It Could Happen Here Weekly 171

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone 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 (00:27):
Welcome Jay Knappen here a podcast that has been really,
really fucking bleak basically since Trump took office. So instead
of doing another episode about how doom Vus is, we
are taking a I don't know a field trip to
Argentina to talk about something extremely funny. And that extremely
funny thing is the Argentinian President, Javier Malai promoting a

(00:49):
meme coin and maybe going down for it and with
me to talk about this is really the only person
I could have on to talk about a crypto thing.
Who is Molly White And I'm trying to explain who
Bally White is. My explanation of this is in the
same way that the great twentieth century marksis theorist C.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
LR.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
James's book Beyond a Boundary is both universally considered to
be the best book ever written about cricket and also
literally calling it the thing that it is the best
book ever written about cricket is like a damning insult
to how good the actual book is. Molly is like
probably the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter
citation needed also does web three is going great, which

(01:31):
is amazing. Everyone should go listen to it, and Molly,
welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 (01:35):
Thanks for having me. What an intro.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one
for such a long time. A great book, by the way,
which everyone should both go subscribe to citation needed and
also go read Beyond the Boundary because it's great. So God,
we were talking about this before the show. I had
planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at
Sea Pac with Javier Malay like with me Malay's signature chainsaw,

(02:02):
doing an even weirder version of Malays thinking about like
cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (02:10):
Yeah, what a spectacle that was.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Oh my god, I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute.
Wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there that was
only like day one.

Speaker 6 (02:23):
Well that's overdone now you know everyone's doing it. You
have to do something new.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, you have to get to wander around the stage
with a chainsaw like he didn't even do the Malay thing,
which is you have you have like a book of
regulations or whatever, you cut it with a chainsaws. Oh god.
So I am very excited to talk about the crypto
scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and
I am deeply sorry. I already I apologized before this

(02:50):
recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain
who Hoavier Malay is, I have to do the single
most difficult thing I've ever attend in my like not
just in my like my history as a podcast, like
that's obviously trivially true, like by my entire history doing
theoretical work in general, which is I'm about to attempt

(03:10):
to explain paronism in under ten minutes on four hours
of sleep.

Speaker 5 (03:13):
Let's say it.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Here, we fucking go because because to guess, that's why
you know, why we have to do this, right, Like,
Malay is able to take power like basically because he
he's like one of the first candidates in a long
time to in Argentina to run as an anti Paronist.
And that may seem weird because hold on, wait, shouldn't
there always be like, okay, if you have an ideology,

(03:39):
shouldn't it shouldn't that the person from like either the
left right side of the political spectrum, you know, be
running against an ideology and no, no, up until basically now,
both the left and the right in Georgina we're both paronists.
So to get an understanding of what paranism is, we
need to go back not just to who who I'm
parone is, and we'll we'll we'll get to Hujuan Peron,

(04:01):
who's like the guy this ideology is named after, and
you know, the ideology is based on like this guy
returning from exile from the military coups. But we have
to go back to one of the sort of foundational
parts of the modern Argentinian state, and that element is
the fact that Argentina has one of the most militant
workers movements in the entire world and has had it

(04:24):
for about a century. I was on Margaret's show, it
could happen here, and Jesus Christ not it could happen here.
Good Lord, you tell them on.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
Four US you're doing great, Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
I haven't even gotten we have not gotten to my
final analysis of Peronism, where that the closest thing I
can compare it to is post short cultural revolutions nineteen
seventies era China. So this is about to get so
much more unhitched. But a while back I was on
Margaret Show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff to talk
about the second Argentinian giant and arcosyndy closed uprising in

(04:58):
about a span of four years, which was the giant
anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty two.
And this is the second one because the first one
was the nineteen nineteen general strike, which ends in an
event called the Tragic Week where everyone sort of gets
killed by the military. But you know, the fact that
there's there's two in different parts of the country, enormous

(05:18):
and arcosndicalist uprisings in a span of about four years
is a demonstration of the fact that this is one
of the most billetant working classes in the world, and
any political movement that is trying to hold power in
this country is going to have to deal with the
fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment. Can
you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake
up one day and there's a black flag flying over
your factories because your workers have seized it. And the

(05:42):
sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is
even still relevant today is that like the last of
what you would I guess you could call like the
classical twentieth century revolutions. So a line of uprising started
with like the original formation of the workers' councils in
Russia in nineteen oh five, you know, and that continues
to do like the occupations of factories and Itallly you
the two Red Years, and like nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen,

(06:03):
like the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, with the
revolutions in Hungaria and Algeria, like you know, all like
through sixty eight, like the factor occupations in France and Italy,
and like all this whole, this whole lineage of like
the thing that happens when you do you revolution, as
workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of
the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina.
In two thousand and one, like everywhere else in the world,

(06:24):
this ship was gone, and then randomly in Argentina in
two thousand and one, like there's a there's a giant
one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really
put down by a sort of left Corona's government agreeing
to like tell I am have to fuck off, which
was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in
the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, Okay,

(06:47):
if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have
to deal with this, like what what do you do?
And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology
the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism
under the sea batter of Argentinian nationalists class collaboration, which
the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand,
like paroism is, oh god, protoism is simply the weirdest

(07:09):
ideology ever. I promise we're going to get to the
fun crypto stuff, but we have to, unfortunately do this,
We have to do our whole work first, and part
of this is so Juan Perone, the actual guy who
who is ideologies based off is an enormously popular president
in like the late forties and fifties until he gets
overthrown by military coup and to get a sense of
again like how weird this guy is. Like, this is

(07:31):
a guy who when he comes into power a bunch
of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not
just you know, obviously like like the famous Nazis fleet Argentina.
This is the whole meme about that, right, But I
mean we're talking about guys who do u stat si
like guys guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand,
like flee to Argentina and Drena's administration, and when a
military coup overthrows him, they flee the country. So again,

(07:51):
like the US back military junta is less pro Nazi
than this guy is. He is also personal friends with
Chae Guavara and consider like the Cuban Revolution to be
like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply
deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this
is that, Okay, so you have a military dictatorship through

(08:12):
like the fifties and the sixties, right, and like the
entire time there's a tatorship, not the entire night, but
most of the time this atatorship is happening, right, the
entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political
energy onto we want Parone back, because Parona is remembered
as like the guy who like brought workers rights to
the country and also like gave women the right to vote,
and also as you remember it as like a stable

(08:33):
nationalist right wing government by the rights like everyone on
like both sides the political spectrum project all of their
political aspirations into the single figure of Perome, which works
because he's not in the country, is not not there,
so you know, and because he's gone, you can project
anything you want onto him. And this is to a
large extent the origin of modern populism, right, like the

(08:54):
you know, modern populism is the projection of all grievances
onto one guy and then having that come in take
power do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like
fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here
is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is
very specifically Paronism, because one of the theoreticians of like

(09:15):
modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is
my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher and NESTL. Leclough
and his wife Chantill Moffe, who were like they were like,
you know, these are these people were like the the
theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left
in this sort of euro Communism era and even up
until like like pot Daemos in Spain twenty eleven, like
these are the people who are the theoretical force behind

(09:35):
so much like left electoral stuff in the last like
fifty years. And it's all from Leclough, who was a
left paronist. So all of all the dots are going
on the pin board and while he's gone, he's this
guy that like from an American perspective, it's like imagine
that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from twenty sixteen
were both the same guy, and both sides were just

(09:57):
trying to get this one guy to come back to
Argentina like fix everything. So this creates like the left
and right paronists. And when parn comes back in the
seventies and like immediately gets elected president again, the right
Paronis just I mean you literally starts slaughtering to left
Paronis in the streets, and Parne like backs the right
Paronists against the left, and you would think this would

(10:19):
destroy left Paranism, but no, no, Left Paronism was in
power in Argentina until like Malai's election like a few
years ago. It's so okay, So like why would you
still be a left Paronis after Parone like had all
your boys machine guns in the seventies. Part of the
reason this works also is that he dies and his
wife takes power and there's like another military coup, so

(10:42):
you know, he's not like in power long enough kind
of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's
just he's in power just long enough for people to
remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And
at this point I could finally attempt to go what's Paronism?
They're like how many minutes of like, oh god, I
think I've got over my limit of what is But okay,

(11:03):
Paron's deal is this right?

Speaker 7 (11:04):
Like so okay?

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Like if you're a pronus, right, and in Perona's state,
everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of
the Argentinian state, And so if you're a leftist, you
focus on the everyone is going to be equal part,
and this means on the one hand, you know, there
are there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working
class that they didn't get under the you know, the
sort of previous administrations. And under the junta, right, you know,

(11:26):
you have like massive expansions of workers' rights and nationalizations
of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have
this like strategy of national development through like import substitution.
There's there's like a long strain of like feminist paranism
from you know his like like him being the administration
where women got the right to vote. On the other hand,
if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before

(11:47):
the power of the Argentinian state part which means like
permanent class collaboration. And this this is the part of
the deal that brings the right in is like the
deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all
of this stuff, and you set up these really complicated
patriots networks, and you know, people have jobs and like
they have a social safety that at least in theory,
and the trade off is you will never ever again

(12:07):
attempt to like occupy a factory or and like drive
these parasites. You run your entire life out of power.
And the second part of that is this like this hardline,
unhinged right wing like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against
for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise
the comparison to the to the Long Culture seventies Long
Culture Revolution. We've reached that point of it, so to

(12:29):
understand like really what this is, right, It's an active
counterinsurgency that is sort of that is waged by the
state and waged by a bunch of like parts of
the social sector to unfold this really dynamic and miilitant
workers movement into the state in such a way that
there can still be politics kind of but it won't

(12:50):
actually be a threat to the ruling class. And my,
my sort of like closest thing to this is this
very very weird period in Chinese history between like the
end of the Short Culture Revolution in like nineteen sixty
nine and the death of Mao in seventy six, where
like the most unhinged parts of the Culture Revolution are
sort of over because Mao has set off, you know,

(13:12):
so nineteen sixty seven, like Mao sets off this uprising
in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his
strategy to game power of the party. The problem is
that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands
of the Chinese Communist Party, like like the workers take
the city, and this is a disaster because they've all
been reading about the Paris Commune, and I think with
the Paris comunies that they had like direct elections of people.

(13:32):
And there's a moment I actually like I found this
this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to
Joe and Lai, and Joe and Lai is like, if
we let these people do direct elections, like it's going
to lead to anarchism, and Mao is like, oh shit,
we have to stop this. So what happens is that
he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red

(13:53):
Guards and the sort of somebody some like loyal like
rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the
remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition
comprised of everyone on every side of the Cultural revolution, right,
Like normally the Culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly,

(14:13):
there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right,
and he's he's pulled together coalition of a bunch of
elements of both of them with the explicit thing of
we are going to end the revolution. And in the
short run, what this does is it leads to the
back half of the Culture Revolution that people don't talk
about very much, which is instead of like everyone dying
because there are rebels running around, everyone's dying because the

(14:34):
state is killing everyone to like bring everyone back under control.
And that's what most of the people die in the
Culture Revolution are killed, putting the whole thing down. If
one of trying to understand like what parenism is, right,
it's this ideology of bringing together all of the different
sort of disparate political factions in a moment. Right, You're
bringing together everyone from like the fascist on the right
to like the socialists on the left, and you're bringing

(14:55):
them into the banner of this one guy and the
same And the reason Malo was able to do this
is because, like he's Mao, right, every single like faction
on every side of the Culture Revolution, whatever they're trying
to do, is justifying it in the name of like, oh,
this is what Mao wants, This is what Parona is doing, right,
He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way
that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away

(15:17):
from like the junta, and forge this permanent political collition.
And this results in like like the sort of total
dominance that this ideology has a Roger tim politics means
that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malai
takes power is an election between the left and the
right paranists. And okay, okay, I'm so sorry. This finally
is the end divide attempt to explain Baronis. But we're

(15:39):
gonna go to ads when we come back. I'm gonna
actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am
so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much
for serve.

Speaker 8 (16:01):
This.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
This sort of brings us to like how he kind
of takes power and how you know, there's an economic crisis.
There's like all this inflation and so he comes in
on like I don't know, we were talking about this
beforehands and we're going to talk to you about this.
Like there's all these really weird parallels between this and
the American election, where it's like except the inflation in

(16:24):
Argentina is like real.

Speaker 6 (16:27):
Yeah, we just have this sort of like boogeyman version
of it. They actually have hyperinflation.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Yeah, yeah, we really checked the current inflation rate. Yeah,
I think, I mean it's like several hundred percent right now.
I think I think it's like three hundred something percent,
which is actually Lay's entire thing was that he was
going to stop inflation. It's actually it's way worse under
him than it was the previous like Parnas administration. Oh

(16:54):
there's one other thing I forgot about it, which is like,
you know, why if you're on the left, would you
take this deal? And this also ties into like how
this politics?

Speaker 9 (17:02):
How is politics?

Speaker 3 (17:02):
I took over the state, which is that like you know,
there were people in Argentina like under these Prona's governments
got things that are like unimaginable here, Like there's one
that's important to me. And like obviously like it's still
you're still living under capitalism. A lot of it still sucks.
But like one of the things that people won under
these governments was this mandate that one percent of all
government employees had to be trans which is like unimaginable here,

(17:25):
like like like even at the height of like you
know like sort of transacceptance or whatever. Like that's there's
what like that's that's not that's not a thing. That's
even like no one even like thinks to ask about that,
and like yeah, like I don't know, like yeah, like
I might sell my soul to Juan Perona if it
meant that, like none of my trans friends ever had
to sleep in an alley. Again, like I you know,

(17:47):
but the wheels fall off of this and they put
the self described and narcro capitalists in power, which is
this is great and oh god, okay, and this finally
gets a the fun part of this. I said the
top of this episode that like he did a meme coin, right,
can you explain what that is? Because oh god, yeah.

Speaker 6 (18:09):
So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the
cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that
this is a token that has no inherent value, which
I mean, you know, skeptics would argue that that's true
of all cryptocurrency, but but meme coins very actively embrace
that fact, and they're often themed around a meme. So,

(18:30):
you know, a lot of people know of dogecoin, which
is themed about the you know, around the she but
you new dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort
of an idea or a person or you know, just
sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any
given moment. And the idea is that you buy in,
and all of the attention causes more people to buy in,

(18:50):
and if you're really good at it or really lucky,
you're one of the first people to buy in, and
so you buy in at a low price and then
you sell after everyone else has bought in and pumped
the price. Hire that's the idea. In reality, it doesn't
really work that way. It's full of insider trading and
market manipulation, and it's not sort of a fair game
where anyone has a chance to be one of those

(19:12):
early people. But that's sort of the shape of it
at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra,
which is the name coin that.

Speaker 5 (19:20):
Mila was convinced I guess to endorse.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting thing here too,
where it's like our government is just like a fucking
meme coin. Now, Like the thing that is it ConTroll
of the American state is Doge, the barber of government efficiency,
which is just the Doge coin meme.

Speaker 6 (19:38):
Like, yeah, we're in sort of a post ironic world
at this point where crypto and the US government are
somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention
that just before Trump took office, he launched his own
meme coin, which was the Trump Token, followed very shortly
after by his wife launching the Malania And they did

(20:01):
what all good meme coins do, which is that they
spiked in price based on the original interest, and then
they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price
came back down, because with meme coins, people lose interest
and move on to the next one. And you know,
the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
So yeah, like and that's just interesting thing about it,
which is like, Okay, this is just a pump them
dump scheme. Yes, Like, it's just securities fraud. Like I
we have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing
securities fraud, and everyone knows that securities fraud. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
I mean, it's it's really cynical.

Speaker 6 (20:37):
Like if you actually talk to people who are deep
into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's
this broad acceptance that like, oh yeah, yeah, it's totally
a scam. People are trying to run off with the
money after they launched these tokens, Like there's all of
this mark manipulation happening average everyday people, who are you know,
seeing these stories about people buying in super early and

(20:58):
then making a million dollars out of thin air like
that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like
deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge. Like
everyone knows this and openly discusses it, and yet there's
still this active participation in it because the idea is
that like, Okay, sure it's a scam, but if you

(21:18):
get in on the scam early enough, you can be
the scammer and you can be the one who profits
and you know, screw everybody else. So it's like this
really deeply rotten, like cynical world.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Yeah, I remember you talked about this on Jamie's show
about like how just deeply nihilistic it all is. Yeah,
and I think you know, I mean, it's not even
it used to be. You had to do metaphors to
draw a direct line between this sort of like the
nihilism of this shit and like the nihilism of putting
like the lie or like putting Trump and Elon like

(21:52):
in office. But now it's just I mean, they just
do the meme coin right, like there's no Yeah, the
mask is.

Speaker 6 (21:59):
Like fully off of crypto in the memechoin era. I think, like, yeah,
it's kind of amazing. How during the previous crypto boom
in like twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there was
this phrase that everyone was saying, which was wag me,
which was like we're all going to make it, and
the idea was like we're all going to get rich together,
everyone's gonna succeed. And now it's like they've totally like

(22:19):
you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh,
I will punch you in the face and steal your
wallet if I get the moment opportunity, and that is
like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, you know, and like that that is also like
what Malai has been doing to like everyone in Argentina
right like his his thing came in is he I mean,
I got one of the things I remember from like
the very first days he was in offices, he was
talking about all this stuff about how they were going
to take away will for benefits from anyone who was
arrested at protest. Yeah, and like that didn't start. There's
been massive protests like basically since the moment he took power.

(22:51):
But you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical,
very explicit thing of like pitting like everyone in society
against each other. Like you know, like making this argument
too is like a crime thic article about this word.
It's like they, you know, like he's very explicitly making
this argument. They're like, well, Okay, if you're like a
private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason
you're making no money is because wages are too high.

(23:13):
In the public sector, it's because taxes are too high,
and if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay
you more. It's like, yeah, no, but if it fits
into this sort of like pure nihilism of like, yeah,
everyone trying to grift each other, and it's i.

Speaker 6 (23:26):
Mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States too,
where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not
making enough money because you know, people are stealing your
tax money and it's going to you know, people who
don't deserve it, or it's going to these programs to
fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States
or you know, it's like very much trying to pit
everyone against one another so that you don't notice that

(23:48):
the person who's actually taking the money is the guy
who launched the meme coin or the people who have
the insider information.

