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: Recording in progress. Okay, check this out now. I have
Speaker 2: always been amazed by when I take a second to
Speaker 2: actually tap into like my actual network of just friends.
Speaker 3: You know, you have friends in categories.
Speaker 4: You have to say it like it's just like this, yeah,
Speaker 4: you always like you just don't really picture those things
Speaker 4: colliding or when like your friends like meet each other
Speaker 4: and turns out they know each other.
Speaker 3: It's the weirdest thing anyway for me and my like.
Speaker 2: Podcast activists, you know activism world, you know a lot
Speaker 2: of times overlast with the hip hop world because you know,
Speaker 2: we believe with a lot of same stuff. But like
Speaker 2: this one like really happened where I was just like
Speaker 2: in my own network somebody I've known for a while
Speaker 2: who I'm just now learning your name is Tristan.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know your name was Jason. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying. That's how wrap works. So
Speaker 2: introduce yourself however you want to be introduced. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: and then let's let's get into it.
Speaker 6: Hey, everybody, I'm a Tangent Wiggy aka Tristan Hacker. I
Speaker 6: got a lot of other names too, but I'll keep
Speaker 6: it to those for now. And I'm from sam Barnardino
Speaker 6: and I'm an artist in the community with the with
Speaker 6: propaganda as well as a state employee. I paid disability
Speaker 6: claims for the state of California. And in my role
Speaker 6: as a state employee, I am a union rep. And
Speaker 6: I'm an elected member of my union's executive board. So
Speaker 6: I represent state employees from Ontario Region, the Sam Bonardino
Speaker 6: region and in between. And I'm on the bargaining team,
Speaker 6: so I go up to second MENTO and help prepare
Speaker 6: for bargaining against Governor newsm of his team as well.
Speaker 3: Words.
Speaker 2: So this is like we're this is frontline energy, okay,
Speaker 2: which I love about it because it's like like you said,
Speaker 2: like your your day job is. In some ways it's
Speaker 2: it's so crazy because it's like as far away as
Speaker 2: that is from the actual like worker per se like
Speaker 2: you have just this parasocial, like intimate relationship with everybody
Speaker 2: that works for the state because like you seeing you know,
Speaker 2: I'm saying what they're going through and how great it
Speaker 2: is to think inside of such a hero a bureaucracy,
Speaker 2: there's somebody there that's like, no, I'm actually like fighting
Speaker 2: for y'all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate that word. So first of all, tell
Speaker 3: them what the union is.
Speaker 5: Which union were talking about?
Speaker 6: Yeah, S isn't sam e is in everybody I is
Speaker 6: an incredible you as in Union Service Employees International Union,
Speaker 6: but one thousand, right, So s EIU is one of
Speaker 6: the biggest international unions in the world. And and everyone
Speaker 6: out there has probably seen the purple purple SEIU stuff
Speaker 6: on all kinds of stuff, from nurses to state workers
Speaker 6: to in home support services workers and home care nurses.
Speaker 5: And there's a.
Speaker 6: Lot of different people that are under SEIU. More broadly,
Speaker 6: state employees in California are SEIU one thousand, So we're
Speaker 6: Local one thousand, and that's the broader union that I'm a.
Speaker 3: Part of all of Cali.
Speaker 6: Okay, you know, all all hundred thousands state employees that
Speaker 6: are represented.
Speaker 7: Damn.
Speaker 6: Okay, and but I am elected to the executive board
Speaker 6: of DLC seven O four, which is the Inland Empire,
Speaker 6: well the Ontario Samarrardino part of the Inland Empire's chapter.
Speaker 2: Where Ontario Samarandino. Okay, this is going to be very
Speaker 2: Cali specific. Like obviously this everybody here who listens ain't
Speaker 2: from here. So like I've I've cracked many LA and
Speaker 2: I E jokes and just like you know throughout throughout
Speaker 2: our time.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I like to say that I have an IE passport
Speaker 2: stamped like I have my.
Speaker 3: I worked in Pomona. See I didn't, I never lived there.
Speaker 5: Okay, but you mean what I'm saying.
Speaker 6: So my strong connection to Pomona as far as I've
Speaker 6: seen I've seen you.
Speaker 2: You absolutely That's what I mean. Like I'm a naturalized citizen.
Speaker 2: I got a green card. I got an I E
Speaker 2: Green card because like I worked at Pomona. You know,
Speaker 2: foundation was in Pomona. My condemn Lights was in Pomona.
Speaker 2: For y'all listeners, these are like the hip hop and
Speaker 2: poetry spots that I kind of grew up there because
Speaker 2: since I'm you know, born in South Central, but I'm
Speaker 2: from the six to six, so you come me coming
Speaker 2: from La Penteve Linda Pomono was just so much more
Speaker 2: closer than La Merk Park, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so I.
Speaker 3: Ended up just kind of like spending a lot of
Speaker 3: time there.
Speaker 2: And then for high school, I got I got busted
Speaker 2: to the Inland Empire, so I got bussed. I went
Speaker 2: to school out of district because my parents split up.
Speaker 2: It's a long story, but anyway.
Speaker 5: It happens a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that being said, like I have a lot of
Speaker 2: love for the Inland Empire and spent a lot of
Speaker 2: time there, you know what I'm saying. So that's what
Speaker 2: I was like, I got, I got a visa, I
Speaker 2: got a I E visa.
Speaker 5: Yeah absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 2: But that being said, what would you say, I mean,
Speaker 2: if it's kind of like I'm kind of springing this
Speaker 2: one on you, but like what would you say would
Speaker 2: be something that's like unique, a unique thing that someone
Speaker 2: from where you guys are at, like a service worker
Speaker 2: where you guys are at, it might be a unique
Speaker 2: issue that's specific to them that wouldn't be somewhere else.
Speaker 5: I'll do two because I feel like I need two
Speaker 5: to kind of to answer it. Well.
Speaker 6: One is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is
Speaker 6: a city kind of a little connected city to Sam Maerdino,
Speaker 6: Highland has patent state hospital which is basically Arkham Asylum.
Speaker 6: You know, it's basically Arkham Asylum from the Batman comics,
Speaker 6: which is it's a hospital for the criminally insane. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know it's like like in other words, like you've
Speaker 6: committed crimes, but you have mental health issues. Yeah, so
Speaker 6: you're not in the regular prison, but you're not in
Speaker 6: the regular mental hospital. You are in the prison for
Speaker 6: the mental papers. And it's a massive twenty four hour facility.
Speaker 6: And I feel like, even though I work for DED
Speaker 6: doing disability claims, because I'm in a regional chapter with
Speaker 6: the past in state hospital folks, they get a lot
Speaker 6: of the attention of what the union organization does because
Speaker 6: twenty four hour facilities are very, very taxing, and they're
Speaker 6: very right for abuse and for people to go through
Speaker 6: really difficult things work. And then the second thing I
Speaker 6: would say would be the fact that where we are,
Speaker 6: we have a lot of we service a lot that
Speaker 6: maybe more of my job, right, we service a lot
Speaker 6: of undocumented people, Like a lot of the disability claims
Speaker 6: I pay for the state I paid undocumented folks. So
Speaker 6: which is one reason that the eye stuff has been
Speaker 6: hitting so close to home. And also people may now
Speaker 6: realize that California doesn't regulate about documented status the way
Speaker 6: that the federal government does. Right, so, as long as
Speaker 6: you could prove your wages to the State of California
Speaker 6: in a legit, straight paper work kind of way, we
Speaker 6: don't care that you're undocumented.
Speaker 5: We're going to pay you because you're a worker and
Speaker 5: you need our services.
Speaker 2: Facts, And like, I love that you said that, because
Speaker 2: when they talk about like how the undocumented don't pay taxes,
Speaker 2: I'm like, yes they.
Speaker 5: Do, Yes, they do, Yes, they do, Yes, they pay
Speaker 5: a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you can think of just off the head,
Speaker 2: Like obviously over the years, the negotiations, different things that
Speaker 2: have come up varied over time. We'll get to the
Speaker 2: ice raids, because that's obviously where everything got super ratchet up,
Speaker 2: ratcheted up, But like what was some of the most
Speaker 2: like I don't like, I don't know how would I
Speaker 2: phrase this where you were like, this is the most
Speaker 2: reasonable request we can ask for, Like this is just
Speaker 2: like I don't this is so I don't understand why
Speaker 2: this is so hard for y'all. Like this is incredibly
Speaker 2: I just want to like calibrate because a lot of
Speaker 2: times people here, they here to wear a union. They
Speaker 2: got all these pictures about what the things are and
Speaker 2: what this you know what I'm saying. They got all
Speaker 2: these pictures. But I'm just like, fam, you ever heard
Speaker 2: of a five day week work week? That's unions, my gi,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying. So like that seems very reasonable,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. So, so if you could
Speaker 2: think of like some of the things you've had to negotiaate,
Speaker 2: what was some of the most Like this is, I
Speaker 2: don't understand why this is so hard for y'all.
Speaker 6: So have you ever heard, you ebably heard the phrase
Speaker 6: every crisis is an opportunity? Right, Yes, you've heard people
Speaker 6: say that, right. So, my union and other unions have
Speaker 6: been pushing for telework. You know, in my entire twenty
Speaker 6: years with the state, I'll be seventeen years veteran with
Speaker 6: the state as of December, right, Wow.
Speaker 5: The entire time we wanted telework.
Speaker 6: It took the quarantine crisis of twenty twenty twenty twenty
Speaker 6: one to actually get the state to agree to mass
Speaker 6: implement telework, and so that was like, that's a crisis
Speaker 6: that we made an opportunity.
Speaker 5: That's like, hey, we needed telework.
Speaker 6: So many people are also caring for their kids, are
Speaker 6: also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring
Speaker 6: for a new baby, or you know, take you know,
Speaker 6: just at the house so that contractors could come fixed
Speaker 6: their plumbing. You know. It's like like tell of work
Speaker 6: has been something that we thought was very reasonable for
Speaker 6: a long time, that it took it took until the
Speaker 6: COVID crisis for us to get telework. And we feel
Speaker 6: like we're pioneers that in a workforce way, because now
Speaker 6: there's lots of places that have telework, partly because I
Speaker 6: think the work that unions like us.
Speaker 5: Have done that's dope, man.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously coming out of the pandemic and recently
Speaker 2: like a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys
Speaker 2: can come back to the office and people are like
Speaker 2: absolutely not, Wow, Like why take it away?
Speaker 5: Are you taking away unless you got it?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, why would we do that.
Speaker 2: I know my own Like my wife, you know, she
Speaker 2: pre pandemic at the spot she was working. As she
Speaker 2: was working at a nonprofit. You know, she was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I was touring so much, and she was just like, dude,
Speaker 2: like you want me in this office at a certain time.
Speaker 2: It's stressed on the whole family to get my daughter
Speaker 2: to school. It's you know, just breaking her neck to
Speaker 2: figure stuff out. She's like, I'm done with the stuff
Speaker 2: that can be done at a desk within an hour.
Speaker 2: She's like, I'm just I'm just scrolling the internet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like I'm just like like I'm trying to.
Speaker 6: Tell you you're paying for lights, you're paying for.
Speaker 5: You're paying for audi.
Speaker 2: There's no reason, like I don't have to be here,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: And so she pushed.
Speaker 2: She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights,
Speaker 2: you know, figured it out and you know, without telling
Speaker 2: her business. She uh, she actually helped the staff unionize there,
Speaker 2: Like you know what I'm saying. She was like, look, man,
Speaker 2: it's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 9: You got a real one, Yeah, don't don't don't google
Speaker 9: it anyway.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so something that you had to you know,
Speaker 2: you said, you actually go to the state, you you
Speaker 2: interact with Gavin Newsom, you know, which is the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Sure we have our opinions on mister Newsom, Sure you know,
Speaker 2: and like how allied are you as an ally? Like
Speaker 2: you say, and you know if you were complicated. We
Speaker 2: can't always agree on the same things, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying, Like, but like that's correct. There's been there
Speaker 2: have been times where it's been like, hey, you know what, Sue.
Speaker 6: He's doing something dope, and then other times when he's not, yeah.
Speaker 3: Doing something dope. The other times it's like, bro, who
Speaker 3: are you?
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, like what is happening right now?
Speaker 2: So so obviously you know when you go up there,
Speaker 2: you're you're not interacting with him, You're interacting with his team, right.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: The one time I actually met him, I went to
Speaker 6: the California Democratic Party convention and shoot some twelve in
Speaker 6: San Diego, and I just went with a friend, just
Speaker 6: showed up.
Speaker 5: I was not a delegate. I was a union riff already,
Speaker 5: but I had no official role.
Speaker 6: I just showed up and walked around the San Diego Hilton,
Speaker 6: which is also where they founded San Diego Comic Con yeah,
Speaker 6: and uh.
Speaker 5: And I got to meet a lot of.
Speaker 6: Officials, including some inland ones, including some really famous people
Speaker 6: like Nancy Pelosi's daughter. But I went up to I
Speaker 6: went up to at the time Lieutenant governor knew him
Speaker 6: and basically thanked him because he had just voted against
Speaker 6: the tuition hype for the Cal States and UC.
Speaker 5: And I was and I went to cal say Samary.
Speaker 6: Know, I have my master's in poetry by MFA and
Speaker 6: poetry from Cal say Samardino. And so I was still
Speaker 6: a student at the time, and he had just voted
Speaker 6: against a tuition increase.
Speaker 5: So there's a picture of me meeting him from that
Speaker 5: from that time. That's all. That's great.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so that and he had just done something good
Speaker 6: and he and he said humble things about it when
Speaker 6: I thanked him for it. So my one personal interaction
Speaker 6: with him was good. But since then, when in the
Speaker 6: capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team,
Speaker 6: like my our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team Instacramento.
Speaker 2: Were okay, so give me one something that's been like
Speaker 2: that were what they were asking for. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: like this is completely unreasonable, guys, Like what are you talking.
Speaker 6: So every three years, every three years, our state employee
Speaker 6: contract goes up, uh huh, right, And so around the
Speaker 6: two year mark, we start gearing up negotiations, you know,
Speaker 6: and the state Newsome has the power to summon us
Speaker 6: for negotiation, and we have the power to summon his.
Speaker 5: Team for negotiation.
Speaker 6: Right, So at that two year mark we start negotiating.
Speaker 6: So in twenty twenty two, we started negotiating about the
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three expiring, you know, so that by the
Speaker 6: end of twenty three we could have a new contract.
Speaker 5: When your state employee, it's difficult.
Speaker 6: It's hard to strike, right, Like, you have to have
Speaker 6: an extremely high threshold to strike. Like if you're a
Speaker 6: a a private company in you're union, it's a lot
Speaker 6: easier to strike. You guys all want to strike, you
Speaker 6: strike Like episode of the Simpsons, temer became the union.
Speaker 6: They're just like devil plan, you know, and they started
Speaker 6: striking right right with the state. Because we provide essential
Speaker 6: services to Californians in need, it is an extremely high
Speaker 6: threshold in terms of what it would take for us
Speaker 6: to legally be allowed to strike, right And Newsome and
Speaker 6: his team know that, so they could kind of like
Speaker 6: really slow walk negotiations and stop negotiating in good faith.
Speaker 6: But as long as there's like you know what, there's
Speaker 6: signs of life on the hospital tickers the negotiations, then
Speaker 6: they're stick. We're still obligated to not strike damn right.
Speaker 6: So in twenty twenty three our contract expired, Newsom was
Speaker 6: offering us one or two percent raised for the next
Speaker 6: three years, and meanwhile he was going on TV saying, oh,
Speaker 6: debate Ron DeSantis, Oh during that time, I want to
Speaker 6: help the screen Actors Guild finish their contract and the
Speaker 6: Screenwriters Guild, and I want to So it's like, well,
Speaker 6: whoa bro, where are your kids?
Speaker 5: Why are you trying to go help their kids?
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, it.
Speaker 6: Was like, why you're not negotiating with us, but you're
Speaker 6: on TV talking about I want to help Harrison Ford
Speaker 6: and I want to help, you know, I want to
Speaker 6: help the actors get their contract. And it's like, so
Speaker 6: I had something I made a TikTok recently about how
Speaker 6: I think my lefty friends, and I'm lefty to help,
Speaker 6: of course, but like artist friends, anti establishment friends, you know,
Speaker 6: leftist friends, I think hate democrats in stupid ways, whereas
Speaker 6: there are smart ways to hate Democrats right, Like, to me,
Speaker 6: the stupid the stupid way to hate Democrats is to
Speaker 6: be like, oh, both parties are the same. I'm going
Speaker 6: to sit out and let Republicans win and hurt us worse. Right,
Speaker 6: to me, the smart way to hate on Democrats is
Speaker 6: to realize when they're doing a good thing here, they're
Speaker 6: distracting you from a bad thing here.
Speaker 5: And then they're doing a bad thing here they're distracting
Speaker 5: you. You know, it's like a good things right.
Speaker 6: So, like Newsome at times might be capitulating to Trump
Speaker 6: on something federally, but then he does something good state
Speaker 6: domestically in the state.
Speaker 5: To kind of keep his rep up. Or the reverse.
Speaker 6: Maybe he's fighting with Trump on something and that's good,
Speaker 6: but he's doing some wax shit like slow walking our contracts. Yeah,
Speaker 6: we're not Hollywood actors, right, so when our contract goes up,
Speaker 6: you didn't get the news about it, like with the
Speaker 6: Screen Actors Guild, because that's slapping your Hulu, that's stopping
Speaker 6: your Disney.
Speaker 5: Plus, you know you hear all about that.
Speaker 6: When our contract expires, you don't hear about it unless
Speaker 6: you're on disability.
Speaker 5: Unless you're on one of our programs and then.
Speaker 6: You can't go to the office because because we're understaffed
Speaker 6: or because something's going wrong with us. Right, So twenty
Speaker 6: twenty three was a pissed off time for us because
Speaker 6: he's offering us peanuts. He is offering to help everybody else.
Speaker 6: Let me help that actors, let me help the screenwriters.
Speaker 6: Let me fight Ron DeSantis. Let me go go to
Speaker 6: Washington and have federal fights. Meanwhile, we're our contract expired.
Speaker 6: And when our contract expired, there's things we lose. There's
Speaker 6: stuck things we lose, there's benefits we lose. And he
Speaker 6: just so he had us, had.
Speaker 5: Us in a bind.
Speaker 6: So I organized a work site picket at my office
Speaker 6: in San Bernardino one hundred and two degree weather.
Speaker 5: We can't strike, but we can picket.
Speaker 11: Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, see I didn't know that.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: So that's part of being a union rep is like
Speaker 5: what are my tools?
Speaker 8: You know?
Speaker 5: Like what are my tools?
Speaker 6: Like you know your arsenal, know your weaponry? Right, And
Speaker 6: so I organized a picket. We had signs me and
Speaker 6: and I'm just I tear up and I think about
Speaker 6: this because I had coworkers, but I didn't think we're
Speaker 6: going to march in the heat with me.
Speaker 5: I thought it might have been me by myself. You know.
Speaker 6: I was one of only one or two union reps
Speaker 6: in my office at the time. Now we have four
Speaker 6: because I've been recruiting, you know, and I have good
Speaker 6: people in my office, you know.
Speaker 5: But at the time, I was one of the only
Speaker 5: union reps.
Speaker 6: There's people who I knew had legitis get the system
Speaker 6: about the union. I didn't expect it. But every single lunch,
Speaker 6: not just my lunch, at every lunch, we had people
Speaker 6: picketing in front of my office with signs. People were
Speaker 6: honking in support of us. Within a month or two,
Speaker 6: we got an eight percent raise on that next negotiation.
Speaker 7: Let's go, you know.
Speaker 6: And so you know, when we fight, we went. When
Speaker 6: we unite, we win, you know, like you don't. We're
Speaker 6: not fighting for nothing. And and and that was a
Speaker 6: duor die moment for me as a union organizer. Because
Speaker 6: I hadn't had many real fights yet, and I had
Speaker 6: I couldn't really point to my co workers and say, hey,
Speaker 6: we did this and got this.
Speaker 5: We did this and got this.
Speaker 6: So the fact that I got my co workers to
Speaker 6: march in one hundred two degree whether with me instead
Speaker 6: of just sitting in the air condition having lunch, and
Speaker 6: that we won that.
Speaker 5: A few weeks later, they said, you're gonna get a
Speaker 5: eight percent rais.
Speaker 6: Now that's hard, you know, Like I was like, yes,
Speaker 6: like proof of concept.
Speaker 5: I have proof of concept. I'm not just wasting my
Speaker 5: co workers time.
Speaker 6: I could tell you there's a tangible result to when
Speaker 6: we organized together.
Speaker 2: See, that's these are the type of like wins we
Speaker 2: need to hear. Yes, we've been, we've been taking them
Speaker 2: mails like yes, sir speaking to l so, y'all's y'all's
Speaker 2: s CiU one thousand.
Speaker 3: You know David ware though, right, that's his.
Speaker 12: Name, m hm.
Speaker 6: David Wareth is from one of the California s CiU branches.
Speaker 6: He's tightly connected to our union. But he's not one.
Speaker 5: He's not one thousand, okay where, but he is CiU
Speaker 5: so he is part of us.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So when Ice, you know, invaded our streets, yes, he
Speaker 2: was outside, you know, doing what he had to do.
Speaker 2: I know SCIU set up the thing at Alvera Street. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they set up a location there for like to educate.
Speaker 2: It was just such a beautiful thing. But the first
Speaker 2: thing that got me out. The house was the rally
Speaker 2: for when he was detained, So like, man, tell me
Speaker 2: what was going on, and as much as you can
Speaker 2: behind closed doors. So most of the listeners here know
Speaker 2: this story because this show is like pretty tapped in.
Speaker 6: But yeah, right, So what I would say is this
Speaker 6: to me an opportunity to talk about like the cultural
Speaker 6: differences with Inland and la right, because the Union is
Speaker 6: very progressive, right, but the Inland is a much more
Speaker 6: conservative area, right. And compared to Los Angeles, compared to
Speaker 6: San Francisco, compared to you know, it's not as big
Speaker 6: of a city.
Speaker 5: It's more impoverished.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, there's a lot of you know, even
Speaker 6: just the geography of it, right, people grew up in
Speaker 6: the city, like my mom grew up aroundhere.
Speaker 5: You're trying about day and a monthday.
Speaker 6: I was born in a Monthay, But there was a
Speaker 6: suburban exodus in the late eighties of like people who
Speaker 6: wanted to go from that east of late six to
Speaker 6: six area to raise their kids in the Inland because
Speaker 6: that was the more conservative suburbs.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: So for me, every time something like that happens with
Speaker 6: something like a David Watar or something in one of
Speaker 6: the bigger cities happens, and we're fighting with the right
Speaker 6: wing about things. It's a matter of me educating my
Speaker 6: inland people about why we care.
Speaker 5: And while we're all come okay, you know, and then there's.
Speaker 6: Always some people and I got to respect us as
Speaker 6: a union organizer. I really have to be able to
Speaker 6: talk with my more conservative members because there are people
Speaker 6: in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me.
Speaker 6: They're just workers who want to be represented.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, that's actually a good point to
Speaker 2: hammer down because like last year, one of the shows
Speaker 2: on our network covered a union strike at a I
Speaker 2: want to say, it was like a metal plant in Alabama,
Speaker 2: like in the sticks of Alabama.
Speaker 3: These are good old boys from the South.
Speaker 2: But one thing we can agree on me is like
Speaker 2: pay me what I'm worth, Like YO say, Like, it just.
Speaker 3: Seems pretty simple to me.
Speaker 2: I don't understand how you've got to be a progressive
Speaker 2: to want to be paid what you worth, you know, So, sir, so,
Speaker 2: I think that that's a good point to say that, Like,
Speaker 2: even in a rather conservative place, all of us want
Speaker 2: to go home and eat, you know, and earn the
Speaker 2: wages that I that I should be pay me what
Speaker 2: I'm worth. It just it seemed that simple, exactly.
Speaker 6: And so so that's a tension that happens, right, and
Speaker 6: this is kind this is probably a discussion that happens
Speaker 6: among a lot of progressive groups in general. That like,
Speaker 6: there's people who want you to focus on your on
Speaker 6: your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're
Speaker 6: part of an interconnected society where it's like if the
Speaker 6: immigrants are being harmed, then the laborers are being harmed,
Speaker 6: if the artists are being harmed, then the nurses are
Speaker 6: being harmed, if the teachers, you know.
Speaker 5: So there's always that divide.
Speaker 6: But in the Inland, which is a more conservative area,
Speaker 6: there's especially that divide between people who are like, I
Speaker 6: don't want my union fighting about immigration and ice. I
Speaker 6: don't want my union fighting about the environment. Wow, I
Speaker 6: don't want the union fighting about LGBT. I just want
Speaker 6: the union to fight for my rais. I want the
Speaker 6: union to fight for my telework and that's all I
Speaker 6: want them to do. Right, So that's a that's a
Speaker 6: big thing for me, is to kind of exlain to
Speaker 6: people how no, given where the fighting for immigrant rights
Speaker 6: is him fighting for you as a worker, okay, you know,
Speaker 6: because if they came for then they could come for you,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 5: So that's kind of how I see that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, did you feel like it landed?
Speaker 5: Well, it always does with some and it doesn't with some.
Speaker 5: You know, I'll be honest with you.
Speaker 6: There are people who just left the union after the
Speaker 6: Charlie Kirk killing.
Speaker 5: Oh wow.
Speaker 6: In my opinion, they're going to really weird logic jumps
Speaker 6: when they're like, well, the union endors Kamala, and Kamala
Speaker 6: has supporters that are happy about Charlie Kirk dines in
Speaker 6: the union.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm like, uh so you don't want that raise.
Speaker 3: You really ran string in that joint.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: That is definitely the all way sunny in Philadelphia meme
Speaker 2: of just you like tieing these strings together like brouh.
Speaker 3: I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, And so, to be honest, there's been some
Speaker 5: of that.
Speaker 6: You know, I'll say this that Charlie Kirk gave us
Speaker 6: more of that than that immigration stuff. But there's always
Speaker 6: those few whispers from a few people who are like
Speaker 6: they're just not down with the broader cause.
Speaker 5: Those of us who are in the leadership of the union.
Speaker 6: I think we have solidarity, you know, we have solidarity
Speaker 6: not just with other states workers, but with anyone who's
Speaker 6: in any SAU Yeah, with Team Stirts, for anyone who's
Speaker 6: in any union, and with Californians, anyone who is somebody
Speaker 6: who is in.
Speaker 5: A vulnerable group, you know.
Speaker 6: And so there's just always that difference of opinion. I
Speaker 6: would say, over let's say sixty percent hits in a
Speaker 6: good way and in my area, because it's so conservative,
Speaker 6: let's say forty percent.
Speaker 5: It doesn't, you know in some way you work on.
Speaker 5: That's interesting.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: My last two questions would be this, like I'll give
Speaker 2: them both, Like, so, what are y'all currently kind of
Speaker 2: like pushing for. I'm assuming it has a lot to
Speaker 2: do with immigration and ice rays and stuff, but also
Speaker 2: in what ways can we as just a broader community
Speaker 2: help Well, how.
Speaker 5: Do I put this?
Speaker 6: So I work in downtown samur Dino, Okay, and my
Speaker 6: disability office is next to the Mexican Consulate.
Speaker 7: Let's go.
Speaker 2: First of all, we need to paint a picture of
Speaker 2: Sam Bernardino. I really feel like, yeah, for those that
Speaker 2: don't know California, the nature of what Sam Bernardino is
Speaker 2: is a part of this story that you might be missing?
Speaker 2: First of all, like, Okay, all that you pictured, everything
Speaker 2: that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was
Speaker 2: in the nineties, all the pictures.
Speaker 3: That you think.
Speaker 2: YO said that, you go, oh, it's really Sam Bernardino,
Speaker 2: Like YO say, yeah, So, I mean, I'm trying to
Speaker 2: say this in a way that's a descriptive and not derogatory,
Speaker 2: because obviously, like it's always KLi love for me and
Speaker 2: you know, I'll of course, but there is a certain
Speaker 2: there's a certain part of Sam Bernardino that feels like
Speaker 2: like just a spirit of like we just gave up
Speaker 2: the walking dead, the walking Deat's exactly it. It feels
Speaker 2: like a zombie land, like just this dark I remember
Speaker 2: the Carousel mall, like you walk by that mall.
Speaker 5: It's eerie.
Speaker 2: It just feels like when people talk about the Forgotten Man,
Speaker 2: the Forgotten America.
Speaker 3: I'm like San Bernardino, like, yes, Winne gave up on.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: It has recently gone from two hundred and thirty thousand
Speaker 6: people to only two hundred thousand people. But also probably
Speaker 6: because a lot of people that left were the most
Speaker 6: impoverised people. Our poverty rate went from let's say, in
Speaker 6: the post Bush Too recession, like twenty ten, we had
Speaker 6: a thirty percent poverty rate. We were the most impopulous
Speaker 6: city in the state. We've gotten down to like seventeen
Speaker 6: percent poverty, which is still bad. Yeah, you know, that's
Speaker 6: still almost one one out of five people. What was
Speaker 6: It's very diverse, I mean, and someone who pays anention
Speaker 6: in the politics, it has all the problems exactly like
Speaker 6: you said, all the problems that people talk about when
Speaker 6: they say the important problems. It's post industrial. There's gun violence,
Speaker 6: it's diverse, there's poverty. You know, there's environmental issues because
Speaker 6: it's such a warehouse empire. Yeah, because it's such a
Speaker 6: you know, area of freight and warehouses.
Speaker 5: It's like the air quality is some of the worst
Speaker 5: in the state. Yeah, you know, we we have real problems.
Speaker 5: You know, we got real problems.
Speaker 6: And in downtown downtown smer do you know, is a
Speaker 6: lot of where the problems are. We want to get it,
Speaker 6: like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and some of the
Speaker 6: other NICs of downtowns.
Speaker 5: But it's just not there yet.
Speaker 6: And there are people absolutely working on that and like
Speaker 6: there are a couple of alleyways in the city that
Speaker 6: sounds so it sounds so humble, But we have a
Speaker 6: couple of alleyways in the city that got five hundred
Speaker 6: thousand dollars grants recently to kind of make them an
Speaker 6: ARC's alleyway to kind of look like something more like
Speaker 6: the Claremont Village.
Speaker 3: Let's go, you know.
Speaker 5: And so yeah, you know, and so we are always
Speaker 5: working on it.
Speaker 6: And I will always you know, as somebody who founded
Speaker 6: co founded the Inland Empire Music Award Show and other
Speaker 6: platforms that I put on not just my art, but
Speaker 6: I helped put on other artists in the Inland. I
Speaker 6: will always tell you about the amazing tacology could get
Speaker 6: in my city, the amazing small businesses you could support
Speaker 6: my city, the amazing art community, yeah, put on by
Speaker 6: by my ogs like Judah one of Pomona, like Noah
Speaker 6: James of the Inland and Lisa j and many.
Speaker 5: Others you know who helped build a really.
Speaker 6: Beautiful ecosystem like there's there's please come to summer, you
Speaker 6: know and hit me up and I'll take you to
Speaker 6: save beautiful sports of it, you know.
Speaker 5: But yes, it's it's rough to your point.
Speaker 3: I know, I want you to get to the next thing.
Speaker 2: But to your point, that was the same as that
Speaker 2: picture of content to where it's like yes, like in
Speaker 2: the sense that like we know it's dangerous, we know
Speaker 2: there's poverty, we know there's that, but there's beauty here,
Speaker 2: dope stuff you know, and let me come like and
Speaker 2: again like just the hood rules where it's like, well
Speaker 2: you and me like, oh, you're good.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm saying, Like, you know.
Speaker 2: And some of them may yeah, like we can, we
Speaker 2: can definitely shine lights. Like I said, Like, you know,
Speaker 2: I've talked about Noah James on this show.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. I've talked about Judo one.
Speaker 2: You know that I talked about since here C four
Speaker 2: like the people that like I came, I came up with,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Inland Empire.
Speaker 2: A lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to
Speaker 2: LA is really ie.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Yes, sir, And we know,
Speaker 3: like we know because they're not lying about it.
Speaker 2: We know that matter of fact, nobody has pride about
Speaker 2: I he got pride boy.
Speaker 5: Like they're like no, no, no, no, we are to Inland.
Speaker 3: And I love that about y'all.
Speaker 5: Anyway, I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels check it out.
Speaker 3: Yup, yup, yop yup.
Speaker 5: You know, yeah, because the I he got a hide,
Speaker 5: I gotta hides.
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, So anyway, so your office is next
Speaker 2: to the Mexican Consulate.
