interesting distinction here too, because
Speaker 3: I think there's like a kind of differing parts of
Speaker 3: the storysness of the kind of like we came here
Speaker 3: to work thing, because that was the Asian American thing
Speaker 3: from maybe twenty years ago, and the last ten years
Speaker 3: and especially post twenty twenty has been people realizing that
Speaker 3: it's not real, yeah, and that you know, you work,
Speaker 3: you work, you work, you work, and this is this
Speaker 3: is actually also funny enough, exact same thing happening in
Speaker 3: China with sort of different political results because it's less
Speaker 3: it's you know, we're not dealing with yeah, like the
Speaker 3: same kind of sort of immigrant culture stuff. But the
Speaker 3: Chinese American version of this was like, Okay, we need
Speaker 3: to figure out who to blame for this, and they
Speaker 3: were like, well, yeah, okay, it's because of like all
Speaker 3: of this crime shit, because like people are going to
Speaker 3: prison for one million years, and like I see a
Speaker 3: black person and there's like a homeless person who I
Speaker 3: have to like walk past every day. This is the
Speaker 3: reason why like our fucking dream died. And that was
Speaker 3: a really sort of appealing message people. And it's the
Speaker 3: same kind of thing with the people who went for
Speaker 3: the affirmative action stuff, where it was like the people
Speaker 3: who you know are like in all seriousness, like we're
Speaker 3: running into kind of like oh no, there actually is
Speaker 3: a sort of wall that you hit, yeah, where it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter how hard you work, like there's only so
Speaker 3: many spots at the university, there's only so many totally,
Speaker 3: you know, there's only so much so far you can go,
Speaker 3: And hitting that wall drove a bunch of people you.
Speaker 7: Make a good point, you know, and and I imagine
Speaker 7: the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese
Speaker 7: community is going to be the same with ours, where it's like, okay,
Speaker 7: you gon' learn that you are not welcome to that table.
Speaker 7: You know, they will always choose themselves. And you know,
Speaker 7: you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to
Speaker 7: the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors.
Speaker 7: For us, it's like to the degree for which you
Speaker 7: can remove your blackness is to the degree for which
Speaker 7: you're welcomed in this table. But at some point you
Speaker 7: can't take it off. It a'll rub off, you know,
Speaker 7: dress your kids up.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: That was like for us with respectability politics, like teach
Speaker 7: your kids to speak proper English and dress them up
Speaker 7: and don't let them wear hoodies. Okay, good luck, you know,
Speaker 7: like jay Z's seminal work. Look, OJ said, I'm not black,
Speaker 7: I'm OJ okay, Like you know, it's just they will
Speaker 7: never accept you. The world you're trying to get into
Speaker 7: will never accept you. And this step towards trying to
Speaker 7: be accepted by this world is working against you and
Speaker 7: everyone else behind you.
Speaker 5: You know, But this is America. You can vote whatever
Speaker 5: you want to.
Speaker 3: Vote well, and I think twenty twenty eight, like for us,
Speaker 3: was that moment right where like, you know, everyone kind
Speaker 3: of got knocked out of the.
Speaker 4: You know, whichever way you sort of fragmented politically.
Speaker 3: It's like, that's when we got knocked out of the
Speaker 3: sort of obamam multiracial dream. Was when you realize that,
Speaker 3: like all of this fucking progress you've made isn't going
Speaker 3: to stop people from killing you in the street. Yes,
Speaker 3: And the reaction to that was like, and I saw
Speaker 3: this on the left where like a bunch of people
Speaker 3: basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because
Speaker 3: they were afraid, and they were like, Okay, well, you know,
Speaker 3: here's this thing that we have, this like strong state
Speaker 3: that will protect us, and we just have to fight
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 4: Here it's like, well that didn't work, right, you know.
Speaker 3: And then you have a lot of other people who
Speaker 3: started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen right,
Speaker 3: that like the thing that they had bought into was
Speaker 3: a lie. But the part of it that they believed
Speaker 3: they were just like, well, okay, if we can just
Speaker 3: like fucking get the black people out of here and
Speaker 3: like we can get the cops in yea, you know,
Speaker 3: we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And that's been just the sort of dominant response to it.
Speaker 3: And I don't know, it's bleak, but it's it's not
Speaker 3: something that can't be overcome, but it's gonna require like,
Speaker 3: it's going to require organizing, and it's going to require
Speaker 3: the left to not be about fucking making white people
Speaker 3: feel more anti imperialist, which has been what fucking politics
Speaker 3: ordizationan Americans has been. And until that shit at Shedison's like,
Speaker 3: you're gonna keep seeing this shit accelerate.
Speaker 7: Yeah, man, has there been any if the right term
Speaker 7: is like vision casting among this community, because like I
Speaker 7: say that to say, albeit a very small, very small
Speaker 7: fraction of voices, but among some of the black thinkers
Speaker 7: is like a serious consideration of pursuing like creating a
Speaker 7: third party of just like like but let's like take
Speaker 7: it serious this time, like for real, for real. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, like there's you know, it's, like I said,
Speaker 7: it's very small and like obviously, like my grandchildren will
Speaker 7: probably be the ones to see any sort of beginnings
Speaker 7: of that actually taking route but it's still like, you know,
Speaker 7: people are some of the things that are being talked
Speaker 7: about right now, like we should like really like really
Speaker 7: consider it.
