Speaker 1: Calzon Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome, dick it up and hear a podcast about things
Speaker 3: falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 4: I am your host Mia Wong with me is James Stout. Hi?
Speaker 1: Mary, happy to be here again?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we
Speaker 3: are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort
Speaker 3: of neoliberal American state of the last about fifty years,
Speaker 3: created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And
Speaker 3: we'll start with the fun part of this, which is
Speaker 3: that Tesla stock is down twenty five percent in the
Speaker 3: last month. Yay, it's extremely funny. The protests are working.
Speaker 3: People are like lighting them on cars on fire literally
Speaker 3: all over the world, Like there was just a big
Speaker 3: ration in France the day we're recording this. The pressure
Speaker 3: is working, he's having a bad time. Twenty five percent
Speaker 3: is just the start we can get the other seventy
Speaker 3: five percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and like for people who like I guess,
Speaker 1: I don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly
Speaker 1: tied to Elon Musk's net worth. Like, obviously he's diversified,
Speaker 1: he doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks. But
Speaker 1: like when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Speaker 3: Yep, it's great, it's great. We love we love making
Speaker 3: Elon Musk poorer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
Speaker 3: However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show
Speaker 3: about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the
Speaker 3: American state and about all of the people who he
Speaker 3: is harming in the lives. Is showing the people who
Speaker 3: are dead because of his actions, and I think it's
Speaker 3: worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
Speaker 3: it came to be that. You know, at the beginning
Speaker 3: of the Communist Manifesto, Mark famously wrote to the boorscheoise
Speaker 3: Z produced their own grave diggers, and you know, his
Speaker 3: his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus
Speaker 3: far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state,
Speaker 3: seems to have produced their own grave diggers, partially in
Speaker 3: the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Speaker 3: Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story
Speaker 3: of how specifically this happens, and also, I think what
Speaker 3: neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I
Speaker 3: think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines
Speaker 3: of the story of the extent to which you know,
Speaker 3: Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but
Speaker 3: it's worth going into some of the more structural elements
Speaker 3: of how this happened.
Speaker 5: Why.
Speaker 3: So, one of the problems that we have here, and
Speaker 3: I say we have here because this is a problem
Speaker 3: that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does
Speaker 3: not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of things he doesn't understand.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest of
Speaker 3: all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon
Speaker 3: Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to
Speaker 3: be when neoliberalism is what is sort of weird libertarians
Speaker 3: and whatever you call his sort of ideology you know,
Speaker 3: is supposed to be and you know, like he is
Speaker 3: just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand,
Speaker 3: he's a product of this wing of that movement that
Speaker 3: was created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like, ah,
Speaker 3: you must like decrease the size of the state. You gotta,
Speaker 3: you gotta eliminate all regulations you have to you know,
Speaker 3: you keep keep decreasing the size of the state. Keep
Speaker 3: fire like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Yeah, and again this is I think largely
Speaker 3: what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right. They
Speaker 3: think it's like, okay, neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller,
Speaker 3: And this has always been a fucking joke, Like to
Speaker 3: this entire ideoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy
Speaker 3: keeps increasing, and this has always allowed a kind of
Speaker 3: like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to you know, when
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah, the economy, entire
Speaker 3: economy collapses, and then out of the woodwork come all
Speaker 3: of these like Rand Paulls of like quote unquote libertarians
Speaker 3: who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a
Speaker 3: bunch of fascist groups and like all of these sort
Speaker 3: of fascist perilitaries. But you know, they can come out
Speaker 3: of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight collapse happened was because there is
Speaker 3: too much government regulation. And this is like sort of
Speaker 3: what bitcoin is, right, It's like, ah, the evils of
Speaker 3: capitalism are happening because like.
Speaker 1: Not enough capitalism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's because like the but like cecifically, like
Speaker 3: the evil and s trench interests have taken over the
Speaker 3: state and you don't have the power to access to
Speaker 3: things that they do, which is obviously you know, like
Speaker 3: it is obviously true that these people have control of
Speaker 3: the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled
Speaker 3: opposition of if you put us in power, will eliminate
Speaker 3: parts of the state, will get rid of all this
Speaker 3: regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has
Speaker 3: always been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this
Speaker 3: is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or
Speaker 3: like on the most extreme mentioned arco capitalism. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: this is something that the Montpellier society, which is like
Speaker 3: the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like
Speaker 3: their academics come from, they slow of conferences. They've always
Speaker 3: had a problem with this where there's always been a
Speaker 3: branch of an archer capital there who think the only
Speaker 3: thing that the state should do is enforced contracts or
Speaker 3: just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just do Yeah,
Speaker 3: and the neoliberals are like, Okay, that you guys are
Speaker 3: fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that
Speaker 3: the actual thing that these people believe and this is
Speaker 3: this is something that if you read more highek than
Speaker 3: just like the Road to served him right, that's like
Speaker 3: the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff
Speaker 3: that you ask for public consumption, if you read sort
Speaker 3: of like rope Key, and you read all of the
Speaker 3: sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF, and
Speaker 3: you know, you go through all the different schools. What
Speaker 3: they actually believe. Contrary the things that they say were like, oh,
Speaker 3: markets naturally emerge and the state just like exist to
Speaker 3: control them. What they believe is that you have to
Speaker 3: use the states specifically to create markets, and you have
Speaker 3: to use the state to discipline workers through just pure
Speaker 3: violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market
Speaker 3: subjects you go to work, go home, buy things, and
Speaker 3: do nothing else. And the product of this is the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, right, is the replacement of the welfare state,
Speaker 3: which is the sort of carrets of this system with
Speaker 3: just the pure stick of the police baton and the
Speaker 3: prison system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World
Speaker 1: War welfare state order, right that we saw certainly in
Speaker 1: the US but mostly in the Europe.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But and this is very important, this never actually
Speaker 3: decreased the size of the state because what the state,
Speaker 3: you know, what it was was it was a shifting
Speaker 3: of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the
Speaker 3: state giving you things towards the states, you know, like
Speaker 3: beating you over the head with a hammer, and also
Speaker 3: insofar as it gives you things, making you go through
Speaker 3: all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort
Speaker 3: of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and
Speaker 1: for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And this and this is always something that all
Speaker 3: of these people have supported. Right now, The other important
Speaker 3: part for our purposes is is the thing I said
Speaker 3: earlier about the state creating markets, and that's that's kind
Speaker 3: of like an abstract thing, right, there are sort of
Speaker 3: historical examples you can go through to look at what
Speaker 3: this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
Speaker 3: But this is something that's very important because a huge
Speaker 3: amount of what Tesla is is a direct result of
Speaker 3: you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state
Speaker 3: stepping in to create a market as its way of
Speaker 3: doing regulation and with the way to interact with the world.
Speaker 3: And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now,
Speaker 3: selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty
Speaker 3: three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is
Speaker 1: if people I'm.
Speaker 3: Familiar, Yeah, actually has numbers on this. Their numbers are
Speaker 3: that since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total
Speaker 3: profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So
Speaker 3: the way the system works is that the EPA sets
Speaker 3: standards for how much this is. Like you know, I
Speaker 3: read the ACXIO this thing too, but like the EPA
Speaker 3: set standards for how much like CO two per mile,
Speaker 3: all of the cars and trucks combined that a car
Speaker 3: company makes can can admit and you know, instead of
Speaker 3: doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just
Speaker 3: going to be like a firm cap on these emissions,
Speaker 3: they're like no, no, no, you know this this is what
Speaker 3: I say when I say they create a market. So
Speaker 3: if what happens if you go over the cap, isn't
Speaker 3: that like you know, like people get hauled off the
Speaker 3: jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to
Speaker 3: buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap,
Speaker 3: it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
Speaker 3: So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right,
Speaker 3: their cars produced like zero basically like.
Speaker 1: They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within
Speaker 1: their line.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can
Speaker 3: ask a question where is that electricity coming from? But
Speaker 3: you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored
Speaker 3: into it, which is part of the sort of problem
Speaker 3: with trying to use the state like this to solve right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it just
Speaker 1: looks at driving the car missions.
Speaker 3: You know, this is this is the problem with trying
Speaker 3: to use a regulatory state like this to solve the
Speaker 3: problem with climate change by creating a market. And so
Speaker 3: Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this
Speaker 3: was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not
Speaker 3: from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So
Speaker 3: what they're doing is making it so that other companies
Speaker 3: can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients, can
Speaker 3: produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
Speaker 1: It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV
Speaker 1: pickup truck, Like I think they may be plug in
Speaker 1: hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US
Speaker 1: manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the
Speaker 1: that form fifty lightning that they have now is because
Speaker 1: they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy
Speaker 3: because instead of having all of the car companies just
Speaker 3: like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one
Speaker 3: car company that makes electric cars, and then all the
Speaker 3: rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
Speaker 3: sto Tuper like Biles et cetera et cetera. And the
Speaker 3: secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now,
Speaker 3: is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort
Speaker 3: of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of
Speaker 3: what a market is, right with the explain it. So
Speaker 3: it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all
Speaker 3: this like competition in the market. The competition is going
Speaker 3: to create the best product. And what actually happens, and
Speaker 3: the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that
Speaker 3: when the state creates a market like this, what is
Speaker 3: doing is handing like a person, like a single individual,
Speaker 3: a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly
Speaker 3: is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed
Speaker 3: the title of the richest man in human history by
Speaker 3: the state's regulatory apparatus.
Speaker 1: Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean,
Speaker 1: there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right,
Speaker 1: Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce
Speaker 1: resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And again this is you know, going back to
Speaker 3: the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed, right,
Speaker 3: Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever
Speaker 3: produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct
Speaker 3: neilerbal intervention into the market, which is what neolibililism is, right,
Speaker 3: It's it's the nailerble state coming into great markets and
Speaker 3: the product of it is Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And when we come back from ADS, well, we'll go
Speaker 3: into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon
Speaker 3: Musk and not all of these other companies that became
Speaker 3: the sort of single guy and how and how else
Speaker 3: he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the
Speaker 3: other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how
Speaker 3: how how Tesla is built on on these on this
Speaker 3: carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that
Speaker 3: Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts.
Speaker 3: The Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're
Speaker 3: ever going to do like this now that Bezos has
Speaker 3: been like weird free market capitalists like tried to go
Speaker 3: through and find all of the money in government contracts
Speaker 3: that they've gotten.
Speaker 4: They totaled it.
Speaker 3: Well, I think I think they're also including like tax
Speaker 3: credits and stuff like that, but they totaled it at
Speaker 3: thirty eight billion dollars, and that's just the ones that
Speaker 3: are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of
Speaker 3: what SpaceX does SpaceX is, you know, most other company
Speaker 3: is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified
Speaker 3: like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
Speaker 3: more than that, right, Yeah. But this comes to the
Speaker 3: other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how
Speaker 3: tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies,
Speaker 3: like in general, do not make money, right They hemorrhage
Speaker 3: money for basically their entire existence until they can find
Speaker 3: a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.
Speaker 3: And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating
Speaker 3: shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA
Speaker 3: talks about this.
Speaker 4: They got a.
Speaker 3: Four hundred and sixty five million dollars low interest loan
Speaker 3: for the Department of Energy in twenty ten that basically
Speaker 3: saved the company from the brink of collapse.
Speaker 1: Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on
Speaker 1: in twenty ten. No one else needed low interest low
Speaker 1: into a I think it was fine.
Speaker 3: No, No, there was no attempt to build like a
Speaker 3: giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed.
Speaker 1: Yep, you know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living
Speaker 1: in my car at that time. It was fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you Obama.
Speaker 7: And so and so.
Speaker 3: As this goes on, right, the goal of you as
Speaker 3: a tech company, there's two things you want to do.
Speaker 3: If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get
Speaker 3: bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire
Speaker 3: on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger
Speaker 3: tech company, you were trying to amass enough US contracts,
Speaker 3: like US government contracts, to like get you to sort
Speaker 3: of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX
Speaker 3: now has gotten eighteen billion dollars of contracts with NASA,
Speaker 3: And this is sort of a part of like, I mean,
Speaker 3: NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different,
Speaker 3: Like this is just straight up there using Tesla's rockets
Speaker 3: to do things. And this is also part of why
Speaker 3: like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up, as part of
Speaker 3: why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the
Speaker 3: space station right now, because these things do not work.
Speaker 3: But there's there's been an enormous amount of money here.
Speaker 3: And the other thing, you know, this is one of
Speaker 3: the other sort of like great neo liberal things, is
Speaker 3: that a lot of the a lot of the factories
Speaker 3: that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones
Speaker 3: that are in the US, are there because they get
Speaker 3: unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and taxi centers from from
Speaker 3: from local states themselves. All of this brings us to,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the other really core aspects of
Speaker 3: sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling
Speaker 3: in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should
Speaker 3: also mention this is some thing Axios talks about that
Speaker 3: like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this
Speaker 3: company would literally never make money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write
Speaker 1: about this like I think two years ago. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember writing about this before. Eat the Musk have gone
Speaker 1: full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are.
Speaker 1: They're a cobbon credit company that makes cars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by
Speaker 3: a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
Speaker 1: It's now the time. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Can you want to talk about the other one that's
Speaker 3: driving these unhinged.
Speaker 1: Sales, Yes, I do, because I have been driving around
Speaker 1: San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of
Speaker 1: cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs
Speaker 1: to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck,
Speaker 1: nor the people who need a pickup truck for work
Speaker 1: by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks. And
Speaker 1: so I did some digging and I discovered that the
Speaker 1: IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are
Speaker 1: rated over six pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle
Speaker 1: weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the
Speaker 1: mass of the vehicle if you drove it like off
Speaker 1: the dealer lot onto a scale, that's the maximum operating
Speaker 1: weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So
Speaker 1: it's your tesla with I mean, they are very funny
Speaker 1: videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts into the
Speaker 1: back of the Tesla and being it's a great truck
Speaker 1: for truck stuff.
Speaker 3: The other really funny one is when when they try
Speaker 3: to attach like a winch to it and try to
Speaker 3: use it to pull the pull heavy things in the
Speaker 3: back of the truck comes off because it's just like
Speaker 3: made of like.
Speaker 1: It's like like glue, like a unibody. Yeah, it might
Speaker 1: not be a body on frame, like, it might not
Speaker 1: be a proper truck. I actually don't know now how
Speaker 1: stually I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's
Speaker 1: I bet most of the electric or like high minage
Speaker 1: pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually,
Speaker 1: under it's called Section one seventy nine. Under Section one
Speaker 1: seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating
Speaker 1: over six thousand pounds, you can deduct up to thirty
Speaker 1: one thousand in the first year rather than deducting the
Speaker 1: depreciation of the capital good over time. Right, So instead
Speaker 1: of instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that
Speaker 1: you purchase your business over time and not paying tax
Speaker 1: on that amount, you can not pay tax on thirty
Speaker 1: one thousand in the first year of your vehicle if
Speaker 1: it's over six thousand pounds.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've
Speaker 1: got a may bark or something really fucking heavy, so
Speaker 1: that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla
Speaker 1: Model X have the GBWR above that. With a truck,
Speaker 1: there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to
Speaker 1: have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment,
Speaker 1: that is six feet or more in length. So the
Speaker 1: cyber truck just happened to have a six foot bed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can deduct one hundred percent of value in
Speaker 1: the first year from what I understand for these vehicles
Speaker 1: which have a six foot bed. At least this was
Speaker 1: the case when I was looking. I became aware of
Speaker 1: the exact nature of this when I went on the
Speaker 1: Cyber Truck Owners Club forum and looked what tax deduct
Speaker 1: peoples were doing, right, and then I worked back from there,
Speaker 1: and it does seem that people are doing this. I
Speaker 1: think it might be changing. So you can only deduct
Speaker 1: a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear
Speaker 1: that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I
Speaker 1: qualified to do so. Accountant, This is not this is
Speaker 1: not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the
Speaker 1: IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit. Right, that's a credit, not
Speaker 1: a deduction, So the deduction would discount the amount of
Speaker 1: your income that you pay tax on versus the credit,
Speaker 1: which is just great credit. So potentially the person could
Speaker 1: deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost
Speaker 1: of wrapping the fucking cyber truck ruck to prove it's
Speaker 1: a business vehicle, and then if you're wrapping it. From
Speaker 1: what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the
Speaker 1: percentage of the vehicle's use that is business. I guess
Speaker 1: this could be like the equivalent of fringes on the
Speaker 1: flag tax theory, people claiming that when they're driving their
Speaker 1: their cyber truck to go to Whole Foods but it's wrapped,
Speaker 1: they're advertising a business, so it's a business use. I
Speaker 1: don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but well,
Speaker 1: you know, but.
Speaker 3: Part of this is, like it's very easy, like especially
Speaker 3: right now when the irs is being gutted, Like it's
Speaker 3: very easy to do this kind of bullshit.
Speaker 1: And people are not getting all it did.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they can take a seven thy five hundred
Speaker 1: commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much,
Speaker 1: and like you would struggle to persuade me that that
Speaker 1: is not why a lot of people are buying cyber
Speaker 1: trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got
Speaker 1: the bed size. Like it's a lot of people who
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds. Now,
Speaker 1: I will never buy a new drug because I can't
Speaker 1: find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement
Speaker 1: and larger than six foot bed and four by four
Speaker 1: and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year.
Speaker 1: But like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks
Speaker 1: that apply. And like for a truck with a six
Speaker 1: foot bed and a six thousand pound gross vehicle weight rating,
Speaker 1: the cyber truck's pretty small and it fits kind of
Speaker 1: with people who don't actually need a work truck that
Speaker 1: can none the less take advantage of the work truck
Speaker 1: tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing
Speaker 1: the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, well,
Speaker 3: you know, you'll see a bunch of things about how
Speaker 3: Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right,
Speaker 3: and part of it is from this but also you know,
Speaker 3: and this is this is the other aspect of this.
Speaker 3: It's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out
Speaker 3: today by Amanda Mold that talks about how fifty percent
Speaker 3: of all American consumer spending is now by people who
Speaker 3: in the top ten percent of the income bracket, so
Speaker 3: people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year
Speaker 3: or more, and that means increasingly that everything in the
Speaker 3: United States reflects the you know, the sort of like
Speaker 3: cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who
Speaker 3: all also want to buy this for their sort of
Speaker 3: like like cultural grudges and you know, to like to
Speaker 3: own the libs and like show how like much of
Speaker 3: a fucking man they are. Yeah, and you know, and
Speaker 3: and and so you already you have that initial incentive,
Speaker 3: and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax
Speaker 3: incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like,
Speaker 3: definitely this is like designed with a shit in mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say,
Speaker 1: it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like
Speaker 1: a culture war signifier.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In addition to all those things, I guess people also
Speaker 1: like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash
Speaker 1: against people who own tesla's. If you go on the
Speaker 1: day we're recording, the top article on the front page
Speaker 1: of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post
Speaker 1: is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car,
Speaker 1: and it's got a picture of Musk Zeke hyling on
Speaker 1: people's teslas in Boston. Ye shout out to that person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, So we're going to take a break and
Speaker 3: when we come back, we're going to sort of finish
Speaker 3: this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of
Speaker 3: how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.
Speaker 3: We are back now, I think this all. I think
Speaker 3: if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard
Speaker 3: of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of
Speaker 3: most of what I've said to some extent. I don't
Speaker 3: think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
Speaker 3: seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something
Speaker 3: deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here
Speaker 3: is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also
Speaker 3: a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all
Speaker 3: been living in for decades now. It's a product of
Speaker 3: an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Knesianism.
Speaker 3: So regular knesianism, right, is about you know, having the
Speaker 3: government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Speaker 3: Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like,
Speaker 3: let's not sort of like chigarcoat it, but it's about
Speaker 3: using a bunch of state money to like make there
Speaker 3: be jobs and using this to sort of I don't
Speaker 3: know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending,
Speaker 3: but it's like they want to use the state to
Speaker 3: spend money to make there be jobs and to put
Speaker 3: money into the economy and to put goods into the
Speaker 3: economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Knesianism is still the
Speaker 3: state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's the
Speaker 3: state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of
Speaker 3: incentives entries of sort of tax structures, and specifically also
Speaker 3: very much in terms of the federal reserves interest rates,
Speaker 3: specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also you know,
Speaker 3: and you know the reason he calls it assets, right,
Speaker 3: because it's not just stocks, right, it's also things like
Speaker 3: real estates. It's to increase the value of speculative assets,
Speaker 3: things that you buy because you think it's going to
Speaker 3: be worth more later. I have talked about this a
Speaker 3: lot on this show. This has been the fundamental the
Speaker 3: global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever
Speaker 3: since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the eighties.