Speaker 10 (23:53):
You know.

Speaker 6 (23:54):
It's like this very direct mirror of what is happening
in society, and yet it's like so obvious.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
The problem that we have is like I think people
do probably recognize that, like everyone who is rich got
rich by fucking robbing people. But instead of trying to
do anything about that, the solution that's being positive by
these people is like, well, instead of you just being
scammed all the time, like you could be the scam artist.

Speaker 5 (24:17):
You could be the robbery. Yeah, Like that's.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Like the new scam instead of like, you know, because
like organizing is fucking hard, right, and like attempting to
fight these people is really hard. They have all the money,
they have all the power, they have the police, they
have the military, and so you get like this shit
on the other hand, sometimes in backfires because these people
like are like all in enough on this fucking meme
cooin shit to like run it. So yeah, let's let's

(24:40):
talk about this specific mean coin Libra. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (24:43):
So it's kind of a weird example of a meme coin,
because you know, most meme coins, the idea is like
this has no intrinsic value, this has no purpose. You
just gamble on the token price and hope for the best.
Libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of
point to it, making it much unlike most of the

(25:04):
meme coins, but it was still you know, basically a
meme coin under the hood. But the idea was that like,
somehow some of the profits from this Libra token we're
going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something
like that. There was this sort of like social benefit
side to it, where which was all very vague and

(25:25):
like they're very little detail, like you know, you never
really know what these things what is actually supposed to happen.
But that was the story, is that like this is
going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel
money to their projects and all this.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
It almost feels like an older kind of scam, Like
it reminds me of like an NFT scam. We're like, yeah,
they'll they'll be like ah, so we're in the future
we're going to make a game and you're all going
to put it. It's like that thing, but they brought
it back for one last ride.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Right.

Speaker 6 (25:53):
It's like the historical, like twenty twenty era crypto scam
where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap
of all these things we're going to do, and we're
going to give you gifts and rewards. And then it's
like okay, but how is it going to work? And
they're like, Oh, don't worry about it, we'll tell you later.
Just give us your money now. And that was kind
of the idea with the libri coin. But basically the
team behind it had some folks who were involved in

(26:17):
something called tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group
of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle
to it, who had access to Malay via this sort
of project that was happening in Argentina where you could
like pay to come to this conference and Malay was
going to be there and all this, and so they
joined forces with some meme coin guys who had a

(26:39):
lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the
Malania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched
by someone who purchased the trademark rights to the Enron company.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
I forgot about that.

Speaker 5 (26:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, that came back.

Speaker 6 (26:55):
To haunt us, and so they all joined forces and
launched this meme coin, and they were able to get
President Mila to promote the meme coin on his Twitter
account by saying like, here's this Libra project. It's going
to support Argentinine entrepreneurs. Here's the contract address. Buy in,
And so everyone got super excited because a president had

(27:19):
just endorsed a meme coin, and he unfortunately was too
slow to be the first president to do such a thing,
with Trump beating him to that particular record.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
But actually, I actually can't believe I blankey on his name,
the guy Nol Salvador hadn't pulled one yet. Oh yeah, Bukeley,
I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet.

Speaker 6 (27:38):
Yeah, it's probably because he's a real bitcoiner and bitcoin
maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 5 (27:45):
That would be my guess. But yeah, it is a
little surprising. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (27:48):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
Also, okay, there's another run hinged angle here which I
want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny. One of
my good friends, Julie point to bt which is part
of the thing that's like originally, originally maybe you want
to do this is that So one of the people
who was like involved in like this hookup process with
like the crypto people was this guy named Augustine Lahay
who's like this very very famous conservative writer and he's

(28:09):
the guy who like introduced the concept of gender ideology
to Argentina. So he's like one of and one of
what lays like big things is like being a turf
all the time, right, And the guy who like got
all of these people into turf shit is like the
guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scamp, and
he might have to sell him out in order to
get out of the cryptoscamp bullshit, which is just oh god,

(28:33):
trans people getting our revenge.

Speaker 5 (28:36):
You love to see it.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad
break before we get into all of the rest of
this bullshit. We are back to the main story of

(28:57):
the really unprecedented access is a ministration has given the
crypto people. Can you talk a bit about like who
the like who the people involved in this are, because
it's a lot of like very very large like players
in this world.

Speaker 6 (29:11):
Yeah, so, I mean it's still sort of coming out
like who exactly was involved and to what degree they
were involved, but it's really starting to look like the
creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch
of guys at a group called Kelsey or Ventures that
has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch
of these tokens, and that's sort of a family run operation.

(29:34):
There's a guy named doctor Tom and then his two sons,
Hayden and Gideon.

Speaker 12 (29:39):
I believe that lady named Kitty Jesus Rice like oh no,
making these guys in a lab, and you know they're
they're kind of young guys, like Hayden is like twenty
eight or something like that, which is you know, typical
for the crypto world, I guess.

Speaker 6 (29:58):
But yeah, and so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind
much of the launch, but they're working very closely with
a bunch of other people in the crypto world. And
that's something that they sort of have to do with
these big, splashy token launches, you know, the Trump token.
I had to do this as well, where you can't
just show up as like a president and launch a
meme coin and expect everything will just work, because when

(30:21):
that many people all try to buy a token at once,
you know, you need someone on the other end to
actually be selling the tokens. And you know, there's all
of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches,
and so you need people to do the market making,
and there's the liquidity providers, and there's all these you know,
projects under the hood that are that are involved. And

(30:43):
it's beginning to look like a lot of those people
were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that
was perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah, I know, propriety around
mem coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but
you know, we're there's sort of talks out how one
of the co founders of a project called Mediora, which

(31:03):
is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a
place where people are actually buying these tokens, can.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
You explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners.

Speaker 4 (31:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (31:13):
Yeah, so it's it's basically sort of what I what
I suggested, which is that like if you go out
and launch a token and you don't do any prep
when someone goes to buy that token there's or sell
that token there's there's no one on the other side
of that trade. You need some amount of liquidity in
the markets when you start off.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, so they're like, there have to be like there
have to be like actual tokens that you can sell
to people.

Speaker 6 (31:36):
Just yeah, and if someone, you know, if someone buys
one of your tokens, they want to be able to
sell it to someone as well. And so you need
to be able to sort of absorb that kind of
trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air.
These people will exist on both sides of the trade,
and so there are these projects called liquidity providers where
you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity

(31:58):
and they'll step in in that role, and that's sort
of the market maker end of things. Mediora is a
little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision,
which I'm not going to go into too much detail
about because it's very mind numbing.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
But it's also so funny that like the terms that
have taken hold for these things like are financial terms,
and it's like, yeah, it's like like this is not
liquidity in the sense of like does the US government
have cash on hand to pay something? This is like
are there these like stupid little weird program things to
like move other programs around.

Speaker 5 (32:32):
Yeah, and it's not even.

Speaker 6 (32:34):
Dollars, you know, we're not We're not talking about real
dollars here. We're talking about like people providing you one
fake token in exchange for another fake token. But I
think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms
to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it
and cover up the fact that, like, oh and if
you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all
the liquidity out of there, you've just made a ton

(32:55):
of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit
because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists
in like traditional finance. But yeah, so there's this Mediora
project where that liquidity operation all happens, and you know,
Mediora was deeply sort of involved in some of these
big token launches like trump token was starting out on Mediora.

(33:17):
Milania started out there, this Libra token started out there,
and now it seems like the co founder was like
very closely connected to this Hayden guy, He even supposedly
introduced the Milania team to Hayden Davis, the Kelcier guy.
Sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations

(33:38):
out there, he was personally involved in a lot of
this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into
when it comes to Libratoken and why everything went so wrong.
And it seems like there is this sort of network
of people throughout this meme coin world who are running
these big platforms and who are making connections and all
of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of

(34:00):
these big token launches, so that when those people who
were buying it up early and making all this money,
it's like, oh, yeah, that's the guy who runs Metiora.
This happens so much in the crypto world, and I
should stop being surprised every time it happens. But what
happened is when the co founder of Metiora stepped down,
the other co founder, who was like previously not really known,

(34:22):
stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co founder,
and he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow,
the co founder who stepped down, was, you know, he
thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing
shady was happening at Metiora et cetera. The other co
founder who just like came out of the woodwork. He
runs Jupiter, which is the other it's like the ostensible
Metiora competitor. It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the

(34:45):
same people, you know, behind the scenes. And you know,
some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on
this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all
insider trading too. The Metiora guys are insider trading, like
they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed a
lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world,
in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like

(35:06):
oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins like you
are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not
done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly
also to Malays as well.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Yes, well, let's let's get into like Malay's involvements in this.
Can you give you lamps to the timeline of this,
because it's so funny.

Speaker 6 (35:24):
Yeah, it's a little wild, so unlike the Trump token,
Malay did not launch this token. He was not the
mastermind behind it. It's not clear how much he really
knew about the team behind it or what they were doing,
but he was certainly convinced to endorse this token and
you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this.

(35:45):
And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme
coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to
find a president, but apparently not now, Like it was
true it was unusual for them to find a present.
But you know, there's this whole process with meme coins
where they try to find influential people to talk about
them to drive the interest in the token. And so

(36:08):
they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in
the crypto world or you know, anyone with some degree
of a platform to promote a token, and ostensibly they're
supposed to disclose that they are being paid.

Speaker 5 (36:22):
To promote the token. They rarely do.

Speaker 6 (36:25):
Yeah, it is technically illegal, but like rarely rarely enforced
for for someone to promote a token without disclosure. One
of the very few cases where it was enforced was
against Kim Kardashian aivolts.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
Yeah, although that that SIT's all gone now.

Speaker 6 (36:42):
Yeah, and that was years ago before the SEC was
bought by the crypto companies and so yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Like I mean they literally like I think, like yesterday
it was that this Yeah, was it yesterday as we're recording,
this recording is on Friday? Was it yesterday that the
the is it the SEC the SEC that dropped the
case sainst Coinbase.

Speaker 5 (37:00):
SEC and that was today yeah, this morning to day.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
Oh my god.

Speaker 13 (37:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (37:05):
Yeah, And I mean we're seeing this everywhere.

Speaker 6 (37:07):
But the SEC has paused a case against Binance, which
had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort
of like minor securities law violation.

Speaker 5 (37:17):
Fraud is also actually of the securities law violation.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Those those are all, by the way, a bunch of
like very very like like by Ins and like Coinbase,
like the biggest players in like the regular crypto market.

Speaker 6 (37:26):
Yeah, Finance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.
Coinbase spent over seventy five million dollars on the most
recent political cycle in the US and now is reaping
the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped.
So I would not expect much in the way of

(37:47):
SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies. Yeah, especially given
that they have also installed crypto friendly people at the SEC.
At the CFTC. The CFTC nominee for chair is an
Andreson Horowitz, guy who is advising them on crypto policy.
Like it's totally rotten now.

Speaker 5 (38:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
Well, and also with the actual guy running the government
right now is Elon Musk, who is you know, like
what are their boys?

Speaker 6 (38:13):
Yeah, and the guy who's ostensibly running the project has
his own meme coin project, so I suspect he's not
going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against
meme cooin operations either.

Speaker 14 (38:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Good god, it's such a mess.

Speaker 15 (38:27):
Ye.

Speaker 5 (38:29):
Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.

Speaker 3 (38:32):
Oh god.

Speaker 5 (38:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (38:34):
So, so basically, you know, the coin launches, me lay,
you know, fires off a tweet about how this is
such a great meme coin, and you know, he he
gives the token address so you can all go buy it,
and then very early on it becomes clear that there
is some degree of insider trading happening. So, you know,
the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's

(38:57):
all recorded on a public blockchain.

Speaker 5 (38:59):
People can look.

Speaker 6 (39:00):
At who is doing the early trades and these tokens,
and it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that
are that were involved in launching the token, and so
the ones that are being controlled by the people who
you know actually created this token and are promoting it,
are also involved in this early sniping of the token.

Speaker 5 (39:22):
And sniping is when.

Speaker 6 (39:25):
You use crypto trading bots, you know, like automated programs
to buy up the tokens very early on at low, low,
low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably
be expected to go but hit the buy button.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do
or like, like the reason why you can't buy a
PS five is that all these trading bots get in
like immediately exactly.

Speaker 6 (39:49):
It's one hundred percent analogous to that. But in the
case of these trading bots, you know, often they have
insider information, they have the contract address before it's public,
so that they can be like split stack and on
it to buy these tokens early, and then they usually
dump them really early too. So you know, if if
Melea tweets about ameme coin. The price shoots up within
minutes of this thing launching, and within minutes these snipers

(40:13):
sell off and they make millions of dollars, often in profits.
And it is that selling that often causes the price
to crash right back down again, causing those average people
who thought that they were early to be the ones
basically subsidizing the folks who make.

Speaker 5 (40:30):
Millions of dollars off these launches.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Like it's pupp a dump.

Speaker 16 (40:33):
It's just literally just a puppe dump, Like it's just fraud,
Like I just right, I don't know, like I just
this is my my like old like twenty ten cents
of ethics emerging here, which apparently doesn't exist in the
sort of bold new world, is like nihilism, Like this
is just fraud.

Speaker 6 (40:51):
Yeah no, And like people talk about, you know, we
need cryptoregulations, like you don't need any new regulations. Fraud
is still fraud, Like stealing from people is illegal. But
that's like a whole seperate point.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
This entire thing. When everyone was doing this on Wall Street,
it like crashed the economy a bunch of times. We
were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to
do this, But I don't know, capitalism is such that
you could just buy the governments and now all your
follow You're like, fraud schemes are legal, right if you
do it on the blackchain?

Speaker 5 (41:18):
Crime is legal apparently.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (41:20):
But yeah, so you know there's this there's this really
early scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are
trading this token. Everyone's calling it a rug pull because
that's like the cloak wheal term for when someone launches
a project and then steals all the money. And it
certainly looks like that's what's happening. And so Melay very
quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet

(41:43):
that he made and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically,
I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really
know what their project is. I just thought it was this,
you know, cool thing that was gonna support Argentinian businesses.
I you know, I renounced all affiliation with it, basically.
And then he of course like blames his political opponents
for trying to weaponize this against him, and you know,

(42:05):
he goes very much shout swinging on people, being like,
I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to
come after my reputation.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Oh the pronus made me do it.

Speaker 5 (42:15):
Oh yeah right, He's like, this is all your fault somehow.

Speaker 6 (42:20):
So anyway, you know, that all happens, and it sort
of launches the project into chaos because the way that
the people on the inside are talking about it, and
huge grain of salt here, because you know, these are
people who are potentially admitting to their crimes.

Speaker 3 (42:36):
Well it also like these are professional liars, like their
job is to lie to people for a living, like
it's and yeah.

Speaker 6 (42:43):
And several of the things that they've said have already
been proven to be untrue. So like a huge, huge,
huge grain of salt here. But their story is that, oh,
we were sniping the token yes, but it's not bad
because we were doing it to try to protect people
from the other token snipers who show up on launches
like this, Like we didn't no.

Speaker 17 (43:04):
No, you know what I said.

Speaker 5 (43:05):
We had to do.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
The scam to save you from the other people who
were trying to do the same scan.

Speaker 5 (43:10):
You're not even exaggerating. That's literally what they said.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
That's so good.

Speaker 6 (43:15):
And so they come up with this like hair brain
theory where they're like Okay, if we snipe the tokens early,
we can stop other token snipers from accumulating these huge
piles of the tokens and then dumping them and causing
the whole thing to crash. And so you know, they
will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally
wreck the whole you know, chart basically and cause.

Speaker 5 (43:37):
It to go to zero.

Speaker 6 (43:38):
And then we'll take our accumulated pile of tokens and
like slowly seed it back in to try to stabilize
the chart. I mean, it's like blatant manipulating market manipulation
that they're describing, like in defending themselves against allegations that
they're committing crimes, they're admitting to new crimes.

Speaker 5 (43:56):
It's like this whole thing.

Speaker 6 (43:58):
But that's the story is that they were like, we
have to do this to protect the chart. And the
idea was that, like Melay was going to make this
video promoting the token even more, and at that point
they were going to put all this money that they
had taken back into the project. But of course that
video never came because Meulay had already cut his losses
and was like, I don't want anything to do with this,

(44:18):
and so now the guys who launched this token are
sitting on like, ostensibly one hundred million dollars worth of tokens.
I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the
numbers aren't real, and you know, there's really not one
hundred million dollars.

Speaker 5 (44:34):
Floating around in there.

Speaker 14 (44:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (44:35):
People again people talk about how this is like a
four point five billion dollar crypto scam. There was never
four point five billion dollars in this. It's all fake money.
But like the it is true that there were people
who put real money into this. They got totally scammed,
basically taken for a ride because they thought that they
might be able to make money on it because the

(44:56):
President endorsed it, because they thought there was this, you know,
some legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses.
They lost their money and it all went to this
guy Hayden Williams, who is you know, connected to Mela,
who has some degree of influence with Malay, who claimed
in text messages.

Speaker 5 (45:13):
That he controls Mela.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Oh my god, yeah, but what use the N word
by the way, these two, yeah, like who these people are?
Like this is this is this is a white guy,
using the N word like Ica is like whiter than
I am, and using the N word to say that.

Speaker 5 (45:30):
Not great.

Speaker 6 (45:32):
He said in this text message that was leaked that
he was sending money to Mela's sister, who is very
influential and who sort of is Meala's right hand sister,
you know, sent money to her, and that as a
result of that, Melee will do anything that I want.
He'll say what I want, he'll tweet what I want,
He'll you know, he's my puppet basically. Of course, Mela
was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like

(45:56):
there's money trading hims behind the scenes, even though Mela
was not, you know, behind the token directly. And you know,
this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal
for Ula, which is both surprising that like, of all
things that could have caused a political scandal for Meula,
there are so many things to choose from, and this
is what it was. But you know, he's now facing

(46:19):
these these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud,
that he should be impeached. Even you know, there's some
rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some
sort of impeachment proceedings against him, and it's all gone
very south, very quickly for him.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
I think, God, it really would be so incredibly funny
if this is the thing that brings him down. I
don't know if it will. But also like I don't know,
this is one of these, like an even bigger way
than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political
fucking godsend, like handed down to the opposition, and the
Democrats aren't don't use it right because you know they're

(46:55):
the Democrats, right, instead of just like doing instead of
doing a thing I would do, which is starting literally
free speech with fucking no cops, no kings, no crashes.
They're like they're like, no atiuty. But like this is
like if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration,
like this is like fucking God like reaching a giant
hand down and going, hey, have this thing to beat,
have this stick to beat over the head with.

