It Could Happen Here Weekly 169

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Calzon Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome, Dick, It happen. Hear a podcast about things falling
apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host,
Na Wong with me as James Stout.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
Hi.

Speaker 5 (00:35):
Miya glad to hear about what I was going to
shit today.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting
everything episode with this. Until you people stop, until you
stop doing this. It is the year two thousand and
twenty five. We are a quarter of a century into
this millennium and people are still getting kettled by cops
on bridges. I did this occupy in twenty eleven. They

(01:01):
did it in twenty eighteen during the Occupy Ice protest.
The people did it in twenty twenty, people did it
last year. During the dream of the power signing cam lets.
People are doing it again this year. Simply do not
lead a march onto a bridge, yep.

Speaker 6 (01:13):
Or a tunnel to AI reasons, we would also include
a tunnel.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yes, don't do the tunnel either.

Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yeah. If there's no side exits, just don't.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yes, here's the thing. The moment you walk onto a bridge,
all the cops have to do is take both exits
and everyone on the bridge gets arrested. You can simply
not do this. If you must do it, you need
to like make one thousand percent sure you can hold
both sides of the bridge. Yeah, both of them. You
need to all both of them. Yeah, and almost certainly
you can't. So only you, only you, dear listener, can

(01:41):
prevent four thousand more people from getting kettled on fucking bridges.
And I'm going to keep starting episodes hockeyboll get it,
don't get kettled up bridges until this stop. All right,
this is what this has been me as public service
announcement of a bridge kettling. Let's get into the nature
of imperialism and why Trump's is different. So we've been

(02:01):
covering a lot of Trump's sort of I don't know
the trade wars, his call for the US to seize
the Gozel strip, a whole bunch of stories about the
way that Trump is using the power of the American
state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually
taking a second to unpack this because things are probably

(02:22):
going to get worse. There is a non zero chance
that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the
next few months.

Speaker 5 (02:31):
It's great, it's spanging. Everything's going so well.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, But I want to start with talking about the
way that Trump has been using tariffs as as a
sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool,
but varies very specifically as a political weapon, and how
this differs from the previous economic regime, because I think
there's been a lot of you know, as the terroriff's
the threat of the tariffs go up, in the markets
sort of tank in fear of them. There's been a

(02:56):
lot of sort of defense of like free trade in
ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening.
And to understand how what Trump is doing is different
from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually
understand what trade is now. When an economist talks about trade.
They go, oh, yeah, obviously, trade is when two countries
exchange a thing, right, yep, But that's not actually what

(03:20):
most of the stuff on earth that is labeled as
global trade, that's not what it is, right, Look at
like US Mexico trade. We're going to go a bit
more into detail about what that stuff is. But do
you know what most not most, but you know what
a huge portion of US Mexico trade is. It is
the same company, the same company moving an auto part
from one side of the border to the other, back

(03:41):
and forth across the body.

Speaker 5 (03:43):
Yeah, I suppos got to say.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Yes, back and forth. Right, So it's a lot of
different people being paid different wages can make the same thing.

Speaker 6 (03:50):
Yeah, or if someone paid lower wages can make it. Yeah,
someone paid more con Q see it and then they
can send.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
It back yep.

Speaker 5 (03:57):
Yeah, very very common.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, And this is actually a real substantive problem with
the way that I think everyone thinks about trade, because what
is happening here, and this is an argument that the
anti globalization movement used to make. You know, David Graeber
like makes this argument a lot, and they're right, which
is that most things that we think of as quote
unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving a
resource around the world so that they can produce something.

Speaker 6 (04:20):
Yea and exploit labor at some impossible exploitation rate.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah, you know. And this means that using nation states
as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible
way to think about global economy. Right there, there are
some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, Like
trade is important because you know, even even the same
corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how

(04:46):
much foreign currency a country, right right, And so okay,
there's things like balance of payments where if you run
out of it, if you're a country and you run out
of American dollars, suddenly you can't employ like fuel anymore
in your country, like explodes, And that's a very common
way that like this happens in Trilanck, for example, pretty recently.
This is a way for your economy to blow up.
But that's kind of an edge case in terms of
how global trade actually operates. But the problem is that

(05:09):
it is to the advantage of the ruling class for
you and everyone else to think about trade as something
that's like a war between you and the country next
to you instead of a corporation. Like fucking over everyone
involved in this entire thing. Now, there's a pretty interesting
book that I read recently called Border Economies Cities Bridging
the US Mexico Divide by James Greber Gerber Nicks Gerber, Okay,

(05:32):
And one of the things he points out is that
the two largest trade relations between any country, any two
countries on Earth are the US in Mexico and the
US in Canada. And those are the countries with the
highest tariffs that trumbles attempting to apply. Yeah, and it's
worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what
actually is traded between, for example, the US and Mexico.

(05:55):
And the place I want to start is that one
of the largest kinds of goods is moved from from
Mexico to the US is computer equipment. And nobody fucking
talks about this ever, No one, like zero fucking people
talk about this. I am convinced this is because of racism.
But Mexico is a huge sort of like assembly place
for a whole bunch of things like monitor screens, like

(06:17):
computer equipment in general, and a lot of that stuff
comes into the US. And there's also you know, the thing,
the thing that we started this episode on. That's I
think the thing I gets talked about the most now
is transportation equipment, right, And this is a combination of
consumer vehicles and also like heavy duty cargo trucks, which
are unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy,

(06:40):
right of the entire global economies. Like having these trucks
is a sort of vital infrastructure thing for the United States.
You can move stuff around a lot of that cost
in Mexico. And then also like a lot of it
is like whole cars that are like like finished assembly
like in Mexico, and they get shipp across the border
and there's a lot of things there. And these are
also like all the same international companies that work in

(07:01):
the US. So it's like Toyotas like Konda.

Speaker 6 (07:03):
Yeah, I mean these are your American trucks often, right,
or like.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, four does this too? Yeah, what's GM
now Stalores.

Speaker 6 (07:13):
Yeah, yeah, like Chevy GM like these as well as
like Toyota.

Speaker 5 (07:17):
Toyota I think has a big planet.

Speaker 6 (07:18):
I forget exactly where, but along the board is somewhere
if I recall correctly.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, this is extremely common Yeah. And what this is, right, like,
this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products
across the border. Yeah, and this gets counted as Mexico
doing trade. You know. One of the things in one
of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's
economy never had the kind of economic bump that China

(07:43):
did from the amount of industrial production if you look
at like the East Asian tigers, right right, And I
think part of that is actually something that is not
mentioned in the book, which is if if you look
at the East Asian economies that that develop their economies
that you're talking like your South Korea's, et cetera, cedule
like a lot of those countries, like Japan, there was
a lot of US military investment there in a way
that's just not true of Mexico. Like Mexico is not

(08:05):
like a place where you offshore you're supplying your supplies
to because you need to move stuff to you know,
fight the war in Vietnam. But you know, one of
the other reasons is that, Yeah, Okay, so like where
is all the profit from the international trade going. It's like, well,
it's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah,
because it's it's those those multinationals are the people who
actually reap all of the benefits.

Speaker 6 (08:26):
Yeah, to a degree, like post NAFTA, right, post ninety four,
it has created a class of people in Mexico who
have benefited from it, but it has it has not
lifted up like like the average income. Right, It's created
a greater disparity of income than at any point.

Speaker 7 (08:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (08:44):
Yeah, previous to that.

Speaker 6 (08:45):
And you'll hear people I was talking to us Ran
about this yesterday in Tijuana, like how like what NAFTA did,
Like now, if you look at nineteen ninety four, I
think it's a really good example of what you're talking
about of Like, yeah, we opened up that border to
international companies to do tariff free back and forth, right,
but we didn't open it up to people.

Speaker 5 (09:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (09:03):
At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right like
enforced much harsher border enforcement. And the two things in
parallel really kind of indicate, yeah, what the free trade
is going for.

Speaker 7 (09:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah, And you know, and this is another old anti
globalization thing like we ever talks about. This is like yeah,
free like free trade is about the free movement of
capital and the unfree movement of people, right, Yeah, so
it's about locking people down in place so you can
like you can you can dictate wages to them, and
then moving capital around the world to avoid them exactly.

Speaker 5 (09:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, and we're gonna get into this more in a second,
but I want to talk about some you know, some
of the other things that are that are exported from
Mexico fruits, vegetables, alcohol, or like huge exports.

Speaker 5 (09:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
And then also and this is something that I don't
think is people don't understand what's happening very well. Is
there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to
the US. But the thing that's happening there, and this
is the thing that's very weird about the oil industry,
is that the refinery facilities are not in the same

(10:04):
country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time.
So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't
have the refinery facilities to like refine the specific kind
of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So like, yeah,
it's again one of these situations where it's not really
like Mexico is sending its oil to the US. It's
like I mean kind of right, that's like one of
the more direct issh ones, But largely what's happening is

(10:28):
that like again like it's an oil company moving stuff
to you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of
it so they can sell it. Now There's there's been
some other stuff happening with Mexico that's a kind of
reaction to Trump's previous thing. And I think the extent
of this has been overblown to some extent, but a
lot of very low end manufacturing stuff has been leaving
China for a long time. This is one of my

(10:50):
media things on the show, is that this has been
happening for a while because labor price has been rising
in China and one of the places that these things
went to is Mexico. So there's been a lot of
like direct investment from trying to et cetera, et cetera,
and all of these things. You know, like these these
these kind of movements. I'm talking about them because these
kind of like seismic global economic shifts right of the
kind that we're going to be see are driven by

(11:11):
a lot of things, you know, I mean this stuff
like currency valuations, like local tax laws, like state corporate
planning policies like demands or just blah blah blah blah blah.
But one of the single most important things is the
state of class struggle in a country and what effect
that has on wages or like, you know, like straight
up uprisings.

Speaker 5 (11:27):
Right.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the
term the spatial fix, though other people were already using it,
and I don't like his work much, but he did.
He is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes,
you know, the sort of free trade regime that that
persisted roughly through like now. I mean it was it
was taking shape in sort of the eighties, like the
eighties through like roughly now, as the spatial fix for

(11:53):
declining profitability. Right, you know what else has declining profitability? Well?

Speaker 5 (11:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (12:00):
The worst things get the more people are listen to
our podcast, and you can say that.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
We are back. Okay, So let's talk about this, this
sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort
of finds fit this, right. You know, through the seventies
there's this sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the
economy is sort of going to shit. And it's happening
everywhere because they're sort of like structural overcapacity and manufacturing.
And the solution to this is a spatial fix, right,

(12:34):
which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it
to other places. Yeah, and you know, and this is
this is sort of what James was talking about earlier, right.
The goal is to sort of weaken the power of
the working class by locking people down into their countries
and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor
protections and also a weaker level of sort of like
workers organization, right.

Speaker 6 (12:55):
Yeah, and then it leaves like the previously well organized workers.
Like if you look at the industries and the places
where my grandparents come from, the dog workers and minors, right,
those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers
of people in the UK anymore. And like as a result,
those working class towns are just destitute, you know. So

(13:15):
that previously thriving a well organized working class that we
had northern England, it's left kind of like it has
to relocate or reorganize, right, and it destroys those like
nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up
until the eighties.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
With a minus strike, right, Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
This was this was done deliberately, yah, right. I mean
there there's always a debate in the literature about to
what extent, like neoliberalism was like planned, or to what
extent it was you know, a sort of reaction to
a bunch of crazies. But specifically this kind of like
offshoring and the container ships have been part of this,
but like this specific kind of thing, and even the
transition cold oil was like was a very deliberate thing

(13:55):
done by like done by sort of American and British
politicians in order to sort of break the power like
miners unions. And you know, one of the major places
that this went obviously like a lot of these things
go to Mexico. The sort of first round of these
go to like the original like Asian tiger economies I
was talking about, Well, I mean places like it, like
Indonesia too, with a lot of those economies sort of

(14:16):
like Thailand, those commies kind of blew up in the nineties. Yeah,
but you know, one of the largest, most important ones
was China. And you know it's important to sort of
remember I've talked about this on the show before. A
lot of this is also the product of Tianoman Square,
because the thing that's important to remember about Tianneman is
that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tiannemen and

(14:40):
also the sort of CCP line. Most of the people
who died at Tannama were workers, right, Most people who
were executed after Wridge were workers. They were like students died,
but it was mostly workers who were killed. And a
lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tanneman
was like the last time that China's like trade union federation,
which is like now such a joke that it's like

(15:00):
it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as
to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union.
Like that's that's how fuck it is. And the last
time that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was
in favor of the Tianeman protests. And then the army
shows up and just like like slaughters their base. Yeah,
And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese

(15:22):
working class, right, It breaks the alliance with the students
that they'd had that was you know, and that was
a durable political force dating back to like the nineteen twenties, right,
And it breaks this extremely militant, well organized Chinese urban
working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and
less organized like migrant working class yea. And that is

(15:42):
the class that like to this day right now is
like the engine of global capital or like those like
three hundred million migrant workers yep.

Speaker 5 (15:49):
And they can be in different parts of the world,
right like the other way.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
The three hundred million number, that's just the microtworkers in China, Jesus.
To be clear, there are a lot more internationally. Yeah,
but yeah, China's miketworking population is like almost the size
of the US. It's like the fourth largest country in
the world just by like itself.

Speaker 5 (16:05):
It's yeah, that's mad.

Speaker 6 (16:07):
I was just thinking of today, like the scam compounds
which exists on the border between me and Mah and Thailand,
like they actually Thailand.

Speaker 5 (16:16):
Just cut power off to them today.

Speaker 6 (16:18):
I mean, I can see that the strategy there, but
it's just going to end up hurting the people who
are in those compounds more of course it is. Yeah,
of course, those people who are in those compounds used
to be able to escape and go to places where
they could like get back to their lives, right, like
be re taken care of, and of course that's well
funded by USA, so they don't exist as of this week,
which is pretty brutal. But like, yeah, these people, right,

(16:41):
these these migrant workers who come from all over the
world hoping for a chance that the things that capitalism
have promised them are the people who have to be
exploited so that people in wealthy countries can.

Speaker 5 (16:51):
Have their treats.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, and those workers are the basis of monoglobal capitalism, right,
Like you know, like those Chinese workers for example, like
it it is illegal for them to form an independent union.
If you try to form an independent union, you will
go to prison so fast that like though we dust
clouds like.

Speaker 5 (17:09):
Hey and like Wiley Coyote will take you to prison.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, Like even trying to get your union to like
do something like trying to have your own independent people
elected to your to that union, like canon will get
you arrested and like and even like short, Chinese labor
oppression like is pretty intense. But it's like you know
that we're also talking about countries like Columbia. It's like, well, yeah, okay,
so what happens to union organizers in Columbia's like they
get being shopped by paramilitaries with machine guns. Right, And

(17:32):
that's that's that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right,
was moving jobs to places where the ruling classes sort
of control was more firm and their ability to use
violence was higher. Yeah, And so this is what the
American imperial system sort of had been, right. It's based
on American capital flowing around the world. And this is

(17:54):
also like international capital too, right, Like we've literally been
talking about like Japanese corporations right doing like the same shit, right,
But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world,
extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it
in American corporations like that. That's what free trade is.

Speaker 5 (18:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
And it's also you know, secondarily, right, it is a
debt system. It's based on forcing countries to like pay
back loans that were taken out by dictators. Gogurid de
Draber's debt last five thousand years, it's very good. But yeah,
it's based on like turning entire countries into just debt
servicing engines, where like all of the wealth that is

(18:31):
produced by entire nation is just going to like pay
debts to bank of America. Yeah, And you know, the
thing about this is that this is actually a very
very efficient model of empire. It's one of the most
sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen.

Speaker 8 (18:45):
Right.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
It works extremely well and makes the US an unbelievable
amount of money. It protects global capitalism, and the people
currently running it don't want it to work like that.
Now do you know who else? It doesn't want the
current system to work like it does because they can
make more money.

Speaker 5 (19:01):
I can guess it's.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
The products and services for this point, excited to hit
which one we get?

Speaker 6 (19:07):
You know, it could be it could be anything. I
really at this point, who knows?

Speaker 3 (19:21):
We are back, So we've entered I guess what you
could call the phase of mask off imperialism. US imperialism
usually at least sort of like war human face. And
and it did it for good reason, right you know,
Ronald Reagan did not give a single ship about democracy
and human rights, right like like you know, and this
is this has been true in the US for like

(19:43):
ages and ages and ages, right you know that, like
they prop up right wing military dirtatorship constantly. But the
thing is, democracy and human rights are things that like
people like and so you know, it was it's it's
a weapon that he and and his sort of brand
of conservatives, like anti communist conservatives like wielded it again communism,
and it was a very very powerful ideological weapon because

(20:03):
if if if your choice ceases to be between like
communism and capitalism, and your choice is now between like
do you want to live in a dictatorship, but do
you want to live in a democracy? Like that's a
very different question, and it's it's a very very important
question for sort of how how the Cold War was
won and how international power is wielded, right, because there's
there's always been an illusion that there's an international community

(20:26):
in that countries are like working together and and this
is this is a very very powerful ideological thing, you know,
I mean, and this is something like you live through this,
like God, it probably listen to you didn't leave to
this now, dear God. But like like the Iraq War, right,
the US didn't unilaterally invader Rock now I was called
the quote unquote Coalition of the Wilding and included like

(20:46):
like they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to
like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government, Like,
so you.

Speaker 6 (20:55):
Know, yeah, you had all kinds of people running around
in a rock for a while then, I guess, yeah,
obviously the United Kingdom played a big role in it,
like an outside troll, given being a relatively small country.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah, and you know, and this, this, this is the
way that you do. You know, even just overtly straight
up imperialist stuff like it, like invading a rock, right,
was still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions.

Speaker 5 (21:17):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
And the thing about different about Trump is Trump doesn't
give a fuck about any of that, right, absolutely not.
He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who is
like boldly answers the question what if Trump smoke crack
like that is Rob Ford, Like he's he's turning on
his allies, like people people like right wingers who should
be his allies in Canada, right, who are exactly the
kind of people who you would expect to do sort

(21:41):
of like right wing multilateral interventions in countries, right. Yeah,
and you know he is caused with with his like
threat to put tariffs on like, he's caused these people
to become anti American. And this is the same thing
with Mexico. Right, even the sort of like the nominally
center left governments in Mexico like have cooperated with American imperism.
But Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He
wants to run everything just very purely and very openly

(22:03):
as as an American empire.

Speaker 6 (22:05):
Yeah, Like America's always bullied Mexican. Right when we talk
about the deployment of troops to the border. Biden absolutely
bullied Amlo into into bringing those troops to the border
because they came before Donald Trump even came into office.
But now Donald Trump's just doing it on true social yeah,
like it's it's it's kind of different. Or Panama fuck, Like,
you know, I was in Panama September of twenty four

(22:27):
and I went to the Canal Museum, and Panama like
is very proud of its history of independence.

Speaker 9 (22:32):
Right.