Speaker 3: As after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire
Speaker 3: domestic sort of export manufacturing economy through the Plaza Accords.
Speaker 3: And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who
Speaker 3: listened to the show will be able to explain what
Speaker 3: the Plazative Cords and the River's Plasai Accords are from.
Speaker 1: We stop it won't happen here after that because you'll
Speaker 1: understand and you'll stop it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of
Speaker 8: the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the
Speaker 8: US forces all of these countries to increase to value
Speaker 8: if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes
Speaker 8: American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing.
Speaker 8: These countries need to find another place to you know,
Speaker 8: develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution
Speaker 8: Japan comes to is real estate speculation, this blows up,
Speaker 8: This blows up. In the nineties, this is this is
Speaker 8: a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse
Speaker 8: stuff is from this, and then the US is forced
Speaker 8: to do the reverse Plasea Cords in the nineties is
Speaker 8: Bill Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American and
Speaker 8: manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest,
Speaker 8: like proper Japanese manufactory to keep their economy from completely employing.
Speaker 8: Japan's a number two economy in the world at that point.
Speaker 8: But again this means that the US has now been
Speaker 8: doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts,
Speaker 8: where like to try to stop a market collapse that
Speaker 8: was obviously coming with a tech bubble bleuw up. Green
Speaker 8: Span kept cutting the interest rates over and over again,
Speaker 8: trying to keep the bubble from collapsing. It just making
Speaker 8: it bigger, and then eventually it blew up. This is
Speaker 8: what two thousand and eight is was, you know, we
Speaker 8: did a whole bubble. I mean there's another bubble and
Speaker 8: collapse between there. But like you know, and this is
Speaker 8: what we've been doing for the last two decades, Like
Speaker 8: since two and eight, we've been creating this giant tech bubble,
Speaker 8: and this tech bubble shit, and this sort of asset
Speaker 8: speculation is also a huge part of the value of
Speaker 8: Tesla stock is just you know, people who've been given
Speaker 8: a whole a whole bunch of access to cheap credit
Speaker 8: and by and by people, I mean like not really
Speaker 8: you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people
Speaker 8: have access to like incredibly cheap loans, and they use
Speaker 8: that money to buy Tesla stock. This is the sort
Speaker 8: of cyclical thing that just continues to increases the value
Speaker 8: of the company. And it's not just sort of like
Speaker 8: banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into
Speaker 8: Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yeah, from
Speaker 8: a bunch of bunch of of a whole bunch of
Speaker 8: different countries, and also like a huge number of American states,
Speaker 8: Like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
Speaker 8: because pension reform. But the way that we sort of
Speaker 8: like lost the pension as a normal thing was that
Speaker 8: it was you know, it was converted to four one case,
Speaker 8: and the people who still have like regular state pensions,
Speaker 8: all of that money is now sort of invested in
Speaker 8: the stock market and it puts billions of dollars into
Speaker 8: Tesla every year. And so this is also another aspect.
Speaker 8: This is this is the brought structural level on which
Speaker 8: on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to create a
Speaker 8: bunch of companies like Tesla and then US sort of
Speaker 8: like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to tax credits
Speaker 8: and you know all of these government contracts that they've
Speaker 8: been given to do like everything from like fucking build
Speaker 8: these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right,
Speaker 8: and like the US is like contract he got started.
Speaker 8: Like now, I mean like all of this stuff, right,
Speaker 8: is is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but
Speaker 8: there is a third.
Speaker 3: Even deeper level in which you know, we can look
Speaker 3: at at how how these cars are actually produced and
Speaker 3: how these rockets are actually produced, and they're produced by
Speaker 3: just incredible the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers.
Speaker 3: And I think people tend to think about, you know,
Speaker 3: Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all
Speaker 3: over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in shing John,
Speaker 3: you know, there's factories all over China, and you know,
Speaker 3: these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit they work
Speaker 3: in unbelievably dangerous conditions, and at the end of the
Speaker 3: day they get a very small amount of money so
Speaker 3: that the richest man in the world can get fucking
Speaker 3: richer every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient parts to
Speaker 1: Tesla's right, you know that we we just addressed, for instance,
Speaker 1: in our episode on Congo. Yeah, there are parts of
Speaker 1: your test Geotesla that come out of this country where
Speaker 1: there has been a war for as long as most
Speaker 1: of us has been alive. Really very little effort has
Speaker 1: gone into improving conditions for people there. Certainly for workers.
Speaker 1: They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy
Speaker 1: and to like Mia and my four for a one
Speaker 1: k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo
Speaker 1: to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know this is something there's something our
Speaker 3: standard of living is based off of. But at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, right Eon Musks, all of Elon
Speaker 3: Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States monopoly
Speaker 3: on violent is used to stop all of these people
Speaker 3: from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order
Speaker 3: to stop these people from taking back the fucking value
Speaker 3: that they create. Now, Unfortunately, all of this sort of
Speaker 3: neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right,
Speaker 3: this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have
Speaker 3: everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this
Speaker 3: sort of like non politics where you're voting for two
Speaker 3: parties that are like literally even more the same than
Speaker 3: they are.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: This attempt to do things like solve climate change to
Speaker 3: these to these promotion of carbon markets and create the
Speaker 3: sort of like stable like capitalist sogeniminy forever has ultimately
Speaker 3: been self defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital
Speaker 3: inevitably fail, because the functioning of the capitalist system, and
Speaker 3: particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism
Speaker 3: has worked, has concentrated like the most wealth ever held
Speaker 3: by a single human being into the hands of one
Speaker 3: guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use
Speaker 3: their wealth to cubate political power and seize control of
Speaker 3: the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them.
Speaker 3: And you can't solve this problem with regulation because again,
Speaker 3: eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and
Speaker 3: eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve this problem just
Speaker 3: by killing them. I see people talk about like the
Speaker 3: killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this,
Speaker 3: and like a that's all political faction, lane fighting stuff,
Speaker 3: and they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like
Speaker 3: the Chinese workers, so that they never have to fucking
Speaker 3: watch the pla get right out of Shanghai again. But
Speaker 3: the thing is, even if somehow you use the state
Speaker 3: to just kill them, right, it doesn't work, because capitalism
Speaker 3: will just produce more of these people. If you actually
Speaker 3: want to stop this, if you want to stop this
Speaker 3: elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly
Speaker 3: ending all life on earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons,
Speaker 3: and so they're simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop
Speaker 3: someone from accidentally setting one off. You were going to
Speaker 3: have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power,
Speaker 3: the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire,
Speaker 3: the power of the dictator, must be broken. This tiny
Speaker 3: group of men cannot as a class, be allowed to
Speaker 3: own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply
Speaker 3: chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must
Speaker 3: belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way
Speaker 3: to save this world is to take it back. If
Speaker 3: we want to save democracy, the only way to do
Speaker 3: it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon
Speaker 3: Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the
Speaker 3: workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the
Speaker 3: despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves
Speaker 3: us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule,
Speaker 3: They must cease to exist not as individuals but as
Speaker 3: a class. And the only way to do that is
Speaker 3: by giving control of their power, and their property and
Speaker 3: their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of
Speaker 3: it in the first place. That is the tax that
Speaker 3: we have in front of us. The challenge that we
Speaker 3: face is that we face effectively the entire might of
Speaker 3: the American state, which is the one of the most
Speaker 3: powerful apparatus of repression that has ever been built. Our
Speaker 3: advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being
Speaker 3: run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are and
Speaker 3: I cannot emphasize this enough. Maybe the two figures most
Speaker 3: emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's after his extensive
Speaker 3: study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions Podcast,
Speaker 3: concluded to be the great idiots of history who either
Speaker 3: their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision
Speaker 3: at every single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And
Speaker 3: if these people are not the great idiots of history
Speaker 3: that allow us to bring them down and stop them
Speaker 3: from destroying everything that has ever been in this world
Speaker 3: that is good, then nothing else is.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We have the one great stroke of a good foiltime
Speaker 1: we have, right, is that that the old Paris been
Speaker 1: concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted
Speaker 1: to diet coke and being mad at that.
Speaker 3: You'll yep, And they you know, we have already seen.
Speaker 3: They don't understand how this apparatus works.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: They fired the nuke police by accident.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of
Speaker 1: the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to
Speaker 1: make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea
Speaker 1: that like the great debate of our time is how
Speaker 1: much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered
Speaker 1: anarcha capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool
Speaker 1: aid that got them in power. That is the one
Speaker 1: thing going in our favor right now, that they are
Speaker 1: dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe
Speaker 1: the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could
Speaker 1: be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have
Speaker 3: is that they have been they have said about systematically
Speaker 3: alienating every single group of people who they would need
Speaker 3: as their political base. They are pissing off the military,
Speaker 3: they are pissing off the intelligence services. They are going through,
Speaker 3: and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states.
Speaker 3: You know, like the farmers obviously do not have that
Speaker 3: like don't fucking matter, but they're picking They're pissing off
Speaker 3: the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing
Speaker 3: off a whole bunch of the of the of the country.
Speaker 3: Scientific resources. They're going through, They're like fucking with the
Speaker 3: Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off
Speaker 3: every single group of people on earth who matter, and
Speaker 3: people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
Speaker 3: matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know,
Speaker 3: the other big thing that we have right now is
Speaker 3: that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by
Speaker 3: by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he
Speaker 3: would do, and by pulling apart his base of support,
Speaker 3: and by putting together coalitions of some of these people
Speaker 3: and not all of them, some of them. Some of
Speaker 3: them you just need to divide and conquer by getting
Speaker 3: them out from backing him, right, Like the whole thing
Speaker 3: with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was
Speaker 3: that but people just mostly stayed home and that was
Speaker 3: how they won. Like that's that is largely what we need.
Speaker 3: We need these people to stay home. But these people
Speaker 3: can and will if we have anything to say about it,
Speaker 3: be fucking we'sriven home and hopefully we can bury both
Speaker 3: the grave diggers and the people whose graves they were
Speaker 3: digging in the same spot in the dust bit of
Speaker 3: history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.
Speaker 4: Welcome to it could happen here to show that things
Speaker 4: falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined today by
Speaker 4: a special guest host, Richard's Todd. Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 9: Ah, thank you, so much for having me. I am
Speaker 9: completely excited to be here. I am a listener of
Speaker 9: the show, so it feels like getting to be on
Speaker 9: a show that I actually freak out too often.
Speaker 4: And I'm very excited for you to be here because
Speaker 4: you have a special report on one of the people
Speaker 4: who I've been cyberstalking for you, and I'm very excited
Speaker 4: to hear the details of what she's been up to
Speaker 4: these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough
Speaker 4: overview because again because of my cybers talking, but I've
Speaker 4: not done a deep dive the way you have, So
Speaker 4: I'm very excited to hear an update on this on
Speaker 4: this character.
Speaker 9: So it sounds like we are in a similar place
Speaker 9: when it comes to this person, and this person is
Speaker 9: none other than Candice Owens. First of all, what are
Speaker 9: your thoughts on her? Because I am low key fascinated
Speaker 9: with her. I follow her on social media, I watch
Speaker 9: her videos like I am.
Speaker 7: Like weirdly captivated by her.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've I've covered her mostly through her involvement
Speaker 4: with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind
Speaker 4: of how that'll fell apart, you know, like a year
Speaker 4: and a half ago or so, I've talked a little
Speaker 4: bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 4: and she's just kind of been one of like these
Speaker 4: like randomly, you know, like like orbiters, like the online
Speaker 4: like right wing content sphere for like I don't know,
Speaker 4: the past six years at least, and I typically focused
Speaker 4: more on like you know, like the Ben Shapiro's, the
Speaker 4: Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Stephen
Speaker 4: Crowders and stuff. But Candas was always just like around
Speaker 4: and like she definitely like went after a different demographic
Speaker 4: than what like my usual focuses, right Like I'm focused
Speaker 4: on like what's going on with straight white men, like
Speaker 4: why why are they like this? And who who is
Speaker 4: targeting them? And you know, and that's you know, that's
Speaker 4: like the Matt Walsh, like Stephen Crowder kind of angle.
Speaker 4: Like Candas Owens has like a kind of a broader
Speaker 4: net that she targets with her content. So like she's
Speaker 4: always kind of come up as like a side character.
Speaker 4: I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus
Speaker 4: on her before besides just you know whatever kind of
Speaker 4: crazy post or like you know, anti trans or like
Speaker 4: very like weird like racist rank that she goes on
Speaker 4: like every once in a while.
Speaker 9: Yes, so there is so much to talk about when
Speaker 9: it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you,
Speaker 9: like I sort of saw her as a side character,
Speaker 9: but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in
Speaker 9: my life life are listening to Candace Owens and citing
Speaker 9: Candace Owens and they have no idea any about her,
Speaker 9: anything about her backstory.
Speaker 7: Yeah, all the stuff that you that you were just
Speaker 7: talking about.
Speaker 4: She's like reinvented herself like multiple times. And you know,
Speaker 4: some people who mainly come at this from like the
Speaker 4: anti fascist research perspective might not be aware of her
Speaker 4: like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear
Speaker 4: about today. Yes, I just remembered how she had that
Speaker 4: whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM
Speaker 4: documentary that was a whole other Candace era. Yeah, so much,
Speaker 4: My god.
Speaker 9: I have to say I was like low key embarrassed
Speaker 9: for her because like during her Kanye West era, she
Speaker 9: was like, Kanye West designed the katore outfits for my
Speaker 9: Blexit movement, and Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't,
Speaker 9: And like I was like, Oh, they're so embarrassing that
Speaker 9: you like that, you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West,
Speaker 9: only for him to basically like diss you publicly right
Speaker 9: after Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then come out as like an explicit neo Nazi
Speaker 4: like two weeks later.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, uh, Candace girl.
Speaker 9: So I want to talk about her, like, I don't
Speaker 9: want to spend too much time on her background, but
Speaker 9: there are some pieces that I think like are good
Speaker 9: for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure
Speaker 9: that she's been totally if there is not like a
Speaker 9: behind the bastard's on her, do you know, if there is,
Speaker 9: there should be If there's not.
Speaker 4: Not yet, Like similarly on bastards, she's been one of
Speaker 4: these like recurring characters, Oh my god, but she has
Speaker 4: not had a distinct focus.
Speaker 9: Robert Evans, get on it, because we need the Candace
Speaker 9: Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut.
Speaker 9: While she was a student there, she went through this
Speaker 9: horrible sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her like this
Speaker 9: racist death threat on her voicemail. That turned into like
Speaker 9: a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the
Speaker 9: student who made that threat via voicemail, did so in
Speaker 9: a car with a group of students that included the
Speaker 9: sun of the then mayor and then future Democratic Governor
Speaker 9: of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy. So she got tons of support
Speaker 9: from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family
Speaker 9: ended up suing the Stamford Board of Education in federal
Speaker 9: court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a
Speaker 9: thirty seven thousand, five hundred dollars settlement. She went on
Speaker 9: to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.
Speaker 4: This is like the early two thousands.
Speaker 9: Yes, this was like young, like baby Candace, high school
Speaker 9: Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today. Yeah,
Speaker 9: so I sort of like almost see a little bit
Speaker 9: of myself and where she got her start. Like me,
Speaker 9: She was an early adopter of using the Internet to
Speaker 9: talk about things like race and politics.
Speaker 7: Like me.
Speaker 9: That also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot
Speaker 9: of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early
Speaker 9: days of blogging. Like in twenty fifteen, she was writing
Speaker 9: blogs making fun of Trump's penis size.
Speaker 4: Sure, many such cases.
Speaker 7: Yes, many such cases.
Speaker 9: So in twenty fifteen, Owens is running a blog called
Speaker 9: Degree one eighty, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans,
Speaker 9: writing about the quote that shit crazy antics of the
Speaker 9: Republican tea Party. The good news is they will eventually
Speaker 9: die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope, and
Speaker 9: then we can get right on with the obvious social
Speaker 9: change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog.
Speaker 9: So back then she was really someone who had like
Speaker 9: a progressive point of view and was doing a lot
Speaker 9: of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing
Speaker 9: in politics at the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people
Speaker 4: might not know if they've only like become aware of
Speaker 4: her through daily wires. Yeah, like in the pre twenty
Speaker 4: sixteen like BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere. She was just
Speaker 4: like one of like these people who would yeah, have
Speaker 4: like like you know, progressive like ish takes, criticize embarrassing
Speaker 4: like politicians, and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then
Speaker 4: the degree to which this this like heel turn happens
Speaker 4: is like one of the most stark examples I've seen
Speaker 4: in like a cop I don't know, I'm trying to
Speaker 4: think of it. If there's like any like exact parallel.
Speaker 4: I don't know, like there's like certainly some like detransition
Speaker 4: like a grifters. There used to be like ex gay
Speaker 4: influencers or you know this like like proto influencers kind
Speaker 4: of before influencers were a thing like x gay speakers.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the switch around on Candace from these blog
Speaker 4: posts is so concentrated.
Speaker 9: So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 7: Yeah, how it happened is like fascinating to me.
Speaker 9: So in twenty sixteen, when Gamergate was in full swing,
Speaker 9: Owen's launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy,
Speaker 9: which she described as a way to catalog the abuses
Speaker 9: of trolls and cyberbullies. Fun fact that Kickstarter is still
Speaker 9: up today, it is such a weird time capsule of
Speaker 9: a different time. There's like a video of her speaking
Speaker 9: earnestly about the need to like have the Internet be
Speaker 9: a like.
Speaker 7: Safer, more equitable landscape.
Speaker 9: It is nuts, Like people shall go listen to her
Speaker 9: speaking about this project. So the plan for this project
Speaker 9: was essentially that she would create a way to de
Speaker 9: anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their
Speaker 9: real names and their real life employers. And what's so
Speaker 9: funny is that, like that is the very same argument
Speaker 9: that a lot of people use, people who like want
Speaker 9: to restrict the open Internet still use today that like
Speaker 9: problems on the Internet, online harassment and abuse would all
Speaker 9: be improved if only everybody had to use their government
Speaker 9: idea and government names to access the Internet. And so like,
Speaker 9: it's very funny that that idea it was bad then,
Speaker 9: and it didn't really die, it was just recycled into today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, like there's a version of this that happens,
Speaker 4: or at least it kind of used to happen more
Speaker 4: in regards to like anti fascist research, where like you're
Speaker 4: like identify specific like extremely racist accounts or like explicit
Speaker 4: neo Nazis and contact their employer in in an attempt
Speaker 4: to get to get them fired so they can focus
Speaker 4: on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than
Speaker 4: doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like,
Speaker 4: you know, a member of like a group, whether that
Speaker 4: be you know, the Proud Boys back in the day
Speaker 4: or many many other groups Patriot Prayer now, Patriot Front,
Speaker 4: that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic
Speaker 4: is soon to be by people like Candice and the
Speaker 4: Daily Wire people. But here she's advocating it herself exactly,
Speaker 4: and they just like post Anita Sarkisian kind of content
Speaker 4: like world.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea,
Speaker 9: including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember
Speaker 9: was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was
Speaker 9: like viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and docs, and
Speaker 9: she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and
Speaker 9: said so publicly as you can probably guess, like people
Speaker 9: like Milo Gyanopolis loved this. People who were promoters of
Speaker 9: Gamergate really hyped up Owens's claims that like, yes, feminists
Speaker 9: were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.
Speaker 4: Okay, I can see this is going.
Speaker 9: So this event is what Owen's credits with her turn
Speaker 9: from progressive to quote becoming a red pilled radical. She says,
Speaker 9: I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were
Speaker 9: actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls. She starts
Speaker 9: promoting right wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself
Speaker 9: quote red pill black, which I gotta say is like
Speaker 9: pretty good branding, Like, I'm not mad at the branding there.
Speaker 9: I was like, Okay, black woman talking about like right
Speaker 9: wing stuff, red pill.
Speaker 7: Black I get it. I get it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was
Speaker 4: a consideration here. Oh yes, how much your kickstarter god
Speaker 4: versus how much she realized she could get if she
Speaker 4: jumped on the other side of the content churn.
Speaker 9: Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder
Speaker 9: of Turning Points USA Right, and he hires her almost immediately.
