WEBVTT - The Age of Extremophiles 0:00:01.720 --> 0:00:08.520 Also media, Hey everybody, this is it could happen here. 0:00:08.560 --> 0:00:11.799 And I am Robert Evans, and initially this was supposed 0:00:11.800 --> 0:00:14.560 to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering 0:00:14.560 --> 0:00:19.160 over the fact recently that I feel weirdly optimistic, particularly 0:00:19.200 --> 0:00:21.560 in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a 0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:24.360 lot of the people that I know and spend time around. 0:00:24.760 --> 0:00:27.159 And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of 0:00:27.200 --> 0:00:29.680 the same pieces of news differently than they have, and 0:00:29.800 --> 0:00:33.040 because I've been coming across some different pieces of information 0:00:33.680 --> 0:00:36.360 than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk 0:00:36.440 --> 0:00:39.920 people through why I've been feeling so optimistic, and so 0:00:40.159 --> 0:00:43.279 I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of 0:00:43.400 --> 0:00:46.720 last week, and then over the weekend a gunman attack 0:00:46.800 --> 0:00:49.760 the White House Correspondence dinner, and I actually, this hasn't 0:00:49.920 --> 0:00:53.240 really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:57.000 that this week, probably on ED. But I did make 0:00:57.040 --> 0:00:59.520 some alterations to the episode as a result of that, 0:00:59.560 --> 0:01:03.240 although I I do think it reinforces my primary point, 0:01:03.280 --> 0:01:06.119 which is that the political era that we now find 0:01:06.120 --> 0:01:11.880 ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms 0:01:11.920 --> 0:01:15.160 with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to 0:01:15.200 --> 0:01:18.880 survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places 0:01:18.920 --> 0:01:21.360 like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean, 0:01:21.680 --> 0:01:24.520 or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's 0:01:24.600 --> 0:01:27.679 called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time, 0:01:27.760 --> 0:01:30.360 people thought it was too salty to host any life. 0:01:30.959 --> 0:01:33.920 Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The dead 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:37.280 sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because the Dead 0:01:37.360 --> 0:01:40.959 Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined 0:01:40.959 --> 0:01:44.320 in nineteen seventy four by R. D. McElroy to describe 0:01:44.360 --> 0:01:48.120 microorganisms scientists we're increasingly finding in places that should have 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:51.120 been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term 0:01:51.160 --> 0:01:54.320 that literally means love of extremes, and while it is 0:01:54.440 --> 0:01:58.080 usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms 0:01:58.080 --> 0:02:01.240 and very odd locations, where its have over the years 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:04.480 pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too. 0:02:05.120 --> 0:02:09.000 In the journal article all about Extremophiles JOHNS. Hopkins Universities, 0:02:09.120 --> 0:02:13.080 James A. Koker wrote that quote, despite common perception, most 0:02:13.080 --> 0:02:14.880 of Earth is what is often referred to as an 0:02:14.919 --> 0:02:18.280 extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home. 0:02:18.560 --> 0:02:21.640 It is simply that home. They have adapted to thrive 0:02:21.680 --> 0:02:24.760 in these environments, and in the process have evolved many 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:28.760 unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our 0:02:28.840 --> 0:02:31.040 human centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to 0:02:31.040 --> 0:02:33.640 think of ourselves as being in the Goldilock zone, not 0:02:33.760 --> 0:02:36.919 too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled 0:02:36.960 --> 0:02:39.840 with all the things necessary for life to exist. To 0:02:39.840 --> 0:02:42.600 some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us 0:02:42.639 --> 0:02:45.800 from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth is 0:02:45.840 --> 0:02:48.600 mostly a cold place. Over ninety percent of its oceans 0:02:48.639 --> 0:02:51.360 are at or below five degrees celsius, and it has 0:02:51.400 --> 0:02:54.680 an average temperature of around fifteen degrees celsius, and several 0:02:54.720 --> 0:02:58.520 conditions we humans consider normal i e. Twenty percent oxygen 0:02:58.560 --> 0:03:01.560 in the air actually make us extremophiles from the point 0:03:01.600 --> 0:03:05.200 of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have 0:03:05.240 --> 0:03:08.240 a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like 