Speaker 6 (22:33):
It's relatively short, yeah, and hard earned and paid for
in blood. But like, yeah, I traveled. I'm a US
City cinema traveling you. No one gave me any shit.

Speaker 5 (22:41):
It was fine.

Speaker 6 (22:41):
Everyone's very nice to me. Now the burning American flags
in Panama City, like.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Yeah, yeah, because Croup is trying to take the Panama
canal back and before we get into like you know,
I mean, I guess we can get into hear some
of the stuff that he's doing. Right, he's pulled out
of the International Criminal Court and it's putting sanctions on it.
He has been trying to use the sanctions that he's
been threatened to apply to Canada. Who get Canada to
join the US? Like he is trying to conquer Canada, Right, Yeah,
he's he's been trying to He's been trying to force

(23:08):
the government of Denmark to buy Greenland.

Speaker 6 (23:10):
Sell Greenland, right, Like he wants to purchase greenland from there.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yeah, he wants to buy Greenland. Yeah, there was. There
was the whole sort of showdown with Columbia over Columbia's
like being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Columbia,
and he used sanctions. There there is again him saying
the US is going to take over Gaza. And this
is a very, very substantively different thing than than the
kind of American empire that we've had before.

Speaker 6 (23:34):
Right.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, the last time the US tried to take Canada
was eighteen twelve. Right, it's been like two hot hundred years.
This is how Britain returns to the world stage, right,
And the thing is, last time, the last time the
US tried to take Canada, they burned the capitol down,
so like you know, yeah, but like like this is
something that even even under like people like Bush, right,

(23:55):
who is like a Bush is like a very very
avert American imperialist, right, yeah, Bush would ever try to
invade Canada. Like yeah, yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right,
And this is this, this is just a very very
different kind of imperialism than than what existed before. And
I wanted to go into I think why this is
the case? Yeah, and I think the reason why this

(24:17):
is the case. Okay, So the reason that there's been
such a defensive free trade is like people being like,
oh my god, if he puts teriffs in place, it'll
raise prices, and like, yeah, that's true, right, it'll crash
the global economy because the global economy has been turned
into a very very efficient engine of extracting profit from
countries and putting them in the hands of corporations. Right.
It's it's working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now,
if the US wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that

(24:37):
is technically possible, right, Reagan was able to do this.
But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that well,
I mean kind of you but like the main thing
that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords.
And the Plaza Accords was this this thing in the
eighties where he forced Japan. Japan was the important moment,
like Japan, West Germany. I think there are a couple

(24:57):
other countries like he forced them to increase the value
of their currency relative to the dollar, because like, you know,
so if you have a currency and it's worth a
bunch of like another person's currency, so like you know,
you have like the dollar and it's worth like a million,
like yen or whatever the fuck, right, the currency that's
worthless has a more competitive manufacturing economy. And Reagan was

(25:18):
able to like restart the American like manufacturing economy for
a while by doing this. But the problem is that
it blew up the entire world economy. And so to
save the world economy, Clinton rolled back the accords and it,
you know, and that was the thing that actually finally
sort of like a viscerated American manufacturing and the exchange
here was you know, and all of the stuff that
I've been I've been talking about for the last few minutes.

(25:39):
So there's a very very good essay written right after
two thousand and eight called What's good for Goldman Sachs
is good for America by the economist Robert Brenner. And
what the strategy became, and this is a strategy that
was originally pioneered by Japan that we took was instead
of having like a manufacturing economy, like actually a production
based economy, you have an economy based on the value

(26:01):
of assets.

Speaker 5 (26:01):
Right.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
So assets are things that you own, right, this is
the stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for
our purposes. And the goal is to make the value
of those things go up.

Speaker 5 (26:10):
Right.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
And so what you do is you speculate on you
you take out loans, You speculate on the prices of
stocks going up, the prices of houses going up right,
and you know, you make it very easy to borrow money. Now,
obviously this produced a series of like staggering economic collapses,
including like the dot com collapse two thousand and eight
with you.

Speaker 5 (26:29):
Know remember that one.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
But the thing is in the way of the financial collapse.
The US mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize
the system. But the thing is, you know, they were
sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right. What
they couldn't stabilize was the political sector, where if you
look at the two people who are currently running the
United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human
personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy, right,

(26:54):
and the other one is Donald Trump, who is the
human manifestation of the real estate class, right, whose wealth
like belie enormously. And the thing is right, but because
Elon Musk is like a tech bubble go up guy, right,
those people don't think like the people who built like
American financial capitalists, right, just like the people who designed
the tratism, they don't think the same way Trump does.

(27:14):
Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right, And this
is how he sees the world. Right. He thinks in
terms of land and borders and territorial control. And he
thinks in terms of like what physical thing can I
steal from someone in order to make money? Right, and
that you know, this is why you're trying to steal
the Panama Canal. And and he thinks this way instead
of like things that are more abstract like debt servicing
and like, you know, the sort of lines of power

(27:35):
in the coalition building.

Speaker 10 (27:36):
Right.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this
looks really big. I want it and so and now
he's going to try to use the American empire to
just seize this.

Speaker 5 (27:46):
Yeah. He sees things in terms of like raw power.

Speaker 6 (27:49):
It's a very uh undeveloped notion of like power, right,
Like yeah, yeah, I was thinking the other day, like,
whoever is in the same room as Joseph I must
be having a fucking field day right now at the
guy who he was there? He wrote books about soft power, right,
the idea of the US power to persuade rather than
power to kind of whether there rather than like hard power,

(28:12):
which comes in tanks or tariffs.

Speaker 5 (28:14):
I guess, Joseph and I is no longer relevant. I
get that.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
Yes, yes, no, we're we're back. We're back in pure hardpower.
And something I think is renal very alarming that I
want to close on is the extent to which, like
the US media is just sort of just once do
you propaganda for it? Yeah, I'm gonna I'm going to
read a quote from a CNN arc again this is CNN. Quote.
The subject heading is the US has been expanding for
its entire history. This is an article, oh, the title

(28:41):
of which is Trump is Trump wants to redraw the
map of the Western hemisphere for fun's.

Speaker 6 (28:47):
Sake, like twenty twenty five Monroe doctrine posting on CNN literal.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Literally literally, Okay, okay, you are so far ahead of
this thing, because the next I'm going to read the
one I was going to read.

Speaker 6 (28:58):
First, Uplift civilizing cris you and I what's an next paragrad.

Speaker 3 (29:02):
The next section heading is and I quote what is
Trump's doctrine and explains the Monroe doctor for.

Speaker 6 (29:08):
Fox sake, this is I cannot explain how like I
have taught this as a thing in history classes for
more than a decade from the perspective of like that
was fucked up and shameful, and even the conservative students like, yeah,
hard agree, look at these racists as fuck cartoons about
Filipino people that were used in here to justify this,

(29:29):
and now we are back like it is, and like, yeah,
CNN is just out there like fucking cranking the manufacturing consent.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
That's not even the worst part about it, Like I
want to read the session. So one of the other
section headings is the US has been expanding for its
entire history sick quote expansion. Expansion is built into the
American DNA's has retired Ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor
of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service
career officer.

Speaker 6 (29:55):
Okay, yeah, like an angel sweeping across the planes, fucking
manifest destinies.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Yeah, it's we're you know, and this is this is
this coming all sort of coming into like the way
that Trump thinks about which Trump thinks about the US,
like like an eighteenth century land empire, Yeah right, Yeah,
eighteenth century land empires, you know, got money by conquering
people and like extracting tribute from them directly. And then
also you know they were mercancilest empires, right, so they

(30:20):
they got they got a bunch of their money. And
this is the thing that Trump explicitly talks about. It
is like he wants he thinks he can raise revenue
from like terrosts, which like, no, he can't, but like
what he can do is use the threat of tariffs
to like force countries to do whatever the fuck he
wants and this is the kind of imperialism that we're
in now. It is a definite, substantive break from what
we've seen in the US for a century, more than
a century. Yeah, and I think I think it's important

(30:41):
for people to understand exactly how this functions. Yeah, and yeah,
it's sick.

Speaker 5 (30:45):
We're going into the new opium wars. It's going to
be so fun. Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Well, this is this spiniacul happened here. Do not get
kettles on bridges, go out into the worlds and make trouble.

Speaker 6 (30:58):
And people want to read more about the early like
globalizing that the previous year of neoliberal globalization, Like Naomi
Klein has some good stuff, and I think Joe Stiglitz
does as well.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
We can Yeah, yeah, I also recommend David Graber's direct
action in Ethnography, which is him writing about the original
like anti like ult globalization protests and his like time
in them. So you know, if you need direct action ideas,
they did some fun stuff. Yeah, dressing guys up like
marshmallows and police batons would bounce off the great.

Speaker 5 (31:30):
Yeah, bring back clown block. That'll get us through it.

Speaker 9 (31:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (32:00):
The government of two Weeks ago no longer exists. We
are now in a fundamentally different country. Under the authority
President Trump. Elon Musk is leading a de facto cyber
coup of the United States using the intentionally vague and
unaccountable department of a government efficiency, Musk is seizing control

(32:20):
of the United States critical digital infrastructure, literally rewriting the
code that runs our country and culling the federal workforce.
Using the justification of removing government bureaucracy, Musk and the
Trump administration have installed their own batch of bureaucratic tech oligarchs,
made up of former Tesla and SpaceX interns and engineers,

(32:43):
teal fellowship researchers, pallenteer employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and literal nick fuentes,
pilled gropers. Career employees have been locked out of their
respective agencies, both digitally and physically, as the DOGE team
ransacks various departments and accesses wide swaths of sensitive government data.

(33:04):
Agency officials who have tried to resist Musk's seizure of
classified materials have been fired, and more federal employees have
been put on leave, including the entirety of USAID. This
effectively amounts to Musk abolishing the whole department, all without
congressional authorization or oversight, not even in executive order from
Trump that extends presidential authority on a whim. The unelected

(33:29):
Elon Musk decided to carry out the closure of an
entire government agency, and he is far from finished. Doge
has hijacked the Treasury to withhold authorized payments to multiple agencies,
resulting in an ongoing battle of lawsuits and court orders.
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and

(33:49):
this episode is an audio companion to an article I
published on the shatter Zone substack linked below. In the description.
You can follow along online at Shatterzone dots substack dot
com and click the hyperlinks for more information and sources.
Elon Musk has personally directed the General Services Administration to

(34:10):
terminate leases on quote unquote mostly empty federal buildings. The GSA,
essentially the landlord of the federal government, was one of
the first agencies to receive Musks quote unquote fork in
the road deferred resignation letter offering to buy out the
entire workforce. The legality of the letter is still uncertain,

(34:30):
as it promises to pay out currently unappropriated funds. IRS
workers who accepted the resignation offer have already been asked
to return to work until May. The newly appointed GSA Commissioner,
Michael Peters, a private equity executive that specializes in downsizing
corporate real estate, has decided that quote non DoD federal

(34:51):
building space should be reduced fifty percent quote, According to
a GSA employee who requested to remain anonymous, on top
of planning to cut the entire federal portfolio by half,
DOGE is seeking to cut GSA's own budget by as
much as fifty percent, with talk of consolidating GSA offices
into a few major cities using a quote unquote hub model.

(35:16):
Wired reports that DOGE staff may be trying to use
White House IT credentials to access GSA computers remotely. An
anonymous GSA employee claims that few people at the agency
have elected to take up the voluntary paid resignation offer,
with those who have mostly being of retirement age. High

(35:36):
leveled Trump appointees used quote unquote scare tactics in agency
emails pressuring career employees to accept the deferred resignation offer,
warning that cost cutting measures will eventually lead to a
further reduction in force. Employees are concerned that a reduced
federal workforce would result in federal buildings losing their operations

(35:56):
and maintenance contracts, with disastrous consequences for the functionality of
government buildings. Quote the brain drain is going to cripple
our ability to maintain the buildings even more than it
already was. We aren't overstaffed unquote for a GSA employee,
they continued, quote, I think this process is already too

(36:18):
far along to stop. I'm hoping we just need to
get to the mid terms unquote. What is happening across
the federal government right now is unprecedented. But this is
not Germany in the nineteen thirties. It's not the fall
of the Soviet Union. We grasp at analogies to help
contextualize current events that escape understanding. There are similarities, but

(36:40):
what's happening is new, very American, very twenty first century.
Think of the growth of the Internet, social media tech
startups in fifty years. What's happening right now could be
talked about in the vein of what happened to the
United States in the mid twenty twenties. Now, rhetoric of

(37:00):
cutting red tape and breaking federal bureaucracy has been common
political clap trap for decades, and previous efforts have been
largely all bark and no bite. But now there's been
a huge chomp. So why now? What happened? Trump has
blamed entrenched federal bureaucracy or the quote unquote deep state,

(37:22):
for preventing him from enacting sweeping change during his first term.
The obstacles Trump encountered didn't just come from Congress and
the courts, but rank and file government workers who run
day to day operations. Last month, the far right America
First Policy Institute published a report titled Tales from the Swamp,

(37:43):
How federal bureaucrats resisted President Trump. The author, James Shrek,
a former Heritage fellow, credits quote unquote hostile career employees
for quote unquote refusing to implement policies. Shrek says, quote
many employees refused or defied directives withheld information, slow walked

(38:05):
projects that they opposed, performed unacceptably, and used strategic leaking
to undermine the president's agenda unquote. Trump himself realized this
late into his first term and sought to remedy the
situation by revoking civil protections for tens of thousands of
federal career employees, reclassifying them as atwill employees under an

(38:26):
executive order called Schedule F. This allowed Trump to treat
large swaths of government employees as political appointments. In his
article for the America First Policy Institute, Shrek refers to
career removal protections as a quote modern invention that protects
entrenched bureaucracy unquote. Though Biden repealed Schedule F, Trump effectively

(38:48):
reinstated the order on the first day of his second term.
Trump promised to restore his authority to quote remove rogue
bureaucrats back in early twenty twenty three under his Agenda
forty seven plan, vowing to quote wield that power very
aggressively unquote. When Trump first ran on Drain the Swamp

(39:08):
in twenty fifteen, he was referring to corporate lobbyists special
interests in Washington corruption, but now the term is used
to deride the so called administrative state, federal agencies, regulatory boards,
and bureaucratic career employees that maintain the basic functionality of
our government. Both Schedule F and Doge are part of

(39:29):
a too pronged assault on the administrative state, all in
service of consolidating than amplifying executive power. Trump has fully
embraced the unitary executive theory proposed by the likes of
Russell Vaught, Project twenty twenty five co author and the
newly confirmed director of the White House Office of Management

(39:51):
and Budget. Although it's understood that Congress has quote unquote
power of the purse, under unitary executive theory, Trump now
believes that funding appropriated by Congress does not need to
be spent. Rather, the executive branch controls the flow of
federal spending and Congress merely sets a ceiling on spending
that the executive must not exceed. Under this interpretation of

(40:14):
the Constitution, the president has sole and complete control of
the executive Branch, including all of its agencies and departments.
But people in Trump's circle like JD. Vance and Elon
Musk could be pushing Trump to go even further to
where the president considers both the judicial and legislative branches
as purely ceremonial and advisory. In the words of New

(40:38):
Right philosopher Curtis Jarvin, and arguably we are already well
on our way to that point. This centralized executive power
allows the executive branch to achieve goals I would have
previously considered to be quite lofty. And I'll outlined two
of those examples, pulling from the aspirations of the modern
conservative movement. After this ad break, welcome back to it

(41:11):
could happen here, and get ready to say bye bye
to the FBI. Though the right has typically been thought
to be firmly in the back of the blue camp,
this isn't always the case, especially on the more extreme end.
The far right militia movement has long clashed with federal
law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF. In the

(41:32):
aftermath of January sixth, many Mega supporters found themselves at
odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Republican politicians began
to feed into right wing uproar surrounding the FBI, as
Trump himself became a target for investigations after the mar
Lago raid. In August of twenty twenty two, Marjorie Taylor
Green tweeted defund the FBI. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar joined

(41:57):
in attacks on the bureau, hosting weight to destroy the FBI,
we must save America. That same month, right wing columnist
and podcaster Liz Wheeler published in op ed titled Abolish
the FBI, which called to quote farm out the vital
functions of the FBI and raise the rest unquote. The

(42:18):
new right publication Compact Magazine featured a slightly better written
article by the same title, Abolish the FBI at CPAC.
In March of twenty twenty three, Matt Gates, noted pedophile
advocated to get rid of the FBI among other federal agencies.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Either get this government back on our side, or we
defund and get rid of Abolish the FBI.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
CDC, atf DJ, every last one of them if they
do not come to heal.

Speaker 7 (42:50):
In April of twenty twenty three, Trump joined in in
calls to defund the FBI after being charged with thirty
four felon accounts of falsepying business records. Next month, to
former FBI employees testified in a congressional hearing accusing the
Bureau of weaponization against conservatives in regards to the January
sixth investigations. The same two former FBI employees who had

(43:13):
their security clearance revoked after espousing j six conspiracy theories.
Later called to quote abolish the FBI at a Heritage
Foundation symposium on the quote weaponization of the US government
in April of twenty twenty four.

Speaker 8 (43:30):
You're given that magic wand that ability to be Jim Jordan, what.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
Would you do?

Speaker 5 (43:35):
I think you have to abolish the FBI. That's where
I'm at at this point.

Speaker 8 (43:39):
What now, some people are going to say, Okay, yeah,
we're gonna have to do you just abolish a What
would to you?

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Is there a replacement? I mean, you can't just not
have federal law enforcement, right.

Speaker 5 (43:51):
I think in large part, you could just not have
federal lawforce.

Speaker 7 (43:55):
During a live episode of Donald Trump Junior's podcast on
July eight eight, twenty twenty four, he called to abolish
several federal agencies, starting with the FBI as well as
the CIA and the IRS.

Speaker 4 (44:08):
Abolished the DEA. You know, I imagine of all the
places to abolish, and I don't know if that's the
best one. I'd start with the FBI, I'd start with
the CIA, I'd start with the IRS. There's a lot
of you know, the DA. Now maybe I know agent
level guys. So if they're going after narcos and stuff
like that. Perhaps a little bit more forgiving. They don't

(44:30):
seem to be setting up or in trapping people like
the FBI.