Speaker 9: She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well,
Speaker 9: that her videos really go viral. Video where she's doing
Speaker 9: things like dismissing the twenty seventeen white supremacist Unite the
Speaker 9: Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co
Speaker 9: host some of his info War shows. She's doing stints
Speaker 9: on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like business is
Speaker 9: booming for Candace Owens from this.
Speaker 4: Turn Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her.
Speaker 9: Yes, in twenty twenty one, she joins up with The
Speaker 9: Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring
Speaker 9: Candace like it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville,
Speaker 9: fun fact, there was even a House joint resolution House
Speaker 9: Joint Resolution three fifty, a resolution in the Tennessee government
Speaker 9: to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for
Speaker 9: her work at Daily Wire. That reads whereas miss Owens
Speaker 9: has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans
Speaker 9: through her activism in support of President Trump as a
Speaker 9: black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and
Speaker 9: leftist political tyranny.
Speaker 3: Very cool stuff.
Speaker 9: Yeah, imagine it being like a joint resolution in your
Speaker 9: local government when you move someplace.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the governor of Tennessee was like super excited when
Speaker 4: the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought
Speaker 4: in all these people. Like there was there was like
Speaker 4: so many like private dinners meetings. There was like a
Speaker 4: like a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to
Speaker 4: Tennessee in this like twenty twenty one period as they
Speaker 4: were just starting to like launch their own like streaming
Speaker 4: service website, which is why they recruited Candice is because
Speaker 4: they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.
Speaker 9: So you would think that this should be like a
Speaker 9: match made in heaven, right, smooth sailing. They need insidiary
Speaker 9: content creators. She's an insidiary content creator. Should be a
Speaker 9: match made in heaven. Perfect Not quite, because things end
Speaker 9: in like this really messy public fallout just a few
Speaker 9: years later. So I know that you've done episodes on
Speaker 9: this from my perspective, and I would love to know
Speaker 9: what you think. It's not one hundred percent clear what
Speaker 9: went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and
Speaker 9: Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it
Speaker 9: seemed to be like related to reactions around the situation
Speaker 9: in Gaza.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally so.
Speaker 7: Ben Shapiro is Jewish and Owens, as we.
Speaker 9: Said, has said and done like a lot of anti
Speaker 9: Semitic stuff, like a lot and.
Speaker 4: Like actual anti Semitic stuff like that people use that
Speaker 4: as a way to like shut down like very very
Speaker 4: admirable like like like Propelstinian like activism. No, like Candas
Speaker 4: owns just is anti semitic and this it's like the
Speaker 4: same thing with like Jackson Hinkele, and she made it
Speaker 4: like an escalating series of anti semitic claims after October seventh,
Speaker 4: which which slowly kind of like broke with the company
Speaker 4: and ben like more and more and more of an
Speaker 4: over series of a few months. Yes, and it's it's
Speaker 4: it's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this
Speaker 4: like online fight she had with Stephen Crowder like a
Speaker 4: year or so prior when Daily Wire trying to recruit him,
Speaker 4: and then she got informed about like how like abusive
Speaker 4: he was to his wife, and then she went on
Speaker 4: like a media blitz like against him as like as
Speaker 4: he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire. She's
Speaker 4: like very willing to like stir shit up, like even
Speaker 4: if it like goes against her own interests or the
Speaker 4: interests of like whatever company she works for, Like she is,
Speaker 4: she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind
Speaker 4: of like chaotic spectacle regardless of her own like you know,
Speaker 4: financial security.
Speaker 9: I guess yes, like she I'm so glad that you
Speaker 9: mentioned that she is not afraid to get down and
Speaker 9: dirty in public. And I do think, like, you know,
Speaker 9: as a black woman who works with a lot of
Speaker 9: white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking, like,
Speaker 9: I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't
Speaker 9: want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black
Speaker 9: woman or whatever.
Speaker 7: She it's it seems like.
Speaker 9: She has no such qualms, Like she is like I will,
Speaker 9: I will make this a public, messy fight, and I
Speaker 9: am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and so it is really important to note that, like
Speaker 9: as you said, she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state.
Speaker 9: She was like getting into like blood liable and like
Speaker 9: deep conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, it was. There was some really nasty posts.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like one of the things that she said, She's
Speaker 9: claimed that Judaism was quote a pedophile centric religion that
Speaker 9: believes in demons and child sacrifice, and that she was
Speaker 9: waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like.
Speaker 7: Stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Not great, not good, not good.
Speaker 9: So, as you said, like this starts to become like
Speaker 9: a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter,
Speaker 9: no one can serve two masters and ended her post
Speaker 9: writing you cannot serve both God and money, which Ben Shapiro,
Speaker 9: her boss, tweets like quote tweeted, oh my God, Like Candice,
Speaker 9: if you feel that taking money from the Daily Wire
Speaker 9: somehow that comes between you and God, by all means quit,
Speaker 9: Like messy is there It's crazy.
Speaker 4: That instead of having like a company meeting, they were
Speaker 4: just doing this on Twitter.
Speaker 9: Oh my god, and my messy ass was eating it up.
Speaker 9: I was like, keep fighting, let him fight.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I'm totally willing to like watch this,
Speaker 4: watch this go down. I do not want to get involved,
Speaker 4: right right right.
Speaker 9: Owens like went on took her Carlson Show and said
Speaker 9: that Ben Shapiro was quote acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged
Speaker 9: for weeks now. She said that Shapiro quote crossed a
Speaker 9: certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself
Speaker 9: into it, I will not tolerate it.
Speaker 4: Very cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So, at one point, Owens tweets that she wants
Speaker 9: Ben Shapiro to have a public like debate with her,
Speaker 9: moderated by podcaster Patrick Bett Davide. Ben Shapiro was having
Speaker 9: none of this, he tweets, Candice, I can see why
Speaker 9: you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who
Speaker 9: said we should rename our company quote daily Jewish Wire
Speaker 9: just yesterday.
Speaker 7: No Jesus one on one Monday at.
Speaker 9: Five, we can sit down and have a healthy debate
Speaker 9: like adults, and we'll live stream it on x and YouTube.
Speaker 9: Take it or leave it as to the true reason
Speaker 9: why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down
Speaker 9: with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back
Speaker 9: in February. I have no idea what the hell you're
Speaker 9: talking about. Like, this is employer employee going at it
Speaker 9: on Twitter.
Speaker 4: I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not
Speaker 4: just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer.
Speaker 4: But it's a really it's a really tough situation here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I feel the same way, because, like it's just
Speaker 9: not a great look to have somebody that you just
Speaker 9: hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this
Speaker 9: on Twitter, like and I think, I mean, this is
Speaker 9: just my opinion, so like take that for what it's worth,
Speaker 9: just as somebody who has worked in media and been
Speaker 9: around the block. The reason why I'm not comfortable saying
Speaker 9: like their feud was entirely based on Owens's anti Semitic
Speaker 9: comments and behavior is that she just went so hard
Speaker 9: and so public that something to me, I almost wonder
Speaker 9: if there was like a contract dispute here that like
Speaker 9: she was like, oh, I can make more money on
Speaker 9: my own totally gotta get out of this contract or something,
Speaker 9: because like it just doesn't smell right.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, if she had like an inclination that
Speaker 4: she could afford to lose his job because you might
Speaker 4: make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely that
Speaker 4: that would allow her to push this further than what
Speaker 4: she might otherwise might Like there's been a lot of
Speaker 4: a lot of discussion in the right wing contents fear
Speaker 4: about like the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts despite still
Speaker 4: getting paid like tens of millions of dollars, there is
Speaker 4: like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization
Speaker 4: because the Daily Wires like a company trying to make
Speaker 4: a profit. So totally, I think there could absolutely be
Speaker 4: other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more
Speaker 4: like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one
Speaker 4: thing or another.
Speaker 9: Yes, So, after Rabbi Schmooley Boteach criticized Owens for her
Speaker 9: defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked to tweet asking Bouteach
Speaker 9: if he was quote drunk on Christian blood again, And
Speaker 9: I guess that was the final straw. A few days later,
Speaker 9: Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owen's
Speaker 9: tweeting the rumors are true, I am finally free. Okay,
Speaker 9: So that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So
Speaker 9: where is she now? Well, this is where the story
Speaker 9: gets interesting because I had not heard from Candice Owens
Speaker 9: in a minute, and my reintroduction to her appened recently,
Speaker 9: and what I was trying to make sense of the
Speaker 9: dispute between two Hollywood A listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
Speaker 9: So the issue between Blake and Justin it's a little
Speaker 9: bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting
Speaker 9: story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy,
Speaker 9: like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms
Speaker 9: can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence
Speaker 9: where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they
Speaker 9: do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later.
Speaker 9: Like that is my favorite thing in the world, Like,
Speaker 9: please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that
Speaker 9: my nosey ask and read it later and be like, ooh, messy.
Speaker 9: So I do encourage like folks to read up on
Speaker 9: it because it does go beyond just like two celebrities
Speaker 9: having a feud, but you don't really need to know
Speaker 9: the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version
Speaker 9: is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a
Speaker 9: movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover
Speaker 9: called It Starts with Us. In December, Lively filed a
Speaker 9: legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and
Speaker 9: starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that
Speaker 9: and has sued her. In response, both camps have released
Speaker 9: information like emails, text messages, and video that attempting to
Speaker 9: make the other look bad. So it has kind of
Speaker 9: turned into one of those ink blot tests that changes
Speaker 9: depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that
Speaker 9: Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a
Speaker 9: fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man, or
Speaker 9: version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was
Speaker 9: using her star power and a list celebrity network like
Speaker 9: her husband Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool to control the narrative
Speaker 9: around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody
Speaker 9: on this project. Cool, yes, and so it's what's interesting
Speaker 9: about this to me is that it's one of those
Speaker 9: stories where algorithmically it depends on what silo or what
Speaker 9: pocket of the Internet you're at sure to determine, like
Speaker 9: what version of this story you're getting, like much like
Speaker 9: Johnny Depp's deformation lawsuits.
Speaker 4: Sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and so like, for whatever reason, TikTok
Speaker 9: thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over
Speaker 9: every nuance of how she is a fraud right like,
Speaker 9: but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively,
Speaker 9: we should.
Speaker 7: Be supporting her.
Speaker 9: Like. It's one of those situations where just depending on
Speaker 9: where you are on the Internet, you might get a
Speaker 9: very different impression of the public sentiment, leaning one way
Speaker 9: or another.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this is all the types of things I
Speaker 4: try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So, yes,
Speaker 4: I do not like you, you know.
Speaker 9: So I was trying to get to the bottom of
Speaker 9: it because I kept hearing about it, like everyone was
Speaker 9: talking about it. So I'm talking to my cousins, who
Speaker 9: I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are
Speaker 9: not super online. It's like they're not like you and me,
Speaker 9: They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or
Speaker 9: anything like that.
Speaker 4: No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun
Speaker 4: Slash four works.
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah, and my cousins are like, oh my god,
Speaker 9: there is this black girl journalist who has been following
Speaker 9: everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea
Speaker 9: will tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens. Okay, so
Speaker 9: all right, you know, Candace has been making so many
Speaker 9: videos off of this and like her coverage, if you
Speaker 9: coverage in quotes, has really taken off online. As The
Speaker 9: Cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens has
Speaker 9: gone mainstream, they write the right wing commentators coverage of
Speaker 9: the Blake Lively Justin Baldonnie case has reached millions of viewers.
Speaker 9: Owens podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case,
Speaker 9: deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds'
Speaker 9: recent snl Fiftheist Anniversary Space Secal appearance. One listener said,
Speaker 9: she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies
Speaker 9: and some of the things Blake Lively said, rather than
Speaker 9: us having to go through it on our own.
Speaker 4: Ah. Of course, it's the woman who's lying about being
Speaker 4: sexually harassed of course.
Speaker 9: One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen
Speaker 9: seems to have a pro Buldani bias, but she doesn't
Speaker 9: care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the
Speaker 9: fact that this is not a feminist issue at all,
Speaker 9: that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here,
Speaker 9: she's uniting the left and the right.
Speaker 7: The right wing Women's.
Speaker 9: Magazine also published a headline about this, saying how Candice
Speaker 9: Owens is uniting conservatives and liberal with her it ends
Speaker 9: with US coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has
Speaker 9: really allowed her to attract.
Speaker 7: A lot more viewers beyond her like normal right.
Speaker 9: Wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot
Speaker 9: of white men like that who was really listening to
Speaker 9: her content before when she was with Dailey Wier. Now
Speaker 9: she has really branched out. So like normy, like my
Speaker 9: cousins who have no idea who Owens is, have no
Speaker 9: idea her background, her past, the work that she has done,
Speaker 9: and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist,
Speaker 9: like digging and getting the dirt.
Speaker 4: I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I
Speaker 4: assume YouTube as well. She also just like trying to
Speaker 4: like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reachs. Is
Speaker 4: this kind of part of how she's trying to like
Speaker 4: expand her reach.
Speaker 9: It is like she's everywhere, and then she has her
Speaker 9: longer form podcast than YouTube. But then clips of her
Speaker 9: like you know, breaking down the top lies or top
Speaker 9: inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said. Those go
Speaker 9: super viral on social media. The short clips yeah okay,
Speaker 9: and all of this has been just gangbusters for her
Speaker 9: growth and engagement.
Speaker 7: Here's how The Cut put it.
Speaker 9: Since Owen started covering the Lively Baldani case, her YouTube
Speaker 9: channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a
Speaker 9: much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives
Speaker 9: she is amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively
Speaker 9: racks up at least one point five million views. In
Speaker 9: the past month alone, Owens has i asked more than
Speaker 9: four hundred and fifty thousand new subscribers on YouTube, and
Speaker 9: her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year.
Speaker 9: This is according to data from the platform's social blade
Speaker 9: oh No. Over the past three months, her audience on
Speaker 9: YouTube has almost started skewing sixty five percent female according
Speaker 9: to data provided by a spokesperson, a market shift from
Speaker 9: her past fan base. So yeah, she's exploding in popularity.
Speaker 9: She's everywhere, and now she's attracting like normy women who
Speaker 9: are just coming in for the celebrity dispute.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's probably not gonna end well.
Speaker 7: Huh, well, I don't think it will end well.
Speaker 9: You know, I was like racking my brain trying to
Speaker 9: figure out, like, why has this story taken off so
Speaker 9: much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons.
Speaker 9: I think this is like working for her. One, I
Speaker 9: hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting
Speaker 9: to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive
Speaker 9: voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point
Speaker 9: of view when a clear voice and a perspective, and
Speaker 9: that really that really comes through when she's breaking down
Speaker 9: Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of
Speaker 9: speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to
Speaker 9: the listener like this person is really breaking it down.
Speaker 9: It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media
Speaker 9: when someone is like story time or like I'm about
Speaker 9: to tell you all the details of something. Those videos
Speaker 9: always perform very well on social media, and I think
Speaker 9: that Owens is is just very good at knowing how
Speaker 9: to hold somebody's attention online, Like I have to say it.
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean she's been doing the content churn for
Speaker 4: almost a decade now, Like, yeah, you you do get
Speaker 4: good at it on like a technical proficiency level.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 9: Also, you know, we just love good old fashioned misogyny.
Speaker 9: And if that misogyny can be laced with like a
Speaker 9: conspiracy theory, oh yeah, I think.
Speaker 7: That's it's even better.
Speaker 9: So, like I think that part of this is just
Speaker 9: like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny.
Speaker 9: I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, massage noire,
Speaker 9: or racism, all of that is like baked into the
Speaker 9: experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 9: And I think that Omens takes it even further because
Speaker 9: she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy.
Speaker 9: Like it's not just let's talk about about Blake Lively,
Speaker 9: it's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm gonna
Speaker 9: I'm gonna expose Blake Lively's dark truth, right, and so like,
Speaker 9: of course that's gonna take off.
Speaker 4: And she does gain this element of authority because she's
Speaker 4: a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better
Speaker 4: about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay
Speaker 4: to I mean, this is this is the same thing
Speaker 4: that she was able to weaponize for all of her,
Speaker 4: like like yo, anti black lives matter stuff for all
Speaker 4: of her, like like racism isn't real things. She tries
Speaker 4: to use it to her advantage, mostly to make like
Speaker 4: white members of her audience like feel good about their
Speaker 4: own racism because a black woman told them it's actually
Speaker 4: okay and like that. That's been like a big part
Speaker 4: of her career the past few years exactly that.
Speaker 9: And I think like she really understands that the inviting
Speaker 9: power of taking what you might think of as like
Speaker 9: a contrarian stance on something like yeah, totally, like after
Speaker 9: the Me Too movement, how many women got engagement by
Speaker 9: taking a contrarian stance, right, Like, I think going against
Speaker 9: the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to
Speaker 9: automatically support the woman in this in this dispute probably
Speaker 9: makes people tuning into omens's breakdowns feel like they're like
Speaker 9: free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know,
Speaker 9: by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects
Speaker 9: to her more odious stances on things like trans people
Speaker 9: and women and Jewish people.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, I mean, like you see the same thing with
Speaker 4: like you know, like the gays against Groomer's thing, right
Speaker 4: wing trans influencers, detrans influencers. It's the same, like gambit.
Speaker 4: And certainly I think, like, yeah, like your identification of
Speaker 4: her as like a professional contrarian is like very very
Speaker 4: key to her success exactly.
Speaker 9: I also think like part of the reason why people
Speaker 9: are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for
Speaker 9: like fantasy world building, and I think I really see
Speaker 9: the ways that she injects that into her coverage, even
Speaker 9: the word coverage I put that in worlds because like
Speaker 9: she is like a wild person. To her coverage is
Speaker 9: like also wild. She does not adhere to, as she
Speaker 9: puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting.
Speaker 4: You know, I'll take her word for that one, you
Speaker 4: know what, I'll.
Speaker 3: Believe her on that that single point.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I believe her.
Speaker 9: I believe that, you know, she amplifies rumors and even
Speaker 9: once she read a letter that she said that she
Speaker 9: got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach
Speaker 9: when he was twelve, and to Kenneth Owens, his acting
Speaker 9: coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid.
Speaker 3: You know what, I also believe it.
Speaker 9: I oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like
Speaker 9: her coverage, it includes like side.
Speaker 4: Characters, Yeah, things that have this whatsoever? I mean, yeah,
Speaker 4: I feel like this, this focus on like this like
Speaker 4: conspiratorial ben is like the same. She's using the same
Speaker 4: tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for
Speaker 4: like most of our political work, like it, it's she's
Speaker 4: using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually
Speaker 4: she like reaches this like stress point or this like
Speaker 4: threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she
Speaker 4: can't see a way to surpass it, and then she
Speaker 4: does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog, this
Speaker 4: happened even at the Daily Wire. She does not she
Speaker 4: doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And like this,
Speaker 4: this new pivot is learning. Hey, it's sup super lucrative
Speaker 4: to be like a tabloid entertainment quote unquote journalist. Very easy,
Speaker 4: super lucrative, and all of the tactics you learned on
Speaker 4: the right wing media sphere work great here, Like all
Speaker 4: of this, like conspiratorial thinking really uh, a disregard for
Speaker 4: like like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort
Speaker 4: of like rumor based reporting, and it spreads like crazy,
Speaker 4: And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you
Speaker 4: aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right.
Speaker 4: This this can be so much more broad to like
Speaker 4: the giant audience of like you know, quote unquote like
Speaker 4: a political people go to these platforms for a form
Speaker 4: of like of like escapism and entertainment rather than just
Speaker 4: hearing about politics yet again, because that's you know, very
Speaker 4: very tiring.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it
Speaker 9: is sort of sort of connected. Like Ben Shapiro, nobody
Speaker 9: cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than
Speaker 9: Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like I don't
Speaker 9: care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with
Speaker 9: like Beyonce and Meg thee Stallion, Like it was just
Speaker 9: like a negative obsession. Like yeah, you know, anti fandom
Speaker 9: is still fandom when you make video after video about
Speaker 9: how much you don't like Meg thea stallion in a
Speaker 9: kind of way, you are a fan, just in the
Speaker 9: opposite direction. And so I think that Candice Owens really
Speaker 9: took that and learned how to perfect it because she
Speaker 9: is much I think that she is much better at
Speaker 9: this than Ben Shapiro is.
Speaker 7: Like the evidence being that, like.
Speaker 9: Her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would
Speaker 9: never watch any any of Ben Schipper here, I was content.
