It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

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

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

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome, dick it up and hear a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
I am your host Mia Wong with me is James Stout. Hi?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Mary, happy to be here again?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Yeah, I am.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we
are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort
of neoliberal American state of the last about fifty years,
created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And
we'll start with the fun part of this, which is
that Tesla stock is down twenty five percent in the
last month. Yay, it's extremely funny. The protests are working.

(01:02):
People are like lighting them on cars on fire literally
all over the world, Like there was just a big
ration in France the day we're recording this. The pressure
is working, he's having a bad time. Twenty five percent
is just the start we can get the other seventy
five percent.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, I mean, and like for people who like I guess,
I don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly
tied to Elon Musk's net worth. Like, obviously he's diversified,
he doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks. But
like when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Yep, it's great, it's great. We love we love making
Elon Musk poorer.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show
about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the
American state and about all of the people who he
is harming in the lives. Is showing the people who
are dead because of his actions, and I think it's
worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
it came to be that. You know, at the beginning
of the Communist Manifesto, Mark famously wrote to the boorscheoise

(02:00):
Z produced their own grave diggers, and you know, his
his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus
far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state,
seems to have produced their own grave diggers, partially in
the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story

(02:21):
of how specifically this happens, and also, I think what
neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I
think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines
of the story of the extent to which you know,
Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but
it's worth going into some of the more structural elements

(02:42):
of how this happened.

Speaker 5 (02:43):
Why.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
So, one of the problems that we have here, and
I say we have here because this is a problem
that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does
not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, there's a lot of things he doesn't understand.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest of
all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon
Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to
be when neoliberalism is what is sort of weird libertarians
and whatever you call his sort of ideology you know,
is supposed to be and you know, like he is
just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand,

(03:20):
he's a product of this wing of that movement that
was created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like, ah,
you must like decrease the size of the state. You gotta,
you gotta eliminate all regulations you have to you know,
you keep keep decreasing the size of the state. Keep
fire like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera,
et cetera. Yeah, and again this is I think largely
what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right. They
think it's like, okay, neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller,

(03:42):
And this has always been a fucking joke, Like to
this entire ideoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy
keeps increasing, and this has always allowed a kind of
like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to you know, when
two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah, the economy, entire
economy collapses, and then out of the woodwork come all
of these like Rand Paulls of like quote unquote libertarians
who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a

(04:03):
bunch of fascist groups and like all of these sort
of fascist perilitaries. But you know, they can come out
of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the
two thousand and eight collapse happened was because there is
too much government regulation. And this is like sort of
what bitcoin is, right, It's like, ah, the evils of
capitalism are happening because like.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Not enough capitalism.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, well it's because like the but like cecifically, like
the evil and s trench interests have taken over the
state and you don't have the power to access to
things that they do, which is obviously you know, like
it is obviously true that these people have control of
the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled
opposition of if you put us in power, will eliminate
parts of the state, will get rid of all this
regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has
always been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this

(04:42):
is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or
like on the most extreme mentioned arco capitalism. Yeah, and
this is something that the Montpellier society, which is like
the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like
their academics come from, they slow of conferences. They've always
had a problem with this where there's always been a
branch of an archer capital there who think the only
thing that the state should do is enforced contracts or

(05:04):
just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just do Yeah,
and the neoliberals are like, Okay, that you guys are
fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that
the actual thing that these people believe and this is
this is something that if you read more highek than
just like the Road to served him right, that's like
the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff
that you ask for public consumption, if you read sort
of like rope Key, and you read all of the

(05:25):
sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF, and
you know, you go through all the different schools. What
they actually believe. Contrary the things that they say were like, oh,
markets naturally emerge and the state just like exist to
control them. What they believe is that you have to
use the states specifically to create markets, and you have

(05:45):
to use the state to discipline workers through just pure
violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market
subjects you go to work, go home, buy things, and
do nothing else. And the product of this is the
nineteen eighties, right, is the replacement of the welfare state,
which is the sort of carrets of this system with
just the pure stick of the police baton and the
prison system.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World
War welfare state order, right that we saw certainly in
the US but mostly in the Europe.

Speaker 4 (06:15):
Right.