Speaker 7 (44:34):
The Trump administration has already begun the process to dismantle
large swaths of the FBI before cash Battel has even
been confirmed by the Senate. Eight top FBI officials have
been fired or forced resign by order of Acting Deputy
Attorney General Emil Bove, despite resistance from Acting FBI Director
Brian Driscoll. A questionnaire was distributed to FBI supervisors requesting

(44:58):
agents provide information to their own involvement in the January
sixth investigations. This was believed to be used for the
targeted removal of agency personnel. Last week, the FBI handed
over a list containing the information of five thousand employees
and agents who worked on the January sixth investigations. FBI
leadership initially chose to withhold employee names. In response, Bove

(45:21):
accused the FBI leadership of insubordination. This was ultimately a
fruitless effort, as data seized by Elon Musk's DOGE team
could easily match employee IDs to names. Trump has since
agreed to not publicly release the names of agents until
at least late March as lawsuits continue, and is required

(45:42):
to give two days notice if the administration chooses to
publicly disclosed names. But individual agents are still worried. An
anonymous letter from an FBI agent to Warren's quote. Currently,
there is an effort to cull a significant number of
career special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation unquote.
Around one third of FBI agents were told they would

(46:03):
be placed on leave. According to a government source who
spoke on the condition of anonymity, FBI employees have lost
access to systems, only to later regain access, while others
were told to wait to find out about their employee status.
Agents are now trying to negotiate back into their jobs,
with sources saying FBI employees may be able to stay

(46:24):
on if they can prove their loyalty to Trump and
disown the January sixth prosecutions. I write all of this
not in defense of the FBI, but to demonstrate how
far Trump is willing to go to expand his executive
power and transfer law enforcement duties to agencies seen as
more loyal to the president. Though I doubt the FBI

(46:45):
will be completely abolished in the next few years. The
agency could become unrecognizable, a shell of its former self,
with hardline Trump loyalists replacing the existing and already largely
conservative workforce. Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump,
like Homeland security investigations, could start picking up the FBI slack.

(47:08):
According to a senior government source, on day two of
Trump's second term, HSI was instructed to reopen investigations into
the twenty twenty George Floyd protests to quote identify protesters
BLM rioters likely did to us after January sixth, unquote.
For another once considered far fetched goal of the conservative

(47:30):
movement that now seems oddly within grasp, let's talk about
the Department of Education. Conservatives have advocated for dismantling the
Department of Education ever since Jimmy Carter signed its modern
incarnation into law in nineteen seventy nine. Most notably, Ronald
Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department in nineteen
eighty one, but Reagan's Commission ironically strengthened support for the department.

(47:55):
Once Reagan ran into roadblocks, he instead sought to limit
the Department's power end influence. Since then, calls to abolish
the Department of Education have been a recurring Republican talking
point among certain think tanks and politicians, but they have
struggled to land sizeable blows against the department. Trump previously
fiddled around with merging the Departments of Education and Labor

(48:15):
during his first term, but that plan went nowhere. In
Trump's own Agenda forty seven plan, released in twenty twenty three,
he expressed his goal of quote closing up the Department
of Education in Washington, d c. Later, at the National
Religious Broadcasters twenty twenty four Christian Media Convention in February
of twenty twenty four, Donald Trump repeated this promise, quote,

(48:39):
I will close the Federal Department of Education, and we
will move everything back to the states where it belongs,
where they can individualize education unquote. Project twenty twenty five
outlined how to achieve the effective dismantling of the department
by transferring funding and duties to other departments such as
Health and Human Services and the DOJ. Opposition to the

(49:00):
Department of Education was a frequent topic at the twenty
twenty four Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Robert Sophie
and I attended multiple panels and events taking aim at
the department, hosted by groups like Moms for Liberty and
the Heritage Foundation. On the first day of the convention,
the party ratified their official twenty twenty four RNC platform,

(49:23):
which called to quote close the Department of Education in Washington,
d C. And send it back to the States where
it belongs, and let the states run our educational system
as it should be run unquote. And now the Department
seems to be next on the Trump doge chopping block.
The administration is drafting a sweeping executive order. While Trump
says he wants his education nominee Linda McMahon to quote

(49:45):
unquote put herself out of a job. The planned executive
order would not just direct the Secretary of Education to
begin dismantling the department, but also ask Congress for assistance
in formally abolishing the agency. It's unlikely that Trump would
get the sixty Senate votes needed to pass the quote
unquote necessary legislation, but even if they can't manage to

(50:08):
technically abolish the department, he could still try to rip it,
scuts out, slash spending and forcibly resign or fire employees,
basically make the department simply non functioning, much like what
Doge did to USAID. Upwards of sixteen DOGE staffers are
currently listed in the Education Department Directory. Federal education employees

(50:28):
have already received the Fork in the Road resignation buyout offer,
while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI.
Without someone like Elon Musk and Trump's administration, there was
no clear path towards implementing some of the more lofty
plans proposed by conservative thought leaders, whether they be Trump's
own Agenda forty seven, the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five,

(50:51):
or Curtis Jarvin's dream of a national CEO king. Only
Elon Musk could do this. You need someone with his influence, connections, money, experience,
and knowledge of fringe neo reactionary Silicon Valley political theory
to propose and carry out something like Doge. So how
did Musk get here? Though it's common knowledge that Musk

(51:14):
has drifted pretty severely right word the past five years
leading into the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, he was
not an out and proud Trump supporter as recently as
twenty twenty two, Musk deemed Trump too old to serve
as president, again, tweeting that it was time for Trump
to quote hang up his hat and sail into the
sunset unquote. Initially, Musk threw his support behind the doomed

(51:37):
presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but as it
became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, Musk fell
in behind his new party line, but his implicit support
of Trump was kept on the down low. The two
met in Florida in March of twenty twenty four among
other wealthy Republican donors, as Trump was lobbying for campaign funding.

(51:59):
The New York Times reported that Musk did not want
to publicly endorse Trump as of early twenty twenty four,
telling friends the most he would do was an anti
Biden endorsement. Instead of public support, Musk would create his
own super pac to secretly help get Trump elected, timing
payments so his fiscal backing of Trump's campaign could only
go public after the election. But all that changed on

(52:22):
July thirteenth, after Trump's brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania,
Musk seemingly took Trump's call of fight Fight, Fight to heart,
tweeting less than an hour later, quote I fully endorse
President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery unquote. This
opened more frequent communication between Musk and Trump. Later that weekend,

(52:43):
both Musk and Peter Teel called Trump to recommend J. D.
Vance as vice president. Next week was the Republican National Convention,
during which Elon Musk was frequently name dropped, both by
official speakers and regular attendees, talked about as almost some
kind of mythic right wing superhero. On the final day

(53:05):
of the convention, rumors circulated that Musk himself would make
a surprise appearance on stage, Though said rumors did not
come to fruition. Musk's specter haunted the entirety of the RNC.
Come August, Musk just finished overhauling leadership at his America
Super Pack and was rigorously pushing pro Trump messaging on

(53:26):
X the Everything app. On August twelfth, Musk hosted Trump
in a two hour live streamed phone call dubbed in
x Space. This conversation marked the first time Trump casually
spoke at length about the assassination attempt. The pair also
discussed quote unquote migrant crime and the need to eliminate

(53:47):
federal bureaucracy. Trump gave a rare compliment to Musk, calling
him the greatest cutter, followed up by saying, quote, I
need an Elon Musk. I need someone that has a
lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to
close up the Department of Education, move education back to
the States unquote. News outlets were more interested in reporting

(54:09):
on the stream's technical glitches rather than Musk's idea for
a government efficiency commission, to which Trump responded very positively.
Next month, on September fourth, Trump announced that, at the
suggestion of Elon Musk, if elected, he would quote create
a government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial

(54:30):
and performance audit of the entire federal government and making
recommendations for drastic reforms unquote. Musk himself agreed to be
appointed head of the commission, aiming to cut trillions of dollars.
This announcement was not taken very seriously. The New York
Times called commissions such as this quote a favorite Washington

(54:51):
solution for delaying dealing with hard problems unquote, and The
Times later reported that the commission quote can issue recommendations
around federal five funding and regulations, but will be powerless
to enact them without executive actions by mister Trump or
funding approval by Congress, even though I can admit that
both myself and some of my coworkers underestimated Doge's ability

(55:14):
to physically carry out Musk's suggestions with no Congressional oversight
or authority. As the election ramped up, musk super Pac
mobilized thousands of canvassers across key swing states and collected
data to target both enthusiastic and unlikely voters. Throughout twenty
twenty four, Musk spent over two hundred and ninety million

(55:35):
dollars in contributions in support of the Mega campaign, mostly
via his own super pack. On October fifth, Musk made
his first appearance at an official campaign event, joining Trump
for his return to Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk continued to appear
at Trump rallies in the month leading up to the election.
By election day, Musk was firmly in Trump's inner circle,

(55:57):
spending Election night and most of the next week with
President Elect Trump atmar A Lago. After this adbreak, we
will return to discuss how Elon Musk is now trying
to become the CEO of the United States of America. Okay,

(56:21):
we are back, and now a few months after the election,
Elon Musk is doing to the United States exactly what
he did to Twitter. By the end, it still might
technically function on some level, just worse in every way,
prone to glitches, and full of Nazis. The previous version
was already bad and harmful, but the new one somehow

(56:43):
sucks even more and no longer has the aspects that
made it semi worthwhile. The Fork in the Road deferred
resignation letters sent to government employees used the exact same
title as a similar email sent to Twitter employees after
Musk bought the com company. The Doge team has installed
sofa beds on the fifth floor of the headquarters of

(57:06):
the Office of Personnel Management to enable working around the clock,
mirroring Musk's previous actions. During his takeover of Twitter, Musk
has brought on some of the same exact people who
helped him take over Twitter, all of whom are now
special government employees with odd job titles but immense power.
It was reported and Wired that a Musk stooge told

(57:28):
General Services Administration workers that the agency will now pursue
quote an AI first strategy unquote, and that the GSA
should operate like a quote unquote startup software company. Musk
has ordered the General Services Administration to terminate leases for
all roughly seven thousand and five hundred federal offices, amidst

(57:51):
a national call to return to in person work. This
again is a classic Musk move, taken from his takeover
of Twitter, in which to cut costs, he refused to
pay rent for Twitter offices in London, New York City,
and San Francisco while the buildings were still in use.
A current GSA employee was quoted and wired as saying, quote,

(58:14):
they are acting like this is a takeover of a
tech company unquote. Musk's own personal success hasn't been from
his skill as an inventor or a software engineer. What
he's proficient at is taking over corporations and molding them
in his image. This is what happened to Tesla, SpaceX
and Twitter in twenty twenty. Musk called the federal government

(58:37):
quote the ultimate corporation unquote, and now he seeks to
become CEO. In doing this, Musk is following the tech
industry motto of move fast and break things. So far
all his actions bypass Congress. The slow controller of stable government,
having everything be done via executive order and doge helps

(58:59):
to speed run a full reboot of the administrative state.
The motto of the old government may as well have
been move slow and build things. Progress is slow, but
detonation is fast. The breakage of government isn't a mere
side effect or a bug of this expediated form of rule.
It's a feature to reshape the government into their ideal technocracy. First,

(59:23):
breaking things is a requirement. They might not get away
with all of it, and they don't need to. They're
doing so much so fast, knowing that they will only
get away with some of it. But with new Supreme
Court approved presidential immunity and unlimited pardon power, they can
try as much as they want with zero consequence. These

(59:43):
are not the moves you would make if you wanted
a stable government. It's the moves you would make as
a new tech company, which is why Musk's operation is
masked with the Silicon Valley language of efficiency. The inefficiencies
of government are part of the point. That's what creates stability,
makes the country a trusted ally, and gives the dollar value.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (01:00:06):
Regulations can be bothersome sometimes and downright problematic, but that's
kind of the point. They act as a control on
imprecise and rushed decision making. If the cost of doing
business is slowing down the process, that's the cost that
has to be made, to quote a government employee who
spoke on the condition of anonymity. But those inefficiencies and

(01:00:29):
pesky regulations really irritate the Silicon Valley tech bros who
think they are the smartest people on the planet. It's
their view that since they're so smart, shouldn't they run
the country. Musk has a personal interest in slashing the
regulatory state, as it interferes with his own businesses and
dreams of space colonization. Last year, Musk claimed that Doge

(01:00:52):
quote was the only path to extending life beyond Earth unquote.
The White House Press Secretary has said that Musk himself
will determine when there is a conflict of interest involving
his businesses and Doge. SpaceX alone has received fifteen point
four billion dollars in government contracts, according to The New

(01:01:14):
York Times. The large reduction in the federal workforce through
the combined efforts of doge and schedule F. There is
an irrefutable similarity to a plan outlined by New Right
blogger Curtis Jarvin, Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher. Last year, Robert
Evans did a behind the Bastards on Curtis Yarvin, and
you should absolutely check that out for more information. In

(01:01:37):
twenty twenty two, Jarvin outlined how a second Trump term
could quote unquote reboot the United States government. This plan
amounts to a corporate takeover of government, which subsequently reshapes
the structure of government, akin to a corporation. Though in
Yarvin's mind, it is not President Trump who assumes the

(01:01:58):
role of CEO. Instead, the President acts as chairman of
the board, and before inauguration should select a CEO who
is an experienced executive. This appointed CEO could then quote
run the executive branch without any interference from Congress or
the courts, to quote Jarvin. While President Trump reviews the

(01:02:18):
CEO's performance in the background, Jarvin writes, quote most existing
important institutions, public and private will be shut down and
replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring
this CEO's performance on TV and can fire him if
need be unquote. Musk may believe that he has successfully

(01:02:39):
maneuvered Trump into appointing him CEO, but Trump could be
well aware of Musk's ambitions, but is keeping him around
as an emergency patsy, ready to fire when needed. The
Trump admin is currently testing the limits of presidential authority,
and once those limits get surpassed by the standards of
Senate Republicans, Musk is the easiest guy to blame and

(01:03:02):
push out of the administration's inner circle. The first step
in Yarvin's plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing
executive power to eliminate government inefficiency. This was both in
line with Project twenty twenty five and Musk's suggestion of
an efficiency commission once Trump gets into office. The plan

(01:03:23):
is as follows, purge bureaucracy what Jarvin calls rage retire
all government employees. This is essentially being carried out by
doge schedule lef and by just pressuring career employees to
accept deferred resignation offers. By threatening future mass layoffs, senior

(01:03:45):
level officials have been replaced by a batch of loyal
tech oligarchs with links to Musk and Peter Teel. The
stupidity of Doge was almost a secret weapon. The cryptocurrency
meanness made everyone in respectable society not take the idea seriously.
What's the worst an advisory commission could do with no

(01:04:05):
power to enforce its suggestions.

Speaker 9 (01:04:08):
Oops.

Speaker 7 (01:04:09):
Another step in Yarvin's plan is to nullify elite institutions
of power like the media and academia. Musk's takeover of
Twitter has gone a long way in altering the country's
information ecosystem. The Trump admen seems to be utilizing Steve
Bannon's flood the Zone strategy to distract and exhaust the media,

(01:04:30):
as well as more directed attacks. On January thirty, first,
the Department of Defense kicked out NBC News, The New
York Times, NPR, and Politico from their in house press
offices and replace them with One American News, The New
York Post, Breitbart, and huff Post. Under direction from Doge,

(01:04:51):
the White House has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions
to policy news services from multiple news outlets. A White
House advisor told Axios, quote, the eye of Sauron is
on more than just Politico, It's all the media unquote.
In terms of attacks on academia, the federal grant freeze
has had devastating effects on university research. Another step in

(01:05:16):
Yarvin's plan is to co opt Congress and ignore the courts.
This is where we are at right now. The goal
is to reduce both the judicial and legislative branches to
being purely ceremonial and advisory, as advocated by Yarvin. So far,
the Trump administration has effectively sidestepped the legislative bodies via

(01:05:36):
Elon Musk and Doge. It's highly unlikely Trump would ever
be impeached or removed by this Congress. Furthermore, this Congress
seems to have willfully given up on their power over
the federal budget. To quote a senior government official quote,
the real challenge is that Congress is on board for
now in losing their own budgetary authority. So far, a

(01:06:00):
loan security guard standing outside you, sayed and the Department
of Education has been enough to deter resistance from the
Democratic Party. Last week, I interviewed to Derek Black, a
constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. The
full interview will air tomorrow, but here's his short take
on the current situation.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
When Congress is willing to hand the keys over to
the president. Then we really no longer really have a democracy,
or at least the constitutional democracy that was created, you know,
a couple centuries ago. So the bigger danger, I think
is that through law itself, Congress sedes more and more
power to the president with a new legislation. So if

(01:06:42):
Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more
centralized power, well that would be a concerning thing to me.

Speaker 11 (01:06:48):
Right now.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
The real roadblock is the courts.

Speaker 7 (01:06:52):
The Trump administration has already displayed a willingness to ignore
the courts based on the continued halting of federal spending
and grants order from a US district judge. The Justice
Department has argued that the order to resume funding quote
contains several ambiguous terms and provisions that could be read
to constitute significant intrusions on the executive branch's lawful authorities

(01:07:14):
and the separation of powers unquote. This past weekend, Musk
raged against a federal judge who ordered to temporarily restrict
doja's access to Treasury Department data. Both Musk and the
White House have labeled a judge an activist, with White
House spokesperson Harrison Fields calling the order quote absurd and

(01:07:35):
judicial overreach unquote. On x the Everything app, Musk boosted
claims calling this a judicial coup and shared an announcement
from California Representative darryl Isa to introduce legislation to quote
unquote stop these rogue judges. But even without added legislation,
Musk and the Trump administration are gearing up to directly

(01:07:58):
defy judicial authority. On Saturday, Musk shared a tweet reading,
I don't like the president it sets when you defy
a judicial ruling, But I'm just wondering what other options
are these judges leaving us if they're going to blatantly
disregard the Constitution for their own partisan political goals quote.
And On Sunday, Vice President j. D Vance posted a

(01:08:20):
statement undermining judicial power.

Speaker 11 (01:08:22):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (01:08:23):
If a judge tried to tell a general how to
conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a
judge tried to command the attorney general in how to
use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges
aren't allowed to control executive's legitimate power unquote. So now
it all comes down to force. If the executive branch

(01:08:44):
not just ignores judicial authority, but blatantly defies it. Who
would be left to enforce the power of the court.
That leads us to another step in Yarvin's plan, centralize
the police, nationalize local law enforcement to place them under
federal control. Trump has flirted with his tactic in the past,
when he deputized Washington police as US marshals to kill

(01:09:08):
Michael Rhinol. In twenty twenty, Doge staff threatened to call
us marshals when you say to security officials who have
since been fired, denied them access to classified systems. Jorvin
believes this step is paramount.

Speaker 11 (01:09:21):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (01:09:22):
Support of the democratic public is a cipher. I think
that actually all you need is command of the police unquote,
if you have all of the guys with guns who
can physically stop you. Support from the public doesn't hurt, though,
and if things get tricky, Trump could employ the next
step in Yarvin's plan. Mobilize populist support, but crucially, don't

(01:09:47):
wait until you're at your weakest at the end of
your term after losing an election under popular mandate, deploy
your empowered supporters at the height of your powers to
oppose any obstruction from government agencies or the cour sort.
Trump may weaponize a Supreme Court ordained presidential immunity and
his unrestricted pardon power to make any willing actor carry

(01:10:08):
out his bidding with zero risk of legal consequence. Now,
even if Trump himself isn't aware of Jarvin's plan, his
vice president certainly is. On a far right podcast in
twenty twenty one, JD. Vance laid out a very similar
vision for a second Trump term, using what the Peter
Teel protege described as a dewocification program to purge bureaucracy.