Speaker 5: Is there anything like that going on?
Speaker 3: No, Like, and this is this social part of the
Speaker 3: problem is like the Asian American intellectual class is like
Speaker 3: one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country.
Speaker 6: There's nothing.
Speaker 3: It's a wasteland out there. Like it's oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 3: like it's it's so bad. It's it's like all of
Speaker 3: the art in the media, the culture and the sort
Speaker 3: of analysis is all I've talked about in this show
Speaker 3: a decent amount, but it's all wrapped up in this
Speaker 3: sort of like oh, you two can like integrate and
Speaker 3: become a small business owner. And those people, you know,
Speaker 3: the people who leave that and people who did that,
Speaker 3: don't actually have any interesting ideas. Yeah they have. They
Speaker 3: have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class. The incredible
Speaker 3: narrow idea, incredibly narrow ideas of their class are completely
Speaker 3: useless for the sort of task we have ahead of us. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And and it's kind of working for them, yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean it's working for them, it's just it isn't working
Speaker 3: for anyone else.
Speaker 5: Exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like God, like I don't know, like the
Speaker 3: people who are supposed to be like Wesley Yang, who
Speaker 3: was supposed to be like the great sort of like
Speaker 3: new Asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked, right
Speaker 3: winger Like some of some of the people have been
Speaker 3: like turning on like some of the like the big
Speaker 3: podcasters have been like turning on trans people, and I'm
Speaker 3: just like, well, fuck all you guys eat shit basically,
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's it's the situation's bad.
Speaker 4: It's also the fragmentation is so powerful because you're dealing
Speaker 4: with so many kinds of like linguistic lions and lines
Speaker 4: between people who've been here for ten generations and people
Speaker 4: who just like walk off the boat yesterday. There's you know,
Speaker 4: and so the fragmentation I think helps prevent a more
Speaker 4: coherent sphere. But like it's it's bleak out there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 7: Obviously, like the black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant
Speaker 7: and strong and organized, and you know, at least from
Speaker 7: the part of the intersection that I'm a part of,
Speaker 7: you know, the voice coming out of that that space
Speaker 7: of like a lot of times of like very much
Speaker 7: prophetic and like you know, very much like truth telling
Speaker 7: that you hear from again, Like, you know, black queer
Speaker 7: community is like from our perspective, they continue to be
Speaker 7: like five steps ahead of us, you know of like
Speaker 7: where we need to go as as a as a people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this was like the sex worker orgs for us.
Speaker 3: But then because this is another thing with left just
Speaker 3: kind of shit the bed right, Like this is a
Speaker 3: thing with Bernie where Bernie voted for SIS to Falster
Speaker 3: right and there's never been a reckoning about that at all. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so you know, like the stuff that could have
Speaker 3: come out of that just kind of never did, and
Speaker 3: we never got the kind of integration and the kind
Speaker 3: of politics that we could have had if people had
Speaker 3: been like five percent, well not five so they would
Speaker 3: be able to require them to move their positions a bit.
Speaker 3: But like people had actually cared about sex workers, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker 5: But you told a different story. Yeah, yeah, well that
Speaker 5: was informative.
Speaker 7: This has been, Uh, I don't know, how do I
Speaker 7: how do we describe what.
Speaker 5: This has been?
Speaker 4: Well, miya, you know, I think I closed this right,
Speaker 4: Like this situation isn't hopeless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, there's there's been a lot of good tenanted
Speaker 3: organizing going on, Like there's a lot of kinds of
Speaker 3: stuff that can and do work. It's knows to the
Speaker 3: grindstone time, right, it is time to lock in, time
Speaker 3: to organize, and these communities can be organized.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we just haven't yet.
Speaker 7: And you know, yeah to your point, like for me,
Speaker 7: like all information is helpful, like like somebody's lying to you,
Speaker 7: like it's it's good information to know that this person
Speaker 7: thinks that that's something worth lying about, you know, like
Speaker 7: you just you just told me something about yourself that
Speaker 7: the fact that you think that that's worth lying about.
Speaker 7: So I say all that to say this understanding a
Speaker 7: better understanding of like it's hard to reason reason with
Speaker 7: somebody when they're hungry, you know, so just a better
Speaker 7: understanding of what are these communities actually prioritize, what do
Speaker 7: they actually value? And obviously, like you know, the dims
Speaker 7: and and unfortunately even the left was just like just
Speaker 7: swinging a miss guys, Like this type of thing, like
Speaker 7: you said, is not hopeless. It's like, now there's an
Speaker 7: understanding of like, okay, so you value the hustle, all right, well,
Speaker 7: let me tell you in the ways for which the
Speaker 7: choice you just made is working against your hustle, you know,
Speaker 7: like or now now here, Here are ways for which
Speaker 7: you can, like you said no to the grind and
Speaker 7: accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detri
Speaker 7: mental to the people around you. Yeah, you know, I'll
Speaker 7: with it. Like, I'm not hopeless either. I think that
Speaker 7: we just need to think about the word our word
Speaker 7: choice and what hells we willing to die on and
Speaker 7: be like, this is what we meant when we said this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
Speaker 1: week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 4: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 2: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2: You can now find sources for It Could Happen here
Speaker 2: listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 6: Thanks for listening.