Speaker 6: Mexican Consulate, right, and so I've actually spent my you know,
Speaker 6: I've been at this office in Samuray, you know, since
Speaker 6: twenty fourteen, and five years before that I worked in
Speaker 6: the Riverside office.
Speaker 5: But I've been in my office in Chemuary No.
Speaker 6: Twenty fourteen, and I have gone to so many I've
Speaker 6: infiltrated so many right wing protests that are in front
Speaker 6: of the Mexican Consulate.
Speaker 5: Yes, and like and like, so I'll go hang out
Speaker 5: with them. They're like, oh, what do you guys, what
Speaker 5: are you guys doing?
Speaker 6: And then I'll like take their markers, I'll take their
Speaker 6: posters and I'll just kind.
Speaker 5: Of be like, oh, yeah, maybe you have a point there.
Speaker 6: And then I'm like I'm in my office and then
Speaker 6: my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office.
Speaker 5: Is like, oh, where did you get these markers? Loot.
Speaker 6: I got you some mark because it's you know, and
Speaker 6: so I'll infiltrate right wing protests. But but on the
Speaker 6: flip side, lately, you know, Ice knows they could come
Speaker 6: to my corner. And my corner in downtown has the
Speaker 6: Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican Consulate, the
Speaker 6: Disability Office, the old city Hall building, like it's like
Speaker 6: the hub. It's one of the downtown hubs of the city.
Speaker 6: And Ice has been coming in snatching people up in front.
Speaker 5: Of my office. It happened.
Speaker 6: It's happened twice at least in the last month. And
Speaker 6: one of the days that it happened, I was in
Speaker 6: the office. I called my congressman, I called the mayor.
Speaker 6: I got all the local authorities involved. By the end
Speaker 6: of the day, the horse mounted unit of my city's
Speaker 6: police was like patrolling to make sure Ice wasn't messing
Speaker 6: with us. And tell you, homie, what a weird place
Speaker 6: this is. I've never been so happy to see the
Speaker 6: regular cops right right right.
Speaker 12: You know what is this?
Speaker 14: What is this?
Speaker 7: Timeline?
Speaker 12: Are you doing to me? What are you doing to me?
Speaker 6: We're like, I'm I'm in seven eleven six in the morning,
Speaker 6: getting my getting my coffee, and I see regular cops.
Speaker 6: I'm like, thank you sir for at least showing a warrant. Yeah, yeah, exact,
Speaker 6: rest me, yeah exactly, you know, because Ice is doing
Speaker 6: none of that. None of that. They're not doing warrants
Speaker 6: to do it. They took I want to cry.
Speaker 5: They did.
Speaker 6: They pushed a wife out of the way. She's like,
Speaker 6: what are you doing. They took the husband, tossed him
Speaker 6: in the band and drove off. It all happened so
Speaker 6: fast that no one was able to film it. Damn
Speaker 6: you No, in this era, no one was able to
Speaker 6: film it.
Speaker 5: And they know that. How that they're doing it that fast.
Speaker 3: That's the trick. Yeah, that's the trick. That's what we've
Speaker 3: been telling.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of people have asked me, just friends
Speaker 2: from out of town, like dude, has it has it
Speaker 2: toned down? And I was like, no, it just went underground.
Speaker 2: It's like they just they're a lot more sneaky now,
Speaker 2: Like it's not this big.
Speaker 3: Display of power.
Speaker 2: It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where like you said,
Speaker 2: you just getting your gas, I usally how your pumping gas?
Speaker 2: And then somebody just and it's so fast I can't
Speaker 2: film it, you know what I'm saying. Yes, And the
Speaker 2: hard part for me is like is to your point
Speaker 2: to where it's like since you know, identifying yourself, like
Speaker 2: you might not even be an ice agent.
Speaker 5: And that's a thing that happened.
Speaker 6: That's the thing that there are people who impersonate law
Speaker 6: enforcement officers and go harassed people just on a racist basis. Yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, and and and it's arguable that the Trump
Speaker 6: administration is empowering people like that.
Speaker 5: M man. Yeah, so so yeah, it absolutely is happening.
Speaker 6: To be honest, my union, Uh, we're going to always
Speaker 6: support the actions that are fighting back against it. But
Speaker 6: the but the only things that we really have jurisdiction
Speaker 6: to actually fight.
Speaker 5: H is the labor related word, you know.
Speaker 6: And so you know, we we actually just got telework
Speaker 6: extended in exchange for delaying our rais you know, because
Speaker 6: the states really broke right now for a lot of reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 6: we delayed for two years a raise that we were
Speaker 6: about to get in July, so there were already a
Speaker 6: couple of months past not having that raise. But in exchange,
Speaker 6: we got our telework agreement extended for two years. So
Speaker 6: what I would tell people who want to get involved
Speaker 6: is like, if you are in a workplace that has
Speaker 6: a union, get involved, you know, or if you had
Speaker 6: someone in your life like me who does union stuff
Speaker 6: outside of work, next time they invite you to a
Speaker 6: phone bank, or next time they invite you to an event,
Speaker 6: go support because we're absolutely we were at the No
Speaker 6: Kings protest, we were at the anti Ice protest like
Speaker 6: like like, we're in the unofficial capacity, we're we're gonna
Speaker 6: do all those kind of things to.
Speaker 5: Support the broader community. And even though it's my union.
Speaker 6: For example, on Wednesdays we have a lot of our meetings,
Speaker 6: we're doing a phone banking for Prop fifty right, which
Speaker 6: is the whole redistrict, which gives us the power to
Speaker 6: take some seats away from the Republicans. I know there's
Speaker 6: a lot of there's a debate to be had there,
Speaker 6: but ultimately it's us trying to take keep some power
Speaker 6: away from the right wing. And you don't have to
Speaker 6: be in my union to go to those phone banks
Speaker 6: if you want a phone bank to help Prop fifty
Speaker 6: pass so we could take some Republican seats away from
Speaker 6: the federal House representatives.
Speaker 5: Hit me up.
Speaker 6: Hit up anybody you know in the Inland Empire chapter
Speaker 6: of SEIU, and we can bring you to a phone
Speaker 6: bank in Ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever,
Speaker 6: and we.
Speaker 5: Could phone bank against these dang Republicans. Yeah, man, Man Tangent,
Speaker 5: I appreciate this, man, I appreciate you.
Speaker 14: Man.
Speaker 6: I've wanted to have wanted you to have me on I.
Speaker 6: I love your show and I love you man. I
Speaker 6: think you're such a cool dude.
Speaker 5: I think wise.
Speaker 6: I think that you're engaging in the community in a
Speaker 6: cool way. You're an artists I respect a lot, and
Speaker 6: not just me. I mean people friends like Sincere, like
Speaker 6: explain to me why you're significant to them and why
Speaker 6: you're an influence and.
Speaker 5: Stuff like that. So I appreciate even being on your radar. Brother, Man,
Speaker 5: stop it, stop it some more.
Speaker 3: I'm just kidding. My wife says that, okay, so perfect.
Speaker 2: Well, then tell us how people need to hear your music,
Speaker 2: how they can get in touch with you, how they
Speaker 2: can follow you.
Speaker 3: Give me all the links.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah yeah, So T A n J I
Speaker 5: n T is Tangent.
Speaker 6: You know you can find me on everything on Twitter, Instagram,
Speaker 6: you know Facebook, what was it The Inland Empire Music
Speaker 6: Award show that I'm a co director and co founder of.
Speaker 6: Is that it's only Empire dot com. That's its only
Speaker 6: Empire dot com. And also I want to encourage Inland
Speaker 6: Empire artists. You know, you still have from now to
Speaker 6: the end of September to submit to the award show.
Speaker 5: And we've been doing it for three years. We partner
Speaker 5: with nonprofits and businesses.
Speaker 6: We throw a dope ass it's pretty gala, you know,
Speaker 6: award show at a little art center in downtown sammer
Speaker 6: Deane with the Garcia Center for the Arts. Or We
Speaker 6: give away real trophies and real awards and we have
Speaker 6: red carpet media and performances. It's like it's like the
Speaker 6: Grammys for the Inland Empire. So you know, please get
Speaker 6: involved in It's only Empire dot com. That's only Empire now.
Speaker 6: Famli Likely is my group with Diesel. We got a
Speaker 6: new album out that's like scam likely on your phone,
Speaker 6: but fam Likely because it's likely that your family's hitting
Speaker 6: you up.
Speaker 5: Fam Likely. West Coast Avengers is.
Speaker 6: My first group, the more nerd core Inland Empire stuff,
Speaker 6: and we got an album that came out just under
Speaker 6: a year ago.
Speaker 5: Now the Harvest. So I'm everywhere. You can catch everything
Speaker 5: all over the place. Yeah, yeah, tangent.
Speaker 2: Wiggle, thank you so much, my brother, Hey, thank you
Speaker 2: man much love.
Speaker 12: Welcome in to that and here a podcast about why
Speaker 12: everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I'm your
Speaker 12: host Vi A long and oh boy, thing feel bad.
Speaker 12: I don't know. This is my bost This is my
Speaker 12: most Robert a while with me to talk about why
Speaker 12: everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between
Speaker 12: the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump and the
Speaker 12: way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that
Speaker 12: you interact with. Is Vicky Ostrowell, who is a writer
Speaker 12: and editor at the collective journal Call You were of
Speaker 12: many things agitated.
Speaker 15: I'm very busy, I.
Speaker 12: Think it says bricklayer.
Speaker 15: That's right.
Speaker 12: Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended
Speaker 12: Universe out April fourteenth next year that is about the
Speaker 12: way that Disney sort of took over the world through
Speaker 12: the deployment, expansion and usage of the violence of the
Speaker 12: copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again
Speaker 12: in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours, So we'll be talking
Speaker 12: some more about that and about Disney's long history of
Speaker 12: fascist bullshit towards the end.
Speaker 15: Of the Yeah.
Speaker 16: Yeah, well it's it's it's a pleasure to be hearing
Speaker 16: me at thanks, and yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel,
Speaker 16: you know, in this moment, I think, oh.
Speaker 12: God, oh no, Jimmy's Kimble.
Speaker 15: Oh that's that.
Speaker 12: Okay. So I think that the place I wanted to
Speaker 12: start is with this like question of like, why does
Speaker 12: it feel like this? Yeah, And I think part of
Speaker 12: the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval
Speaker 12: rating is really low, Like people don't actually like him.
Speaker 12: It's like forty one's reading is forty one percent. It's
Speaker 12: down like a point in September, even with all the
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirk stuff, it's still down. His most popular policy
Speaker 12: is immigration policy, which is terrifying, But his most popular
Speaker 12: policy is pulling at forty two percent, So no one
Speaker 12: actually likes him or anything that he does, right, and
Speaker 12: like forty one percent is still like a lot of people,
Speaker 12: but it's not the majority of the country, notably, like
Speaker 12: biol math works.
Speaker 15: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 12: Yeah, There's been a few things I think are interesting
Speaker 12: about this. There there are signs that this is actually
Speaker 12: really really there's something substantive happening here. One of them
Speaker 12: was a special election that I think people have paid
Speaker 12: attention to for about two days and then forgot about,
Speaker 12: which was a special election in Iowa which prevented the
Speaker 12: GOP from getting a two third supermajority in the state legislature.
Speaker 12: And the Democrats somehow, miraculously, even though the Democrats are
Speaker 12: hideously unpopular, they won a special election in a district
Speaker 12: in western Iowa that was plus eleven for Trump this year.
Speaker 12: And this is not like a like this is a
Speaker 12: district that is like just Sioux City or something, or
Speaker 12: like you know, this is a this is a jerrymandered
Speaker 12: ass district that is like a little bit of Sioux
Speaker 12: City and then stretched out all the way into a
Speaker 12: bunch of rural areas like tofuse the vote. They won
Speaker 12: this district by eleven like last year, they lost this
Speaker 12: election by eleven points in Western Iowa.
Speaker 15: Yeah, unhinged.
Speaker 12: They're doing like all elections like this like that. It's
Speaker 12: it's being ridiculous. Like again this this is like this
Speaker 12: is again like voting for people who are like not popular,
Speaker 12: but it's like literally any alternative people are like, holy shit.
Speaker 12: Western Iowa is like nah fuck this, this fucking sucks ass.
Speaker 15: Like it's yeah.
Speaker 16: A thing that you know, I've been following a bit
Speaker 16: is that farmers are freaking out. Yeah, soybean soybean crops
Speaker 16: and corn crops are gonna be rotting in the fields.
Speaker 16: You know, I think soybeans, so soy in particular, something
Speaker 16: like fifty percent of the US soy crop is traditionally export.
Speaker 16: And by traditionally I mean every year exported to China.
Speaker 16: This year China is not buying any American soybeans yep.
Speaker 16: So literally half of the market is going to die.
Speaker 16: And I don't know, you know, people sometimes these numbers
Speaker 16: don't don't really do justice. If half of an economy collapses,
Speaker 16: that's the whole economy collapsing. That's not that's not like
Speaker 16: oh yeah, they just like took you know, a haircut,
Speaker 16: Like that's massive.
Speaker 12: Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed out class
Speaker 12: of people who are not like major corporations in the
Speaker 12: entire world, and it's not working. Like they keep being like,
Speaker 12: oh it's okay, we'll just like give you a bunch
Speaker 12: of money, and it's not enough because China has decided
Speaker 12: not to buy any of this, so I mean crop.
Speaker 12: But it's like okay, yeah, And this is something we
Speaker 12: talked about like at the beginning of the administration, which
Speaker 12: is that like this administration has been going through and
Speaker 12: systematically alienating every single part of the coalition. Yeah, they're
Speaker 12: pissing off like the farmers, they're pissing off like the
Speaker 12: major pharmaceutical companies, they're pissing off the military. They're pissing
Speaker 12: off a whole bunch of the parts of government bureaucracy.
Speaker 12: Like they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones
Speaker 12: over like comey stuff that they're still mad about. And
Speaker 12: then the guy they put in charge of it is
Speaker 12: just like completely incompetence, and it's like, Okay, there's only
Speaker 12: so long you can sort of go like systematically alienating
Speaker 12: every party of your coalition, just like basically attempting to
Speaker 12: drop a bomb on the economy every single week, and
Speaker 12: sometimes it drops and sometimes it doesn't.
Speaker 15: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 16: I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here
Speaker 16: with tech stocks and with like the economy in general
Speaker 16: that has been sort of you know, on the ground
Speaker 16: for most of us has felt like it's been in
Speaker 16: recession since twenty twenty. Yeah, right, you know of different
Speaker 16: sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while.
Speaker 15: Now it's really bad.
Speaker 16: No one can get a job, yep, right, Like things
Speaker 16: are really like, prices are going.
Speaker 15: Up, up up.
Speaker 16: Everyone feels bad, and yet the stock market is still
Speaker 16: achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized
Speaker 16: equivalent strategy of like make it look like things are
Speaker 16: normal and good, and like that will actually just support
Speaker 16: things materially, and like, yep, I mean maybe it will forever.
Speaker 15: Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know.
Speaker 15: I don't think that's I think that's not bad bad,
Speaker 15: but like, okay.
Speaker 12: Yeah, well but and I think the interesting part of
Speaker 12: this too is if you look at what's going on
Speaker 12: with the economy, and it's also word noting, right, Like,
Speaker 12: the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms, looks fine.
Speaker 12: They're not fine, but it looks sort of okay, right,
Speaker 12: the stock market is still growing. There's technically like economic growth.
Speaker 12: But comma, we both saw this chart a couple of
Speaker 12: weeks ago. That is the most unhinged thing I've ever
Speaker 12: seen in my entire life, which is there is a
Speaker 12: GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst which shows that
Speaker 12: tech in the last year roughly and like in the
Speaker 12: last sort of like short and window, it's been thirty
Speaker 12: five to forty five percent of all US GDP growth. Yeah,
Speaker 12: and what I say tech, by the way, like to
Speaker 12: be clear about this, it is technically a composite of
Speaker 12: like all sector, right, but like it's basically just the
Speaker 12: like the top like the five big tech companies, right, yep,
Speaker 12: it's like Apple, its Microsoft, but pasifically. And this is
Speaker 12: the one that's like unhinged right now, is that like
Speaker 12: the most valuable company in the world is in video,
Speaker 12: a company that makes graphics cards yep, yep. And this
Speaker 12: is all because this is all of his GDP growth
Speaker 12: quote unquote is AI boom stuff? Right, it's like massive
Speaker 12: fix capital investments. Sure, it's like, yeah, there's like incredible
Speaker 12: fixed appal investments, but the fixed capital investments are just
Speaker 12: We're building a diesel powered AI data center somewhere in
Speaker 12: Tennessee that is going to poison the entire population for
Speaker 12: no benefit. Yeah, And it's like all of these companies
Speaker 12: like have gone just completely totally all in on AI
Speaker 12: A think that doesn't make anybody, can't make anybody instructurally
Speaker 12: will not make any money. And this is like a
Speaker 12: third like the growth of the economy.
Speaker 16: We are actually living through the famous old tweet the
Speaker 16: drill Is it drill about the candles? Someone out fixed
Speaker 16: my economy living in the candles street. The whole economy
Speaker 16: is candles.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And this is thing that our colleague at this
Speaker 12: run argues that there's just there is not enough money
Speaker 12: in the world to just continuously bail these companies out. Yeah,
Speaker 12: Like there just isn't right the cash flow of these companies.
Speaker 12: It's like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate
Speaker 12: that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is
Speaker 12: just unbelievable. And I think this is one of the
Speaker 12: disconnect things, right because like it's interesting You're starting to
Speaker 12: see a little bit of stuff crop up from like
Speaker 12: local level politicians where offy once in a while you
Speaker 12: get them to be like, oh yeah, no, it is
Speaker 12: like a recession economy, like on the ground in like Wisconsin.
Speaker 12: But I feel like in the media and this is
Speaker 12: one of the things that I think makes everything insane.
Speaker 12: It's not being treated that way.
Speaker 16: Yeah no, and I think you know you you went
Speaker 16: exactly where you know, hitked about going, but we're gonna go.
Speaker 16: Which is that like part of what is so crazy
Speaker 16: making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between
Speaker 16: sort of the on the ground experience that everyone's been
Speaker 16: having for years now. But it is like especially intense
Speaker 16: and like the fact that like AI is very obviously
Speaker 16: not interesting or good and no one likes it, and
Speaker 16: like even that people who sort of are I think
Speaker 16: mostly in good faith like trying to take it seriously,
Speaker 16: and who are like, yeah, it's going to change everything,
Speaker 16: Like you know, like normally people in work stuff, like
Speaker 16: they don't really use it very much, or if they
Speaker 16: do use it, like it's not effective. There wasn't a
Speaker 16: campaign to force everyone to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened,
Speaker 16: everyone wanted one because it was like obvious what it
Speaker 16: did for you. Now you know, they're obviously whatever's this
Speaker 16: is not a defense of the smartphone, but like there
Speaker 16: is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right, that
Speaker 16: like the AI economy is nonsense, that like the economy
Speaker 16: that everyone says is doing fine, feels bad. And this
Speaker 16: has been going on since you know, Biden campaigned on
Speaker 16: you know, oh it's just a vibe session. The you know,
Speaker 16: the economy is fine, and like the economy wasn't fine.
Speaker 17: No.
Speaker 16: One of the charts I really am obsessed with is
Speaker 16: a chart from like Bloomberg, which is like a small
Speaker 16: business owner confidence from like twenty ten to twenty twenty five,
Speaker 16: and like if you look like from twenty sixteen to
Speaker 16: twenty twenty, which is the first Trump term, it goes
Speaker 16: up like five hundred percent, right.
Speaker 12: She's just goes up.
Speaker 15: It just just as huge.
Speaker 16: It's the highest that's been by huge margin, and it
Speaker 16: just drops again in twenty twenty. So it finally made
Speaker 16: me understand why so many Libs were like so committed
Speaker 16: to the vibe session analysis, because there was a massive
Speaker 16: vibe inflation under the first Trump administration. So the reason
Speaker 16: people felt like the economy was good was because small
Speaker 16: business owners. And this is the classic analysis of fascists, right,
Speaker 16: the petty bergs, Wow, the small business Yeah, they were like,
Speaker 16: these are the best times you've ever lived through, based
Speaker 16: on no evidence. And if you work for a business
Speaker 16: and your boss is like things are booming, We're doing great.
Speaker 15: You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely
Speaker 15: to believe it.
Speaker 16: You know, like if if everyone around you is saying that, like,
Speaker 16: there's no reason to doubt it, unless I mean, you know,
Speaker 16: you don't you don't really believe your boss at the time,
Speaker 16: but you know what I'm saying, Like it just has
Speaker 16: it has an effect of making everyone feel.
Speaker 15: Like things are better.
Speaker 16: That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election
Speaker 16: November twenty twenty four, before Liberation Day, but on the
Speaker 16: announcement of the Liberation Day, traffs tanks.
Speaker 15: So that's gone.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's gone. Yeah. And I think that's a really
Speaker 12: vital sort of component of what's happening. Is like, you know,
Speaker 12: we talk a lot about how so there's sort of
Speaker 12: these like self contained like reality tunnels that people are
Speaker 12: gone down. But it's also really diffused by class. Yes, yes,
Speaker 12: And this ties back to the AI stuff for example,
Speaker 12: where it's like, if you are in the tech sector,
Speaker 12: AI is kind of useful because the one thing you
Speaker 12: can sort of kind of do decently well is programmed, right,
Speaker 12: and you're and if you are in this sort of
Speaker 12: like world which is again, enormous portions of all of
Speaker 12: the economic growth right that is happening is coming out
Speaker 12: of these places, and it's like, oh, this really does
Speaker 12: look like like the future is here. If you've you
Speaker 12: suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you.
Speaker 12: And it's like, well, maybe coding, which wasn't that hard
Speaker 12: to begin with, maybe, but like you know, like guys,
Speaker 12: I say this as someone who learned to code and
Speaker 12: hated it, but like, you know, but like it creates
Speaker 12: these sort of like self reinforced like reality tunnels. But
Speaker 12: every the thing about the reality tunnels is like every
Speaker 12: once in a while, like the actual world comes in
Speaker 12: like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it. And that's
Speaker 12: what happened to those all business people was they were like,
Speaker 12: oh shit, what do you mean they got rid of
Speaker 12: the deminimist sicccession? What do you mean they're putting all
Speaker 12: these tariffs up? What do you mean They're like just
Speaker 12: straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistic system
Speaker 12: that have been Like that's the basis of like most
Speaker 12: America's all businesses are like are shipping businesses right like
Speaker 12: or they're either either directly shipping businesses or they rely
Speaker 12: on on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries.
Speaker 12: This even goes into like the grift economy, right, Like
Speaker 12: massive portions of the grift economy are just like yeah,
Speaker 12: like drop shifting.
Speaker 16: Grift bulls, supplements, stacks, Yeah exactly, Yeah, Like you know,
Speaker 16: it's another reality Tonnel mea.
Speaker 12: Oh these products and services, dammit, that was a better
Speaker 12: one than I was. I was gonna do. You know
Speaker 12: what else is a scam, But these products and services
Speaker 12: that support this podcast. We are so back. We have
Speaker 12: never been more back. I want to kind of also
Speaker 12: talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as
Speaker 12: this has been going on, which is that Trump and
Speaker 12: his party has staged a pretty successful takeover of a
Speaker 12: lot of it. You know, you had, I mean Elon
Speaker 12: Musk obviously buying X but like they're in the process
Speaker 12: of taking over CBS basically by using the fact that
Speaker 12: quote unquote free media is actually capitalist media, and you
Speaker 12: can just buy them out and bully them by threatening
Speaker 12: them with losing money. You can, in fact just completely
Speaker 12: get them to fall in line or have your own
Speaker 12: which backers just buy it. And I think this is
Speaker 12: refueling the disconnect right where there was also this this
Speaker 12: post twenty twenty, all of like this. The senior management
Speaker 12: level of all of the newspapers kind of lost their
Speaker 12: minds in twenty twenty because their staff was like, no,
Speaker 12: we don't want to print Tom Cotton calling for the
Speaker 12: US Army to be deployed against protesters, and these people
Speaker 12: were like, Okay, fuck it, We're we're like, you know,
Speaker 12: you see as like the Washington Post, they were like, yeah,
Speaker 12: we will literally rather burn the Post than have that
Speaker 12: happened again. And the Post obviously is like under the
Speaker 12: control of Jeff Bezos. She was a style war Trump ally,
Speaker 12: and I think this has been contributing to it because
Speaker 12: like they've been able to take over social media platforms,
Speaker 12: and they've been able to take over the sort of corporate
Speaker 12: like bourgeois media, and it's created this incredible unreality of
Speaker 12: this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular
Speaker 12: leader and that the things he do are popular, and
Speaker 12: that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff,
Speaker 12: and it's like, well, I mean, they're kind of has
Speaker 12: been a cultural shift in terms of like you know,
Speaker 12: elite liberals are allowed to be racist again, Like all
Speaker 12: of the people who always wanted to be eugenicists are like,
Speaker 12: you know, on that shit now.
Speaker 16: And they you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed
Speaker 16: up under COVID, right like this this is also contiguous
Speaker 16: in a way, and yeah, yeah, no, I think that
Speaker 16: that's exactly right. And I think part of what we
Speaker 16: saw in the last week, I mean, I know we're
Speaker 16: going to talk about this a bit that like the
Speaker 16: last week when we're recording this, which was the week
Speaker 16: of the Charlie Kirk memorializing when everyone pretended that ventilating
Speaker 16: a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had the
Speaker 16: fallen American heroes. And I saw a lot of people
Speaker 16: who had been up until then relatively level headed suddenly
Speaker 16: really start to panic that week and feel like things
Speaker 16: were really And I think part of that was because
Speaker 16: with a man as absolutely risless and as obviously malicious
Speaker 16: and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk getting that treatment like he was,
Speaker 16: you know, Robert Redford or whatever he was about it,
Speaker 16: I think that happening in Unison across all the media,
Speaker 16: I think people finally realized, like, oh, everything is totally captured,
Speaker 16: and the people who hadn't really thought that felt like
Speaker 16: that there was sort of this unanimity, the unanimity you're
Speaker 16: talking about, because they're able to project this unanimity through
Speaker 16: this one sort of media voice, and like the fact
Speaker 16: that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel getting fired, and
Speaker 16: they're being like a genuine upswell of popular attention about
Speaker 16: the man show guy, like like who hasn't been funny,
Speaker 16: like probably since he was fourteen or whatever. I think
Speaker 16: a lot of people have focused on that as being
Speaker 16: extremely embarrassing in cringe, which like, yeah, accurate, But I
Speaker 16: think like also like they couldn't even hold it together
Speaker 16: for a week, right, Like they couldn't even hold this
Speaker 16: full court press together for a week.
Speaker 15: They had that Charlie Kirk documentary.
Speaker 16: They were like, we're gonna film it on you know,
Speaker 16: on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing
Speaker 16: Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 15: They just canceled it. They put it on YouTube.
Speaker 12: Yeah, twenty six thousand views. This means I am very
Speaker 12: very proud of this. More people listen to me complaining
Speaker 12: about the way that everything everywhere, all at once, was
Speaker 12: spreading the porschwise patriarchal ideology of the family. More people
Speaker 12: listen to me talk about that on this show that
Speaker 12: watched the stupid fucking Charlie gud worry.
Speaker 15: Sorry to that man, but people do not care, Like people.
Speaker 16: Don't care about that guy and and it didn't And
Speaker 16: also as you said the opening, his poles have gone down.
Speaker 16: People are like shut up about this, like they don't care.
Speaker 16: It doesn't work like this, like poles aren't everything. But
Speaker 16: like I think this disconnect. It's so hard is that
Speaker 16: if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment,
Speaker 16: which all of us do, Like that's how most of
Speaker 16: us get all of our information. That's this is not
Speaker 16: a judgment. It feels like everyone is like, you know,
Speaker 16: is at like half mast, you know, for their for
Speaker 16: their beautiful their beautiful boy. Look what they did to
Speaker 16: my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his
Speaker 16: huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and
Speaker 16: caught bullets. Like a Fox News article said that he
Speaker 16: was like particularly strong bodied and he kept saved other people.
Speaker 12: Okay, I didn't talk about this for a second because
Speaker 12: this is so fucking un hite. What Okay, so his
Speaker 12: like surgeon or whatever was like, oh yeah he was.
Speaker 12: He started his surgeon wrote a thing about like this
Speaker 12: bone that doesn't exist, yeah that he was like, oh yeah,
Speaker 12: he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet.
Speaker 12: And this got like picked up by like Fox News,
Speaker 12: who's that running a story about this magical iron bone
Speaker 12: in Charlie Kirk's neck that like God put there or
Speaker 12: something to save I just.
Speaker 15: It's it's so I can read the headline for you.
Speaker 15: Hang on, I've got it here.
Speaker 16: Oh god, this is Fox News on x There's a
Speaker 16: picture of Charlie Kirk that says surgeon says, Charlie Kirk's
Speaker 16: body stopped bullet in quote absolute miracle that saved others,
Speaker 16: TPUSA says, and then quote man of steel, Charlie Kirk's
Speaker 16: body stopped a bullet that would typically quote just go
Speaker 16: through everything and it was quote an absolute miracle. Nobody
Speaker 16: else was killed his surgeon. Tod's turning point, us, So
Speaker 16: that's weird behavior that people don't like.
Speaker 15: That's not yeah.
Speaker 16: No, So I think like basically they have this capacity
Speaker 16: to do this like really really intense, unified message across
Speaker 16: the entire spectrum of the media, and we're seeing it
Speaker 16: again right now with like NPR publishing basically does tile
Speaker 16: it all actually cause autism, so the science.
Speaker 15: Isn't out yet, you know, or whatever like as their headline,
Speaker 15: you know.
Speaker 16: Yeah, So like obviously, like that's scary if you're used
Speaker 16: to a reality which is shaped largely by the media,
Speaker 16: and and Trump has gotten into office twice based on
Speaker 16: a media reality shaping effect.
Speaker 15: The media has been the.
Speaker 16: Main tool, both social and mainstream, for putting him into power.
Speaker 16: So it's understandable to take it seriously because it does
Speaker 16: need to be taken seriously.
Speaker 15: But there's other stuff going on.
Speaker 12: Well, And like the funniest version of this was just
Speaker 12: how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimmel back, yes,
Speaker 12: which was like sub one week.
Speaker 15: Yeah, no, it was sub one week.
Speaker 16: And you know, to me, that says that actually the
Speaker 16: boycott spread real fast and real far. Like there was
Speaker 16: a Disney adult on TikTok right who was sort of
Speaker 16: like giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney
Speaker 16: World vacations and was like canceling his Disney World wedding,
Speaker 16: you know, and like this was like all happening really
Speaker 16: really fast. People were really mad. And you know, yeah,
Speaker 16: it's again it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel. But
Speaker 16: it's not really about Jimmy Kimmel, right, it's because everyone
Speaker 16: hates this man.
Speaker 15: They hate this.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and people don't actually want this in dipshit to
Speaker 12: just literally and you know, and he's trying to do
Speaker 12: this again, right, he's apparently trying to sue Disney, like
Speaker 12: they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able
Speaker 12: to just straight up say what is legal to say
Speaker 12: on TV. Yeah, which is the thing that he is
Speaker 12: attempting to do right now.
Speaker 16: And the other thing about it that I think is
Speaker 16: really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't
Speaker 16: go to the press and fire this man. They pull
Speaker 16: strings behind this. They get him to retract like on
Speaker 16: his show in a way that causes no attention, and
Speaker 16: the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand
Speaker 16: that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they
Speaker 16: probably don't really think much about it.
Speaker 15: Right.
Speaker 16: That is how like real, really smooth smooth repression of
Speaker 16: a free press into a bot press involves a lot
Speaker 16: of strings being pulled behind the scenes, and in fact,
Speaker 16: it has been happening for twenty years in America. There
Speaker 16: has been a lot of that going on. Part of
Speaker 16: what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain
Speaker 16: way is that Trump just needs to do less. Things
Speaker 16: have been set up for fascism for a while.
Speaker 15: He just needs to do less. And he can't help himself.
Speaker 15: They can't help themselves because they're you know, because they
Speaker 15: need it to be in this sort of public mode.
Speaker 15: And also he's lost his you know, his juice.
Speaker 12: But yeah, yeah, well and it's also just like, I mean,
Speaker 12: this is so partially Trump is just like pathologically obsessed
Speaker 12: with late night comedy, right because he's a TV guy
Speaker 12: and so he's just mad on Red and maden nude online.