Speaker 8 (01:10:33):
I think Trump is going to run again in twenty
twenty four. I think he'll probably win again in twenty
twenty four. I think that what Trump should do, like
if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire
every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil sermon in the
administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts,
because you will get taken to court. And then when
the courts stop, you stand before the country like Andrew

(01:10:55):
Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling,
now let him enforce It.

Speaker 7 (01:11:00):
Writes that the initial goal of this new administration should
not be simply to govern, but to quote figure out
what the Trump administration can actually do when it assumes
the full constitutional power is given to the chief executive
of the executive branch unquote. What the administration can do
once they fully seize this power is so incredibly vast.

(01:11:24):
Without checks and balances, all those crazy things Trump tried
to do during his first term would be a lot
easier to enact, let alone, whatever Musk and the tech
oligarchs want out of the United States incorporated. But that's
a whole separate topic. The current fight determines the degree
to which this power is seized, and Jarvin notes the

(01:11:45):
importance of going all the way.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (01:11:48):
When Trump in twenty seventeen took office, he took about
zero point zero one percent of power. If Trump in
twenty twenty one wants to have more than zero point
zero zero one percent of power, the only way he
can do it is to take one hundred percent, take
it all at once, completely legally.

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):
The real Donald J.

Speaker 7 (01:12:11):
Trump would never have the guts to even think of
doing this, and he's just too old unquote. Funny pessimism
from Jarvin. There, all of this doesn't even need to
benefit average Trump supporters, because Trump's main campaign promise wasn't
mass deportations, fixing the economy, or abolishing the Department of Education.

(01:12:32):
It was retribution as extremism. Analyst Jared Holt notes, quote
the right got its base so hooked on the idea
of revenge. He doesn't even need to pretend that any
of this benefits their base in any tangible way. They
just have to say it hurts the wrong people, and
that satisfies them.

Speaker 5 (01:12:52):
Unquote.

Speaker 7 (01:12:53):
If Trump and Musk continue to get their way, it
could take years to fix. But the past ten years
have shown us you can't really return to normal. There
probably is no going back. The options are to hunker
down and play it slow and try to survive whatever
happens in the next two to four years while offering

(01:13:14):
passive resistance, or we accelerate to whatever comes next, put
cards on the table, trigger a kinetic confrontation, and fully
manifest the results of this constitutional crisis. We are dealing
with managing crumbles versus a full system's collapse. Sad face
emoji this is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Day.

(01:14:01):
Last week I was working on an essay about how
the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Department
of Education. Now very quickly that project expanded to being
about how Elon Musk is actually trying to internally coop
the federal government and become the CEO of the United States.
That article is now published on Shatterzone dot substack dot com,

(01:14:24):
and it's also.

Speaker 11 (01:14:24):
The previous episode of this podcast.

Speaker 7 (01:14:27):
But during my research, I talked with law professor Derek
Black about the Department of Education, the state of disunion
in the country, and if we still have a democracy already.
Some of the things we talked about have begun to happen,
like Republicans introducing legislation to expanding executive power, while Trump
and Musk flirt with denying the authority of the courts.

(01:14:50):
But I decided to publish the full interview because I
believe his perspective is still helpful and the conversational format
alters the way we process information compared to me just
reading a kind of depressing essay for forty minutes. So,
without further ado, here is the interviewing.

Speaker 5 (01:15:10):
I'm Derek Black.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.
My area focuses on education, law and policy and really
sort of how that relates to democracy. But I teach
constitutional law and courses like that, author of a couple
of books schoolhouse burning, public education, and the assault on
American democracy, and then more recently dangerous learning the South
long war on Black literacy.

Speaker 7 (01:15:31):
Let's start by discussing what's going on at the Department
of Education right now, and maybe let's actually start a
little bit further back. Attacks on the Department of Education
like are not new. Reagan famously kind of pioneered the
rights focus on this, but it's been something they've struggled
to deal sizable blows against, especially in terms of wanting

(01:15:52):
to abolish the organization. Could you talk about like the
history of conservative attacks against the department?

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):
Yeah, I mean there's always been this states rights issue
that's been with America since its founding. Obviously was a
big part of the Civil War, big part of the
Civil rights movement, you know, a big part of the
Affordable Healthcare Act debate. So you always have this stage
rights argument going on, and at least amongst the folks
that are worried about that, public education comes up as

(01:16:20):
being a target because there's this argument always that well,
education is not in the federal constitution, so what business
does the federal government have to be involved, and so
it's really more of a talking point as opposed to
any particular substantive reason why they want to get rid
of it. But that's really where it's come from. But
you know, it's often been not that serious of a critique,

(01:16:41):
but obviously it's gotten very serious here in the last
couple of weeks.

Speaker 7 (01:16:45):
Yeah, that's the general overall feeling I'm having is that
there's a lot of things going on that I would
have previously thought are kind of like pipe dreams. Calls
to abolish the Department of Education, even this rallying call
from the new Right the past years to abolish the FBI,
general claims of you know, like draining the swamp, these
types of like old it's almost like stereotypical claims that

(01:17:08):
now through musk they've been able to like weasel their
way into actually dismantling like large, large systems that make
the everyday functionality of the government possible. What should people
know right now about the current attacks in the Department
of Education? Trump is still allegedly drafting in executive order.
He'll probably have to work through Congress, but we'll see

(01:17:30):
the degree to which he even needs to do that
what are you worried about like right now, and what
do you think people should know about like the current
the current attacks on the dewy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:41):
Well, there's the sort of immediate worries and then there's
the larger worries. The immediate worries I'll have to say,
I'm not terribly worried about. I mean, if you look
at the reporting that we've seen, it is interesting that
the White House seems to distinguish between the things that
it can do unilaterally right without Congress, and those things
that would need Congress. And I mean, it's a weird

(01:18:01):
silver lining, but that gives me like some like measure
of comfortability in this weird, bizarre world, only because you know,
two weeks ago the administration was willing to do things
that it had no authority to do right, just sort
of his claiming authority to do everything. And so there
is this at least recognition that there's not unbounded power.

(01:18:23):
So that's sort of the immediate threat is not that
huge because the White House or Trump's power over the
Department or to close it up is relatively narrow, like
most of the Department is established by statute, and he
can't just dissolve things or move things around that are
created by statute. He can't take money that's for poor
kids and spend them on vouchers. Right, these things, you know,

(01:18:43):
the law dictates. And the fact that he's implicitly acknowledging,
or rather his advisors or implicitly acknowledging they need Congress's
help gives me a little bit of comfort because I
think that getting rid of the department is I'm not
sure there's a majority in the House for that, but
there's certainly not a filibuster, you know, sixty vote majority
for that in the Senate. So that's short term. But

(01:19:05):
I think there's something far more disturbing to me, and
it's the long term, This sort of idea that there's
something illegitimate about the federal role and education, that there's
something illegitimate about public education itself. Those are very dangerous ideas.
I have a piece that just came out yesterday and
Slate that says, look, you know, the federal role in

(01:19:26):
public education predates the Constitution itself. You know, probably no one,
not many listeners, probably familiar, ever heard of the Northwest
Ordinances of seventeen eighty five and seventeen eighty seven, but
before we even had a United States Constitution. This foundational
document laid out how our territory is going to become states.
And without going through all the details, Congress embeds public

(01:19:48):
education and the very fabric of what it means to
be a state before we even have a constitution. And
so that's very important. Is where we start at the
end of the Civil War, right where we almost lost
our democer see Congress as a condition of readmitting Southern
states into the Union, says that one of the terms
of readmission is that you create public education system and

(01:20:09):
you never take those rights away, right, forcing public education
into the South in places where it never had been before.
You know, people are more familiar with the civil rights movement.
So I won't go through all that, but just to
take one more pause, I mean, Congress created a Department
of Education in eighteen sixty seven, right to get this
public education project off the ground. So this isn't some

(01:20:32):
wild new sort of fantasy of liberals or unions that
we need a department so that we can hand over
the spoils to teachers. This is an idea about what
it means to have democracy in America and public education
is a centerpiece of that, and the federal government has
been pushing it for two hundred and fifty years. And
that's a good thing. It's a good thing.

Speaker 7 (01:20:53):
How do you think that relates to the administration's attempts
to centralize executive power? Though, Like, if you look at
like what happened with you say it, right, this agency
that has been has been tried in law that may
not be legally abolished now, but they've been effectively abolished,
Like all the employees are on leave, it's been hallowed out.

Speaker 3 (01:21:11):
It essentially no longer exists.

Speaker 7 (01:21:13):
I feel like they're trying to at the very least
test the bare limits of executive power and bypass Congress
when they can. Part of my fear is like Congress
is not willing to fight them on that, Seemingly like
they're not willing to call them on that. They're almost
willing to acquiesce their like appropriation's ability as well as

(01:21:35):
you know, the ability to have actually have to like
remove departments from existence or create new ones.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Yeah, so you're picking up on a thread that's much
bigger than a department. Right, So, when Congress is willing
to hand the keys over to the president. Then we
no longer really have you know, a democracy, or at
least the constitutional democracy that was created, you know, a
couple of centuries ago here in which the president executes
the law. The president doesn't make the law, right, Congress

(01:22:02):
funds programs, not the executive. But if if ultimately Congress
is going to shift all that authority over like that,
that's a dangerous place for democracy to be. There are
no checks anymore. So I think what you're raising up
is the fear that there aren't any checks in place.
You know, Fortunately, there still is a legal apparatus. I mean,
even if Congress isn't standing up shouting and complaining, it's

(01:22:25):
still the case the president can't just do whatever he wants,
and hopefully the courts, you know, would would step in.
I use the word hopefully. I think courts will step
in to limit his ability to do things that go
beyond to statutory power. So the bigger danger, I think
is that through law itself, Congress seeds more and more
power to the president with a new legislation. So if

(01:22:47):
Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more
centralized power, well that would be a concerning thing to me.
Let me just stop and we'll get to your next
question to go. But we have a larger phenomenon that's
just it's not just about Trump, and people don't necessarily
realize this. I mean, look, I don't think that President
Obama was a dictator or had authoritarian tendencies. I was

(01:23:09):
part of the Obama Biden transition team, but I testified
against Arnie Duncan in a case or against the United
States Department of Education in twenty twelve or fourteen or
something like that, because the department was taking power that
it clearly did not have in regard to a no
Child Left Behind waivers. And you know, I told the
current administration, as much as I hate it, right, I

(01:23:30):
wish we could just wipe away student debt. I feel
bad for my students who have huge debt. But I said,
it is beyond the president's power to just wipe away
all this debt, and they did it anyway. The real
point here is that both Democrats and Republicans have been
asking things of their presidents that their presidents don't have
the power to do, and their presidents are doing it anyway, right,

(01:23:51):
And it's because our Congress is broken. Our Congress isn't
doing its job. So citizens are demanding that our presidents
do things that they really don't have the power too.

Speaker 7 (01:24:00):
And that's like the big thing that I'm concerned about
is we talk about these things that presidents are not
quote unquote like allowed to do. And I feel like
like both Trump and Muskre now are are speed running
like the limits of executive power, and they are willing
to test the boundaries a little bit a little bit
more than previous presidents, and they're willing to break the
government temporarily to like their goals be enacted. And at

(01:24:24):
a certain point, it's really tricky when the thing that
you always hear is, you know, like hopefully the courts
will step in, hopefully they'll do something. If things get
really bad, who will like literally stop them in terms
of like the courts told them to halt the funding freeze,
and there's there's still grants that they were refusing to
issue that were already approved legally need to be followed

(01:24:45):
through on that they are still withholding. And it's really
frightening when it comes down to like basic level of
like is there people military police who will enforce this
that things get really bad? That's something I don't have
like complete confidence in anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
Well, you know, I deal with this every year at
the beginning of my constitutional law class. Right, this is
not a new problem. It seems more real and frightening,
but it's not a new problem. And so what I
tell my constitutional law students is that the rule of
law doesn't exist because of courts. Right, it doesn't exist
because of police officers. Right, that the rule of law,

(01:25:22):
when push comes to shove, exists in the hearts and
minds of Americans, and if they don't believe in it,
all is lost.

Speaker 7 (01:25:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
So, for when Brown versus Board of Education was decided,
it was reportedly the case that the President said, you know,
if the court wants to desegregate schools, let it do
it itself. Because guess what, what's the Supreme Court. It's
nine old people in one building with a handful of
Capitol police. Like, they can't do anything, don't have a

(01:25:52):
power to do anything. Right, So, our entire system really
rests on good faith, or as I tell my students,
like what is due to something you know, President Trump
or Biden or whoever had done. The Federal District Court
issued an order directing us marshals to take President Trump
into a custody, so that order goes out. The marshals

(01:26:14):
receive it, they march over to the White House. They
come in the door and they say, we are here
to take the president. Signed and it's already been fast
tracked by Supreme Court, signed by the Supreme Court. The
answer to whether we'll just use Biden, the answer to
whether President Biden is escorted out of the White House
by US marshals is not a function of military it's

(01:26:35):
not a function of police power. It's a function of
when that piece of paper is held up, does the
secret service member believe that the rule of law exceeds
his loyalty to the man standing behind him.

Speaker 5 (01:26:49):
Yeah, that's where it's at.

Speaker 1 (01:26:51):
Right, And so you know, it really is a good
faith litmus test. And I think we used to live
in an era when I think we all had maybe
more faith in the idea that people put fidelity and
commitment to the Constitution and the law above personal loyalty.
But we increasingly live in a Congress and in a

(01:27:11):
world in a situation when it seems that people put
personal loyalty above the Constitution.

Speaker 10 (01:27:17):
At times, JD.

Speaker 7 (01:27:28):
Vance was interviewed on a far right podcast about like
two or three years ago, and he expressed desire for
what he called a quote unquote dewocification program. Jahan like,
sounds silly, but this is basically happening now. He extrapolated
and said, quote, I think Trump is going to run
again in twenty twenty four. I think what Trump should

(01:27:50):
do if I was giving him one piece of advice,
fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in
the administrative state. Replaced them with our people. When the
courts stop, you stand before the country and say, the
Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.
And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to

(01:28:11):
this scenario.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
I'm sorry, where did jd. Vance make this statement at
what context?

Speaker 7 (01:28:16):
On Jack Murphy's podcast Jack Murphy is like a fart commentator.
Vance is invoking the political philosophy of Curtis Jarvin, who's
becoming increasingly popular in the New Right. While lots of
what Must and Trump by extension have been doing the
past few weeks is taken pretty directly out of Curtis
Jarvin's playbook for seizing executive power. And I feel like

(01:28:36):
we're getting closer and closer to this, and so much
of what's happening in various agencies it is about proving
loyalty to Trump so that if there is some kind
of constitutional confrontation, people side with them. DOGE is basically
installing loyalty tests and running through communications to see what
the loyalty to Trump is For different levels of administrative

(01:28:59):
employees the FBI are negotiations to stay on, but only
if they can prove their loyalty to the president. And
like it's it's all of these scenarios that again, like
originally would be kind of far fetched. When you're hearing
someone like JD. Vance talk about this a few years
ago on some like right wing podcast, that's one thing
to watch this like happen in real time. For people

(01:29:20):
like me who study like this type of like more
like esoteric far right political theory, it's kind of surreal
to watch the type of thing that you've been like
writing about and thinking about, like on background for years
now happen. I just kind of rambled there, But do
you have any like, I guess thoughts on like this
idea that like Vance is talking about in terms of
like creating this constitutional crisis.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
Well, I mean, look, I tend to be I tend
to be the guy in the room that says, let's
not let's not overreact, let's let's see what happens. You
know that there's a lot of you know, institutional history,
and there's a lot of Americans who I think the
majority of good and decent people, and they don't they
don't want authoritarianism. So this, this is me, right, this

(01:30:05):
is my predisposition. But a week or so ago, I
had a huge crisis of confidence, should we say, there
were just a few events in the news that I
was just like, I just never thought that this would
happen in America. I never thought a governor would I mean,
some of this was what governors were doing. I never
thought a governor would do that. I never thought a

(01:30:26):
president would do that. I just never thought, you know,
never thought, never thought. And so I said to myself,
you know, are any of my opinions or projections you know,
valid anymore? Because I'm the guy who never thought? And
so that was that was you know, that was a
tough twenty four hours for me. I'll have to say. So,
you know, I don't know if like I just rebooted
and for self sanity and move forward, or you know,

(01:30:51):
whether there is still some truth and reason to believe
in certain stability. And I mean, I will say this,
you know, as we started this conversation, and the fact
that the White House is conceding that it can't do
everything to the Department of Education that it wants to
do without Congress is a good thing. If you read
the five executive orders for that they've already issued there,

(01:31:14):
it's a good thing that actually, if you read them carefully,
it's mostly directing appointees to think about stuff, not actually
do stuff, but to think about stuff. And of course
the president can appoint them to think about stuff. If
they do the stuff they're thinking about, that becomes a problem.
But again it is this sort of like can I

(01:31:35):
grab a headline about what would sound like an awful
you know reality, But really, all I've done is type
of to think about that reality. You know, that gives
me some faith, right And notwithstanding the fact that this
United States Supreme Court, you know, granted an immunity to
all presidents that I never could have imagined. You know,

(01:31:58):
this court does you know, issue opinions that surprise us
every single term, and they line up with the rule
of law. It's just it's unpredictable to some extent which
which opinions those are going to be. So I have
this faith, you know, these sort of pieces of of
the puzzle that still suggests we're still democracy and are
going to remain one. But you know, I have I

(01:32:19):
have my really bad days. I think, like you know,
I think a lot of people have a bad day
every day right now. It's you know, I just feel
thankful minor mine or fewer and further between than others.
And maybe that's just psychological coping. I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:32:41):
Let's let's I guess clip we're talking about disunion and
and how that relates to the general feeling I think
a lot of people are experiencing around the country as
well as you know, linking back again to the attacks
on Department of Education.

Speaker 2 (01:32:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:54):
So I spent a good a pretty good deal of
time on this disunion question in my new book, Dangerously Learning,
because I'm most of that book is focused on the
three decades leading up to the Civil War, so that
like the Civil War doesn't just happen overnight, it happens
over the course of late eighteen twenties to the eighteen
sixty with the South is saber rattling over and over again,

(01:33:15):
openly talking about disunion. Right, so that you had a
South that actually was diverse in lots of ways in
its opinions about various things. I'm not going to say that,
you know that there were a bunch of abolitions, but
there was a manumissioned society in North Carolina in eighteen
twenty nine that had I think sixteen hundred members. Right.
The very idea of sixteen hundred you know, anti slavery

(01:33:38):
advocates in North Carolina in the eighteen twenties is shocking
to a lot of people, right, But ten years later,
only twelve people show up to the final meeting, right,
So you had something that changed there, right. And so
you have this sort of period of escalating disunion and
censorship and propaganda and sort of policing what is publicly
you know, acceptable commentary in the South. All this stuff

(01:34:02):
is happening sort of going in and you know, editing
their sort of censoring textbooks, you know, demanding that books
only be written by Southerners. Like, oh, I make a
go on and on and on. We don't have time
for it. What I point out though, in my analysis
of what's going on, you know right now, over the
last few years of education, is that there are a
lot of policies that are attacking public education in the

(01:34:25):
way that they previously had, and a lot of them
are symbolic of disunion instincts, right, sort of just sort
of anti government, right, anti sort of whatever the current
culture is. And then there's actually policies that I argue
are facilitating disunion. And one of those that I talk
about is our public school voucher. I say, private school vouchers.