0:03:08.280 --> 0:03:11.639 this metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit 0:03:11.680 --> 0:03:14.799 of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes 0:03:14.800 --> 0:03:18.120 than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials and 0:03:18.160 --> 0:03:20.400 even Gen Z and Alpha kids too young to have 0:03:20.440 --> 0:03:22.919 known the nineties to look back on that decade as 0:03:22.919 --> 0:03:26.240 a sort of cultural goldilock zone, as if the brief 0:03:26.280 --> 0:03:29.360 period post Cold War in pre nine to eleven was 0:03:29.440 --> 0:03:32.560 some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything 0:03:32.639 --> 0:03:35.800 since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different 0:03:35.800 --> 0:03:37.760 reasons for this. Some of them blame nine to eleven. 0:03:37.840 --> 0:03:39.560 Some people will argue that we were in that sweet 0:03:39.560 --> 0:03:42.680 spot where the Internet existed and could tap you into 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:45.880 cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along 0:03:45.960 --> 0:03:48.200 yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:51.640 up with different justifications for this, but this view keeps 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:55.160 people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the nineteen nineties, 0:03:55.200 --> 0:03:57.680 which is that they were full of genocides and Rwanda 0:03:57.720 --> 0:04:00.440 and Bosnia just to name two, and repeated the US 0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:03.520 military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe, 0:04:03.560 --> 0:04:08.119 some of which ended disastrously as in Mogadishu. Our president 0:04:08.240 --> 0:04:10.640 for most of the nineties was a sex pest, and 0:04:10.720 --> 0:04:13.240 members of the far right staged a series of bloody 0:04:13.320 --> 0:04:17.239 terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing. 0:04:17.880 --> 0:04:20.000 And while all this was happening, a new and more 0:04:20.040 --> 0:04:25.000 openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuver Democrats 0:04:25.120 --> 0:04:28.800 gawked in awe. The reality is that the nineties were 0:04:28.839 --> 0:04:32.800 a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just 0:04:32.880 --> 0:04:35.920 like every other period of human existence, and the extremity 0:04:35.960 --> 0:04:39.120 of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one 0:04:39.240 --> 0:04:41.840 radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring 0:04:41.920 --> 0:04:46.200 us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, 0:04:46.320 --> 0:04:50.280 those same neo Conservatives seemed tame next to their modern descendants, 0:04:50.320 --> 0:04:52.800 the Maga movement, but in their own time, they were 0:04:52.839 --> 0:04:55.719 the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a 0:04:55.760 --> 0:05:00.120 fundamental reality in American politics. If survival and extreme time 0:05:00.240 --> 0:05:03.640 requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much 0:05:03.680 --> 0:05:06.279 of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have 0:05:06.320 --> 0:05:10.880 primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill 0:05:10.880 --> 0:05:13.760 Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:16.640 the era of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, 0:05:16.880 --> 0:05:19.840 just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme 0:05:19.960 --> 0:05:23.520 choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, 0:05:23.680 --> 0:05:26.520 he was such an extreme choice that the Conservative movement 0:05:26.520 --> 0:05:28.839 had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the Maga 0:05:28.880 --> 0:05:32.400 movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal 0:05:32.480 --> 0:05:35.599 the changes from the Obama years in power. I like 0:05:35.680 --> 0:05:38.080 thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that 0:05:38.120 --> 0:05:41.560 one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is this, 0:05:42.040 --> 0:05:46.960 in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We 0:05:47.000 --> 0:05:49.800 Homo sapiens, have been in the business of extreme adaptations 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:52.719 for as long as we've existed. That's all. Central heating 0:05:52.760 --> 0:05:56.960 and air vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR fifteen are adaptations 0:05:57.000 --> 0:06:00.560 to extreme environments and situations, many of them extreme environments 0:06:00.560 --> 0:06:04.320 and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is 0:06:04.440 --> 0:06:07.680 our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more 0:06:07.720 --> 0:06:12.000 extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations, and so 0:06:12.120 --> 0:06:14.359 on and so forth until we invent the Internet and 0:06:14.400 --> 0:06:19.320 satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good, 0:06:19.440 --> 0:06:22.680 but once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, 0:06:22.920 --> 0:06:25.360 you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got 0:06:25.360 --> 0:06:29.880 to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. 