Speaker 12: Except like the previous version of it were like you
Speaker 12: were just like throwing shit at your television set in
Speaker 12: like nineteen fifty five, which is a real really terrified
Speaker 12: thing to have in the presidency. But you know, speaking
Speaker 12: of speaking of having things in the presidency, these products
Speaker 12: and services, look, if they've painted more, you get better transitions.
Speaker 18: Yeah, but they don't, so vote for them.
Speaker 12: We are back, So you know, I think it's worth
Speaker 12: noting that, Like yeah, no, like like the immediate financial
Speaker 12: pressure of you know, just just the collision of weight
Speaker 12: hold on like the people who buy things, which is
Speaker 12: most people admittedly, like Disney adults are a very narrow
Speaker 12: subset of people, but like the speed and rapidity of
Speaker 12: which reality, which is people don't like this guy hit
Speaker 12: the like sort of you know, just just like just
Speaker 12: like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of the
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirk stuff was just unbelievable, you know, and like
Speaker 12: part of this this is something that Marissa Cabas from
Speaker 12: uh the Handbasket reported, which is that part of what
Speaker 12: was going on with Disney was about to roll out
Speaker 12: a price increase. Yeah, and so they had to bring
Speaker 12: it back so they could do their price increase, which well, brother,
Speaker 12: just delay the price increase if we're trying to do
Speaker 12: authoritaries whatever. Okay, you know, I am happy these people
Speaker 12: suck at doing this. It's great, we like it. We
Speaker 12: like that they're bad at it, right, Yeah, you know,
Speaker 12: like Disney is being pressured here, but I think it's
Speaker 12: worth talking about something that you have been spending a
Speaker 12: ungodly amount of time in the minds of, yeah, which
Speaker 12: is Disney and fascist Oh boy.
Speaker 16: Hey, yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny
Speaker 16: about this week for me personally, and that's what really
Speaker 16: matters obviously, is that is that is that, like you know,
Speaker 16: when we went into this administration and we started seeing
Speaker 16: what they were doing, I was like, I can't believe
Speaker 16: I'm writing a book about free trade and law fair right,
Speaker 16: like warfare by law, like you know, like sort of
Speaker 16: this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by
Speaker 16: global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart right like that,
Speaker 16: Like the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow to
Speaker 16: the IP regime. Sorry, the intellectual property regime. The IP
Speaker 16: regime is what I analyze in the book I've just
Speaker 16: written and is coming out in April, and it's about
Speaker 16: how Disney really was like a sort of pioneer in
Speaker 16: understanding the value of intellectual property and manipulating it and
Speaker 16: how you can see that through the entire corporate and
Speaker 16: artistic history of Disney Studios. So it's about like Disney
Speaker 16: movies and how they're all connected. They actually all sort
Speaker 16: of tell stories about IP in certain ways, and how
Speaker 16: we sort of miss that angle on them very often,
Speaker 16: very frequently, and misunderstand how much IP functions in the
Speaker 16: broader society because, for example, fast fashion companies, Now I
Speaker 16: know you said talk about Disney, I'm.
Speaker 15: Talking about something else.
Speaker 16: Say fast fashion companies, they actually own very very read
Speaker 16: little materially, so their offices are leased. Mostly their factories
Speaker 16: are contracted. You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted.
Speaker 16: They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores. Right,
Speaker 16: They like have very few direct employees other than like
Speaker 16: store level if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise.
Speaker 16: They might not even employ the store level people, but
Speaker 16: they probably do store level people corporate employees. And then
Speaker 16: they own their IP and maybe they own a headquarters
Speaker 16: building somewhere right like that's a fancy building, and everything
Speaker 16: else is quote unquote owned by them, controlling the designs,
Speaker 16: the logos, the images, and they can guarantee that they
Speaker 16: can make almost infinite money off of that. Because the
Speaker 16: global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that
Speaker 16: would make people who would like to see any human
Speaker 16: rights thing enacted blush with shame, and it is incredibly effective.
Speaker 16: It is the one thing that international law does quite
Speaker 16: well is enforced copyright YEP and trademark and patent. So
Speaker 16: when you have stuff like the you know, you can
Speaker 16: no longer ship under eight hundred dollars without tariffs. Like
Speaker 16: those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move
Speaker 16: these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because
Speaker 16: they don't own ships, they don't own factories, they don't
Speaker 16: even really own the you know, they they own the
Speaker 16: shirts only when they arrive on American shores.
Speaker 12: Really, this has always been the dream of reproduction of capital,
Speaker 12: which is to have a company with no assets that
Speaker 12: makes money exactly, and they're so close, they're so cleanly.
Speaker 15: Close, and all this stuff is destroying it.
Speaker 16: So I was like, well, great, now I've written this
Speaker 16: whole book about how Disney you know, is actually really
Speaker 16: like a state actor, and like they have they have
Speaker 16: like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about
Speaker 16: a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District you
Speaker 16: may or may not know about.
Speaker 15: People talked about Celebration Florida a bit.
Speaker 16: When that happened in the two thousands, which is like
Speaker 16: a weird creepy company town that they run. They actually
Speaker 16: own a huge section of It's like two counties it's
Speaker 16: larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida. Jesus Christ,
Speaker 16: what the conflict with the Santis over that don't say
Speaker 16: gay bill, which people you know, interpreted largely through the
Speaker 16: lens of the you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics.
Speaker 15: Who's pushing, which is understandable.
Speaker 16: Is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida because they
Speaker 16: don't pay taxes in the same way, they make their
Speaker 16: own laws, they have their own police force.
Speaker 15: So basically, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 12: Is they made the first networks.
Speaker 16: They did it, they did it, and they've been doing
Speaker 16: it for thirty years. That probably sixty sixty nine is
Speaker 16: when they get the deal for READI creat They've had
Speaker 16: it for a long a long time. People don't love
Speaker 16: to talk about this for some reason. I think it's
Speaker 16: really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting. But the reason that
Speaker 16: that's all really really connected to intellectual property is because
Speaker 16: one of the things that Disney did, despite you know,
Speaker 16: having literally their own statelet in the middle of Florida,
Speaker 16: is maintaining themselves as the magic kingdom. They are associated
Speaker 16: with childhood nostalgia magic. Even as they've grown and grown
Speaker 16: and grown. This behemoth. Like they've managed to largely stay
Speaker 16: connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood.
Speaker 16: And there have been moments in the nineties they overreached
Speaker 16: a bit. There's been like you know, there have been problems,
Speaker 16: and you can read all about that. But basically they
Speaker 16: did image management on all these different levels. So they
Speaker 16: managed Mickey Mouse, They managed the law around copyright, like
Speaker 16: copyright extensions famously were largely driven by Disney lobbying in
Speaker 16: nineteen seventy six and then again in nineteen ninety eight. Anyway,
Speaker 16: so all of these things, I'm trying to reduce a
Speaker 16: very big argument to a very small package here, But basically,
Speaker 16: Disney designed and the and the other IP businesses that
Speaker 16: work around it have figured out that if you can
Speaker 16: control the way your product appears in the market, and
Speaker 16: you can control the images and the feelings people have
Speaker 16: about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you
Speaker 16: can really do whatever you want materially behind the scenes,
Speaker 16: right like that, Like controlling an image is so powerful.
Speaker 16: And part of why like what's happening with Disney, weh
Speaker 16: it's falling apart so fast, is because if they give
Speaker 16: in to Trump at all it requires shattering that image
Speaker 16: that has been a century in the making, right, Like,
Speaker 16: like part of what was so brutal about the thing
Speaker 16: with Jimmy Kimmel was like, it's just obvious that Disney
Speaker 16: did that, that the corporate people did that, and they
Speaker 16: did it because Trump did it publicly. Trump is humiliating
Speaker 16: these these corporations publicly. Right, He's humiliating them. He's forcing
Speaker 16: them to come to heal. It's not working popularly, He's
Speaker 16: not capturing anti corporate sentiment.
Speaker 15: Really, people are.
Speaker 16: Like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel, Like
Speaker 16: that's weird, You're a creepy Yeah. But then also he's
Speaker 16: also destroying legitimacy of everyone. It's pulling everything down around him.
Speaker 16: It's a family annihilation, right, He's so angry about twenty
Speaker 16: twenty and like being tried that he's just going to
Speaker 16: rip everything down around him.
Speaker 12: Wow.
Speaker 16: I just said a lot of different things, but all
Speaker 16: of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about
Speaker 16: like the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship
Speaker 16: to Disney is that Disney has for so long built
Speaker 16: this image of America that has managed to persist like
Speaker 16: across and against you know, a century of increasingly violent,
Speaker 16: ineffective and visible imperialism like in Korea and Vietnam and
Speaker 16: then Iraq and Afghanistan. It was so crucial to the
Speaker 16: image of what American capitalism was. And then Trump, a
Speaker 16: man who is just as built by images as the
Speaker 16: Disney Corporation, comes and is just like just is ripping
Speaker 16: it all down because he's sort of you know, one
Speaker 16: gaping narcisstic wound right like and running a country.
Speaker 15: Right yeah. So if you look at the history of.
Speaker 16: Like Disney in general, Hollywood, and intellectual property management in general,
Speaker 16: what you can see is the way that we have
Speaker 16: that this this media apparatus has been built. When I
Speaker 16: say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know,
Speaker 16: when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever,
Speaker 16: they just think about.
Speaker 15: Stuff on TV.
Speaker 16: But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate
Speaker 16: through society. And it's like the way that you get
Speaker 16: paid for your job with you know, like the idea
Speaker 16: of clout is like actually part of that, Like it
Speaker 16: does function as a form of payment, right, Like it's
Speaker 16: not like people make fun of that, like oh good,
Speaker 16: but like then everyone acts as though it's real, right,
Speaker 16: and when everyone acts though.
Speaker 15: It's real, it's real. It's a social relation.
Speaker 16: So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on
Speaker 16: images that rely only on being forced through a sort
Speaker 16: of massive group thing from the top of the economy
Speaker 16: and the political class, was built by these corporations, but
Speaker 16: it was built explicitly to you know, reap as much
Speaker 16: wealth as possible for their shareholders.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, have to make money. Yeah.
Speaker 16: Trump is too perfect a product of that, and this
Speaker 16: regime is too perfect a product of that. And now
Speaker 16: it's all it's all you know, it is its own
Speaker 16: grave digger.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 12: Yeah. The port has a line about like the way
Speaker 12: that the spectacle sort of like intrudes into and like
Speaker 12: becomes reality. And like if Disney is sort of like
Speaker 12: the stage manager of this, right, Like Trump just is
Speaker 12: the thing like come to life and powering through it,
Speaker 12: and she doesn't because he is the image and not
Speaker 12: the thing that creates the image. He has different interests, yes,
Speaker 12: than the people who create the image. Who are you know,
Speaker 12: trying to make money. Trump is trying to like satisfy
Speaker 12: all of his like vindictive sort of versissistic rage.
Speaker 15: Exactly.
Speaker 16: It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's
Speaker 16: doing is extremely real. Yeah, he genuinely is fighting over
Speaker 16: the election and over like Komi, Like he is like
Speaker 16: he really believes these things. This is a regime that
Speaker 16: believes the things that for example, Carl Rove would teach
Speaker 16: people to say to get away with doing what they
Speaker 16: wanted to do. Right, these are these are as you said,
Speaker 16: they are the image itself, they are true believers in
Speaker 16: the spectacle, and as such break the fourth wall, right
Speaker 16: if we're going to use a theater metaphor here as such,
Speaker 16: they end up they end up like just destroying it.
Speaker 16: And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture
Speaker 16: the spectacle, right, and then there were all the people
Speaker 16: you as you describe, and the people who make the spectacle,
Speaker 16: maintain the image, make the image.
Speaker 15: They were around him.
Speaker 16: So they would just they would just close up the puncture,
Speaker 16: they would close up the susture. They'd work really really hard, right.
Speaker 16: So what I mean by that is like Trump would
Speaker 16: say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would
Speaker 16: be like the controversial statement from President Trump, right, which
Speaker 16: like completely normalizes it, and like everyone would sort of
Speaker 16: pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatication.
Speaker 16: And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right,
Speaker 16: Like people would just pretend that it was normal.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that he was speaking of four seasons total landscage.
Speaker 16: Yeah, right, like just like shit would happen exactly and
Speaker 16: everyone would sort of try it would normalize it. And
Speaker 16: that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle. And it
Speaker 16: made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch
Speaker 16: August institutions such as the Washington Post going over backwards
Speaker 16: to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim. Right,
Speaker 16: So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him
Speaker 16: as he punctured it. Right, But he he has actually
Speaker 16: too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair.
Speaker 16: He actually thought they were his enemies, the Rhinos, right,
Speaker 16: the Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media.
Speaker 15: They have been purged.
Speaker 16: They have all been purged and controlled, and now they
Speaker 16: all just repeat what he says. And what ends up
Speaker 16: happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people
Speaker 16: see through it like it's just not working anymore. And
Speaker 16: I think what's scary is that it still feels like
Speaker 16: they're repairing the spectacle around his claims because the entire
Speaker 16: media is speaking as one, and the Democrats are speaking
Speaker 16: as one, and the Republicans are speaking as one, and
Speaker 16: they're all agreeing. You know, we imagine someone else, John
Speaker 16: Q Public sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay,
Speaker 16: it's all pretty normal, Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a
Speaker 16: good guy. You know, we sort of project that that
Speaker 16: person is there. But actually more and more people who
Speaker 16: would have been like that in the first regime are like, well,
Speaker 16: I don't believe any of this shit.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also we're saying, like
Speaker 12: the way that we're talking about this in terms of
Speaker 12: his and popularity and reality, and you know, in terms
Speaker 12: of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that
Speaker 12: there's not horrible shit happening constantly, right, And that's the
Speaker 12: other part of his ability to sort of eliminate that,
Speaker 12: the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that
Speaker 12: it was to some extent restraining him, right, Like, that's
Speaker 12: the reason why there wasn't just like there were a
Speaker 12: bunch of deportations in their Trump There are a bunch
Speaker 12: of deportations under Biden. The thing that's happening now is
Speaker 12: not the thing that was happening before, right, Yeah, the
Speaker 12: Secretary of the Interior wasn't showing up at like five
Speaker 12: thirty in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to
Speaker 12: blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American
Speaker 12: citizens out of their house. Like that was like not
Speaker 12: happening yeah before, And that's off. It's just you know,
Speaker 12: it's unbelievably horrifying. And it's also not popular, like even
Speaker 12: those approval rating numbers, right, Like, you know, like his
Speaker 12: immigration policy in theory is the most popular thing he's doing.
Speaker 12: And also ICE can't do mass, large scale raids because
Speaker 12: if they stay in one place for too long, so
Speaker 12: many people will show up. They can't do it. And
Speaker 12: you know, and the lightning raids that they've been doing
Speaker 12: have been really brutal and really effective, but like those
Speaker 12: are not the tactics a stormtrooper force that broadly has
Speaker 12: the has popular consents. Yeah, right, they don't move like that.
Speaker 12: And you know, I talked about this. I guess it'll
Speaker 12: be like two weeks ago on executive's order. But like
Speaker 12: people are like stopping these raids in like Wheton. Like
Speaker 12: Wheton used to be literally the center of the base
Speaker 12: of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit.
Speaker 12: For like forty years, this was like the center of
Speaker 12: the Christian Right. And they have lost Wheton. It's been
Speaker 12: like electing democrats, and it's not just leatin democrats, like
Speaker 12: the speed of which has moved from electing democrats to
Speaker 12: like a bunch of people showed up and are stopping
Speaker 12: like lightning ice raids, which is really impressive, genuinely, very
Speaker 12: very impressive organizing. It's very hard to do. Most times
Speaker 12: it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough.
Speaker 12: And somehow again like the place that used to be
Speaker 12: the capital of the moral majority, it's like Jerry Well's
Speaker 12: fucking like home domain, right, like the epicenter of like
Speaker 12: of the Christian Right is in doing the anti ice
Speaker 12: raid shit like what like and this is the thing
Speaker 12: as we're going on for like you know, probably like
Speaker 12: four or five years, but like them do it like
Speaker 12: really serious, very good direct action. The entire terrain of
Speaker 12: the world is shifting beneath us, while all of these
Speaker 12: people constantly try to like paint over this like little
Speaker 12: tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like no, no,
Speaker 12: the ground's still there. There's all these holes in the
Speaker 12: middle of it, but like, you know, we're gonna put
Speaker 12: us some tarp that like looks like the sky beneath
Speaker 12: it. It's like, wait, why is the sky down? Yeah, don't
Speaker 12: ask questions to keep walking exactly.
Speaker 16: And I think that's like, I think that's really important
Speaker 16: and a thing that I think happens sometimes when I
Speaker 16: sort of make this analysis with my friends. I think
Speaker 16: they think that I'm saying that like fascism isn't here,
Speaker 16: or that like this isn't a fascist regime, or that
Speaker 16: like they don't want to like.
Speaker 15: Do Nazism like they very clearly do.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 15: My analysis has been like since February.
Speaker 16: I mean part of what's happened is in February, when
Speaker 16: the dose stuff was going on, I was like, well,
Speaker 16: the American Republic is over, like we'll never be able
Speaker 16: to go back, Like now what do we do? So
Speaker 16: I think like a lot of the disjuncture and the
Speaker 16: confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is
Speaker 16: because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines.
Speaker 16: Because it's really hard to accept it's a hard and
Speaker 16: complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually, like
Speaker 16: this is dying, Like this is a dying regime and
Speaker 16: a dying empire, and like that does not mean it's
Speaker 16: less dangerous. In fact, historically it's often more dangerous and
Speaker 16: it's death throws. And it does not mean when you
Speaker 16: and I talk about him being ineffective, it does not
Speaker 16: mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying. We're both
Speaker 16: trans women who organize with other trans women, Like we
Speaker 16: know about it, okay, y'all, Like we are dealing with
Speaker 16: the fallout all the time. But like the situations that
Speaker 16: we could be going through, the situations that they could
Speaker 16: be achieving that with the public that they were handed
Speaker 16: by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID,
Speaker 16: that had created an effective red scare around Gaza, that
Speaker 16: had like you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten
Speaker 16: liberals to like say that that was normal and good, right,
Speaker 16: Like that was a very very scary public yea to
Speaker 16: hand to Nazis two now with nukes, right, And like
Speaker 16: I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when
Speaker 16: the only fascist regimes, we think about are Nazism and
Speaker 16: we think that like it's inevitably like going to be
Speaker 16: just like the Nazis, or even if we just say, well,
Speaker 16: it could be more like Italy. Like there are dozens
Speaker 16: of different dictatorships. Yeah, across the history. I don't expect
Speaker 16: everyone to study all of them, but like, but like
Speaker 16: it's worth understanding.
Speaker 12: Learn a third one, pick one, literally pick one, fucking
Speaker 12: anyone that's got the maid too. There are so many
Speaker 12: like you have you are.
Speaker 5: Spoiled for exactly.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yeah, you can do. You could do if you know,
Speaker 15: pick a decade.
Speaker 16: You know, you like the seventies, go for swat though
Speaker 16: in Indonesia, you like the eighties Brazilian military dictatorship, no problem, Like,
Speaker 16: or you could do Korea in the eighties. You've got
Speaker 16: lots of choices. Oh, the fifties, go for Greece, no problem, don't.
Speaker 15: Worry about it.
Speaker 16: The reason that I bring all that up is just
Speaker 16: to say that, like, things are really bad and if
Speaker 16: we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build
Speaker 16: an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia
Speaker 16: of the power that they have available on the time
Speaker 16: that they can wait. But as you're saying, and as
Speaker 16: I've been sort of seeing, also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance.
Speaker 16: It is completely uncovered. It is not being seen. But
Speaker 16: because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made,
Speaker 16: they also don't see and understand their level of resistance.
Speaker 16: Like they've just organized the FBI, right they fired about
Speaker 16: like was it like a fifth of FBI agents like
Speaker 16: headed agents, and then like a bunch more are now
Speaker 16: doing like street crime and are like being put into
Speaker 16: ice raids.
Speaker 15: And people talk about that as being terrifying, and it
Speaker 15: is terrifying.
Speaker 16: The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids
Speaker 16: and to use every resource available in them is scary.
Speaker 16: But also if they don't have the FBI's eyes on
Speaker 16: the ball.
Speaker 15: Which they clearly don't anymore.
Speaker 16: They have redirected the FBI, they are not nearly as
Speaker 16: cognizant of what's going on in terms of distance as
Speaker 16: they were even six months ago.
Speaker 12: No, like if you look at the guy who shot
Speaker 12: Charlie Kirk, right, this is like Carly Kirk is like
Speaker 12: their guy. Right that the FBI is so stripped down
Speaker 12: right now that with a full court press, the only
Speaker 12: reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand
Speaker 12: that discord wasn't private, and he like dropped his gun
Speaker 12: and didn't pick it.
Speaker 15: Up again, and his dad recognized it.
Speaker 12: Right, And if he had done those two things, they
Speaker 12: wouldn't have found him, Like they didn't catch him. He
Speaker 12: turned himself in, right, And that's again someone assassinated like
Speaker 12: their guy and they couldn't find him. Like this repressive
Speaker 12: apparatus it is really really scary and very good at
Speaker 12: doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now,
Speaker 12: which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at
Speaker 12: like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors
Speaker 12: down and like dragging them away to a prison. Right,
Speaker 12: It's not good at anything else. And the thing, right
Speaker 12: that is a very very good way to create an
Speaker 12: engine of you know, like immense human misery that who's
Speaker 12: spectacle they can sell, But it's not actually a good
Speaker 12: way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship. We have seen
Speaker 12: very very successful sort of dictatorships in the last like
Speaker 12: twenty thirty years, right, yeah, And you know, like they
Speaker 12: take a bunch of forms. I think, like the most
Speaker 12: classically like nineteen thirties Nazi Party one is Modi in India, yep,
Speaker 12: and Modi India has done the thing in the sense
Speaker 12: of like has really really successfully transformed the consciousness of
Speaker 12: people in India to this sort of like unbelievably unhinged
Speaker 12: right wing fascist version of like Hindu supremacy that hasn't
Speaker 12: happened here.
Speaker 16: Right, you know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which
Speaker 16: is his brown shirts, like has four.
Speaker 15: Million people in it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, right, Like, I mean you know it has million.
Speaker 16: They have millions of brown Shirts, right, Like Ice is
Speaker 16: having trouble hiring twelve thousand extra agents in a continent
Speaker 16: of four hundred million people. Again, this doesn't mean it
Speaker 16: everything's fine, but yeah, like if you look at that,
Speaker 16: if you look at Ernolan and Turkey, or you look
Speaker 16: at Putin and Russia, or even Orbon to a different degree,
Speaker 16: in Hungary, like they slow rolled it, right, They went
Speaker 16: through a few elections that were like slightly sketchy but
Speaker 16: basically normal, like they like, and they just slowly built power,
Speaker 16: and it took them a decade to get to the
Speaker 16: point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that
Speaker 16: Trump was trying to do. And like, again there's no rules,
Speaker 16: it might work what Trump is doing. But like compared
Speaker 16: to Milay in Argentina, right, who they all loved so much,
Speaker 16: who came into power similarly to Trump started throwing truth
Speaker 16: bombs everywhere, you know, because like ripped apart and has
Speaker 16: now had to come hat in hand begging for a
Speaker 16: bailout to the United States yep, because his whole thing,
Speaker 16: his regime, fell apart within twenty four months.
Speaker 12: Yep.
Speaker 16: There is ultimately a material limit to what you can do.
Speaker 16: You can't just speak reality into existence for that long.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And that's the thing, right, if it was possible,
Speaker 12: did you speak reality into existence, we would all be
Speaker 12: living on a neo conservatism, right, there would be like
Speaker 12: a pure, well functioning oil extracting American client state in
Speaker 12: a rock right now. And I don't know what the
Speaker 12: fuck they would have done with a guinnessent, but like if, if,
Speaker 12: if you could just do the thing. And I talked
Speaker 12: about this on the show. I talked about this on
Speaker 12: the show all the time, right, the thing the neo
Speaker 12: conservatives thought they could do with evidence based reality thing, right,
Speaker 12: where like they they thought that what they could do
Speaker 12: was just instead of observing reality and creating your positions,
Speaker 12: from it. They thought they could just purely influence and
Speaker 12: manipulate reality to become whatever they wanted it to be,
Speaker 12: and they couldn't. Right, like where is George Bush right now?
Speaker 12: Right like where is Dick Cheney? Like the Trump administration
Speaker 12: somehow staggeringly has managed to like they finally found a
Speaker 12: war crime so bad that John wu the art like
Speaker 12: the guy who wrote the torture manuals, was like, wait,
Speaker 12: hold on, you can't just blow up random like boats
Speaker 12: of people in Venezuela, Like what what? Like I literally
Speaker 12: had not even occurred to me that it was possible
Speaker 12: for you to commit a war crime so bad that
Speaker 12: the guy who off the torture memos was like, hold on,
Speaker 12: hold on, hold on, Well, I ain't set up for
Speaker 12: this shit.
Speaker 16: Like it's yeah, they're absolutely like unhinged. They're horrible and
Speaker 16: thank god they are so unpopular and so bad at this. Yeah,
Speaker 16: because if they were just a little bit better at this,
Speaker 16: I think it's very clear what they want.
Speaker 12: We're different. We're screwed. Yeah, like we go we go
Speaker 12: under like four months, but that hasn't happened because they're
Speaker 12: not good at this and they're tearing apart the very
Speaker 12: institutional apparattus like Disney, like they're tearing apart the very
Speaker 12: institutional apparattus is that were designed to like propagate them.
Speaker 12: Like Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right,
Speaker 12: Like Trump could have just used you know, like like
Speaker 12: basically like the way that every other being, like like
Speaker 12: the way literally the Nazis did right like until like
Speaker 12: literally until they were forced to break it off dream
Speaker 12: like World War two, right, which is like used Disney
Speaker 12: as a propaganda apparat is for you.
Speaker 16: And Disney was gun shy because of the fight with
Speaker 16: the fight with Santas didn't go that well for them, Yeah, surprisingly,
Speaker 16: you know, like they had some trouble with that, and
Speaker 16: so they were gun shy, like going into the administration,
Speaker 16: like they were very quiet, like they were not rocking
Speaker 16: the boat.
Speaker 15: They were making lots of statements about how like, you know, we.
Speaker 16: Support it, Like he didn't have to goad them into
Speaker 16: taking a position in the culture war, Like they were
Speaker 16: just very glad that they weren't fighting off Da Santis anymore,
Speaker 16: and that they weren't fighting off you know the Daily Wire,
Speaker 16: you know, claiming that they were you know, whatever the
Speaker 16: woke mind virus or whatever the hell, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 16: Like they were just they were just putting their keeping
Speaker 16: their heads down, trying to rebuild after the disaster of
Speaker 16: the pandemic, right, like trying to like get their cruise
Speaker 16: line back up and like as profitable as it could be.
Speaker 16: You know, Like they were they were working on like
Speaker 16: they were just doing their thing, and they were like,
Speaker 16: no reason Trump should stop that.
Speaker 15: There's no reason trum should spped that. They is what
Speaker 15: they thought.
Speaker 12: No, It's like they were implementing like a lot of
Speaker 12: the culture wars they wanted in terms of like Okay,
Speaker 12: we're going back to white people. We're never having another
Speaker 12: non white character again, like eat shit.
Speaker 16: Like they canceled they they're canceling TV shows with just
Speaker 16: like quick your character is Like they're just they're just
Speaker 16: doing stuff like that. They're they're doing everything that the
Speaker 16: regime wants. But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there
Speaker 16: watching TV and like like throwing his remote around and
Speaker 16: like unfortunately his remote like dictates US policy.
Speaker 12: M I think that's an important note to close on
Speaker 12: because like his remote dictates US policy to the extent
Speaker 12: that everyone pretends that it does. And one of the
Speaker 12: things that can start happening in the in the end
Speaker 12: stages of these kind of regimes, is that like the
Speaker 12: levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Right, So he just like declared that antifas like a
Speaker 12: domestic terrorist organization. Right, We're gonna be talking about that
Speaker 12: later this week, possibly earlier this week. Got to know
Speaker 12: when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything
Speaker 12: in and of itself. He's just like waving a magic
Speaker 12: wander round. But if he doesn't have the repressive apparatus
Speaker 12: to make that matter, then okay, then then him throwing
Speaker 12: the remote around isn't like gesturally controlling the arm of
Speaker 12: like one of the most sophisticated, what's supposed to be
Speaker 12: one of the most fiscated pressed apparatuses ever. Right, And
Speaker 12: they rely on both the compliance of the state bureaucracy,
Speaker 12: which they've been decently good at pulling in line, but
Speaker 12: also they rely at our compliance for this, and you
Speaker 12: don't have to comply with them. That's the fun thing
Speaker 12: about about existence is that they can't just they can't
Speaker 12: just make it real unless you help them.
Speaker 16: And as we saw, as you're already talking about the
Speaker 16: Charlie Kirk Special doesn't go up, right, they say like
Speaker 16: the yeah, the COVID vaccines are like, we're going to
Speaker 16: restrict them. And most of the pharmacies are just like
Speaker 16: just check a box saying you need it, like you know,
Speaker 16: like not in every state. But again, like these massive institutions,
Speaker 16: they can't really get them in line, So why are
Speaker 16: you letting them get you in line?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 12: And remember, you know, like they had better control of
Speaker 12: their institutional apparatuses in twenty twenty and the outcome of
Speaker 12: that was there was a giant uprising and they put
Speaker 12: the president in a bunker or a thing that he's
Speaker 12: still mad about to this day. Right, even when it
Speaker 12: looks like they have total control, they don't. And I
Speaker 12: don't know if he's gonna like end up in a
Speaker 12: Hitler bunker. But look, as of right now, as it stands,
Speaker 12: the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in
Speaker 12: a bunker is one hundred percent. So you know, if
Speaker 12: if if the past is to be a prediction of
Speaker 12: the future, we could see it again when all of
Speaker 12: this ship goes to hell and the economy collapses and
Speaker 12: everyone's like, oh, this was all lie. The whole time. Wow, damn,
Speaker 12: hey look like you know, and oh god, but I
Speaker 12: don't know if we can. Uh, we're just gonna, we're
Speaker 12: just gonna, we're just gonna put a really long leaf
Speaker 12: over that entire sentence and we're gonna, we're we're gonna
Speaker 12: leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader, completing
Speaker 12: the sentence, just figuring out what it was saying, not
Speaker 12: doing the thing. Okay that this this, this has been.
Speaker 12: It could happen here, Vicky. Where can people you order
Speaker 12: your book?
Speaker 16: Oh, you can go to Haymarket and that's who's putting
Speaker 16: it out and they have a list of links. You
Speaker 16: can also go to my blue Sky account vickyacab dot
Speaker 16: b Sky dot social and you can find a link there.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And where can people find you in your work?
Speaker 16: Car Shiny things dot com. It's the Collective Anarchist Writers
Speaker 16: or any other acronym you like.
Speaker 15: C AW. That's where I'm working the most regularly.
Speaker 12: Now, good crowth, heming. That's great, that's great.
Speaker 15: It's Corvid based.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we love a Corvid based economy.
Speaker 15: Thanks so much for having me Amiya, Yeah, thanks for
Speaker 15: coming on.
Speaker 13: Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me James today,
Speaker 13: and I'm very lucky to be joined by a couple
Speaker 13: of people who I am about to introduce to discuss
Speaker 13: the very important topic of does Tyler and O'll give
Speaker 13: your baby autism? I think we probably already know the answer,
Speaker 13: but nonetheless we have half an hour to talk about it.
Speaker 13: So you were here doctor Carve Hodeth laughing, that's uh me,
Speaker 13: that's cave. Yeah. Many of you will know him, but
Speaker 13: he's a medical doctor and host of the House of
Speaker 13: Pod podcast. And I'm also joined by Tyler Black, who's
Speaker 13: a psychologist in British Columbia. Welcome Tyler, chiatrist, psychiatrist.
Speaker 7: Fucked it up? Them fighting words, James, them fighting.
Speaker 13: Yeah, no, I know, yeah, this is yes. Like when
Speaker 13: people call me a sociologists, I understand, or even worse,
Speaker 13: an anthropologist.
Speaker 7: It's a pleasure to be here and no worries. Tyler
Speaker 7: is Canadian, so to see him correct somebody on something
Speaker 7: makes me happy. I'm very sorry, yeah, but that's why
Speaker 7: we get him on.