(01:34:46):
You are so upset with You're so raging at the
public school system that we need private school vouchers, right,
and we are effectively paying, We're going to pay individuals
to leave the public school system. And I call this
a coded call for disunion, even if people don't think
that's what they're doing. If we look back at where

(01:35:08):
we started this conversation, which is institution of public education
as something upon which American democracy has been built. Of course,
it has lots of flaws and it wasn't perfect, but
it's been part of how we build a democracy. It's
always been a bipartisan project. Now becoming the thing that
we rage against now becoming the thing in which we
are going to finance exit from. Right, this is a

(01:35:31):
step towards disunion from a fundamental institution of American democracy.
What happens to us if they actually execute on that plan.
I shudder to think about where we might be, because it's
not just some private school that's the equivalent of the
public school. We're talking about people on the public dollar
retreating into their religious silos, into their racial silos, into

(01:35:54):
their culture silos. And if there's anything I think that
we could all agree on, is listening to only the
people that you like on Twitter or listening only to
the people that you like for the evening news is
what got us here. And if what we have is
education that becomes the equivalent of MSNBC and Fox News

(01:36:15):
and Newsmax and you know whatever else, like that is
a dangerous place. I don't know how we build democracy
on such a system.

Speaker 3 (01:36:24):
What's the solution here?

Speaker 7 (01:36:26):
I mean, like beyond beyond people diversifying where they get
their media from, and like for vast pats of the country,
I think that that line's been crossed a long time ago.
If you look at the way like Twitter functions, the
way that people just exist in their bubbles and are
happy to like people don't want to hear anything else,
and with the most hostility coming from like both extreme ends. Yeah,

(01:36:50):
I don't know how to get around this problem. This
is something that you know, we've thought about a lot
the past eight years, but certainly longer.

Speaker 1 (01:36:57):
Well, I'll say this, you know, public school can't solve
all of the democracy's problem. You know, be a fool
to say otherwise. But if what we're doing is talking
about education itself, I think number one is that I
think our leaders need to understand better understand the dangers
of you know, vouchers for instance, like right now and
I'm writing about this, like they think it's just a

(01:37:19):
policy dispute, and like if you just look at the
surface level, it's like, well, who cares if we give
some more vouchers and that makes the most far reaches
of our party happy. But like I think sort of
really stepping back and appreciating how dangerous this is to
our democracy is step one. That's hard, right, I'm talking
about teaching adults to see things differently than what they
currently see them. But as to our schools, I mean,

(01:37:40):
I've got a little bit of stiff medicine for both sides.
I mean, I do think that in the push for
more justice in our public schools, and I think we
do need. I mean, that's what I've devoted my career to.
I do think that, Well, I don't think our schools
did any of the any of the awful stuff that
you know that the right has said, but I do
think that they maybe were not as open to people

(01:38:02):
disagreeing with them as they should have been. And what
I really mean is in the push for justice, I
think there was a bit of shutting down conversation. Not
teaching children to reach their own conclusions, but giving them
conclusions and expecting them to reach them. And so one
of the things I'm working on my new book is that, like,
I really think we have to rethink how we teach history,

(01:38:22):
you know, how we teach literature. Maybe not so much literature.
I think our literature teachers are pretty good, but rethink
how we teach those things such that we are not
committed to our children reaching particular conclusions. What we're committed
to is our children engaging in free and open thought
amongst themselves, right with hopefully an adult in the room
that can you establish some guidelines. But I think you know,

(01:38:47):
public education didn't do that very well five years ago,
ten years ago, thirty years ago when I was there.
But I think in this moment of cultural fracture, we
do really have to commit to free speech, open to
a inquiry, listening harder, thinking harder, right, not just bullet points,
not just bullet points.

Speaker 7 (01:39:08):
What would cross the rubicon for you? People throw around
the term constitutional crisis? What would actually happen that would
make that something that you that you would be like
this like it like like it is happening? What is
that like make or break moment?

Speaker 1 (01:39:24):
You wanted me to imagine a realistic one or just
sort of give you some sort of example that makes.

Speaker 7 (01:39:28):
Sense, No, like like what what would that be like
for you? Because like I think everyone has their own
personal rubric for like like what is too far in
my mind? Like what is something that's like this is
this is completely unacceptable? And for some people this this
may have already happened. But like in terms of like
legitimate like constitutional crisis, what is that for you?

Speaker 1 (01:39:51):
Well, this just rewind and this is I guess an
example of why you know, someone still got their finger
in the damn hold them back, holding it together. You know,
the President of the United States asserted unilateral authority over
the entire federal budget when he came into office, right,
he does not have that power. Federal district court and

(01:40:13):
joined it. He then backed down from that, right, but
let's say he didn't back down. It's like, well, okay,
you know, maybe you know it's a district court. But
if the United States Supreme Court or a court of
appeals told the president you lack the authority to sequestor
those funds and he still did it. So just the budget,

(01:40:34):
that's it. Just the budget, you know, just the belief
that the president can spend our money however he wants
with no constraint, and that would be crossing the rubicon. Now,
I'll tell you. And this is why you know you
had to kind of be like a constitutional law professor,
or well, you don't have to be a constitutional law professor,

(01:40:54):
but you've been following it. It's like, you know, I
have been alarmed, and this goes back. This isn't just
a Trump problem. Like I was alarmed with the NCLB waivers.
Probably nobody in this even knows what I'm talking about. Right, like,
you know, a decade ago, not that like President Obama
was like going to take over the country, but alarmed
that somehow another he thinks he can do this, Like

(01:41:15):
why is he even testing the boundaries this way?

Speaker 7 (01:41:17):
Like executive power has been steadily expanding certainly.

Speaker 1 (01:41:21):
Yeah, and so but I was like, you know, you
can kind of get it. There was some gray area
this where he kind of need to be a constitutional
law professor to kind of figure out why that was
such a big deal. But when Biden, I mean think
back and again, I don't begrudge people needing their debts relief,
but when President Biden effectively asserted the power to allocate

(01:41:42):
federal dollars to pay off debts, that was like, you know,
half of the discretionary funds of the entire federal government.
Like that's a big move to just say, yeah, I
can I can commit this nation to a fifty percent
increase and it's in its fiscal outlays tomorrow. That's not
constitutional democracy. But now right, we have a present going

(01:42:02):
even further than that. But he liked Biden at least
thus far stepped back at least from the district court
right when the court said can't. So it's really that
sort of defying of the court at that point. Yeah,
they've all been pushing the boundaries. He's pushed him further
thus far. They've all complied with judicial orders, but it
would be the refusal to comply with judicial order.

Speaker 7 (01:42:23):
I mean, I guess the main difference there for me
relates back to what you said about acting in good faith.
Something that people on the left I think get mad
about sometimes is Democrats seeming a complete commitment to acting
in good faith sometimes. And it certainly appears that that
Trump is willing to push a little bit farther, especially

(01:42:45):
in terms of like tests for loyalty. And it's at
a certain point, like if he does something really bad
at least for these next two years, like I don't
see a way that he'll get like impeached or removed
from office, like certainly not with this Senate, not with
this Congress, Like that check and balance just no longer
is viable due to the last election, and acting with

(01:43:07):
that popular mandate has I think given them a bit
more courage on their side to go, you know, a
little bit further, play a little bit more fast and
loose some of these like checks and balances than what
we've like previously seen, but this is certainly still still developing.

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
Well, the thing that really sort of jumps out at me,
and I was telling some you know, several reporters, is
that you're right, he's pushing it further. It looks scarier.

Speaker 5 (01:43:34):
But part of why.

Speaker 1 (01:43:35):
It's scarier, to be quite honest, well, I think it's
scarier is that he's doing it out in the open.
I mean, on some level, some of this stuff like
telling people to cook up crazy plans to do this
that like presidents have been doing it, like you know,
Nixon was Dixon. Nixon was paranoid. He was like, like,
this is what presidents do, but it's not appropriate to

(01:43:56):
do it in public, right, you do it behind close doors.
You know, offer some plausible rational rationalization for what you're doing,
and you know, you minimize it, act like there's no
big deal. What's startling here is that he is out
in the open expressing his designs to us, giving us
the sort of thoughts. And that's very unusual. And it

(01:44:17):
does show that what's acceptable from public officials is much
different now because had you know, had Nixon shared his
designs of the American public, he wouldn't have made it
as long as he did, you know, and probably true
of a lot of other presidents, they would have been gone.
So what's actually acceptable as public behavior has clearly changed,
what's acceptable as a policy agenda has clearly changed. And

(01:44:40):
so he's just putting it out there. He's putting his
dirty laundry out there, and people are like, oh, this
is normal.

Speaker 7 (01:44:44):
Unless you have anything else to add, Do you want
to talk about where people can find you and your writing?

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
Yeah, I mean I'm on Blue Sky more recently, still
on on Twitter. I sort of have, you know, just
lots of friends on there, so I'm still there. But
to me too, yeah, you know, I'm not on there
as often as I used to be. You know, I
give up blogging a long time ago, so, you know,
as we drink out of a fire hydrant, you know,
I spent a lot of time just trying to explain

(01:45:11):
basic things about public education to reporters. But you can
find me there. I'm a professor of law at the
University of South Carolina, And like I said, you know,
Dangerous Learning just came out, you know, a week or
so ago, really helping us, I think, helping us to
see this current moment through a long lens of war
on black equality, black freedom, and to be quite honest,

(01:45:31):
just free and open debate. We've had those wars before
and and we scarily are having them again.

Speaker 2 (01:45:37):
All right, thank as much, Thank you, Welcome back to

(01:46:00):
It could happen here. This is a daily news podcast
about all of the things happening here, which is wherever
you happen to be, and also the world in general.
And today we are going back to talk about Gaza,
particularly what has happened and changed in sort of US
policy relating to Gaza, to what's going to happen as

(01:46:24):
the actual combat operations wind down, to the Trump administration's
so far promises to effectively ethnically cleanse the entire area
and turn it into some sort of weird US satellite.
And with me today is Donna el Kurd, an assistant
professor of political science, guest on our episodes about bib

(01:46:44):
N Yahoo over It, Behind the Bastards. Dana, thank you
so much for being here with us. How are you
doing today? I know that's a dumb question. I just
asked you that at the start of this too.

Speaker 12 (01:46:54):
Now, thank you for having me. I think every Palestinian
in the world is not doing great.

Speaker 5 (01:46:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:00):
Yeah, yeah, again, like I said, a dumb question. The
short story of what is happening is that Trump made
an unprecedented announcement about a week ago on stage with
Netan Yahoo that gazo would be that, like the Palestinian
population would be forced out and not allowed to return,
and it would be turned into effectively American condos. Right,

(01:47:21):
Like that's I think that's essentially the gist of the
initial meeting, which was met with a degree of chaos
even from Israel, because I don't think anyone entirely knew
exactly what Trump was going to say when he got
up on that stage, which is pretty normal Trump fashion.
But yeah, how would you characterize kind of the initial
reaction to that announcement.

Speaker 12 (01:47:40):
Yeah, so a couple of different audiences for that announcement
to begin with. For the Israeli side, I mean, what
I'm hearing from analysts and people who follow Israeli politics
is that this has really changed the permission structure for them.

Speaker 5 (01:47:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:47:57):
I think you're right that didn't expect something to this degree,
But now that it's been said, it's like that is
the full extent of what we can expect to do right,
and so I don't think a lot of people are thinking, like,
for real, there's going to be a Gaza riviera. But
what this does is it just expands the scope of

(01:48:18):
what they think is possible for Gaza, whether it's preventing
reconstruction and you know, basically keeping them in this kind
of stagnant condition and allowing people to start trickling out
and leaving and anybody left is considered combatant. That could
be a possibility moving forward. It could cover up for

(01:48:40):
more aggressive action ending the ceasefire. I mean, it's really
upended the things in terms of the Israeli perspective. Yeah,
and how much they've accepted it, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:48:51):
Yeah, because I mean my interpretation would be that what
Trump's literal words leave the door open to everything from
like you said, sort of slowly waiting for people to
trickle out and not letting them back in kind of
like what you saw in the Chagos Islands, or outright
mass killing. You know, like there's no closed doors and
Trump's plan Other than about three hours before we recorded

(01:49:13):
this on Monday the tenth, a series of articles went
out based on some of Trump's comments, confirming Palestinians wouldn't
be allowed back into Gaza under his plan, right, the
plan is for ethnic cleansing, right, Like, that's the only
way to describe that.

Speaker 12 (01:49:27):
Yeah, No, it's very explicit. And I think that the
way in which American allies, allied regimes in the region
have reacted to this, like shows a great deal of alarm. Obviously,
Jordan and Egypt, already struggling as it is with a
variety of issues, don't want a bunch of Palestinians who
are very politically active to be absorbed into their population.

(01:49:49):
The Saudi government, you know, put out I would say,
like a pretty strong statement. I mean I was. I
was surprised how strong it was about how much they
do not endorse such plan.

Speaker 2 (01:50:01):
So yeah, and it's interesting because Trump, in the way
that he often just like says shit has I'm going
to read the exact quote. I'm talking about starting to
build And I think I could make a deal with Jordan.
I think I can make a deal with Egypt. You know,
we give them billions and billions of dollars a year,
and so far Egypt and Jordan have both said no,
this is not something we're interested you and special Rapporteur

(01:50:23):
Francesca Albanize said Trump's proposal was nonsense but has to
be taken very seriously, which I actually think is a
reasonably good summary of how to handle everything that he says.
It's nonsense that you have to take it very seriously.

Speaker 12 (01:50:36):
I mean, the man has the nukes, as we've discussed,
so yeah, I mean the way that people have reacted
is obviously a great deal of alarm. And on the
Palestinian side, it's like Palestinian different Palstinian political actors are
bracing for, Yeah, the end of the ceasefire essentially.

Speaker 2 (01:50:55):
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty stark term to put it.
And I don't know, I guess because yeah, one thing
that the door is open on Israel saying, well, now
that we've announced this plan and people have to get out,
everyone's staying is effectively a combatant exactly.

Speaker 12 (01:51:08):
Yeah, I think that that's. Yeah, it's not you know,
what we've seen over the past four hundred and seventy
days up to cease fire is not that they have
much respect for non combatants to begin with. Yeah, that
really didn't stop them from targeting civilians, targeting children. So
you can imagine now that even I mean, it's hard

(01:51:29):
to even talk about it in these terms. It's not
like le Bide administration was really holding them accountable either,
But now again, because the permission structure has just been
expanded to such a degree that we don't know what
kinds of things we're going to see for people who
remain in Gaza in the coming future. And obviously this
derails any possibility for Palestinian and Israeli civil society actors

(01:51:51):
who are trying to move beyond this particular status quo.
And there's no international actor that's really empowering those efforts,
and so it's really bleak.

Speaker 2 (01:52:03):
Yeah, I mean it's bleak in so many comprehensive ways.
Like one thing, and not to I don't mean to
like kind of take the focus off of Gaza, but
this is you use the term permission structure on an
international level. The US saying we are backing a forced
expulsion in genocide of an entire population does change the

(01:52:24):
permission structure for every international actor in terms of like
a massive variety of conflicts around the world, Like this
is like a sea change in international norms that so
many millions of people outside of Gaza will eventually and
the probably immediately be effective.

Speaker 12 (01:52:42):
By I mean, I think that there has always been
gaps in what is acceptable and what is permissible under
international law. Obviously that has never been applied evenly. And
then if you were a particular group that didn't have
American backing, for example the Armenians in Artza, it didn't

(01:53:02):
matter if you were ethnically cleansed. But like you said,
this just expands it to such a scope like now
this is an acceptable policy solution to remove wholesale, huge populations.
And when the ceasefire happened, there was an argument, and
I think that this is a valid one that Palestinians
the fact that they were able to in the ceasefire
agreement secure their right to return even to the rubble,

(01:53:25):
that was a huge obstacle to this kind of precedent,
and I think Trump is now try to upend that victory,
even if it's you know, in terms of a precedent
set or in symbolic terms, like you said, this is
now going to become how states operate. I mean, the
Syrian dictator during the Syrian Civil War I think pushed
the bounds of how states can operate. And this is

(01:53:47):
another level.

Speaker 2 (01:53:48):
Yeah, well, and I think that this is an I
want to kind of zero back in on Gaza in
a second, but I really do. I think that that
broader point that you just make can't be made enough,
not just the centrality of Syria, but the idea that
when on the international stage the leader of a country
is allowed to do force displacements through massive aerial bombing,

(01:54:10):
Like there's this idea that you can just be like, well,
that's just Syria, right, It's never just Syria, just like
it's never just Gaza. You know, these things metastasize. You
have to view that those kind of actions in the
international stage like a cancer.

Speaker 4 (01:54:22):
Right.

Speaker 10 (01:54:23):
No.

Speaker 12 (01:54:23):
Absolutely. There was a Syrian activist and political writer, yasinl Hrsala,
who said, the Syrianization of the world. Yeah, and we're
seeing the gasification of the world. We will see the
gassification of the world. Yeah, and that's very, very dangerous
for everybody involved.

Speaker 2 (01:54:36):
Yeah, that can't be overstated. A chill kind of goes
down my spine thinking about that and thinking about that quote,
which makes this a very bad time to throw to ads.
But that's what I'm going to do. Then we're going
to come back and we're going to talk about b mining.