Speaker 6 (47:17):
Yeah, And you know, to their credit, I feel like
Argentinian politicians are taking better advantage of this than US
politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are
calling for you know, impeachment. There have been you know,
many lawsuits filed against me Lee, and you know there
is a judge looking into his degree of connections here.

(47:39):
Obviously there is you know, some amount of corruption over
in the Argentinian government and so you know, the degree
to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Questionable, let's just say, yeah.

Speaker 6 (47:52):
And you know, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually
you know, getting the votes to go to trial is
certainly questionable. But this has been used, you know, in
a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of Melee,
which is you.

Speaker 5 (48:06):
Know, worth doing.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
And you know, I say this about paranism, right like
the thing that the thing about Paronism is that it
it's like the engine that devours social movements, right like
anytime social movement comes in, the parnas sort of like
consume it from the inside. But the thing, the thing
about the way that like protos and functions is like, okay,
so they've they've eaten all these social movements, but it's
not quite like the US where you can just like
disband it and make it go away, like you actually

(48:30):
have to still have have the thing that social movement does.
And that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest,
like whatever else is it about the paronas, like aren't
capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets.
And I'm really interested to see what's going to happen
like this weekend and over the coming weeks, to see
if we see another seventeenth giant round of protests, like

(48:51):
also specifically about this.

Speaker 5 (48:53):
Yeah, yeah, I'll be curious too.

Speaker 6 (48:55):
It's really interesting to me, like to what degree this
resonates with three Day people, I guess in Argentina because
you know, there's there's a lot to complain about with
the MELA government, and so you know, it's sort of
fascinating to me that people are latching onto this, and
you know, it's sort of interesting just to compare with
the United States, where there's a lot to complain about

(49:16):
with the Trump administration, and you know, people were complaining
about the meme coin, but by the time that was,
you know, partly because it was pre inauguration and so
Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders and so
it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of
blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration, and so
it didn't get that much traction in sort of the

(49:38):
longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this
play out in a different country where you know, Milay
has been in office for some time now, and you know,
this has gained at least some degree of a foothold,
and I'll be curious to see, you know, if that
endures or not. He's he's sort of trying to play
it off as like, you know, oh, everyone knows crypto
is risky. He said something and he tried to do

(50:01):
this like damage control interview on TV where he said
that basically, like the people who bought this token knew
they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet,
which is a wild thing to say. Christ Yeah, that's
just a nutty thing to say, but also very in
character for him. And you know, he said something in
then an interview to the effect of, like, you know,

(50:22):
only a couple thousand people lost money, what's the chances
that those people were even Argentinian, Like we shouldn't even
care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so,
you know, it's it's sort of interesting to watch him
try to downplay this. It's like well, yeah, of course
people lost money. It's a scam, you know.

Speaker 5 (50:40):
Like yeah, I guess.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
I think part of the reason this is like a
real issue for him is that like he really truly
you know, and this is something that like Trump is
also doing this, like that he but he he like
really truly went out to like his main base of supporters, yeah,
and was like I'm just going to take you up
behind a woodsend shoot you and like take the money
out of your pocket. And like the way he's like

(51:12):
systematically fucking all of the people who were supposed to
be his political base, and like like Trump was also
doing is but like people sort of like haven't set
in that this is what's happening, whereas like this rug
pull thing, it's like this is like the only thing
that the fucking unhinge right when crypto wrote people care about,
like this is like the one thing you could possibly
do to like this the wall.

Speaker 6 (51:32):
Yeah, it's really interesting to see like what causes crypto
people to turn on you, because it did happen in
a much more limited way with Trump, where you know,
the US crypto movement I guess that's not the right
word for it, but the industry or the crypto world
had really supported Trump very heavily, and you know, they
had donated to him. But there was also this widespread

(51:53):
belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going
to be good for crypto. He was going to cause
crypto prices to go up, he was gonna to fix
all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry
back and all this stuff. And then when Trump came
out and launched a meme coin, some of his most
devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it,
and they really responded in a way that I think

(52:15):
a lot of people didn't expect, which is, like, I
can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin. He's supposed
to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal
money from his supporters, and so like, there was actually
this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto
world in the US as well. And so I think
that's you know, sort of interesting to see, is that like, Okay,

(52:36):
you're allowed to do scams and you know, run your
government in a way that personally benefits you, as long
as it's not reflecting poorly on us, and it's not
taking money from us. But as soon as it starts
to make people, you know, look at scance at meme
coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts
to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
Yeah, I wonder, I don't know. I'm interested in your
take on this, Like how much of that is people
who are in less meme coiny things who are worried
about like their assets because they said at some point
like have to be able to cash out.

Speaker 18 (53:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (53:14):
I think that's a big part of it. Like there
are factions in crypto where I sort of referred to
this earlier when we were talking about Bichayley. But you know,
there are bitcoiners who believe that bitcoin is the one
true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam,
and so they are really upset when these meme coins
come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on
Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together. There's

(53:37):
sort of a step down from that, which is people
who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin,
but meme coins are not them. And so there's been
all this talk recently where they're like, look at all
these meme cooin scams that are getting in the news.
You know that there was like the Hawktua meme coin
that totally like yeah, stole a news cycle for a
minute there, and they're terrified that, you know, people are

(54:01):
starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know,
it's just one and the same. And they're like, people
are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate
cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking
about hactua coin and how they ripped off a bunch
of people, which like, personally, I think that the reputation
is perhaps somewhat deserved, but you know, there is this

(54:22):
belief among some people that like, oh, this is not
real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a
bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of
that in some of the higher places where you know,
I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the
Hawktua coin on Capitol Hill, you know, like when they're
talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds,

(54:45):
the opposition is like, well, do we want haktua coin everywhere?

Speaker 5 (54:49):
Like is this really what we want?

Speaker 6 (54:50):
And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception
and the perception in you know, Congress to some extent,
which I think is what's really scary people, because they've
just made these huge inroads with you know, all of
these now crypto friendly politicians and friendly regulators, and now
crypto is out here making a fool of itself right

(55:11):
as you know, new legislation or regulation might be installed.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
Yeah, and this gets me too. I think the thing
I want to close on, which is, you know, like
we actually did successfully as a society kill the NFT. Yeah,
Like we took that all the fucker out back at
staded to death.

Speaker 5 (55:26):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
And I'm wondering whether you think that like this is
this is a moment where we can like use this
as a wedge thing to try to like fucking kill
this entire industry. And how how vulnerable they are to
like the negative pr rattlings from.

Speaker 4 (55:38):
All of this.

Speaker 6 (55:39):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point that,
like the NFT, even as crypto has had a resurgence,
you know, Bitcoin crossed one hundred thousand dollars, NFTs are
like nowhere to be found, you know, Like the NFT
platforms are struggling there. A couple of them just went
out of business, and I think it is largely thanks
to the fact that NFTs became really cringe and you know,

(56:00):
like everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures, and
that had like a really devastating impact on this entire
industry that was supposed to be like the future of
art or whatever. And so I think there is that
potential throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would
not be shocked to see that happen to these memecoin platforms,

(56:21):
where they sort of lose their novelty value and people
just see them as big scams and there's really no point.
But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of
crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or you know,
the sort of societal distaste for it, because I mean,
there are people who have bought bitcoin early, who have

(56:44):
billions of dollars in crypto. In bitcoin, they are now
working in the US government. You know, they have like
very strong control over very powerful institutions, and so there
is this countervailing force you keep crypto alive at basically
any cost, and I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate

(57:07):
to do that, as we're seeing calls for say a
bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up,
the idea that like the US government should personally stockpile bitcoin,
which you know, they make a couple of arguments as
to why they should do that, which are not very
convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world.
But the sort of underlying thread through it is that

(57:30):
if the US government holds a substantial amount of bitcoin,
they won't be able to afford to let the bitcoin
price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the
cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing
the attempts to you know, sort of work crypto into
government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance, you know,

(57:52):
people trying to get bitcoin e ETFs into you know,
your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like
that is really to make it so oh endemic and
so contagious. I guess to the rest of the financial
world that it's almost like, you know, this this threat
that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right,
if you kill us, we'll kill you.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
Yeah, And I think it's this interesting thing of like, sorry,
I know, I said we were going to close out,
Like no, this is fun. There's this interesting way in
which like this seems like the endgame for the entire
like tech bubble economy is like you know, like none
of these fucking companies have everybody able to make money, right,
none of these fucking companies. But they all they all
every like fucking like everything from like like fucking Uber

(58:36):
to like fucking like Google and Amazon like hemorrhaged money.
Uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops
and it dies. Right, But like Amazon only really started
making money, you know, Google was kind of making money,
Like Amazon only started making money when they started getting
government contracts for like their cloud computing shit. Yeah, and
like that like looks like the endgame, Like you know,
this is this is the thing with like Elon's like

(58:57):
fucking electric armored vehicle content is like the only thing
that can keep the bubble going is just pure standing intervention.
But that also gives me a little bit of hope
because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble
economy going for like over like a decade and a
half now has been really really even under the original

(59:17):
Trump administration, I mean, and the original administration kind of
got bailed out by COVID to some extents, Like you know,
I mean, like the the original Argentinian economic crisis was
this there's this there's this huge wave of currency collapses
in twenty eighteen where it was sort of contained, like
the IMF did a bailout in while I was trying
to do a bailout in Argentina, and it like it
kind of got contained, but it set off a black
wave uprisings. But like there's been this like really it's

(59:37):
just taken this really careful financial management and like all
of these like like like a trillion dollars of like
overnight repo purchases like every day from the Treasury to
like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking industry
to prevent like the kind of like two thousand and
eight style collapses. And I think it it takes it's
taken a really delicate hand, and you know, like I

(59:58):
don't think it's a good thing. But on their hand,
like these guys just fire the nuke police, like while
they were moving a nuke, and I wonder if they
can actually keep the dance going, or if they're just
gonna if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy,
just blow it all up, which might yeah, maybe nuke
all of these people in the process.

Speaker 5 (01:00:16):
Maybe.

Speaker 6 (01:00:17):
I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism,
I think that one of the most interesting things that
we're going to be seeing now is that the crypto
industry has long argued that they have all this potential.
You know, they are just around the corner from reinventing
the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the
only reason that they haven't you know, actually made true

(01:00:41):
on that is because of those pesky regulators that are
stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want.
And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming
that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators
would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators,
they're in a world where, you know, they basically own
the regulation there, all of the enforcement cases against them

(01:01:02):
are going to go away, you know, the friendliest possible
regulations are going to be introduced. And now crypto doesn't
have that excuse anymore, right, they can't just say that
the reason we don't do anything useful is because these
stupid regulators won't let us lend you bitcoin or whatever.
And so I think, you know, there is going to
be this moment where people are like, okay, so do

(01:01:25):
it now, you know, like do the innovation now, And
it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks
and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry because
they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will
be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take, like, you know,
the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.

Speaker 4 (01:01:46):
Well.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
My line on this is that like accelerationism as an
ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's not there's nothing you
can do to do the acceleration. Yeah right, like or
the like left accelerationism like Trump and Elon Musk like
just have their fucking foot hammering the pedal all the
way down. We are accelerating as fast as we could
possibly go, and all we have left is to like
make sure what the fucking acceleration goes our way and

(01:02:07):
up theirs.

Speaker 6 (01:02:08):
Yeah yeah, but I yeah, I guess, like you know,
it's me trying to find a light in the darkness.
You know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at
least we might see the crypto industry fall apart.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
Yeah, well I look, look, they might bring down the
first of arco capitalists president.

Speaker 5 (01:02:26):
So yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Yeah, I don't know today Argentina, tomorrow in the world.

Speaker 5 (01:02:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:02:33):
Well, and I think also just like you know, it's
interesting to see this uprising and sort of broad distaste
formula and everything that he's doing when everything that he's
doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his
affection for Elon Musk, and so you know, to see
people sort of turn on that is perhaps a little

(01:02:54):
bit instructive.

Speaker 12 (01:02:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
And I think this is interesting kind of like bounce
back thing too, because he's like, you know, somebody say
he's modeling himself on Trump one, like the first trumpministration,
but he got even weirder with it than like Trump wanted,
and now Trump modeling itself back. Yeah, like slingshotting. But yeah,
and and and and and and I don't know, hope, hope,
hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too, and they also

(01:03:18):
get the backlash to it, and we Yeah, I don't
know we we don't all die when they actually set
a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.

Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
That would be nice.

Speaker 4 (01:03:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
Well, Mollie, thank you so much for coming on the
show and for talking talking with us about this unhinged bullshit,
and also just genuinely thank you, thank you for reporting
on all of the ship because oh my god, it
is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane.

Speaker 6 (01:03:46):
I don't pretend I do give in the madness. Yeah, yeah, well,
thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
Yeah, and where where where can people find your work?

Speaker 6 (01:03:57):
You can find me at citation needed dot news. I
also a run web three is going just great, which
is web three is going great?

Speaker 5 (01:04:02):
Dot com.

Speaker 6 (01:04:03):
And then I'm on social media everywhere you'll find me
from either of those websites.

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
Yeah, we will put links to all of this in
the description. Thank you again, and yeah, I don't know,
go make crypto so uncool that these people have a
terrible day in panic.

Speaker 5 (01:04:18):
I'll do my best.

Speaker 9 (01:04:41):
Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here a
podcast about things falling apart and the people putting them
back together. And today Garrison and I are joined by
Hailey and Dan, both Haley and Dan are gender affirming
care providers in the Northeast, and they both work at
federally qualit health centers. Welcome to the show, guys.

Speaker 7 (01:05:03):
Thank you so much and year.

Speaker 9 (01:05:06):
Okay. So for people who are not familiar, right, maybe
they've been fortunate enough to have like really good health
care the whole life, or fortunate enough to not live
in the United States and have this bizarre like web
of healthcare provision. Can you explain what a federally qualified
healthcare center is?

Speaker 4 (01:05:23):
Sure? You matter?

Speaker 15 (01:05:24):
If I take this with Hailey, So I would start
by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot
if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care.

Speaker 19 (01:05:35):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:05:36):
So yeah, I dismissed with that to start.

Speaker 9 (01:05:37):
Oh, yeah, I get yeah, I guess good is a
relative to Yeah. I've relied on federally qualified healthcare center
for one and it was great.

Speaker 7 (01:05:45):
They were very nice.

Speaker 9 (01:05:46):
Actually, my prescriptions cost a lot less now than they
do with my very expensive Eyheigh insurance.

Speaker 7 (01:05:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:05:51):
So, around the nineteen sixties there was the sort of
free clinic movement that got started, and what grew out
of that became the federally qualified health center system in
the United States, So there are roughly sixteen hundred unique
federally qualified health centers all over the country, and we,
as a sort of confederated set of health centers all

(01:06:13):
across the country, are responsible for treating those most in
need in the United States, so the Medicaid population, those
without insurance. We cannot turn anybody away if you do
not have insurance, people in rural areas where healthcare is
very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and
really everybody in between. At the health center that I

(01:06:33):
work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is
pretty typical, although you'll find in states with no Medicaid
expansion it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But
we are the nation's safety net healthcare provider, and without us,
there are roughly one in ten Americans would not get
their healthcare.

Speaker 9 (01:06:50):
Jeez, well, I guess people who are not in the
United States, do you want to go and give us
a go one minute speedrun of what Medicaid is medicare.

Speaker 15 (01:07:00):
Sure, So America does not have a nationalized insurance program.
As we are very frustrated with most of the time.
It's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job.
But if you are not fortunate it's not the right word,
but if you're not fortunate enough to get that. Medicaid
is the system that gives health insurance to people who
are living at or below the federal poverty line. With

(01:07:20):
the Affordable Care Act or the Acabambacare, that level raised
a little bit, so you could still get Medicaid if
you were at above the federal poverty line.

Speaker 7 (01:07:28):
But this is mostly for the working poor. That's who
gets Medicaid.

Speaker 4 (01:07:32):
Cool.

Speaker 9 (01:07:33):
Yeah, it's a great system. Let's talk about how this
has funded them. And you said the US doesn't have
like a single pair healthcare system, So how are these
healthcare centers funded right now? Or maybe how were they
funded like six weeks ago.

Speaker 15 (01:07:47):
Yeah, So most of the work that we do is
fee for service. We're not a lot different than a
lot of other places in that regard. Right, if you
have Medicaid patients, we are a fee for service program.
We give provision of care to them on a per
visit base, same as anywhere else in the country. And
how that works and we get reimbursed for it. What
makes FQS different than everywhere else.

Speaker 7 (01:08:06):
Is two things.

Speaker 15 (01:08:06):
One, we get a special rate that is designated because
of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more
complicated patients and to ensure that they are healthy enough
to keep out of expensive.

Speaker 7 (01:08:18):
Systems of care like the emergency rooms and things of
that nature.

Speaker 15 (01:08:21):
And two is that we have a grant called the
FED three thirty And this is a sort of like large,
sort of use it as you need to grant that
depending on the agency, is anywhere from five to twenty
five percent of your total annual funds and is meant
to cover all of the folks who can afford care
and are uninsured.

Speaker 19 (01:08:40):
Part of my funding also, I do a lot of
work with HIV and HIV prevention, so a lot of
my work is done via Ryan White funding. And there's
some other kind of separate funding streams that's applicable specifically
to gender firming care. However, it's all kind of messy
and tied up in a lot of those other funding
streams that Dan mentioned, and there's some specific limitations because

(01:09:03):
of those funding streams. Again historically because who knows right now,
but through something called the High Amendment, it means that
our funding would be at jeopardy if we provided abortion care.
So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of
what we do as an FQHT is providing really comprehensive,
expansive care where kind of some of the few clinics

(01:09:26):
that do everything that we do under one roof, But
there have been some limitations, specifically abortion to that.