Speaker 14: He's very sorry, he's very sorry about that. I love
Speaker 14: Tyler very much. He comes on my show not infrequently.
Speaker 14: And one really pleasant thing that's happened, one little bright
Speaker 14: spot in the last I don't know five years of
Speaker 14: terror that have been happening medically is seeing Tyler gradually
Speaker 14: over time become grumpier and more willing to fight.
Speaker 7: That's the only bright spot I've had. Thank you Tyler
Speaker 7: for that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I imagine that's the side effect of your consumption
Speaker 13: of a seat to metaphana may Yeah.
Speaker 7: Got a cut back, bro got cut back? Yeah?
Speaker 13: All right. For those not familiar, where are we talking about?
Speaker 7: Thailan All?
Speaker 13: Might be the name you're familiar if you, especially of
Speaker 13: your American people, like to use brand names a little more.
Speaker 13: I still find that very confusing, and I've lived here
Speaker 13: for a better part of two decades. But why are
Speaker 13: we talking about tail and all?
Speaker 12: Tyler?
Speaker 7: Do you want to introduce this concept? Sure so, Yeah.
Speaker 7: Talent All goes by Paracenamol in UK and other places
Speaker 7: in the world. It's a ceta minifin here, so it
Speaker 7: really is not talking about talent although the shorthand that
Speaker 7: the political people who've been talking about it have specifically
Speaker 7: called out the brand Talentol, which is bizarre. But this
Speaker 7: stems from both a mission that RFK Junior when he
Speaker 7: took over as the HHS sort of had, which was
Speaker 7: to find the cause of autism, which is his political
Speaker 7: quest to find some environmental cause. I mean, he started
Speaker 7: as an environmental lawyer. I don't think he's doing this disingenuously.
Speaker 7: I think he truly believes there was an environmental cause
Speaker 7: to autism. But of course RFK wheeled science probably driven
Speaker 7: by the brain worm, and so he has this way
Speaker 7: of having a conclusion that and finding the science to
Speaker 7: support it. And it was very clear that he was
Speaker 7: going to point towards vaccine vaccine schedule, and at some
Speaker 7: point this is definitely coming. I think this might be
Speaker 7: a roundabout way to do it through fevers and talinol.
Speaker 7: But the talent link is something that has been a
Speaker 7: question mark. So a really quick aside will be that
Speaker 7: when drugs are regulated, the drug companies have very little
Speaker 7: natural interest to study it and pregnant people it only
Speaker 7: brings the risk. There's no reason to do it. You
Speaker 7: are required to submit what studies you have on animal
Speaker 7: toxicity in utero and these types of things, but not
Speaker 7: really that much for humans, and so the drug companies
Speaker 7: usually put their hands up and go talk to your
Speaker 7: doctor about using this, and then the rest of us
Speaker 7: in medicine have to take that information that's been generated
Speaker 7: about this medication and try and interpret it on pregnant people.
Speaker 7: And it creates this system where we create the evidence
Speaker 7: over the next twenty years in what we call pharmacal
Speaker 7: vigilids or post marketing studies, where we basically has there
Speaker 7: been a problem, did we find any birth effects?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 7: And we kind of do it backwards. It kind of
Speaker 7: makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCAT on
Speaker 7: pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any
Speaker 7: reason for the for the drug. So it's one of
Speaker 7: those sort of loopholes. And so this natural conversation has
Speaker 7: resulted in science that points in a number of directions.
Speaker 7: Does the seed of Menifhite cause autism? Can't be answered
Speaker 7: by the current science because it's all cohort data, it's
Speaker 7: looking backward, it's looking at populations. It's confounded. How are
Speaker 7: The best study was published in twenty twenty four, which
Speaker 7: makes the timing of this announcement really awkward. There was
Speaker 7: two point five million people. It was a believe it's
Speaker 7: a Danish study, Swedish study, okay, And in that study
Speaker 7: there was a small link found, But because they had
Speaker 7: two point five million people, they could check that link
Speaker 7: by looking at sibling pairs within that two point five million.
Speaker 7: So in that group they had sixteen thousand sibling pairs
Speaker 7: both exposed to and not exposed to acetaminifin, and lo
Speaker 7: and behold, they found that there was no relationship there.
Speaker 7: So this really is one of the more definitive correlational
Speaker 7: studies that says pretty much, any effect we're seeing is
Speaker 7: probably confounded. It probably isn't due to the assineminifin. Though
Speaker 7: there are some animal studies that might hint at it,
Speaker 7: it appears to be minor and Caves are about to
Speaker 7: say something, Yeah, first of all, that's exactly right.
Speaker 14: I think that there are a lot of things that
Speaker 14: Maha and RFK Junior talk about there are just insane
Speaker 14: and you can dismiss out of hand. This is a
Speaker 14: topic that is not complete rubbish. It is something that
Speaker 14: has a little bit of nuance and we can talk
Speaker 14: about as Tyler was just mentioning, there is some evidence
Speaker 14: that there might be a small relationship, but the real
Speaker 14: key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative.
Speaker 14: Are they just related for some reason or another, or
Speaker 14: are they caused by each other? And that study that
Speaker 14: he talked about, that Swedish study looked at about one
Speaker 14: hundred and eighty thousand infants that had parents that were
Speaker 14: exposed to sudemenafin. What's really elegant about that is that
Speaker 14: it looked at the siblings. That's why it's such an
Speaker 14: important study. And that's what I say, it closes the
Speaker 14: door on the matter. No, I agree with Tyler. I
Speaker 14: think the preponderance of evidence now is that there is
Speaker 14: no connection between town law and autism. But I don't
Speaker 14: know if this study totally closes the door. It is
Speaker 14: really well done though. So they showed that if you
Speaker 14: look at siblings, if you look at a family, there's
Speaker 14: no connection. You take out some of the variables, you
Speaker 14: take out some of the confounders there that can obfuscate
Speaker 14: or confuse an issue. You take those out of the picture,
Speaker 14: and you see that there's no relationship between town and menaphin.
Speaker 14: What's interesting in that same study that we just study,
Speaker 14: if they then put those back in, if they didn't
Speaker 14: account for the siblings, then yeah, showed that there is
Speaker 14: a little bit of evidence, a small basic relationship between
Speaker 14: you knowcedomenaphin and developing autism. But once you start accounting
Speaker 14: for some of these these really tough to account for variables,
Speaker 14: then you start to see that that falls apart, and
Speaker 14: that implies that most of these other studies are not
Speaker 14: causal but correlative relationships.
Speaker 7: The sort of twenty twenty five update is and I
Speaker 7: think this might have I think, as that we learn
Speaker 7: more about it, this might have been something that was
Speaker 7: either solicited or developed in tandem with RFK and his goals.
Speaker 7: But there was a publication in twenty twenty five by
Speaker 7: I think the Harvard Dean of Medicine, who has been
Speaker 7: a plaintiff's witness for attorneys battling talentol in developing autism.
Speaker 7: So there is a bit of a financial conflict of
Speaker 7: interest there.
Speaker 13: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 7: Baccarelli, Yeah, doctor Buccarelli, who published a study called a
Speaker 7: Navigation Review, and it's basically a science y version of
Speaker 7: let me tell a story, and here's the evidence that
Speaker 7: supports it. Basically, what they did is they took the
Speaker 7: number of studies, they counted the number that pointed towards
Speaker 7: talinol as a factor, and they counted against it, and
Speaker 7: they found about twenty something in total. The majority of
Speaker 7: them found a link to talent al and autism, and
Speaker 7: then a minority found no link. But of course that's
Speaker 7: not really how we do science in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 7: If we had two studies and you can actually look
Speaker 7: at his studies, and some of these studies are two
Speaker 7: hundred people, three hundred people, five hundred people, and then
Speaker 7: you have this other study that's two point five million
Speaker 7: people in the real world, that larger study would dwarf
Speaker 7: the significance of the other ones. But in the way
Speaker 7: that this navigation study was set up, they're all equal.
Speaker 7: In fact, he treats the non confounded sample that Cave
Speaker 7: was mentioning as its own study, and then he treats
Speaker 7: the controlled sample with siblings as its own studies. So
Speaker 7: the same study from Sweden was cited twice, one four
Speaker 7: and one against. You can see how you could shape
Speaker 7: a narrative, which is what a narrative review is. It's
Speaker 7: when you shape a narrative. It's not a very sciencey
Speaker 7: way to do things. We like to do systematic reviews,
Speaker 7: and this did provide a bit of cover because now
Speaker 7: everyone in AHHS can point towards this study by the
Speaker 7: Harvard Deed of Medicine published in BMC Environmental Studies, Peer reviewed,
Speaker 7: showing that a navigational study shows that there could be
Speaker 7: a link, but it really if you read the study,
Speaker 7: any scientists reading it like, yeah, there could be a link,
Speaker 7: but the largest study in that group suggests there is
Speaker 7: no link.
Speaker 13: Right, yeah, in terms of someone's playing games with evidence
Speaker 13: when they've already decided what the completion would it be. Yeah,
Speaker 13: let's talk about this fascination with autism that exists in
Speaker 13: the MAHA. Right, make America healthy again. For those who
Speaker 13: are not familiar what's happening here, people are probably diagnosed
Speaker 13: with autism at a higher rate now than they were
Speaker 13: when these people were young. Right, that is not however, well,
Speaker 13: I will let you guys explain that. Explain how that
Speaker 13: doesn't mean that we're giving children autism if that, if
Speaker 13: my understanding is correct.
Speaker 7: Sure, I mean I'll jump in first. So there's a
Speaker 7: number of ways to test whether or not the rate
Speaker 7: is truly increasing. So the first thing to say is,
Speaker 7: over the world, we've seen a gradual increase in the
Speaker 7: global population that has autism from about zero point eight
Speaker 7: percent of the population to about two percent of the population.
Speaker 7: That's what's happened over the past twenty five years of
Speaker 7: studies across the world. Now, that's not exactly the exponential
Speaker 7: rise that you are and hear about in the United States.
Speaker 7: The United States has a lot of unique features though.
Speaker 7: You have a ton of people working in this area,
Speaker 7: you have a ton of researchers, lots of people have
Speaker 7: access to healthcare. There's many reasons why global numbers might
Speaker 7: not look like American numbers, but the general idea behind
Speaker 7: this increased rate of autism. Most of that increases due
Speaker 7: to our change in diagnostics and the way that we
Speaker 7: label things. So when RFK was a kid, there were
Speaker 7: kids that were excluded from school because they were literally
Speaker 7: called retarded. They were not allowed to come to school.
Speaker 7: They were known as spass and goofs, and they were
Speaker 7: the ones that were made fun of and they struggled
Speaker 7: throughout life. Now that were they called autistic? No, did
Speaker 7: they have the same symptoms that the kids today that
Speaker 7: are being diagnosed with autism have probably, And the way
Speaker 7: that we can control for that are there's some really
Speaker 7: elegant studies. One is we take diagnostic criteria from children
Speaker 7: and then we ask adults currently living today to go
Speaker 7: through a structured interview looking for those things, and yuess what,
Speaker 7: we find the same rate in adults that we see
Speaker 7: in kids. Okay, this idea that it's an exponential right now,
Speaker 7: I think the rate is also increasing, but I think
Speaker 7: it's increasing gradually, and this is because the extreme of
Speaker 7: ages are having kids more often, especially at the older end.
Speaker 7: And we do know that older age is related to autism,
Speaker 7: especially older age of the father. And we also know
Speaker 7: that premature babies and babies with significant developmental disabilities are
Speaker 7: surviving their postnatal period as soon as they're born. Instead
Speaker 7: of instantly dying or dying during childbirth or not being
Speaker 7: able to be resuscitated, they're kept alive and survive and
Speaker 7: this is good. But this does mean that there's more
Speaker 7: neurodiversity in the world because of course these children have
Speaker 7: encountered significant harm. Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 14: I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded and
Speaker 14: that's part of why we see more.
Speaker 7: But yeah, I think the.
Speaker 14: Two things we know that are related are some genetic
Speaker 14: predisposition if there's people in the family that have it,
Speaker 14: and the older age of patients as we get older,
Speaker 14: I'm an older father myself. You know, you see more
Speaker 14: with older patients, and that's more common now than it's
Speaker 14: ever been before.
Speaker 7: So these are all a part of it.
Speaker 14: Once you take a look, for example, going back to
Speaker 14: that Swedish study in twenty twenty four that was so good,
Speaker 14: that sibling study looks at the genetics of it, and
Speaker 14: once you count for the genetics of it, you start
Speaker 14: to be able to say, Okay, maybe this's other stuff
Speaker 14: like tile mall isn't important?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 13: Yeah, is there a gender element to this as well?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 13: I may have misremembered here. My understanding is that women
Speaker 13: FEN people tended to be diagnosed at a lower rate
Speaker 13: until relatively recently.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so not only is there a gender component, but
Speaker 7: I do think that the biological sex of the child
Speaker 7: has an impact on the genetic expression, because it seems
Speaker 7: like the transmission to males is higher than the transmission
Speaker 7: to females. So there might be something buffering about that
Speaker 7: extra X chromosome. You know, we have this shrimpy little
Speaker 7: Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates. You only have
Speaker 7: one Y chromosome? Sorry, are you a superman?
Speaker 13: I have two whys caves y why you know, Harry,
Speaker 13: my ears are so.
Speaker 7: There are a number of disorders that the extra X
Speaker 7: chromosome is protective for, and I do wonder if that's
Speaker 7: the case for autism. But what's also true is we
Speaker 7: have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys
Speaker 7: should be, and that leads to boys being diagnosed with
Speaker 7: autism more frequently than girls. So the girl that's quiet
Speaker 7: and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid
Speaker 7: a lot more quickly than when you see that in
Speaker 7: a boy that the parents think autism or the clinician
Speaker 7: thinks autism. So there could be some social reasons for
Speaker 7: that discrepancy as well. And then the last thing I
Speaker 7: really wanted to say is that the really tragic thing
Speaker 7: about all of this is profound autism, which autism is
Speaker 7: the spectrum. Profound autism is extremely disabling for people around
Speaker 7: the person. Generally, autistic people enjoy their lives, especially if
Speaker 7: the world is set up in a way so that
Speaker 7: they can live safely without impediment. Autistic people are perfectly
Speaker 7: content to be autistic. And this whole idea of autism
Speaker 7: being this travesty, this epidemic, this blight on society, is
Speaker 7: really doing a disservice to the wide variety of people
Speaker 7: that we're now calling autistic, because when our criteria expanded,
Speaker 7: we created a whole space of autistic people who are
Speaker 7: very what we would call non profound autism. These are
Speaker 7: people that have difficulties in social communication or do the
Speaker 7: same thing over and over despite you know, it being
Speaker 7: at an abnormal level, but it's what they need to
Speaker 7: soothe themselves. You know, that will be called autism. Now, Now,
Speaker 7: would a parent want a child who's in a home
Speaker 7: constantly rocking back and forth and just soothing themselves by
Speaker 7: licking their fingers or whatever, you know, some very severe
Speaker 7: autistic behavior. No, that probably wouldn't be the parent's ideal.
Speaker 7: But I've worked with so much autism in my life.
Speaker 7: I'm a child in nodicston in psychiatrist. I've seen so
Speaker 7: many autistic kids live happy, happy, happy lives artistic. So
Speaker 7: I'm not a fan of the blight sort of messaging
Speaker 7: of it either.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because that's one
Speaker 13: of the worst things about In a sense, one of
Speaker 13: the most damaging things about is where people who are
Speaker 13: living happy, healthy and fulfilled lives are being like slandered
Speaker 13: or pathologized to rided by the government of this country
Speaker 13: and that's fucked. Yeah, and I'm sure will have an
Speaker 13: impact on those people, because it would have an impact
Speaker 13: on anyone to see this condition that, as you said, right,
Speaker 13: like maybe difficult for people who are not familiar with
Speaker 13: it to navigate, but it doesn't mean that you can't
Speaker 13: have a fulfilling and happy and very pleasant life. Suddenly
Speaker 13: suggested it some kind of massively disabling and terrible travesty
Speaker 13: and that the person who gave birth to you is
Speaker 13: to blame for this, right right.
Speaker 14: That's what really bothers me, is like we're always trying
Speaker 14: to find ways to blame mothers. This is yeah, this
Speaker 14: is a mantle and I apologize for that. Listener, Please
Speaker 14: don't at me for that. Yeah, but part of what
Speaker 14: this is like control over women. And while that Swedish
Speaker 14: study of mention may not completely close the issue, I
Speaker 14: think it's pretty clear that the evidence pretty strong against
Speaker 14: there being a connection between tel nal and to make
Speaker 14: a whole sale governmental recommendation that as a country, for
Speaker 14: us to move this way, to make such strong claims,
Speaker 14: to have a president come out and just say grit
Speaker 14: your teeth and bear it. To women in regards to
Speaker 14: the one medicine that we've told them they can use
Speaker 14: during a pregnancy is insane to me. So there's the
Speaker 14: autism issue in the insult essentially to that community, but
Speaker 14: also to women in general. It's insane to me that
Speaker 14: this is happening right now. Again, there is a bit
Speaker 14: of nuance to this issue. As I mentioned, it's not
Speaker 14: like totally insane to ask about and question it, but
Speaker 14: to make a wholesale directional change in how we recommend
Speaker 14: managing patients with our pregnant is is nuts?
Speaker 7: Is just nuts? Yeah, And to piggyback on that, you know,
Speaker 7: like it's really normal. It was normal advice in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty four for us to say, yeah, you can use
Speaker 7: talent all, but try to use it sparingly. We're not
Speaker 7: really sure use it when you need it though, because
Speaker 7: we do know that pain and fever and these types
Speaker 7: of things are bad for the baby, right, you know,
Speaker 7: So this this kind of way in which it's now
Speaker 7: been massaged. So I saw a letter from doctor Marty Mackeriy,
Speaker 7: who's another grifter who's now in the American political system.
Speaker 7: There has written a letter basically saying at the bottom,
Speaker 7: use it judiciously, and it is the only one that's approved.
Speaker 7: So but that's exactly where we were before. There was
Speaker 7: no need for a past conference. Every doctor was saying,
Speaker 7: use talent all sparingly, but you can use it. James Tayley,
Speaker 7: what's driving me crazy about this? Yeah?
Speaker 13: Please?
Speaker 14: This administration has done something. Trump in general has done
Speaker 14: something that has blown my mind, which is somehow, time
Speaker 14: and time again, I find myself the FAI people and
Speaker 14: things that I would never want to defend. Like, first
Speaker 14: of on watching Jimmy Kimmel, I don't know how that happened. Yes,
Speaker 14: I blame Trump for that. Second, like, tylanol is a
Speaker 14: dangerous medication. I'm a liver doc. Yes, I feel like
Speaker 14: talanyl overdose is causing acute liver injury and acute liver
Speaker 14: failure is a massive, real issue across the world, and
Speaker 14: it is it's it's a real thing. So there are
Speaker 14: reasons that we should be watchful of talanol, but this
Speaker 14: is not one of them.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Personally, I'm a champion of all talanol should be
Speaker 7: like the UK, it should be in individually wrapped pieces
Speaker 7: because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of
Speaker 7: intentional overdose and even ic overdoses that cause liver failure.
Speaker 7: So yeah, take away freedoms and right this is the
Speaker 7: medical freedom crowd. It's amazing.
Speaker 13: Yeah, we should take an advertising break and then come back.
Speaker 13: So we'll do that.
Speaker 14: Oh god, that would be fantastic if I could take
Speaker 14: it now advertising. I could use an ad right now.
Speaker 12: So bad.
Speaker 13: It's going to be for fucking lemon pepper water, which
Speaker 13: is the only pain treatment you.
Speaker 7: Should be taking. Bark to put between your teeth.
Speaker 10: For sure.
Speaker 13: Go get some leaves and fucking eat them. What can
Speaker 13: get wrong? All right, we're back. Thank you for that
Speaker 13: message from Leaf Pain Relief.
Speaker 7: Hit the spot.
Speaker 13: It's good. Don't eat leaves. I saw someone posing with
Speaker 13: a they were taking their graduation pictures. Very nice setting.
Speaker 13: I'm not going to say the flower, I guess just
Speaker 13: in case, you can call it quite remarkable hallucinations and
Speaker 13: it is not a good idea to be like half
Speaker 13: in it. It's a nice looking flower. If you didn't know,
Speaker 13: you might have.
Speaker 7: Well, now I want to know what the hell you're
Speaker 7: talking about. You're going to tell me later.
Speaker 13: I'm assuming lived in California. Your whole life.
Speaker 12: How do you not know this?
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'll text you afterwards.
Speaker 7: The dandelions?
Speaker 5: Is it d I've been told not to.
Speaker 7: It reminds me though there was a TikTok video of
Speaker 7: there's been a few of women proudly being pregnant and
Speaker 7: ingesting talanol. And to be clear, that's an insane response
Speaker 7: to this problem, like please don't take talanol. As a point,
Speaker 7: as k was saying before the break, right, helenol does
Speaker 7: deplete the glutathione in your body, and it is toxic
Speaker 7: to your liver. If you're a deliver, doesn't have the
Speaker 7: glue to thion necessary, it directly injures the liver. And
Speaker 7: this is what happens when you take an overdose, is
Speaker 7: it overwhelms the amount of gluteothion that your liver has
Speaker 7: and it causes liver damage.
Speaker 14: And most pregnant women who want to keep the baby
Speaker 14: are very judicious to begin with, not just like downing
Speaker 14: shit willy nilly, you know what I mean, Like they're like,
Speaker 14: oh God, this is really bad, I bear take something.
Speaker 14: It talan all, by the way, sucks, you know, as
Speaker 14: a pain medicine. You know it's not gonna it's like
Speaker 14: the thing you take when they won't give you anything
Speaker 14: else is not a great one. So to take it
Speaker 14: from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism.
Speaker 14: If you're going to make extraordinary claims, you have to have,
Speaker 14: if not extraordinary evidence or ponderance of it. So this
Speaker 14: is really bothering me, as you can tell, because it
Speaker 14: does not exist.
Speaker 13: Yeah. I think something you mentioned earlier, like when like
Speaker 13: you said, you're back to to a corner where you're
Speaker 13: defending like a big farmer and tynel specifically, is the
Speaker 13: one thing that they've tried to do is like inhabit
Speaker 13: nuance and then disingenuously use it absolutely.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, that's the entire anti vaccines.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, right, and then it leads to people responding
Speaker 13: in a way that it raises nuance entirely. I understand
Speaker 13: where we get that response, but like it's it's not
Speaker 13: the correct response, right, Yeah. People want you to be
Speaker 13: like this is one hundred percent safe. Right. They want
Speaker 13: you to say this is actually the perfect medication and
Speaker 13: it's fine and you should have it for breakfast.
Speaker 7: And the HHS tweeted out statement that Talanold did in
Speaker 7: twenty seventeen basically saying we don't recommend talent All and pregnancy.
Speaker 7: But no drug maker recommends any medication. They all say, specifically,
Speaker 7: talk to your doctor about this medication. They're not allowed
Speaker 7: to recommend the medication. Only doctors can't. So when they're
Speaker 7: using that language and then HHS tweets it out, HHS
Speaker 7: is tweeting it out specifically to give the illusion that
Speaker 7: we don't want pregnant people to be taking this medication.
Speaker 7: They specifically said we don't recommend it, and that's a
Speaker 7: nuance and that's how they use it. And it just sucks.
Speaker 13: Right, that's exactly right. And tile Mall, the makers of it.
Speaker 14: By the way, I am curious about the fact that
Speaker 14: Johnson Johnson spun Off can view. I wonder if they
Speaker 14: knew this was coming and that's why they did it
Speaker 14: the same way that DuPont spun Off.
Speaker 7: It was only three years ago that they did that,
Speaker 7: but you didn't know.
Speaker 14: Like DuPont spun Off, the company in charge of all
Speaker 14: their pfasts they're Forever chemicals, because they knew it was
Speaker 14: coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 7: I wonder if that was the same reason here. Tal
Speaker 7: Mall did this. Well, they put band Aid and nutrigena
Speaker 7: in the same group, so I think it was more
Speaker 7: just to consolidate home stuff. Interesting.
Speaker 13: Yeah, got a press conference coming next week about banding.
Speaker 7: It's can sick cause anxiety.
Speaker 14: Anyways, It's very interesting to me that this is happening
Speaker 14: at all. Really, I mean, what I thought was interesting
Speaker 14: about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys
Speaker 14: picked up on this too, was you know, I was wondering,
Speaker 14: why is this pivot happening? How can RFK Junior be
Speaker 14: happy about this? He can't be happy about leaving his
Speaker 14: crusade against vaccines. The MOHA community behind him clearly doesn't
Speaker 14: love that aspect, and I wonder why they were pivoting
Speaker 14: to that, and I wonder what you guys think about that.
Speaker 14: I did feel that during that press conference, Trump really
Speaker 14: went out of his way to sort of give lip
Speaker 14: service that we should we should talk about this too,
Speaker 14: about vaccines. He talked about vaccines a lot, even though
Speaker 14: there's no new evidence about vaccines causing problems. And Trump
Speaker 14: gave this terrible advice about breaking up the vaccines, which
Speaker 14: we know is a terrible idea because that's going to
Speaker 14: lead to decrease uptake overall. The more visits you have
Speaker 14: to go back to us like you're going to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 14: so the more likely you're not going to be vaccinated.
Speaker 14: But but it made me wonder why this is happening now,
Speaker 14: why they decided to make this pivot, and I wonder
Speaker 14: what you both think about that.
Speaker 7: My theory is the link with fevers. If I'm being
Speaker 7: really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try
Speaker 7: and link vaccine induced fever to autism, and they're going
Speaker 7: to say, oh, we thought it was the title and all,
Speaker 7: but it turns out to be the vaccines. It's the fever,
Speaker 7: and the fever is caused by the vaccinees. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: My theory is gender. I think that telling pregnant people
Speaker 13: to suck it up is when you've got you know,
Speaker 13: your dude's all standing on the podium there right, Like
Speaker 13: the majority're pregnant people are going to be women. It's
Speaker 13: something that men have been doing to women for millennia,
Speaker 13: Like it's a safer bet then yeah, your kid might die,
Speaker 13: but you know, you never know.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, which actually is you know that brings up
Speaker 14: another thing I think we should talk about, which is
Speaker 14: what Trump kept saying. Trump kept saying don't take it,
Speaker 14: but what's the worst that happens? Nothing bad will come
Speaker 14: of it, So it invokes this precautionary principle, which is like,
Speaker 14: you know, why not avoid the talent all, what's the
Speaker 14: worst that can happen? And that doesn't work here, No,
Speaker 14: because we know that people are taking this for a fever.
Speaker 14: Talme law is not good for inflammation, doesn't work on
Speaker 14: inflammation the way advilabbiprofen does it, but it can work
Speaker 14: on a fever. And we know that fever can have
Speaker 14: some risk at least as much, if not more than
Speaker 14: tilnol in harm to the baby and harm to the pregnancy.
Speaker 14: So to me, the precautionary principle just doesn't apply here.
Speaker 14: And to hear the president, I never heard a president
Speaker 14: give medical advice before like that. It blew my mind.
Speaker 14: I felt like I was disassociating while I was watching this.
Speaker 14: I'm like, this cannot be realized. He said it so unequivocally,
Speaker 14: don't take talentol, just sec it up. And I tweeted
Speaker 14: something that I read from doctor Glockenplocken, who's one of
Speaker 14: my favorite medical comedians. But he said this will kill people,
Speaker 14: and I do agree. I think people were very incredulous
Speaker 14: when I said this will kill people, and they were like,
Speaker 14: what do you mean people dying of a fever. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 14: kind of like fevers can be really bad for you,
Speaker 14: and if you're not going to hospital and the only
Speaker 14: thing you have is talentol, it's a really good idea
Speaker 14: to take the talentel. And there's some people that don't
Speaker 14: go to hospital for lots of reasons, and fevers can
Speaker 14: kill you.
Speaker 7: They just can't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I.
Speaker 7: Disapprove of the Canadian and englishmen referring to the hospital
Speaker 7: as hospital. They need you guys to refer to it
Speaker 7: as of the hospital.
Speaker 13: I've forgotten about that. Yeah, always for the definite article.
Speaker 7: Yeah, taking it to a hospital, Thank you guys.
Speaker 13: But yeah, I think you're right, Like there is no
Speaker 13: like no harm option here, right, Like that is a
Speaker 13: damage is done when people don't take this, right.
Speaker 7: I just imagine this poor mom you know at home,
Speaker 7: you know, doesn't have great healthcare but does have a
Speaker 7: bottle of talentol and is battling a sorry I'll americanize this,
Speaker 7: like one hundred and four degree fever. Thank you don't
Speaker 7: make me do mad? Yeah, you're going to make me
Speaker 7: do mad, you know, And and you know it's it's
Speaker 7: around that one hundred and three hundred and four mark
Speaker 7: where we actually get really worried about the person's brain.
Speaker 7: We get really worried about their health and what's going
Speaker 7: to happen, and what would happen to that person in hospital?
Speaker 7: They would absolutely get talent al right away, prescribed by
Speaker 7: a doctor right that moment. And so I worry about this.
Speaker 7: I worry about this mom presenting a hospital with her fever,
Speaker 7: she's pregnant, and the doctors say, okay, we're going to
Speaker 7: give you talanol and she says, noah, right, what because
Speaker 7: I don't want I don't want my child to have autism?
Speaker 14: Because people are listening to this guy. First of all,
Speaker 14: again the hospital. Second, they're going to listen to this guy.
Speaker 12: It's insane.
Speaker 7: People are really going to take this advice. And I
Speaker 7: could see, you know, especially the more Trump following people
Speaker 7: saying you will never give me talinl not in this hospital,
Speaker 7: right And so so it does sound silly that not
Speaker 7: taking talanol could kill you. But if you're so scared
Speaker 7: of talinal because it causes autism, that you don't take
Speaker 7: it when it's recommended to you by where it's prescribed
Speaker 7: to you by dark you could die. And I won't
Speaker 7: be surprised when there are more fever induced deaths in
Speaker 7: twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six in the United States.
Speaker 7: I already have the CDC Wonder Data search ready to
Speaker 7: go because I study mortality all the time, and I
Speaker 7: am absolutely sure we're going to see a few more
Speaker 7: fever induced deaths than we would have previously.
Speaker 13: Geez, yeah, maybe like we can finish up by explaining
Speaker 13: to people, like, you know, if you're talking to someone
Speaker 13: in your family, right, someone who maybe isn't a listener
Speaker 13: sadly to either of our podcasts. I know this isn't
Speaker 13: directly the area either of you specialized in, but from
Speaker 13: what I understand, pregnant people like the way that drugs
Speaker 13: are categorized, as we spoke about earlier on. That's not like, yeah,
Speaker 13: go ahead and take all of these right, there's like
Speaker 13: probably fine if you have to, probably a bad idea
Speaker 13: unless you really need to, like maybe some straight up don't. Yeah,
Speaker 13: can you explain that for people?
Speaker 7: Sure? So there's a classification system and it's technical, but
Speaker 7: it's exactly like that. There are very few medications that
Speaker 7: are like totally fine. These are medications that are given
Speaker 7: during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy. But
Speaker 7: for the most part, pretty much everything else in my
Speaker 7: world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodazepines
Speaker 7: and whatnot, they all have the same classification, which is
Speaker 7: basically contraindicated. Don't take it unless your doctor persuades it
Speaker 7: for you. Now, we still get pregnant people with depression
Speaker 7: and psychosis and who need all these medications, and so
Speaker 7: we do have to interpret it based off of the
Speaker 7: data that we have, and the data that we have
Speaker 7: always comes late, so if we find a problem, it's
Speaker 7: found too late, and generally it's precautionary. So typically I
Speaker 7: don't know cave if there's a similar thing in GI work,
Speaker 7: But like for me, I'll get a call all the time. Well,
Speaker 7: we have this woman, she's thirty two, she's really worried.
Speaker 7: She normally takes antidepressants, but she's thinking about stopping them
Speaker 7: because she's really worried about passing into her baby or whatever.
Speaker 7: And I'm like, how bad is the depression? Well, it
Speaker 7: was really bad. She was hospitalized three times and nearly died.
Speaker 7: I was like, probably want to keep antidepressant treatment going
Speaker 7: and just let her know that there could be some
Speaker 7: harm to the fetus. But depression is way worse. And
Speaker 7: if we just go with God, you know, do your best.
Speaker 14: There are certain medications where we are going to say you, absolutetion,
Speaker 14: take these during pregnancy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you should.
Speaker 7: Discuss that with your obstrician. You to talk that over
Speaker 7: with your.