(01:55:00):
We're back so to zero Beckon on Gaza. Obviously, one
thing that comes up when Trump talks about this plan
that is an actual thing that would have to be
dealt with one way or the other, is that huge
chunks of Gaza are uninhabitable right now and will be
for the foreseeable future because of the sheer quantity of
munitions dispensed. A number of munitions that have been used
in Gaza are cluster munitions, but even munitions that are

(01:55:23):
not cluster munitions, when you're dropping bombs on particularly dense
urban targets, there's a wide variety of things that can
happen to those munitions on their way to their target,
including them getting deflected by debris, them getting deflected by
pieces of metal and rebar and the like that damages
the device and stops it from detonating but leaves it
still in an active state. And the estimate I'm seeing

(01:55:46):
for munitions used in Gaza is about ten percent of
the munitions, and there's no way of knowing how many
have been dropped, but estimates are at least thirty thousand
in the first seventy days I think weeks sorry much
less than seventy days, nearly thirty thousand munitions in the
first seven weeks of the war, so a huge number,

(01:56:06):
about ten percent at least, are still active and live.
And you know, for an idea of how long it
takes to d mine and render an area safe for
munitions like this, there are still people who die in
France from wor World War One munitions, you know, up
to the present day in twenty twenty five. So this
is a massive problem. In the best case scenario, something

(01:56:28):
has to be done with these munitions. This is something
that Trump has been bringing up and when talking about
like his desire to clear people out of their d
mine and then rebuild effectively what sounds almost like a
vacation colony right for the United States. And one of
the issues just with any sort of practical sort of
effect with D mining is that USAID has been gutted

(01:56:50):
as an agency, and that's the agency through which D
mining was done. We've spent billions of dollars, put billions
of dollars into D mining around the world through USAID.
The US military is actually not allowed by our laws
to do D mining operations. There's a complicated history there,
but like so we both got this situation where the
proposed justification for pushing the population out is, well, it's

(01:57:13):
not safe to be there, we have to determine it.
And also we have created a situation in which the
organizations that do d mining can't do it anymore.

Speaker 12 (01:57:22):
Yeah, and I think those same organizations asked for like
an exception to the stop work order and were denied
by the State Department. And yep, no, you know, no
explanations were given. And so I mean it's it's obviously
a fig leaf. Yeah, it's obviously an excuse, like this
has nothing to do with bettering conditions in Gaza. And

(01:57:43):
I the fact that he's gone back and clarified and
has been asked the number of times, including last night
after the super Bowl or something, and he said no, no,
they won't be allowed to return. Yeah, well, all right,
what are you demining? You really think you're going to
build hotels?

Speaker 3 (01:57:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:57:58):
My understanding is like people in the administration were also
surprised by this tack of reasoning. So I wonder who's
fed him this idea, Like, who's given him this idea
that he's going to be able to build hotels.

Speaker 2 (01:58:13):
Here my understanding, based on reading don't have any inns
in the Trump administration. But the reporting I've seen suggested
came from Kushner that like a year or so ago,
he was talking, I have been talking about this like
this is great, you know, a great place to build
a condo. It's beautiful, you know, wonderful weather. I mean,
we know just from the past. That is kind of

(01:58:33):
how Trump works is somebody people tell him a lot
of shit, but something sticks in his brain and that,
like with the Greenland shit can become US policy. And
that appears to be I mean, as best as I
can tell, that's the origin of this.

Speaker 12 (01:58:45):
It's just like the grift can really stick in his mind.
He's really good at holding onto possibilities for grifting.

Speaker 2 (01:58:52):
Yeah, the fact that you are doing a genocide in
order to clear land for condos doesn't make it less
of a genocide, but it is like a justification for genocide.
I don't think i've heard a country's leader make before, right.
I mean, parts of this are familiar and go back,
you know, even to the Iraq War in terms of
US Paul and further back right, like what is kind

(01:59:14):
of the core of US support of Israel as our
desire to have a stable territory within the Middle East
from where we can project power, right, So, to that extent,
this is like a natural expression of US policy for
decades in the area, Like, well, what if we just
take this for ourselves and then we have this stable
platform from where we can airstrike whoever the hell we want,

(01:59:36):
and also Jared Kushner can have his condos.

Speaker 12 (01:59:39):
Yeah, I mean the thing is they can. They can
achieve and have already been able to maintain American hegemony
with all sorts of bases across the Middle East some secrets,
I'm not, Yeah, cultar like it's it's this is I
think this is another level where it's like American andgemony
is tangential to Jared Kushner making money. So it's an

(02:00:00):
interesting little I've never seen a hedgemon kind of shoot
itself in the foot in this direction to this degree.

Speaker 2 (02:00:09):
Yeah, I don't want the focus to be on the
danger to Americans from this, but this is extremely dangerous
for Americans too, right, Like having your country openly back
a genocide to this extent, like not just even arming it,
but saying like we are specifically going to build, like
take this land and profit off of it is such
as it so comprehensively escalates everything on an international scale,

(02:00:34):
Like I don't even, I can't even. I can't think
of a single decision that's this reckless that's been made
in my lifetime by American politicians other than the Iraq War, right.

Speaker 12 (02:00:43):
And that was I think maybe the first nail in
the confine. And we're reaching the last nails in the coffin.

Speaker 2 (02:00:50):
Yeah, yeah, well the coffin's almost done.

Speaker 12 (02:00:52):
It's almost done. We're dismantling the whatever remnants of the
international order used to exist, and it's really going to
be a free fall.

Speaker 5 (02:01:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:01:03):
I don't know what more to say on that. I
guess kind of one thing we should get into is
what we're seeing in terms of the Trump administration and
pro Palestine protests in the United States. Obviously, last night
at the Super Bowl, we had a moment where a
member of Kendrick Lamar's the performance crew on the ground.
I think it was one of his dancers. As far
as I can tell them, I don't believe the individual

(02:01:25):
has been named yet. Maybe I missed that.

Speaker 12 (02:01:27):
I think somebody has released his name. I took to intercept.

Speaker 2 (02:01:30):
Okay, well, I don't feel specifically a need to do that,
but an individual who was a part of that was
standing on like one of the cars that was on
stage that Kendrick had been dancing on, unfurled a Palestine
and Sudan flag is a fairly small, like a couple
of feet wide, couple of feet deep, so like not
like a mask, certainly not a destructive act, but like,

(02:01:52):
not only did that person get like banned for life
from all sort of NFL events and performing or attending them,
which I suppose was not super shocking, but there were
immediate announcements by New Orleans Police that they are trying
to figure out what to charge this person under, which,
like I tell me what kind of crime that is?

Speaker 12 (02:02:14):
You know, I mean, it's not like he even invaded
the pitch, right, like he's it was like to be
an actor.

Speaker 5 (02:02:19):
Yeah, he did a thing.

Speaker 2 (02:02:20):
I think that wasn't part of the script, I assume,
but like, I don't know how you even charged him. Yeah,
I don't think charges are out yet, right, but they're
going to find something to do, which is also going
to set a precedent, right because this is nothing. This
person was not in a place they weren't allowed to
be this person didn't damage any property they held a

(02:02:41):
thing like that's the definition of protected speech. You know,
if you're their employer, you can fire them for that,
but you can't charge them criminally for that.

Speaker 12 (02:02:50):
I mean they wanted to make an example. They and
we'll see what kind of example that they try to
make out of this person. And it like, like you said,
it's really in line with Trump, the Trump administration taking
aggressive action against any forms of dissent around American foreign policy.
That is obviously, as we've mentioned, like very tied up

(02:03:12):
with the genocide that unfolded. And so it's these executive
orders around deporting international students, it's executive orders around like
expanded understandings of anti semitism and the ideas. Even if
you don't go after everybody, you're making an example enough
that like you're chilling people's abilities to engage, whether it's

(02:03:34):
on campuses or you know, off campuses, and so it's
it's definitely I can tell you from like the academic perspective,
like a number of disciplinary organizations and and and like
mile Ease Studies Association and things like this, like they're
they're very concerned, like this is a very concerning moment.

Speaker 2 (02:03:53):
Yeah, I want to kind of dig into that a
little bit more and will continue our conversation. I've got
to throw to Adds one last time and then we'll
be back. We're back, Dana. Yeah, we're just talking about

(02:04:14):
kind of the chilling effects this has had as an academic.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what
you've experienced so far and what you think kind of
needs to be the response to this attempt to chill
any kind of protected speech in favor of Palestine or
not even in favor that's the wrong way to put it. Yeah,
discussing the reality of the genocide.

Speaker 12 (02:04:35):
Yeah, I mean that's the thing is, like they have
not They've conflated Yeah, any any attempt to give information
with advocacy. Yes, so there's that conflation. But then, of
course advocacy in and of itself is protected. Yes, you're
certainly allowed to advocate if you're a student or things,
or you know, a citizen in the world, like of course,

(02:04:55):
so there is that conflation. And I will say that, like,
we're seeing attacks on academic freedom, and we're seeing attacks
on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on academic campuses,
both in public institutions, that have to uphold public laws
and also in private institutions that have paid lip service
to things like free speech and are now ignoring that

(02:05:17):
commitment in the past. And so we've seen even tenured
professors like what happened in Nihlenberg College, like tenured professors
being targeted losing their jobs. And I can say that
this has really activated organizations like the American Association of
University Professors, the AAUP, the Middle East Studies Association as well.
Their Committee on Academic Freedom has been working to collect

(02:05:41):
data on how this has impacted people's abilities to engage
on the issue of Israel Palast that even in their
research or teaching. And then there was a study by
two professors Mark Lynch and Shibity Tidhemi George Washington and
University of Maryland respectively that found something like over ninety
percent of professors who teach on the Middle East are

(02:06:02):
self censoring Jesus. And it's not because they're out in
front of the classroom giving a crap about giving their opinion.

Speaker 3 (02:06:10):
Yeah, I can tell.

Speaker 12 (02:06:10):
You none of us want to change anybody's minds about this.
It's like they're literally just self censoring the content. Yeah,
like we're just afraid to even address what happened, what's
happening in a historical context, or you know, teaching a
course on Israel Palestine or any of those kinds of
things is now completely under the microscope.

Speaker 2 (02:06:32):
And this is all part of the whole kind of
authoritarian chilling effect of any ability to express anything outside
of like what the regimes can that you live under
considers acceptable, you know, And it always starts with these well,
you know, if we talk about Palistine and what's happening there,
then maybe this department will get you know, its funding cut,

(02:06:52):
and we won't be able to talk about anything. So really,
this is the same decision a lot of hospitals are
making around like the treatment for trade and skill wealth.
We'll lose our funding if we do this, and we
do all these other good things. But they never stop, right, like,
you never actually are safe. There's no point at which
these people say it's enough. They take your ability to

(02:07:14):
talk about or to act in one way away, and
then they take it in a way in another, and
they keep taking, you know, until you make a stand,
and you might as well make a stand the first
time they start trying to take shit from you, otherwise
you're going to get backed even further into a fucking corner.

Speaker 12 (02:07:28):
Yeah, there has to be institutions and leadership at these
institutions holding a line because this kind of preemptive obedience
hasn't served them and it's not going to change. Fundamentally,
the fact that this administration sees academic knowledge production as
a political landscape they need to control. And see, I

(02:07:50):
mean Jadvan says it like professors are the enemy. Yeah,
so what are you doing trying to placate you know,
it's like you're just giving them an easier time.

Speaker 10 (02:07:59):
No.

Speaker 2 (02:08:00):
Yeah, Through the use of funding and their ability to
kind of gin up outrage in media, groups like APEC
have effectively blasted a salient in free speech in this
country where you really you almost can't talk about Palestine
and you certainly can't acknowledge what Israel is doing, right,
You can't say it stayed in plane terms like we

(02:08:22):
are watching a genocide be at least attempted here, right,
And if you do that, there are huge consequences to
most people in traditional organizations, particularly professors, which is always
where it starts. And yeah, that salient is just going
to get whiter and whiter and whiter, right, like that
that's the way this stuff works.

Speaker 12 (02:08:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is not a new argument,
but it's like the ways in which the United States
has engaged abroad. It's very much boomeranging home, you know.
And so it's not about, like you said, it's not
just about Palestine. It's not about people who studied Palestine
are each about Israel Palestine. It's so much broader than that.

(02:09:03):
The precedent that is being set, and what is like
kind of a silver lining is that the last year
of the Biden administration, the last year plus of the
Biden administration, and then even now, I think at least
it has helped people connect the dots a little bit,
like this is not an issue in isolation, and just
because you don't happen to work on it doesn't mean

(02:09:23):
that you're safe from people meddling in your syllabi or
chilling your speech on other issues, whether it's trans rights,
whether it's you know, reproductive rights, whatever issue. If you
don't toe the line, they're going to come for you too, right,
And so I think that at least I've seen folks

(02:09:45):
who are not who have never been, you know, activated
on the issue of Israel Palestine, whether in their advocacy
or in their research, they're making that connection at least,
and maybe that's a silver lining that I'm trying to
be less bleak here.

Speaker 5 (02:09:57):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's helpful.

Speaker 2 (02:10:00):
You know, when I think about the hypocrisy of this moment,
I think about how much of the clamping down on speech,
particularly the attempt to punish like student protesters in the
United States, is predicated on accusing them of backing HAMAS, right,
And it's so interesting to me because, like, you know,
obviously I don't think Hamas is a good organization, but

(02:10:21):
neither is the IRA, and the former President of the
United States, Joe Biden, made pro IRA statements, right, Like
one thing is okay and the other is not. I
don't know. I find it incredibly frustrating that like there's
this pretended act that like, because you've got some people
on one side who have made statements in favor of
this group, that sucks that that is a reason for

(02:10:43):
cracking down on the ability of people to talk about
a genocide. Like it's it's just this hideous hypocrisy that
I don't even understand how like people can keep that
consistent in their own heads. But they don't need to, right,
That's always the thing with fascists.

Speaker 12 (02:10:57):
No, there's no need for consistency. Yeah, yeah, I mean
that's the thing. Is like, first of all, the conflation
that like the entire movement made such a statement or
you know, I mean obviously that that in and of
itself is dishonest. And like you said, it's not that
they care about consistency and they don't have to maintain
an honest approach to this. They're just using these isolated

(02:11:19):
incidents of particular you know, particular students or particular groups
to shut down any speech around it. And I was
featured in this like Vox video and it was just
like an explainer, and I received some harassment and like

(02:11:41):
accusations that because I was providing context in a Vox video,
which is what I was asked to do based on
my expertise, that I was making excuses for, you know,
what had happened on October seventh. And I was like,
is the red line now? Just even discussing anything like
with any kind of expert tease or information like it's
it's uh, yeah, it's mind boggling.

Speaker 2 (02:12:03):
I mean, I guess I think that is what they
want to make thee Yeah. Yeah, what you went through
there too makes me so angry when I read shit
like and this is not on Gillibrand, but Christin Gillibrand
was on someone's podcast recently talking about why some of
her Republican colleagues who had expressed opposition to some of
Trump's picks ultimately voted for them. And she's like, they're

(02:12:23):
scared of getting murdered, and like, isn't everyone who says anything,
and like you've got death threats for a vox video,
Like why are these Congress people who have so many
more resources to protect themselves, why do they get to
be scared?

Speaker 12 (02:12:35):
Oh well that's that's yeah, Congress, And it's and it's
inability to do anything, Like yeah, that's that's a whole
other level of demoralization.

Speaker 2 (02:12:44):
Yeah, is there anything else you wanted to make sure
we hit on during this conversation before we sort of
close things out.

Speaker 12 (02:12:50):
I'm not sure if maybe this is two in the weeds,
but I think there's been a lot discussed around Trump
and the statements around Gaza and his and his supposed
plans for Gaza, and some analysts have claimed that this
has to do with like taking an extreme position, so
that then Arab Israeli normalization deals could make the claim that,
like we talked him down from this brink, yeah, and

(02:13:10):
like Saudi is going to make peace with Israel and
claim that we convinced Trump not to do this kind
of thing. And so that's been something I've read in
some analysis, and I don't think it's actually correct. I
don't think that Trump is making these kinds of statements
or possibly these kinds of plans, just as kind of

(02:13:31):
like I don't know, multi level chess with Saudi Arabia
to get them to sign a peace deal with Israel,
and the conditions in the region I think have really shifted.
And I don't think Saudi Arabia, as I mentioned at
the beginning, because they put out statements to this effect,
I don't think they're at all interested in this kind
of move right at this point. So I just maybe

(02:13:52):
I would only add that Trump is not playing this
long game that we think he is. Maybe we can
take him at his word.

Speaker 2 (02:13:57):
Yeah, No, I know, because like Biden was playing a
long game, a dumb long game, but a long game
trying to brokers deal with like Saudi Arabia and Israel
that I'm again I think deranged. If there's clear evidence
that the fact that he was not compassmentous, it's that right.
But it was a long game, and I don't think

(02:14:18):
that Trump is I don't think Trump cares about that.

Speaker 12 (02:14:22):
Yeah, and the region has changed so much, you know,
for whether we like it or not, Like Iran is
not the threat it used to be, closer ties with
Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, I mean, has a huge influence
on the new Syrian government, Like they don't need this,
they don't need this, and like this is not this
kind of long game, multi level chess, you know, mastermind

(02:14:43):
over here that Trump is now doing. So yeah, I
just wanted to add that.

Speaker 2 (02:14:46):
People are just doing shit and trying to grab onto
whatever they can.

Speaker 12 (02:14:50):
Right and like let's see what sticks, essentially.

Speaker 2 (02:14:52):
Exactly I mean, and that is so much of that
is the entirety of the current plan of the new
regime in the United States is row everything you can
out there and see what sticks.

Speaker 3 (02:15:02):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:15:03):
Yeah, they're doing that in Gaza, just like they're doing
it everywhere else. Well, Donna, thank you so much. Do
you want to plug anything at the end of this
your own stuff or something else.

Speaker 12 (02:15:13):
Check out I Guess The Fire These Times podcast. I
sometimes do episode for.

Speaker 2 (02:15:17):
Them, Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 12 (02:15:19):
And if you're looking for organizations to help support gosins
right now, Heal Palestine or a nara A n E
r A are both doing really crucial work.

Speaker 2 (02:15:29):
Excellent, excellent, We'll check that out. Definitely check out The
Fire These Times and that's a great place to send
some aid. Donna, thank you so much for being on
the show again. And yeah, I hope you Uh, I
don't know, I hope, I hope.

Speaker 5 (02:15:43):
I hope that's what I got.

Speaker 12 (02:15:44):
Hope.

Speaker 5 (02:15:45):
Yeah, yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1 (02:15:46):
For having.

Speaker 2 (02:16:12):
Welcome to the Birds and the Bees, a podcast where
James Stout makes animal noises and also we talk about
what's going on in the White House this week.

Speaker 7 (02:16:22):
That's right, this is it could happen here Executive Disorder,
our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,
the crumbling of our world, and what this means for you.
That is Robert talking previously. James Stout is also here.
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm also joined by Mia Wong. This episode,
we're covering the week of February sixth to February twelfth. Currently,
ME and Mia are inside New Orleans, Louisiana, and I

(02:16:45):
am proud to report that fascism has been defeated. The
Philadelphia Eagles have beat the KK Kansas City Chiefs in
Super Bowl. Drake has been executed live on stage. It's
a great week.

Speaker 2 (02:16:58):
That would have been kinder than what I actually happened
to Drake.

Speaker 3 (02:17:03):
Look as someone, as someone in my brusk I mentioned,
says capitalism. Currently the rule of capitalism seems inescapable, but
the divine, the divine rule of the Chiefs once seemed
undefeatable too. And they were fucking humiliated.

Speaker 5 (02:17:16):
Oh my god, they lost so bad.

Speaker 3 (02:17:19):
I can't even I can't even say that they were
beaten up and down the field, because I'd even fucking
get down the field, obliterately generational beat down.