Speaker 9 (01:09:33):
Yeah, it's more of a a healthcare experience that I'm
used to with someone from Europe, like going to one
of these centers and like the American one where you
get a referral and then yeah, get approves and blah
blah blah, and like a.

Speaker 19 (01:09:44):
Lot of the ways that I talk to friends who
live in other countries, Like, I feel like my role
is kind of more similar to like a GP as
a nurse partitioner. There isn't necessarily an equivalent, but I
feel like a GP is kind of a very similar
universal way to understand a lot of what I do.

Speaker 9 (01:10:00):
Yeah, that makes sense. So can you explain Ryan White funding?
Like where does that come from? Why is it called
Ryan White?

Speaker 19 (01:10:06):
So basically Ryan White funding was initiated in I believe
the early nineties during the AIDS crisis and was a
large government initiative. It's named after Ryan White, who was
a patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Yeah, so Ryan White.

Speaker 19 (01:10:26):
Funding right now is a major source for funding things
like PREP, which is medication for prevention for HAV as
well as direct HIV treatment.

Speaker 9 (01:10:39):
Yeah, so a number of these things, right, gender affirming care,
preps care for people with HIV, or preventing people from
getting HIV through pre exposure prophylaxis. That you said, like
these are things that have been like at the center
of the culture war for the current government, right, Like
that they're like the things that they point to is

(01:11:02):
you know, whatever they're sort of like impacton's impacts in
construction of fascism, he talks about moral decline, right, and
this is their moral decline. That this is what they
use when they're constructing their kind of we will save
you narrative. What does that mean for funding? And like,
what does that mean more importantly for your patients of
people who come to you for these different types of care.

Speaker 19 (01:11:24):
I mean, I think it's terrifying. I think I'm more
on the patient facing side. So a lot of the
conversations I've been having are just about the uncertainty I'm
a prescriber for a lot of trans youth adolescents and
young adults, and so moreover, the uncertainty of just being

(01:11:45):
able to you know, get their medication, the stress of
being publicly named and targeted in this culture war has
just created a climate of fear. As my job, I
want to be able to reassure patients that I am
going to fight for them and do all that I can.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
But it's really scary.

Speaker 19 (01:12:06):
As Dan mentioned, a lot of our patients don't have
financial safety net, they don't have a medical safety net.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
We're really the one option for them.

Speaker 19 (01:12:16):
And if our clinic does not continue to offer this
type of care, these are our kids who are going
to go without hormones. I prescribe puberty blockers. My work
as a gender for maing care provider isn't just blockers
and hormones, but those are medications that we know are
life saving. We know that that unfortunately, kids will suicide
if they don't have access to those medications. And so

(01:12:39):
I think, you know, talking about funding, talking about kind
of these bigger shifts politically, you know, are sayings that unfortunately,
a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming
just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out
support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones
if we can't prescribe them.

Speaker 15 (01:13:01):
Yeah, I think it's worth talking about the fact that, like,
there are so many angles of attack on this. Right,
there is the one that is just very clearly aimed
at trans kids, right the EO that specifies like protecting
children it's nonsense, but that is aimed at ending this
care everywhere. Now are they going to be able to
do it everywhere? I don't know, maybe, but not quickly.

(01:13:24):
But they can end it for FQHCs all across the
country by simply making it like the heighth Amendment. If
we were to perform abortion services at the place that
I work, then we would lose our FED three thirty
funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would
cut our rate in half, and that would devastate the
business and put us out and mean that we could
not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of

(01:13:47):
other people that we care for besides those kids.

Speaker 4 (01:13:51):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:13:51):
Then there are also just.

Speaker 15 (01:13:53):
The doze fuckery that is going to harm all of
this and may create a lot of the same outcomes right,
which is they turned off grants kind of just across
the board. Yes, some of them were targeted on things
like gender affirming, most of them were just like, it's
a grant, we're turning it off. And then there was
the tro but much of that funding has remained frozen.

(01:14:16):
We have been told that the system is up and
running and that they undid what they did, and the
courts stepped in, and oh, don't we have the courts
still here in the United States. Isn't that a good thing?
But they just kept the funding off. Whether because they're
incompetent or because they're actively defying the law doesn't really matter.
And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across
the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics

(01:14:37):
and have entirely gone underwater in some cases. And then
those people are not there to treat the community that
needs them so badly. And all of these systems are
grounded in their communities. So when you lose the clinic
that's in LA that had to close its doors for
the office that's on one side of town, the people
there knew that place. It was part of their community.

(01:14:58):
Part of their existence is grounded in that community and
its community's needs, and.

Speaker 7 (01:15:02):
That's just gone.

Speaker 15 (01:15:04):
And this puts us in a very difficult position, and
you know, leadership in the very difficult position of figuring out, well,
do I worry about these trans youth and the fact
that they might kill themselves, or do I worry about
the impact that standing up on principle and saying I
won't toss them to the wolves might have on the
rest of the system. And it becomes a very difficult
sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But

(01:15:26):
you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with
for them too.

Speaker 9 (01:15:30):
Yeah, that's tough. Can you briefly explain, like maybe lay
out a timeline, because we talked about executive orders there,
We talked about a tro like there was a large
number of executive orders right in the last three weeks,
so like maybe people miss them. Can you explain the
pertinent executive orders? And then what's a tensat difference training order?

Speaker 15 (01:15:50):
Yeah, So on Trump's first day in office, on the
day of his inauguration, so January twentieth, he signs one
hundred some odd executive orders. The ones that are particularly
of interest to us in healthcare. Were protecting children against
chemical and surgical mutilation is the name of it, which
is a disgusting and vile name.

Speaker 20 (01:16:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:16:10):
And then protecting women something something something defending women. Yeah,
defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals, and
I think will be used after we are under attack
for trans youth, to come after trans adults in federally
qualified health centers as well. Those eos led to later

(01:16:31):
that week, on Friday, we got emails to every PI,
which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had,
that said, because of those two, and there was one
about DEI, which is also in executive order, you are
not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in
service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders.

(01:16:53):
So that was the first shot we got, and it
came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't
specific right. It didn't specifically say we're going to do X,
Y or Z, but it was here, here's a threat.
The following Tuesday, dog is let loose and announces that
they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that
is in opposition to those things. If you actually looked

(01:17:17):
at the excel file that they released with the actual grants.
It froze everything. Like it was not just the stuff
that they felt was in opposition to this, it was
like everything. We have a ton of grants that were
on that list at the agency that I work at,
and boy, oh boy, oh boy, was there a lot
of panic going around. Wednesday rolls around, and they get

(01:17:38):
a judge to come in and sort of put a
halt on it. And then later that day a press
secretary says, oh, we're just going to find the memo.
We're still going to freeze everything, and then the judge
comes back and puts a temporary straining order. So in theory,
what that should have meant is that all of that
grant funding once again flows. And it did not importantly
too for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take

(01:18:00):
in Medicaid portals, and all fifty states went down, so
we could not get any of those dollars in service
of what we were doing for twelve hours. But still
it was this very concerning situation because bedicaid was not
on their list of things that they were after, and
yet we couldn't even access it on the state level.
A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, Hey,

(01:18:22):
you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another
judge issued an order saying that, like, no, for real,
I meet at this time unfreeze everything. I know some
of the grants that we had that we couldn't access
seem to have come back online, but I don't know,
you know, I think it would be an impossible thing
to do an accounting of like every single one that
might have been turned off that might might or might

(01:18:44):
not be back on right now. But I am doubtful
that at this point every single grant across the federal
agency is potentially available for folks.

Speaker 7 (01:18:52):
Just seems unlikely to me.

Speaker 9 (01:18:54):
Yeah, we should pivot to advertisements here. So I'm going
to do that and then we'll be right back. Okay,
we are back. So you talked about like these grants
being turned off or not coming. What does that mean?

(01:19:16):
Does that mean people don't get cared? That mean providers
don't get paid? Does that mean they can't access their prescriptions?
Like what does it look like if I'm trying to
access care through one of your clinics?

Speaker 19 (01:19:26):
So, yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit on
the prescriber side, because I think, you know, having direct
contact with someone who works in the administration is really
the only way that I have really been able to
get any updates. So as a healthcare provider, it's been
out our chaos. Basically every day we've gotten different messaging
around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients,

(01:19:50):
can you know, schedule intakes, whether or not we're able
to prescribe these life saving medications, and no one knows
exact eactly. Gender firming care is basically healthcare. There's nothing
that separates it. There's no hardline, there's no clear distinction.
It is medically indicated, evidence based care. So saying you

(01:20:14):
can't do gender firming care, it literally doesn't make any
sense in terms of, you know, what we do as prescribers.
And on my end, I've been faced with intimidation. I've
been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming
from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because

(01:20:35):
they do see this type of care as a liability.
I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the
state that I am in that prevents my ability to
act us to the full extent of my scope. There
are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing,
and I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do

(01:20:57):
what I believe is best for my patients, which is
to continue to provide them with a care that they need.

Speaker 1 (01:21:02):
But it's terrifying, I.

Speaker 15 (01:21:04):
Think importantly, Haley and I have the event of working
for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of
health clinics out there that have a week's worth of
working capital, right, so if all of a sudden they
lose access to every grant dollar, it lose access to
their three thirty. They were scheduled to draw down on
a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch

(01:21:24):
of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet, and
then they can't. Like in very real ways, that may
mean that the doors are closed and the place goes
under and that no one can get care there.

Speaker 7 (01:21:34):
And there is this real.

Speaker 15 (01:21:36):
Challenge of you know, how do we decide what is
the best thing to do. But for me and what
sort of started working with in our agency at least
to organize around this, is that like this is an
anti fascist practice. That is the right medical thing to do,
it is the right ethical thing to do, but it
is also our chance to take an anti fascist stance
against this government, because if we don't stand now for

(01:21:57):
the very first group they're coming for, then the next group,
which is without question trans adults and undocumented people, then
those groups will fall just as quickly, and then at
some point we're doing the poem the first they came for,
the socialist thing, and I just refused to be a
part of that.

Speaker 9 (01:22:14):
Yeah, let's talk about what that means then. Like you said,
it's difficult to get any response from administration right in
terms what you can do, intens what you can't do,
how odd stuff, and providers organizing to make sure that
they're able to keep providing for their patients, So just to.

Speaker 19 (01:22:34):
Provide also like a little bit of a peek into
kind of the broader landscape of this. Our clinic is
not alone in their confusion on how they've been handling this,
not only sqhcs, but also hospital affiliated clinics, academic medical
clinics have basically, clinic by clinic, decided on their own

(01:22:54):
plan on how to manage this, which is also incredibly confusing.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
For providers and for patients.

Speaker 19 (01:23:01):
But something that was really heartening was that NYU ling Go,
and this was in the news recently, they canceled appointments
for two kids, literally just two kids, which is more
than enough.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
And it sparked this enormous outcry and protests.

Speaker 19 (01:23:16):
And so I think there's also, on my end, a
lot of solidarity building with other providers who are doing
this work, and a lot of inspiration. There are clinics
out there, some who are FQHCs like us, who have
stood firm and they've said our doors are going to
stay open, We're going to keep providing this care. And
so I think there are models out there, and I

(01:23:39):
think that there are networks of healthcare providers who are
committed to continue to advocate and just continue to do
this right because a lot of what we're facing right
now is intimidation. It's not actual legal.

Speaker 1 (01:23:55):
Threats as of yet.

Speaker 15 (01:23:56):
Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging but
also hugely rewarding.

Speaker 4 (01:24:01):
Right.

Speaker 15 (01:24:02):
It became really obvious really early on that both from
the federal government's perspective as well as from our organization's perspective,
that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to
live and die.

Speaker 7 (01:24:13):
That was the place that served them and their goals
the most.

Speaker 15 (01:24:17):
And so how does uncertainty sort of foster Well, people
don't talk to one another, right, like this is true,
kind of an organizational sensus across the board. Right, if
you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary
doesn't benefit you, it benefits the boss. And so if
we're not talking to one another about where our lines are,
who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep
doing it, or listen to them what we're being told,
we're not being told that were consulting lawyers, all these

(01:24:38):
other kind of things, then we're all just alone in
the dark kind of you know, trying not to scream
and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.
So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there.
Folks who before anything was going on internally, you know,
made really bold statements about what they would and would
not do around this kind of stuff. And now all

(01:24:59):
of a sudden, there there's an internal network that's looking
at well, Okay, so individually we can keep doing this
care because it's the right thing to do. But as
a group, if they start coming after us.

Speaker 7 (01:25:09):
We have a lot more power. There's a lot more
that we can do.

Speaker 15 (01:25:12):
And I suspect, and you know, Hayley's getting at this
point that like, there are probably a network of us
across the entire country in these kind of settings that
are not talking amongst ourselves at our workplace, but are
really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level.
And I think we have some power that could be
used there to really make a difference in all of this.

(01:25:33):
And I am optimistic that if we talk about this,
we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating
openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we
can work together to prevent this from being the first
of many dominoes to fall.

Speaker 19 (01:25:46):
And one thing that's interesting, I think is that with transscare,
TRANTULSCA is inherently radical. Like Transtall's care is not something
that came from the kind of medical hierarchy. This is
by and large a field that was communal. Trans people
were doing their own trans healthcare before it became kind

(01:26:06):
of institutionalized into a lot of these spaces. So I
think we also have a lot of providers who are
willing to function up right, like the community and the
providers are intertwined. And I do think there is a
real kind of radical bent to this type of work,
which is why I think a lot of us have

(01:26:28):
been so easily able to collectivize and strategize and kind
of come together.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
It's a pretty small world as well.

Speaker 15 (01:26:37):
We sat down on a call and talked about, you know,
what are we going to do? And I made mention
that like, oh, through my other organizing work, I've got
a DIY connection for Estra dial. So that's a huge
thing that will help us if we can't prescribe this anymore,
if Medicaid stops covering it, Yah, YadA, YadA. I was like,
but I don't have a you know, a DIY solution
for tea. If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great.

(01:26:57):
And immediately someone's like, oh, yeah, absolutely, I do. It's tested,
it's a ninety nine point nine percent pure we're ready
to go. So now, like I wouldn't have done that,
There was no way for us to know that that
was the kind of radical work that people were doing.

Speaker 7 (01:27:08):
If not for coming together on this kind of stuff, Yeah,
maybe we.

Speaker 9 (01:27:11):
Should explain like the inherent risks like legally, and then
then distinction between those two hormones legally, right, like if
people are unaware.

Speaker 19 (01:27:21):
Yeah, so you know, as a medical provider again, I
have to be a little bit careful here. But basically,
because the stosterone has been used by mostly the cistmail
community as an anabolic steroid and used you know, and
somewhat would call like anabolic steroid misuse or steroid use disorder,

(01:27:41):
it is a controlled substance. Estradial is not. They're both
bioidentical hormones. Every human on this planet, their body makes
estrogen and testosterone E.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
And t estradyle and testosterone.

Speaker 19 (01:27:54):
However, in the United States, testosterone is considered a controlled substance,
which makes it a little more tricky for folks to
access without a prescription and also can put them at
legal risk if they do so.

Speaker 9 (01:28:10):
Right, Like there's a built in legal consequence for people
who are trying to manufacture there or who are trying
to obtain it, like outside of the sort of prescription system,
not that there aren't other probably legal threats coming down
the pipeline, I guess.

Speaker 21 (01:28:23):
Also, testosterone is yes, it is a controlled substance. It
does flow in the bodybuilding community. Ye, it's well controlled. Yeah,
that is also like worth stating, because yes, if you
go to your average gym.

Speaker 9 (01:28:39):
Oh yeah, you can walk across the borders to Tijuanner
and see like gas stations have the prices like unleaded premium. Yeah,
you can get testosterone prices like displayed in the same fashion.

Speaker 1 (01:28:50):
I mean, I'm sure you're you're huge fans of Joe Rogan.

Speaker 9 (01:28:53):
So many many.

Speaker 19 (01:28:57):
Of my other patients who are not trans have been
influenced to purchase disasterone because of our good friends.

Speaker 5 (01:29:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:29:07):
Yeah, fascinating self.

Speaker 15 (01:29:08):
Yeah, which is also gender affirm and care for whatever
that's worth, like gender a firm in care too.

Speaker 9 (01:29:14):
Yes they do. It's a lot easier for them right now.
So let's talk about like what this organizing looks like
on the ground, right, Like if someone's working, maybe they're

(01:29:36):
not in an f QHC, right, Maybe they're working in
an academic health center. Maybe they're working, you know, in
one of the many other places where you can access
gender affirming care in this country, and they are feeling
like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any
affirmation or help from their management, and they don't know
who they can talk to among their colleagues, Like how

(01:29:58):
are people connecting? Like what are people talking about? And
like how can people who are because you know, the
healthcare system is fast in this country because it duplicates itself.
It's the nature of American privatized healthcare. Like, how can
people who want to continue providing care for patients do that?
How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact

(01:30:19):
people who are already organizing, Like, let's talk through that
nuts and bolts of it.

Speaker 19 (01:30:23):
I mean, I think there's a lot of national orgs
out there that are really doing the work. So if
you're a medical provider, I would highly recommend to join GLAMMA,
which is a gay lesbian medical association, because they have
some lawsuits and as a member of GLAMMA, that could
possibly give you some additional protection. Following other orgs like

(01:30:46):
Lambda Legal Stage, which is an organization for an elder gay,
lesbian and queer folks, people have existed and have built organizations.
A lot of those are organizations are fighting this on
a national level, and some of those are more geared
toward healthcare professionals.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
Like Gleamma, I.