Speaker 4: The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wires
Speaker 4: first film, Lady Ballers left us on a cliffhanger with
Speaker 4: with Candas Owans and Matt Walsh sitting in a car
Speaker 4: talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot
Speaker 4: of the film as like as like some kind of
Speaker 4: scheme or like social experiment, and you know, it was
Speaker 4: implied there would be more. You know, it was like
Speaker 4: a you know, like Avengers Nick Fury type post credit scene.
Speaker 4: And now we're never gonna learn what Candae OANs and
Speaker 4: Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company.
Speaker 4: She's now doing her own thing. So now we just
Speaker 4: had this dangling plot thread that's just gonna bug me forever,
Speaker 4: Like what does the Candae Owan's character at the end
Speaker 4: of Lady Ballers Do next. I'm gonna be thinking about
Speaker 4: this for like years.
Speaker 7: America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that
Speaker 7: out there, I think we do deserve closure.
Speaker 3: I just think my closure is gonna be a little
Speaker 3: bit different.
Speaker 4: I am. I'm very fine having all of these plot
Speaker 4: threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see
Speaker 4: that in the cards immediately.
Speaker 9: So in terms of where she's at now, like you know,
Speaker 9: my question is like, has Owens has this kind of
Speaker 9: like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass. Has
Speaker 9: she changed her views she is she trying to do
Speaker 9: a rebrand or a pivot. In an interview, she said,
Speaker 9: in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've
Speaker 9: been anti METO since long before it was cool.
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean that can be true. It's also true
Speaker 4: that she is getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint. Which, yeah,
Speaker 4: then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able
Speaker 4: to slip in more things that I would find on
Speaker 4: Savory to a larger audience over time, But she also
Speaker 4: might be content to keep growing that and be slightly
Speaker 4: less off putting in the meantime, but no, like there's
Speaker 4: also just a huge audience for like the anti woke backlash,
Speaker 4: antiemetwo stuff right now. Like that's kind of that's kind
Speaker 4: of like the new mainstream frankly, so I am certain
Speaker 4: that she's going to try to continue to like flex
Speaker 4: that and grow that in the in the next few
Speaker 4: months years.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I agree with you.
Speaker 9: I believe Owens when she says that, like her stances
Speaker 9: have not changed much easy to be like, Oh, well,
Speaker 9: she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these
Speaker 9: like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity.
Speaker 9: And you can, honestly, you can sort of see some
Speaker 9: of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like she
Speaker 9: was sort of known for having very severe hair, the
Speaker 9: joke being that she had alienated herself so much from
Speaker 9: her fellow black people, but like, no black person was
Speaker 9: going to do her hair, and that's why it looks
Speaker 9: that way. But lately you've really seen this like softening.
Speaker 9: She's kind of going for like a softer public look.
Speaker 9: She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched
Speaker 9: out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and
Speaker 9: some kind of a fitness program.
Speaker 4: That makes sense. Yeah, totally, like the health Guru fitness
Speaker 4: entertainment bubble. Yeah that's huge.
Speaker 7: That's such a good grift. She's gonna make so much money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, she is.
Speaker 9: But I really agree with you, gaire that, like, I
Speaker 9: think that these new followers are certainly going to be
Speaker 9: walked down a pipeline that includes for extremist attitude just
Speaker 9: using celebrity scandal as a hook, because, like as you said,
Speaker 9: celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for
Speaker 9: a lot of people. So like, people who care about
Speaker 9: extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as
Speaker 9: a space that they need to pay too close of
Speaker 9: attention to about these stories that you might see on
Speaker 9: the cover of an US weekly. But these stories actually
Speaker 9: can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash
Speaker 9: them in a whole new audience.
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, like.
Speaker 9: You were saying, if you are just like watching a
Speaker 9: podcast because you're want to be entertained about a story
Speaker 9: about two celebrities, you might not have your like bullshit
Speaker 9: detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content,
Speaker 9: because it's it's seen and treated as a less charge space.
Speaker 9: And so you know that line of thinking that says
Speaker 9: that you know, this is just fluff, It doesn't really
Speaker 9: matter what happens in celebrity news is not incorrect. It
Speaker 9: is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more
Speaker 9: susceptible to to it when extremist content is slipped in
Speaker 9: without even really realizing it.
Speaker 4: I mean, and like that relates even to like the
Speaker 4: originator of this gamer git stuff and the whole like
Speaker 4: anti woke like media fandom content sphere right where so
Speaker 4: much of like the anti book backlash has been built
Speaker 4: on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke. Now
Speaker 4: there's too many women in movies, there's too many black
Speaker 4: people in commercials. Where do all the white people go,
Speaker 4: There's too many gay people in TV, there's too many
Speaker 4: trans people in TV, and like that is it is
Speaker 4: definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons,
Speaker 4: and you can very easily pivot back to that sort
Speaker 4: of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively,
Speaker 4: like this is this is a very small jump where
Speaker 4: you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this
Speaker 4: like anti woke framing like, you know, why is all
Speaker 4: these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids?
Speaker 4: You know, whether that be talking about you know, transactors
Speaker 4: in the business, whether you be talking about you know,
Speaker 4: like female lead or like diversity casting, like all all
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff that especially Candice can use her
Speaker 4: like contrarian position to speak on authority about talking about
Speaker 4: why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people
Speaker 4: of color? Or why is a woman the lead of
Speaker 4: this thing when it should be actually a man? You know,
Speaker 4: just like very very basic stuff that's been a part
Speaker 4: of like the YouTube slop for a decade now, but
Speaker 4: it's still like still takes in a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of clicks and it is it is a lot
Speaker 4: of like the Daily Wire and like right wing content
Speaker 4: still still does. It's all this like weird like culture
Speaker 4: warst stuff. It's very very tightened with Hollywood. Like you
Speaker 4: were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims, you know,
Speaker 4: like hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative
Speaker 4: to it, but he can't stop talking about it, like
Speaker 4: he can't stop complaining about Disney's snow White. And I
Speaker 4: can see Candice doing like the exact same thing, but
Speaker 4: now with like an honestly like a bigger, a bigger,
Speaker 4: more like a political audience that's much more malleable and
Speaker 4: can be shaped around these like larger cultural trends. When
Speaker 4: you think about this like perception of this backlash against wokeness, I.
Speaker 7: Absolutely think that's what we're gonna see.
Speaker 9: And I can tell you we can finish by I
Speaker 9: can tell you about her next big pet issue, which
Speaker 9: is going to be yes.
Speaker 7: Championing Harvey Weinstein.
Speaker 9: Who she is no, no, no, So She's been interviewing
Speaker 9: him since twenty twenty two, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Speaker 9: She explains, while he is quote an immoral man, he
Speaker 9: is also a justice system.
Speaker 4: A victim, sure victim, And she says.
Speaker 9: I've always had faith in our court system, and now
Speaker 9: it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder if
Speaker 9: our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made
Speaker 9: her think this is Harvey Weinstein.
Speaker 4: It's wild. I mean, like Ben Shapiro is starting his
Speaker 4: own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's gonna
Speaker 4: be a lot of pressure on the courts right now.
Speaker 4: I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump
Speaker 4: as well. I think undermining the authority of the court,
Speaker 4: I think is actually kind of part of this larger
Speaker 4: concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now,
Speaker 4: because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving
Speaker 4: their right wing utopia is the court system. And I
Speaker 4: you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part,
Speaker 4: like Ben Shapiro, candastones aren't aren't like intentionally collaborating on this,
Speaker 4: but they may be copying each other's trends. And if
Speaker 4: they're seeing this this wider push across a large amount
Speaker 4: of like the right wing content people to put pressure
Speaker 4: on various aspects of the courts, including by using like
Speaker 4: high profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Shouvin's, that's
Speaker 4: not a great sign. And I can I can definitely
Speaker 4: see them trying to trying to do that in conjunction.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah.
Speaker 9: I think we're going to see a lot more of it.
Speaker 9: Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that
Speaker 9: apparently tells his side of the story. Look out for that,
Speaker 9: And I think that's the thing, like I think with
Speaker 9: her content, like when asked why it was she thought
Speaker 9: that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off. She
Speaker 9: says that she believes her new fans on the left
Speaker 9: quote have just kind of gotten wise to the fact
Speaker 9: that maybe women lie just like men. And so I
Speaker 9: just implore folks that, like, even if you think that
Speaker 9: you're just like retaking in this content because you're following
Speaker 9: fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to
Speaker 9: go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted,
Speaker 9: or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs, a stance
Speaker 9: at Candace herself that's actually advocated for despite very obviously
Speaker 9: being a working woman. And so I don't think we
Speaker 9: should trust Candace Owens even if she does this rebrand, Like,
Speaker 9: don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity
Speaker 9: investigative journalist. Like she put all of these odious views
Speaker 9: out into the worlds, and I don't want her to
Speaker 9: be able to like soften it or you know, soften
Speaker 9: what it is that she advocates for, what it is
Speaker 9: that she believes in, if that is truly what she's
Speaker 9: trying to do to just sort of like a mass
Speaker 9: a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it if
Speaker 9: you're if you're getting tagged in Candace Owens videos, just
Speaker 9: know what she actually is about.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, I think I think for our audience,
Speaker 4: it's it's more likely that you'll have like family members
Speaker 4: who are going to be finding this stuff, and you
Speaker 4: should find a list of sources. Maybe this this episode included,
Speaker 4: but probably you know, you can find some articles as
Speaker 4: well that theyk of some background on Candace's history and
Speaker 4: and and previous beliefs. Can pick and choose some of
Speaker 4: her most like outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends
Speaker 4: you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively
Speaker 4: are kidnapping children or something, you can you can maybe
Speaker 4: inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything
Speaker 4: this Candice Owen's character is saying.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money,
Speaker 7: might not be on the level.
Speaker 9: No, yeah, inform an Auntie today, Yes that's right, and.
Speaker 7: Uh, that's all I got. That's it. I don't know
Speaker 7: how you usually end these episodes.
Speaker 4: Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has
Speaker 4: been an interesting dive into the life of a woman
Speaker 4: with many, many careers, many a chameleon many personalities, A chameleon,
Speaker 4: a chameleon of contrarianism.
Speaker 3: Oh I like that.
Speaker 7: If I ever write a book about her, that'll be
Speaker 7: the title.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ. Oh what a nightmare that would be. Man
Speaker 4: scary bridget Where can people find you online?
Speaker 9: You can find me on my podcast. There are our
Speaker 9: girls on the internet on this network. iHeartRadio. I mean
Speaker 9: you can find me on Instagram at bridget Ran DC
Speaker 9: or on Blue Sky at bridget Time.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you so much, good luck in d C.
Speaker 4: Thanks for holding holding the line out there as Elon
Speaker 4: puts a kildozer through your entire city.
Speaker 7: We're doing our best.
Speaker 4: I would would love to talk again about a DC update.
Speaker 4: Maybe maybe next time you come on the show. Oh
Speaker 4: my god, yes, please, there we go. Well we will
Speaker 4: talk then, goodbye everybody.
Speaker 3: It could happen here.
Speaker 4: I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top
Speaker 4: fifteen highest endowment universities in the country, but I am
Speaker 4: not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert
Speaker 4: Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news
Speaker 4: of students having their visas and or green cards revoked
Speaker 4: by US customs in relation to anti genocide protests. James,
Speaker 4: this is something that you've been putting together a piece
Speaker 4: on for a while.
Speaker 2: Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra like to no avail.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I do feel like we kind of saw
Speaker 1: this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it's not bad. And specifically the case we're talking about today,
Speaker 1: I think is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve
Speaker 1: someone's student visa. Right. So I've been working for a
Speaker 1: while on people who actually, under the Biden administration were
Speaker 1: potentially facing deportation, right, But the material difference between that
Speaker 1: and now is that those people were facing deportation because
Speaker 1: the university removed their visas or the university removed them
Speaker 1: from the university, and therefore their visa was no longer valid.
Speaker 1: In this case, it seems that the order came directly
Speaker 1: from the State Department to deport a guy whose name
Speaker 1: is Mahoud Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in
Speaker 1: the encampment Columbia, Right, But what's notable is that and
Speaker 1: the events here, as best we can tell, went down
Speaker 1: like this, referencing an ap article here that will link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door,
Speaker 1: which is on university property, and told him that they
Speaker 1: were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported.
Speaker 1: He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa,
Speaker 1: that he was a legal permanent resident right colloquially referred
Speaker 1: to as a Green card holder. They then told him
Speaker 1: or his lawyer. At some point, he got his lawyer
Speaker 1: on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer.
Speaker 1: They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the
Speaker 1: green card, and at some point it's reported that they
Speaker 1: attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen,
Speaker 1: which of course is not a thing that ICE can do.
Speaker 1: So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a
Speaker 1: student visa is like the place I want to start
Speaker 1: this because they are materially very different. Right. Student visas
Speaker 1: are pretty fragile. People lose their student visas for lots
Speaker 1: of things all the time. A green card is a
Speaker 1: much higher barrier, and the revocation of his green card.
Speaker 1: We spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly
Speaker 1: kind of where this comes from. In Trump's missmatch of
Speaker 1: executive orders and speeches, right, because after he was detained,
Speaker 1: we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card.
Speaker 1: We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right,
Speaker 1: Rubio being a secretive of State, normally the green card
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a state department thing.
Speaker 2: Now, it seems.
Speaker 1: The most likely course of events as far as we
Speaker 1: can tell from what we know right now today's the
Speaker 1: tenth of March, is that Ice came thinking he had
Speaker 1: a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ice raids
Speaker 1: to not have all the information on someone. From what
Speaker 1: I understand, I mean, this is just a police thing.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's not just like the caps who are doing
Speaker 2: raids reoff and don't have all or accurate information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ice in particularly very often don't have a judicial warrant.
Speaker 1: They have a warrant that they made they assign themselves,
Speaker 1: which is a different thing. They're supposed to require warrant
Speaker 1: to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now,
Speaker 1: I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have,
Speaker 1: and I think the apology also allowed for them to
Speaker 1: allow Ice onto campus in like exigent circumstances. So we'll
Speaker 1: have to see what exactly that warrant was for why
Speaker 1: exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like
Speaker 1: they came a temperature evoke this guy student visa, realized
Speaker 1: you didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and
Speaker 1: then kind of expos facto, the these tweets and statements
Speaker 1: came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in. I mean,
Speaker 1: Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right,
Speaker 1: he uses the word aliens a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we've been trying to kind of figure out
Speaker 4: the exact details of like what is going on, what
Speaker 4: justification they have for doing this, and how we can
Speaker 4: like extrapolate this out to larger trends because deporting like
Speaker 4: legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also
Speaker 4: the rhetoric coming out of the White House and like
Speaker 4: the White House like social media accounts around this incident
Speaker 4: is like extremely worrying, Like the way they're basically putting
Speaker 4: up like wanted posters for protesters and in general, the
Speaker 4: way that the White House account has been doing this
Speaker 4: like own the Libs, like mimetic nationalism that the past
Speaker 4: few weeks has been has been really upsetting. And this
Speaker 4: has continued around this issue, and I think it is
Speaker 4: worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation because
Speaker 4: you had people like mamad U Tall, who I think
Speaker 4: Cornell tried to revoke their student visa and then he's
Speaker 4: in some way negotiated back into that to stay on.
Speaker 4: The interim provost John Ceciliano eventually ruled in Tall's favor
Speaker 4: so he did not end up getting deported last year.
Speaker 4: And now this new development in relationship to the Columbia
Speaker 4: protests is a significant escalation. Yeah, because not only is
Speaker 4: this not just like the university revoking n F one,
Speaker 4: which they do have the you know, authority to, this
Speaker 4: is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they
Speaker 4: are going after specific students without the involvement of the university,
Speaker 4: and students who may be legal permanent residents.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on white House dot
Speaker 1: gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote to all
Speaker 1: resident aliens who joined in the pro Jahadist protests, we
Speaker 1: put you on notice. Come twenty twenty five, we will
Speaker 1: find you and we will deport you.
Speaker 2: And that would seem to include the legal permanent residence. Yes, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like,
Speaker 2: I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the
Speaker 2: language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are
Speaker 2: other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to
Speaker 2: use that vagueness for things like this, right, like who
Speaker 2: might see that as a benefit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, and you've seen that with other things, like
Speaker 4: with like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people
Speaker 4: right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They
Speaker 4: leave the enforcement up to like individual actors, and then
Speaker 4: they can eventually like figure out the logistics like in
Speaker 4: court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal,
Speaker 4: So like, yeah, it is vague because they want to
Speaker 4: test the actual like full authority of their power. But
Speaker 4: I think the specific like fact sheet, which is like
Speaker 4: a sister article towards this executive order, says like James
Speaker 4: was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in
Speaker 4: the pro gihattist protests, we put you on notice. Come
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, we will find you and we will
Speaker 4: deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas
Speaker 4: of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses which have been
Speaker 4: infested with radicalism like never before. So there you have
Speaker 4: him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably
Speaker 4: refers to Green cardholders, as well as student visas. So
Speaker 4: these are two separate things that he a specifically named
Speaker 4: as going after. And now you see more direction from
Speaker 4: Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday. You see
Speaker 4: more direction from Rubio and the State Department in like
Speaker 4: specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and
Speaker 4: targets for ice actions, which is not something that is
Speaker 4: extremely common.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where I've seen it before was like in cases
Speaker 1: of material support for terrorism, which but that has quite
Speaker 1: a high bar of proof, right that's like a listed
Speaker 1: organization proving a material ie financial or physical support, right
Speaker 1: like in kind donations like I've written about a guy
Speaker 1: who is providing material aid to the Islamic State called
Speaker 1: Siki Remy's HODGEI sending stuff from bass pro actually like
Speaker 1: thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But
Speaker 1: that has a much higher bar than this, which we
Speaker 1: will see you because we have a legal permanent resident
Speaker 1: here and they're seeking to revoke that. I imagine we will
Speaker 1: see a court case and we will see exactly the
Speaker 1: justification for revoking his green in that court case. That
Speaker 1: will be some time in the future.
Speaker 4: Let's go on a quick break and we will come
Speaker 4: back to discuss some more of the details on what
Speaker 4: Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all
Speaker 4: end up. Okay, we are back. I would like to
Speaker 4: talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has
Speaker 4: been using since this arrest and a little bit of
Speaker 4: what he was saying before. Like we were saying before
Speaker 4: the break, some of this kind of vague language can
Speaker 4: kind of be used to their advantage. And this is
Speaker 4: certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump
Speaker 4: would do on the campaign trail, right where he would
Speaker 4: talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general,
Speaker 4: regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or
Speaker 4: just US citizens. Right like Trump has made statements about
Speaker 4: wanting to do all of that, and campaigns like off
Speaker 4: the cuff statements and the actual like government policy are
Speaker 4: two different things. And right now, like they're trying to
Speaker 4: figure out where the line between that is, like how
Speaker 4: much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy.
Speaker 4: And we mentioned like the fact sheet from the executive
Speaker 4: order that I believe was signed in January, which is
Speaker 4: you know, to quote unquote combat anti Semitism. And then
Speaker 4: like last week, so before this arrest happened, we had
Speaker 4: a post from the Secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account official quote,
Speaker 4: those who support designated terrorist organizations, including HAMAS, threaten our
Speaker 4: national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign
Speaker 4: visitors who support terrorists. Violators of US law, including international students,
Speaker 4: face visa denial or revocation and deportation unquote, So that
Speaker 4: one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty pretty firmly on
Speaker 4: people who have student visas. Right, he names like visitors,
Speaker 4: And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different
Speaker 4: statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be
Speaker 4: revoking the visas and or green cards of HAMAS supporters
Speaker 4: in America so that they can be deported unquote, sharing
Speaker 4: an ap article. And then the Homeland Security DHS gov
Speaker 4: account posted on March nine, twenty twenty five, and supported
Speaker 4: President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti semitism, and in coordination
Speaker 4: with the Department of State, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
Speaker 4: arrested Mahmud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil
Speaker 4: led activities aligned to hamas a designated terrorist organization ICE
Speaker 4: in the Department of State are committed to enforcing President
Speaker 4: Trump's executive orders and protecting US national security unquote. And
Speaker 4: there's now been a flurry of posts from both the
Speaker 4: White House account and DTS accounts basically posting like a
Speaker 4: picture of this person saying that he's aligned with hamas
Speaker 4: in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but
Speaker 4: instead of just reads like arrested. And that is like
Speaker 4: the that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now
Speaker 4: on their official accounts, something that like James I think noted,
Speaker 4: it's it's important to like think about if ICE was
Speaker 4: just freestyling this action or if there was a directive
Speaker 4: beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right, And it
Speaker 4: seems like at least for the people like doing the raid,
Speaker 4: they did not care nor did they like, no, they
Speaker 4: weren't informed. They just were told to go after this
Speaker 4: person from someone higher up, right, and that that very
Speaker 4: well could be Rubio. I mean a lot of DHS
Speaker 4: is being ran by Steven Miller right now. A lot
Speaker 4: of this feels very Miller esque.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we got an update as of the time of recording.