Speaker 7 (02:17:29):
And yeah, when I arrived here in New Orleans on Monday,
this is the Monday after the Super Bowl, so a
complete nightmare. But there was just an ocean of an
ocean of out and proud Eagles fans. And the funniest
thing I saw is that when I was waiting for
me to fly in, there was this like half a
full clothing rack, a leftover Chiefs merch.

Speaker 3 (02:17:52):
And all of the Eagles merch were gone.

Speaker 6 (02:17:55):
I will see that Chiefs merch again somewhere in like
a resource pause setting, and it's from now.

Speaker 2 (02:18:01):
Yes, yes, that's going to be the uniform of a
future civil war.

Speaker 7 (02:18:08):
Literally literally Taylor Swift themed Kansas City Chiefs merch.

Speaker 5 (02:18:13):
Ah. Yeah, huge Alpha capital.

Speaker 2 (02:18:15):
It's so funny. Oh man, Well, I guess. Yeah. The
big losers this week, Drake and unfortunately the nation of
Ukraine and most of the rest of Western Europe. Yeah,
I guess We'll start with the big news today, which
is that Trump just had a really great call with
Vladimir Putin, went super well. They're going to be meeting,

(02:18:36):
maybe in Saudi Arabia. There's been some floating of the
fact that they might meet at the White House, which
I don't think it ends well for Putin if he
visits the Uniteds. I don't think it ends well for
anybody if he visits the United States. This country is
too heavily armed and crazy right now. But they're doing
this because Putin and Trump have evidently reached some sort

(02:18:56):
of agreement about the end of the war in Ukraine. Zelensk,
he was not really consulted on this. He's made a
couple of statements like, yep, we're hoping that this is
what pushes everything towards peace, but it's very clear that
what's happening is Ukraine is going to be made to
give up a decent chunk of their territory. Now they
do have Russian territory still to bargain with somewhat, so

(02:19:20):
it hopefully will not be a situation where Putin gets
is entirely his own way. But that is kind of
the what's happening. And the sea change that will accompany
this is that new Secretary of Defense and Alcoholic Pete
Hegseth made a statement and a meeting in Brussels that
the United States will no longer be the guarante of
peace in Europe. Specifically, he stated that we're not going

(02:19:41):
to tolerate of an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency. But
this was an announcement that the post war sort of
status quo is no longer something that we can rely
on going forward, and that is a really significant admission
from the sec deaff.

Speaker 5 (02:19:57):
Yeah, it's sick, it's pretty cool and it's gonna be great.
It's gonna be great.

Speaker 6 (02:20:02):
If you're in the German arms industry, it's gonna be
a banger year for you.

Speaker 5 (02:20:06):
You making simil.

Speaker 2 (02:20:08):
I think we could all agree the future is bright
for German weaponry.

Speaker 5 (02:20:11):
Yeah, once again Germany will rise to its former glory. Hussah.

Speaker 3 (02:20:15):
Yeah, you say that as kind of a joke, but
like genuinely the fact that we are doing a bunch
of stuff that is leading to the full re armament
of the German army at the moment when the German
fascist parties are like about to take power.

Speaker 2 (02:20:29):
When off Day is getting into power, Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 6 (02:20:31):
And the Luftwaffe hasn't even bother to change his slogo
since the last time, so that's cool.

Speaker 2 (02:20:35):
Well, and what you bring up there me is probably
worth discussing in concert with all of this, which is
that AfD off Day, the Alternative for Deutschland, which is
the new Nazi Party in Germany, is not the majoritarian party,
but is taking enough seats that it is going to
be included in the next governing coalition, which is something

(02:20:55):
that has not happened in the post World War Two era.
In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, every Western
European nation basically came to a tacit agreement referred to
as the Cordon sanitaire, which is when a right wing
party starts to gain power, you do not coalition with
them under any circumstances. Germany is actually like the last

(02:21:17):
of the European countries to give up this idea. But
the fact that the Cordon sanitaire has fallen in Germany
is real bad news.

Speaker 3 (02:21:26):
Yeah, and the ADF, like it's worth mentioning, right, Like
the ADF is so right wing and so nazi that,
like the Italian Fascists to our empower right now, will
not work with them.

Speaker 2 (02:21:37):
Like yeah, yeah, A bunch.

Speaker 3 (02:21:38):
Of stuff leaked a little while ago about these people
at meetings openly talking about deporting every single Jew and
every single immigrant from the country. Like these people are
you know, I mean, they're just Nazis. And yeah, so
now we're fucking handing them the fucking justification to fucking
rebuild their entire arms industry. So yep, rich stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:22:01):
It is dark, I mean. And again when we say
the Italian Fascist this is literally Mussolini's party, as in
his granddaughter it's a member. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, that's bad.
I think that's probably most of what we can say
about what's going on in Europe and with Ukraine right now.
But it's not good.

Speaker 5 (02:22:19):
Yeah, yeah, it's not good. It doesn't point to a
great future.

Speaker 6 (02:22:23):
And this is the multi polar world that like Russia
has wanted for some time, like coming to fruition, right,
and I didn't want to talk about. So there was
a time when Vladimir Putin some as you remember, was
sanctioned by the International Criminal Court for his war crimes
in Ukraine the United States. However, the United States has

(02:22:43):
not been a signatory to the Rome Statute, so it
wouldn't necessarily have enforced that arrest warrant anyway. But this
week Trump signed a little executive order titled in block capitals,
as We've come to expect, imposing sanctions on the International
Criminal Court. In doing so, he followed the example of Putin,
who in twenty twenty three put out arrest warrants for

(02:23:06):
ICC prosecutors after they put out a warrant for his arrest.
Trump didn't cite the Putin example. He called the ICC's
actions against Israel illegitimate and baseless. That's a quote He
specifically called the warrants against UF Gallant and Benjamin Etting
Yahoo baseless. He then went on to claim, quote, both

(02:23:27):
nations are thriving democracies with militaries strictly adhered to.

Speaker 5 (02:23:31):
The laws of war. This is a thing that is
not true.

Speaker 6 (02:23:34):
His order then goes on to outline what it calls
protected persons for people who an't familiar at the United States.
Person is distinguished from the United States citizen. It also
includes any permanent residents. It also includes US Armed Forces
government officials and contractors working on behalf of US Armed
Forces contractors Yeah, yeah, yeah, the people who can do

(02:23:55):
no wrong. It then goes on to include US allies,
including all of NATO and sometimes contractors working on their behalf.
It says that if the International Criminal Court investigates any
of these people, Trump called the Clara National Emergency. It
also imposes material sanctions and travel bands on both ICC
prosecutors and people acting on their warrants, as well of

(02:24:15):
the families of those people.

Speaker 3 (02:24:17):
Interesting.

Speaker 6 (02:24:18):
Yeah, this is an unprecedented American politics, and sometimes it
gets reported like it is. I want to throw back
to what they called the Hague Invasion Act that wasn't
its real name, but that was George Bush's. Like it
authorized the President to use any means necessary to release
United States people held by the ICC or at its request,

(02:24:39):
So people studied calling it the Hague Invasion Act.

Speaker 5 (02:24:41):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:24:42):
Trump did also sanction ICC prosecutors and their families in
twenty twenty for looking into US war crimes in Afghanistan.
I think that happened in June of twenty twenty, so
you can be forgiven for having missed up because some
stuff was happening at that time.

Speaker 5 (02:24:58):
Oh was it? Yeah, things were going down.

Speaker 6 (02:25:01):
I'm sure the Philadelphia Eagles were beginning their rise to
glory again. That was a big thing. Kansas City chiefs
were doing some racist shit shockingly, shockingly. I'm sure Taylor
Swift was doing something too. But yeah, this is like
Israel has for nearly a decade been trying to hack
smea surveil and threaten the Court. In the show notes,
I'll include a link to a Guardian article that came

(02:25:21):
out last year about Israel's attacks and attempts to undermine the.

Speaker 5 (02:25:24):
International Criminal Court.

Speaker 6 (02:25:26):
And just if I've been talking about something and you're like,
what is the International Criminal Court? Very Briefly, it's based
at the Hague. So if you've heard, you know you
will stand trial at the Hague. That's what they're talking about.
It has its most immediate routes in the tribunals investigated
perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The US and
Israel are not members of the court. They never signed

(02:25:47):
the Rome Statute. Russia withdrew in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (02:25:50):
Curious time to withdraw.

Speaker 5 (02:25:52):
Interesting, fascinating.

Speaker 6 (02:25:53):
Yeah, they just decided that it wasn't for them, and
off they went to do some war grants. The ICC
has been criticized, probably reasonably, for the vast majority of
the people who have actually been prosecuted for the ICC
being outside of the core neoliberal states. Right, it's prosecuted
a lot of people in Africa. That doesn't mean that

(02:26:13):
like African people can't do war crimes in Africa, of
course they can, but it means that they're held accountable
more often than when countries in the global North do
war crimes, which they can do too. Okay, So Trump,
that's like everything else he does, was condemned internationally for
this right, including by several NATO allies. In so much
as they really are NATO allies anymore given everything we've

(02:26:34):
just talked about. However, it's also worth noting that some
of the countries like France, who condemned Trump's sanctioning of
ICC prosecutors, also allowed someone with an ICC warrant I
Benjamin that's in Yahoo to transit their airspace. So like,
therefore commitment to the ICC perhaps can be questioned, Like
this is a problem with the ICC, right it doesn't

(02:26:55):
have an integral enforcement mechanism.

Speaker 7 (02:26:57):
Yeah, yeah, I mean like Canada previous sleep promised quote
unquote promised, yeah, to arrest nat Yahoo if they were
ever like able to, And like, yeah, I'm very curious
to see how this is going to shake down with
the US taking like an extremely firmer stance at least
than we previously had.

Speaker 3 (02:27:13):
We already like you know, quote.

Speaker 7 (02:27:14):
Unquote like condemnic Canada, but like I'm interested to see
Trump like be more interested in actually pushing this further
than it has been.

Speaker 5 (02:27:22):
Yeah, I guess we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 6 (02:27:24):
For people who are unfamiliar, I do want to like
really quickly mention that like Palestine is a signatory and
therefore war crime to happen within Palestine and covered by
the CORE. Even if states such as Israel are not signatories,
right therefore, then they're still under the court to jurisdiction.

Speaker 5 (02:27:40):
So that that's how in this case this is happening. Yep.

Speaker 6 (02:27:44):
It could also make the ICC's life very difficult in
terms of using technology, right that the tech back end
of everything that ICC does. Try to remove that from
any United States involvement would be very hard.

Speaker 7 (02:27:57):
Well, let's go on a quick out of break in
return to talk about I don't know, the treasury or something.

Speaker 2 (02:28:02):
Yeah, let's talk about the treasury.

Speaker 11 (02:28:04):
All right, all right, we are back.

Speaker 7 (02:28:19):
But before we talk about the Treasury, I first wanted
to do some breaking news while kind of breaking. So
when I was flying to New Orleans, I was able
to fly past the brand new Gulf of America. It
was a life changing experience. It really warmed my heart.
And then luckily, a few days ago, Georgia Representative Buddy
Carter announced legislation to empower Trump to enter into negotiations

(02:28:44):
to quote unquote purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland and importantly
to rename it Red, White, and Blue. Lind God, let's
get some quick reactions from the panel.

Speaker 6 (02:28:56):
Sorry, as a person born in Europe, the idea of
Buddy Carr authorizing the formation of Red, White and Blue Land,
it's simply just like the fact that this is not
a parody. It's just fucking too much for me.

Speaker 2 (02:29:07):
Yeah yeah, I mean, well, what it is is purposefully ridiculous.
It's a it's a flex, it's a statement of the
power that they have over their own party and the country.
It is purposefully absurd and everyone is going to go
along with it because the Chief the King supports it, right,
Like that's the point in my opinion.

Speaker 5 (02:29:26):
Yeah, see empress new clothes of evading places.

Speaker 2 (02:29:29):
Like, it doesn't matter. We can be as silly as
we want.

Speaker 5 (02:29:32):
Genuinely interested in hearing from people in Greenland.

Speaker 7 (02:29:35):
Yes, honestly, I'm kind of surprised because I would I
would assume it. Maybe maybe this is still in the works.
If Elon Musk can find a way to call this
thing excellent, is really my concern.

Speaker 6 (02:29:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but now I'm really interested
in hearing from Greenland. Is genuinely You can contact us
at cool Zone tips at proton dot me, which is
an encrypted email address that you can send emails.

Speaker 3 (02:29:59):
To Yeah, all right, let's let's let's talk about Trump
potentially crashing the entire world economy. He's taking more shots
to just literally blow this all up. Yeah, okay, So
let's talk about the treasuries thing and him potentially talking
about not paying out our fucking treasury bonds. Okay, so
many reason quotes from Reuter's so this is Trump. We're

(02:30:19):
even looking at treasuries. Trump said there could be a problem.
You've been reading about that with treasuries, and that could
be an interesting problem. Now, treasuries again, our course, US
treasury bonds. We will get to what those are in
a second, but I need to read the rest of
this quote. It could be that a lot of those
things don't count. In other words, that some of the
stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we

(02:30:41):
have less debt than we thought. Now that's a very
scary thing to say.

Speaker 2 (02:30:47):
Yeah, Treasury bills are the primary underpinning of like economic
stability in this country. T bells are what large corporate
institutions when they have a lot of cash. But like
very wealthy people, it's where you park your money, and
it's where foreign governments park a lot of their money, Like, yeah,
and it's how our government gets a lot of its

(02:31:08):
money because it's a good, reliable investment. So saying maybe
we're going to declare some of these T bill investments
bullshit is very dangerous.

Speaker 5 (02:31:19):
Yeah, for the global economy.

Speaker 3 (02:31:21):
Yeah, yeah, I want to read this next line because
one of the things that's happening here, right is that
people just simply and this has been a real problem
for this entire administrations, people simply do not believe that
he means to do the thing he says he's going
to do.

Speaker 5 (02:31:37):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:31:37):
Quote is this from Broiders. Again, it could be treasury payments,
which is not linked the treasury bonds, said for shop Behani,
investment chief for Asia at BNP Power Boss Wealth Management,
I would be very surprised if they ever stopped a
payment of treasury bonds to a holder. It would be
like shooting yourself in the foot.

Speaker 5 (02:31:55):
He said.

Speaker 3 (02:31:56):
Now, this is something where these these institutional investors like
they still have not quite wrapped their head around the
fact that no, he really will do this shit because
he doesn't understand at all. He thinks that American debt
works the same way as like his own personal debt,
and no it doesn't. I mean, it's it's worth saying something. So,
I mean, just a very very basic shit about how

(02:32:19):
national debt works. Right, Like all of our money, literally
every single dollar that is in circulation, every dollar that
is in a bank account, that is literally government debt,
right like that that's what money is, right, And these
treasury bonds are as you were talking about earlier, Right,
this is like the investment asset for literally the entire world.

(02:32:41):
And there's trillions of dollars of these. Actually Japan is
the largest holder of treasury bonds. China's sort of been
selling some of theirs, but they have a lot of them.

Speaker 2 (02:32:50):
Yeah, probably good to be doing that.

Speaker 11 (02:32:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:32:52):
And it's also you know, like the fact that he's
saying he's not gonna pay these yet, Like this can
start a massive crisis in which I've been talking for
a bit about. You know, every day we sort of
get closer to credit rating agencies like downgrading the quality
of US debt, which is a real problem for us
trying to like get money from people. And and you know,
even if you listen to what that what the sort

(02:33:13):
of bond analyst is saying, right, he's like well, it's fine,
they'll just stop paying like US debt to other things,
which is like unbelievably unhinged. Would also in and of itself,
like like destroying the full faith and credit of the
United States would absolutely just fucking annihilate the world economy.
And it's also another example of Trump not understanding how
the empire he's inherited works, because like, the one of

(02:33:35):
the ways the US funds is government is by getting
its client states to buy like trillions of dollars of assets.
Like that's partially why feelie. Look at who who buys
US assets, Like it's China and US tributary states like
Japan for example, which is just purely in American military protectorate. Right,
it's a sort of incredible system for the US. Right,
you get a bunch of people and you, you know,

(02:33:56):
you just you just sort of perpetually keep borrowing money
from them, And it's this thing where they don't understand
and who actually holds the power in the relationship, which
is that the US having all this, is the one
with the power and is the one that's getting everyone
else's money for this sort of secure asset. So you know,
who knows what's going to happen with this. If this
actually starts happening, like, yeah, this is the world rending

(02:34:16):
economic crisis levels of stuff. Well, we'll see if he
moves on it, he may simply forget about it, or
we're going to wake up one day and like the
US's credit's going to be downgraded to like junk bond status,
and yeah, everything's going to be chaos. So, speaking of
Trump trying to sort of like take shots at pillars

(02:34:37):
of the global economy, starting in March, he's trying to
implement a twenty five percent tariff on all imported steel
and aluminum. Most of that's actually from Canada and Mexico.
I think in their minds is the thing about Chinese steel,
but it's mostly from Canada and Mexico. This is also
a fucking shit show because the US manufacturing capacity that

(02:34:57):
we still have and we still actually do have a
decent amount of like very high tech manufacturing capacity, right
relies on this stuff, and this is going to make
it more expensive, gets bad. It will do nothing to
deal with the fact that US doesn't produce steel anymore,
which is the product of that. One day, I'll do
my structural Chinese steel over capacity episode. But you know,

(02:35:18):
it's the product of like half a century of the
global manufacturing economy, you know, becoming zero sum and they're
simply not being a large enough consumer market for all
of industrial goods, which means the production becomes increasingly you know,
it becomes impossible to expand production to one place without
you know, getting red production another place. In Trump things
you can solve those with tariffs. You can't. Mostly it's

(02:35:39):
just another like throw things at the economy.

Speaker 10 (02:35:42):
Shit.

Speaker 3 (02:35:43):
Now, you know, Trump is sort of throwing bombs at
the economic system. One of the largest ones that he's
thrown is he just straight up stole eighty million dollars
in FEMA funding that they had already paid out, Like
just straight up stole it from like New York City
bank account. They like, so we've been paid to the
government in New York. Right, this happened earlier today. Right,

(02:36:03):
This is yeah, literally literally, this this is breaking news,
breaking news on Wednesday. This is coming out Friday. This
episode is being recorded on Wednesday. Everything that you hear,
if shit has happened in the US a few days,
that's from the future.

Speaker 1 (02:36:13):
We didn't know.

Speaker 3 (02:36:14):
But yeah, yeah, he literally like they have taken eighty
million dollars just from this bank account. They just stole it.
The hospital government is just straight up robbing banks.

Speaker 2 (02:36:25):
It's okay that came out today and said that don't
worry your bank accounts are still safe, everybody.

Speaker 7 (02:36:32):
Yeah, And this is like appropriated funds like for FEMA,
being sayly secured in banks that have like literally been
still funds so approved.

Speaker 5 (02:36:41):
By Congress for a specific purpose.