Speaker 14: Gynecologist and your primary care doctor. You should talk it
Speaker 14: over with your medical team. That's great, but every medication
Speaker 14: has some small amount of risk, some larger than others.
Speaker 14: But it's really about the risk versus the benefit. And
Speaker 14: this has been well studied by the experts, and what
Speaker 14: you've heard, what those people have heard from Trump and
Speaker 14: RFK Junior is well outside of the normal recommendations right
Speaker 14: from the experts like the ACOG, the American College of
Speaker 14: Obstetricians and kind ofcologists, the people who have been keeping
Speaker 14: our pregnant patients alive and relatively well for many, many years.
Speaker 14: This is well outside of those recommendations. And while it's
Speaker 14: an interesting topic and I think maybe you know, sure,
Speaker 14: i'd like to see more studies on it. I'm never
Speaker 14: going to say don't study this more. I would say
Speaker 14: that the preponderance of evidence and scientific belief and medical
Speaker 14: belief in this one goes against what they're saying, and
Speaker 14: I would say, at least talk it over with your doctor.
Speaker 14: If you have a question, talk it over with your doctor.
Speaker 14: And that's you mentioned it before. Town Law has sort
Speaker 14: of like, you know, try to hedge its bets by
Speaker 14: saying talk it over with your doctor. But the reason
Speaker 14: they do that is they know most doctors are going
Speaker 14: to be reasonable about this and follow the scientific evidence
Speaker 14: that's there. So I would say if they really have
Speaker 14: a question, they shoul talk about with their doctor.
Speaker 7: Because Trump, whether or not they love.
Speaker 14: Him or not, this is well out of his range
Speaker 14: of understanding, and he is getting It's like a game
Speaker 14: of telephone. He's getting a version of the medical information
Speaker 14: transmit to him by RFK Junior, who is getting a
Speaker 14: weird version of it from his belief system. And it's
Speaker 14: being supported by people who are there solely just just
Speaker 14: there to do the back and call of Trump at
Speaker 14: this point, and that's super dangerous. And so if they
Speaker 14: can keep an open mind about it, talking over with
Speaker 14: their doctor, continue to do what their parents did. I
Speaker 14: think they're going to be okay.
Speaker 13: Yeah, real quick, because like for reasons that if you
Speaker 13: related to the way that we do healthcare in the
Speaker 13: United States, people sometimes are retident to talk to their doctor,
Speaker 13: unable to talk to a doctor, reliable sources of medical information.
Speaker 13: That is the shit that you find on Google. Give
Speaker 13: us a a five minute primer.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So you know, in almost every jurisdiction there is
Speaker 7: an official health agency that you can go to their
Speaker 7: website and get good health data. So in BC we
Speaker 7: have Health Length BC and there's a number that you
Speaker 7: can call to speak to a nurse. In America, you
Speaker 7: have great I would say it used to be great.
Speaker 7: Like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they
Speaker 7: got a little hokey. I would still say, you know,
Speaker 7: there are some really good American places that you can go.
Speaker 7: Male Clinic has a lot of public facing information that
Speaker 7: has pretty good general descriptions. But just make sure it's
Speaker 7: from a place that is official, because there is a
Speaker 7: whole space now that's going to be opened up because
Speaker 7: the second part of this presentation that RFK gave was
Speaker 7: about a generic medication that might help some people with
Speaker 7: a very specific form of autism. And I promise you
Speaker 7: the amount of huckstering that's going to happen based on that.
Speaker 7: The alternatives. You know, we made a joke about lemon
Speaker 7: water before the ad break, but there are to be
Speaker 7: people who are going to be selling the alternative titalinol
Speaker 7: that is autism free, and that's really worrisome.
Speaker 14: Yeah, Be wary of anyone that has something in their
Speaker 14: Instagram there to talk their wellness post that uses the
Speaker 14: words detox. Be wary about ancient remedies. Be wary about
Speaker 14: anyone that is selling something like doctor Oz, who, by
Speaker 14: the way, sells a version of the full linic acid
Speaker 14: or the lukovorin that they're talking about here, So be
Speaker 14: wary about that.
Speaker 7: We don't sell shit.
Speaker 14: Be wary about people like doctor Baccarelli, the dean of
Speaker 14: Harvard Epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a
Speaker 14: good doctor from the friends I have in Harvard, they
Speaker 14: say he's not a bad guy. But be wary about
Speaker 14: the fact anytime you see someone's making one hundred and
Speaker 14: fifty thousand dollars off of court trial to sue tailanol
Speaker 14: and has a vested interest in these things, so you
Speaker 14: should be wary about those things. That's definitely something to
Speaker 14: look for in if you're looking for trusted source. Speaking
Speaker 14: of hucksters, you could listen to my podcast The House
Speaker 14: of Pod anywhere you find podcasts where we're going to
Speaker 14: talk about medical stuff just like this, and I will
Speaker 14: bring you trusted sources.
Speaker 13: Beautiful. That was all a long play to get to
Speaker 13: listen to Kave's podcast, But.
Speaker 7: I'm in it for the long con. I'm in it
Speaker 7: for the long con, buddy.
Speaker 13: Yeah, thank you for helping us clear that up a bit.
Speaker 13: I think it's a real rough time for healthcare in general,
Speaker 13: and especially people with autism, like like well nero divergent people.
Speaker 13: It really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government
Speaker 13: bad mouthing people. So, yeah, we are thinking of you.
Speaker 7: Very similar to the issue with trans kids. Like I'm
Speaker 7: a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door
Speaker 7: to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the
Speaker 7: route of Florida and other things with respect to trans policies,
Speaker 7: and it's just got to suck to be a trans
Speaker 7: kid in Florida right now. It's got to suck to
Speaker 7: be a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing
Speaker 7: what's coming down the pipeline, and it'll be the same
Speaker 7: for people with autism and families with autistic kids.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yep.
Speaker 14: I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours.
Speaker 13: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 14: We didn't even talk about hepatitis B. By the way,
Speaker 14: we didn't talk about hepatities people. We can talk about
Speaker 14: this on the point. There's just so much. There's so much,
Speaker 14: and it's so terrible, and you're absolutely right, it's really
Speaker 14: like for that community right now.
Speaker 7: By the way, I wanted to debunk something because it's
Speaker 7: been said multiple times.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, I get it.
Speaker 7: RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I
Speaker 7: didn't know anybody autistic when I was you know, when
Speaker 7: I was a kid or whatever. I've never met someone
Speaker 7: autistic my age. Donald Triplett was the very first person
Speaker 7: diagnosed with autism in nineteen forty three, I believe nineteen
Speaker 7: forty three. He just died last year. I think he
Speaker 7: was something like eighty ninety years old. Okay, autistic people
Speaker 7: are old too. This idea that there aren't old autio
Speaker 7: fistic people is so asked backwards. It was just not diagnosed. Yes,
Speaker 7: and and and it's it's such a shame because when
Speaker 7: when when Donald Tripplett passed, you know, like people in
Speaker 7: psychiatry notes, that's not the type of thing that people
Speaker 7: in the world noticed. But he was the very first
Speaker 7: autistic person. He lived a full life, he was an engineer.
Speaker 7: He had autism, it was diagnosed. He was the first
Speaker 7: ever case diagnosed. And he also lived a life. And
Speaker 7: and so for for RFK to just erase him completely
Speaker 7: and say I've never known an old person to have autism,
Speaker 7: it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 13: Yeah. And if you conduct yourself as Rskade does, but
Speaker 13: being a piece of shit to neurodivergent people, then even
Speaker 13: people who who have been diagnosed, I'm just going to
Speaker 13: be like, hey man, yeah, I wanted to talk to
Speaker 13: you about more because you're being a turd to them,
Speaker 13: and like you're being unkind. Yeah, Like what do you expect?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean yeah, Tyler grand In is like how
Speaker 7: old is she now, like in her seventies. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's it's absurd to think that this is a totally
Speaker 7: new thing.
Speaker 14: I mean it it also tells me that he was
Speaker 14: probably a bit sheltered and it probably didn't meet enough people.
Speaker 7: Wow, Kennedy sheltered.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 13: Yeah. Yeah, he's had a different experience of life than
Speaker 13: any of us. It's fair to say.
Speaker 7: I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler
Speaker 7: and All pun. I'm very proud of that. I usually
Speaker 7: do pretty much every time, and it kisses my wife
Speaker 7: off so much. I'm really proud of you, man. I
Speaker 7: showed a lot of growth.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, that's great. I was gonna make one, but
Speaker 13: I thought I didn't want to want to offend. Yeah,
Speaker 13: thank you very much. Where can people find both of
Speaker 13: you on the internet if they'd like to, oh, you know,
Speaker 13: in person?
Speaker 14: Don't find that as You can listen to my podcast,
Speaker 14: The House of Pod. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll
Speaker 14: hear people like James, you'll hear people like Tyler. Last
Speaker 14: time Tyler was on was actually for episode two eighty four.
Speaker 14: We did an episode on Adult ADHD with author Rex King.
Speaker 14: She's Brad so that's a good episode to listen to.
Speaker 14: And you can find me on Blue Sky at CAVEMD.
Speaker 14: I still have a Twitter account and Instagram account, but
Speaker 14: I don't really use those that much, so find me
Speaker 14: on Blue Sky, Blue Sky by the way, as a
Speaker 14: shout out, as a plug. I think it's good for
Speaker 14: science if you're interested in science based stuff. It may
Speaker 14: not be that much fun for everything else, but at
Speaker 14: least in terms of like if you want to follow
Speaker 14: doctors scientists, that's a good place to go. That's where
Speaker 14: a lot of us have gone. So I'll be there
Speaker 14: at Blue Sky.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I'm I am still on Twitter Tyler Black
Speaker 7: thirty two. I'm slugging it out. It is a lot
Speaker 7: of hate and a lot of death threats now, especially
Speaker 7: as I've I've been on a few trans podcasts, I've
Speaker 7: been on quite a few medical anti vacs and vaccine podcasts,
Speaker 7: So you know, I'll pop up from time to time
Speaker 7: on a podcast or something. But I'm not really have
Speaker 7: anything to plug anymore. I'm just really hoping that we
Speaker 7: can continue to fight this sort of It's a really
Speaker 7: disgusting reality in this decade that misinformation has won the
Speaker 7: day and literally misinformers are the political leaders now, and
Speaker 7: misinformation has just eroded science to the point where I
Speaker 7: don't know if America is ever going to get it back.
Speaker 14: Yeah, if we do. This has set us back many years.
Speaker 14: This has set us back many many years.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 7: Well that was fun.
Speaker 13: Let's send on that hopeful note. Yeah, all right, hey everyone,
Speaker 13: it's James here. We promised that we would get you
Speaker 13: something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's
Speaker 13: series of executive orders targeting certain groups, and we reached
Speaker 13: out to a lawyer, Moe, who is a fantastic lawyer,
Speaker 13: and we asked he into you them. They said they
Speaker 13: had just done an interview with Final Store Radio, which
Speaker 13: is an excellent show, and they suggested that I take
Speaker 13: listen to that. I took a listen to that, and
Speaker 13: I think it's a fantastic interview and I don't think
Speaker 13: as much as that we can add to it. So
Speaker 13: we're going to re air that interview in full. The
Speaker 13: one thing I would add to it is that there
Speaker 13: have been a number of cases recently where grand juries
Speaker 13: have not returned an indictment. That's relatively rare, but we
Speaker 13: are seeing that more frequently, and that just enforces everything
Speaker 13: that most says here, which is that at this time
Speaker 13: we still have separation of powers, and at this time
Speaker 13: the executive cannot simply make law. One still has to
Speaker 13: be prosecuted according to a statute by a district attorney
Speaker 13: or a USA attorney. Right, they President cannot just make
Speaker 13: law in this instance pertaining to the First Amendment by
Speaker 13: executive order. That doesn't mean that they will not be harassment.
Speaker 13: And as you're here here, there's two distinct things, and
Speaker 13: I think MO gives an excellent outline on how we
Speaker 13: should think about and conceive this moment in American history. So,
Speaker 13: without any more of me taking your time, this is
Speaker 13: an excellent interview that bursted with MO. I hope you
Speaker 13: enjoy it, and if you would like to check out
Speaker 13: Final Store Radio, you can do so using the link
Speaker 13: that I will put below this episode.
Speaker 19: Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location,
Speaker 19: or other contexts that would help us understand who you are.
Speaker 10: Good morning. I'm Moura Meltzer Cohen. Everybody calls me MO.
Speaker 10: My pronouns are they are MO. I'm an abolitionist, an educator,
Speaker 10: and an attorney in New York. Primarily I represent people
Speaker 10: who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and
Speaker 10: do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements.
Speaker 19: So we're here to talk about the recent White House
Speaker 19: statements following the assass I mean, I mean following the
Speaker 19: reelection of Trump, but more recently the assassination of Charles
Speaker 19: Kirk that Antifa is domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 7: Can you talk about what.
Speaker 19: Legally changed with the executive order of September twenty second
Speaker 19: of this year or yesterday ism when we're recording this
Speaker 19: National Presidential Security Memo number seven titled countering Domestic Terrorism
Speaker 19: and Organized Political Violence. Again, it came out on September
Speaker 19: twenty fifth, What changed with those?
Speaker 10: Well, Before I answer that question, the first thing I
Speaker 10: want to say is nothing that I say on this
Speaker 10: program is legal advice. This is information. If you want
Speaker 10: legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged
Speaker 10: conversation with a human attorney who is admitted to practice
Speaker 10: in your jurisdiction. As to your overall question, what changed
Speaker 10: legally is essentially nothing. I think the top level takeaway
Speaker 10: here is that these exists executive orders are frightening. They
Speaker 10: are a frightening contribution to an already dangerous political discourse,
Speaker 10: and they may very well end up being quite disruptive
Speaker 10: to left movements, including I think primarily centrist liberal movements.
Speaker 10: But nothing that was legal last week is illegal this week.
Speaker 10: Certainly not because of those statements. And the state cannot
Speaker 10: prosecute you for things that were legal when you did them.
Speaker 10: So yeah, I mean, I can't see the future, but
Speaker 10: as of right now, the law and the constitution have
Speaker 10: not changed. So if this administration wants to in any
Speaker 10: meaningful legal way designate anyone, any group as domestic terrorists,
Speaker 10: they can change the law, which is not going to
Speaker 10: be quick or easy, or they can dispense with the law.
Speaker 10: But under the current legal regime, there is no mechanism
Speaker 10: that would make it illegal to be and to whatever
Speaker 10: that means, or to hold anti fascist values, or to
Speaker 10: assemble or to petition the government. And you know, to
Speaker 10: be clear, not that doing any of those things or
Speaker 10: being any of those things are necessarily effective at creating
Speaker 10: social change right now, but my point really is they're
Speaker 10: not illegal.
Speaker 19: Just to sort of throw this back your way, So
Speaker 19: there was when you were responding to that, it made
Speaker 19: me think of there's a veteran who lost a bunch
Speaker 19: of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know,
Speaker 19: about a year ago hit this region. He was recorded
Speaker 19: like he went pretty viral calling out and shouting down
Speaker 19: a state politician who had a like public meeting here
Speaker 19: in the area, just saying there's been like total like
Speaker 19: lack of support after the storm and hear all the
Speaker 19: needs and you're just a lying politicans and this sort
Speaker 19: of thing. The same man, right after the executive order
Speaker 19: that Trump made about burning US flags, went out and
Speaker 19: burned one across from the White House and then he
Speaker 19: got arrested for it. Like I thought that there was
Speaker 19: a Supreme Court decision back in the eighties that said
Speaker 19: it's not actually illegal to burn a flag. So does
Speaker 19: that make his executive orders now law?
Speaker 5: No, there is.
Speaker 10: A Supreme Court decision. It's called Texas v. Johnson, and
Speaker 10: it is still law. And in fact, after Texas v. Johnson,
Speaker 10: Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning
Speaker 10: the American flag and it was found on constitutional It
Speaker 10: is astonishing and illuminating that that man was arrested for
Speaker 10: burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct.
Speaker 10: I will say, I'm not sure what he was at actually.
Speaker 20: Charged with, right if he was charged with, you know,
Speaker 20: creating a fire hazard, I suppose that apart from the
Speaker 20: fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation.
Speaker 10: I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating
Speaker 10: a fire hazard in a public place or something like that,
Speaker 10: but no flag burning remains protected regardless of what the
Speaker 10: President or Congress says about it. It would take either
Speaker 10: an amendment to the Constitution or a very serious change
Speaker 10: in Supreme Court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal.
Speaker 19: Okay, Yeah, so this is the distinction I'd love for
Speaker 19: us to get back to in a moment between like
Speaker 19: legality versus what, you know, the sort of like box
Speaker 19: that that powers decide to put a thing into. Like
Speaker 19: I know, I've I've definitely been totained, not for being
Speaker 19: an annoyance to the cops, but within my legal rights.
Speaker 19: But they'll say, ah, but your shoes untied on a
Speaker 19: Tuesday whatever, and then waste my time.
Speaker 10: Let's talk about that. And because I do want to
Speaker 10: talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements,
Speaker 10: and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are
Speaker 10: and can be and have long been used to surveil
Speaker 10: and disrupt and target the left. But actually, before we
Speaker 10: do that, why don't we talk about sort of some
Speaker 10: of the categories that are played in playing here and
Speaker 10: be really clear about definitions, or at least understand that
Speaker 10: there are differences between these categories, right, because there is
Speaker 10: a difference between the law and political discourse, and there
Speaker 10: is a difference importantly between law and power. And there's certainly,
Speaker 10: at least on daylight, between the legal constraints on state
Speaker 10: power and the state's power to ignore those constraints. And
Speaker 10: then I think what will be significant to this discussion
Speaker 10: is there is a significant difference between antifa, which is
Speaker 10: a set of practices or beliefs that are not necessarily
Speaker 10: even all that well defined, and what this administration refers
Speaker 10: to when it uses or deploys the word antifa. And
Speaker 10: there is yet more difference between the booking man that
Speaker 10: is being invoked by that word and the individuals and
Speaker 10: organizations that the administration actually intends to target. There's a
Speaker 10: difference between political targeting, surveillance, disruption, and prosecution, right, those
Speaker 10: things are all different, And there's a difference between prosecution
Speaker 10: and conviction. And there is an important difference between someone's
Speaker 10: political belief and associations which are and remain protected by
Speaker 10: the First Amendment and politically motivated conduct that is illegal.
Speaker 10: So you know, executive orders and these kinds of statements
Speaker 10: on national security are policy statements. They don't in and
Speaker 10: of themselves make things happen. They don't in and of
Speaker 10: themselves change the law. And an executive order that is
Speaker 10: inconsistent with the constitution or existing law at least ought
Speaker 10: to be unenforceable.
Speaker 19: Okay, but yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know,
Speaker 19: cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate,
Speaker 19: and those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting.
Speaker 19: They can affect your job prospects, they can affect your
Speaker 19: housing stability. They can affect whether or not some unhinged
Speaker 19: person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy
Speaker 19: theory about you. But so that distinction of like, well,
Speaker 19: you might get exonerated by a court after you've been
Speaker 19: held in pre trial for a year, I guess that
Speaker 19: is an important distinction, right, because it means you're not
Speaker 19: spending you know, an extra thirty years or twenty years
Speaker 19: or whatever behind bars.
Speaker 7: With the terrorism enhancement, well.
Speaker 10: I mean that is also called comfort. I'm really not
Speaker 10: trying to be dismissive. I think it's important to recognize
Speaker 10: what these distinctions are and the primarily because I want
Speaker 10: people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared
Speaker 10: for and what we need to be worried about, and
Speaker 10: what tools we have and what tools are effective at
Speaker 10: resisting what's coming down the pike. And in order to
Speaker 10: do that, we need to know what's coming down the pipe.
Speaker 10: We need to know who actually has power in this situation.
Speaker 10: The fact that an executive order doesn't change the law
Speaker 10: does not mean an executive order will not result in
Speaker 10: a lot more state repression, or that it won't disrupt
Speaker 10: movements or even ruin lives. It doesn't mean that Trump
Speaker 10: is not going to a comp the thing that I
Speaker 10: think he's actually trying to accomplish here in the immediate
Speaker 10: short term, which is broadcasting to his base that non
Speaker 10: state action against people identified as or perceived to be
Speaker 10: part of the despised group you know is desirable by
Speaker 10: this administration will be condoned by this administration. I think
Speaker 10: that is important to recognize. Saying that it doesn't change
Speaker 10: a law does not mean it is dangerous. I just
Speaker 10: want to be very precise about I think the ways
Speaker 10: in which it is likely to be dangerous, and some
Speaker 10: of the ways that it might not might not be.
Speaker 10: And again I'm not trying to be dismissive, but state
Speaker 10: repression exists all the time. State repression against leftists and
Speaker 10: anarchism in particular has been ongoing the whole time. This
Speaker 10: is not a Trump thing, And in fact, I think
Speaker 10: it's important to note that the executive who's probably most
Speaker 10: responsible for having laid this groundwork is Biden, who set
Speaker 10: forth a policy strategy that focused on funding the federal
Speaker 10: targeting of what at that point he was calling political extremists,
Speaker 10: which was a label that was being applied to groups
Speaker 10: on the left as well as neo Nazis and all
Speaker 10: right groups. So this administration has already been engaged, and
Speaker 10: not just this administration, right, we have centuries at this
Speaker 10: point of targeted disruption of left movements. The way that
Speaker 10: it's currently being rationalized is a little bit different. The
Speaker 10: way that it's being broadcast normalized is a little bit different,
Speaker 10: but it's I will say, I don't think this is
Speaker 10: actually anything all that new or different, And the difference
Speaker 10: in how dangerous it is is one of scale maybe
Speaker 10: rather than it's a difference in scope, Rather than nature.
Speaker 19: I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction. I
Speaker 19: think that like sometimes people in the center and even
Speaker 19: sometimes people on the left will look in particular things
Speaker 19: that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory, they're like confusing,
Speaker 19: and they're bombastic, and there's a part of us that
Speaker 19: we'll say like, no, but that's that's not what's actually happening,
Speaker 19: that's not what actually was the motivation for that person,
Speaker 19: or like that person voted you know, Republican in the
Speaker 19: last election. Whatever. And so I think that that distinction
Speaker 19: that you're making of you know this, this may not
Speaker 19: this may be like an approach to motivate the base,
Speaker 19: it may prove not to be legally like standing, but
Speaker 19: that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on people.
Speaker 19: And what we should be looking for out of this
Speaker 19: is a projection of not only like all call to
Speaker 19: action or red meat for the base or whatever, but
Speaker 19: also like a clear proposition of that's meant to chill
Speaker 19: us and chill some society, that these are the intentions
Speaker 19: moving forward. This is the narrative, and this is the
Speaker 19: story that they're going to be going.
Speaker 10: With right absolutely, And I think it is important to
Speaker 10: point out. Right now, we're seeing a lot of people
Speaker 10: pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact
Speaker 10: that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality. And
Speaker 10: I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing
Speaker 10: out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful.
Speaker 10: I mean, I think it's part of the point, right
Speaker 10: Manipulating the facts, making narrative claims that are totally unsupportable,
Speaker 10: and muddying the waters in this really fundamental way is
Speaker 10: part of the project.
Speaker 19: There was a German jurist I guess who became the
Speaker 19: highest jurist during the Nazi regime in Germany, but continued
Speaker 19: writing theory like was writing it before as a member
Speaker 19: of the Conservative Revolution that they called it, and then
Speaker 19: afterwards he survived the war and continued living in Germany
Speaker 19: writing Carl Schmidt, who talked a lot about like the
Speaker 19: limits of liberal approaches towards legality and liberal governance, with
Speaker 19: a belief that like it makes sense to push it
Speaker 19: to its limits and beyond break it and recognize that
Speaker 19: governance is about the imposition of power and the sheltering
Speaker 19: of those who are under the controller or in the
Speaker 19: protected community of the state with a consideration of war
Speaker 19: through the state's power against internal enemies as well as
Speaker 19: external enemies. And this is the devil's bargain that we make.
Speaker 19: It's like Hobbs on steroids. And it feels like a
Speaker 19: lot of the stuff that the Heritage Foundation and Project
Speaker 19: twenty twenty five has been pushing is that they have this.
Speaker 19: I know that there are some theocrats in that movement.
Speaker 19: There's the unitary executive theory that a lot of them
Speaker 19: have been pushing, and they'll play with this idea like
Speaker 19: the Trump administration will play with this identity of the
Speaker 19: King King Trump or whatever the on as it were,
Speaker 19: like making these executive decisions and being unbeholden to anything else.
Speaker 19: And they've actually been like, you know, saying to courts,
Speaker 19: you can't stop us from deporting these peoples who with
Speaker 19: unsafe third country whatever, stop us. I wonder if, like
Speaker 19: I wonder if you have any comments on this, if
Speaker 19: I'm coming out of left field or what.
Speaker 10: Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt as opposed
Speaker 10: to the Heritage Foundation, he was at least intellectually honest.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where
Speaker 11: they're trying to normalize what we Schmidt would have called
Speaker 11: like a state of exception, where they're sort of unbridled
Speaker 11: executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints
Speaker 11: on state power.
Speaker 10: Right. And it's funny because I've been in conversations over
Speaker 10: the last months where I'm talking with a bunch of
Speaker 10: my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the
Speaker 10: current legal regime, and we're talking about how dangerous it
Speaker 10: is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law,
Speaker 10: you know, And it's sort of amusing for a bunch
Speaker 10: of anarchists to be like, oh, no, the rule of
Speaker 10: laws collapsing. But when I'm talking about the rule of
Speaker 10: law in this way, I'm really talking about constraints on
Speaker 10: state power, and those are what's collapsing. And that's exactly
Speaker 10: what Schmidt envisioned and argued for. Frankly, and I do
Speaker 10: think we're seeing that. I think one of the things
Speaker 10: that I noticed in some of these eos, especially the
Speaker 10: couple of statements from the last few days, is he
Speaker 10: keeps talking about things like love of God and Christian
Speaker 10: anti Christian sentiment, which is I mean, you know, this
Speaker 10: is entirely incompatible with the First Amendment, which provides no
Speaker 10: state shall establish your religion, right. I mean, we really
Speaker 10: are outside the contours of recognized you know, legal norms,
Speaker 10: constitutional norms, and I think a lot of this stuff
Speaker 10: is functioning and is meant to normalize this kind of
Speaker 10: discourse and to inject it not only into the exercise
Speaker 10: of government power, but to normalize it in terms of
Speaker 10: what people understand to be legitimate legal discourse.
Speaker 19: Kind of shifting a bit like let's get into some
Speaker 19: of the implications of this. So if it hasn't changed law,
Speaker 19: but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted.
Speaker 19: I've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and
Speaker 19: getting docsing attention. There's a website now I think called
Speaker 19: like who Killed Charlie Kirk? Are the people who killed
Speaker 19: Charlie Kirk or something like that, and maybe an app.
Speaker 19: It's kind of like the post Charlie Kirk assassination version
Speaker 19: of Canary emission. Does this mean that police are coming
Speaker 19: after people for sharing memes? Is that happening? Is that
Speaker 19: what's happening in these cases?
Speaker 10: I mean police have always been coming after people for
Speaker 10: sharing memes. I would say, I get calls at least
Speaker 10: every month from people who have been visited by federal
Speaker 10: agents because they said something on the Internet that was
Speaker 10: upsetting to somebody else and then they reported it, and
Speaker 10: the FBI is just following up on a tip. But
Speaker 10: that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment. Let me
Speaker 10: say that in human.
Speaker 12: Language, thank you.
Speaker 10: This does not undermine the First Amendment. The First Amendment
Speaker 10: still exists, and all of the legal framework around having
Speaker 10: the right to say things as long as those things
Speaker 10: are not true threats, that still exists. So it is
Speaker 10: not unusual for people to be targeted or monitored or
Speaker 10: visited by law enforcement, but typically that stuff doesn't actually
Speaker 10: really go anywhere. I am concerned about people being subject
Speaker 10: to doxing and having negative social content sequences and fallout
Speaker 10: from this kind of stuff, and it certainly is you know,
Speaker 10: can be life ruining. Again, I don't mean to trivialize
Speaker 10: the effects of this kind of retaliation social retaliate, but
Speaker 10: it is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution
Speaker 10: or a criminal conviction. It's a different set of mechanisms. Now,
Speaker 10: one thing that I do think is interesting is that
Speaker 10: these eos and the statement that came out on the
Speaker 10: twenty second and yesterday particularly identify certain modes of that
Speaker 10: kind of social conduct that you're talking about, like dotsing swatting, right,
Speaker 10: which is making a false report of like an ongoing
Speaker 10: violent crime so that a swat team shows up and
Speaker 10: raids somebody's.
Speaker 12: Home, which could be deadly right, This is.
Speaker 10: Very dangerous and interestingly to me anyway, there are these
Speaker 10: specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements,
Speaker 10: and those specific behaviors are largely tool of the right.
Speaker 10: People on the left are not notably interested in sending
Speaker 10: law enforcement to someone's house. So there is a perverse
Speaker 10: way in which this may end up being sort of protective,
Speaker 10: I suppose, because I think it would be very difficult
Speaker 10: for the government to go after the people who are
Speaker 10: exposing ICE agents, which again is not illegal right now.
Speaker 10: Even if it were to become illegal, it isn't right now,
Speaker 10: and it would be very hard for them to go
Speaker 10: after those folks and not also go after the folks
Speaker 10: who are running that silly website about people who say
Speaker 10: something mean about Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 19: Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, And this is
Speaker 19: the speculation outside of like legal advice or any not
Speaker 19: that we're giving legal advice, but outside of like the legal.
Speaker 10: Framework, definitely not giving legal advice.
Speaker 19: I mean it kind of points to a thing that
Speaker 19: already this hypocrisy or this difference between what it's called
Speaker 19: when one party does it versus what it's called when
Speaker 19: another party does it, like outside of the fact that
Speaker 19: the government gets to do what it was wants to
Speaker 19: until the government stops itself from doing a thing. I mean,
Speaker 19: it feels like it's a part of the creation of
Speaker 19: a differentiated subjectivity. Like there's the subject of the state
Speaker 19: that falls under the values that are being attacked Christianity, whiteness, heteronormativity,
Speaker 19: these like patriotism in these certain ways versus the people
Speaker 19: that are doing these same things but are corrupt, are dirty,
Speaker 19: are outside our internal enemies, are Soros funded. However we
Speaker 19: want to like that. But yeah, I guess that's not
Speaker 19: I mean, that's this is nothing new. It's just an
Speaker 19: amplification of that same right.
Speaker 10: Yeah, very much. And you know what is changing a
Speaker 10: little bit, although all of these threads have been present,
Speaker 10: is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of
Speaker 10: targeting with respect to in particular Palestine, solidarity movements, gender
Speaker 10: and unconforming people, and what they're calling anti buzz. So,
Speaker 10: you know, we're seeing we've been seeing congressional investigations, the
Speaker 10: allocation of funds to federal law enforcement, purging not just individuals,
Speaker 10: but whole agencies that the administration feels are insufficiently aligned
Speaker 10: with its priority replacing federal law enforcement that and I
Speaker 10: mean ranging from FBI agents on the ground to doj
Speaker 10: with people who will enthusiastically and blindly pursue these priorities,
Speaker 10: and using a lot of resources to target the nonprofit
Speaker 10: text status and funding of groups identified as being aligned
Speaker 10: with any of the disfavored movements. And one of the
Speaker 10: things that they're doing is kind of it's this real spaghetti,
Speaker 10: you know, throwing everything at it, and it's very overwhelming.
Speaker 10: It's overwhelming for movement infrastructure, it's overwhelming for legal for
Speaker 10: people on the ground, and it's all happening at once,
Speaker 10: and I think it's all being it's mutually compounding, it's
Speaker 10: mutually reinforcing, it's demoralizing, and in particular, the stuff that's
Speaker 10: happening with immigration is so devastating, and because immigration is
Speaker 10: so wholly under the control of the executive. That is
Speaker 10: an area where he's able to sort of make a
Speaker 10: policy and make it so and have it be carried
Speaker 10: out by FIAT. And he has made his own private
Speaker 10: army with ice. And I think one of the effects
Speaker 10: that I in just in my observation, that that has
Speaker 10: had is that people see that happening and assume that
Speaker 10: he has that level of control over everything else. And
Speaker 10: I do want to point out, like, again, it's absolutely
Speaker 10: devastating to see what's happening in the immigration space, but
Speaker 10: in fact he does not have that level of control
Speaker 10: over the ret of government and over non immigration laws,
Speaker 10: and I think that's really important to remember.