Speaker 15 (01:31:09):
Would say, there's two conversations that we all need to
be having. Like those external organizations are huge and necessary
for direction within your own space, you have to talk
to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk
to them about risk taking. Talk to them about where
you will and will not budge on some of these
kind of things. Talk to them about the value of

(01:31:30):
the work that you all do because there's more of
you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist,
they're out there, like they have very strong opinions on this,
I am sure. And then talk to a lawyer. Talk
to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very
different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to
protect the company and its bottom line, and both they

(01:31:54):
and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are
spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone
with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's
nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is. And
then when you start thinking about as an organization, as
a group, as a set of employees communicating with you know,

(01:32:16):
leadership about these kind of things, Know that the law
is actually not on their side, it's on yours. And
let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability
for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number
of other things that they probably don't want to be
on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've
got right now. It seems to have slowed things down
a little bit internally for us that they've had to

(01:32:39):
confront like a very well pointed out legal opinion that
said that like they were exposing their providers to civil
lawsuits if they didn't do this, and that the FDCA,
the Federal Tort Claims Act, didn't protect people under these guides.
That has been really beneficial to us. The other thing
I would say is like there's a real union sort
of feel to a lot of this, and as we

(01:33:01):
started coming together, a bunch of us realize, well, we
all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way,
But corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of
like individual sort of arms of companies, like the ones
that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics
of the work you do. They are interested in your benefits.
They are interested in you as a worker but they're

(01:33:22):
not interested in like your relationship to the work. And
so we are approaching this not necessarily as a union,
but from the perspective that if we need to strike
on behalf of patients and their access to care, like
that's a tool in our toolbox, and we don't have
to do anything more than declare it to strike to
be protected under the NLRB and some of these various

(01:33:43):
different things. And we can do it for political reasons
instead of for pay reasons, which means we could do
it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses,
all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and
therapists and lcsws, where they break us apart by discipline
instead of by you know what sort of managerial status
you are.

Speaker 9 (01:34:02):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good point. I
read a book recently about how the long shoremen in
San Francisco stopped weapons going to the Gilol salbad Or
by striking and refusing to load weapons onto ships, and like,
that's a union energy we could use right now. Yeah, Yeah,
I think people be well advised to, Like I will
say that they'd be well advised to check with federal

(01:34:24):
and local law because like some state legal landscapes can
be very different. Right. I want to end with like
people are probably afraid of accessing care, right, Like, like
people are probably afraid of going to see their providers,
like understandably, like you said before, like especially kids or
people under eighteen are like right in the center of

(01:34:46):
the President of the United States called out a friend
of mine personally by name recently. She's a trans athlete,
and like they're really coming after people. I understand that
people are afraid, Like what should they know if they're
concerned about their whole moned supply or they're own puberty blockers?
Right now, like people are listening, what would you Maybe
they don't know where their provider stands, you know, Yeah.

Speaker 19 (01:35:09):
I mean I tell my patients this, But I'm in
awe of them. They're incredible. And a lot of them
are nerdy theater kids who love cats and they want
to just exist. And some of them are also incredible
outspoken activists. They are just amazing, And I will fight

(01:35:32):
with everything that I've got for them, and I really.

Speaker 1 (01:35:36):
Hope they know that.

Speaker 15 (01:35:38):
I think one of the mantras I've been given to
fellow colleagues as well, as to our leadership to like
get their heads on straight. Is that like pascism is messy, right,
Like it's a scary messy. There are a lot of
throwing stuff with the wall and seeing what sticks. But
the things that in theory are still in place, like
when and if they fall. We have different problems the

(01:36:00):
ones we're facing now, right, So we still have in
this country protections for your healthcare information.

Speaker 7 (01:36:07):
So if what you worry about.

Speaker 15 (01:36:08):
In going to the doctor is that someone will find
out that your trends and put you on a list, like,
I can't tell you that's never going to happen, but
I can tell you that if it happens through your
healthcare clinic, like, we have significantly changed the threat model
that we're all living in because HIPPA doesn't matter anymore
and doesn't exist. Your providers are spending enormous amounts of
time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document,

(01:36:29):
how much of a deal they want to make it,
whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing
for you, and what diagnosis is for We are finding
ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade
and camouflage over this as we can, but you shouldn't
not come get care. Your life matters. You being in
the body that you were meant to have matters. Come

(01:36:50):
talk to us, come ask for help. We're here to
do it, and we're not going to stop until they
make us. And right now they can't make us, and
so we're going to keep doing it.

Speaker 19 (01:36:59):
And the mantra of trans people have always existed. Trans
people exist, and personally, I'm going to do my best
to make sure that for every single one of my
patients that they continue to get what they need.

Speaker 21 (01:37:13):
However that looks like, then it is good to hear.
I know a lot of trans people have essentially trauma
with aspects of the medical community, establishment, whatever, and like
you know, not not all practitioners maybe as much in
our camp as maybe you are. And I would encourage
people if they are, if they're still looking for care

(01:37:34):
through like these these sorts of channels, you should you
should try to find out where other trans people in
your city are already going. There's certainly like clinics will
have stuff on their website that indicate that they either
specialize in this or they offer this as supposed to know,
maybe just a general general practitioner who may not be
you know, the greatest in this vein, and like this,

(01:37:55):
this still happens. I've I've talked to a lot of
friends recently who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with
nurses or doctors, whether they're trying out like different clinics
or different or different providers, university providers. So it is
definitely worth doing some research beforehand so you know the
place you're going is going to be like with you,

(01:38:18):
which is just an unfortunate reality also of being trands.
But that has been the case for a long time
and it only continues to be a factor when considering care.

Speaker 15 (01:38:27):
Absolutely, it's really important to ask ask your friends. That's
really solid advice, in part because whether I like it
or not, a lot of organizations are taking the stuff
that says, hey, we treat trans people down off their website,
off their marketing materials.

Speaker 7 (01:38:41):
We are not trying to draw that attention.

Speaker 15 (01:38:43):
It doesn't mean we don't do it, doesn't mean we're
not skilled and trained and educated and smart and passionate
about it. It just means we don't really want to
totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now,
because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk
to your friends, talk to people in your community.

Speaker 7 (01:38:58):
They know us, we know them.

Speaker 15 (01:39:00):
I have a lot of activism and experience outside of
my work, and it's amazing how many of those people
end up being the same people that.

Speaker 7 (01:39:07):
Are in this conversation because of the way that this
all works.

Speaker 9 (01:39:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 19 (01:39:10):
Yeah, I was just going to say, I think, unfortunately
it is the norm. An evidence shows that, like large
evidence of studies show that trans people are treated pretty
horribly by the healthcare system, and most of my patients
have experienced that in some way or another. But like
I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare

(01:39:31):
kind of comes from a DIY community and there's a
lot of really good community information about, you know, kind
of who to trust and who you can go to
in terms of finding an allied provider.

Speaker 9 (01:39:43):
Yeah. Yeah, and that's really good. I think that was
really great.

Speaker 4 (01:39:47):
Guy.

Speaker 9 (01:39:47):
Thank you so much for your time and for your
words for people. Is there anything else you want to share?
Or perhaps if people want to support your efforts somehow
or support people's access to care, that's an organization you
could direct them to, or maybe like the way people
coming shout out to you or I know a lot
of people. There are people in my family who are
healthcare providers who have substantially changed their outlook on the

(01:40:09):
world and politics by how terribly their trans patients have
been treated. So like, you know, like some of us
have been organizing for a minute, some of us have
been organizing for like literally a minute, And like, how
do those people access these networks? Like how can people
who are not in healthcare support you and what you're
doing and reach out?

Speaker 19 (01:40:27):
The gender liberation movement is incredible. They're doing a lot
of work, kind of public feasing to really get the
point across on why this is so essential and also
why everybody should have the right to their own bodily
and gender autonomy. I think I mentioned earlier, but Lama,

(01:40:48):
if you're on the healthcare side, and you know there
are also kind of if you're in an academic setting
looking to wpass the World Professional Association for Transgender how
kind of going to the experts in this field and
really following and mirroring what they're doing.

Speaker 15 (01:41:07):
I think if you're looking as a SIS person who
gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding, but
this is the thing that you care about, would encourage
you to sort of make people get on record about
this kind of stuff, right, it's been the most distasteful
piece of all of this is the kind of like
weasel hiding in all of this. So force them on

(01:41:28):
the record, ask them. If they don't tell you, send
them an email. If they don't know, respond to the email,
send a follow up email. Like, make people get on
the record about this so that we know where their
values are. And if their values don't align with yours,
take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day,
helthcare is a business because the United States sucks, and
so we have to use those dollars in the ways
that we can, and it matters in a lot of ways.

(01:41:51):
I don't know that anyone will care to and I
certainly don't want to present us as the people with
all the answers here because we just like are figuring
this as we go to But you can email us
at Community Health Resistance at proton dot and maybe let's
have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people
in the FQ world who want to do like an
Amazon or a Starbucks like diy union project where we're

(01:42:13):
all working on this together. For the politics rather than
the pay as the primary sort of reason for it.
Let's let's let's be a red union and get something going.

Speaker 7 (01:42:22):
I don't know that we can.

Speaker 15 (01:42:22):
I don't know that it's the right call, but I
imagine there's more of us out there feeling this way
than not.

Speaker 9 (01:42:27):
So Yeah, and like whatever it is, we're stronger together
than we are apart. So like talking is how we
fix this. Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate
you being so open about this. And yeah, I hope
that you succeed. You're able to keep taking care of
people you can.

Speaker 7 (01:42:42):
We hope so too.

Speaker 10 (01:43:03):
I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in
Dallas called White Metropolis, and have co authored an upcoming
book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The
Purifying Knife.

Speaker 22 (01:43:14):
And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who
covers extremism and far right movements for a variety of publications,
including The Texas Observer and The Barbed Wire.

Speaker 10 (01:43:26):
School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically
spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and
other tedious topics, but Beginning in twenty twenty, Christopher Ruffo,
a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the right wing
Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project twenty twenty five,

(01:43:49):
launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have
become communists and doctrination centers. Rufo falsely claimed that public
school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called critical
race theory or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race
theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in

(01:44:11):
American politics, law, and culture that anti discrimination laws typically fail.
While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs,
it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where
the outrage has been directed.

Speaker 22 (01:44:26):
That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums
across the nation due to its large population and purchasing
power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather,
it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel,
something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets

(01:44:47):
in twenty twenty one. The goal is to have the
public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think
critical race theory, Rufo wrote, we have decodified the term,
and will you codify it to annex the entire range
of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans?

Speaker 7 (01:45:06):
End quote?

Speaker 22 (01:45:08):
On Fox News, Newsmax and other right wing media outlets,
Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing,
and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash
white children into hating themselves and goading black children into
hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had

(01:45:29):
launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.

Speaker 23 (01:45:34):
In a foundational paper called Whiteness's Property, the critical race
theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing
land and well from the rich and redistributing it along
racial lines.

Speaker 10 (01:45:47):
Rufa's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial
CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already
felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings,
remote learning, and mass mandates, now convinced that their children
were being taught to scapego white people for all the

(01:46:07):
country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at.

Speaker 9 (01:46:12):
Local school boards.

Speaker 10 (01:46:13):
Reuters reported on one meaning that turned violent in Loudon County, Virginia.

Speaker 24 (01:46:21):
What had been planned as a typical school board meeting
in Virginia's wealthy Louden County this week devolved into pandemonium,
with hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the
school system of teaching their kids that racism in America
is structural and systemic, something the school board denies is

(01:46:43):
part of the curriculum. Things got so heated that the
board members eventually walked out, leaving the police to deal
with the unruly crowd.

Speaker 3 (01:46:52):
Two people left in handcuffs.

Speaker 24 (01:46:56):
First Louden Counties school Board has been roiled for months
by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a
school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in
US law and institutions, and that legacies of slavery and
segregation have created an uneven playing field for black Americans.

(01:47:18):
The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public
schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives, who, like
many in Louden, say it is being used to indoctrin
eight children that America is a racist country.

Speaker 4 (01:47:32):
Critical race theory is anti white, and it's not American.

Speaker 22 (01:47:37):
Those within a year for historical rhymes may find this
outcry familiar. Resistance to racial integration and the Civil rights
era movements drue similar accusations of being hostile to whites
and being a product of anti American communism, and those
with experienced teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of
ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrinaisation. A common joke posted by

(01:48:02):
teachers online is that quote, if we could indoctrinate students,
students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop
panic over CRT expanding to include anti LGBTQ sentiment as well,
with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed
squarely in the crosshairs of a well funded national hate
machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's

(01:48:26):
a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the
school board meeting of my hometown school district, grape Vine, Kullyville,
from August twenty twenty two and bryce simple truths.

Speaker 16 (01:48:37):
There's only two genders and boys should go to boys rooms,
girls should go to girls bressrooms.

Speaker 13 (01:48:43):
And guess what teachers should be forced to use your freaking.

Speaker 7 (01:48:46):
Made up fantasy pronouns.

Speaker 9 (01:48:48):
Find like hell, hold the line against the LGBT mafia
and their.

Speaker 3 (01:48:54):
Dang pedo fans.

Speaker 14 (01:48:56):
Keith winning, you know what, keep the winnan, keep the
monkey cocks.

Speaker 9 (01:49:01):
How's that working?

Speaker 3 (01:49:03):
That king rings so much? Will can come?

Speaker 20 (01:49:06):
You know what?

Speaker 2 (01:49:06):
We're gonna keck come so hard?

Speaker 3 (01:49:08):
The only thing these will cards have to figure out is.

Speaker 9 (01:49:11):
Spoilers all their face, back bone, thighs.

Speaker 7 (01:49:14):
Wow, it's all.

Speaker 22 (01:49:18):
As absurd as all this may seem, there was something
to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. As
of twenty twenty, the United States had become more culturally diverse,
racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before,
and our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's
also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the

(01:49:41):
advances of the Civil Rights era and beyond, schools in
the United States have often been the centers of ideologically
motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages
the right.

Speaker 25 (01:49:53):
In fact, it's usually been the opposite.

Speaker 22 (01:49:55):
For most of its history, American public schools have effectively
advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In
this episode, we're going to look at what has actually
been taught in American schools over the years, with a
particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about
American history depends on where you live and how Christian

(01:50:17):
supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in
much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.

Speaker 10 (01:50:25):
Textbooks before the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties Civil rights
era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. Schoolbooks in the South,
for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a
noble loss cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see
in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids

(01:50:46):
were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before
the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country
into Civil war, and this too steeped into the public
imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail starring Van Heflin.

Speaker 4 (01:51:02):
The Time is Coming when the rest of us are
going to wipe you and you're kind off the face
of the earth.

Speaker 10 (01:51:12):
According to the miss promoted first in schools, then echoed
in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if
only white slave owning Southerners had been left alone to
figure it out themselves. Screenplaywriters, how often echoed what they
heard in the classroom.

Speaker 9 (01:51:27):
Is we see?

Speaker 10 (01:51:27):
In this scene from the nineteen forty film Santa Fe Trail,
here Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who
tried to start a slave rebellion Harper's Ferry, Virginia in
eighteen fifty nine. Massey portrays them as a thoroughly crazed maniac,
while Aero Flynn depicts future Confederate General J. E. B.

(01:51:48):
Stewart as sweetly rational.

Speaker 18 (01:51:50):
Half the people in America believe in your theory, a
lot of them, even Condonia methods that'll guarantee you a
public trial, not.

Speaker 25 (01:51:59):
On trial, but the nation itself.

Speaker 8 (01:52:02):
Are you too stupid and blinded by a uniform to
see what I see? A dark and evil curse laying
all over this land. A kind will sin against God
can only be wiped out in blood.

Speaker 18 (01:52:15):
But why in blood. The people of Virginia are considered
a resolution to abolished slavery for a long time. They
sensed that the tomorrow wrong and the rest of the
South will follow Virginia's example. All I ask is time.

Speaker 22 (01:52:28):
From the eighteen eighties until the nineteen sixties, school books
depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at
the time, the Reconstruction period from eighteen sixty five to
eighteen seventy seven, as a time of rampant corruption. These
books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and

(01:52:49):
expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.

Speaker 10 (01:52:55):
American school children furthermore learned from their teachers that so
called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes
dictatorship was the better option. The nineteen twenty four textbook
Are World Today and Yesterday, a History of Modern Civilization,
published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy,

(01:53:16):
had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The
authors told the impressionable high school students the following about
the world's first fascist leader.

Speaker 26 (01:53:26):
Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men
and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country.
He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and
downing the Communists by violence. Nevertheless, he has done much
to do away with strikes and to re establish conditions

(01:53:46):
as they were before the economic demoralization of World War
One set in Again.

Speaker 22 (01:53:54):
School books reinforced an American culture in the nineteen twenties
that responded to the horrors of World War One, labor unrest,
and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more
intolerant but also more anti democratic.

Speaker 27 (01:54:08):
All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of
a thriving country and a VIAU leader Beluche stripped down
for the camera book side by side with the peasants
and wrestled wild animals, never mind that this one had
no teeth. Nonetheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide,

(01:54:28):
including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi. Here he
speaks to as many supporters among Italian Americans.

Speaker 20 (01:54:38):
I tell it the Italians of America who I want
to make America greed.

Speaker 10 (01:54:45):
Another textbook published in nineteen thirty five, The Record of
America told Stins that the so called Founding Fathers like
Alexander Hamilton were not big believers in democracy, an attitude
the authors seemed to endorse. As the Record of the
America put.

Speaker 26 (01:55:00):
It, the Founders had little faith in the ability of
people as a whole to maintain self control and wisdom
in government. They had no confidence in the man without property.
A man who had failed to accumulate property would be
regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a

(01:55:21):
voice in the government of others. The Constitution was written
to retain power in the hands of those who released
radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical
mob action.

Speaker 22 (01:55:35):
After the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties civil rights movements.
History textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery,
the heroism of African American abolitionists like Surgeon or truth
in Frederick Douglas, and the evils of the Ku Klux
Klan with clarity. But the backlash was swift, particularly after
the election of the first African American President, Barack Obama

(01:55:58):
and the rise of the High Conservative Tea Party in response.
In twenty ten, TEA Party supporters took control of the
Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school

(01:56:20):
book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist
past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.

Speaker 10 (01:56:28):
In twenty fifteen, Ronnie Dean Baron got a text from
her son, Kobe, who was glancing at a ninth grade
geography textbook published by McGraw hill signed him by his
high school in Perilyn, Texas, near Houston. He sent her
a video highlighting a map in its shocking caption. Soon
Burn posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported,

(01:56:54):
spread outrage across the nation.

Speaker 28 (01:56:56):
A video post on Ronnie dan Buren's Facebook page, I'm
going to.

Speaker 5 (01:57:00):
Show you the book and then there's just an interesting.