Speaker 6 (06:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
Yeah, But and this is very important, this never actually
decreased the size of the state because what the state,
you know, what it was was it was a shifting
of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the
state giving you things towards the states, you know, like
beating you over the head with a hammer, and also
insofar as it gives you things, making you go through

(06:36):
all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort
of like scant welfare policies still exist.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and
for withdrawing your benefits reasons.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, And this and this is always something that all
of these people have supported. Right now, The other important
part for our purposes is is the thing I said
earlier about the state creating markets, and that's that's kind
of like an abstract thing, right, there are sort of
historical examples you can go through to look at what
this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
But this is something that's very important because a huge

(07:12):
amount of what Tesla is is a direct result of
you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state
stepping in to create a market as its way of
doing regulation and with the way to interact with the world.
And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now,
selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In
twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty

(07:35):
three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is
if people I'm.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Familiar, Yeah, actually has numbers on this. Their numbers are
that since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total
profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So
the way the system works is that the EPA sets
standards for how much this is. Like you know, I
read the ACXIO this thing too, but like the EPA

(08:03):
set standards for how much like CO two per mile,
all of the cars and trucks combined that a car
company makes can can admit and you know, instead of
doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just
going to be like a firm cap on these emissions,
they're like no, no, no, you know this this is what
I say when I say they create a market. So
if what happens if you go over the cap, isn't

(08:24):
that like you know, like people get hauled off the
jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to
buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap,
it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right,
their cars produced like zero basically like.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within
their line.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can
ask a question where is that electricity coming from? But
you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored
into it, which is part of the sort of problem
with trying to use the state like this to solve right.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
It doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it just
looks at driving the car missions.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
You know, this is this is the problem with trying
to use a regulatory state like this to solve the
problem with climate change by creating a market. And so
Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this
was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not
from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So
what they're doing is making it so that other companies
can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients, can

(09:22):
produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV
pickup truck, Like I think they may be plug in
hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US
manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the
that form fifty lightning that they have now is because
they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy
because instead of having all of the car companies just
like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one
car company that makes electric cars, and then all the
rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
sto Tuper like Biles et cetera et cetera. And the
secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now,
is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort

(10:09):
of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of
what a market is, right with the explain it. So
it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all
this like competition in the market. The competition is going
to create the best product. And what actually happens, and
the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that
when the state creates a market like this, what is
doing is handing like a person, like a single individual,
a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly

(10:33):
is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed
the title of the richest man in human history by
the state's regulatory apparatus.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean,
there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right,
Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce
resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
Yeah, And again this is you know, going back to
the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed, right,
Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever
produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct
neilerbal intervention into the market, which is what neolibililism is, right,
It's it's the nailerble state coming into great markets and
the product of it is Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, it's a monopoly.

Speaker 7 (11:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
And when we come back from ADS, well, we'll go
into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon
Musk and not all of these other companies that became
the sort of single guy and how and how else
he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the

(11:42):
other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how
how how Tesla is built on on these on this
carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that
Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts.
The Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're

(12:04):
ever going to do like this now that Bezos has
been like weird free market capitalists like tried to go
through and find all of the money in government contracts
that they've gotten.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
They totaled it.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Well, I think I think they're also including like tax
credits and stuff like that, but they totaled it at
thirty eight billion dollars, and that's just the ones that
are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of
what SpaceX does SpaceX is, you know, most other company
is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified
like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
more than that, right, Yeah. But this comes to the

(12:36):
other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how
tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies,
like in general, do not make money, right They hemorrhage
money for basically their entire existence until they can find
a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.
And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating
shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA
talks about this.

Speaker 4 (12:57):
They got a.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Four hundred and sixty five million dollars low interest loan
for the Department of Energy in twenty ten that basically
saved the company from the brink of collapse.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on
in twenty ten. No one else needed low interest low
into a I think it was fine.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
No, No, there was no attempt to build like a
giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yep, you know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living
in my car at that time. It was fine. Yeah,
thank you Obama.