Speaker 19: Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting. There's a
Speaker 19: lot of people that have talked and not to get
Speaker 19: too far down the road with this, but like with
Speaker 19: the like attempt to normalize sending national guard or sending
Speaker 19: active military to different states, or federalizing national guards to
Speaker 19: be present from different states in these places, almost like
Speaker 19: if it's constant and like overlapping enough, then eventually just
Speaker 19: military being on the streets generally rousing houseless folks is
Speaker 19: going to be a normalized thing.
Speaker 10: Man, I'm in New York. There's military people in all
Speaker 10: price like that got very normalized post nine to eleven
Speaker 10: in certain places. And so you know, again this is
Speaker 10: not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new.
Speaker 19: So to get back to antifa, Sure, Antifa, Antifa. How
Speaker 19: is the administration identifying Antifa and the left and what
Speaker 19: are they actually dismantling and attacking. I'm thinking like he
Speaker 19: loves talking about bilfunds or like lgbt QIA, youth advocacy organizations,
Speaker 19: secularist groups, like yeah, what's going on?
Speaker 10: Yeah, well this is this is where things get really fun.
Speaker 10: Most of the groups that are actually being targeted are
Speaker 10: not remotely related to antifa. George Soros is not antifa,
Speaker 10: the various legal defense funds are not Antifa. Antifa is
Speaker 10: the rationale, but not the reality. So one of the
Speaker 10: interesting issues here is that a significant group of the
Speaker 10: people who really need to be very worried are people
Speaker 10: who work in the nonprofit sector, in extremely normal and
Speaker 10: liberal community advocacy organizations and NGOs. And these are people
Speaker 10: who have nothing whatsoever to do with Antifa by any
Speaker 10: stretch of the imagination, who are being attacked, whose funding
Speaker 10: is being attacked who are primarily I would say at risk,
Speaker 10: not because they have engaged in anything approaching unlawful conduct,
Speaker 10: and frankly, I think the biggest risk for many of
Speaker 10: those people is the anticipatory compliance of their funders. We
Speaker 10: have seen a really similar thing happen with universities, where
Speaker 10: universities have been targeted by the state, by the federal
Speaker 10: government and have been accused in particular of anti Semitism,
Speaker 10: and frankly, I think it would be the work of
Speaker 10: an afternoon for general counsel at any of these universities
Speaker 10: to point out that, in fact, there is a legally
Speaker 10: established difference between anti Semitism and anti Zionism, that criticism
Speaker 10: of the nation state of Israel is in fact entirely
Speaker 10: legally distinct from criticism of or threats against Jewish people.
Speaker 10: And if any of these universities actually bothered to challenge
Speaker 10: these allegations, I think that they would win in court
Speaker 10: on the law.
Speaker 5: And what we're.
Speaker 10: Seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge these allegations,
Speaker 10: settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to
Speaker 10: the allegedly aggrieved parties, and capitulating in ways that are
Speaker 10: unnecessary unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and seed more ground,
Speaker 10: not just more ground than is legally called for, but
Speaker 10: more ground than is even being asked for in these cases.
Speaker 10: And so you know, this is to me one of
Speaker 10: the great dangers of normalizing these discourses is that these
Speaker 10: large institutions are engaged in acts of self preservation that
Speaker 10: actually undermine civil society, when even a small amount of
Speaker 10: courage would go a very long way to preserving it.
Speaker 19: I think we also sort of saw this in the
Speaker 19: early days of the administration with legal firms that had
Speaker 19: brought challenges to the administration in the past backing down
Speaker 19: or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration.
Speaker 19: And we're seeing it now also with some of these
Speaker 19: large media corporations silencing some of their pundits or whatever,
Speaker 19: or in some cases, I mean it's clearly quid pro
Speaker 19: quo because they've got, you know, a merger that's being
Speaker 19: discussed by the FCC at the moment.
Speaker 10: Well, what we've seen, though, we have seen a lot
Speaker 10: of that sort of craven capitulation. But what we've also
Speaker 10: seen is when we fight, we win. Now, I'm not
Speaker 10: trying to be a Pollyanna about this. What I'm trying
Speaker 10: to say is the demands that are being made by
Speaker 10: this particular administration are actually so far beyond the pale
Speaker 10: that based on our legal regime as it currently is,
Speaker 10: when we fight, we win, and so I think it
Speaker 10: is very worth reminding people that, however imperfect the law is,
Speaker 10: the current state of the law forbids much of what
Speaker 10: this administration is doing, and it is actually worth standing
Speaker 10: up to it. There are other groups of people similarly
Speaker 10: who are not related to Antifa, and one of those
Speaker 10: groups is toasters, like including boomers, who are on Facebook
Speaker 10: and Twitter making jokes about how the right it's so hypocritical,
Speaker 10: and those people are getting targeted, and I would just
Speaker 10: gently remind everyone that the First Amendment does still exist
Speaker 10: and that the solution to repression is not self censorship
Speaker 10: but courage. And also, as I have said many times,
Speaker 10: including to you on this program, discretion is the better
Speaker 10: part of valor, and not everything needs to be said
Speaker 10: on the internet, so maybe think about it before you
Speaker 10: post something that you would not like to hear read
Speaker 10: back to you by a humorless prosecutor. Then we have
Speaker 10: these other groups that are engaged in exposing law enforcement,
Speaker 10: which I referred to a minute ago. And I think
Speaker 10: the groups that are exposing ICE are definitely going to
Speaker 10: be targeted have already been targeted for that activity, but
Speaker 10: it sort of remains to be seen how that can
Speaker 10: happen while also protecting Canary mission. Right then, we have
Speaker 10: groups that are being perceived as or identified as Antifa,
Speaker 10: who are the people who are like doing food not
Speaker 10: bombs and community gardening and cooperative bookstores and prisoner letter writing,
Speaker 10: all of which are extremely First Amendment protected activities and
Speaker 10: all of which are not only likely to be highly surveiled,
Speaker 10: are already highly surveiled. And this is the group of
Speaker 10: people who I think are actually probably most used to
Speaker 10: this and best prepared for it, and also might be
Speaker 10: really hard to prosecute effectively because they're not doing crimes.
Speaker 10: And you know, like the NGOs that we were talking about,
Speaker 10: the biggest point of exposure for all of these groups
Speaker 10: is likely to be financial. We can certainly anticipate that
Speaker 10: the state is highly interested in looking at all of
Speaker 10: our bank records, to the extent that our bank records exist.
Speaker 5: With all the.
Speaker 10: Money we have, right like, we're all handing around the
Speaker 10: same staff of twenty singles to each other. But hey,
Speaker 10: you know wirefraud. What I can say is that you know,
Speaker 10: something like a bail fund, and you know, community support
Speaker 10: funds do need to be very cautious. That has already
Speaker 10: always been the case, And this is a really good
Speaker 10: time to hire a CPA to go over your books
Speaker 10: and to make sure that you have kept really meticulous records,
Speaker 10: to make sure that if you have raised money for something,
Speaker 10: you have only used it for the thing that you
Speaker 10: said it was going to be used for. And this
Speaker 10: is once again something that largely is a feature of
Speaker 10: far right organizing.
Speaker 20: Right.
Speaker 10: I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon was
Speaker 10: actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money
Speaker 10: to do something.
Speaker 5: Build the wall.
Speaker 12: Build the wall.
Speaker 10: He was raising money to build the wall, but not
Speaker 10: using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 10: So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already
Speaker 10: know that you have to be very careful about how
Speaker 10: you raise that money and how you monitor and track
Speaker 10: and use that money. So most of the people, I
Speaker 10: would say, the overwhelming majority of people who are sort
Speaker 10: of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring
Speaker 10: A have already been subject to it, and b haven't
Speaker 10: actually done anything unlawful. And you know that doesn't mean
Speaker 10: this won't be disrupted. It just means, Look, I'm not
Speaker 10: naive enough to say that your innocence will protect you,
Speaker 10: but it's a good start. And then we have folks
Speaker 10: who maybe actually do engage in unlawful conduct or revolutionary action,
Speaker 10: or people about whom that claim could somewhat credibly be made.
Speaker 10: And that's actually just a different a different group, right,
Speaker 10: And those things were illegal last week and they're illegal now,
Speaker 10: and they're not more illegal because they're politically motivated. Right,
Speaker 10: Although you know there are terrorism enhancements and sentencing enhancements
Speaker 10: and things like that. The fact is, like, you know,
Speaker 10: it can't be more illegal to spray paint Free Gaza
Speaker 10: on the side of a building than it is to
Speaker 10: spray paint I Love Trump on the side of a building. Right.
Speaker 19: I mean, what whether or not this like pans out
Speaker 19: in the courts, right is one thing. But I know
Speaker 19: that like, say, for the library case that happened here
Speaker 19: where people were arrested because some people were filming in
Speaker 19: this like Palestine related workshop in a public library and
Speaker 19: they were asked to stop filming, and then a scuffle
Speaker 19: broke out and a phone got knocked to the ground
Speaker 19: and people got apparently dragged outside. Again, I was not
Speaker 19: there for this, but like now the people are facing
Speaker 19: like people who were in the crowd, who are not
Speaker 19: the people who were filming or facing charges of ethnic intimidation.
Speaker 19: That's a very specific case in a different jurisdiction from
Speaker 19: where you are practicing law. But it's not just about
Speaker 19: like what's being charged against them isn't about assaults per se.
Speaker 19: It's this enhanced politically driven statement based on the rhetoric
Speaker 19: that's you know, based on the politics.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 10: Absolutely, And I'm glad you pointed that out, because I
Speaker 10: certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions
Speaker 10: don't happen. They absolutely happen. These reset statements don't change
Speaker 10: the way in which they happen, right, And there are
Speaker 10: ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics,
Speaker 10: and those have those are again not new. I think
Speaker 10: the point that I'm trying to make is that I
Speaker 10: don't think this has changed substantively. Yeah, like the fact
Speaker 10: that the President said at a domestic terrorist organization just
Speaker 10: doesn't really change the legal landscape. This has been the
Speaker 10: targeted surveillance of the left, whether you call it anti FA,
Speaker 10: whether it's the Green Scare, whether it's the Black Liberation Army.
Speaker 10: This has been a priority for decades of administrations. More
Speaker 10: and more legislation has been developed to criminalize garden variety
Speaker 10: protest conduct. We saw that a lot around Standing Rock
Speaker 10: and BLM. More and more resources are allocated to testing
Speaker 10: creative strategies for monitoring and criminalizing political activities. You know, again,
Speaker 10: state repression and the tools that are used in the
Speaker 10: service of state repression are just not new. And the
Speaker 10: fact that you put out these statements is maybe a
Speaker 10: good reminder that we should be circumspect and aware of
Speaker 10: repression and prepared to bear up under it.
Speaker 19: So is the RICO sixty one Atlanta case a model
Speaker 19: for what we see moving forward at a federal level
Speaker 19: in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering, the
Speaker 19: focus on bail funds, and other abolitionist infrastructure, civil liberties
Speaker 19: organizations like Section H of that September twenty fifth statement
Speaker 19: refers to the Attorney General pursuing quote, politically motivated terrorist
Speaker 19: acts such as organizing docs and campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault,
Speaker 19: destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. Like,
Speaker 19: I know those are all things that you know, they've
Speaker 19: already got charges attached to them. It's just these are
Speaker 19: now being framed within the framework of being terrorist acts.
Speaker 19: But you know, you said, like these practices of attacking
Speaker 19: adjacent like supportive movement and civil society organs is. It's
Speaker 19: not in and of itself new, but it seems like
Speaker 19: the framing, especially with the Atlanta case where the process
Speaker 19: Cuters brought up at the beginning Eric like they gave
Speaker 19: a Merriam Webster Dictionary definition of anarchism and then said,
Speaker 19: all these people fall under this umbrella because they all
Speaker 19: have this ideology, therefore they are a conspiracy. Is that
Speaker 19: what the administration is trying to do? And is that
Speaker 19: different from what they've already done at a federal level.
Speaker 10: So, first of all, I do think that that's very
Speaker 10: likely that they will try. I think this is signaling
Speaker 10: a real interest in that. I don't think that's particularly new,
Speaker 10: but I think that it's clearly being prioritized. So let's
Speaker 10: talk about Rico Rigo. Let's talk about Rigo Briefly, RICO
Speaker 10: is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and it
Speaker 10: was enacted in I think nineteen seventy to go after
Speaker 10: the mob. Right, it was to go after crime families.
Speaker 10: But it's been used against so called gangs and other
Speaker 10: politically motivated prosecutions for a long time, and so RICO
Speaker 10: has really used to kind of criminalize whole communities. But
Speaker 10: it requires that an actual crime has happened. Right, Association
Speaker 10: or ideology in itself is not sufficient, So it requires
Speaker 10: an actual crime has happened. And it also requires an
Speaker 10: quote an enterprise, like a coordinated enterprise. And because the
Speaker 10: First Amendment protects association and a large diffuse group of
Speaker 10: people sharing values is not an enterprise. You know, I'm
Speaker 10: not sure. It's not a straightforward path to say we
Speaker 10: want to use REGO in a politically motiv motivated way
Speaker 10: and to actually be able to capture this group under
Speaker 10: a net. Right. That's like, you know, saying we want
Speaker 10: to go after Antifa is like saying we want to
Speaker 10: go after people who like cats. Right, there are people
Speaker 10: who like cats, but they certainly aren't coordinating together. I
Speaker 10: suppose that there are actually people who would say, like, yes,
Speaker 10: I identify strongly with this set of values, but it's
Speaker 10: not a membership organization, and it would, I think, be
Speaker 10: very difficult to mount a prosecution, or to mount a
Speaker 10: successful prosecution on the basis of what are clearly First
Speaker 10: Amendment protected beliefs and associations. And there's pretty good law
Speaker 10: on this point, actually, and it comes from an effort
Speaker 10: to prosecute a bunch of anti abortion protesters under RICO
Speaker 10: and the court said you can't do that. The fact
Speaker 10: that there's a large group of people who happen to
Speaker 10: believe the same things does not mean that they are
Speaker 10: an enterprise. So look, don't get me wrong again, this
Speaker 10: would be hugely disruptive, but it would be very difficult
Speaker 10: to sustain an effective prosecution or obtain a conviction if
Speaker 10: there was one competent investigator, prosecutor judge or jury member
Speaker 10: anywhere along the way. But yes, hugely disruptive if they
Speaker 10: managed to do it. I would like to know something
Speaker 10: about the Stoff cups city Rico. That's important. So first
Speaker 10: of all, yay, all those all those charges, those Ricos
Speaker 10: were dismissed for legal reasons of being utter bolts. And
Speaker 10: I know that. You know, there's some concern that that
Speaker 10: will be appealed, but I think it is worth noting
Speaker 10: and celebrating that when we fight, we win.
Speaker 5: But sort of more to.
Speaker 10: The point in this context, I do want to note
Speaker 10: that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute,
Speaker 10: and it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute,
Speaker 10: and it still couldn't be effectively used in this way.
Speaker 10: And also federal RICO has often failed. Right, Efforts to
Speaker 10: use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed.
Speaker 10: So if you look up like the Ohio seven, which
Speaker 10: was a fairly early effort to bring a politically motivated
Speaker 10: RICO that did not go great for the government. So yeah,
Speaker 10: I think that's important to note about RICO.
Speaker 19: So you mentioned this like FBI designation earlier, it had
Speaker 19: been for a while, I think under I thought this
Speaker 19: came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under
Speaker 19: Biden for the prosecution of January sixth, But anti government extremists,
Speaker 19: which included militia movements and also anarchists, it's been shifted
Speaker 19: to far left extremists. In the verbiage of the boj
Speaker 19: and who they're pursuing. Anti law enforcement and anti conservative
Speaker 19: attacks have been framed as you know of considered effort
Speaker 19: by far left extremists in the media and also like
Speaker 19: by these institutions as they're you know, moving forward before
Speaker 19: they actually make any arrests or whatever, and through their prosecution,
Speaker 19: sometimes using terms like you know, antifa or trantifa or
Speaker 19: whatever sort of motivations they're giving. I also wonder if
Speaker 19: you could say a thing specifically about this sort of
Speaker 19: framing that is being given again, that is, like, like
Speaker 19: I was thinking about this before more recent mass shooting
Speaker 19: events that have happened, or before the hullabaloo around Charlie
Speaker 19: Kirk's assassination and the shooter, the alleged shooter's relationships to
Speaker 19: other people, that there seems to be this considered effort
Speaker 19: around clinically framing and politically flaming, framing transness as a
Speaker 19: mental health issue but also as a political extension of
Speaker 19: woke gender ideology that's coming for your children. And it's like,
Speaker 19: it's it's interesting because like, in order for people in
Speaker 19: a lot of cases in the US to be able
Speaker 19: to gain access to medical care that they desire or
Speaker 19: need around maybe gender dysorio or some other experience. They
Speaker 19: often have to use these like clinical terms for what
Speaker 19: they are experiencing and why they need medication for it,
Speaker 19: and not faulting people for making that approach, because you
Speaker 19: need the medicine that you need.
Speaker 12: But now this is.
Speaker 19: Being turned around and reframed as therefore, if people need
Speaker 19: this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have
Speaker 19: some sort of mental deficiency or some sort of issue
Speaker 19: which is being used in order to challenge people's right
Speaker 19: to keep in bear arms under the Second Amendments, or
Speaker 19: saying that people are like because of their transnits being
Speaker 19: motivated towards this attacks like I don't know if you
Speaker 19: have anything to again, not exactly like not exactly a
Speaker 19: legal issue, but I don't know if you have any observations.
Speaker 10: Well, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it.
Speaker 10: Just to be very clear, the DSM makes it very
Speaker 10: clear that for that being trans is not a mental illness,
Speaker 10: that gender dysph you is distress caused by discrepancy between
Speaker 10: the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist
Speaker 10: if any CIS person were being treated as a gender
Speaker 10: that they didn't identify with right, that would be a
Speaker 10: distress that would arise for any person. I think that
Speaker 10: there are real problems with the sort of clinicsization or
Speaker 10: medicalization of gender affirming care. But I do want to
Speaker 10: be very clear that that does not have to and
Speaker 10: does not formally or officially include pathologizing trans identity. That's
Speaker 10: something that's being imputed and being imposed, but it has
Speaker 10: no basis in clinical practice. Not that that necessarily matters
Speaker 10: to the government, but I do think it's important to
Speaker 10: point that out. I think, given that previous efforts to
Speaker 10: restrict gun ownership on the basis of previously diagnosed mental
Speaker 10: illness have not been super successful, I don't know that
Speaker 10: this one will be either. But again, this is an
Speaker 10: issue of power and less an issue of law or
Speaker 10: logical coherent legal philosophy.
Speaker 19: So this term has been coming up a lot of
Speaker 19: you know, with Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists,
Speaker 19: there's been a lot of pushback back from the legal
Speaker 19: community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are
Speaker 19: you talking about? Can you talk about, like what it
Speaker 19: means to be called domestic terrorists? What changes that makes
Speaker 19: in like how the law approaches he or how you
Speaker 19: can be convicted.
Speaker 10: Yeah, gladly. So at this point, what it means to
Speaker 10: be called a domestic terrorist is actually nothing. There is
Speaker 10: no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or
Speaker 10: for designating a domestic group a terrorist organization. And given
Speaker 10: the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court,
Speaker 10: I think it would be very, very difficult to change
Speaker 10: the law in the way it would have to be
Speaker 10: changed in order to make that designation. There are ways
Speaker 10: to freeze the assets of a domestic group. There are
Speaker 10: ways to posit or show a connection between a domestic
Speaker 10: group and a designated foreign terrorist organization, which is a
Speaker 10: real thing that has legal effect. There is a way
Speaker 10: to financially designate a group or an individual, as you know,
Speaker 10: having this kind of relationship to a foreign terrorist organization
Speaker 10: or an FTO.
Speaker 5: So, but there's no legal.
Speaker 10: Mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group. That's not a thing.
Speaker 10: So this is a place where the government could simply
Speaker 10: dispense with the law. But I do not think this
Speaker 10: is a place where the government can use the law
Speaker 10: to create a category of domestic terrorist organizations. And just
Speaker 10: to like explain FTOS a little bit, there is a
Speaker 10: category of organization that are designated by the State Department
Speaker 10: as quote, foreign terrorist organizations ftos are designated by the
Speaker 10: State Department, and they are listed on the State Department website. Right,
Speaker 10: it's not a secret who they are. You're not going
Speaker 10: to suddenly find out that, you know, you gain money
Speaker 10: that to I don't know the Greek equivalent of the ACLU,
Speaker 10: and now it's you know, it turns out it's an FTO.
Speaker 10: There are certainly cases where the government has successfully claimed
Speaker 10: that a connection between a domestic group and an FDO exists,
Speaker 10: even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Speaker 10: And if you have a connection to an FDO, you
Speaker 10: can be prosecuted for what's called material support for terrorism.
Speaker 10: And it's a very serious charge. It's a very frightening charge,
Speaker 10: and it does criminalize a lot of things that most
Speaker 10: people understand to be protected by the First Amendment right.
Speaker 10: It criminalizes providing things like medical care to certain groups.
Speaker 10: It criminalizes providing education or legal support to certain groups
Speaker 10: that are designated foreign terrorist organizations. And frankly, this is
Speaker 10: the idea that on pens material support for terrorism charges
Speaker 10: is offensive to many people because it does feel very
Speaker 10: much incompatible with constitutional norms under the First Amendment. It's
Speaker 10: an important thing to be aware of, but it would
Speaker 10: be very surprising to me if the government were able
Speaker 10: to successfully make broad claims connecting quote Antifa to foreign
Speaker 10: terrorist organizations.
Speaker 19: I was when you were saying that that had me
Speaker 19: thinking a little bit about the Holy Land five case.
Speaker 19: I was trying to remember that example. I guess like
Speaker 19: to be labor this. Can we talk about the distinction
Speaker 19: between domestic terrorist organization, which is a classification that doesn't exist,
Speaker 19: versus the charge of committing terrorism because people who get
Speaker 19: terrorism enhancements at least like the Marus Mason one example
Speaker 19: that comes to my mind, right, who is a member
Speaker 19: of cell that was associated with the Earth Liberation Front,
Speaker 19: like so that that person got over two decades in
Speaker 19: prison based on being convicted of crimes that existed and
Speaker 19: then getting enhancements based on the definition that those were terrorists,
Speaker 19: amplifying the amount of time.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 10: The difference is the difference between criminalizing conduct or defining
Speaker 10: conduct as being terroristic, and criminalizing a group. The First
Speaker 10: Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression, and that
Speaker 10: means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations,
Speaker 10: and expression. We cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides
Speaker 10: our conduct, our actions, And so there can be terrorist
Speaker 10: offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct
Speaker 10: that you are convicted of. If you engage in se
Speaker 10: illegal acts and a judge determines that those acts were
Speaker 10: motivated by desire to do terrorism, that the penalty for
Speaker 10: engaging in those acts can be enhanced. But you cannot
Speaker 10: designate a group, a belief, or an expression as being
Speaker 10: a crime in itself unless there is conduct associated with it.
Speaker 10: Because we don't criminalize people's identities. I mean, we do
Speaker 10: criminalize people's identities, but it's we don't say the impermissible
Speaker 10: to prosecute people for having those identities.
Speaker 19: I guess I have note as I understand the terrorism
Speaker 19: enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Luis gim
Speaker 19: Angioni case have been dropped. Is a thing that I heard, yes,
Speaker 19: which I mean at the same time, this is referenced
Speaker 19: in one of those documents that came from the White
Speaker 19: House as being a terroristic act.
Speaker 13: So yes, what are.
Speaker 12: The courts know?
Speaker 7: Okay, thank you? For making that distinction more clear.
Speaker 19: All right, So, how might those of us on the
Speaker 19: left or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive
Speaker 19: of the state's view of us. How do we rally
Speaker 19: support for our identities and positions? What are some good
Speaker 19: practices understanding, like, having had this conversation, the terrain on
Speaker 19: which we're operating.
Speaker 10: Absolutely so, I guess what I would say about best
Speaker 10: practices is understand whether you are at risk, even if
Speaker 10: you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even
Speaker 10: if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing
Speaker 10: that the system works and that this particular administration is
Speaker 10: like an aberration. I would say, Look, this administration is
Speaker 10: preoccupied with the funding streams for very mainstream liberal causes,
Speaker 10: and the fact that it's sort of lumping everything under
Speaker 10: the banner of antifa, you know, is probably a big
Speaker 10: surprise for some of these groups, like you know, suburban
Speaker 10: white moms against guns or whatever. But they are very
Speaker 10: focused on things like wirefraud and money laundering and stripping
Speaker 10: nonprofits of their tax status. If there's even a whisper
Speaker 10: of the possibility that those nonprofits are pursuing goals that
Speaker 10: are in any way antagonistic to state interests. So if
Speaker 10: you are in a group that has a bank account
Speaker 10: or raises money, the best practices here haven't changed. Keep
Speaker 10: very precise track of your funds. If you raise money,
Speaker 10: use it for that theyk you said you were going
Speaker 10: to use it for. Have an accountant, you know, be
Speaker 10: very very careful about your money. And again the best
Speaker 10: practices for the rest of us also haven't changed. This
Speaker 10: is political discourse that reaffirms what we already know about
Speaker 10: targeted surveillance, and we have for a long time known
Speaker 10: how to deal with this. If you are approached by
Speaker 10: law enforcement, remember that the Fifth Amendment protect you're right
Speaker 10: not to speak to them. You have no obligation to
Speaker 10: speak to law enforcement. It is a crime to light
Speaker 10: of federal agents, and that means that it is safest
Speaker 10: not to say anything. Besides, I'm represented by counsel. Please
Speaker 10: leave your name a number, and my lawyer will call you.
Speaker 10: There is truly never a compelling reason to speak to
Speaker 10: federal agents before consulting with an attorney. The Energy Anti
Speaker 10: Repression Hotline can be reached at two one two six
Speaker 10: seven nine two eight one one. You can call to
Speaker 10: have a free privileged conversation about your rights, risks and responsibilities,
Speaker 10: and to be connected with appropriate legal resources in your area.
Speaker 10: And at the end of the day, we keep ourselves
Speaker 10: safe by refusing to submit to this fear, refusing to
Speaker 10: comply in advance, refusing to second guess whether we actually
Speaker 10: have rights, and more importantly, we persist by being confident
Speaker 10: in the fact that, no matter what, our communities are
Speaker 10: going to rally around and care for each other.
Speaker 19: I think that would be a great place to tie up.
Speaker 19: Thank you so much for having this conversation and for
Speaker 19: the insights that you've shared, and for the work that
Speaker 19: you do.
Speaker 10: Mo. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 17: Happy g October everybody.
Speaker 13: Oh, shut the fuck up, we can't.
Speaker 12: This is that could happen here?
Speaker 17: Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 17: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 17: I'm garouson Davis Today, joint by me along Jamestown and
Speaker 17: Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of September twenty
Speaker 17: first to October first, and what a week it was. Yeah,
Speaker 17: it does not feel like it should be October but
Speaker 17: who cares. I guess the government's shut down right now,
Speaker 17: So all of the dozens of anarchists around the country
Speaker 17: are rejoicing, uh huh, as the Senate has failed to
Speaker 17: pass a short term funding bill.
Speaker 1: That's right, everyone, we did it. We defeated the state
Speaker 1: using the power of the state.
Speaker 5: State.
Speaker 17: Yeah. In many such cases, as the government shut down,
Speaker 17: Trump is threatening mass layoffs, and Republicans are framing this
Speaker 17: whole shut down as being caused by Democrats who are
Speaker 17: trying to defend healthcare for quote unquote illegals, which isn't real.
Speaker 17: Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care. That's not
Speaker 17: even what the Democrats are fighting for. Would be cool
Speaker 17: if they were, would be cool if the theory of
Speaker 17: this country you could just get health care, that sounds nice.
Speaker 17: Wouldn't that be a cool, almost utopian place to live.
Speaker 17: But that's not what's happening. And the rights confronted with this,
Speaker 17: but they just do not care. Here's a Mike Johnson,
Speaker 17: Speaker of the House, on CNN, having a little debate
Speaker 17: about this.
Speaker 21: If that counterproposal was enacted, is illegal aliens would be
Speaker 21: paid for American taxpayers hard earned dollars would be paying
Speaker 21: for benefits for illegal aliens.
Speaker 1: Again, we're not doing that, but it's.
Speaker 5: Against federal law for people who are here illegally.
Speaker 8: To get yes.
Speaker 21: And that's why our reforms are so important to enforce
Speaker 21: all that. What the important thing to remember is what's.
Speaker 10: Happened the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally.
Speaker 21: Again, because they don't have the level of specification that
Speaker 21: we had in our bill, it will unwind that and
Speaker 21: all those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed.
Speaker 3: We can't afford to do that.
Speaker 21: But that you're making right, No, that is a red
Speaker 21: herring in this in this debate.
Speaker 17: So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is
Speaker 17: they're trying to extend the current currently enacted federal subsidies
Speaker 17: for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people
Speaker 17: able to access healthcare. And Democrats are also trying to
Speaker 17: reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid,
Speaker 17: which happened under the One Big, Beautiful Bill earlier this year.
Speaker 17: That is what they are actually fighting for. The White
Speaker 17: House is retruthing and retweeting proposals from the Democrats that
Speaker 17: include a health care for aliens. But that's legal aliens,
Speaker 17: that's like legal documented residents, And they're framing this as
Speaker 17: health care for quote unquote illegals.
Speaker 13: It's a bad faith representation, as it always is. Like
Speaker 13: people can go all the way back to the episode
Speaker 13: that I made with Robert Sophie last year about what
Speaker 13: Trump might do to learn more about the public charge
Speaker 13: rule and how that pertains to people who are not
Speaker 13: US citizens. I don't think we really have the time
Speaker 13: noise as the place to go over that here. But
Speaker 13: there is not, and there has never been a massive
Speaker 13: federal free health care plan for undocumented people. In fact,
Speaker 13: people who are undocumented are not going to see the
Speaker 13: doctor right now because of the persistent and untrue rumor
Speaker 13: that ICE are taking people from hospitals. That is not
Speaker 13: something I'm aware of ever happening. ICE do take people
Speaker 13: who are already in their custody to hospitals, and they
Speaker 13: will wait for those people while those people are treated.
Speaker 13: That it's not the same as entering the hospital and
Speaker 13: grabbing peace people based on the immigration status. And I'm
Speaker 13: aware of several cases where people whose life was genuinely
Speaker 13: in danger were afraid to go and seek medical attention.
Speaker 13: Because they were afraid that they would be targeted for
Speaker 13: their immigration status.
Speaker 17: So we'll see how long this government shut down last.
Speaker 17: The last one started on twenty eighteen, lasted thirty five days.
Speaker 17: If this shutdown is still happening next week, I'm sure
Speaker 17: we will include some details about government services being affected.
Speaker 17: But this could resolve in a few days, a few hours,
Speaker 17: or in a few weeks.
Speaker 7: We do not know.
Speaker 17: But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country.
Speaker 17: There still is a ray of hope. And that ray
Speaker 17: of hope is named Jimmy Kimball, who was thankfully back
Speaker 17: on the air. I know we've all been watching. We've
Speaker 17: all been watching this certainly, and next our En Sinclair
Speaker 17: have ceased preempting his show. That's back on air across
Speaker 17: the country. Free speech is hashtag. So back in America, provert,
Speaker 17: Do you want to talk about the Disney plus Voika?
Speaker 1: Yes, So we've gotten some data finally on the damaged
Speaker 1: on to Disney's result of the boycott. After they fired Monsieur.
Speaker 12: Kimmel suspended, suspended, Monsieur kim.
Speaker 1: Il suspended, suspended, they were definitely going to fire They
Speaker 1: wanted to fire his They definitely wanted to fire him,
Speaker 1: and you know, there was a lot of posting online
Speaker 1: about there was a lot of posting, a lot of
Speaker 1: posting about people canceling their accounts and people being like wow,
Speaker 1: and it's I always it's always very frustrated to me
Speaker 1: because like people get very excited and it's impossible to
Speaker 1: tell with the moment, is this actually anything?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 5: Yees?