Speaker 28 (01:57:02):
Section, went viral. Her video has been viewed more than
one point eight million times and has forty eight thousand shares.
To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have
to turn through the pages of her son's geography textbook.

Speaker 3 (01:57:16):
The immigration in the United States can be divided in
four district periods.

Speaker 28 (01:57:20):
Kobe, who's in the ninth grade, at Perlin High School
was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook,
a comment that referenced African slaves as workers.

Speaker 19 (01:57:29):
As if we worked our way up in America, as
if we came here by choice for a better life.

Speaker 22 (01:57:35):
The offensive caption read, in full quote, the Atlantic slave
trade between the fifteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds brought
millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States
to work on agricultural plantations. The publisher of the book,
simply titled World Geography later apologized for the euphemism, noting

(01:57:56):
that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both
into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.
The company said it would revise the digital version of
the text and future print versions, but it was unclear
at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.

Speaker 10 (01:58:13):
The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw hill had given the
Stay of Texas what it wanted, rather than anything like
critical race theory. The State Board of Education twenty ten
adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools known
as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that imposed a whitewash
of American slavery, raised doubts about human cause climate change,

(01:58:38):
and imposed other right wing content. To be sold in
Texas school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.

Speaker 22 (01:58:46):
Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts
that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state
and serve four year terms, while the governor appoints the
chair of the board. Since the beginning of the twenty
first century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists.
As a twenty thirteen PBS report notts.

Speaker 17 (01:59:04):
Don McLeroy has three jobs and he loves them all.
Good Morning, doctor mclroy's offices.

Speaker 20 (01:59:10):
Job number one, dentist, Job number two Sunday school teacher,
and job number three member of the Texas State Board
of Education, a seat he's held for the last twelve years.

Speaker 17 (01:59:25):
But it's that third job which has put this dentist
and Sunday school teacher from Brian, Texas into a national
debate over what kids are taught in school. Critics have
accused McLeroy of injecting his religious conservative beliefs into the curriculum.
About every ten years, the board revises the textbook standards
for different subjects. Any books bought by the state must

(01:59:48):
conform to these guidelines. The last big battle was over
the science standards. This year he's tackling social studies.

Speaker 10 (01:59:58):
The demand's Texas makes of texts book publishers matter, as
PBS reported a decade ago.

Speaker 17 (02:00:03):
According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit
Texas's standards because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks.
That means the choices made here could determine books that
other states will buy, and that's led to a school
fight that has the entire country looking on.

Speaker 10 (02:00:23):
This is how Kobe Burn ended up with the World
Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves.
Kathy Miller of the anti censorship group Texas Freedom Network
said quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas.
We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and
so flawed that's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those

(02:00:47):
serious about education aren't laughing.

Speaker 9 (02:00:49):
However.

Speaker 10 (02:00:49):
In twenty eighteen, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the
first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party,
from the list of major historical figures Texas students must
learn about, a decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.
In twenty ten, that board mandated that textbooks depict the
Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and

(02:01:13):
not slavery, a choice that was later modified in twenty
eighteen to return slavery as the primary cause, but still
maintained that quote states rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.
Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools and
the Jim crow Eric quote had similar buildings, buses, and

(02:01:33):
teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of these separate
but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included cartoon
in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks
if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.

Speaker 22 (02:01:48):
Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy
about whether human activity has led to climate change and
to quote consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution,
even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels
trinking climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution

(02:02:09):
is nearly unanimous.

Speaker 10 (02:02:11):
Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based
on which state they attend schools. A New York Times
comparison textbooks used in California, Texas show that both versions
of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of
Rights in reference to the Second Amendment. However, the California

(02:02:31):
textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation
of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the
same book replaces US commentary with a quote blank white space.
As The New York Times.

Speaker 22 (02:02:45):
Reported, Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African
American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students
are told that quote. Some dismissed the quality of the
literature produced by.

Speaker 7 (02:03:00):
The Harlem Renaissance, as.

Speaker 10 (02:03:02):
The New York Times reported, The California version of the
history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena
whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and
moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbooks said this.

Speaker 26 (02:03:18):
Some people wished to escape the crime and the congestion
of the city. Movement of some white people from cities
to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away
from more culturally diverse neighborhoods. Others believed the suburbs offered
better and more affordable living.

Speaker 10 (02:03:37):
The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence
referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but
left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what
students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World
War Two. The Texas State Board also specifically asked one
textbook publisher demphasized how many clergies signed the Declaration of

(02:03:59):
Independence and to underscore the disposed importance of religion to
the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense
lobbying by Texas Christian nationalist David Barton.

Speaker 22 (02:04:12):
Barton, a seventy year old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas,
which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth,
has become a major influence on the Republican Party and
its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star state,
but across the nation. While reporting on the Conservative Political
Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a

(02:04:35):
copy of one of Barton's books, he calls himself a historian,
although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious
education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one
time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in
his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in nineteen eighty eight
as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He

(02:04:58):
declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf
Hitler committed, and said that the lack of cure for
AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote your
sexual choice is not a God given right, he said
on one occasion.

Speaker 10 (02:05:14):
In nineteen eighty eight, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit.
The organization says dedicated to quote educating the nation concerning
the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans
have been deceived about the true meaning of the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress
shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.

(02:05:37):
The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick
a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also
argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation
between church and state should operate only in one direction,
that the government should not interfere with a religion, but
that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in

(02:06:01):
an interview, so.

Speaker 29 (02:06:02):
We've got to get away from from being scared to
say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do
is define it the right way, define it the historical way.
We can't let the left steal three hundred years of heritage.
We can't let them wipe out three hundred core cases,
wipe out what dozens of presents and governors have said
simply because they don't like the term. We are a
Christian nation. We have been a Christian nation, and that

(02:06:24):
doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic,
we're not coercive. We believe in free choice. We don't
believe in any of the others. And that's what we've
got to get back to doing. We don't need to
be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we
believe we have a Christian nation.

Speaker 22 (02:06:39):
The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and
he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the
generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, agreed
with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence,
that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson
successfully established separation of church and state in his home

(02:06:59):
state of Virginia in seventeen eighty six when it adopted
the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment,
adopted in seventeen eighty nine, also banned Congress from quote
establishing a religion, and most states embraced, to varying degrees,
the doctrine of church state separation.

Speaker 10 (02:07:16):
There were some states that objected to this notion. The
state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted
the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish.

Speaker 7 (02:07:28):
Religion, but states could.

Speaker 10 (02:07:30):
Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the
Congregationalist Church, respectively until eighteen eighteen. In eighteen thirty three,
for decades, some states had so called quote jew laws
that prohibited non Christians from holding office or had similar
bands on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and

(02:07:50):
fell by the wayside by the end of the nineteenth century.
The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in eighteen sixty eight placed the
same limits on state power. There are plaed on the
federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld
in the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case. Ever since
versus Board of Education.

Speaker 22 (02:08:10):
Artin has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own
alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately one hundred
thousand primary documents written before eighteen twelve. Based on that
selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation,

(02:08:31):
and that American law should be based on the Bible.

Speaker 10 (02:08:34):
Art believes that not just the Bible, but also the
original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery such
as the Three Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God.
He asserts, again with no evidence and without defining terms,
that fifty two of the fifty five signers of the

(02:08:55):
Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote orthodox or
evenangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't
speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who
saw God not as a deity, invested in the daily
lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put

(02:09:16):
the gears the universe together, wound it up, and let
it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in
history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben
Franklin proposed opening the first session the seventeen eighty seven
Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down,
with only four approving Franklin's motion, and a gathering that

(02:09:39):
as many as fifty five attended on any given day.

Speaker 22 (02:09:43):
In their letters, many of the Founding Fathers scoffed at
the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its
myriad translations. As John Adams said of the Bible.

Speaker 25 (02:09:54):
In an age when fraud, forgery, and perjury were considered
as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators, and theologians,
what may not be suspected.

Speaker 22 (02:10:10):
Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Styles that Jesus was
a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that
Christ was the son of God. Franklin questioned whether the
depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as describing
the Gospels could be trusted.

Speaker 25 (02:10:24):
As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of
morals and his religion as he left them to us
the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.
But I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and
I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in

(02:10:46):
England as to his divinity, though it is a question
I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.

Speaker 22 (02:10:55):
And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believe that the American
government should be based on Christian values, was even more
blunt about a central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his
virgin birth.

Speaker 25 (02:11:07):
Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth, of
a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind, who set out
without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was
punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the
Roman law.

Speaker 10 (02:11:27):
Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements
attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been
able to find. He cherry picks evidence to Bolster's claims
about the founder's religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up
a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church
services in the US Capital. More reputable scholars argue that

(02:11:50):
while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at
the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially.
What's more, Jefferson and was far from an orthodox Christian
or the sort of Christian that dominates conservativism today. He
edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a

(02:12:13):
condensed version of Jesus's teachings from the Bible that excludes
all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural,
the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.
These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's twenty
twenty two New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies,
Exposing the Myths You Always believed about Thomas Jefferson.

Speaker 22 (02:12:36):
For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States
as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson. In his
seventeen eighty five book notes on the State of Virginia.

Speaker 25 (02:12:48):
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only
as are injurious to others. But it does mean no
injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty
gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor
breaks my leg.

Speaker 22 (02:13:05):
Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some
of Barton's fellow Christian Conservatives. The History News Network website
derided the book as quote the least credible history book
in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's
book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it
had quote lost confidence in the book's details. Yet, in

(02:13:27):
spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing
company eventually released a new version.

Speaker 10 (02:13:43):
In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton
is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast,
Barton claimed that Republican US House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted
with him about staffing at the Capitol. Johnson made his
speech at a wall Builder's event, telling the audience that
the theocratic evangelists had quote a profound influence on me,

(02:14:05):
my work, my life, and everything I do.

Speaker 22 (02:14:08):
Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed
public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas
governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be
ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed
those lesson plans.

Speaker 10 (02:14:25):
Huckabee has long produced so called history videos for school
children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that United
States has a unique relationship with God, such as a
series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God,
which portrays a revolutionary war soldier and George Washington suggesting
God was on their side.

Speaker 30 (02:14:46):
We will bring the plagues upon our British oppressors, just
as Moses did in ancient Egypt, and we will win
the same freedom.

Speaker 3 (02:14:55):
We fight for the idea that we can make something
great here. Spirit compels us forward, and the.

Speaker 4 (02:15:03):
Times of writers upon us.

Speaker 22 (02:15:06):
This video series may not be shown to kindergarteners in Texas,
but the lessons in the Huckabee design curriculum clearly favor
a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The
Scripture field lessons are not required by state law, but
the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars
per student for teaching Huckaby's product. This is an attractive

(02:15:28):
offer to the many school districts in Texas that are
currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.

Speaker 10 (02:15:34):
Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over
the last decade. One of his political action committees played
a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the
United States Senate. He has close allies with Texas Lieutenant
Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors
and other states. Patrick said this at a twenty twenty

(02:15:56):
two Conservative political Action convention in Dallas about who he
thinks wrote the US Constitution.

Speaker 13 (02:16:02):
We were a nation founded upon not the words of
our founders, but the words of God. Because he wrote
the Constitution, he empowered them.

Speaker 29 (02:16:12):
We were a Christian state, and we've been blessed because
of that.

Speaker 25 (02:16:15):
For so many years.

Speaker 22 (02:16:17):
In twenty ten, the Texas State School Board for the
first time required that textbook publishers portray a particular Biblical
figure as an honorary founding father. This supposed founder was
famously portrayed in the nineteen fifty six box office smash
by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five term

(02:16:38):
president of the National Rifle Association.

Speaker 4 (02:16:41):
Woo unto the you're Israel, you have sinned a great
sin in the sight of God. You are not worthy
to receive these Ten Commandments.

Speaker 10 (02:16:54):
In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers
are required to tell Stin that Moses, the prophet depicted
in Judeo Christian scripture as well as the Qur'an as
leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence
on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence,
the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June twenty

(02:17:16):
twenty four which requires every public school classroom in the
state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments
for the Book of Exodus, derived from Protestant translations of
the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an
injunction barring enforcement.

Speaker 9 (02:17:33):
Of the law.

Speaker 22 (02:17:34):
With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get
a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required
every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments
at least sixteen inches wide and twenty inches tall, and,
as the law put it, quote, in a size and
typeface that is legible to a person with average vision
from anywhere in the classroom.

Speaker 7 (02:17:56):
The bill passed the state.

Speaker 22 (02:17:57):
Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when didn't come
before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline.
As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue
his crusade in the coming months.

Speaker 30 (02:18:10):
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force
public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session,
but missed a key deadline and died in the House.
Louisiana just passed a similar law this week, the Lieutenant
governor posting on x saying, quote, Texas would have and

(02:18:33):
should have been the first state in the nation to
put the Ten Commandments back in our schools end quote.
The Lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during
the next legislative session.

Speaker 22 (02:18:45):
Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major
world religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be
posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state
government violating the First Amendment. Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained
by such laws like those signed by Louisiana or Governor
Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.

Speaker 13 (02:19:06):
There are three references to religion in the Constitution. All
three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away
from the state. There is no religious tests required for
office forms, a remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The
First Amendment says there will be no national religion established
by the national government. Says that we will not interfere

(02:19:27):
with your private right to worship or not worship as
you see fit.

Speaker 4 (02:19:30):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:19:31):
That is what the Constitution says. And so Landry says
he wanted to put this up because Moses was the
first lawgiver.

Speaker 5 (02:19:37):
He's not.

Speaker 13 (02:19:38):
The Code of Hamerabi predates Moses by four centuries or something.
But also, if you want to look at the real
law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls.
Let's students read what the real law of this country
has to say about the proper role of religion in politics.

Speaker 10 (02:19:54):
The history of posting Ten Commandments signs or plaques are
building such monuments public spaces over the last seventy years
has an origin that might shock many right wing cultural
warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism. As Cruise points
out in this book One Nation Under God, How Corporate
America invented Christian America. The three hour, forty minute epic

(02:20:18):
movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wild
audiences with its twenty five thousand member cast and advanced
special effects. When it was released in nineteen fifty six,
the movie grossed more than eighty five million dollars. The
film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director Cecil B.

(02:20:39):
De Mel hated the New Deal and testified to the
House un American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence
over unions, including those in Hollywood, that drove up the
cost of filmmaking.

Speaker 22 (02:20:52):
The film can be read as a metaphor about the
Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union
and the freedom loving Hebrews standing out for the United States.
At the beginning of the movie, Demil appears and calls
the movie quote the story of the Birth of Freedom,
the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism

(02:21:12):
and ironically, the anti semitism of a country that had
not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadel tells
a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments.
According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's
wife became pregnant. Demill then told Heston that if his
wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be

(02:21:32):
cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth
to a son, Demill sent her a telegram saying congratulations,
He's got the part.

Speaker 10 (02:21:42):
Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode appeared in the film
in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who
broke the thirteen year informal NFL ban on African American
players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in
nineteen forty six, stro played both an Ethiopian king and
the enslaved attendant of Moses's adopted Egyptian mother. Demill thought

(02:22:05):
that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby
was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they
wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and
a slave because of the racist belief that all black
people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt
and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light skinned cast,

(02:22:26):
even though Demill's mother was Jewish. The only Jewish actor
to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who
earlier became famous playing gangsters, and who won de Mill's favor,
perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House
on American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunts. Thus,
the one prominent Jewish face in The Ten Commandments was

(02:22:47):
cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan who
continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves
to return to their Egyptian masters.

Speaker 3 (02:22:59):
You take too much upon yourself.

Speaker 1 (02:23:03):
We will not live by your commandments.

Speaker 30 (02:23:05):
We're free.

Speaker 4 (02:23:07):
There is no freedom without the law.

Speaker 3 (02:23:10):
Who's law?

Speaker 5 (02:23:11):
Most you yours?

Speaker 4 (02:23:12):
Did you call those tabolists to become a prince over us?

Speaker 22 (02:23:16):
As Cruz documents? When the Ten Commandments film was initially released,
the Mill came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He
teamed up with a conservative anti communist organization, the Fraternal
Order of the Eagles, to establish ten Commandment monuments across
the country around the time that Southern States erected new

(02:23:36):
Confederate monuments to protest desegregation. Ten Commandment monuments appeared at
the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall,
and near the US Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly
one hundred and fifty such monuments were erected across the country.
Momentum stalled during the Civil Rights era, to the extent
that in Alabama, State Justice Roy Moore suffered ridicule when

(02:23:59):
he placed without authorization, a self funded five thousand, two
hundred and eighty pound monument in the rotunda of a
judicial building housing State Supreme Court in two thousand and one.
The monument was ordered removed two years later, but once
fringe figures like more have moved closer to the American
political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton,

(02:24:21):
Lieutenant Governor Patrick and their allies.

Speaker 10 (02:24:23):
The contemporary of session with festooning public spaces with religious
artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as
with religious zeal men like anti CRT crusader Christopher Rufo,
along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the
world that made The Ten Commandments film, a world in

(02:24:45):
which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark skinned
people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as
an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history
of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide. And now once again, advocates
of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.

Speaker 14 (02:25:05):
The time has come to reclaim our once great educational
institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.
Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's
called accreditation for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to
ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers,

(02:25:26):
but they have failed totally. When I return to the
White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that
have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs
and lunatics.

Speaker 22 (02:25:39):
On January twenty ninth of this year, Trump issued an
executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any
public school that allegedly imprints quote anti American subversive, harmful,
and false ideologies on our nation's children. This can include
teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to students, or

(02:26:01):
educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia,
or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide
quote unquote patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton and others
who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of
indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning

(02:26:24):
history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days
of the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, when textbook
writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place,
and those willing to die to end slavery were painted
as the bad guys.

Speaker 10 (02:26:38):
In the Civil Rights era, black and brown parents boycotted
public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their
own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history,
and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who
want their children receive an honest accounting of the nation's
past will do well to learn from these pretas sessers

(02:27:00):
and to disrupt the meetings of right wing school boards
as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned
into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This
is Michael Phillips and.

Speaker 22 (02:27:13):
This is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Freoff for reading
passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes
from the founding fathers.

Speaker 7 (02:27:21):
Of course, thanks to you for listening.