Speaker 7 (13:24):
And so and so.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
As this goes on, right, the goal of you as
a tech company, there's two things you want to do.
If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get
bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire
on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger
tech company, you were trying to amass enough US contracts,
like US government contracts, to like get you to sort
of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX

(13:45):
now has gotten eighteen billion dollars of contracts with NASA,
And this is sort of a part of like, I mean,
NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different,
Like this is just straight up there using Tesla's rockets
to do things. And this is also part of why
like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up, as part of
why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the

(14:06):
space station right now, because these things do not work.
But there's there's been an enormous amount of money here.
And the other thing, you know, this is one of
the other sort of like great neo liberal things, is
that a lot of the a lot of the factories
that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones
that are in the US, are there because they get
unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and taxi centers from from

(14:28):
from local states themselves. All of this brings us to,
you know, one of the other really core aspects of
sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling
in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should
also mention this is some thing Axios talks about that
like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this
company would literally never make money.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write
about this like I think two years ago. Yeah, I
remember writing about this before. Eat the Musk have gone
full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are.
They're a cobbon credit company that makes cars.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by
a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars.
It's now the time. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Can you want to talk about the other one that's
driving these unhinged.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Sales, Yes, I do, because I have been driving around
San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of
cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs
to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck,
nor the people who need a pickup truck for work
by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks. And
so I did some digging and I discovered that the

(15:40):
IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are
rated over six pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle
weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the
mass of the vehicle if you drove it like off
the dealer lot onto a scale, that's the maximum operating
weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So

(16:00):
it's your tesla with I mean, they are very funny
videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts into the
back of the Tesla and being it's a great truck
for truck stuff.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
The other really funny one is when when they try
to attach like a winch to it and try to
use it to pull the pull heavy things in the
back of the truck comes off because it's just like
made of like.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
It's like like glue, like a unibody. Yeah, it might
not be a body on frame, like, it might not
be a proper truck. I actually don't know now how
stually I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's
I bet most of the electric or like high minage
pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually,
under it's called Section one seventy nine. Under Section one

(16:38):
seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating
over six thousand pounds, you can deduct up to thirty
one thousand in the first year rather than deducting the
depreciation of the capital good over time. Right, So instead
of instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that
you purchase your business over time and not paying tax

(16:58):
on that amount, you can not pay tax on thirty
one thousand in the first year of your vehicle if
it's over six thousand pounds.

Speaker 4 (17:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've
got a may bark or something really fucking heavy, so
that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla
Model X have the GBWR above that. With a truck,
there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to
have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment,
that is six feet or more in length. So the

(17:27):
cyber truck just happened to have a six foot bed. Yeah,
so you can deduct one hundred percent of value in
the first year from what I understand for these vehicles
which have a six foot bed. At least this was
the case when I was looking. I became aware of
the exact nature of this when I went on the
Cyber Truck Owners Club forum and looked what tax deduct
peoples were doing, right, and then I worked back from there,

(17:49):
and it does seem that people are doing this. I
think it might be changing. So you can only deduct
a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear
that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I
qualified to do so. Accountant, This is not this is
not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the
IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit. Right, that's a credit, not
a deduction, So the deduction would discount the amount of

(18:13):
your income that you pay tax on versus the credit,
which is just great credit. So potentially the person could
deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost
of wrapping the fucking cyber truck ruck to prove it's
a business vehicle, and then if you're wrapping it. From
what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the
percentage of the vehicle's use that is business. I guess

(18:34):
this could be like the equivalent of fringes on the
flag tax theory, people claiming that when they're driving their
their cyber truck to go to Whole Foods but it's wrapped,
they're advertising a business, so it's a business use. I
don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but well,
you know, but.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Part of this is, like it's very easy, like especially
right now when the irs is being gutted, Like it's
very easy to do this kind of bullshit.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
And people are not getting all it did.

Speaker 4 (19:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, so they can take a seven thy five hundred
commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much,
and like you would struggle to persuade me that that
is not why a lot of people are buying cyber
trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got
the bed size. Like it's a lot of people who
wouldn't necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds. Now,

(19:25):
I will never buy a new drug because I can't
find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement
and larger than six foot bed and four by four
and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year.
But like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks
that apply. And like for a truck with a six
foot bed and a six thousand pound gross vehicle weight rating,
the cyber truck's pretty small and it fits kind of

(19:48):
with people who don't actually need a work truck that
can none the less take advantage of the work truck
tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing
the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.

Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, well,
you know, you'll see a bunch of things about how
Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right,
and part of it is from this but also you know,
and this is this is the other aspect of this.
It's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out
today by Amanda Mold that talks about how fifty percent

(20:21):
of all American consumer spending is now by people who
in the top ten percent of the income bracket, so
people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year
or more, and that means increasingly that everything in the
United States reflects the you know, the sort of like
cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who
all also want to buy this for their sort of

(20:42):
like like cultural grudges and you know, to like to
own the libs and like show how like much of
a fucking man they are. Yeah, and you know, and
and and so you already you have that initial incentive,
and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax
incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like,
definitely this is like designed with a shit in mind.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say,
it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like
a culture war signifier.

Speaker 4 (21:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
In addition to all those things, I guess people also
like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash
against people who own tesla's. If you go on the
day we're recording, the top article on the front page
of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post
is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car,
and it's got a picture of Musk Zeke hyling on

(21:27):
people's teslas in Boston. Ye shout out to that person.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Yeah, okay, So we're going to take a break and
when we come back, we're going to sort of finish
this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of
how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.

(21:51):
We are back now, I think this all. I think
if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard
of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of
most of what I've said to some extent. I don't
think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something
deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here
is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also

(22:13):
a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all
been living in for decades now. It's a product of
an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Knesianism.
So regular knesianism, right, is about you know, having the
government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like,
let's not sort of like chigarcoat it, but it's about

(22:34):
using a bunch of state money to like make there
be jobs and using this to sort of I don't
know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending,
but it's like they want to use the state to
spend money to make there be jobs and to put
money into the economy and to put goods into the
economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Knesianism is still the
state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's the

(22:56):
state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of
incentives entries of sort of tax structures, and specifically also
very much in terms of the federal reserves interest rates,
specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also you know,
and you know the reason he calls it assets, right,
because it's not just stocks, right, it's also things like
real estates. It's to increase the value of speculative assets,

(23:18):
things that you buy because you think it's going to
be worth more later. I have talked about this a
lot on this show. This has been the fundamental the
global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever
since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the eighties.
As after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire
domestic sort of export manufacturing economy through the Plaza Accords.

(23:39):
And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who
listened to the show will be able to explain what
the Plazative Cords and the River's Plasai Accords are from.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
We stop it won't happen here after that because you'll
understand and you'll stop it.

Speaker 8 (23:49):
Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of
the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the
US forces all of these countries to increase to value
if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes
American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing.
These countries need to find another place to you know,
develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution

(24:11):
Japan comes to is real estate speculation, this blows up,
This blows up. In the nineties, this is this is
a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse
stuff is from this, and then the US is forced
to do the reverse Plasea Cords in the nineties is
Bill Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American and
manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest,
like proper Japanese manufactory to keep their economy from completely employing.

(24:32):
Japan's a number two economy in the world at that point.
But again this means that the US has now been
doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts,
where like to try to stop a market collapse that
was obviously coming with a tech bubble bleuw up. Green
Span kept cutting the interest rates over and over again,
trying to keep the bubble from collapsing. It just making
it bigger, and then eventually it blew up. This is
what two thousand and eight is was, you know, we

(24:53):
did a whole bubble. I mean there's another bubble and
collapse between there. But like you know, and this is
what we've been doing for the last two decades, Like
since two and eight, we've been creating this giant tech bubble,
and this tech bubble shit, and this sort of asset
speculation is also a huge part of the value of
Tesla stock is just you know, people who've been given
a whole a whole bunch of access to cheap credit
and by and by people, I mean like not really
you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people

(25:15):
have access to like incredibly cheap loans, and they use
that money to buy Tesla stock. This is the sort
of cyclical thing that just continues to increases the value
of the company. And it's not just sort of like
banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into
Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yeah, from
a bunch of bunch of of a whole bunch of
different countries, and also like a huge number of American states,

(25:37):
Like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
because pension reform. But the way that we sort of
like lost the pension as a normal thing was that
it was you know, it was converted to four one case,
and the people who still have like regular state pensions,
all of that money is now sort of invested in
the stock market and it puts billions of dollars into
Tesla every year. And so this is also another aspect.