Speaker 1: I've just discovered that Mahud Khalil's lawyers filed the lawsuit
Speaker 1: challenging gives attention and a judge in New York City,
Speaker 1: federal judge obviously or that Khalil shouldn't be deported while
Speaker 1: that court then considered his case.
Speaker 2: Yes, I was going to bring that up so that also, like.
Speaker 1: His case will we considered in New York City, which
Speaker 1: is for me, good for him, as opposed to a
Speaker 1: more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere.
Speaker 4: Right, totally like this happening in Texas, Like in all
Speaker 4: of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set
Speaker 4: up his corporations, because there's friendly judges, this would be
Speaker 4: handled quite differently, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at
Speaker 1: least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter
Speaker 1: into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less
Speaker 1: favorable to them, and they'd say the ninth circuit where
Speaker 1: they would be avanted in California. I'm sort of surprised
Speaker 1: if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone
Speaker 1: like U T. Austin or somewhere like that.
Speaker 2: Now they're going directly after this individual in part because
Speaker 2: he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise
Speaker 2: be like up in arms about a move like this,
Speaker 2: would say because of some of his connections and some
Speaker 2: of the things he said in the past. Well he's
Speaker 2: you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like I
Speaker 2: think they're really trying to find the first case is
Speaker 2: they want someone that they can have a lot of
Speaker 2: like liberals off from being too scared to support because
Speaker 2: he said some things that like they don't want to
Speaker 2: have attached to them, Like that's that's how they're and
Speaker 2: they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time.
Speaker 2: You find some folks who you can scare off a
Speaker 2: lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise
Speaker 2: natural support base because you can point out this thing
Speaker 2: or that thing they did that was that was not
Speaker 2: great acou types like when I'm not I'm not insulting
Speaker 2: or is trying to say bad things about this guy,
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, like that's that's the tactic here, right,
Speaker 2: just to try to paint this guy is like, well
Speaker 2: this guy did this bow you do really want to
Speaker 2: support that, which is why you have to take an
Speaker 2: incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to
Speaker 2: do this, The State department doesn't get to do this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, regardless of of any things that this person may.
Speaker 1: Have said, the First Amendment is for everyone. I don't
Speaker 1: care what he said, you know, so, Like, it's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that Colombia, specifically the Intercept is reported on
Speaker 1: this that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumnife Israel,
Speaker 1: and they have been explicitly trying to identify the students
Speaker 1: and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution
Speaker 1: if students like And I think the Columbia encampment was
Speaker 1: particularly objectionable to a lot of people, and that was
Speaker 1: kind of the one that got a lot of the
Speaker 1: national focus in the reporting, right, So it's understandable that
Speaker 1: that's where they went for this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's high visibility. And I think it's also
Speaker 4: very likely that they're just looking to have a test
Speaker 4: case for this to see if they can create legal
Speaker 4: precedent for removing people's green cards for you know, anti
Speaker 4: genocide protests, right, And the specific details of that will
Speaker 4: become more and more or less important based on like
Speaker 4: the results of the case, as long as they can
Speaker 4: create that precedent, right, and specifically like the president for
Speaker 4: revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. Yeah, they
Speaker 4: want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like
Speaker 4: the most favorable towards their outcome. So I mean that's
Speaker 4: part of what they're trying to do with this specific case,
Speaker 4: and it is it is very much in line with
Speaker 4: with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has
Speaker 4: said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone
Speaker 4: who's you know a little bit more policy minded, taking
Speaker 4: steps towards this outcome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which I think is like the other thing they
Speaker 1: didn't get to do, I guess is that they weren't
Speaker 1: able to like deport the guy at hyper speed, which
Speaker 1: they have been doing with some people. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana, and
Speaker 1: people were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing
Speaker 1: him from easy access to his lawyer and to his
Speaker 1: family and to his eight month pregnant wife. Right, that's
Speaker 1: all things that should have be done. It's also something
Speaker 1: that a Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes
Speaker 1: on this actually, especially in San Diego, where we have
Speaker 1: some funding that allows people who are detained access to
Speaker 1: legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants
Speaker 1: to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with
Speaker 1: migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for
Speaker 1: them in the ICE Immigrant Detention Locator and They've been
Speaker 1: moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's
Speaker 1: bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened
Speaker 1: under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We
Speaker 1: should have let it happen. Then we should support it
Speaker 1: when it happens now.
Speaker 4: And I think before we go and break again, I
Speaker 4: do want to kind of close this section by by
Speaker 4: talking about how like they don't necessarily need an executive
Speaker 4: order specifically allowing Trump to do this like like or
Speaker 4: like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order like
Speaker 4: explicitly for this based on like immigration deportation law, like
Speaker 4: there will be an argument made in like in court
Speaker 4: that that they they have justification for this action already.
Speaker 4: This is something that I've already been through when I
Speaker 4: immigrated to the country and like did like my citizenship interview, right,
Speaker 4: like if you if you have discussed in the past,
Speaker 4: you know, something that can be construed as support for
Speaker 4: a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from US citizenship.
Speaker 4: And right, so there's gonna be a lot of arguments
Speaker 4: like around like specifically these terrorism statutes that will make
Speaker 4: someone like this a subject for removal. Yeah, and like
Speaker 4: that that's gonna be like the angle in which they
Speaker 4: they go about this, And I think that's like worth
Speaker 4: keeping in mind.
Speaker 2: I also think it's worth because I I don't want
Speaker 2: to make this because a lot of people online have
Speaker 2: this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediately primary
Speaker 2: concern should be mood and the other people like him
Speaker 2: who are in situations like him be targeted. But I
Speaker 2: don't think it's unreasonable to say that, like if they
Speaker 2: get away with this, at some point that we'll start
Speaker 2: saying like look to support palast the government describes like
Speaker 2: or any support for any group that the government considers
Speaker 2: a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here
Speaker 2: as a citizen. You know, we can start like that
Speaker 2: that is a potential in state of this, which is
Speaker 2: again not should not be on your front burner. It
Speaker 2: should be the people being targeted right now. But also
Speaker 2: an awareness of like this is part of why you
Speaker 2: have to draw such a hard line. Like if if
Speaker 2: the situation was reversed and this where a democratic administration
Speaker 2: coming after an anti vaccine student activist who is a
Speaker 2: permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to
Speaker 2: disappear them, right, Like that has to be like where
Speaker 2: the line is drawn.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, the state should not have this ability, Like
Speaker 4: we should not let them get away with this, and
Speaker 4: we should put as much support and legal support into
Speaker 4: preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way
Speaker 4: this will go, Like immigration law is the one of
Speaker 4: the most like headache conducing things I've ever had to
Speaker 4: go through in my entire life.
Speaker 1: Ah, Like he will be spending a lot of money
Speaker 1: on immigration lawyers now.
Speaker 2: Also be really clear, I'm not equateing support for Palestine
Speaker 2: to being anti vax I'm just saying, like, if you know,
Speaker 2: if this was like a shitty guy, right, it would
Speaker 2: still be wrong.
Speaker 4: People, if it's something that we like to like laugh
Speaker 4: at for getting measles in Texas, disappearing people bad if
Speaker 4: you thought Russia was doing anti fascism in Ukraine, it
Speaker 4: would still be important, right, right, you know, to to
Speaker 4: do this, And should we take a break and come
Speaker 4: back and discuss some.
Speaker 1: More, Yes, yes, I wanted to give a little bit
Speaker 1: of background here some other stuff that I've been looking into.
Speaker 1: So in the fifth of February, Attorney General Pam Bondai
Speaker 1: issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing
Speaker 1: a quote October seventh task for so I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from it here to prioritize seeking justice for victims
Speaker 1: of October seventh, twenty twenty three terrorist attack in Israel,
Speaker 1: addressing the ongoing threat post by her Mass and its affiliates,
Speaker 1: and combating anti Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights
Speaker 1: violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items
Speaker 1: for the FBI. Right among them is investigating and prosecuting
Speaker 1: acts of terrorism, anti Semitic civil rights violations, and other
Speaker 1: federal crimes committed by her Mass supporters in the United States,
Speaker 1: including on college campuses. The final point is quote supporting
Speaker 1: efforts by the Israeli government Department of Defense and Department
Speaker 1: of Treasury to pursue non criminal responses to the October
Speaker 1: seventh attack and other terrorist activities by her mass. There's
Speaker 1: a couple of things that are can Obviously, the non
Speaker 1: criminal responses could include deportation, right like the person is
Speaker 1: not being accused of a crime, but none less have
Speaker 1: their visa evoked. Also that the idea of cooperating with
Speaker 1: a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide,
Speaker 1: potentially against US citizens or US residence, is quite concerning.
Speaker 1: It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive
Speaker 1: order that we've already discussed. Right. One of the parts
Speaker 1: of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I
Speaker 1: haven't seen any reporting on was the quote infantry and
Speaker 1: analysis of all the Title six complaints sort administrative actions
Speaker 1: including in K through twelve education related to anti Semitism
Speaker 1: pending or resolved after October seventh, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: Can you explain what Title six is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can in Garrison, and I would love to so.
Speaker 1: Title six is part of the Civil Rights Act of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four. Right, it prohibits discrimination based on race, color,
Speaker 1: or national origin. Yes, it applies to federally funded programs, activities,
Speaker 1: or institutions which receive federal funding. Right, which were almost
Speaker 1: every institution of education in this country, apart from some
Speaker 1: religious private schools. I guess maybe they still get some
Speaker 1: federal funding. There have been a number of Title six
Speaker 1: cases filed for anti Semitic discrimination and anti Palastinio or
Speaker 1: anti Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October seventh to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem
Speaker 1: to be covered by this, but the other ones do.
Speaker 1: The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and
Speaker 1: resolve some of these in the last few weeks of
Speaker 1: his tenure, and normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It
Speaker 1: was like some more trainings, the review of policies. Anyone
Speaker 1: who's who's been an educator at one of these institutions
Speaker 1: will have already been very familiar with the sort of
Speaker 1: anti discrimination training video that you have to watch, and
Speaker 1: they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos.
Speaker 1: I'm not really convinced that that is the way we
Speaker 1: deal with hatred, but that's why they recommended. The Emory one.
Speaker 1: I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it
Speaker 1: had to commit to a quote equitable hand of protests
Speaker 1: after its campus police were so violent towards anti genocide protesters.
Speaker 1: A lot of the other cases are still pending, but
Speaker 1: it seems like the Trump administration is going to go
Speaker 1: back and review all of them anyway. It does seem
Speaker 1: like whether it's spread organically or whether it's some kind
Speaker 1: of campaign to file Title six complaints. A lot of
Speaker 1: Title six complaints were filed after October seventh, and during
Speaker 1: this time when we saw like campus protests, when we
Speaker 1: saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right,
Speaker 1: and we saw some faculty who may or may not
Speaker 1: have supported the protest but felt very strongly about the
Speaker 1: right of students to have freedom of speech on campus.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure they would have been kind of wrapped
Speaker 1: up in this big drag net too. That this potentially
Speaker 1: raises the specter of like at least career threatening. And again,
Speaker 1: lots of faculty are not US citizens, right. They might
Speaker 1: be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they
Speaker 1: might be here on a visa. There are a number
Speaker 1: of different immigration statuses that they could have that are
Speaker 1: not US citizen that they could pretendally lose.
Speaker 4: So what is Trump trying to do about these cases
Speaker 4: which could be pending or have already been resolved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize
Speaker 1: institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility, so that that's not
Speaker 1: allowing someone to enter the United States. Right, and read
Speaker 1: out the section of the United States Code that a
Speaker 1: section of the United States Code quote so that such
Speaker 1: institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students
Speaker 1: and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that
Speaker 1: such report about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with
Speaker 1: applicable law, to investigations and comma, if warranted, comma actions
Speaker 1: to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right, This
Speaker 1: is in Trump's late January executive order. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking
Speaker 1: universities to do some of that legwork for them. It
Speaker 1: seems I imagine that this is the same section of
Speaker 1: the United States Code that we'll see us with reference to,
Speaker 1: but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which
Speaker 1: is people coming into the country. But I guess they
Speaker 1: could make an argument that like he disguised his inadmissible
Speaker 1: status or became inadmissible.
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean, there's these two sections, right, There's this
Speaker 4: one that revolves around who can be like admitted, who
Speaker 4: can be accepted. There's that one section which is a
Speaker 4: section one two two seven sub section A four a
Speaker 4: dash C, which is the section specifically on deportation as
Speaker 4: relating to like supporting quote unquote terrorist activities. So I
Speaker 4: think they will try to use these both like in conjunction.
Speaker 4: And I think it's also important to not doubt here
Speaker 4: the use of the word like aliens as opposed to
Speaker 4: the word that like Rubio was using previously, which is
Speaker 4: like visitors, right, Like visitors, I would say, probably applies
Speaker 4: more to like student visa holders, yeah, non residents versus aliens.
Speaker 4: Aliens can be anyone, right, like aliens, you can be
Speaker 4: visa holders, can be Green card holders, right. And so
Speaker 4: at least in like the official wording here, these are
Speaker 4: the word I think aliens is important as opposed to
Speaker 4: like Rubio's like you know posts on x dot com. Yeah,
Speaker 4: which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that refers to like just like you know, visitors
Speaker 4: to this country.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The right has used aliens for a long time, right,
Speaker 1: because it differentiates them from people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like it's very basic like dehumanization like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, in this case, it's I think it's important.
Speaker 1: It's pivotal, so like we have a sense of what
Speaker 1: will happen there. And maybe I could just finish up
Speaker 1: by saying, if you are faculty or a student, if
Speaker 1: you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using
Speaker 1: our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out
Speaker 1: to us, it's cool zone tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 1: It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as
Speaker 1: well as a recipient, so that would mean using a
Speaker 1: proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than
Speaker 1: using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again,
Speaker 1: cool zone tips at proton me. Obviously, this is something
Speaker 1: we're going to continue taking an interest in, and obviously
Speaker 1: it's something that we can't report the entirety of now
Speaker 1: because we're still waiting on the court case, but we
Speaker 1: are very interested in learning more about it, so please
Speaker 1: feel free to reach out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying they
Speaker 4: will be taking a continued interest in. He is promising
Speaker 4: that this is the first arrest of quote unquote many
Speaker 4: to come, so as they could do to focus on
Speaker 4: this we will as well. James, did you have anything
Speaker 4: else you wanted to say, like re lawyers.
Speaker 1: Yes, So, as I mentioned before, right, people under by
Speaker 1: administration had been moved away from their lawyers. This is
Speaker 1: very common. It seems that now people are being moved
Speaker 1: away from their lawyers and having teleconference request denied. I
Speaker 1: let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a
Speaker 1: client detained to San Diego. They moved to Texas, and
Speaker 1: now you can't tele conference in for a ten minute hearing,
Speaker 1: so you would have to fly right for that ten
Speaker 1: minute heref which is going to make it impossible both
Speaker 1: in time down to financial terms. What I'm understanding. I'm
Speaker 1: still digging into this a little bit more, but that's
Speaker 1: what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an
Speaker 1: ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer in
Speaker 1: one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas,
Speaker 1: you can help. But you probably already know that, and
Speaker 1: you're probably already doing that, and you're probably already very
Speaker 1: very overworked. Do you work asylum cases? So yeah, I
Speaker 1: think now is the time for groups like the ACLU
Speaker 1: to step up or shut up, and we'll see well.
Speaker 2: In the ACOU has come out against Mamod's arrest. Okay, good.
Speaker 2: The ADL obviously totally for it. Shocked at the ADL,
Speaker 2: an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not
Speaker 2: see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in
Speaker 2: order to disappear as political enemies. So we love the
Speaker 2: ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did. I mean, we'll
Speaker 2: see if they do anything, but they did, like make
Speaker 2: a statement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've been very good. I should say, the ACLU
Speaker 1: has been pursuing a lot of litigation. It's Trump administration.
Speaker 2: This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently.
Speaker 1: Yes, especially at a national level, they've been very good
Speaker 1: at this. And so yeah, you know, shout out to them.
Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know. We don't need to shout
Speaker 1: it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: Like this is literally why why you're there?
Speaker 3: Do a good job or else you'd better.
Speaker 2: Do something else too, like yeah, yeah, you'd better show up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't donate to the ad L. I guess if
Speaker 1: you were thinking of doing that after listening to.
Speaker 2: This podcast, Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here,
Speaker 2: meaning our podcast, it could, it is, It's happened.
Speaker 4: Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast it is happening here?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Uh huh, that's that's a fun joke that I only
Speaker 2: hear forty seven times a day. And the whole point
Speaker 2: of the podcast was, well, initially I was a crazy
Speaker 2: person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and now
Speaker 2: it's a bunch of that stuff happened, and even more
Speaker 2: of it looks very likely. And so now I just
Speaker 2: feel bad all the time.
Speaker 1: It's going to be called I fucking called it. I
Speaker 1: fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.
Speaker 4: Why don't you redad the podcast? I just feel bad
Speaker 4: all the time?
Speaker 2: Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have
Speaker 2: bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did. And
Speaker 2: DGI jeez, should I have bought stock and DGI?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna buy her a little DGI drone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going
Speaker 2: to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James.
Speaker 1: I should point out that I'm buying one. It's not
Speaker 1: capable of carrying a payload.
Speaker 4: It's definitely a s for investments to pull out your
Speaker 4: furrow one k. Now, when the market's crashing, use that
Speaker 4: money by drones. Those drones will be worth a lot
Speaker 4: more in five years.
Speaker 1: Or what is that?
Speaker 7: That is?
Speaker 1: That is a sound of a sound investment, a box
Speaker 1: of bullets.
Speaker 4: It's like how boomers used to like invest in like
Speaker 4: silver or gold as like a stable current. No, we're
Speaker 4: investing in DGI, like physical DG hydrones.
Speaker 2: We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta get it in a bottle. Rubbed it
Speaker 1: in a box. It can get light struck or get moist.
Speaker 1: You want to get it in a special black black bottle.
Speaker 2: James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And uh, you
Speaker 2: know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping
Speaker 2: it in toilet paper and swallowing it.
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: Sure, okay, Well did you say somebody.
Speaker 2: Speaking of toilet paper? Nate Silver has a newsletter and
Speaker 2: it would be useful as toilet paper more so than
Speaker 2: it is as a newsletter.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from twenty twenty
Speaker 4: four whend you said that it's okay.
Speaker 2: Normally my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting
Speaker 2: in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly
Speaker 2: fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or
Speaker 2: four times in a bucket, and then head over to
Speaker 2: Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.
Speaker 2: And I do this. I hate that I keep having
Speaker 2: I have regularly on election the years people were like but.
Speaker 5: He was always wrong.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually
Speaker 2: if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the
Speaker 2: reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read
Speaker 2: him during elections and I hate it because he's never
Speaker 2: been right about anything else. But he's he's a gambler.
Speaker 2: He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking
Speaker 2: about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by god, election polls
Speaker 2: are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists worth reading.
Speaker 2: And then after the election, no matter how well or
Speaker 2: badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years.
Speaker 2: And I didn't get to do that this year because
Speaker 2: on February twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, Nate wrote a
Speaker 2: column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence.
Speaker 4: Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right?
Speaker 2: Spiky intelligence? Yes? And it very helpfully starts with a
Speaker 2: drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he
Speaker 2: must have used some AI like video software to do that,
Speaker 2: just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking
Speaker 2: thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I
Speaker 2: can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like
Speaker 2: we needed this illustrated.
Speaker 4: I have to see this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I would like it to be shared.
Speaker 2: Look at this? Why did you, like, oh promise of
Speaker 2: AI we couldn't yes, wow, yeah yeah, it just it
Speaker 2: looks like maybe an amoeba if you looks like an amoeba,
Speaker 2: and then like a poorly drawn star.