Speaker 2 (02:27:45):
Hey, everybody, welcome to it could happen here. This is
Robert Evans, and I have an episode for you. It's
also an article I wrote for our substack, Shatter Zone,
So I'm just going to get into that. Since February fifth,
twenty twenty five, atum has been circulating among democratic parties, staffers,
and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Jarvin and

(02:28:07):
the Silicon Valley led coup to end US democracy. The
document is titled the Imminent Neo Reactionary Threat to the
American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief
was quote iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan
and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous
due to concerns about being targeted. The full document is here.

(02:28:30):
The table of contents is split into three main areas,
one the new shape of threats to the American Republic,
two understanding recent events in the context of threats to
the American Republic, and three a list of appendices. The
title of the actual file when I received it was
Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim
as quote explaining the nature of the current political crisis

(02:28:53):
to journalists who are attempting to inform the public. However,
I spoke with two sources who are members of these
groups and received the document. They told me that, to
their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists,
but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers,
people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks. One

(02:29:15):
source I interviewed explained it is a thing for think
tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists
or congress see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks
the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this
is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down. The paper opens by
acknowledging the scope of the executive power grap being perpetuated

(02:29:36):
under President Trump, and that is stabilization wrought by Elon
Musk and his doge team. It then notes the threat
is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power
grap It states that Musk is tied to a quote
broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel
and Mark Andresen Curtis. Yarvin is labeled as a thought

(02:29:57):
leader in this group quote called the neo reactionaries. I'll
stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough
for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it.
Musk probably would not label himself a neo reactionary, and
he doesn't have much of a history with Jarvin. Peter
Teeal does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than

(02:30:18):
mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that
Teal and Andreas and find Yarvin useful because of his
success and spreading to a lot of young techy kids
the idea that tech CEOs should run the world. Musk,
I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the
neo reactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers

(02:30:39):
Jarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the
independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions.
This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger
of the neo reactionaries and Musk to regular people. But
I also think it's a mistake to credit Jarvin with

(02:31:00):
more power than he holds. The document refers to him
as the leader of the neo reactionary movement, and I
think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about
how all of this works. That said, the document does
do a pretty good job of summing up the threat
that we face. Quote. The neo reactionaries have openly stated
their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional

(02:31:22):
order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate
state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become
subjects owned by the state state slaves in Yarvin's terms,
because everything rots when it has no owner. Human beings included.
That last quote is also one of Jarvin's. From here,
the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting

(02:31:45):
to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote
nervous system of the state. Another Jarvin quote These would
be the data and communications systems that DOSE is trying
to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of
this docum document make a call to action. Quote the
most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown nineteen seventy seven, India

(02:32:06):
twenty twenty two, Brazil twenty twenty three, Poland have been
accomplished by radically large, tent cross ideological coalitions with little
in common accept a desire for the continuation of a
constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American
democracy is dire enough that such a broad tent approach
focused on Musk and his associates may be required. And

(02:32:29):
I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part
of the whole document for me. For one thing, I
believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment,
a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add
to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts the original,
which is France from nineteen thirty four to nineteen thirty eight.
So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has

(02:32:52):
started to grow within D and C policy circles in
the people around them. The source who sent me this document.
In the first described themselves as a member of quote
a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high
ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They
noted that these are normally quote very milk toast lib spaces,

(02:33:13):
but quote they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed
for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to
with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote I've suspected
for a while a lot more things in D and
C stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In
other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within

(02:33:34):
the DNC, and people they know have made statements to
that effect. They were worried that these quote GOP moles
might reveal their identity, but more so, they were worried
that these moles might have planted the document itself and
put false information inside it with the goal of provoking
a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans.

(02:33:56):
I do think this caveat is worthwhile it's certainly not impossible.
I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has
Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But
I should note that when it comes to the actual
accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to
take issue with. I've spent more time than most people
studying Curtis Jarvin and the neo reactionaries. I would not

(02:34:19):
describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but
I do have a good base of knowledge here, and
nothing that I've read in this document struck me as
obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem
hysteric or unreasonable. So I asked my sources if over
the last month they'd seen more people talking about Jarvin
in their daily lives within sort of the circles that

(02:34:40):
they work in and around, because again, they communicate with
a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said, respectively, No,
and quote. That's kind of one of the odd things,
to be frank, this guy Jarvin is being brought to
big events in DC. He's been referenced by Bannon Advance.
I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths,
but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some

(02:35:03):
of fears that I had late last year about Jarvin
and the neo reactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some
time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with
him largely, a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with
money had become much more influential among Trump and his
tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately,

(02:35:25):
I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards
because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention
to the subject. I really had kind of a gut
feeling that this was going to become much more relevant
very soon, which is why I picked it as the
topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's
by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had
on the show so far, and I hope that that

(02:35:46):
would help kind of get we were talking about out
to a wider audience, and it did. The episodes did
very well between YouTube and our downloads in the podcast
were probably at something like a million listens for them
at this point. Listener base is a mix of leftists
and progressive liberals. Right their interests are not representative of

(02:36:06):
the Democratic Party at large. It is noteworthy and perhaps
even important that influential individuals in the policy space with
connections to democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization,
have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about
Jarvin as a threat, and that's what this document represents.
It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about

(02:36:29):
the danger and the fact that a clock is currently
ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote. If
non governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained,
and or unaccountable actors gain access to key digital infrastructure,
they could seize control of critical functions of government in
ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. And

(02:36:51):
speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for
our sponsors.

Speaker 4 (02:37:07):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (02:37:07):
So to continue from this document, there's a section next
titled national security, and the focus shifts from Jarvin and
his neo reactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote poses
a uniquely significant security risk. This, in its argument, is
because Musk and Doge espouse quote anti constitutional ideologies and

(02:37:29):
quote are under the influence of America's principle foreign adversaries
China and Russia. It goes on at some length about
Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him. Now,
I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see
his actions as very much consistent with those of a
man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people

(02:37:50):
speaking to an audience that is largely you know, when
it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on
the centrist side of things in the policy space, and
otherwise largely lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians.
I understand why you focus on the China and Russia
of it all with them, But when it comes to
both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of

(02:38:13):
people to care, I really don't think that's the right
strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus
popular messaging around how this all empowers quote America's principle
foreign adversaries, because most Americans don't really think that way
or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger

(02:38:33):
issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not,
in fact the Russian or Chinese governments, it's himself, and
he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat
to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government.
I think that's undeniable, and I think again, it's an
error not to frame it that way. The next section

(02:38:55):
of the paper lays out the definition of a coup quote.
In essence, a coup is a number one rapid seizure
of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power
by two seizing critical government infrastructure, and three weaponizing it
to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them. The
unelected actors then use this power to four remake the

(02:39:16):
rules of the political game in a way that cannot
easily be checked or undone through democratic processes. Now it
argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now.
One thing I found compelling is the way at which
this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now,
and how it can and will be used by the
new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep

(02:39:39):
the present legal system quote without canceling elections. For example,
cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new
levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to
unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis
of their shareholder power shielded from public view. I think
that's a real thing to be concerned with. I also

(02:40:01):
think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project. Now,
next we have a summary of the neo Reactionary Agenda,
which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elde
currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs,
Blaji Shrinivasan, and JD.

Speaker 7 (02:40:17):
Vance.

Speaker 2 (02:40:18):
Also name dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land,
who is in fact referenced twice in this paper. He
is quoted directly as having said in his paper the
Dark Enlightenment quote for the hardcore neo reactionaries, democracy is
not merely doomed. It is doom itself fleeing it approaches
an ultimate imperative. Land has had a huge impact on

(02:40:39):
a lot of these guys, although he's not really a
Jarvin like figure in he's not this kind of guy
who sees himself as or I think, really wants to
be a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy
from behind the scenes. He's really someone stating what he
believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about
our presentest historical moment that happened to comport with a

(02:41:02):
lot of the things that these guys believe now. The
author's next layout Jarvin's concept of the Butterfly Revolution, which
is based on an essay he wrote in twenty twenty
two in which he laid out how a full reboot
of the US government could be accomplished.

Speaker 4 (02:41:16):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:41:17):
Jarvin's seven part Butterfly Revolution has been roughly summarized as follows.
Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform
of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once
he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees.
Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency.
Number four, co opt Congress. Number five, centralize the police,

(02:41:39):
federalize the national Guard, create a national police force that
absorbs local ones.

Speaker 7 (02:41:43):
Number six.

Speaker 2 (02:41:44):
Shut down the elites, the media, and the universities who
make up the cathedral. Number seven. Get people on the
streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency.
And obviously all of that we've seen Trump and his
people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right,
And that's in fact what the next chunk of the
document is Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the

(02:42:08):
Trump administration and DOJE activity, and they show how it
comports with the Butterfly Revolution blueprint. Now, we've all lived
that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize
their arguments here. So the document ends with a section
on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as
quote government contracts which fund many of Musk's companies at present,

(02:42:30):
and the next is Greenland and Mars quote. A core
tenant of neo reactionary ideology is the replacement of nation
states with network states, but states require territory. Technocracy Inc,
a predecessor to the neo reactionary movement, whose one time
director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American Technate
where the entire continent of North America would be united

(02:42:53):
under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter teelbacked
network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements
about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of
a territorial project. Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors
primarily seem to fear, as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now,
I think most of this is pretty credible. Although I

(02:43:14):
feel differently about musk talk about colonizing Mars. I think
that's been more about pr than anything. I do think
there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think
that that's something feasible on any kind of close end
time frame, that we start building persistent colonies on Mars.
I think the science suggests that if that ever happens,

(02:43:35):
it won't be anytime soon, and I think he knows that.
I think he's largely understands hype well and how to
use it, and Mars has been an easy way for
him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say
the document is fairly thorough, and it's layout of the
neo reactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted
to end US democracy. It includes a section that lists

(02:43:59):
several of the earliest known DOGE employees, and it quotes
extensively from Jarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land. The
paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment
to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all powerful
executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who
rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts

(02:44:21):
and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial. After laying
out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises
that quote Section three articulates what Congress and other actors
can do in order to stop this threat. However, the
document in its present form does not include any Section
three or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other

(02:44:44):
actors might carry out in order to stop the present
assault on democracy. And perhaps there's a later version of
the document that I don't have access to that includes that,
perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out.
I have to say and heart as I find the
way in which this document talks about the threat that

(02:45:04):
we're facing, and the fact that I think it's overall
good that people in positions of influence and around the
DNC are talking about this stuff. It's also kind of
perfect that at the end they're like, hey, you know,
don't worry, We've included some tips on how to defeat
these guys, and then they just don't. You know, if
the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier,

(02:45:26):
but unfortunately it is pretty dire.

Speaker 4 (02:45:28):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:45:29):
If you want to take a look at the full
document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've
read to you now, but it is really worth reading,
especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin
guy or the neo reactionarys and you kind of want
to know how this all fits together with what Musk
is doing in more detail, if you go to my
substack at shatter Zone, the most recent article is the

(02:45:50):
text of this and I include a couple of different
points links to the full document which I have uploaded
to scribed, and you can read the whole thing if
you want. It is not been altered since I have
received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting
out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode.
We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks,

(02:46:13):
I don't know, keep an eye on this shit.

Speaker 4 (02:46:17):
Bye.

Speaker 3 (02:46:42):
This is it could happen here.

Speaker 21 (02:46:43):
Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
White House, Yes, the crumbling world and what it means
for me and you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined
by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes, this week we're
covering the week of February ninth, nineteen to February twenty sixth.

Speaker 9 (02:47:02):
Boy, if you thought we had ed before, do we
have ed now? We still haven't got that Haym sponsorship,
but will yeah crying.

Speaker 2 (02:47:11):
We're going to keep working at it. I'm also looking
to get us a penis pump sponsorship. Speaking of penis pumps,
let's talk about the Germans. So Germany had its election
very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way
their government works is that periodically governments can't continue being governments,

(02:47:34):
and so they have to have a very sudden election.

Speaker 25 (02:47:37):
I'm not going to.

Speaker 2 (02:47:38):
Explain it much more than that, but the actual results
of the election were pretty interesting, right. The primary winner
was off Day AfD Alternative for Germany would be kind
of the mostest English translation of the name of the party.
This is a far right party. It is primarily popular
in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after

(02:48:02):
years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe.
One of the reasons it has always been on the
political fringe is that German parties, both centrists conservatives and
the left have had a tacit agreement since the end
of World War Two called the Cordon sanitaire. It's not

(02:48:23):
just Germany, this is the thing that used to be
present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of
the cordon sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because
these are parliamentary democracies, right, so usually no one party
has fifty percent or more of the vote. So you know,
a party with twenty and a party with fifteen and
a party with eight and they form a coalition government.
And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is

(02:48:47):
still the normal we'll talk about that is that you
don't coalition with AfD, which is a part of why
that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept
them from being a major force in German politics until
you know, over the last eight or so years they
have grown substantially to the point where in this recent
election they doubled their support from around ten percent to

(02:49:10):
a little over twenty percent. This makes them they're not
the largest single block in the German in the Reichstag,
they're number two though, right they are number two, I believe,
which sucks.

Speaker 9 (02:49:24):
Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 2 (02:49:25):
Yeah, the CDU is still significantly larger, although not like
overwhelmingly larger, to be clear. So basically, right now, the CDU,
which is the centrist party and it's kind of like
center right, a little center right, has two hundred and
eight seats in the Reichstag. AfD has one hundred and

(02:49:46):
fifty two, the Social Democrats have one hundred and twenty,
the Greens have eighty five, and the Left Party has
sixty four. So AfD is a minority in the government
compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AfD,
but the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem,
especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern.

(02:50:10):
Right now, this most recent election had unusually high voter
turnout twenty twenty one election, seventy six percent of the
country or so voted. More than eighty two percent of
the country voted in this most recent election. So the
fact that like you have record high turnout and AfD
doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now, it's not one

(02:50:33):
hundred percent bad news because one of the other stories
here is the new Left Party, well not super new,
but the Left Party, which is kind of came out
of East Germany's Communist Party massively increased their support too,
and they actually for the first time, like very significantly
increased their share of the vote, which had been under

(02:50:55):
this kind of five percent threshold before and is now
at about eight point eight percent. So they went up
by an amount. Actually it's not like as much as
AfD went up, but like in terms of a percentage
of their prior vote, it's a similar increase. So there's
another party that had significant gains in this and it's

(02:51:17):
kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is
you could say they do a little bit of like
a Red Brown Alliance kind of thing, where there's some
like left wing messaging in what they're saying with they're
also like super anti immigrant and they're not, you know,
it's not kind of like to the extent that the
AfD is. But when they came on to the scene,

(02:51:40):
they were expected by some people to pull votes away
from the AfD this selection, and that's really not what happened.
And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled
were from Social Democrats and the left parties, so that
was one of the you know, it's because the way
the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system.

(02:52:01):
This didn't like hand the whole election to off day again.
This is the benefit of a system like the Germans had,
which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a
lot harder or a right.

Speaker 7 (02:52:13):
Wing dictator to get in again.

Speaker 2 (02:52:15):
But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging,
I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been
happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to
try to win over far right votes by kind of
mixing in Well, okay, what if we did some sort
of you know, liberal lefty policies, but we also got
really racist. You don't take votes from the far right,

(02:52:40):
but you do wind up pulling the worst people from
the left. Yeah, and yeah, I guess that's kind of
like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although
it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things
that's kind of I don't know, positive may not be
the right. Wait, but interesting to me is if you

(02:53:00):
looked at the twenty twenty one election maps of the
strongest party by constituency in the twenty twenty one election,
and I've found a good article German election results explaining
graphics on DW dot com. If you just google that,
you'll find it. In twenty twenty one. Off Day obviously,
like the whole northeast was you know, their territory, but

(02:53:23):
they also had strong inroads into the northwest parts of
the country, right, you know, primarily like rural areas and
the like. But like there was a there was a
lot of red on that map in the northwest portion
of Germany. In the new election, that's all black, which
is the CDU right, Which means while off Day's representation

(02:53:46):
in the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially,
their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized. Yeah, would
be in a fair way of saying it, which is
which is interesting to me, hard to say too much,
Like does that mean, you know, I think some of
what has happened here, because it's important both to note
that this is bad. It's bad that the Nazis doubled

(02:54:08):
their share of the vote, but also it was expected
to be a little worse than it was. You know,
there's some evidence that after jd Vance made his speech
introducing AfD, their pollings started to like freeze a little bit,
and it may be the fact because a lot of
older voters came in and they seem to have primarily

(02:54:29):
gone with the CDU, with this sort of center right party.
So one story here is you can maybe look at
it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who
are also old enough to really not like the idea
of the AfD, came out and voted for, you know,
the center right party in order to kind of cut

(02:54:50):
off their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of
a lot less optimistic, is that AfD is most popular
among people under thirty who don't view it as an
extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.

Speaker 21 (02:55:06):
And AfD won the majority of like working class, unemployed
and male votes.

Speaker 9 (02:55:11):
Yes, yes, pretty substantially.

Speaker 25 (02:55:13):
Yes, they did.

Speaker 2 (02:55:14):
Extremely well with young men an unemployed young men in particular,
and that's all deeply concerning. So, you know, there's a
few things going on here, all of which are very
interesting to me. But the power off Day continues to
have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. That said,
there's also some evidence here that the situation in the

(02:55:39):
United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting
populace to attempt to stop off Day and kind of
one of the positive things that came out is prior
to this election, there was a lot of talk about
whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with
the AfD and thus into the Cordon Sanitaire, And to

(02:55:59):
make a long story short, they're not going to do that.
They're looking to coalition with the Social Democrats, which is
a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one
will do that in the future. And unfortunately a majority
of German voters suspect AfD will be in a coalition
by twenty thirty, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's

(02:56:19):
as good as things get right now. And that's what
I got to say about Germany.

Speaker 21 (02:56:24):
Yeah, I mean, and people frame these results is like
slightly better than expected, slightly. Previous pulling showed AfD being
being slightly better in results, and that dipped for vance
and Musk started really trying to push AfD, both in
person and digitally, so you saw a slight dip there.