0:06:30.480 --> 0:06:32.760 The good news is that the pendulum has started to 0:06:32.800 --> 0:06:36.039 swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era 0:06:36.160 --> 0:06:39.320 is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction, and you 0:06:39.320 --> 0:06:41.840 can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity 0:06:41.880 --> 0:06:44.840 of Zoron Mandani, or the fact that a former pillow 0:06:44.839 --> 0:06:48.440 of neo conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for 0:06:48.480 --> 0:06:51.520 the abolition of ice. We are in the process of 0:06:51.560 --> 0:06:55.400 deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which 0:06:55.440 --> 0:06:58.279 means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and 0:06:58.400 --> 0:07:00.600 changes that are every bit as good as the ones 0:07:00.640 --> 0:07:04.279 that Trump administration has forced through our bad To do that, 0:07:04.480 --> 0:07:06.320 we're going to have to be brave, and we're going 0:07:06.360 --> 0:07:08.880 to have to start getting our shit together now, because 0:07:08.880 --> 0:07:12.400 this window of opportunity won't last long. The way I 0:07:12.520 --> 0:07:15.480 see it, the GOP entered office this time around, intent 0:07:15.560 --> 0:07:18.920 on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. 0:07:19.160 --> 0:07:21.800 They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt 0:07:21.840 --> 0:07:23.960 they might have had in an orgy of careless and 0:07:24.000 --> 0:07:27.480 brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out by the 0:07:27.560 --> 0:07:30.800 least sympathetic group of Grober's imaginable, one of whom was 0:07:30.920 --> 0:07:34.440 nicknamed Big Balls, A fleury of state and local legislative 0:07:34.480 --> 0:07:37.920 pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left wing activists 0:07:37.960 --> 0:07:42.120 and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage, as 0:07:42.160 --> 0:07:45.880 have relentless ice raids on mostly non white Americans. It's 0:07:45.920 --> 0:07:49.280 been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't pretend 0:07:49.320 --> 0:07:52.000 we're in a good situation today, not at least in 0:07:52.080 --> 0:07:54.280 terms of what we'd like good to mean in the 0:07:54.320 --> 0:07:57.440 everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived 0:07:57.480 --> 0:07:59.920 the first sixteen months or so of the second Trunk President. 0:08:00.640 --> 0:08:02.520 Fewer of us are going to make it to the end. 0:08:02.960 --> 0:08:05.400 But this regime came to power with the knowledge that 0:08:05.440 --> 0:08:08.720 their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action. 0:08:09.080 --> 0:08:12.280 They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and 0:08:12.360 --> 0:08:15.200 they missed it. You can see some evidence of this 0:08:15.320 --> 0:08:17.960 in our War of Choice against Iran. President Trump wanted 0:08:18.000 --> 0:08:20.080 a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the 0:08:20.120 --> 0:08:22.840 evening news, so he told his military to bear down 0:08:22.840 --> 0:08:25.040 on Iran with all the speed and violence of action 0:08:25.120 --> 0:08:28.400 they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why 0:08:28.440 --> 0:08:31.440 are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed 0:08:31.440 --> 0:08:34.800 their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's 0:08:34.840 --> 0:08:38.720 first term, the DoD established the Algorithmic Warfare cross functional 0:08:38.720 --> 0:08:42.400 team nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as 0:08:42.440 --> 0:08:46.000 per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis 0:08:46.000 --> 0:08:49.000 of drone footage and other data humans previously would have 0:08:49.000 --> 0:08:51.160 gone over by hand, in order to speed up the 0:08:51.280 --> 0:08:54.599 rate at which targets were identified and struck in wartime. 