Speaker 3: Is it's to keep this is? This is an actual thing.
Speaker 1: This sifts you wait, this is a thing.
Speaker 4: This is This is Boba and Kiki with a weird
Speaker 4: like digital fuzz over the.
Speaker 2: Fucker Boba and Kiki.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, Garrison, Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask
Speaker 4: people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these
Speaker 4: shapes are, like.
Speaker 2: Which was oh, it's like a then sure?
Speaker 4: Like like which one looks which one looks nicer, which
Speaker 4: one looks meaner, you know that sort of thing. I'm
Speaker 4: a Kiki type, like like I I am a Kiky
Speaker 4: in terms in terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.
Speaker 2: Now that you bring up Rorshak, all I can think
Speaker 2: of is how cool it would be if Rorshak from
Speaker 2: The Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house and did
Speaker 2: his thing.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, I think Rorshak and Night Silver might get friends.
Speaker 2: Actually yeah, no, no, Nate would. But after them getting
Speaker 2: along for like forty five minutes, Nate would take him
Speaker 2: to an illegal card game, and Rorshak would murder everybody
Speaker 2: in the room because they were gambling without a license.
Speaker 4: So I'm assuming Theate's going to try to argue that
Speaker 4: that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drug here
Speaker 4: as opposed to like the empathetic right there.
Speaker 2: Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there.
Speaker 2: He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I
Speaker 2: don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer
Speaker 2: it from the image or if he's Okay, we'll get
Speaker 2: your opinion on it is. Is he ripping these people off
Speaker 2: because this doesn't count as enough for him to be
Speaker 2: crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea,
Speaker 2: which he credits to his stupid book that he came
Speaker 2: up with later. But I'm just going to start reading
Speaker 2: the stupid column. Well hit us with the second paragraph,
Speaker 2: because that fuck Kevin gotten paragraph one JAKA.
Speaker 1: That radicalized me immediately.
Speaker 2: There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can
Speaker 2: run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the
Speaker 2: platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest and
Speaker 2: then there's a little ie in parentheses because we need
Speaker 2: that Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then the two
Speaker 2: eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment.
Speaker 2: Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay, you'd
Speaker 2: think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves
Speaker 2: Elon and intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded
Speaker 2: or co founded Tesla, SpaceX, open Ai, neuralink Xai, PayPal,
Speaker 2: and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself
Speaker 2: into a position where he's now the de facto chief
Speaker 2: of staff to the President of the United States. I
Speaker 2: do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.
Speaker 2: Some of these were long shot bets, and Walter Isaacson's
Speaker 2: biography of must documents he thought he'd be ruined if
Speaker 2: there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success
Speaker 2: of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter
Speaker 2: was a candy play for cultural and political influence, but
Speaker 2: it probably And he doesn't bring up in this whole
Speaker 2: thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies,
Speaker 2: not a word about the boring company, not a word
Speaker 2: about hyper loop.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, any of the failed on his.
Speaker 2: Record does seem better if you ignore the two massively
Speaker 2: publicized and invest did absolute failures.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, and last week, I know there was a
Speaker 4: space X lunch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure
Speaker 4: it didn't fling debris all over lower.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft, also
Speaker 2: crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co founded open ai,
Speaker 2: but not in a way that mattered. He just shot
Speaker 2: down money in there and then get kind of edged out. Sure, Yes,
Speaker 2: and is actively in a conflict with everybody who did
Speaker 2: make open ai as prominent as it is. Again, Natela
Speaker 2: has to leave a lot out in order to start
Speaker 2: making this case.
Speaker 4: But so he's going to argue that, you know, we're
Speaker 4: going to see how how well this co presidency goes.
Speaker 4: But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all
Speaker 4: of this stuff done. R.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't be profitable,
Speaker 2: but we'll see how you know, he could probably profit
Speaker 2: from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a
Speaker 2: word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like that,
Speaker 2: just breaking the law. So why are why are we
Speaker 2: Why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that
Speaker 2: get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels,
Speaker 2: Because yes, if you are breaking the loss, sometimes that
Speaker 2: goes well for you financially.
Speaker 4: Well, Walter White, they've done some bad things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but but you can't deny he was a brilliant
Speaker 2: method cook. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is.
Speaker 2: Fourteen hundred. According to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of
Speaker 2: outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably
Speaker 2: even a genius. And yet when my first off, it
Speaker 2: becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a
Speaker 2: fourteen hundred to be an impressive SAT score and would
Speaker 2: normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score
Speaker 2: of fourteen hundred if it weren't for all of Elon's
Speaker 2: other genius accomplishments. And yet, when my partner and I
Speaker 2: were heading to dinner the other day and we saw
Speaker 2: some tweet that Elon sent I forget which one because
Speaker 2: he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's
Speaker 2: such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius
Speaker 2: and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spikey intelligence.
Speaker 4: Here we go.
Speaker 2: This gets to like the core or what's annoying about
Speaker 2: Nate is his need to He's one of these guys.
Speaker 2: You know, you know what it is. He's an intellectual
Speaker 2: enclosurist right where he's not confident to be like everyone
Speaker 2: is very aware of the fact that no one is
Speaker 2: good at everything, and that people have holes in their competence,
Speaker 2: and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad
Speaker 2: fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence.
Speaker 2: This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate has to
Speaker 2: give it a name so that he can sell his books.
Speaker 2: So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual.
Speaker 2: Now it's my idea. I'm the one who came up
Speaker 2: with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate,
Speaker 2: it's annoying.
Speaker 1: Capital ask Capital I rights to trademark spike intelligence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original,
Speaker 2: and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly,
Speaker 2: many of the instances online refer to people of the
Speaker 2: on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he
Speaker 2: has Asperger syndrome. But the concept is simple. All intelligence
Speaker 2: is a multi dimensional phenomenon. The scientific consensus is that
Speaker 2: there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also
Speaker 2: called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd
Speaker 2: associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and
Speaker 2: verbal skills and the gire are correlated. The correlations are
Speaker 2: loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of
Speaker 2: different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's
Speaker 2: just going into like he talks about like the absent
Speaker 2: minded professor, Like it's all just these these very common
Speaker 2: ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more
Speaker 2: things than they're good at, right, Like it's there's no
Speaker 2: need to explain how elon Musk has been successful at
Speaker 2: certain things, but Nate does and he has to keep
Speaker 2: going back to. Like he makes a comment later and
Speaker 2: here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He
Speaker 2: doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, Like, well,
Speaker 2: if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he
Speaker 2: obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves,
Speaker 2: which ignores the fact that, like he's not making any
Speaker 2: of these decisions, Like he bought a company that already
Speaker 2: had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket
Speaker 2: engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring
Speaker 2: in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he
Speaker 2: was very very good at hyping people up and getting
Speaker 2: people to believe in him until he was too big
Speaker 2: to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
Speaker 2: But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of,
Speaker 2: among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is,
Speaker 2: who is a guy who was really good at one
Speaker 2: narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything,
Speaker 2: and he can't that's like a dangerous thing for Nate
Speaker 2: to think too hard about.
Speaker 4: Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very
Speaker 4: soft and soothing ads.
Speaker 6: Yeah we're back.
Speaker 2: I want to talk a little bit about the danger
Speaker 2: of being a guy who gets famous for being really
Speaker 2: good at one thing and then gets a job talking
Speaker 2: about everything, because I've had a version of that experience,
Speaker 2: and let me tell you, you're not ever going to be
Speaker 2: competent to discuss all of the things that you can
Speaker 2: make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No
Speaker 2: one ever has been and no one ever will be,
Speaker 2: which is why what you ought to do is the
Speaker 2: thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on
Speaker 2: a bunch of people to like, run a website with
Speaker 2: you right where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: it turns out five thirty eight was a bad business venture.
Speaker 2: It got massively overvalued, a company spent a shitload more
Speaker 2: money on it that it was capable of making, and
Speaker 2: now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago
Speaker 2: to do his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic
Speaker 2: case in the problem of like hubris and the fact
Speaker 2: that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't
Speaker 2: run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking
Speaker 2: about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that
Speaker 2: maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at
Speaker 2: was being the guy from the Music Man, because I
Speaker 2: think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period
Speaker 2: of time, right, he still clearly does. Yes, Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: been this thing lately where a lot of folks on
Speaker 2: the left have been like the Oh, you couldn't always
Speaker 2: tell that he was a con man, You couldn't always
Speaker 2: tell that he was this bad, like he was always
Speaker 2: the worst. I was like, no, Like back in twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen fifteen, when I was writing about the billionaires and
Speaker 2: rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie
Speaker 2: Diamond because he had helped create the two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight financial collapse and he seen it. He just seemed
Speaker 2: obviously much worse than this guy who up to that
Speaker 2: point was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know,
Speaker 2: you have two companies doing that. Musk was not top
Speaker 2: of most people's radars for very good reason, which gets
Speaker 2: to like, there's this thing that's been created because of
Speaker 2: some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had
Speaker 2: and his like family background which has a lot of
Speaker 2: white supremacy in it, to that that this has been
Speaker 2: Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning, and
Speaker 2: that it's all come together for him, like as if
Speaker 2: he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond
Speaker 2: villain who's been executing this like thirty year plan to
Speaker 2: get where he is.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I.
Speaker 2: Think when you look at his cognition, like he's not
Speaker 2: the same man he was ten years ago. He's not
Speaker 2: the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes.
Speaker 2: And I'm saying he was a good man before then.
Speaker 2: I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly
Speaker 2: his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter.
Speaker 4: And well yeah, and you can like measure this through
Speaker 4: his posting as well, like yeah, like that the types
Speaker 4: of posts he would make in twenty seventeen are like
Speaker 4: completely opposite to the way that that he would talk
Speaker 4: about certain social issues. Now, oh yeah, he's not like
Speaker 4: meming about like anarcho syndicalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to a few of those things. But I want
Speaker 2: to read another quote from Nate's article, because he's going
Speaker 2: to talk about his book On the Edge, which quote
Speaker 2: describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call
Speaker 2: the River. These people who occupy a range of professions
Speaker 2: from AI research to poker to venture capital, are bright,
Speaker 2: but in spikey ways. In Baron Cohen's dacotomy, they lean
Speaker 2: heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good
Speaker 2: at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms
Speaker 2: of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self awareness. They also
Speaker 2: have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example,
Speaker 2: they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrariant. And again,
Speaker 2: what you are talking about all of these people number one,
Speaker 2: When he says AI research, he's not talking about people
Speaker 2: who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking
Speaker 2: about Sam Altman, right, ye, poker, venture capital. This is
Speaker 2: all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The River is
Speaker 2: just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money
Speaker 2: on bets, and they are contrarian and competitive because that's
Speaker 2: how gamblers are. That's the intelligence, that's the river. Like
Speaker 2: he's thinking about it as like the specific chunk of
Speaker 2: intellectuals who have You know, there's some dangers, but they
Speaker 2: have great potential to make the world Brilliant're like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: these are just people who like wind up shooting themselves
Speaker 2: outside of a sports betting facility.
Speaker 4: Like that's the river, mate, I have been turning into
Speaker 4: a monster during our friend poker nights recently.
Speaker 3: It's it's tough garrison.
Speaker 2: By the way, I've been meaning to talk to you
Speaker 2: about wearing the full data makeup, because you know your
Speaker 2: skin can't breathe. If you coat your whole body, you're
Speaker 2: only supposed to put that on your face.
Speaker 4: I don't do that every time I play. Get a
Speaker 4: gold finger yourself, gar, I don't put on the data
Speaker 4: makeup every time I play poker, just that one time. Actually, no,
Speaker 4: I've done that twice nowt never minds.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, it's becoming I also have the little hats.
Speaker 4: I ordered a twelve pack of like of like the
Speaker 4: little like poker visors to complete the outface.
Speaker 2: She did, of course she did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be rude, not too for better or worse.
Speaker 2: This typology the river is associated with high achievement in
Speaker 2: certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is
Speaker 2: also associated with high variance. Makman free built FTX into
Speaker 2: a company that investors valued at thirty two billion before
Speaker 2: the House of cards collapsed again because he was a gambler. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and again Nate can't just accept oh, he was never
Speaker 2: actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a
Speaker 2: while and then gave it and then gambled it all
Speaker 2: away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.
Speaker 2: Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book,
Speaker 2: and I can tell you that he very much falls
Speaker 2: into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbassy,
Speaker 2: lucky dumbass.
Speaker 1: It's not hard.
Speaker 2: What's the genius? Where did he prove that?
Speaker 4: I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate silver a
Speaker 4: man who probably yeah, value his own intelligence like a
Speaker 4: great deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's the whole thing, right, Nate Silva
Speaker 1: kan and like it would be ego death to admit
Speaker 1: that there were just some lucky, dumb white dudes.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If a guy had won like one of the lotteries,
Speaker 2: was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got
Speaker 2: crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks
Speaker 2: because he just kept putting half a million dollars at
Speaker 2: a time on twenty one black at a roulette table
Speaker 2: in Vegas, and I would be like, well, obviously he's
Speaker 2: a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How
Speaker 2: else could he have made the money in the first place?
Speaker 2: And I was like, no, he got lucky, and then
Speaker 2: he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have
Speaker 2: good judgment. Yeah, So it's important to avoid two pitfalls
Speaker 2: when encountering people with spiky intelligence, namely, neither there are
Speaker 2: worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
Speaker 2: And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless
Speaker 2: statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way, because only I
Speaker 2: think the undercurrent here is that only people like this
Speaker 2: It's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring
Speaker 2: the world forward, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no one else to serve empathy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, like you're just addicted to putting money on
Speaker 2: sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, So here's the
Speaker 2: two things he wants to warn us up or wants
Speaker 2: people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent, in several ways,
Speaker 2: but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.
Speaker 2: Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and
Speaker 2: we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd
Speaker 2: to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just
Speaker 2: because he isn't in others. And if he has merely
Speaker 2: very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's
Speaker 2: not high school. Nobody cares about SSAT skills.
Speaker 4: Elon's what like like like fifty, like fifty five or
Speaker 4: something like what are we doing?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are a middle aged man. I
Speaker 2: don't even know what my SAT score was.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say like, I never took our SAT, but
Speaker 1: I spent more than a decade in full time education,
Speaker 1: and anyone who ever told me that SAT schools I
Speaker 1: immediately hated and never took them.
Speaker 5: Seriously.
Speaker 2: I've been almost twenty years asking people questions for a living,
Speaker 2: and I've never asked anyone there A sorry, Garrison.
Speaker 4: Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for
Speaker 4: evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not Garrison, just how much well he doesn't.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have an alternative method and seeing what you
Speaker 1: might quote an infographic because the next section of the
Speaker 1: article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence.
Speaker 2: So first he admits he tried to track Elon down
Speaker 2: for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to
Speaker 2: talk to him. Because even I have to say, Elon
Speaker 2: does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver,
Speaker 2: because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree,
Speaker 2: and that is a better use of his time than
Speaker 2: talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk
Speaker 2: to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from quote
Speaker 2: many other Silicon Valley big wigs I have met, okay
Speaker 2: helping him in the This is the fact that quote
Speaker 2: Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into
Speaker 2: a running diary of his innermost thoughts, and in addition
Speaker 2: to that, the biographies of the guy one more caveat.
Speaker 2: Here I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of
Speaker 2: Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go
Speaker 2: down here and the next segment is dimensions were Musk
Speaker 2: has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally Nate's
Speaker 2: going to prove it, and I'm gonna I'm going to
Speaker 2: show you guys, how he how he chooses to do that,
Speaker 2: what the evidence he gives us here is, and I
Speaker 2: think this is.
Speaker 4: Something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads.
Speaker 2: Good point here, all right, we're back. So let's look
Speaker 2: at what Nate shows as is the chief dimension where
Speaker 2: Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. I'm just
Speaker 2: reading that first line, man, So the first words under
Speaker 2: this are cognitive load capacity in overall horsepower slash ram.
Speaker 2: He's always on, I mean literally look at how often
Speaker 2: he's tweeting, and then a huge graph that shows the
Speaker 2: density of tweets posted and win which has been used
Speaker 2: by other people to prove that since sometime in late
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two, he's almost never gotten more than about
Speaker 2: three hours without posting a tweet, Like it's just a
Speaker 2: solid red after he buys the site. This like graph
Speaker 2: of like when he makes his post, he's never offline.
Speaker 2: Now he's not sleeping.
Speaker 4: So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from
Speaker 4: twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four showing the time of
Speaker 4: day and when a post is posted, represented by small
Speaker 4: red dots and yes, at around twenty twenty two, the
Speaker 4: thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a
Speaker 4: straight red like the period of where he must be
Speaker 4: sleeping in this, Yeah, is very concerning.
Speaker 2: No, he sometimes sleeps from about six to nine a
Speaker 2: as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often.
Speaker 1: It's like a streak at twenty twenty three where he
Speaker 1: just isn't sleepy, he's not sleeping.
Speaker 2: And again he's on drugs. People. I think they're probably prescripted.
Speaker 2: I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.
Speaker 2: When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you
Speaker 2: want to do recreationally prescribed.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that
Speaker 2: to judge drug users. I say that as someone who
Speaker 2: had a drug problem, like this is drug user behavior.
Speaker 2: And specifically Silver he's using the sobriety as possible. Sorry,
Speaker 2: and specifically Silver is using this as an evidence of
Speaker 2: MUCKs intelligence. Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 4: He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he
Speaker 4: must be like a special type of person.
Speaker 2: He's railing adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day.
Speaker 2: That's what this is a sign of, and no one
Speaker 2: is allowed to take his phone away anyway. Here's how
Speaker 2: Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA term, we
Speaker 2: say this as a player with an exceptionally high motor,
Speaker 2: and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world
Speaker 2: becomes more complex. Lack's fall. I was simultaneously doing an
Speaker 2: extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to
Speaker 2: build up Silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even
Speaker 2: if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would
Speaker 2: only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon
Speaker 2: is taking on I don't know, approximately a thousand times
Speaker 2: more stress than that, and has done so for years. No,
Speaker 2: he's not. He just tweets he has a massive number one.
Speaker 2: All of the businesses are being run by people who
Speaker 2: are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to
Speaker 2: sit in meetings and say yes or no, toe stuff
Speaker 2: and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right,
Speaker 2: and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now
Speaker 2: than it gained after the election, and SpaceX just had
Speaker 2: a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not
Speaker 2: done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas,
Speaker 2: and the hyper loop is nothing right like this. This
Speaker 2: is just full of shit, Nate. Like what you have
Speaker 2: just described, running an election model that's functional, going on
Speaker 2: a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is
Speaker 2: more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, more actual effort work.
Speaker 4: Risk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting doing
Speaker 4: drugs and injecting random women with his sperm yes and
Speaker 4: sending tweets.
Speaker 1: He doesn't do the injecting.
Speaker 2: I think, oh, god, Garrison, that comes up to no no, oh,
Speaker 2: and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts
Speaker 2: the graph of how much Elon tweets.
Speaker 1: Okay, good there it is, okay, okay.
Speaker 2: Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.
Speaker 2: Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating,
Speaker 2: especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded
Speaker 2: more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities,
Speaker 2: doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which
Speaker 2: would be stressful on their own, while still managing to
Speaker 2: father thirteen children. I'm tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again,
Speaker 2: equivalent efforts tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering
Speaker 2: thirteen children. He's not a father to them, No, he
Speaker 2: just he contributed by it.
Speaker 7: He didn't even have sex y.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's neually the lowest possible effort way to have
Speaker 1: a child.
Speaker 2: Wait, Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with
Speaker 2: penises listening to this come like, that's not a big effort.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't include that. It's like, what did I get
Speaker 2: done this week? Well, in addition to working forty hours,
Speaker 2: I jacked off.
Speaker 3: That's a little transphobic.
Speaker 7: This is a joke.
Speaker 4: Anyway, continue it said.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying it doesn't count as work, you know,
Speaker 2: yeah from us, unless you're a sex worker, than it does. Okay,
Speaker 2: Like especially I know a lot of male porn stars.
Speaker 2: That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's
Speaker 2: why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that
Speaker 2: kill their hearts.
Speaker 4: I would like to get into more of Silver's like
Speaker 4: justification for why why he associates this this high tweet
Speaker 4: load with like intelligence.
Speaker 2: Well, because it shows rapid cognition in thin slicing ability.