Speaker 2 (02:56:44):
Yes, And this is the other thing that's kind of
worth noting that kind of like red Brown Party, in
addition to being kind of pro social programs, anti immigration,
they're also very anti United States.

Speaker 9 (02:56:58):
Okay, so uh, that may explain some of that too. Yeah,
it does seem like things are changing a lot. And
one of the things that we've seen, like les we've
spoken aboutfore, like not just in Germany, being Canada, was that,
like people hate Musk and Trump so much in the
rest of the world that like their endorsement could be
something of a kiss of death electorally.

Speaker 4 (02:57:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 21 (02:57:20):
Yeah, Like the Conservative Party in Canada has been growing
pretty exponentially in terms of like popular support the past
few years as the Liberals have like tanked, and now
those trends that actually started to reverse. The Canadian like
Liberal polling is up ten points, the Conservative pulling is down.
Conservatives might not even be able to control Parliament in
the next election as they were like expected to. And

(02:57:42):
it'll be interesting to see like if this if this
anti like far right United States trend continues to more
countries beyond like Germany in Canada. But I'm still still eagerly,
eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.

Speaker 2 (02:57:55):
And this is part of the story that is really
interesting right now. Where we've talked a lot about the
transnational fascist coalition. You know the fact that Trump and
his people have had the quasi dictator of Hungary, you know,
over at mar A Lago, and have repeatedly cited him
as an inspiration for how to take and centralized power.
You know how close Polsonyaro was in the last Trump administration.

(02:58:17):
Like you know, obviously the Republican parties increasing closeness and
embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right
now is people like countries that had been heading in
a very more authoritarian right wing direction turning around in
part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away

(02:58:41):
from kind of the international right wing movement, as Poland
being the best example right whereland. Polish politics have changed
substantially in the last several years, and a big part
of that is the war in Ukraine and a lot
there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise
would have been more on board for a lot of
the social conservative shit who are like, well, but all

(02:59:02):
these fuckers are pro Russia and we're pulling it, like no.

Speaker 21 (02:59:10):
All right, let's go on a break and return to
talk more about the crumbling world. And you said, yeah,

(02:59:30):
all right, we are back I'm gonna throw to James
to do a segment on USAID.

Speaker 9 (02:59:38):
Yeah, we are back. And before I talk about USAD,
I do want to talk about something else that has
been advertised along with whatever products and services support this show.
That is the Gold Card. So the Gold Card if
You're not Familiar, is something that Trump floated this week
to replace the EB five investor visa. Trump suggested that
the Gold Card it would require a five million dollar

(02:59:59):
investment investment. I think it's just a charge, right, You're
just giving the money to the United States government, and
in return you will receive a Green card plus privileges,
and it will be not a green but a Gold card.

Speaker 25 (03:00:14):
So that's great.

Speaker 9 (03:00:15):
That is the EB five vs Or if You're not
familiar required you Since twenty twenty two, it's been one
million and fifty thousand dollars investment and the creation of
ten jobs. So it had some kind of like it
trickled down economics. It's not a real thing. It's a
lie that they tell you, but it had some idea
that these rich people would create jobs in the US

(03:00:37):
people who are less wealthy. The Gold card seems to
not have that. You just have to be rich right.
So that's a that's an interesting change to the immigration system.
The other thing I want to talk about today is
a United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.
It's been a target of like the anti work right
for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph

(03:01:00):
Nia would have called soft power, right, their power to persuade,
the power to influence outcomes around the world with things
other than tanks and bonds.

Speaker 2 (03:01:08):
Oh and again, if your power is soft right now,
you might consider trying Hymns or one of our other sponsors.

Speaker 9 (03:01:17):
Gyms is not a sponsor. Sorry, Jams, we needed to
do that, but I have been diverted by returning to
my topic. Yeah, the agency has been massively impacted by
DOGE and Trump administration cuts right. The Trump administration suspended
all foreign aid in January via executive order on the
twentieth of January in order to assess if it was

(03:01:38):
quote serving US interests. The State Department then issued guidance
that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut
nearly basically all USAI the expensive on the thirteenth of
this month, that's February if you're listening. Later, A judges
shoed a temporary restraining order. This TIERRO didn't really stop
them from doing what they were doing, because it told

(03:02:00):
them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State
Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are
already in the contract so that the contracts will have
some kind of kill clause, right, and that they claim
that they're implementing that, so they think they've found a
fun work around. Rather than talking extensively about court battles,
I want to talk about what this means. These are

(03:02:21):
cuts made by the richest man in the world that
have had a direct, tangible, and devastating impact on the
poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, eighty percent of
emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to
two million people will go without food. Local groups organizer
kitchens are running out of money. The way this works

(03:02:42):
is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about
continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means, because
in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending
them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed
to sending them food as an in kind donation. Right,
whatever he communicated, these people are not getting food an

(03:03:07):
as a result, the people who run these mutual aid
kitchens it's a mutual aid coalition of Sudan are facing
the horrible decision of having to turn people away it
or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On
the border between Thailand and Myanmay, a place where Robert
and I have been to report, I've heard that people
are having babies right now outside a lot of clinics

(03:03:27):
and life support machines have been removed for it, so
people who were relying on those life support machines obviously, and.

Speaker 2 (03:03:32):
At least one person has died, yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:03:35):
And I'm sure many many more people than that have done.

Speaker 4 (03:03:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:03:38):
I mean that's just what's reported. Like it's a lot
of most of what happens there does not get out.

Speaker 4 (03:03:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:03:44):
I will try in not too long to be there
and report on that. But it's pretty devastating right now
that Robert and I have met the people who run
some of these clinics, and they are some of the
most incredible people doing amazing work. And yeah, they relied
on USAA funding, as lots of other places do, and
that's not happening now. The State Department has exempted quote

(03:04:07):
life saving humanitarian assistance programs from the cuts, but no
one really knows what that means.

Speaker 4 (03:04:13):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:04:13):
The order reads, quote life saving humanitarian assistance applies to
core life saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance,
as well as supplies and reasonable administrative cost as necessary
to deliver such assistance. As I mentioned before, the mutual
AIDS who are in coalition was receiving financial assistant to

(03:04:33):
help it provision itself, right, which is much better than
the US going through all the infrastructure spending of being
able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors.
Other contractors implementing partners of USAID are still owed money
for work that they completed before January, before the stop
Work Order stopped payment to them. For work to begin

(03:04:55):
again on any of these contracts, they need the contract
officer to sign up on it, and it's at a
lunclear exactly how many of these contract offices are still
employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts, So
essentially USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition
to this, in this country, four hundred and ninety million

(03:05:18):
dollars worth of US grown food, which is in the
USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food,
is currently at risk of spoilage according to USAID. So
it's not just that people are starving, it's that we
are allowing food to go bad here while people starve
in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just

(03:05:39):
really briefly hear plug the Mutual AIDS Sudan Coalition. If
you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly,
and it's Mutual AIDS Sudan Dorg. If you'd like to
do that. It'll be in the show notes too if
you're driving or whatever.

Speaker 21 (03:05:51):
And there is like ongoing legal fights over this issue.
On Tuesday, February twenty fifth, another ordered the Trump administration
to resume hundreds of million dollars of funding towards USAID,
and there's no indication Trump's going to follow that order.

(03:06:11):
They're already planning to appeal again. They have already appealed before.
And like we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges,
fine loopholes, fine workarounds, and Musk and Trump continue to
just openly float like defying the order of the Court.
Representative Andy Ogles introduced articles have appeachment against a specific

(03:06:35):
quote unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere. They don't
have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen.

Speaker 9 (03:06:42):
It's a frontal assault on the separation of powers. It's
what he's proposed, right, And like they don't have their
numbers yet.

Speaker 21 (03:06:50):
Yes, well, and then they have openly floated just like
defying orders because they are they're interpreting the actions of
the judges as like themselves, unlawful. But must have himself
called to impeach judges who violate the law. And I
believe his his most recent pinned pinned x posts reads

(03:07:10):
quote if any judge anywhere can block every presidential action everywhere,
we do not have a democracy. We have a tyranny
of the judiciary.

Speaker 2 (03:07:20):
So what a great legal mind shit we were saying,
and back in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 9 (03:07:27):
So this, this will continue.

Speaker 21 (03:07:29):
I mean, I'm really really waiting for a final showdown
between Trump Elon and you know, maybe the Supreme Court,
and you know, seeing seeing if they will actively defy
a ruling from the Supreme Court, if they indeed rule
against Trump and Musque. But until then, I feel like
we're just kind of all chugging along as the Trump administration,
you know, very very unconstitutionally defies the authority of the Court.

(03:07:53):
In some related news, last week, President Trump signed in
executive order stating that the president can change law erroneously,
citing Article two, which only calls for the presidents to
quote faithfully execute the law.

Speaker 9 (03:08:08):
I'm to quote from the.

Speaker 21 (03:08:09):
Order, the President and the Attorney General, subject to the
President's of supervision and control, will interpret the law for
the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.
The next section is titled reigning in independent Agencies. It
reads the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and

(03:08:31):
Securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the
American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and
regulations without the review of the democratically elected president. They
also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting
the President. Voters and the President can now hold all
federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions,

(03:08:54):
as the Constitution demands, unquote. This is absurd. This is
like extreme, seemly dangerous, one of the most like blatant
like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon.
Like this is gonna get litigated, but this is crazy.
The the fact that that we have that we have
a president saying that he has the ability to interpret

(03:09:15):
the law something that specifically he cannot do. That's why,
that's why we have three branches of government, just like
openly openly claiming that power is like very worrying. Again,
like I feel like every episode on Executive Disorder I
say that, you know, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned,
but that does continue to be the case.

Speaker 9 (03:09:33):
Yeah, it is very concerning. I don't know what more
to say, because it's mad, like we're watching a coup
happen on the timeline while everyone just continues to go
shopping and stuff like it's it's it's pretty weird.

Speaker 21 (03:09:47):
Speaking speaking of shopping, I just got a fantastic Swedish
M ninety feel jacket. It looks great, it fits tight.

Speaker 9 (03:09:54):
I'm very happy, incredible. Garrison's becoming a mill sup.

Speaker 21 (03:09:57):
We will go on break once again to come back
to talk about the Navy and the FBI.

Speaker 3 (03:10:15):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 21 (03:10:18):
Let's now talk about the Navy, arguably one of the
gayer branches of the military, besides the besides the drone operators.

Speaker 2 (03:10:27):
Oh you're you're really missing out on the Marine. As
multiple Marine veterans have told me, the US Marine Corps
is the gayest place I've ever been. The Marines are
like part of the Navy, right, come on, they are,
they are, they are, and they hate it when you say.

Speaker 21 (03:10:44):
Oh, well, wait, wait, go cry about Daddy Trump.

Speaker 5 (03:10:47):
I don't care.

Speaker 25 (03:10:49):
It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 7 (03:10:51):
It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 21 (03:10:52):
So meanwhile, there's a shakeups in the Navy and the
Marines relating to Trump's anti trans executive orders. And we
have obtained an al NAVE memo directed to all Navy
units and Marine Corps from February twenty fifth that outlines
the Department of Navy's guidance on how to implement the
anti trans executive orders. Now, this includes ending programs and

(03:11:13):
policies related to quote unquote gender ideology all across the Navy,
as well as only using assigned sex at birth on
official documentation. I will quote from the statement quote don
entities will review policies for quote unquote intimate single sex
spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are

(03:11:35):
designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships,
and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department
of Navy unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms
and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff
that Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's
been signing. But we are slowly getting more and more

(03:11:56):
of these implementation guides getting sent around to various department
and James.

Speaker 9 (03:12:01):
Yeah, and like, just to clarify that to people, most
of these bases are pretty full, right, These are pretty
crowded places. So this will mean women sharing rooms with
young marines, right. This will meet them sharing non stalled
bathrooms with young sailors and marines, right. This will force
them into very confined spaces together on board ships. Like

(03:12:25):
this isn't like some kind of sort of minor inconvenience
or whatever like this, this will put these people a
demonstrable risk for assault, for bullying, which is a serious
thing and an issue in lots of militaries, including the
US one. But like and many of these people, I
should add, like have had that they're like post surgery, right,

(03:12:47):
and not that it matters hugely, but they're people who
might pass as women or men, and they're now forced
to live according to their gender assigned at birth. Pretty
fucked up.

Speaker 3 (03:13:00):
It's not great.

Speaker 21 (03:13:00):
I'm going to wait before I do reporting on the
implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot
of articles in the Guardian and a few trans journalists
have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables
regarding the issuing of visas to people who are trans Specifically,

(03:13:22):
I think the main cable that we've seen allows the
continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what
the the the case officer or like the whoever whoever
is like handling the actual these information whatever they determined
to be the assigned gender at birth to be. Yeah,
that's that's how it would get issued. But I'm going

(03:13:42):
to wait to report on kind of the rest of
the nitty gritty details, because there is conflicting information from
like from like these like policy wonks, lawyers and journalists
themselves who are trying to figure out kind of what
the full implications of those cables are, but we are
aware of them. We've been talking about them in our chat.

(03:14:03):
Yes they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to
like overblow the scope of some of these things just
to like induce panic when really this is all kind
of vary in line with Trump's earlier orders to only
have male and female documentation that matches a signed gender
at birth.

Speaker 9 (03:14:21):
Yeah, I would say. Also, like, if you are soldier,
sailor em and a person marine whatever, and like these
these gexty voters are affecting you, you can email us
at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me. I know
trans folks tend to serve at a higher rate than
cisgender folks, so its a good number of people who

(03:14:41):
will be affected by this. And like, for whatever it's worth,
if you want to talk to us, you can reach
out to us.

Speaker 21 (03:14:47):
I'm also going to note we obtain information on the
Department of Defense removing travel coverage for abortion. On January eighteenth,
the Department of Defense Travel Management Office Room of Dissection
from their joint travel Regulations that outlined travel allowances for
quote non covered reproductive healthcare quote meaning like abortion and
assisted reproductive technology like IVF. Now this change was directly

(03:15:12):
in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the High Amendment,
which Mia has talked about lots before on the show.
And then on February fourth, they actually re established coverage
for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion
was not re established, so.

Speaker 9 (03:15:29):
That means travel cover for abortion related medical care reproduct
health care is no longer there. Correct. Correct.

Speaker 21 (03:15:40):
For our last main story, I'd like to talk a
little bit about updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Trump goon rap producer and children's book author Cash Patel
has been confirmed as FBI director, and Patel is joined
by far right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan po Gino,

(03:16:01):
who has been appointed deputy director.

Speaker 2 (03:16:04):
Ah God, and I look, I gotta say it. I'm
just glad there's an adult in the room now, you know.
This is thank God again.

Speaker 21 (03:16:11):
Like I don't want to just be talking about how how,
you know, kooky everything is in this new administration.

Speaker 3 (03:16:16):
But this is wild yet.

Speaker 2 (03:16:18):
This is no, no, no, Garrison. I disagree, and that's
because I have professional solidarity. Anything that's good for podcasters
in general, you know, is good for the country's.

Speaker 9 (03:16:31):
So not great, not great.

Speaker 21 (03:16:37):
Last week, Patel told senior officials he wants to relocate
upwards of fifteen hundred employees from DC to fuel offices
around the country, and in a statement on last Friday,
which is February twenty first, Patel said, quote, anyone that
wishes to do harm to our way of life and
our citizens here and abroad will face the full wrath

(03:16:57):
of the dj and the FBI. If you seek to
hide in any corner of this country or planet, we
will put on the world's largest man hunt, and we
will find you, and we will decide your end state unquote.
Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the
Bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from
far right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous

(03:17:21):
BLM Antifa. In related news, on Tuesday, a far right
extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the
National counter Terrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces
and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American first
populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and

(03:17:42):
Patriot Prayer. Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up
to Antifa and Kent himself employed a proud Boy to
consult on a failed congressional campaign in twenty twenty two.
Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts
to target Antifa. And this is like all amidst a

(03:18:02):
report from The Guardian suggesting that the Nazi cocelerationist group
the Base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and
recruitment efforts inside the United States. That's good, so not
cool stuff happening, read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I
guess i'll close unless we have any other thoughts on
Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director.

Speaker 9 (03:18:26):
What are you supposed to say? All right?

Speaker 2 (03:18:30):
I mean, I do think it's funny that because of
the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have
been statements by people in the administration that like, there
aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're
giving them all government jobs.

Speaker 9 (03:18:44):
Well, that's more hymns advertising dollars for.

Speaker 7 (03:18:48):
Us, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (03:18:50):
I feel like this is going to be huge for US.

Speaker 21 (03:18:53):
I would like to close on three more funny news
moments from the past week. On Musk danced around with
a chainsaw at sea pack while multiple of his ex
wives and baby Mama's pleaded for him on Twitter to
respond to emergencies regarding his children, including that including that

(03:19:14):
weird far right journalist and Babylon Bee contributor who's who's
had an increasing spat with Musk and I now I
believe has filed for complete custody of their child.

Speaker 9 (03:19:23):
Yeah, well, I mean that's good luck. I guess, like,
I guess good luck. I can't think of a worse
situation to be and than Elon Musk being one of
your legal parents. So like, for the sake of that child,
I hope that she succeeds.

Speaker 21 (03:19:37):
Tesla stock is down nearly thirty percent this month. There's
been a real pressure on him because people in Europe
are refusing to buy Tesla's in a boycott, you know,
upset at him for doing the whole Nazi salute and
being a Nazi thing. And finally, in some very sad news,
a crypto trader killed himself live on a Twitter space

(03:20:00):
in order to start a sorry sorry on an x
space in order to start a meme coin. How do
we feel about this, folks? I know it's a dark
time for our community.

Speaker 9 (03:20:11):
They did start the meme coin.

Speaker 3 (03:20:13):
Multiple meme cooins actually were started.

Speaker 9 (03:20:15):
So well, well done for the people cashing in on
the guy shooting himself in the head and then bleeding
out for thirty minutes on stream. You are vampires, I
don't know, not the cool kind. No, yeah, not the
not the cool kind, the evil kind, vultures. Vultures can
be cool as well. I guess it depends.

Speaker 21 (03:20:34):
Yeah, well, I think that's it for us. We reported
the news again.

Speaker 25 (03:20:42):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:20:47):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 11 (03:20:52):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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