Speaker 1: Sixteen thousand people shared this thing about how the website
Speaker 1: for Disney was down, but that doesn't mean anything other
Speaker 1: than like someone saw the website down and a bunch
Speaker 1: of people shared and posted it. So it was very
Speaker 1: difficult to tell, like, is there actually any follow through
Speaker 1: on this is Disney's bottom line being hurt? And thankfully,
Speaker 1: I'm very happy to say that it does look like
Speaker 1: Disney suffered a substantial financial setback as a result of
Speaker 1: the boycott campaign. Something like one point seven million paid
Speaker 1: subscribers canceled, and this was immediately before Disney was looking
Speaker 1: to announce a price increase, So like, this is this
Speaker 1: is like a serious I'm not surprised they reversed. Course,
Speaker 1: this is like damaging to them. We're not talking about
Speaker 1: the amount of money that a company like Disney would
Speaker 1: just ignore.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And I think the most important thing here for
Speaker 12: all of us, and this is the thing I talked about.
Speaker 12: We did an episode about this. This is actually before
Speaker 12: kim Old I've reinstated by Sinclair. But one of the
Speaker 12: really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government.
Speaker 12: They are hideously unpopular. All of the all of their
Speaker 12: sort of legitimization stuff, all of the sort of media
Speaker 12: complicity they've bought has bought them about four percent of
Speaker 12: proof of rating bump from where they were this time
Speaker 12: of the administration the first time, so he said about
Speaker 12: forty one percent of poof of rating. Everything that he's
Speaker 12: doing is hideously underwater. Like his most popular thing is
Speaker 12: is immigration policy, which is horrible, but it's again like
Speaker 12: forty two percent. Everyone hates these people, yeah, you know.
Speaker 12: And it's it's very easy, because of their controlled and
Speaker 12: media spear, to believe that they have this sort of
Speaker 12: total hegemonic power over everyone in the US until the
Speaker 12: exact moment where it gets challenged and everyone's like, wait,
Speaker 12: hold on, no, it turns out most of the country
Speaker 12: hates this. Does not what Jimmy Kimmel acts from Disney.
Speaker 17: Like comrade Kimmel has joined the fight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, there are more of us than there are of them,
Speaker 12: and there always have been, and.
Speaker 17: By more of us, Mia is referring to herself and
Speaker 17: Jimmy Kimmel as a coherent political class.
Speaker 12: Just for the record, there no.
Speaker 1: The only two members of the coherent political class.
Speaker 5: But that's good news.
Speaker 12: Just the state which holds me up to Kimmel and.
Speaker 1: Entirety of the fourth Estate. But I don't know, there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of good news for you. A bunch
Speaker 1: of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti First Amendment,
Speaker 1: anti democratic, massive overreach of the state, thought crime, nonsense,
Speaker 1: and the company suffered such dramatic within like literally in
Speaker 1: the space of a week. That's three hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost
Speaker 1: that even Disney can't ignore that kind of money.
Speaker 12: Oh looks like regular people.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, like people who subscribe to Disney bluss.
Speaker 17: Yeah, an army of ordinary liberals, the actual like silent
Speaker 17: majority in this country. Yeah said no Disney, Like.
Speaker 1: Well, that's gross and scary. I'm not paying Disney anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's good that they did that.
Speaker 17: Currently, the rights trying to manufacture a counter boycott against
Speaker 17: Netflix for having children's shows with non binary characters, mostly
Speaker 17: using clips the children's shows that are like two or
Speaker 17: three years old, clips that Limbs of Talk Talk has
Speaker 17: already posted years ago. Now try to write check and
Speaker 17: others are recirculating these clips to be like, yeah, look
Speaker 17: a look at how Netflix has gone too far as
Speaker 17: pushing woke nonsense down the throats of your children by
Speaker 17: using like ancient clips from like the Jurassic Park TV
Speaker 17: show Like okay, guys, good luck with that.
Speaker 7: Have fun.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: In other news, the Department of War. This actually happened
Speaker 17: last month. On September fifth, Trump signed an executive order
Speaker 17: approving the name the Department of War as a secondary
Speaker 17: title for the Department of Defense to use an official correspondence,
Speaker 17: public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non statutory documents within the
Speaker 17: Executive Branch, while the administration also works on changing the
Speaker 17: name officially through Congress. Hag Seth nearly immediately switched all
Speaker 17: of his accounts and his office name plate to read
Speaker 17: Secretary of War.
Speaker 13: Yeah, you know, he pushed hard for this one.
Speaker 17: Defense dot gov now redirects to War dot gov and
Speaker 17: they're just referring to this in all public appearances as
Speaker 17: the War Department, something that we've talked about on the
Speaker 17: show before of them wanting to do and they're going
Speaker 17: to continue to push this and using this kind of
Speaker 17: war framing for domestic operations.
Speaker 12: Yeah, not just international deployments.
Speaker 13: This was its historical name right like way way before
Speaker 13: it was a DoD Yeah. Yeah, it was, so just
Speaker 13: to be clear for people, that doesn't mean that it's
Speaker 13: like a good reason to change it back.
Speaker 17: Trump truthed last week quote at the request of the
Speaker 17: Secretary of Homeland Security, Christ you know, I'm directing Secretary
Speaker 17: of War Pete Hagsath to provide all necessary troops to
Speaker 17: protect war ravaged Portland and any of our ice facilities
Speaker 17: under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.
Speaker 17: I'm also authorizing full force if necessary. Thank you for
Speaker 17: your attention in this matter. War ravaged Portland. How's it
Speaker 17: hanging out there for our Portland correspondence.
Speaker 1: It's fine. It's kind of rainy. I had a nice
Speaker 1: tapas dinner on Sunday. It was pretty good.
Speaker 12: The crows are really nice.
Speaker 17: What it does, does someone want to mention, like the
Speaker 17: nature of the anti ICE protests happening in like one
Speaker 17: square block in like the south water front of downtown Portland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's in the South water front McAdam is what
Speaker 1: people here call it, the neighborhood where the ICE auxiliary
Speaker 1: facility is. And there have been protests off and on
Speaker 1: pretty much since Trump took office. Usually on like a
Speaker 1: good night you get maybe one hundred and fifty two
Speaker 1: hundred people. There were some nights kind of around where
Speaker 1: things blew up in LA that there were more like
Speaker 1: five or six hundred people out for a couple of days.
Speaker 1: There really hasn't been any of the like what we
Speaker 1: were seeing in twenty twenty in terms of like the
Speaker 1: mass mass gatherings. And you know, there has not really
Speaker 1: been much in the way of like people getting arrested.
Speaker 1: Generally getting arrested for crossing a line that separates federal
Speaker 1: property from like state property so to speak, and like
Speaker 1: step over it and then a bunch of guys run
Speaker 1: out and grab them, right. That's that's mostly what the
Speaker 1: arrests are for a lot of people have had charges dropped.
Speaker 1: I mean, people get fucked up charges when they get charged,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them are not really sticking because
Speaker 1: they're not very strong, like because it's just not much
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 17: Right, Yeah, we'll talk more about why Trump thinks there's
Speaker 17: this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland. But yeah, so
Speaker 17: far the protests have been relatively mild.
Speaker 12: Yes, Yeah, the vibe is very much like the classic
Speaker 12: Portland thing of people with like holding doughnuts on fishing
Speaker 12: lines out in front of the cops. Right, it's like that,
Speaker 12: not like molotovs.
Speaker 1: The response has been crazy, Like there's a video going
Speaker 1: around that's a bunch of federal agents. I think they're
Speaker 1: fps rolling in up from a van from outside of
Speaker 1: the ice facility and arresting somebody who again probably crossed
Speaker 1: a line or through something generally is why people have
Speaker 1: been getting arrested. So that the response has been nonsense.
Speaker 1: That that video is from recently, and I'm seeing it
Speaker 1: attributed to Trump's declaration of war. But like I saw
Speaker 1: stuff like that three months ago, four months ago, Like
Speaker 1: it's been happening every day, like they do roll up
Speaker 1: in their vans when they because they periodically throughout the
Speaker 1: day will have Feds come in to go grab a
Speaker 1: couple of people. And that this is a thing they've
Speaker 1: been doing, so they've been so far at least, I
Speaker 1: have not seen either an escalation on the ground really
Speaker 1: in terms of like what protests, what the protests are doing,
Speaker 1: and the numbers of protest since Trump's declaration. And I
Speaker 1: also really haven't seen an escalation in what's being deployed
Speaker 1: on the ground.
Speaker 17: We have not seen the Oregon National Guard presence that
Speaker 17: is being promised now this has just been DHS officers.
Speaker 1: I can confirm, just based on some information that's come
Speaker 1: my way, that there do seem to be an increased
Speaker 1: number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their transponders off. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of reasons they can do that. Some
Speaker 1: of them is for if they are transporting like high
Speaker 1: value quote unquote deportees, right, people who are being deported
Speaker 1: for some sort of serious crime. Some of it is
Speaker 1: if they are feel like they are under threat and
Speaker 1: are doing like emergency personnel transfers. They're not generally supposed
Speaker 1: to fly without their transponders, although again, you can't really
Speaker 1: trust anything to work the way it's supposed to work.
Speaker 1: But there is some evidence that they have been ramping
Speaker 1: up and they have been flying more MQ nine's over
Speaker 1: the city reaper drones for surveillance purposes, so that I
Speaker 1: can say to it does seem to have been a
Speaker 1: degree of escalation, but in terms of we're not seeing
Speaker 1: troops marching through the city yet, and I honestly can't,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to me, as of the moment that
Speaker 1: we're recording this, that there has been an escalation and
Speaker 1: the level of force used on the ground right now.
Speaker 1: That said, the level of force use on the ground
Speaker 1: before Trump declared his war on Portland or whatever, it
Speaker 1: was still pretty extreme. That has continued. I just it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like what's happening right now is a massive
Speaker 1: increase over where we were two weeks ago, you know.
Speaker 1: That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 12: And I think the place where that has happened is Chicago,
Speaker 12: and we will get to that later.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. Well.
Speaker 17: Trump has continued to talk about deploying quote unquote troops
Speaker 17: to US cities, including at a meeting of top brass
Speaker 17: on Tuesday, September thirtieth, where Pete hag Seth basically ranted
Speaker 17: to top of generals and admirals about no more wokeness
Speaker 17: in the military, but Trump also spoke telling top military
Speaker 17: officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal run city,
Speaker 17: calling it a quote war from within. Let's play the clip.
Speaker 8: But it seems that the ones that are run by
Speaker 8: the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago,
Speaker 8: New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're
Speaker 8: going to straighten them out. It will be a major
Speaker 8: part for some of the people in this room. That's
Speaker 8: a war too, It's a war from within. Controlling the
Speaker 8: physical territory of our border is essential to national security.
Speaker 8: We can't let these people.
Speaker 13: In the two separate issues they have that he conflated, right,
Speaker 13: protests in cities and people crossing the border.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been talking about this
Speaker 17: for a while. I mean, same thing with like DC right,
Speaker 17: combining this like crime issue with undocumented immigration, and also
Speaker 17: with protests against ICE operations targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind
Speaker 17: of bundled together into this into this war from within.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I mean the ration issue, right, is one that gives
Speaker 13: him a much broaderly way and the powers the constitutionally
Speaker 13: available to him as the executive than policing with the military,
Speaker 13: which is on the facefoot of thing that shouldn't happen
Speaker 13: in the United States. It makes sense from a tactical
Speaker 13: perspective for them to conflate those two things together, I
Speaker 13: will say, even if it's not particularly real.
Speaker 17: During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders quote, last month,
Speaker 17: I signing an executive order to provide training for a
Speaker 17: quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This
Speaker 17: is going to be a big thing for the people
Speaker 17: in this room talking to the generals, because it's the
Speaker 17: enemy from within, and we will have to handle it
Speaker 17: before it gets out of control. It won't get out
Speaker 17: of control once you're involved.
Speaker 7: Unquote.
Speaker 17: They're directly addressing admirals and generals about them having to
Speaker 17: help form a quick reaction for us to quell civil disturbance,
Speaker 17: which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling
Speaker 17: it again the enemy from within, align that Trump used
Speaker 17: a lot during the tail end of his presidential campaign
Speaker 17: in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 12: Yeah, which is just it's every single element.
Speaker 17: If it is just fascist, it's it's pretty it's pretty
Speaker 17: blanket authoritarian stuff. Like there's no like sugarcoating it here.
Speaker 17: Oh yeah, Yeah, they don't need to use coded phrases, right,
Speaker 17: they just say this stuff.
Speaker 12: Yeah, No, they're just yeah, they're just this is this
Speaker 12: is just fascist, Like they're just trying to do it.
Speaker 13: Yeah, they're just saying the thing.
Speaker 17: In the meeting, he explicitly labeled these dangerous cities as
Speaker 17: a training ground for our military National Guard.
Speaker 8: But I want to salute every service member who has
Speaker 8: helped us carry out this critical mission. It's really a
Speaker 8: very important mission. And I told Pete we should use
Speaker 8: some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our
Speaker 8: military National Guard. But military because we're going into Chicago version.
Speaker 8: That's a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor stupid.
Speaker 12: And I think it's worth noting both the mayor of
Speaker 12: Chicago and the governor Prits have been very unhappy about this.
Speaker 12: Like as much as Pritzker has kind of not been
Speaker 12: doing anything about like CPD aiding ice in raids, he
Speaker 12: is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National
Speaker 12: Guard troops in. So if they're very serious about following
Speaker 12: this through, we're going to see some kind of large
Speaker 12: scale confrontation.
Speaker 7: Yep.
Speaker 12: And Pritzker is not the kind of like knock needs Uh,
Speaker 12: Gavin Newsom type governor.
Speaker 13: Yeah, he's not Gavin Newson.
Speaker 12: He's not simply just going to let Trump do this.
Speaker 12: And yeah, that's going to be a major source of
Speaker 12: confrontation assuming this, assuming this specific like we're going to
Speaker 12: send the National Guard in the Chicago stuff like happens soon.
Speaker 17: Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotec, governor of Oregon,
Speaker 17: about deploying Oregon National Gardener, and her pushing back against that,
Speaker 17: but ostensibly acquiescing in some way because there's been an
Speaker 17: announcement from the organ National Guard that they will be
Speaker 17: deploying and people in Oregon probably aren't gonna be happy
Speaker 17: about it, they won't understand the mission. But during this meeting,
Speaker 17: Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor.
Speaker 8: Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone, and
Speaker 8: I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please
Speaker 8: don't come in. We don't need you. I said, well,
Speaker 8: unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War two.
Speaker 8: Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding, sir.
Speaker 8: We have it under control. I said, you don't have
Speaker 8: it under control, Governor. But I'll check it and I'll
Speaker 8: call you back. I called it back. I said, this
Speaker 8: place is a nightmare. Probably it's certainly not the biggest,
Speaker 8: but it's one of the worst. Is brew They go
Speaker 8: after our ice people, who are great patriots and tough
Speaker 8: job too, but they love it. They love it because
Speaker 8: they're cleaning up our country.
Speaker 13: And I think because there's a fifty thousand dollars sign up.
Speaker 17: Well, unless they're play false tapes, so the tapes aren't
Speaker 17: necessarily false. But if you're watching Fox News twenty four
Speaker 17: to seven, what Fox News is doing is they're playing
Speaker 17: a lot of clips not from the Year of Our
Speaker 17: Lord twenty twenty five, but in fact from twenty twenty
Speaker 17: when Trump's last federal invasion of Portland happened, where he
Speaker 17: deployed Bortac, which looked much more like a war scene.
Speaker 17: Do you know why, because of the massive amounts of
Speaker 17: chemical munitions that Bortac like caked downtown Portland in which
Speaker 17: made it look very similar to a war scene. So, yeah,
Speaker 17: those are the clips that are playing NonStop on TV.
Speaker 17: I've been watching Fox News clips. They're just playing clips
Speaker 17: of Portland twenty twenty to make this look like a
Speaker 17: different situation than what the current on the ground situation is,
Speaker 17: which may have some intense moments, but not nearly the
Speaker 17: intensity of five years ago, which again was stoked by
Speaker 17: Trump's own military police force, which was deployed to the city.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, there's information that Trump got corrected. Internally, I
Speaker 1: don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything,
Speaker 1: but yeah, six year old footage, five year old footage
Speaker 1: being used to justify military deployments about you'd expect.
Speaker 17: Really literally, yesterday I saw footage circulating on x the
Speaker 17: Everything app of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into a street.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember that Molotov. I remember that molo, that
Speaker 1: malotav getting thrown half a decade ago.
Speaker 17: It only hit another protester whose feet got very badly burned. Yes,
Speaker 17: And that's the type of footage circulating that makes it
Speaker 17: look like, you know, once again, Portland's burning down, Portland's
Speaker 17: always burning down, using like one or two select clips
Speaker 17: from yeah, half a decade ago.
Speaker 1: Again, no buildings actually burnt down.
Speaker 13: Yeah, they've created a reality around what happened important in
Speaker 13: twenty twenty that you will never change with facts or evidence. Right,
Speaker 13: Like to people who watch Fox News. Portland was burned
Speaker 13: to the ground in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: And on the worst nights in Portland, we could go
Speaker 1: three blocks and get food from a food cart.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we got a lot of great Chinese food.
Speaker 5: That stuff.
Speaker 1: We've got great Chinese food, schwarma, you know in La.
Speaker 13: When the city was whatever under siege. I went to
Speaker 13: Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings
Speaker 13: at two am on a Wednesday scene.
Speaker 1: That's a war zone. That's a war zone.
Speaker 13: I had my plague carrier on. I was ready to go.
Speaker 12: Here's some ads.
Speaker 17: We'll be back to talk about Chicago. But enjoy these
Speaker 17: possibly Buffalo Wild Wings sponsored ads.
Speaker 13: I doubt it. No vegan food. All right, we are back, sweet,
Speaker 13: and it's good to be back. I want to talk
Speaker 13: very briefly about Pete egsass sec war as he is
Speaker 13: calling himself now right in the little speech he gave
Speaker 13: Pete Pegs he's he's working on his physical fitness for sure,
Speaker 13: his bod that he put a big emphasis on physical
Speaker 13: fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit.
Speaker 17: Male standards.
Speaker 13: Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the
Speaker 13: various role of their combat roles that if they want
Speaker 13: to do that, right, So that would mean, you know,
Speaker 13: the Army Physical Fitness test, right, whatever the male standard
Speaker 13: quote unquote was would be everyone's standard. I don't want
Speaker 13: to go deep into hegseth career that would be that
Speaker 13: would be another episode, possibly of another show. But I
Speaker 13: do want to talk about the stuff. Did you notice
Speaker 13: he said no more. He listed number of generals, but
Speaker 13: one of them was Milli, Right, he said no more
Speaker 13: Millis Chiarelli, and I forget who the other one was,
Speaker 13: But I thought that was interesting given what we saw
Speaker 13: Trump say about a QRF. Right, Milli had a long
Speaker 13: career in the military. Right, he saw plenty of combat
Speaker 13: and all that stuff. But I think he's most well
Speaker 13: known to most people for his cooling effect on the
Speaker 13: use of the US military against protests in twenty twenty ls.
Speaker 13: I think that is what that was referring to, Right
Speaker 13: that Hegcess was talking about removing that kind of person
Speaker 13: from command.
Speaker 1: And Milly also said no to Trump when he wanted
Speaker 1: to deploy for and he was also working behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to
Speaker 1: have a plan if he tries to use the nukes
Speaker 1: after the election.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Milly was doing everything he could to mitigate what
Speaker 13: he saw as a massive danger of Trump responding in
Speaker 13: a completely disproportionate.
Speaker 17: Way, a legitimate national security and danger.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yes, yeah, like, yeah, someone whose job is protecting
Speaker 13: the United States like that, that's some reasonable concern. Was
Speaker 13: a reasonable concern at that time. Obviously, the Trump administration
Speaker 13: does not want people like that in command anymore, and
Speaker 13: that was something that hegxcess spoke about at length. The
Speaker 13: rest of his speech focused on shit like fitness standards,
Speaker 13: shit like grooming visible tattoos, a bunch of stuff that
Speaker 13: you would expect from a mid career infantry officer who
Speaker 13: hasn't had a particularly distinguished career, right, Like, that's the
Speaker 13: shit that mid career infantry officers do.
Speaker 17: I think you mean war fighters, James, which is Haig
Speaker 17: Seth's preferred term for soldiers.
Speaker 13: Yes, fuck me. Yeah, Well, because it's gender neutrals start that.
Speaker 1: They've been doing that for a while.
Speaker 13: But yeah, it's on the MRIs, it's been on the
Speaker 13: Emeris for a while. But yes, Haig Seth does like
Speaker 13: the phrase war fighters. His stuff was, like I said,
Speaker 13: not something you would expect from someone who I think
Speaker 13: he was an O four in the national card, right.
Speaker 13: I don't think any of that is particularly new. He
Speaker 13: issued a number of directives. One thing I did want
Speaker 13: to talk about was this change in grooming standards. So
Speaker 13: the War Department has issued a new directive on shaving profiles.
Speaker 13: What this does in practice is we can see from
Speaker 13: their announcement, which features prominently a black soldier shaving, is
Speaker 13: it takes away long term shaving profiles for soldiers with
Speaker 13: medical conditions such as pseudopholic gulitis or exma, or other
Speaker 13: soldiers who experienced skin irritation by shaving.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 13: Previously, those soldiers may have had a like a waiver
Speaker 13: which they could show to their officers, and their officer said, hey, soldier,
Speaker 13: why haven't you shaved? Soldier, sailor, emon, Space Force guardian, whatever,
Speaker 13: why haven't you shaved? They could say, well, I'm on
Speaker 13: the shaving profile because of this condition that I have.
Speaker 13: Now you will only have a year and then you
Speaker 13: will have to somehow rectify that condition. They talk about
Speaker 13: treatments a little bit in this, So now it's on
Speaker 13: which you can read if you want, not going to
Speaker 13: read them out for you, but this will very clearly
Speaker 13: target black service people the most, and I don't think
Speaker 13: that's a coincidence. And as we see from the picture
Speaker 13: of the black soldiers shaving in the in the release
Speaker 13: that they sent out there, this is happening at the
Speaker 13: same time as arrested his stuff, right, and at the
Speaker 13: same time as we've seen trans folks removed from the military.
Speaker 13: As heg Theft, seems to be going pretty hard on
Speaker 13: removing women from combat roles. He's previously been more out
Speaker 13: right in that this time he's in his speech he
Speaker 13: was talking about how women, if they could meet the
Speaker 13: same standards as men, would be welcoming combat roles, but
Speaker 13: they wouldn't quote unquote lower the standards. The whole thing
Speaker 13: was pretty remarkable to see, heg Theft lecturing, you know,
Speaker 13: people who have spent collectively maybe hundreds of years in combat.
Speaker 17: Right, people have spent decades losing wars. Yeah yeah, decades
Speaker 17: of period of time.
Speaker 13: Yeah yeah, I mean centuries between them, right, But explaining
Speaker 13: how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience
Speaker 13: in it than him, yes, and basically telling them it's
Speaker 13: not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before. Right,
Speaker 13: the soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the
Speaker 13: politicians in the generals. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is nothing new. Yeah,
Speaker 13: but it was still kind of remarkable to see Heigfast
Speaker 13: delivering it to the generals.
Speaker 17: And specifically, both he and Trump made statements about if
Speaker 17: the generals and animals do not like what Trump and
Speaker 17: Heksa were saying, they should just resign, they should just leave.
Speaker 22: I've never walked into a room so silent before. This
Speaker 22: is very don't laugh, don't life if you're not allowed
Speaker 22: to do that, you know what, Just have a good time,
Speaker 22: and if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if
Speaker 22: you want to do anything you want, you can do
Speaker 22: anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying,
Speaker 22: you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank,
Speaker 22: there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay,
Speaker 22: because we're all on the same team.
Speaker 17: Part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists
Speaker 17: in the upper grass of the military, like that's part
Speaker 17: of this process. That's why he doesn't want millies. He
Speaker 17: doesn't want people that will deny him. He wants just
Speaker 17: a complete loyalist government, and that includes the military.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: And if that means that we're going to have a
Speaker 17: whole bunch of generals and animals resigned because of hig
Speaker 17: Seth and Trump's anti woke granting, then that's a desirable
Speaker 17: outcome for the administration at this point.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Speaking of war Chicago, Yeah.
Speaker 12: I mean the scenes that I have seen the most
Speaker 12: frequently described as war or looking like a war this week,
Speaker 12: have come out of Chicago, where on Tuesday the thirtieth,
Speaker 12: there was one of the most brutal raids that we've
Speaker 12: seen from the FEDS yet in any city. This took
Speaker 12: place in South Shore, which is a ninety percent black
Speaker 12: neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, where a whole
Speaker 12: bunch of immigrants who I don't know if people remember
Speaker 12: when Texas and a bunch of other states in the
Speaker 12: South started busting immigrants up to cities in the north.
Speaker 12: Chicago is one of the ones where that happened. A
Speaker 12: lot a lot of these people ended up in South Shore,
Speaker 12: and there was a massive rate on an apartment complex
Speaker 12: in the South Shore. Agents showed up in a combination
Speaker 12: of moving vans, sort of unmarked vans and armored vehicles
Speaker 12: it's still unclear exactly how many people were taken. We
Speaker 12: so don't know. Estimates at the time suggested about forty.
Speaker 12: It's very unclear. What we do know about the raid
Speaker 12: was that it was absolutely brutal. A bunch of a
Speaker 12: bunch of the initial reports thought that they had been shooting,
Speaker 12: but there hadn't been shooting. What there had been was
Speaker 12: that they blew into this apartment complex with flash bank grenades.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty common for people to mistake those two.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and these are just you know, these are just
Speaker 12: regular people who suddenly at one in the morning, a
Speaker 12: bunch of explosions start going off. There's a whole bunch
Speaker 12: of pictures that you can see in various articles about
Speaker 12: this of doors torn off their hinges. The agents did
Speaker 12: a I think this is a classic Chicago police tactic,
Speaker 12: but you know, they just went through and just started
Speaker 12: grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it
Speaker 12: onto the ground. There were black Hawk kilicops optors like
Speaker 12: constantly circling this just random apartment complex. There was a
Speaker 12: massive FBI presence alongside border patrol and ice.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 12: It's also worth mentioning that Independent book Club Chicago, which
Speaker 12: is one of the very sort of prominent independent local
Speaker 12: media outlets. There obtained a picture from a neighbor who
Speaker 12: was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police
Speaker 12: Department on the scene, which they are there expressly forbidden
Speaker 12: like by state law from assisting in immigration enforcement. It
Speaker 12: is worth reading this article in order to see this
Speaker 12: quote quote. We did not participate in or assist with
Speaker 12: any immigration enforcement, spokesperson Maggie he Un said in a statement,
Speaker 12: followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CPD car
Speaker 12: on the scene of this raid. Yeah, this raid is
Speaker 12: a really significant escalation of force in a cy that
Speaker 12: has I mean, I've already seen ice literally shoot someone
Speaker 12: and kill them. But yeah, I'm going to quote this
Speaker 12: from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet in collaboration
Speaker 12: with unraffled Press. Veronica Castro off the Illinois Coalition for
Speaker 12: Immigrant and Refugee Rights, at a press conference said quote,
Speaker 12: this looked like hundreds of masked agents knocking down doors
Speaker 12: and dragging families out in the middle of the night,
Speaker 12: holding babies that were unclothed. Castro added, so they are
Speaker 12: dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night,
Speaker 12: holding naked babies because people haven't had time, Like they're
Speaker 12: not giving people time to like even put clothes on something.
Speaker 12: You see a lot in the accounts of this. I'm
Speaker 12: going to read some more from an account from ABC.
Speaker 12: As I got to my unit to stick my key
Speaker 12: in the door, I was grabbed by an officer and
Speaker 12: I said, what's going on? What's going on? He never
Speaker 12: actually told me. He said I was being detained, said
Speaker 12: Alicia Books. Neighbors like Ebony Watson, say they ducked for covers,
Speaker 12: they heard several flashbangs. They was terrified. The kids was crying.
Speaker 12: People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out
Speaker 12: there when I seen the little girl coming out around
Speaker 12: the corner because they was bringing the kids down too,
Speaker 12: had them zip tied to each other. Watson said, that's all.
Speaker 12: I kept asking, what is the morality? Where is the
Speaker 12: human One of them literally laughed he was standing right there,
Speaker 12: he said, fucking kids. So that is what these raids
Speaker 12: are looking like now. It is again also worth noting
Speaker 12: that like this is this is a very significant escalation
Speaker 12: of force. They are zip tying children to each other
Speaker 12: as they dragged them from their homes at one in
Speaker 12: the morning and saying fucking kids. Yeah, and this also
Speaker 12: marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away
Speaker 12: from the areas they've been targeting before, which had to
Speaker 12: be the suburbs in the outlying areas, and into very
Speaker 12: very majority, the majority black parts of Chicago. And we're
Speaker 12: gonna talk more about this next week with journalists who's
Speaker 12: been on the ground. Yeah. I mean, for example, a
Speaker 12: couple of hours before we recorded this episode. So there
Speaker 12: are sparse details, but there is a video that shows
Speaker 12: the fat just two hands on neck choking a black
Speaker 12: man in East Garfield Park. It's deeply unclear why this
Speaker 12: is happening, but they are just doing this now, and
Speaker 12: what we have so far, we don't know why they
Speaker 12: were doing this. But this is also one thing I
Speaker 12: think is very alarming. This is also reported by Tribe.
Speaker 12: There is a video from the scene where an agent
Speaker 12: is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is
Speaker 12: not an immigration enforcement action. The agent goes on to
Speaker 12: say they were responding to a robbery in progress. All
Speaker 12: we know about is there was a car crash and
Speaker 12: they just started choking this guy. It's unclear exactly what's
Speaker 12: going on with this. There probably will be more details
Speaker 12: by the time this episode is going out, But the
Speaker 12: Feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago,
Speaker 12: I mean, just randomly choking black people on the street.
Speaker 12: And this massive, hideous raid and sashore are pretty significant
Speaker 12: escalations in places that haven't been targeting before or and
Speaker 12: it's and it's hard to see this ending anytime soon
Speaker 12: or there you know, things getting any better from here,
Speaker 12: especially with the sort of you know, as you were
Speaker 12: mentioning earlier, there hasn't been really any sign of like
Speaker 12: an intensification in federal violence in Portland, but in Chicago
Speaker 12: there absolutely has been. And yeah, it's horrible.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess
Speaker 13: according to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS
Speaker 13: is going to use the Cultural, Environmental and Historical Protection
Speaker 13: Waiver that we reported about that came out this spring
Speaker 13: to fall through wall construction in the San Diego sector.
Speaker 13: I am guessing that in part we will see this
Speaker 13: used to wave one of the one of the acts
Speaker 13: that is where it's the Native American Graves Protection and
Speaker 13: Repatriation Act. And I'm guessing in part that this will
Speaker 13: be used to waive that right because Kumei ancestors are
Speaker 13: in these areas and in at the end tail end
Speaker 13: of the previous Trump administration. I reported on this for Sierra,
Speaker 13: which is a magazine of the Sierra Club. Kumii people
Speaker 13: were using ceremony. So they were participating in ceremony every
Speaker 13: day at construction sites in order to slow down the clock,
Speaker 13: and they also filed a lawsuit. Right, But they were
Speaker 13: trying to basically run out the clock on the Trump administration.
Speaker 13: In twenty twenty, they successfully in some areas prevented some construction,
Speaker 13: but with the waiver of nagpray, it's hard to see
Speaker 13: how they will be able to do that. They also
Speaker 13: wave a bunch of other acts that Eagle Protection Act,
Speaker 13: Environmental microturt Bird Treatise, a bunch of other acts.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 13: This comes on the same week as Secretary of War
Speaker 13: headthst restored medals of honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee.
Speaker 13: If people are not familiar, this is the episode where
Speaker 13: I do a history of things sort of happened at
Speaker 13: Wounded Ney Creek. But this was the largest mass shooting
Speaker 13: in US history.
Speaker 12: This was just a slaughter.
Speaker 13: Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lacachas. Civilians were murdered by the
Speaker 13: United States military in the battle.
Speaker 12: This was just a massacre.
Speaker 13: There were significant casualties for the US military, most of
Speaker 13: them were caused by the US military, a friendly fire
Speaker 13: and a completely disorganized slaughter of civilians. There was a
Speaker 13: standoff at Wounded Ney later in the nineteen seventies in
Speaker 13: which two Indigenous people died one went missing. You can
Speaker 13: read Mary brave Bird's book about that if you want
Speaker 13: a first hand of cautfet. It's very good book. But yeah,
Speaker 13: Hegseth is doing this, I think because Lloyd Austin had
Speaker 13: previously ordered a review of those medals because they weren't fighting,
Speaker 13: they were just killing people. Therefore, it makes sense, you know,
Speaker 13: that led to to strip these these medals of honor,
Speaker 13: in that there was very little honor in what they did.