Speaker 3 (02:36:43):
Right, yeah, And what's actually going to happen with this? Right?
Because you would expect a even like a normal shitty
mayor of New York to like go sicker mode. However,
well man, however, comma, here's from Yahoo News quote. Eric
Adams has said he will not publicly create size Trump
or his administration. Instead, he'll take his concerns to Trump

(02:37:03):
in private. On Monday, Adams convened a meeting with his
own top officials to urge them not to speak badly
about the President and public, saying if they were to
do so, it could risk federal funding. Later that day.
That same day, Trump's Justice Department ordered the prosecutors in
Adam's criminal case to drop the charges against him, in part,
arguing Adams must be free of the burden of his
corruption indictment to help carry out Trump's immigration agenda in

(02:37:25):
the city.

Speaker 5 (02:37:26):
Great.

Speaker 7 (02:37:26):
Cool, This is the most like quid pro quote thing
I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (02:37:30):
It is the single most corrupt thing I've seen out
of US politics. Yeah, like blatantly, it's staggering.

Speaker 6 (02:37:37):
I mean it would come from Trump plus Adams, right, like, yeah,
we'll go see it.

Speaker 5 (02:37:40):
That's what we're going to say. We've hit a singularity
of corruption.

Speaker 6 (02:37:44):
Yes, yeah, it's stumbled as always the first stop.

Speaker 3 (02:37:47):
Yeah. The only way they can go further than this
is that Eric Adams is going to appoint Rob Lagoyevitch's
head of like bank robbery or something. One can dream, mia,
one can dream.

Speaker 6 (02:37:55):
There are a few other ways they can go further
with Yo, I'm afraid to inform youmya, but we'll be
hoping those don't happen.

Speaker 3 (02:38:01):
Well on the corruption index, on the corruption index.

Speaker 7 (02:38:04):
Okay, speaking of corruption, let's pivot to ads. All right,
we are back, and I'm going to close by talking
about the war on Woke, my new favorite news beat.

Speaker 3 (02:38:26):
That I'm forced to addention to every week.

Speaker 7 (02:38:31):
There was a transports band that that that Trump did
an executive order about using a whole bitch of children
as a prop, very clearly trying to steal steal the
charisma from whatever that governor who lost the election did
with his free school lunch there anyway. Instead now it's
you just you know, hurt other children in the school
by not making them be allowed to play sports. So

(02:38:53):
that happened, and then a few other things have happened
the past few weeks, and I'm kind of just like
catching up on because I been really focused on, like
reporting on like Muscus specifically, and there's been a lot
of other stuff the past few weeks, So I'm going
to kind of get to that now. The State Department's
travel website changed the acronym LGBT to LGB on a

(02:39:15):
web page like warning about like how dangerous it might
be to like travel to like other countries with like
worse legal protections, say LGB travelers can face special challenges abroad.
Laws and attitudes in some countries may affect safety and
ease of travel. Many countries do not recognize the same
sex marriage. Many countries don't recognize the ex gender marker

(02:39:37):
in passports and do not have it systems at ports
of entry that can accept sex markers other than female
and male.

Speaker 6 (02:39:45):
So they've only changed the title pot. Yeah, they haven't
even bothered to edit the text.

Speaker 7 (02:39:49):
No, because because they also have another info page where
they have just like control ft LGBT two LGB as well.
So this is this is like one of like many
changes we're seeing across a whole bunch of federal websites
in relation to Trump's order to like remove wokeness and
gender ideology. Previously, the CDC removed like HIV and trans

(02:40:12):
related like health info pages from their website, and as
of yesterday, February eleventh, the web pages for the FDA,
Health and Human Services and the CDC were allegedly brought
back online, restoring their January thirtieth status. They did this
like right before a court mandated deadline to restore these pages,

(02:40:32):
so like I can I can now go back on
to the.

Speaker 11 (02:40:35):
CDC's HIV page.

Speaker 7 (02:40:37):
Verge was first reported on this, and they said that,
you know, they've been unable to verify that all of
the pages have been restored exactly to how they were before.
This is something that we're still working on because it's
literally happened, like you know yesterday. This is this is
like a small, a small part of their of their
current war on wokeness. Another aspect of this is there's
been a whole bunch of orders from federal agencies to

(02:41:00):
ban specific woke keywords across their databases, their websites, training information,
including from agencies like Noah. So just like the weather
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they released a
memo of banning specific words across the agency, including words
like ability, acceptance, access, affirmation, aggression, ally shift, androgyne a,

(02:41:26):
sexual belonging, bias, binary, bisexual, black culture, DEI, discrimination, diversity, empathy, empowerment, equity, ethnicity, fairness, gay, gender, genitisphia, handicap, homosexual, LGBTQ, intersex,
pan sexual, queer, transgender, transvestite, as well as words like
impartial inclusion, indigenous, intersectionality, justice, The word white has been banned,

(02:41:55):
They space social justice, underserved communities, race, privilege, powerdynamics, the data,
American multiculturalism. So just all of these Like again, this
is like the Party of Free Speech has banned all
of these words, and it's not it's it's it's it's
not just Noah. Also, the National Science Foundation has has
released my most saying that they cannot have these words

(02:42:17):
included in their documents because it could cause them to
lose grant funding.

Speaker 6 (02:42:20):
Well, it's the end for race science. Then they can't
do race science anymore.

Speaker 7 (02:42:24):
There's a lot of similar words flagged in the National
Science Foundation list of banned words, like activism, activists, advocacy,
a barrier, a bias, black LATINX community, uh diversity, equity,
cultural differences, cultural heritage, culturally responsive, diverse, you know, diverse,
community divice groups, diversified, diversifying, all this kind of stuff, ethnicity, equality, inclusion, inequality, LGBT,

(02:42:54):
institutional marginalize, trauma, underappreciated, stereotype type, systemic underrepresentation, undervalued victim.

Speaker 2 (02:43:06):
I love that you can no longer do scientific papers
about systemic infections. Yeah, organs, Like yeah, no, there's anything.

Speaker 5 (02:43:15):
That has a barrier, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 7 (02:43:17):
There's so many words that are just like used in
like how like studies function that they cannot use because
the word is too woke, and then they're gonna lose
their funding. Like yeah, you can't, like you can't like
look at like things being equal. You can't look at
any kind of like scientific bias, Like you can't like
this very basic stuff. It may just result in like

(02:43:38):
the tiktokification of this, like trying to spell these words
with like a different letter.

Speaker 5 (02:43:42):
Talking about cute little boots.

Speaker 7 (02:43:44):
So what it is, and like I'm laughing because it's
all like absurd and it's kind of like kind of
like a coping mechanism, but like this is all like
very bad.

Speaker 3 (02:43:52):
Well, but like this some thing else, something else we
need to talk about you, which is like like you
are required by law as part of your grand proposal
like have things that talk about like how this is
going to affect different communities, et cetera, et cetera. Is
a legal requirement for you to put that in your thing.
So like if you were to like strictly enforce this,
this kills every fucking grant. And this is this is
one of these things where it's like you're literally just

(02:44:14):
running straight into the federal law tells you you must
do this thing, and the Trow Administration says these words
are banned, and so like yeah, who knows, it's a
really weird situation.

Speaker 6 (02:44:23):
Yeah, you can't do IRB right now. Like most guards
will go through an institutional review board that will determine
like if there are human subjects, they're like there ethical
boundaries and like what you're doing is okay. I can't
see it being possible to do an IRB and not
say these words.

Speaker 7 (02:44:41):
Yeah no, and like we have to do scientific studies
on like how how very disabilities affect people's lives, like
very basic stuff like this, all of these types of things.
It's really bad and these things like are going into effect.
I know, like this is this stuff is still happening.
Columnists to doctor Lucky Tran report quote, the CDC has

(02:45:01):
instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of
any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal.
The move aims to ensure that quote unquote, no forbidden
terms appear in the work band terms must be scrubbed. Great,
it's all really bad, yep. And we're seeing this this
sort of like lists being formed increasingly, including this DEI

(02:45:25):
watch list put together by a conservative oppositional research group
called the American Accountability Foundation CHRIST who released a DEI
watch list, which publishes the names, photos, occupation, and personal
information of mostly black employees who work under the Department
of Health and Human Services When the website was first discovered,
the employee profiles were labeled under targets. This has since

(02:45:48):
been changed to dossiers like very very frightening, like very
bad stuff, like very obvious intimidation for each target. The
website lists a collection of alleged DEI offense, which includes
donations to Democrats and social media posts having pronouns in
their bio or previous work on since deleted diversity, equity

(02:46:08):
and inclusion initiatives. Columnist Jamal Bowie says, quote, they are
mostly targeting black employees. So this is quite literally just
a repeat of Rigrow Wilson's segregationist purge of the federal government.
And like, yes, like all of this, all of this
like push against quote unquote DEEI is like very clearly
just like white supremacists segregation in action. Like this is

(02:46:29):
the whole point is that if any employee is a
person of color, that means that they that they must
be unqualified because they were hired only due to DEI
and to avoid doing that, you could only hire white people.
And Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent out a memo
directing staff on where to direct like grant funds and
he said, quote give preference to communities with marriage and

(02:46:52):
birth rates higher than the national average unquote, which is
a very clear dog whistle to just like only hire
like white Christians are Christians with big families, you know,
parenthesis like white people. This is like very very obviously
what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (02:47:07):
Yeah, and they're I mean, this is extending to the
military now under Hegseth. West Point has just announced effectively
the banning of a number of clubs, including the Society
of Black Engineers, which is like three quarters of a
century old something like that. Also ending programs that are
focused on like recruiting into the military black soldiers but
have like pivoted to recruiting from NRA gatherings, even though

(02:47:31):
there's internal agreement that that brings in a lower quality
type of.

Speaker 5 (02:47:35):
Say I've seen Sementara members.

Speaker 2 (02:47:38):
Yeah, yeah, I've seen a few NRA members, right, and
I yeah. And it's just one of these things, like
there's a very good book that I think people need
to read if you want to know kind of the
operational impact this is going to have, both on the
US military and probably to an extent, law enforcement. We
look at agencies like the FBI, there's a book called
The Dictator's Army that heavily focuses on how changes like

(02:48:00):
this impact operational efficiency, and the gist of it is
that the goal, and clearly what Hegseth's job is, is
to make the military into something that can't pose opposition
to the new regime. Right, that's the goal here, because
there's a very realistic understanding that the military was one
of things that stopped him from maintaining power in twenty twenty, right,

(02:48:22):
both because the military was not willing to be used
to crack down directly on protests and because General Milly
acted as a barrier to Trump's attempt to do a
coup the last time.

Speaker 5 (02:48:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:48:34):
So you have an understanding which is very common when
regimes like this takeover in democratic societies. In the early
days of the Third Reich, the military was the primary
concern Hitler had because they were not Nazis, right, they
were conservative, but they were not in the tank for
the Nazi Party, And there was a lot that he
wanted to do that the military establishment at the time

(02:48:55):
the Third Rich came to power wouldn't let him do.
And that was that was one of the first things.
And this this took several years, but that was one
of the first goals of the Nazi regime and power
was reforming the military as much as possible in their
own image.

Speaker 7 (02:49:08):
And like so much of like what HEGGS is doing
here specifically with like the West Point like club banning,
it's like like these things are not like DEI. These
things are like very old. These are like pretty like
standard standard things that have been like roped into like
what it means to like be in America. And we're
now just seeing this like crusade against DEI being used
to just reverse affirmative action and specifically select for white

(02:49:31):
Christian applicants. Yeah, and like that's the entirety of this
point here, Like they're they're using DEI as like as
this like magical wand to frame things that are like
pretty standard and like accepted parts of like how you
do like hiring practices, how you don't do discrimination to
just specifically only only like uplift white Christians. And that's

(02:49:53):
part of this like very basic like Christian nationalist project
that people like Heritage have been trying to do for
a long time.

Speaker 3 (02:50:00):
I think it's also worth noting too that like the
other thing that this mirrors, you know, and the like.
Specifically in the way that this target's queer people is
the Lavender Scare, which is a thing from like the
sort of late forties through the sixties where the US
is part of this like giant anti communist herge. It
was on basically went through and found every gay government
official and fucking ran them out. That's like another aspect

(02:50:21):
of this whole thing, right, like the way these people
understand the world. In order to sort of like purify
their like white state, right like, you have to ord
to the non white people, and you have to get
rid of the queers, and you know, and people especially
people who are fucking both. And so this is this
sort of transformational project of changing this this sort of
like just changing the composition of what the US is into,

(02:50:45):
like and how its state functions, and how they can
to like what level of violence they can bring about
on people.

Speaker 7 (02:50:53):
And they've wrote these things together so closely now, like
the anti trans like school executive order. Only the first
first half the executive order was actually about the gender
ideology stuff. The second half was aimed at curbing what
they called discriminatory equity ideology d DEI. Basically it was

(02:51:13):
proposing a program for quote unquote patriotic education across the country,
basically trying to rewrite history to make like the United
States like this, like noble historical project. H It's like
stuff that they've tried to do before with that, like
with that, like seventeen seventy six project that The New
York Times reported on. Part of Trump's order called for
quote an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, an ennobling characterization of

(02:51:38):
America's founding and foundational principles, a clear examination of how
the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble
principles throughout history, the concept that commitment to America's aspirations
is beneficial and justified, the concept that celebration of America's
greatness and history is proper. And then the order goes
on to try to ban the concept of white guilt,

(02:51:58):
saying that like, teachers can get in trouble if any
of their students feel guilty about things that people of
like that same race have done in the past, and
like making sure that teachers do not teach things in
a way that could possibly make us students feel quote
unquote guilt.

Speaker 6 (02:52:14):
They use the word children actually not students, which like
is fundamentally something we don't do in education.

Speaker 7 (02:52:20):
Right.

Speaker 6 (02:52:21):
We refer to our students of students because we respect
them as people. We don't think of them as like
lesser than, especially when we're getting to the points where
we're discussing things like race and equity, Like these are
high school students, right, maybe we know we certainly do
discuss these things in university, and like, it's fundamentally shows
a complete lack of understanding of how education works to
call them children.

Speaker 3 (02:52:41):
Yeah, And I think it gets to what this is
actually about when this is something that I would argue
both Trump administrations were about, right if you look at
when Trump like comes down the fucking elevator for the
first time. So I think people may remember, like after
Ferguson in twenty fifteen, there was Baltimore where there was
you know, huge riots, massive convers with the police, like
massive anti racist actions. And that's the that's like the

(02:53:04):
thing that really truly tipped like a bunch of the
Republican Party even further right from where they'd been with
the Tea Party into into this into sort of trump Ism.
It was, you know, it was a reaction to that
and then this entire campaign, right, like all of the
stuff that he's talking about here, you know, this is
about twenty twenty, right, this is about reversing the gains
that had beened, you know, and like obviously they were
incomplete gains. One of the things that did happen was

(02:53:26):
that a bunch of teachers were trying to change the
way the US history is taught to reflect that this
country was like again, a settler colonial empire built by
slave labor, and you know that that expanded its territory
through genocide, which is just this is just objectively true
about how the US started. But the thing is, like
that's not good for you know, these people's projects, right,

(02:53:46):
Like saying that out loud is a fucking issue for them.
And so you know, their their attempt to roll back
everything that was gained from sort of the Black uprisings
is culminating all of this shit with like the purge
of black workers for the federal government, with all of
these things ordering you and like that's why they're talking
about all of these weird all they keep banning all
these weird like terms that don't make any sense, Like

(02:54:07):
we were talking about like empathy, right, so like, okay,
so why the fuck are they talking about banning empathy? Yeah,
because specifically these things come from the purges they've been
trying to do in the education system, where they have
a bunch of very specific grievances about like kinds of
education stuff that teachers the teachers were implementing, particularly in
sort of like middle and high schools.

Speaker 7 (02:54:25):
Well, I'm going to close here with two pieces of
breaking news. One, like, earlier today, we learned that the
NAH has finally has finally acknowledged that the grant funding
freeze is illegal. And this is probably like due to
pressure from like news coverage about all of the temporary
restraining order violations through the continued freezing of funds, and

(02:54:46):
now the NH is saying, because of these orders, we
will resume funding. The first tro was like two weeks ago,
on February first, So it's not like like they just
learned about this. It's that they have in some ways
like perhaps caved to pressure. Again, like, these executive orders
do not enforce themselves, These are enforced by people at agencies.

(02:55:08):
These things do do not do not become automatically enforced.
So this is this is like one one step now
you can go to a popular dot info who has
been breaking the news on this specifically, and then some
some breaking news that I have here on drop site
quote unquote armored Tesla forecast estimated to win four hundred

(02:55:28):
million dollars of State Department contract funds.

Speaker 3 (02:55:32):
What So, this could go one of two ways.

Speaker 7 (02:55:35):
This could either go a really funny way, yeah it's
kinda sha or it could go a really sad way.

Speaker 5 (02:55:40):
Yeah I do.

Speaker 2 (02:55:41):
I do like the idea of a lot of Trump
appointees being in Tesla's that are armored when the batteries
catch and maybe the jaws of life can't cut through those,
you know, yep, yep.

Speaker 6 (02:55:53):
Yeah it was. This is very funny because Trump went
off on a on a cotangent about electric tank horrible idea,
paintrat a couple of times, horrible idea. Yeah, Well he's
had he's had to come to Jesus moment and he
has changed his mind and he wants a more sustainable
sure beast as they called it.

Speaker 2 (02:56:10):
What everyone always says, the problem with tanks is is
that they don't explode enough when hit by munitions or
by themselves, when not hit by being by themselves, just because.

Speaker 5 (02:56:18):
Batteries do that sometimes.

Speaker 6 (02:56:20):
Yes, yeah, you never know what you're going to get.

Speaker 2 (02:56:23):
I'm excited. This is going to make everything a lot
safer for our our our men and women in Greenland.
I'm guessing.

Speaker 6 (02:56:30):
Yeah, batteries. Batteries thrive in the cold, red, white and
blue lid.

Speaker 2 (02:56:37):
Yeah. I do love the new m one a whatever
seven abrams that gets four miles on a chart.

Speaker 5 (02:56:43):
And then again detonates wait.

Speaker 6 (02:56:45):
Six months to use a solar panel to field recharge.

Speaker 5 (02:56:48):
At least it doesn't get light for six months.

Speaker 2 (02:56:51):
Yeah, magnificent upwards of ten miles a year.

Speaker 7 (02:56:54):
Yes, yep, all right, well that is it for us
today on it could happen here, James things. Do you
want to talk about the tip point again?

Speaker 5 (02:57:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (02:57:01):
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(02:57:24):
that you think we should be reporting on, things that
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Speaker 5 (02:57:27):
Draw to our attention to that email address. We will
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been getting a lot of tips.

Speaker 6 (02:57:36):
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Speaker 5 (02:57:40):
We reported the next.

Speaker 2 (02:57:43):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 3 (02:57:49):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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Speaker 12 (02:58:00):
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