Speaker 1: Okay, hmm right, yeah, sure sure.
Speaker 2: Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium, I'm
Speaker 2: being first to market. Making decent judgments fast is often
Speaker 2: more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, vcs imagine
Speaker 2: themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders, as though on Shark Tank,
Speaker 2: relying on well known gut instinct. But this also gets
Speaker 2: people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is
Speaker 2: shark Tank's success rate? Yeah, I bet there's a quick
Speaker 2: answer to that. Yeah, and that's consinuering.
Speaker 1: The air has built in free television advertising for any
Speaker 1: product means.
Speaker 2: It's than fifty percent of the they're successfully closed. God, yeah,
Speaker 2: so I died out. All this tweeting also shows abstract
Speaker 2: problem solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity,
Speaker 2: though in Musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest itself an
Speaker 2: artistic prowesslyevingly.
Speaker 4: You know what, I'll give it to day. There, I'll
Speaker 4: give it today.
Speaker 2: I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course,
Speaker 2: instrumental rationality philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types
Speaker 2: of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ens, basically
Speaker 2: figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want.
Speaker 2: For this category, I think you have to point towards
Speaker 2: the scoreboard, must have some unparalleled accomplishments, and isn't about
Speaker 2: to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a
Speaker 2: category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole,
Speaker 2: not one for nice guys.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 2: And again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal
Speaker 2: getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is
Speaker 2: actively doing as much damage to the bio fear as possible,
Speaker 2: ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary
Speaker 2: to make any kind of off world civilization likely, I
Speaker 2: would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually
Speaker 2: want us to get to Mars, right, He just wants
Speaker 2: to be in charge of everything.
Speaker 4: No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference.
Speaker 4: That's that's really it, yesh.
Speaker 2: It is yes, yes, yes, and he has been very
Speaker 2: successful at that. But again it's the successive brute force.
Speaker 2: It's the same way as like if you hire a
Speaker 2: thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps
Speaker 2: of a guy who annoys you. Like you could say, like,
Speaker 2: I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who
Speaker 2: annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of
Speaker 2: dudes who can beat people up for you. Like is
Speaker 2: that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to
Speaker 2: hire thugs?
Speaker 3: Or are you just a mob boss?
Speaker 2: Right? Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss?
Speaker 2: No one is allowed to attack because it's going to
Speaker 2: be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon,
Speaker 2: you know. Anyway, we need ghost dog.
Speaker 4: It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know, a few
Speaker 4: weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a
Speaker 4: resist Live moment and I actually ashed my clothes cigarette
Speaker 4: on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But
Speaker 4: now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.
Speaker 2: Now, No, you can't.
Speaker 4: I could face substantial charges.
Speaker 1: You might want to text resist to a certain five
Speaker 1: digit number or something. That's probably the best way to
Speaker 1: solve this garrison.
Speaker 2: I just text resist to every single person in my
Speaker 2: phone book every day. I mean, it takes about seven hours.
Speaker 2: I have fallen behind on work.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the only thing we can do to
Speaker 1: five FasTIS.
Speaker 4: The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep
Speaker 4: deprivation and drug problem apparently, or at least that is
Speaker 4: how you show for it. It's funny because I saw
Speaker 4: Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood or
Speaker 4: now plasma. Oh we had a dead guy posted his
Speaker 4: only self study on like the damaging effects of sleep deprivation,
Speaker 4: and I'm pretty sure Musklake retweeted it with like with
Speaker 4: like an emoti or something like, yeah, dude, You're brain
Speaker 4: is completely sure.
Speaker 2: Now you you are you are fried. You are the
Speaker 2: most cooked a ban has ever been.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting study, like there there is legitimately interesting
Speaker 1: things to look at Elo Musk's brain.
Speaker 2: Well yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data
Speaker 2: put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just
Speaker 2: sleep deprivation but like wealth and power impact the brain.
Speaker 2: And like all of it makes a strong case that
Speaker 2: Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to
Speaker 2: his brain than like a career one of those career
Speaker 2: WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then
Speaker 2: shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their
Speaker 2: brain later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, well before before we close, I do
Speaker 4: want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like
Speaker 4: linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know boba and
Speaker 4: kiki is is is? This is a shape language like
Speaker 4: correlation test I myself as well as Nate here, I
Speaker 4: have kind of expanded it's it's it's usage to like
Speaker 4: projecting even more like human or like like emotional qualities
Speaker 4: onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please,
Speaker 4: sociologists leave me alone, do not do not do that
Speaker 4: message me like.
Speaker 1: Your favorite French don't call.
Speaker 4: I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already
Speaker 4: hear like twelve different reddators typing. But yes, I think
Speaker 4: Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor
Speaker 4: to like show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative Musk's
Speaker 4: own intelligences as symbolized by by a kiki as opposed
Speaker 4: to you know, maybe like maybe like a Bill Gates,
Speaker 4: which might be more of like a boba intelligence type. Okay,
Speaker 4: a little softer, a little bit more philanthropy.
Speaker 2: You know, I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist
Speaker 2: and zizion literature for two straight weeks, about a quarter
Speaker 2: of a million words by my last count. Garrison I
Speaker 2: don't have an enemy to do this again. I'm going
Speaker 2: to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where
Speaker 2: things make sense, where the world's safe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War,
Speaker 1: which is my comparative happy place.
Speaker 2: Ah, the Syrian Civil War.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really great world. I do wonder if
Speaker 1: he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing
Speaker 1: by using that little filter that he used over the
Speaker 1: boom BERANKI no.
Speaker 2: Because it would be if it's actually not fair use
Speaker 2: now as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing.
Speaker 1: He doesn't, Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them.
Speaker 2: Then it is fair use, right, and he could use
Speaker 2: like a little clip of it is and illustrate the point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.
Speaker 2: Anyway, this is all I want to say again about
Speaker 2: Nate silver until twenty twenty eight. And if you know
Speaker 2: what the upside if democracy really does die is, we'll
Speaker 2: never have to talk about him again.
Speaker 4: If Trumpet must really take over fully into a full coup,
Speaker 4: we never have to talk about Nate Silvan.
Speaker 2: Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt.
Speaker 2: They'll be doing a.
Speaker 1: Sod numbers and he will still be analyzing that data.
Speaker 1: They straight regime capture of Nate SILVERA.
Speaker 2: Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten
Speaker 2: one hundred and four percent of the vote.
Speaker 1: But there's a spiky percentages.
Speaker 2: There's a spikey percentages.
Speaker 4: Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino
Speaker 4: or something? Right, this is just like just like put
Speaker 4: him away.
Speaker 2: I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need
Speaker 2: to do the other stuff. And if he was like
Speaker 2: just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well,
Speaker 2: that's what he loves.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: If I had Nate's Silver money, I'd probably just write
Speaker 2: novels for the rest of my life because that's what
Speaker 2: I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps
Speaker 2: writing about politics. He's not good at it, and he
Speaker 2: can't like it. He needs to feel special.
Speaker 1: He wants to feel like a special boy who knows
Speaker 1: the answers that no one else does.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, anyway, this is us making fun of
Speaker 2: Nate Silver, so you don't Well, you can still make
Speaker 2: fun of him, but you don't have to read him.
Speaker 2: We did that for you. Good night.
Speaker 4: This is It could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling
Speaker 4: of the world, and what it means for you. I'm
Speaker 4: Garrison Davis today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.
Speaker 4: This episode recovering the week of March five to March twelve.
Speaker 4: Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Junior eats beef tallow
Speaker 4: French fries at Steak and Shake, and Sam Sedter commits
Speaker 4: a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm very happy to join you for ED this week.
Speaker 2: Huge fan of ED, just like just big big ED guy,
Speaker 2: So yeah, psyched to be here. I feel like we
Speaker 2: should mention up top.
Speaker 3: There's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the
Speaker 3: most like electing fucking Caliguli's horse to the Senate thing
Speaker 3: I've seen in a long time, So stay tuned for that.
Speaker 2: Lots of good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yes, we will get to it.
Speaker 4: First, I would like to give a little bit of
Speaker 4: an update on a story that we talked about a
Speaker 4: few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a
Speaker 4: green card for a Palestinian activist Mamood Khalil. As of Wednesday,
Speaker 4: his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client.
Speaker 4: There was a large rally outside the First Court conference
Speaker 4: in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this
Speaker 4: a few days ago for some background, an episode with
Speaker 4: James Robert and myself. Robert, do you want to like
Speaker 4: briefly summarize the situation, and then I'll play a clip
Speaker 4: from one of his lawyers.
Speaker 2: The situation is that this guy got taken into custody.
Speaker 2: My understanding is it was at an apartment that he
Speaker 2: lived in with his wife. He was a US citizen.
Speaker 2: He became aware, it looks like at least about twenty
Speaker 2: four hours before probably became aware that he was being
Speaker 2: It's a little clear if he was just like being
Speaker 2: surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off.
Speaker 2: But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that
Speaker 2: Ice was coming for him about a day before they
Speaker 2: did when they entered the house. My understanding is based
Speaker 2: on the claims being made by his wife that they
Speaker 2: did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything.
Speaker 4: He's still not charged with any crime.
Speaker 2: No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just
Speaker 2: took him and turned off the phone when they were
Speaker 2: on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct,
Speaker 2: So it's like none of this is the way this
Speaker 2: should have gone, Like if this was an arrest, no.
Speaker 4: He was just like black bagged from campus.
Speaker 2: But it's not an arrest again, and they've been very
Speaker 2: clear about this that, like they have specifically stated not
Speaker 2: accusing him of like breaking the law, right, Like, that's
Speaker 2: not what's going on.
Speaker 4: Here, correct, And we will get to some of that later.
Speaker 4: I'm going to play a clip from a press conference
Speaker 4: outside court that happened on Wednesday, March twelfth.
Speaker 11: This is one of his lawyers, Mister Khalil's detention has
Speaker 11: nothing to do with security.
Speaker 5: It is only about repression.
Speaker 11: The United States government has taken the position that it
Speaker 11: can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful, permanent
Speaker 11: resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism, in
Speaker 11: this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and
Speaker 11: an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes
Speaker 11: the position that because the Secretary of State finds his
Speaker 11: descent unacceptable, contrary to US foreign policy, he can be deported.
Speaker 11: As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents,
Speaker 11: including the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
Speaker 5: That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 11: We're also talking about a period of repression that the
Speaker 11: Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following nine to eleven,
Speaker 11: when we were in the courts trying to get people
Speaker 11: out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is
Speaker 11: the legal infrastructure is so much stronger, and everyone out
Speaker 11: here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in
Speaker 11: the face of this amount of repression. We will be
Speaker 11: fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to
Speaker 11: bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading.
Speaker 5: To many others, as the administration has threatened to do.
Speaker 4: Was on Wednesday. For now, a Khalil will be remaining
Speaker 4: in ICED attention in Louisiana, and ICE director Tom Homan
Speaker 4: said Wednesday that quote, free speech has its limitations. Unquote Yeah.
Speaker 2: I have found some stuff today of people on the
Speaker 2: right attacking the judge who put out a I guess
Speaker 2: called a stay on this in part because the judge
Speaker 2: is Jewish, so it's nice to see the anti Semitism
Speaker 2: being used in that way as well in this instance.
Speaker 2: Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.
Speaker 4: A White House official did tell friend of the pod
Speaker 4: the Free Press not necessarily our favorite publication, but they
Speaker 4: do have an exclusive quote here that the basis for
Speaker 4: targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations
Speaker 4: against other students, saying Khalil is quote a threat to
Speaker 4: the foreign policy and national security interests of the United
Speaker 4: States unquote. Said the official that this calculation was the
Speaker 4: driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here
Speaker 4: is not that he was breaking the law. So we
Speaker 4: have this official like openly say, like, he's not charged
Speaker 4: with the crime. We're just wanting to see if we
Speaker 4: can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident
Speaker 4: for saying something that we don't like?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that there's been a lot of
Speaker 3: comparisons to this to direct Macarthyism. I think that's accurate
Speaker 3: to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to
Speaker 3: this is not Macarthyism. It's the Palmer Raids, yep, which
Speaker 3: I think people tend to be way less familiar with.
Speaker 3: That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted
Speaker 3: at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition
Speaker 3: to World War One, and they did basically the same shit.
Speaker 3: A lot of people would give anti war speeches and
Speaker 3: then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort
Speaker 3: of like leftists would get fucking deported for it. So yeah,
Speaker 3: that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the
Speaker 3: line is not drawn here, and it should have been
Speaker 3: drawn like two hundred miles back from here, but if
Speaker 3: isn't drawn here, this is.
Speaker 1: Going to continue.
Speaker 3: This is going to continue to get worse.
Speaker 4: And I mean all of this is in relation to
Speaker 4: Trump's executive order, you know about quote unquote anti Semitism. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: today in the Oval Office he said something incredibly anti
Speaker 4: Semitic and also anti Arab somehow, like in this same
Speaker 4: statement saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as
Speaker 4: I'm concerned, he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish,
Speaker 4: He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian unquote, which is
Speaker 4: just an unbelievably anti Semitic and anti Arab statement all
Speaker 4: at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they
Speaker 4: act or things they've said, or things they believe in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's one of those things. Again, Like it's
Speaker 2: worth like covering this as it develops. There's not much
Speaker 2: to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and
Speaker 2: has to be opposed immediately and vigorously.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, yeah, no, it's really bad. And of course
Speaker 4: you're not gonna have the ADL coming out against Trump.
Speaker 2: HEO, the acl you did, which I should note because
Speaker 2: I heard some people saying they did not expect the
Speaker 2: ACLU too they have. But yeah, the ADL is fully
Speaker 2: in the camp of Lockgin, who won up who's ever
Speaker 2: protested Israel.
Speaker 4: And they're not going to call Trump Andie Semitic for
Speaker 4: making a statement like this, Yeah, because their interests are
Speaker 4: fairly aligned at this point. Read what's happening in Gaza.
Speaker 4: So I think now we're going to play a special
Speaker 4: report from James, who can't be on the recording here today,
Speaker 4: but he does have a report on deportations in Panama.
Speaker 4: So James take it away.
Speaker 1: So something that we've seen in the last week is
Speaker 1: that the people who the US government has deported to Panama,
Speaker 1: who it can't deport to their home countries, have in
Speaker 1: some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given
Speaker 1: a thirty day visa or thirty days to essentially exit Panama,
Speaker 1: and they're not really been given any support. So they're
Speaker 1: in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in
Speaker 1: Panama City, right just wandering around trying to work out
Speaker 1: how to get home and trying to work out like
Speaker 1: what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have
Speaker 1: fled places like Afghanistan, Iran right where they can't go
Speaker 1: back to they would face persecution just for the act
Speaker 1: of having tried to lead, and they weren't already facing
Speaker 1: persecution before, which many of them were. That that's why
Speaker 1: they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down
Speaker 1: the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads.
Speaker 1: But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely
Speaker 1: well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get
Speaker 1: these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.
Speaker 4: Right, We're gonna go on a break and come back
Speaker 4: to talk about the Department of Education and Tariff talk
Speaker 4: with mi A Walng.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 2: Well we're are back, and you know it's everyone's favorite
Speaker 2: time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we
Speaker 2: get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical
Speaker 2: guest to set this section of the program up.
Speaker 4: Lock Locking jazz, Rocky jazz bot sorry lot locking jazz bo.
Speaker 2: Locky jazz bob ah. Yeah, Oh my gosh. That was
Speaker 2: worth the rest of our year's budget. Now everyone will
Speaker 2: be getting paid for the rest of the year in
Speaker 2: Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this.
Speaker 2: But I think we can all agree worth it.
Speaker 4: Do you want to explain what that is because I
Speaker 4: still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening
Speaker 4: theme song is for tariff talk.
Speaker 2: Well, there was a great band called The Clash once
Speaker 2: and they wrote one song that wasn't very good, and
Speaker 2: in it somebody says something that didn't sound very much
Speaker 2: like the word tariff, but if you mispronounce the word tariff,
Speaker 2: it fit in. And that's where forty two thousand dollars
Speaker 2: of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's
Speaker 2: talk about tariff's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now that I've they've gotten one of the two
Speaker 3: things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So
Speaker 3: since last week this has been an entire roller coaster
Speaker 3: because right after we finished recording, in like the next
Speaker 3: two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to
Speaker 3: be that bad, because a lot of the tariffs that
Speaker 3: were hit with Trump sort of general twenty five percent
Speaker 3: Canada Mexico tariff got wave after Trump agreed not to
Speaker 3: apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements.
Speaker 3: But then everyone remembered that the twenty five percent steel
Speaker 3: in a lune of tariff was still going into effect,
Speaker 3: and so that went into effect this week. Now, there
Speaker 3: was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump
Speaker 3: was talking about doubling them to fifty percents. He backs
Speaker 3: off of this in exchange for Ontario's dug Ford stopping
Speaker 3: a like twenty five percent increase in electricity prices. However,
Speaker 3: come the trade war is one hundred percent still on.
Speaker 3: Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of
Speaker 3: reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also terriffs and taxes
Speaker 3: on a whole suite of other US goods. I'm just
Speaker 3: gonna read this from the Associated Press because this is
Speaker 3: no longer the trade war here is no longer limited
Speaker 3: to the US, Canada, China, and to some extp Mexico.
Speaker 3: For Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way
Speaker 3: as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs,
Speaker 3: or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.
Speaker 3: But this week the EU officially joined the phrase. So
Speaker 3: here's from the AP quote across the Atlantic, the European
Speaker 3: Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles.
Speaker 5: Bourbon again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Bourbon twice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Bourbon twice.
Speaker 2: It's twice as important as the other thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually you say this, There
Speaker 3: was a whole like part of the whole speech that
Speaker 3: was not a joke. Maya people the EU would like this.
Speaker 3: This was this was part of the thing. Was yeah, like,
Speaker 3: we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits
Speaker 3: markets with the US backs down.
Speaker 4: It was also the only American product that Trudeau can
Speaker 4: named during his big.
Speaker 2: Very funny, let's be honest, outside of music, this name
Speaker 2: has produced one thing of value to the world, and
Speaker 2: it's Bourbon.
Speaker 3: Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like
Speaker 3: Bourbon was like our what attempts number was it at
Speaker 3: making whiskey before we finally got one that was like exportable.
Speaker 2: Terrible, I mean yeah, it took it took generations. Look,
Speaker 2: you know, Rome wasn't built in the day, and bourbon
Speaker 2: is the ream of liquors produced in Kentucky.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky,
Speaker 3: this is actually deliberately Okay, well, all right, so the
Speaker 3: EU in theory, the line that they're saying is that
Speaker 3: these are deliberately designed to like target things that are
Speaker 3: made in Red States. They also did do soybean tariffs too, though,
Speaker 3: which is, you know, like you're dropping a new kin
Speaker 3: Illinois here. Okay, So, the EU as and post reciprocal
Speaker 3: tariffs on twenty eight billion dollars of US goods. Also
Speaker 3: on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the
Speaker 3: agricultural terrifts that we talked about last week, and notably
Speaker 3: I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such
Speaker 3: a critical part of the system of American agriculture as
Speaker 3: the crop that you rotate out with coren to sort
Speaker 3: of like preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now
Speaker 3: in effect, it's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this
Speaker 3: has I think in ways that are pretty predictable, at
Speaker 3: least to me. This has caused a lot of panic
Speaker 3: in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as
Speaker 3: like more information comes in, but there's stuff that I
Speaker 3: did not predict, which is so okay. Goldman Sachs has
Speaker 3: downgraded its projection for us GDP growth. Their chief economist
Speaker 3: is talking about how he thinks we're going to get
Speaker 3: stagflation again, which is sort of While cyclation was the
Speaker 3: thing in the seventies that was, you know, like you
Speaker 3: have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time, this
Speaker 3: is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state
Speaker 3: and allowed to write take power in the first place.
Speaker 4: That's funny because when I google stag inflation, I get
Speaker 4: very different results. That could just be my own No.
Speaker 2: That's that's stagfilation, Garrison, two very different things.
Speaker 4: Oh sorry, yeah, I think think, I think I'm anyway,
Speaker 4: the things I.
Speaker 3: Have to deal with on this job, they never warned
Speaker 3: me every single time. It's true, it's true, it's true.
Speaker 5: This is this.
Speaker 2: This makes up for a lot if you ever get
Speaker 2: to fight the undertaker. You have a song to go
Speaker 2: on too.