Speaker 13: Hegseth has restored those very amusingly. He said, this is final,
Speaker 13: like another sec def couldn't just order review like in
Speaker 13: four years and change it again. CBP has also issued
Speaker 13: a request for comments here in San Diego about its
Speaker 13: plans to build seven point six miles of wall west
Speaker 13: of Dakat, as well as one point three miles of
Speaker 13: wall east of Dakat, more secondary barrier east of O
Speaker 13: tim Mesa, and install or maintain fifty one miles of
Speaker 13: quote barrier system attributes, which may include fiber uptic cables,
Speaker 13: lighting poles, artificial lights, power cables, surveillance cameras, access and
Speaker 13: patrol roads, and utility shelters. What this would do. I
Speaker 13: think most people who haven't spent time at the border
Speaker 13: in not aware that there are vast gaps in the
Speaker 13: border wall right, and this would close some of those.
Speaker 13: There are still gaps east of this area. When a
Speaker 13: lot of people were entering in twenty twenty three, they
Speaker 13: were coming east of here in a more mountainous area.
Speaker 13: But this will close existing gaps in the wall around Takata,
Speaker 13: around Marin Valley. I imagine that after that they will
Speaker 13: continue to move east the areas where there are gaps.
Speaker 13: Some of the areas where their gaps, for the rest
Speaker 13: aren't that hard to access. Some of them would be
Speaker 13: very hard to access with construction machinery, and therefore they'd
Speaker 13: have to spend a long time building a road before
Speaker 13: they could even begin building the wall. Reuters has conducted
Speaker 13: a review of more than two million court records and
Speaker 13: concluded that federal prosecution of drug cases, especially those of
Speaker 13: high profile traffickers, have dropped to the lowest level in decades.
Speaker 13: Fell forward again a Ward, Yeah, yeah, I mean normally
Speaker 13: you would see things like racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy charges, right,
Speaker 13: but these are down twenty four percent compared to last year.
Speaker 13: Even ongoing investigations have stalled as a federal law enforcement
Speaker 13: apparatus is focusing the vast majority of its people on
Speaker 13: deporting people who have not been accused of any crime.
Speaker 17: Really, and even just like the regular FBI investigative capacity,
Speaker 17: it has been shifted massive large extents towards just immigration enforcement.
Speaker 17: So they're not they're actually just not going after as
Speaker 17: much like actual crime.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I think some agencies, like the Bureau of Alcohol to
Speaker 13: Back of Firearms and Explosive for example, I think have
Speaker 13: the majority of their agents tasked to immigration raids right now.
Speaker 13: The FBI one agent described what he had been tasked
Speaker 13: with as quote photo op bullshit, which was taking photos
Speaker 13: of their teams on and before raids for use by
Speaker 13: the ADF and the White House in social media posts.
Speaker 13: So they do appear to have I've lost the support
Speaker 13: of even some federal law enforcement. Talking of federal law enforcement,
Speaker 13: we have also learned this week about an FBI operation
Speaker 13: during the Biden administration during which Tom Homan allegedly accepted
Speaker 13: fifty thousand dollars in cash. What you didn't hear about
Speaker 13: the Tom Homan back? What a joy to be able
Speaker 13: to share this with You tell me going to get better?
Speaker 13: Just just keep it, keep sim adown a Simma down,
Speaker 13: Sima down, Sima down. So Tom Homan, for those who
Speaker 13: are not familiar, is Trump's borders are and a longtime
Speaker 13: border security official dating back to the biad administration. Let's
Speaker 13: find out about how they got on to Tom Homan.
Speaker 12: Said that there was fifty do dollars in cash, but.
Speaker 13: For what Just wait, wait, wait, wait wait another Obama
Speaker 13: era I stuffer. Julian Calderas, who agents undercover agents had
Speaker 13: contacted as part of a separate investigation, repeatedly suggested to
Speaker 13: the agents that they may wish to bribe Homan in
Speaker 13: order to obtain government contracts. Cayl Deris repeatedly suggested this
Speaker 13: to the undercover agents, so much so that they diverted
Speaker 13: their investigation and set up this investigation. They gave home
Speaker 13: and the money, but waited to see what he would
Speaker 13: do in office in order to see I guess they
Speaker 13: felt would have a stronger case if he came back
Speaker 13: to them and said, you know, I have these five
Speaker 13: federal contracts, which one would you like? The Trump DOJ
Speaker 13: took no further steps to investigate and has closed the investigation.
Speaker 13: According to NBC, the Trump administration is claiming this was
Speaker 13: a set up by the FBI. But of course the
Speaker 13: investigation occurred in September of twenty four, so before the election. Again,
Speaker 13: it was not an investigation that they started on. It
Speaker 13: branched off because Carderus repeatedly suggested that they should continue
Speaker 13: to they should try and bribe home. The agents who
Speaker 13: did this operation were posing as businessman trying to get
Speaker 13: government contracts. Right, This might explain so Homan was a
Speaker 13: big time Trump affiliate, right, big time Trump supporting people
Speaker 13: were suggesting that he might be made Secretary of Homeland Security.
Speaker 13: This might be why we will never know official right,
Speaker 13: This might explain why he's been given a slightly less
Speaker 13: formal role which I don't believe he has to pass
Speaker 13: through Congress, which is quite unquote border CZA.
Speaker 17: This is like the level of normalized corruption which exists
Speaker 17: in every level of this administration is like remember when
Speaker 17: they just could not stop talking about Hunter hide In.
Speaker 17: It's like every all the time. And meanwhile you have like,
Speaker 17: like you know, like all of like Jared Kushner's dealings
Speaker 17: with like Saudi. Is the Tomhoman getting fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 17: in cash, Yeah, like undercover and he's just posing us
Speaker 17: businessman to help obtain like government contracts. It's like an
Speaker 17: absurd comical cartoon world.
Speaker 13: So it's Keystone cop shit. We don't know if he's
Speaker 13: given the cash back.
Speaker 12: Oh that cash is oh god, so much cocaine. Like
Speaker 12: I could either confirm her today it was spent on cocaine. Yeah,
Speaker 12: a wild instance of corruption. Oh God.
Speaker 13: Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela. In Venezuela, it
Speaker 13: seems that Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on
Speaker 13: strikes on a leged drug smugglers. According to a Guardian piece,
Speaker 13: the strikes have been authorized by the Homeland Security count. Sure,
Speaker 13: that's a body that Miller leaves, which has massively grown
Speaker 13: and influence since the Trump administration. It seems like most
Speaker 13: people in the administration were pretty much kept in the
Speaker 13: dark about this until very shortly before the strike took place.
Speaker 13: They were just fined under the Article two Powers, which
Speaker 13: give the president authority to use force in limited self
Speaker 13: defense engagements. But it seems like Miller is pardoned the
Speaker 13: pun driving the ship on this increased violence that we're
Speaker 13: seeing against Venezuela.
Speaker 17: All right, br back for our final story this episode,
Speaker 17: We're going to talk about the National Security Presidential Memorandums
Speaker 17: number seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,
Speaker 17: which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September
Speaker 17: twenty fifth. This relates in many ways to the Antifa
Speaker 17: Domestic Terrorism Executive Order from last week, but this memo
Speaker 17: is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes
Speaker 17: that will affect law enforcement investigations. So let's go over
Speaker 17: the four sections of this very, very long memo. I've
Speaker 17: tried to condense it down as much as possible, but
Speaker 17: there is some good information in here too.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 17: Section one asserts that there's been an increase in political
Speaker 17: violence in recent years, with assassinations and quote unquote riots
Speaker 17: in Los Angeles and Portland, which have resulted into more
Speaker 17: than one thousand percent increase in attacks against ice officers
Speaker 17: since Trump's inauguration two point zero. The memo states that
Speaker 17: riots and violence aren't organic events or isolated incidents, but
Speaker 17: in fact, quote a culmination of a sophisticated organized campaigns
Speaker 17: of targeted intimidation, radical threats and violence design to silence
Speaker 17: of posting speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes,
Speaker 17: and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.
Speaker 12: Quote.
Speaker 13: We've spoken about the statistic about attacks and ice officers
Speaker 13: before and how that's very misleading.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean an ICE officer is attacked when of
Speaker 17: ice officer's fist encounters the face of a child, Right, that's.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Latino grandmother, Yes, uh, Latina grandmother in that case.
Speaker 17: Well, and a lot of this talking about, you know,
Speaker 17: riots is not organized events or us at an incidents.
Speaker 17: What they describe here is this like a culmination of
Speaker 17: the sophisticated campaign. This is just describing like the process
Speaker 17: of like what protesting is, right, trying to direct or
Speaker 17: change policy outcomes, which comes up a lot in these
Speaker 17: like domestic terrorism laws, which when over applied to just
Speaker 17: nonviolent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard
Speaker 17: First Amendment activity.
Speaker 13: It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment.
Speaker 13: Right like the right to assemble the it was several
Speaker 13: of them, actually, the right to assemble, the right to speak,
Speaker 13: the right to petition the government like these are fundamental.
Speaker 17: The right to twitch stream at a riot as a
Speaker 17: free member of the press.
Speaker 13: Yeah, definitely, that's not a right that I choose to exercise,
Speaker 13: but I guess it is one that exists. But you
Speaker 13: and I have you were important and I was in
Speaker 13: Los Angeles. Like the idea that these cities were fundamentally
Speaker 13: like damaged by these protests, it's just not true.
Speaker 17: Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots,
Speaker 17: they're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens.
Speaker 17: This memo describes how these you know, organized campaigns start
Speaker 17: by quote isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder
Speaker 17: or other violent action unquote, claiming that this process happens
Speaker 17: across quote anonymous chat forums, in person meetings, the social media,
Speaker 17: and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized
Speaker 17: docsing with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate,
Speaker 17: or violently assault targets en quote.
Speaker 13: I mean, this is what the Right has done to
Speaker 13: like exp especially migrants and trand people right for for
Speaker 13: a very long time. Anonymous chat forums And do they
Speaker 13: mean a Reddit credits telegram maybe, yeah, I know, I
Speaker 13: know that some subreddits have been closed since the issuing
Speaker 13: of this memorandum, which I'm wondering if it is related.
Speaker 17: Not explicitly, but like I think this memos would be
Speaker 17: in this section like referring to things I can't to
Speaker 17: ice watch, Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of
Speaker 17: sense as well as you know standard like you know,
Speaker 17: anti fasted action against like legitimate neo Nazis, which yeah,
Speaker 17: the Right is not against a doxing as a practice,
Speaker 17: as we have seen a few weeks with the state
Speaker 17: sponsored organized doxing harassment campaigns against people for their comments
Speaker 17: about the death of Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: The memo goes on to list a collection of quote
Speaker 17: common recurrent motivations and indica or indicators that unite this
Speaker 17: pattern of violence and terroristic activities under the umbrella of
Speaker 17: self described anti fascism. These movements portray foundational American principles
Speaker 17: support for law enforcement and border control as fascist to
Speaker 17: justify and encourage acts of a violent revolution common threads
Speaker 17: animating this violent conduct include anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity,
Speaker 17: support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism
Speaker 17: on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who
Speaker 17: hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. So
Speaker 17: in so far as this memo has been reported, it's
Speaker 17: mostly been on this specific section here, listing the indicators
Speaker 17: that could be driving terroristic acts under the umbrella of
Speaker 17: anti fascism, including all of these beliefs that people are
Speaker 17: allowed to hold in the United States due to the
Speaker 17: rights granted to us and the Bill of Rights in
Speaker 17: the Constitution.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean that the hypocrisy is the point, and
Speaker 13: it's sometimes not worth it. It's not a point, but
Speaker 13: it's not particularly you know, it doesn't change anything I'm
Speaker 13: pointing out, But I will just point out that like
Speaker 13: the idea that border control is a foundational American principle
Speaker 13: is not true. That it was not until the Chinese
Speaker 13: Exclusion Act that the United States began to exclude anyone
Speaker 13: from coming here, and that was in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 13: History understanders will have noticed that the United States began
Speaker 13: at some point before the nineteenth century.
Speaker 17: One thing I will say regarding like this section, some
Speaker 17: reporting around this memo is framing things like you know,
Speaker 17: anti capitalism or anti Christianity is now that is going
Speaker 17: to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist.
Speaker 17: That is not the explicit way is written about in
Speaker 17: this memo. These are indicators which if some investigator sees
Speaker 17: on a Twitter account or a blue Sky account, could
Speaker 17: then cause them to investigate further into this person or group.
Speaker 17: But it's not like just expressing these things will itself
Speaker 17: deem you terrorist and be putting you in jail.
Speaker 12: And this does rely on action.
Speaker 17: Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying
Speaker 17: to prevent crime before it happens. I think this would
Speaker 17: be more in the way of how the FBI tries
Speaker 17: to set up like sting operations or catch people who
Speaker 17: are planning a violent act before they actually do it,
Speaker 17: as we've even seen the past few weeks with people
Speaker 17: being arrested for planning retaliation attacks following the death of
Speaker 17: Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 12: This has happened now.
Speaker 17: The memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy
Speaker 17: to quote investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic
Speaker 17: conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence,
Speaker 17: so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before
Speaker 17: they result in violent political acts unquote. So that is
Speaker 17: the pre crime aspect of this order, which they could
Speaker 17: use some of these beliefs like extremism on migration or
Speaker 17: race or gender, or anti americanism as justification to start
Speaker 17: investigating groups, which then arrests could follow prior to imminent
Speaker 17: violent act as deemed by federal law enforcement.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I mean, in theory, the role of the effectially federal
Speaker 13: law enforcement has always been to investigate people who were
Speaker 13: planning violent or terroristic acts. The difference here is that
Speaker 13: this is being specifically framed around a certain group, and
Speaker 13: this probably will lead to more attempts by their more
Speaker 13: surveillance on people within exactly groups.
Speaker 17: Right now, this is very worrying in terms of like surveillance,
Speaker 17: suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent
Speaker 17: or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity first, mental
Speaker 17: protest activity, non government organizations that support progressive causes or values.
Speaker 17: That's the real concern here.
Speaker 13: It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example,
Speaker 13: a number of grandeuries did not return indictment of people
Speaker 13: who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand
Speaker 13: jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them
Speaker 13: for right. This is unusual. Most federal prosecutions do result
Speaker 13: ultimately in a guilty plea right because they bring very
Speaker 13: strong cases when they bring them that It's worth noting
Speaker 13: that the specifically, like the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles,
Speaker 13: has not struck the landing on all of its attempts
Speaker 13: to indict people for things that they did during that
Speaker 13: time of protest in June.
Speaker 17: In terms of like implementation, the memo says, quote, law
Speaker 17: enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities and organizations that
Speaker 17: promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other
Speaker 17: efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society unquote networks,
Speaker 17: entities organizations. These refer to like established organizations like actual
Speaker 17: like formed groups that have political activity.
Speaker 14: Now.
Speaker 17: Section two lines how the National Joint Terrorism Task Force
Speaker 17: will quote unquote coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national
Speaker 17: strategy and orders the local Joint Terrorism Task Force around
Speaker 17: the country to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to
Speaker 17: acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of
Speaker 17: political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation
Speaker 17: of any citizens' rights unquote. The GDTFS Joint Terrorism Task
Speaker 17: Force will also investigate institutional and individual funders, including employees
Speaker 17: of organizations which are quote responsible for sponsor or otherwise
Speaker 17: the AID and EVET the principal actors engaging in the
Speaker 17: criminal conduct as previously described. That's a broadet, right, There's
Speaker 17: a lot of this stuff, Like the Anti for Order
Speaker 17: also alluded to this. Trump's statements made in the Oval
Speaker 17: Office have alluded to this going after funders, foreign funders,
Speaker 17: whether that's the groups like the ACLU or like bail funds.
Speaker 17: They mentioned George sorows very often. Yeah, the Open Society Foundation, right, Yeah.
Speaker 13: I think the right has had a fascination with sorrows
Speaker 13: for a long time. Right, They've been looking for a
Speaker 13: reason to either exclude sorrows from participation in US politics
Speaker 13: and just to be like obviously I think most people
Speaker 13: realize this, but that that fascination is rooted deeply in antisemitism.
Speaker 13: George Soros is a Holocaust survivor, and there has been
Speaker 13: like an attempt to find reasons to exclude sorrows from
Speaker 13: from US political activity for some time. I think it's
Speaker 13: reasonable to see this in that trend.
Speaker 17: This sort of like big organizations foreign organizations is also
Speaker 17: mentioned in this memo and saying the investigation will include
Speaker 17: NGOs and American citizens with foreign ties that could be
Speaker 17: in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act or quote
Speaker 17: money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage
Speaker 17: in activities that support or courage domestic terrorism unquote. The
Speaker 17: memo states that the Attorney General shall issue guidance which
Speaker 17: ensures that domestic terrorism priorities include quote politically motivated terrorist
Speaker 17: acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault,
Speaker 17: damage of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. The
Speaker 17: guides shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns,
Speaker 17: recurrent motivations, or other indica common to organizations and entities
Speaker 17: that coordinate these acts, in order to direct efforts to
Speaker 17: identify and prevent potential violent activity.
Speaker 7: Unquote.
Speaker 17: This is a worrying list of things that are not
Speaker 17: domestic terrorism that they're going to try to claim our
Speaker 17: domestic terrorism trespass. Yeah, like trespassing is now domestic terrorism.
Speaker 17: That's not a great thing for the Attorney General to
Speaker 17: be issuing guidance on. Yeah, civil disorder is a very
Speaker 17: broad and somewhat nebulous term, right, Like, are they gonna
Speaker 17: call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing
Speaker 17: right now domestic terrorism? No, of course not right, These
Speaker 17: things are just taking form for explicit like political prosecution,
Speaker 17: for the political ends of Trump administration.
Speaker 13: I think the goal here, like some of these are
Speaker 13: reason even a statue, right, Like, I'm not aware of
Speaker 13: a broad federal doxing statute aside from certain specific instances
Speaker 13: where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address.
Speaker 17: Violent intimidation of probably like federal law enforcement would be
Speaker 17: one thing that they go after.
Speaker 13: Yeah, federal law enforcement people with protective orders, that kind
Speaker 13: of thing, right, And yeah, there are probably ways of
Speaker 13: doing that, But I think a lot of this is
Speaker 13: intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing.
Speaker 17: Absolutely, the Treasury Secretary will work with ETERN in general
Speaker 17: to quote identify and disrupt financial networks that funded domestic
Speaker 17: terrorism and political activity, and shall deploy investigative tools examine
Speaker 17: financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit
Speaker 17: funding streams unquote. Again very obsessed with this idea that
Speaker 17: there's tons of money that is funding ANTIFA, which if
Speaker 17: you know anyone under the antifam umbrella, you know that
Speaker 17: they are extremely bro Yeah, yeah, this is left wing
Speaker 17: protesters are not the most financially stable budget. Yeah, there's
Speaker 17: there's not this illicit funding streams. This is a huge,
Speaker 17: a huge idea that the right has like latched on.
Speaker 13: Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the
Speaker 13: authoritarian left. Actually, the idea that people can't act independently
Speaker 13: unless there is a large, well funded actor motivating them
Speaker 13: to act is something that because the authoritarian right and
Speaker 13: the authoritarian left agree on some things, and one of
Speaker 13: them is that like people can't take the initiative to
Speaker 13: act right, that there has to be some kind of
Speaker 13: vanguard in the case of the authoritarian left, or nefarious
Speaker 13: funder in the case of the authoritarian right. And so
Speaker 13: this this lines up with the way that they understand
Speaker 13: the world.
Speaker 17: I mean yeah, and I was talking specifically here in
Speaker 17: terms of like regular people on the ground attending protests.
Speaker 17: There's like big, big groups like you know often like
Speaker 17: you know, communist line groups that may be receiving funding
Speaker 17: possibly from foreign sources. Yeah, yeah, yeah for real, But
Speaker 17: I do not believe that is what this order is,
Speaker 17: at least this section is actually wanting to go after.
Speaker 17: That might be what they in the end actually end
Speaker 17: up targeting, end up sweeping up because it's the only
Speaker 17: thing that actually has like you know, foreign funding. But
Speaker 17: like you know, capital a Antifa teenagers with like umbrellas
Speaker 17: showing up in front of an ice building are not
Speaker 17: receiving money from like Iran, China or Russia.
Speaker 13: Like, yeah, as you say, it might be large as
Speaker 13: some policy law center, the ACLU, Open Society Foundation, build.
Speaker 12: Gate Network for Strong Community.
Speaker 13: Yes, like some of these organizations might be what they're
Speaker 13: trying to drag a net over here.
Speaker 12: Or nonprofits.
Speaker 17: The next section instructs the IRS to quote take action
Speaker 17: to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or
Speaker 17: indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and calls
Speaker 17: for the IRS to refer suspect organizations and their employees
Speaker 17: to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.
Speaker 13: It's probably worth the context here that there was this
Speaker 13: is after a twenty ten congressional investigation that found out
Speaker 13: that the IRS had gone after some tea party groups. Right,
Speaker 13: do you remember the Tea Party? Garrison? You or seven
Speaker 13: at that time?
Speaker 12: I remember the Tea Party?
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, So the feeling here Biden, if you remember,
Speaker 13: Garrison also hired a number of new IRS agents. There
Speaker 13: was a conspiracy theory that these were to provide some
Speaker 13: kind of armed, massive, armed element to the IRS that
Speaker 13: was going around in the Biden administration. I'm sure the
Speaker 13: IRS had an armed element, right. There is not a
Speaker 13: federal investigative agency that doesn't, like the Postal Service has
Speaker 13: cops and probably a swat team. But there was a
Speaker 13: feeling on the right that Biden mobilized the IRS against
Speaker 13: right wing individuals, and I could see this being the
Speaker 13: old panting I'm swinging back in the other direction a
Speaker 13: little bit.
Speaker 17: One of the more interesting sections that I've highlighted of
Speaker 17: the memo instructs investigators to quote question individuals engaged in
Speaker 17: political violence or lawlessness regarding the entity or individual organizing
Speaker 17: such actions and any related financial sponsorship prior to perfect
Speaker 17: communication or initiation of a plea agreement unquote. That's directing
Speaker 17: like the interrogations of people arrested at protests, like specifically
Speaker 17: go after who's funding them to be a protest. I'm
Speaker 17: sure some very fruitful information will come out of referring
Speaker 17: back to our discussion of like, you know, the common
Speaker 17: motivators are Indica, including things you know, like anti capitalism,
Speaker 17: anti Americanism, and how those beliefs in and of themselves
Speaker 17: I do not think will be sufficient for declaring someone
Speaker 17: a terrorist and like locking them up. Is because later
Speaker 17: in this memo, the memo directs investigations to quote prioritize
Speaker 17: crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees,
Speaker 17: conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit
Speaker 17: a crime of violent money laundering, funding of terrorist acts
Speaker 17: or otherwise facilitating terrorism, areson violations of the u Rico Act,
Speaker 17: and major fraud.
Speaker 12: Against the United States?
Speaker 17: Quote So could the government use these indicators to then
Speaker 17: find groups to target, to stick some of these crimes
Speaker 17: onto groups or organizations. Absolutely, that's probably what they're gonna do.
Speaker 17: But these these are the things to like be aware of,
Speaker 17: and they're gonna try to, you know, slap these on
Speaker 17: people who are just arrested at protests, people who work
Speaker 17: for NGOs, people who work for legal support networks, maybe
Speaker 17: migrant assistance networks like that's that's gonna be the target
Speaker 17: for a lot of these things. And we've seen some
Speaker 17: of these, like conspiracy charges in San Diego with their
Speaker 17: with their Antifa prosecution case. We've seen similar stuff in
Speaker 17: Atlanta with Stop cop City. Right, there is precedent for this.
Speaker 17: We've seen the state try to and to a degree
Speaker 17: of success and failure, actually push these charges forward.
Speaker 13: Yeah, the panic that those two cases created. I think
Speaker 13: we were still pre trial in the Atlantic case.
Speaker 12: Right, the trials in progress.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, sorry pre uh, I guess the conclusion of
Speaker 13: that trial.
Speaker 17: But the current indication is that most of these record
Speaker 17: chargers are not going to stick.
Speaker 13: Yes, and most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego
Speaker 13: did not, right, and most of those people ended up
Speaker 13: not being convicted of all the things they were accused of.
Speaker 13: I do see the major fraud against the United States,
Speaker 13: and I think that's probably going to use against NGOs.
Speaker 13: I do also wonder they have spoken before about the
Speaker 13: Payroll Protection Plan and looking at PPP fraud.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean financial crimes are always are always really scary, right, like.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, like a lot of nonprofits, you know, like
Speaker 13: people undoubtedly given a scaled of the PPP people abused it.
Speaker 13: I think nonprofits would be a lot more buttoned up
Speaker 13: than almost anyone else in that regard, you know, these
Speaker 13: aspectly these big liberal nonprofits. But that is an area
Speaker 13: which I'm sure that the trumpires will be looking at.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and they might even try to slap these on
Speaker 17: people making jokes or quote unquote threats online right solicitation
Speaker 17: to commit a crime of violence.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, people shouldn't be saying stupid chill on
Speaker 13: social media.
Speaker 17: Right now, which which is absolutely like a chilling speech,
Speaker 17: right that is, that's excting speech.
Speaker 12: That is a bad thing.
Speaker 17: But you don't want to give these people extra ammunition
Speaker 17: to use against yourself right now.
Speaker 13: Fighting words are not always like First Amendment speech right
Speaker 13: now now, Like I'm no expect in where that starts
Speaker 13: and where that ends. But yeah, yeah, like in terms
Speaker 13: of not doing stupid things, like this is not a
Speaker 13: time to do stupid things on your posting websit of choice.
Speaker 17: Section two closes by calling for investigators in federal police
Speaker 17: to quote adopt strategies similar to those used to address
Speaker 17: a violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle
Speaker 17: entire networks of criminal activity unquote. So yeah, especially with
Speaker 17: all this financial stuff, money laundering, rico, conspiracy charges, they're
Speaker 17: basically using or they want to use like tactics to
Speaker 17: take down like organized crime rings. Just targeting their political enemies,
Speaker 17: targeting political organizations and people who attend protests like that
Speaker 17: is that is the real gist of this memo. Section
Speaker 17: three instructs the Eterney General to designate qualifying groups or
Speaker 17: entities under investigation as domestic terrorist organizations per the definition
Speaker 17: of domestic terrorism in eighteen USC two three three one five,
Speaker 17: and to submit a list of such groups to the
Speaker 17: President of the United States. And Section four instructs the
Speaker 17: Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to designate domestic
Speaker 17: terrorism a national priority area and provide extra funding for
Speaker 17: law enforcement to quote, detect, prevent, and protect against threats
Speaker 17: arising from this area. That is the bulk of the
Speaker 17: National Security Potential Memorandum number seven, promising to chill speech
Speaker 17: and go after political opponents and organizations, entities, and individuals
Speaker 17: and employees of organizations. Yeah, very very undemocratic, very very
Speaker 17: on its face authoritarian. Yeah, you don't even need like
Speaker 17: like allegations of political targeting. Like they're writing down how
Speaker 17: they want to do political targeting, they're bragging about it.
Speaker 13: It's really what briefly want to raise the example of
Speaker 13: the flag burning. Right, So Donald Trump signed an executive
Speaker 13: order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier
Speaker 13: this year. I can't quite remember when. Subsequently, someone called
Speaker 13: jan Carey of North Carolina was arrested after they burned
Speaker 13: a flag, an American flag. Just to be clear outside
Speaker 13: the White House, I guess the flag burning executive order
Speaker 13: doesn't apply to like you're you know, like anime flag
Speaker 13: or whatever, specifically about the flag of the United States,
Speaker 13: something which I think Johnson versus Texas is a Supreme
Speaker 13: Court case, right, but there is a considerable amount of
Speaker 13: legal precedent that is First Amendment speech. Kerry was arrested.
Speaker 13: What is being missed in the discussion is that Kerry
Speaker 13: was charged with two misdemeanor crimes. One was for lighting
Speaker 13: a fire not in a designated area and receptacle. The
Speaker 13: other was for lighting a fire in a manner that
Speaker 13: threatened to cause damage to a resulted in the burning
Speaker 13: of property, real property and park resources. These are both
Speaker 13: offensives that you can be incarcerated or fined for. I
Speaker 13: want people to know that, right, Like, he was not
Speaker 13: arrested because of the executive order, although the executive order
Speaker 13: may very much influenced the climate which led to his
Speaker 13: arrest in charge with these other things, but he wasn't
Speaker 13: charged with violating the executive order because that is not
Speaker 13: how it works.
Speaker 17: They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums.
Speaker 17: What they can do is direct how the law will
Speaker 17: be in four or policy guidelines, right, and that's what
Speaker 17: this is affecting right now. All of these branches like
Speaker 17: the DHS, Justice Department, Federal Police are going to be
Speaker 17: following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo
Speaker 17: to then try to enforce the laws that we have
Speaker 17: and some of which they will probably find ways to
Speaker 17: do it and sometimes they won't.
Speaker 13: Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing
Speaker 13: a very large range of things, and someone will find
Speaker 13: some way in there to criminalize someone for something that
Speaker 13: might seem on the face of it to be not nefarious.
Speaker 13: But that doesn't mean that we have executive legiative fusion.
Speaker 13: We don't write yourself too prior to the government, and
Speaker 13: that is important to remember too.
Speaker 17: No, no laws have been changed criminalizing anti americanism, right, Yeah,
Speaker 17: that is that it is an important thing to keep
Speaker 17: in mind. That does not mean that this order is
Speaker 17: not going to chill speech, suppress free speech, or be.
Speaker 12: Used to criminally target people.
Speaker 17: Yeah, criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for
Speaker 17: years and years, regardless of the actual outcome, right, even
Speaker 17: if they get off on the charges. And totally we
Speaker 17: want to be clear that we're not like minimizing the
Speaker 17: effects of this, but we do want to actually break
Speaker 17: down what like the threat model is specifically for like
Speaker 17: NGO's legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, Right,
Speaker 17: these are probably going to be the first targets of
Speaker 17: a lot of like the conspiracy fraud sections of disorder. Besides,
Speaker 17: you know, protesters that get rounded up and get put
Speaker 17: into into this like political war game that they're playing,
Speaker 17: similar to how regular protesters in Atlanta then found themselves
Speaker 17: suddenly admitst like a three year long reco domestic terrorism
Speaker 17: case despite not participating in any kind of large organized
Speaker 17: aspect of stop Coop City. They were just regular attendees.
Speaker 17: So there'll be stuff similar to that that happens throughout
Speaker 17: the next few months to years, and I think that
Speaker 17: is where we should keep our attention focused on mitigating
Speaker 17: the harms of government overreach.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so for the fun raise this week, something slightly different.
Speaker 13: I wanted to read of this go fundme for the
Speaker 13: emergency Circus. They are traveling south of the US border.
Speaker 13: I believe they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to
Speaker 13: hold circus acts circus performances for kids. I have obviously, obviously,
Speaker 13: but I've spent a decent amount of my life in
Speaker 13: refugee camps and migrant shelters and they can be pretty
Speaker 13: hard places for kids, and it's something that I think
Speaker 13: about almost every day. And so people bringing joy to
Speaker 13: their children is something that I think is wonderful and
Speaker 13: very important. People, you know, get the impression that like
Speaker 13: legal funds are important and the kids having a laugh
Speaker 13: is not important, But like children have a right to
Speaker 13: be children, and that's taken away from them by the
Speaker 13: immigration system. And so I would like if you supported this.
Speaker 13: The website is ww dot gofundb dot com slash f
Speaker 13: slash ec hyphen o f f hyphen ic. It will
Speaker 13: also be in a show. If you would like to
Speaker 13: email us, you can do so at our encrypted email address,
Speaker 13: which is cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. Your
Speaker 13: email will only be end to end encrypted if you
Speaker 13: send it from an encrypted email address. Proton mail is
Speaker 13: an example of an encrypted email address.
Speaker 17: Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode
Speaker 17: for next week. There was a shooting at a Mormon
Speaker 17: church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn
Speaker 17: into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity,
Speaker 17: and then once information about the shooter became more clear,
Speaker 17: they quickly dropped the subject. So on Wednesday, I'll be
Speaker 17: doing an episode talking about this shooting and a few others,
Speaker 17: and how various outlets on the right end left are
Speaker 17: only reporting on these big shootings insofar as they can
Speaker 17: turn them into political weapons against the opposition party.
Speaker 12: We reported the news, We reported the news.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Speaker 12: Thanks for listening.