0:08:55.679 --> 0:08:58.320 Project Mabon from the Jump was a product of the 0:08:58.400 --> 0:09:01.760 worst kind of military thing. How can we automate as 0:09:01.880 --> 0:09:05.319 much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is 0:09:05.360 --> 0:09:07.920 the kind of project you pursue when your finest military 0:09:07.960 --> 0:09:10.600 minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing 0:09:10.760 --> 0:09:14.040 or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them 0:09:14.040 --> 0:09:16.640 to give up. The goal was to create a system 0:09:16.679 --> 0:09:19.720 that could colate and synthesize huge quantities of data in 0:09:19.800 --> 0:09:24.120 order to allow one thousand targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, 0:09:24.160 --> 0:09:27.400 writing for The Guardian, notes that this means quote three 0:09:27.400 --> 0:09:31.160 point six seconds per decision, or from the individual targeteer's perspective, 0:09:31.360 --> 0:09:35.200 one decision every seventy two seconds. Now we're going to 0:09:35.200 --> 0:09:37.520 talk about where this kind of thinking has led US 0:09:37.559 --> 0:09:50.040 in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads. 0:09:51.679 --> 0:09:55.200 We're back now. If you listen to the advocates of 0:09:55.240 --> 0:09:57.160 this kind of military build up that people who are 0:09:57.200 --> 0:10:00.960 really bullish on AI for military purposes talk and their 0:10:01.000 --> 0:10:04.800 podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you 0:10:04.920 --> 0:10:07.400 need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions 0:10:07.400 --> 0:10:10.560 per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea 0:10:11.240 --> 0:10:13.760 that a future war between the US and a peer 0:10:13.840 --> 0:10:17.800 or near peer adversary, most prominently China, right, that's what 0:10:17.840 --> 0:10:20.680 they're planning on now. The Chinese military is also heavily 0:10:20.679 --> 0:10:23.000 invested in AI. There was a major New York Times 0:10:23.080 --> 0:10:25.400 article earlier this month in April of twenty twenty six, 0:10:25.760 --> 0:10:29.920 titled Mutually Automated destruction the escalating global AI arms race. 0:10:30.040 --> 0:10:32.680 I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia 0:10:32.679 --> 0:10:35.960 are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own. 0:10:36.120 --> 0:10:39.520 Two US officials said China is developing systems for dozens 0:10:39.520 --> 0:10:42.439 of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought, while 0:10:42.480 --> 0:10:44.840 Russia is building Lancet drones that can circle the sky 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:48.239 on autonomously pick targets. They said Even as the specifics 0:10:48.240 --> 0:10:50.840 of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 0:10:50.880 --> 0:10:54.120 twenty seventeen, mister Putin declared that whoever leads in AI 0:10:54.240 --> 0:10:57.120 will become the ruler of the world. Mister z said 0:10:57.160 --> 0:10:59.160 in twenty twenty four that the technology would be the 0:10:59.200 --> 0:11:03.720 main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete 0:11:03.760 --> 0:11:07.120 Hegseth directed all branches of the US military to adopt AI, 0:11:07.280 --> 0:11:12.199 saying they needed to accelerate like hell now. My interpretation 0:11:12.280 --> 0:11:14.240 of what I've read from most of these guys is 0:11:14.240 --> 0:11:17.000 that they see future conflict as a massive but almost 0:11:17.000 --> 0:11:20.600 instantaneous chess game. Right, whoever has the AI that can 0:11:20.679 --> 0:11:24.160 most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up 0:11:24.200 --> 0:11:28.319 with target packages, and then strike those targets first wins. Right. 0:11:28.600 --> 0:11:30.880 If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand 0:11:30.880 --> 0:11:33.040 strikes in an hour and they can only make eight hundred, 0:11:33.200 --> 0:11:35.800 then we'll destroy more of them and will win the war. Right, 0:11:35.800 --> 0:11:38.400 It'll all be decided right at the start. And this 0:11:38.480 --> 0:11:40.400 may well be how a shooting war between China and 0:11:40.400 --> 0:11:42.840 the US would proceed. But given that very few people 0:11:42.880 --> 0:11:45.000 in either country want that war to happen because it 0:11:45.000 --> 0:11:47.680 would kill us. All I think we might do best 0:11:47.720 --> 0:11:51.360 focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where 0:11:51.360 --> 0:11:54.680 this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure. For at 0:11:54.720 --> 0:11:57.720 least the second time in my life. In two thousand 0:11:57.760 --> 0:12:00.080 and three, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than 0:12:00.160 --> 0:12:02.600 a year of build up, in years of intelligence gathering, 0:12:02.880 --> 0:12:05.600 our military planners put together a list of fifty high 0:12:05.679 --> 0:12:08.440 value targets. The idea was, if we could use our 0:12:08.480 --> 0:12:12.240 incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons 0:12:12.280 --> 0:12:14.880 to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, 0:12:15.120 --> 0:12:18.480 we could hobble any response to the invasion. All fifty 0:12:18.520 --> 0:12:21.880 targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed. 0:12:22.240 --> 0:12:24.080 Now that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just 0:12:24.120 --> 0:12:25.760 means we missed all the people we thought we were 0:12:25.760 --> 0:12:28.960 going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again, 0:12:29.200 --> 0:12:32.000 the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty buildings, 0:12:32.040 --> 0:12:34.480 and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. 