(25:59):
This is this is the brought structural level on which
on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to create a
bunch of companies like Tesla and then US sort of
like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to tax credits
and you know all of these government contracts that they've
been given to do like everything from like fucking build
these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right,

(26:21):
and like the US is like contract he got started.
Like now, I mean like all of this stuff, right,
is is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but
there is a third.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Even deeper level in which you know, we can look
at at how how these cars are actually produced and
how these rockets are actually produced, and they're produced by
just incredible the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers.
And I think people tend to think about, you know,
Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all
over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in shing John,

(26:54):
you know, there's factories all over China, and you know,
these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit they work
in unbelievably dangerous conditions, and at the end of the
day they get a very small amount of money so
that the richest man in the world can get fucking
richer every day.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient parts to
Tesla's right, you know that we we just addressed, for instance,
in our episode on Congo. Yeah, there are parts of
your test Geotesla that come out of this country where
there has been a war for as long as most
of us has been alive. Really very little effort has

(27:29):
gone into improving conditions for people there. Certainly for workers.
They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy
and to like Mia and my four for a one
k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo
to an extent and elsewhere in the world.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah, and you know this is something there's something our
standard of living is based off of. But at the
end of the day, right Eon Musks, all of Elon
Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States monopoly
on violent is used to stop all of these people
from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order
to stop these people from taking back the fucking value

(28:08):
that they create. Now, Unfortunately, all of this sort of
neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right,
this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have
everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this
sort of like non politics where you're voting for two
parties that are like literally even more the same than
they are.

Speaker 5 (28:29):
Now.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
This attempt to do things like solve climate change to
these to these promotion of carbon markets and create the
sort of like stable like capitalist sogeniminy forever has ultimately
been self defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital
inevitably fail, because the functioning of the capitalist system, and
particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism
has worked, has concentrated like the most wealth ever held

(28:54):
by a single human being into the hands of one
guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use
their wealth to cubate political power and seize control of
the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them.
And you can't solve this problem with regulation because again,
eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and
eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve this problem just

(29:17):
by killing them. I see people talk about like the
killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this,
and like a that's all political faction, lane fighting stuff,
and they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like
the Chinese workers, so that they never have to fucking
watch the pla get right out of Shanghai again. But
the thing is, even if somehow you use the state
to just kill them, right, it doesn't work, because capitalism

(29:39):
will just produce more of these people. If you actually
want to stop this, if you want to stop this
elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly
ending all life on earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons,
and so they're simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop
someone from accidentally setting one off. You were going to
have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power,

(30:02):
the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire,
the power of the dictator, must be broken. This tiny
group of men cannot as a class, be allowed to
own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply
chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must
belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way
to save this world is to take it back. If

(30:22):
we want to save democracy, the only way to do
it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon
Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the
workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the
despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves
us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule,
They must cease to exist not as individuals but as

(30:43):
a class. And the only way to do that is
by giving control of their power, and their property and
their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of
it in the first place. That is the tax that
we have in front of us. The challenge that we
face is that we face effectively the entire might of
the American state, which is the one of the most
powerful apparatus of repression that has ever been built. Our

(31:04):
advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being
run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are and
I cannot emphasize this enough. Maybe the two figures most
emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's after his extensive
study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions Podcast,
concluded to be the great idiots of history who either

(31:25):
their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision
at every single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And
if these people are not the great idiots of history
that allow us to bring them down and stop them
from destroying everything that has ever been in this world
that is good, then nothing else is.

Speaker 7 (31:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
We have the one great stroke of a good foiltime
we have, right, is that that the old Paris been
concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted
to diet coke and being mad at that.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
You'll yep, And they you know, we have already seen.
They don't understand how this apparatus works.