Speaker 3: It's true. So okay now now, so it's sort of
Speaker 3: more surprisingly And this is something I have literally never
Speaker 3: seen before with the US. Both City Bank, while City
Speaker 3: which is the over the City Bank like changed his
Speaker 3: name to City or something. But City Bank and ubs
Speaker 3: the giants Swiss Bank downgraded the status of all US equities.
Speaker 3: I have never seen anything like this in my entire life.
Speaker 3: They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity.
Speaker 3: So this is basically like this doesn't have like a
Speaker 3: technical official effect, but this is like this is basically
Speaker 3: their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you
Speaker 3: should purchase right And this is also sort of applies
Speaker 3: to bonds, So is that bad? This is like I
Speaker 3: assume that the US would get its actual credit rating
Speaker 3: devalued before this happens. I've never this is this is unreal.
Speaker 3: Like the argument that they are making here is that
Speaker 3: it is because of the instability in the US, like
Speaker 3: because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's
Speaker 3: going on, that like you should just fucking pull your
Speaker 3: money out of the out of the US and American
Speaker 3: companies and put it somewhere else, and they're they're specifically
Speaker 3: boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is
Speaker 3: astonishing because again one of one of the one of
Speaker 3: the countries again who's whose equity status that they are
Speaker 3: boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now.
Speaker 3: They're dealing with like their fucking housing bubble going under.
Speaker 3: They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer
Speaker 3: based economy for years and years and years and years,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough
Speaker 3: to actually like fuel an economy consumer spending. Like they're
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're about to take giant damage from
Speaker 3: the trade war. And also they like you know, like
Speaker 3: it was only like three years ago the CCP faced
Speaker 3: their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tianamen, right,
Speaker 3: and these guys like and again these these are the
Speaker 3: financial analysts of City Bank and ubs have looked at
Speaker 3: that and went, you are better off putting your money
Speaker 3: there than you are putting it in the US. I mean,
Speaker 3: at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out
Speaker 3: I'm reading four trillion from the US stock market just
Speaker 3: in this past month.
Speaker 2: Now now trillion.
Speaker 1: Is that? Okay?
Speaker 2: So for example, I have thirty two dollars right now
Speaker 2: in my pocket. Is it more than that? I think
Speaker 2: it's a little bit more, Okay, Okay, okay, so it
Speaker 2: is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay,
Speaker 2: this is I'm trying to put this into terms I
Speaker 2: can understand, Thank you.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 3: Imagine imagine one burger, right.
Speaker 2: And a burger in Portland does cost thirty two dollars?
Speaker 4: So yes, yes, Now now imagine I thought you're gonna say,
Speaker 4: does cost four trillion dollars?
Speaker 3: I mean probably tomorrow, right, like kudos. I don't know
Speaker 3: if any plagues.
Speaker 2: That we're doing adding levity because this is it legitimately
Speaker 2: kind of frightening.
Speaker 3: No, like this is I have never seen the financial
Speaker 3: press like yes, like the only times I've ever seen
Speaker 3: the financial press react to something like this is like
Speaker 3: they were kind of acting like this about the possibility
Speaker 3: of Jeremy Corbin like taking power in the UK, like
Speaker 3: they are like I watched a guy on CNBC, right,
Speaker 3: this is not like like this is this is not MSNBC.
Speaker 3: This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC literally
Speaker 3: go on air and call what Trump is doing quote
Speaker 3: insane and start talking about how this is and this
Speaker 3: is I think what these people are worried about is
Speaker 3: they're you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting
Speaker 3: right now, and it's starting with these sort of these
Speaker 3: downgrades US equities is capital flight, which is straight up
Speaker 3: a butt like international capital taking their money from the
Speaker 3: US and fucking literally moving out of the country and
Speaker 3: moving at somewhere else because the US is so unstable.
Speaker 3: This is like, I don't know if anyone knows what
Speaker 3: mass capital flight from the US would do, because I've
Speaker 3: never seen anything like this. So part of what's going
Speaker 3: on right and part of the reason the markets have
Speaker 3: kind of recovered in the last few days after the
Speaker 3: tanking they did Monday is that, like the inflation data
Speaker 3: came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is,
Speaker 3: all of the inflation data we're getting right now and
Speaker 3: all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's
Speaker 3: going to take a little bit of time for the
Speaker 3: actual effects of these tariffs to set in, right Like
Speaker 3: these are these are things that like you know, it's
Speaker 3: going to take It's going to take like six months,
Speaker 3: maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that,
Speaker 3: and but and when we do, it is going to
Speaker 3: fucking lawsmoking creator into the economy. And the worst part
Speaker 3: of it about this is this isn't even the most
Speaker 3: unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this
Speaker 3: is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of
Speaker 3: this in Congress. So one of the few things the
Speaker 3: Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one
Speaker 3: of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationists,
Speaker 3: but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a
Speaker 3: vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular,
Speaker 3: and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class,
Speaker 3: who you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying
Speaker 3: to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring
Speaker 3: a state of emergency, and the Democrats wanted to use
Speaker 3: the National Emergencies Act to force to vote in the tariffs.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to read this in the New York Times.
Speaker 3: The National Emergency Law lays out a fast track process
Speaker 3: for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency,
Speaker 3: requiring committee consideration within fifteen calendar days after one is
Speaker 3: introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.
Speaker 3: But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure
Speaker 3: on Tuesday declare that quote, each day for the remainder
Speaker 3: of the one hundred and nineteenth Congress shall not constitute
Speaker 3: a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that
Speaker 3: Trump declared on February first. So the point we are
Speaker 3: at right now is is, in order to preserve a
Speaker 3: bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate
Speaker 3: the entire world economy, Congress has declared that days don't pass.
Speaker 3: This is fucking this is completely unhinged. This is fucking
Speaker 3: like caligulous horse in the Senate ship like they again,
Speaker 3: they are literally, they've literally declared that calendar days passing
Speaker 3: are not actually calendar days, so that Trump can just
Speaker 3: keep doing tariffs shit and rule by fiat like the Israelites.
Speaker 4: They have stopped time in order to win the battle.
Speaker 3: It's it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this
Speaker 3: has kind of just been swept under the rug. The
Speaker 3: Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right,
Speaker 3: and and and the fact that like the fact that
Speaker 3: Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of
Speaker 3: every day going that the Republicans are voting to stop
Speaker 3: time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing.
Speaker 3: It's this real like sort of admission by the Republican
Speaker 3: Congress that like they're seating authority over policy like to
Speaker 3: Trump completely right, Like the government now is Trump ruling
Speaker 3: by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of
Speaker 3: like run circles around him in courts, which is not
Speaker 3: you know, working enormously Well, yeah, I we'll see and
Speaker 3: and you know, and this, this, this is starting to
Speaker 3: have effects on like investor confidence like in the US
Speaker 3: as a political entity and the US is an economic entity,
Speaker 3: which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth
Speaker 3: noting is that these people like Elin Mus, Donald Trump
Speaker 3: the people around them have been saying for a long
Speaker 3: time that the plan is to cause a recession and
Speaker 3: then after the recession things are going to get better,
Speaker 3: and the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right
Speaker 3: now is the period in which they're starting to realize
Speaker 3: that they were serious about this. And I don't know
Speaker 3: what the political ramifications of that are going to be,
Speaker 3: because these are people who actually matter in the political system.
Speaker 3: And I think we'll see the ramlications of this play
Speaker 3: out and then the sort of coming weeks and months.
Speaker 3: But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit, and
Speaker 3: we're now like Wiley Coyote, like running off the side
Speaker 3: and trying not to look down.
Speaker 2: But on the upside, we have a great new song
Speaker 2: for everybody. So woo, who's to say if any of
Speaker 2: this has been bad?
Speaker 4: All right, we are back speaking of running circles around
Speaker 4: the courts. We do have a small update REUSA side.
Speaker 4: Last week, in a five to four vote, the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a
Speaker 4: case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuddering
Speaker 4: of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS
Speaker 4: Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White
Speaker 4: House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for
Speaker 4: work that has already been completed, and further details will
Speaker 4: be worked out back in the district court. And it's
Speaker 4: still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going
Speaker 4: to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments.
Speaker 4: But this is the first move from the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: regarding you know, Trump's actions the past few months. This
Speaker 4: has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close
Speaker 4: other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department
Speaker 4: laid off nearly half of its workforce, over one thousand
Speaker 4: and three hundred employees. A late Tuesday night, Education Secretary
Speaker 4: Linda McMahon went onto Fox News to say that this
Speaker 4: reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the
Speaker 4: entire Education Department, saying, quote, this was the president's mandate.
Speaker 4: His directive to me clearly is to shut down the
Speaker 4: Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work
Speaker 4: with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what
Speaker 4: we did today was to take the first step of
Speaker 4: eliminating what I think is a bureaucratic bloat unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've talked about
Speaker 2: on the show for a long time, how eliminating Department
Speaker 2: of Education eventually destroying public education has been a long
Speaker 2: running goal. Oh yeah, of the most absolutely unhinged of
Speaker 2: these people who are the people now in charge, And yeah,
Speaker 2: they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in
Speaker 2: the US.
Speaker 4: It's incredible. Well, and so far, the way that they're
Speaker 4: trying to close up the Department of Education is kind
Speaker 4: of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping
Speaker 4: certain parts of the department active.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: On March tenth, the Education Department announced that they were
Speaker 4: launching investigations into sixty universities for quote Title six violations
Speaker 4: relating to anti Semitic harassment and discrimination unquote. And this
Speaker 4: is in relation to anti genocide protests on campus. And
Speaker 4: this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancelation of four
Speaker 4: hundred million dollars in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.
Speaker 4: The Education Department is threatening that these other fifty nine
Speaker 4: universities may lose their funding if they do not quote
Speaker 4: enforce Title six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits
Speaker 4: any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the
Speaker 4: basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes
Speaker 4: shared Jewish ancestry unquote. I don't know how to say here.
Speaker 3: You get to see all the threads of this admin
Speaker 3: coming together, right, which is that you know, these people
Speaker 3: are also attempting to effect if we destroy like the
Speaker 3: secondary education system in this country too, for reasons that
Speaker 3: are sort of unclear to me.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: But what we're seeing here, right is the ways that
Speaker 3: the Democrats sort of like falling into lockscept with Republicans
Speaker 3: on back of the genocide in Israel has sort of
Speaker 3: led to this thing where the Republicans are using this
Speaker 3: to just straight up obliterate like all of the US
Speaker 3: is like political, economic, and social institutions.
Speaker 4: Well and specifically with this like investigation, they are they
Speaker 4: are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in
Speaker 4: efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the
Speaker 4: genocide in Gaza. Right, this is this is the you know,
Speaker 4: the same attack on free speech and free expression that
Speaker 4: they're doing against Khalil, Like this is this is the
Speaker 4: same exact purpose, and now they're trying to get more
Speaker 4: and more universities to be complicit in like the selective
Speaker 4: removal of people in this country who choose to express
Speaker 4: their First Amendment rights regardless of whether they're a citizen,
Speaker 4: a green card, or on a student visa. So this
Speaker 4: is this is all deeply, deeply worrying.
Speaker 2: Robert.
Speaker 4: You have a small segment you want to discuss before
Speaker 4: we start to close out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So
Speaker 2: in the subredit for the five ZHO five oh one
Speaker 2: protest campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in
Speaker 2: all fifty states simultaneously, right, I think their next day
Speaker 2: of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving
Speaker 2: an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit,
Speaker 2: somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier given
Speaker 2: kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would
Speaker 2: respond to orders to carry out violence against US citizens,
Speaker 2: And I just wanted to chat about this book because
Speaker 2: it's it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.
Speaker 2: My opinion is that one of the likely ways things
Speaker 2: come to a head, probably as early as this summer,
Speaker 2: is that there is mass protests in DC and the
Speaker 2: Insurrection Act it gets used, and you know, the Guard
Speaker 2: at least are brought in to attempt to crack down.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before,
Speaker 2: and Trump and his State attorney have both discussed using
Speaker 2: the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think
Speaker 2: they see DC as the place they want to do that.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting to me to see a post like this.
Speaker 2: This is not a thing where like I've been able
Speaker 2: to verify this guy. Yet there's a couple of points
Speaker 2: that make me that is probably is a National guardsman.
Speaker 2: For one thing, there's a lot of them right like,
Speaker 2: this is not like a National guardsman. Where'd you find one?
Speaker 2: There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.
Speaker 2: For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with
Speaker 2: things that I have seen and talked to other people
Speaker 2: who are in and we're in the Guard about There's
Speaker 2: one little bit where he advises people on like stop
Speaker 2: the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says,
Speaker 2: only buy from NAAR and North American Rescue. It's the
Speaker 2: same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive
Speaker 2: thirteen forty four to ten, which is why he believes
Speaker 2: he's he's well within his rights to make a post
Speaker 2: like this, And in essence, what he's saying is that
Speaker 2: it is his belief that most of the military chain
Speaker 2: of command from NCOs up to officers would not be
Speaker 2: down with following the legal orders to fire on US citizens,
Speaker 2: but the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon,
Speaker 2: would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right.
Speaker 2: That's the gist of it is that I think, you know,
Speaker 2: within sort of the officer class and the NCO class,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of resistance to the idea of
Speaker 2: the military being used for domestic policing. That is less
Speaker 2: clear with kind of the enlisted class. Who are you know,
Speaker 2: a significant chuck of them are very much down for Trump.
Speaker 2: But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would
Speaker 2: fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And
Speaker 2: I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate,
Speaker 2: and I don't really see a reason to doubt it.
Speaker 2: There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this
Speaker 2: is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind
Speaker 2: that like, when you're looking at the military, it's not
Speaker 2: the police. Like, if I have to have agents armed
Speaker 2: agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm
Speaker 2: less worried about people being killed if it's the National
Speaker 2: Guard in general. But that situation can change very very
Speaker 2: rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight. And
Speaker 2: I do think like that's the thing we have to
Speaker 2: consider right now, is the possibility that we have us soldiers,
Speaker 2: whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in
Speaker 2: shooting at American protesters. Like that's that's in the cards
Speaker 2: as early as this summer. And it's not a fun
Speaker 2: the thing to think about. But I'm seeing more and more,
Speaker 2: not just posts like this, but I'm having more and
Speaker 2: more conversations with people who are in the military or
Speaker 2: who were are in the National Guard about their concerns
Speaker 2: about what they might be called upon to do. Some
Speaker 2: of this has to do with the border, but like
Speaker 2: it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military
Speaker 2: to worry about how they are going to be used
Speaker 2: in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're
Speaker 2: talking about this summer, right is when there's a very
Speaker 2: good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head.
Speaker 2: So these are things you should be thinking about. If
Speaker 2: you're listening and you are in the military. These are
Speaker 2: things that you should be thinking about because the people
Speaker 2: who are in charge of our government right now have
Speaker 2: made a lot of statements about how they want to
Speaker 2: use the military to deal with protests, and the idea
Speaker 2: that that's going to happen very soon is not not
Speaker 2: fringe or crazy.
Speaker 4: Well, and although these people might have you know, slightly
Speaker 4: more disciplined when it comes to actual firearms. There is
Speaker 4: also incidents like in twenty twenty yep where the Kentucky
Speaker 4: Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd
Speaker 4: control absolutely munitions. I think that is this is also
Speaker 4: worth stating. Even if you know, like a kent State
Speaker 4: situation maybe is not not as likely in like the
Speaker 4: modern day, there's certainly other other ways to cause grievous harm. Yes,
Speaker 4: in these sorts of like protest environments and when we've
Speaker 4: seen and.
Speaker 2: I mean even in Portland, when we have seen which
Speaker 2: you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd
Speaker 2: control devices are usually people in our case it was
Speaker 2: federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and
Speaker 2: have not trained on them. Yeah, because they're not. There's
Speaker 2: certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them,
Speaker 2: and these guys are just Hey, you know how to
Speaker 2: use a gun. You must know how to use the
Speaker 2: robotal thing.
Speaker 4: You know. No, if you use like less lethals the
Speaker 4: way you would use you know, a regular firearm, that
Speaker 4: actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences
Speaker 4: or like life changing consequences. Yeah, which you know, police
Speaker 4: are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control
Speaker 4: munitions that necessarily you know, like bore attack or or
Speaker 4: like state national guards. It's something that's also you know,
Speaker 4: worth keeping in mind. Let's close by my least favorite segment,
Speaker 4: Stinky Musk, which I still has a really bad name.
Speaker 4: On Monday, a Central judge ruled that Musk's DOGE should
Speaker 4: be the subject to comply with Foyer requests and public
Speaker 4: disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge
Speaker 4: ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and
Speaker 4: the Office of Management and Budget and was ordered to
Speaker 4: quote begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon
Speaker 4: as practicable unquote now. Despite Musk's claims of quote unquote
Speaker 4: maximum transparency, last month, the Trump administration tried to shield
Speaker 4: DOGE from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents
Speaker 4: as quote unquote presidential records, which carries special protections. This
Speaker 4: specific case is super interesting. The judge of federal judge
Speaker 4: by the name of Cooper also critiqued the way that
Speaker 4: the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from
Speaker 4: political quote the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way
Speaker 4: of evidence about doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court
Speaker 4: wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that
Speaker 4: the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that
Speaker 4: DOGE qualifies as an agency under some sections of law
Speaker 4: but not others when it suits it. Thus, DOGE becomes,
Speaker 4: on the defendant's view, a Goldilock's entity, Cooper wrote, not
Speaker 4: an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient.
Speaker 4: And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how DOGE
Speaker 4: is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know,
Speaker 4: benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one
Speaker 4: other Musk story to close out. This episode admits Tesla's
Speaker 4: plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of
Speaker 4: vandalism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started
Speaker 4: doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon
Speaker 4: climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate,
Speaker 4: Trump remarked, Wow, everything is computer So this was a
Speaker 4: very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism. Where
Speaker 4: Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models,
Speaker 4: and Trump got to unquote, you know, pick the one
Speaker 4: that he wanted to buy, as he just like sat
Speaker 4: in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his
Speaker 4: you know, company is losing a shocking amount of money
Speaker 4: in the in these talk market.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there, I mean there, there's literally there's literally
Speaker 3: a picture of him with like the notes that he has.
Speaker 3: There's like in a in like really really like a.
Speaker 4: Tesla sales note like bullet point of like how much
Speaker 4: certain models are, what their different features are, which ones
Speaker 4: have self driving features included, which ones you have to
Speaker 4: pay extra for?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, he's he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch
Speaker 4: as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best
Speaker 4: friends and co president's company. Trump said on True Social
Speaker 4: the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively
Speaker 4: boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby,
Speaker 4: in order to attack and do harm to Elon and
Speaker 4: everything he stands for. Unquote. So now not only has
Speaker 4: Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which which is, you know,
Speaker 4: its own form of unhinged. But on Tuesday, Trump announced
Speaker 4: that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism,
Speaker 4: promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell. A
Speaker 4: White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous
Speaker 4: acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are
Speaker 4: nothing short of domestic terror unquote, So that.
Speaker 2: Would be fun to see how that blaze out.
Speaker 3: I feel like we're we genuinely are not that far
Speaker 3: off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal
Speaker 3: mandate saying you must buy a Tesla like this. This
Speaker 3: is the this is the kind of shit that we're
Speaker 3: in now.
Speaker 4: Now, this is one of the most like bizarre things
Speaker 4: I've ever seen. If if Biden or any Democratic president
Speaker 4: did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls
Speaker 4: of people screaming for his impeachment, similar to like the
Speaker 4: erg Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant
Speaker 4: open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where president is
Speaker 4: using his office to boost like the personal financial interests
Speaker 4: of one of his top advisors who's also like running
Speaker 4: government agencies essentially and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit
Speaker 4: their ability to like investigate his own businesses while also
Speaker 4: taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like
Speaker 4: Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty
Speaker 4: pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days,
Speaker 4: and now Tesla shares have risen four percent after Trump's
Speaker 4: support for Musk and Tesla.
Speaker 2: Great, well, I think that's gonna do it here at
Speaker 2: us with the ed to play us out, We're gonna
Speaker 2: refer back to our friend the Narcissist Cookbook who put
Speaker 2: together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're gonna
Speaker 2: hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore.
Speaker 4: We reported the news.
Speaker 3: Jazz Bob lot Jazz got lot Lock Jazz Bob Locking
Speaker 3: jazz bo.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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