0:12:35.600 --> 0:12:39.280 Fast forward earlier this year, the Trump administration orders the 0:12:39.360 --> 0:12:43.040 launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal 0:12:43.040 --> 0:12:45.600 of hyper advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of 0:12:45.600 --> 0:12:49.400 Iran alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks, 0:12:49.520 --> 0:12:52.680 US forces hit six thousand targets picked with the help 0:12:52.679 --> 0:12:55.440 of Project Mavin. One of them was the monob Girls 0:12:55.440 --> 0:12:58.320 Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing one 0:12:58.400 --> 0:13:02.120 hundred and fifty six and wounding then ninety five now 0:13:02.679 --> 0:13:06.000 Alex Krp, the CEO of Pallanteer's hyper Advanced AI, and 0:13:06.080 --> 0:13:09.160 a multi billion dollar network of satellites backed up by 0:13:09.200 --> 0:13:11.880 decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA, and the massade 0:13:12.360 --> 0:13:15.040 wasn't enough to drop us from striking a school that 0:13:15.160 --> 0:13:17.880 we knew contained none of our targets. We had data 0:13:17.920 --> 0:13:19.839 that the people we thought were there at one point 0:13:19.960 --> 0:13:21.960 were no longer there and it was a school now. 0:13:22.320 --> 0:13:24.240 But some of the data may even relied on was 0:13:24.280 --> 0:13:27.600 old and outdated. And these machines aren't capable of real 0:13:27.720 --> 0:13:29.840 judgment and the way we think of it, And because 0:13:29.880 --> 0:13:32.280 people trusted them so much, no one thought to check 0:13:32.360 --> 0:13:35.920 before ordering the strikes. This is a human error, This 0:13:36.080 --> 0:13:39.280 is not an AI error, but it illustrates a massive 0:13:39.400 --> 0:13:41.960 law in the fantasy that winning a war could be 0:13:42.000 --> 0:13:45.720 as easy as building a smarter machine now to be accurate, 0:13:45.760 --> 0:13:47.520 and it is important to note a lot of those 0:13:47.559 --> 0:13:50.080 six thousand targets were what we thought, and they were 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:52.800 accurately struck and killed. In the opening salvo of the war, 0:13:53.200 --> 0:13:56.560 President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of 0:13:56.559 --> 0:14:01.079 Iron Supreme Leader, alongside many other prominent military governmental officials. 0:14:01.280 --> 0:14:03.720 This seemed at first to be way more successful than 0:14:03.760 --> 0:14:06.160 the opening strikes against a Rock. They didn't get any 0:14:06.200 --> 0:14:08.600 of those fifty guys. We got a bunch of our 0:14:08.640 --> 0:14:11.360 initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:13.560 just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Rock. 0:14:13.559 --> 0:14:17.080 Maybe now we're doing it right, you know, finally we'll 0:14:17.080 --> 0:14:19.520 be able to win a war this way. However, that 0:14:19.600 --> 0:14:22.800 quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were 0:14:22.840 --> 0:14:25.600 not enough to break Iron's will or its capacity to 0:14:25.680 --> 0:14:29.640 fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself 0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:32.800 trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding 0:14:32.880 --> 0:14:36.320 him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy. 0:14:36.840 --> 0:14:40.280 Most recent AP and RC poll puts Trump's overall approval 0:14:40.280 --> 0:14:43.160 at thirty three percent, which is down five percent since 0:14:43.280 --> 0:14:46.160 just back in March, only thirty two percent of Americans 0:14:46.160 --> 0:14:49.120 approve of his leadership on Iran. Because most of this 0:14:49.200 --> 0:14:51.440 country can still see a man shooting himself in the 0:14:51.480 --> 0:14:55.200 dick for what it is. Pete Hegseth is our most 0:14:55.320 --> 0:14:59.200 lethality obsessed Secretary of Defense and History, and in him 0:14:59.240 --> 0:15:02.359 we see the result of a long sickness first incubated 0:15:02.440 --> 0:15:05.560 during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin 0:15:05.640 --> 0:15:08.120 their failure to make progress as a kind of victory, 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:10.880 so they turned to bragging about how many fighters they 0:15:10.880 --> 0:15:14.640 had killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants, 0:15:14.640 --> 0:15:17.440 and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed 0:15:17.640 --> 0:15:21.720 based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this 0:15:21.840 --> 0:15:25.480 calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:28.600 body counts as the death knell of a military entity's 0:15:28.640 --> 0:15:31.680 ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer 0:15:31.680 --> 0:15:35.240 to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:38.280 country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess 0:15:38.280 --> 0:15:40.600 and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down 0:15:40.640 --> 0:15:43.400 to the sare cadra of influencers who call themselves right 0:15:43.440 --> 0:15:46.920 wing intellectuals. Today, I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh 0:15:46.960 --> 0:15:50.240 and Chris Ruffo who built their reputations on picking targets 0:15:50.240 --> 0:15:52.360 to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of 0:15:52.400 --> 0:15:56.880 attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring 0:15:56.960 --> 0:15:59.920 up hat and forcing laws all over the country restricting 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:02.600 things like drag shows, are the use of chosen pronouns 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:07.520 and government documents. All these people are by definition huge assholes, 0:16:07.600 --> 0:16:10.240 and so are their followers, and thus when those people 0:16:10.280 --> 0:16:13.680 get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make 0:16:13.760 --> 0:16:17.160 those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has 0:16:17.200 --> 0:16:21.400 resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, 0:16:21.880 --> 0:16:24.960 Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January first, 0:16:25.040 --> 0:16:28.440 twenty twenty one, by Republican activists and former school board 0:16:28.520 --> 0:16:32.040 members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. 0:16:32.440 --> 0:16:34.880 They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a 0:16:34.920 --> 0:16:37.960 nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that 0:16:38.000 --> 0:16:40.400 sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over 0:16:40.440 --> 0:16:43.120 the life and mind of their child. Any influence that 0:16:43.200 --> 0:16:44.960 might lead that child to become a different kind of 0:16:45.000 --> 0:16:47.400 person than the parent, and visions must be pruned away. 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:50.840 The group used the then fresh moral panic over critical 0:16:50.920 --> 0:16:53.360 race theory as a lever from which to force themselves 0:16:53.400 --> 0:16:56.200 into American life. In June of twenty twenty one, they 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:58.920 started filing what would become a long series of criminal 0:16:58.920 --> 0:17:02.520 complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation. 0:17:03.080 --> 0:17:06.360 Schools started removing books, and Moms for Liberty inspired candidates 0:17:06.359 --> 0:17:09.879 began winning school board elections around the country. It looked 0:17:09.920 --> 0:17:12.560 for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical 0:17:12.600 --> 0:17:15.800 fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit four fifty one 0:17:15.800 --> 0:17:19.480 style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple 0:17:19.480 --> 0:17:22.760 of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty 0:17:22.760 --> 0:17:26.600 backed candidates started losing major elections, first a series of 0:17:26.600 --> 0:17:29.680 school board races in twenty twenty three in Pennsylvania, Virginia, 0:17:29.720 --> 0:17:33.800 and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration kareemed towards 0:17:33.840 --> 0:17:36.399 a disastrous new election in twenty twenty four one in 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:38.640 which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, 0:17:38.880 --> 0:17:42.880 regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. 0:17:43.280 --> 0:17:45.800 One of the first was karen's Foboda, a mother of 0:17:45.840 --> 0:17:48.760 seven in Dutchess County, New York. In twenty twenty three, 0:17:48.800 --> 0:17:51.840 she told NPR reporter Jim's Aaroli, I looked into the 0:17:51.840 --> 0:17:54.359 local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed 0:17:54.359 --> 0:17:56.480 through some of the social media of some of these individuals, 0:17:56.520 --> 0:17:58.600 and what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom 0:17:58.600 --> 0:18:00.520 of kids were members of that community, it was very 0:18:00.560 --> 0:18:02.480 concerning to think that these people would be trying to 0:18:02.480 --> 0:18:04.400 get onto the school board, because what does that mean 0:18:04.440 --> 0:18:07.480 for my kids? So she started a group of her own, 0:18:07.680 --> 0:18:11.880 Defensive Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community 0:18:11.920 --> 0:18:14.920 to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated 0:18:14.960 --> 0:18:17.720 an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in 0:18:17.760 --> 0:18:20.800 twenty twenty three, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook 0:18:20.840 --> 0:18:24.440 page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing 0:18:24.600 --> 0:18:26.880 is that even while the twenty twenty four election took 0:18:26.960 --> 0:18:30.160 over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat 0:18:30.240 --> 0:18:33.679 the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts 0:18:33.720 --> 0:18:37.159 across the country to fight for their children's educations. In 0:18:37.200 --> 0:18:40.480 November of twenty twenty five, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas, 0:18:40.480 --> 0:18:43.680 saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take 0:18:43.720 --> 0:18:47.480 the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend 0:18:47.560 --> 0:18:50.480 was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article 0:18:50.520 --> 0:18:54.760 by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats 0:18:54.760 --> 0:18:56.879 slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an 0:18:56.920 --> 0:19:00.680 ongoing tally from Progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund Under the radar. 0:19:00.720 --> 0:19:03.480 Trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with the culture 0:19:03.520 --> 0:19:06.160 wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers 0:19:06.160 --> 0:19:08.520 and generate hyper local interest in politics as the COVID 0:19:08.600 --> 0:19:12.240 nineteen pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats 0:19:12.240 --> 0:19:15.200 in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the national battleground 0:19:15.200 --> 0:19:18.159 of Pennsylvania, the result of well funded campaigns orchestrated by 0:19:18.200 --> 0:19:22.239 local leaders. Now one of my favorite details from that 0:19:22.280 --> 0:19:24.000 piece is a quote from one of the new school 0:19:24.000 --> 0:19:27.399 board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated folks just wanted their 0:19:27.400 --> 0:19:30.720 school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once 0:19:30.760 --> 0:19:33.840 the board was taken over by a superpartisan extremist majority, 0:19:34.000 --> 0:19:38.480 folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue 0:19:38.520 --> 0:19:40.200 to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls 0:19:40.240 --> 0:19:42.679 might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if 0:19:42.720 --> 0:19:45.560 he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because 0:19:45.600 --> 0:19:48.080 they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of 0:19:48.080 --> 0:19:51.080 their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control 0:19:51.119 --> 0:19:55.040 their neighbors is upsetting, an unnatural. The way I see it, 0:19:55.160 --> 0:19:57.840 we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The 0:19:57.920 --> 0:19:59.800 devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on 0:19:59.840 --> 0:20:01.960 a uddle of his own flop sweat along the way. 0:20:02.280 --> 0:20:05.359 The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:07.920 right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump 0:20:07.960 --> 0:20:11.440 supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did 0:20:11.480 --> 0:20:14.120 the thing fascists off and do. He kept reaching until 0:20:14.119 --> 0:20:17.199 he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now. I 0:20:17.200 --> 0:20:19.359 don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely 0:20:19.400 --> 0:20:22.359 unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non zero 0:20:22.440 --> 0:20:25.080 chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some 0:20:25.240 --> 0:20:27.919 token ser is. Rule won't say we abandon them and 0:20:28.000 --> 0:20:30.639 tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also 0:20:30.680 --> 0:20:34.440 possible who'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic, 0:20:34.520 --> 0:20:38.200 hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, 0:20:38.359 --> 0:20:40.760 but either action would just be the flailing of a 0:20:40.760 --> 0:20:43.679 busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that 0:20:43.720 --> 0:20:46.520 Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't 0:20:46.520 --> 0:20:49.720 afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of 0:20:49.760 --> 0:20:52.159 the American people seems to suggest that most of us 0:20:52.200 --> 0:20:56.240 has a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida, 0:20:56.320 --> 0:20:58.359 it's hard to find regular people who are scared of 0:20:58.359 --> 0:21:01.040 the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind 0:21:01.080 --> 0:21:03.600 of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd 0:21:03.680 --> 0:21:08.040 on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get. 0:21:08.359 --> 0:21:11.680 Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even 0:21:11.720 --> 0:21:15.400