Speaker 5 (32:06):
Right.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
They fired the nuke police by accident.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of
the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to
make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea
that like the great debate of our time is how
much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered
anarcha capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool
aid that got them in power. That is the one

(32:32):
thing going in our favor right now, that they are
dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe
the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could
be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have
is that they have been they have said about systematically
alienating every single group of people who they would need
as their political base. They are pissing off the military,
they are pissing off the intelligence services. They are going through,
and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states.
You know, like the farmers obviously do not have that
like don't fucking matter, but they're picking They're pissing off
the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing

(33:07):
off a whole bunch of the of the of the country.
Scientific resources. They're going through, They're like fucking with the
Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off
every single group of people on earth who matter, and
people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know,
the other big thing that we have right now is

(33:27):
that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by
by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he
would do, and by pulling apart his base of support,
and by putting together coalitions of some of these people
and not all of them, some of them. Some of
them you just need to divide and conquer by getting
them out from backing him, right, Like the whole thing
with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was

(33:48):
that but people just mostly stayed home and that was
how they won. Like that's that is largely what we need.
We need these people to stay home. But these people
can and will if we have anything to say about it,
be fucking we'sriven home and hopefully we can bury both
the grave diggers and the people whose graves they were
digging in the same spot in the dust bit of
history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.

Speaker 4 (34:31):
Welcome to it could happen here to show that things
falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined today by
a special guest host, Richard's Todd. Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 9 (34:42):
Ah, thank you, so much for having me. I am
completely excited to be here. I am a listener of
the show, so it feels like getting to be on
a show that I actually freak out too often.

Speaker 4 (34:51):
And I'm very excited for you to be here because
you have a special report on one of the people
who I've been cyberstalking for you, and I'm very excited
to hear the details of what she's been up to
these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough
overview because again because of my cybers talking, but I've

(35:13):
not done a deep dive the way you have, So
I'm very excited to hear an update on this on
this character.

Speaker 9 (35:19):
So it sounds like we are in a similar place
when it comes to this person, and this person is
none other than Candice Owens. First of all, what are
your thoughts on her? Because I am low key fascinated
with her. I follow her on social media, I watch
her videos like I am.

Speaker 7 (35:33):
Like weirdly captivated by her.

Speaker 4 (35:36):
I mean, I've I've covered her mostly through her involvement
with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind
of how that'll fell apart, you know, like a year
and a half ago or so, I've talked a little
bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk,
and she's just kind of been one of like these
like randomly, you know, like like orbiters, like the online

(35:57):
like right wing content sphere for like I don't know,
the past six years at least, and I typically focused
more on like you know, like the Ben Shapiro's, the
Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Stephen
Crowders and stuff. But Candas was always just like around
and like she definitely like went after a different demographic
than what like my usual focuses, right Like I'm focused
on like what's going on with straight white men, like

(36:21):
why why are they like this? And who who is
targeting them? And you know, and that's you know, that's
like the Matt Walsh, like Stephen Crowder kind of angle.
Like Candas Owens has like a kind of a broader
net that she targets with her content. So like she's
always kind of come up as like a side character.
I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus
on her before besides just you know whatever kind of

(36:41):
crazy post or like you know, anti trans or like
very like weird like racist rank that she goes on
like every once in a while.

Speaker 9 (36:48):
Yes, so there is so much to talk about when
it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you,
like I sort of saw her as a side character,
but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in
my life life are listening to Candace Owens and citing
Candace Owens and they have no idea any about her,
anything about her backstory.

Speaker 7 (37:07):
Yeah, all the stuff that you that you were just
talking about.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
She's like reinvented herself like multiple times. And you know,
some people who mainly come at this from like the
anti fascist research perspective might not be aware of her
like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear
about today. Yes, I just remembered how she had that
whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM
documentary that was a whole other Candace era. Yeah, so much,

(37:31):
My god.

Speaker 9 (37:32):
I have to say I was like low key embarrassed
for her because like during her Kanye West era, she
was like, Kanye West designed the katore outfits for my
Blexit movement, and Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't,
And like I was like, Oh, they're so embarrassing that
you like that, you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West,

(37:52):
only for him to basically like diss you publicly right
after Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
And then come out as like an explicit neo Nazi
like two weeks later.

Speaker 7 (38:02):
Yes, yes, uh, Candace girl.

Speaker 9 (38:04):
So I want to talk about her, like, I don't
want to spend too much time on her background, but
there are some pieces that I think like are good
for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure
that she's been totally if there is not like a
behind the bastard's on her, do you know, if there is,
there should be If there's not.

Speaker 4 (38:20):
Not yet, Like similarly on bastards, she's been one of
these like recurring characters, Oh my god, but she has
not had a distinct focus.

Speaker 9 (38:27):
Robert Evans, get on it, because we need the Candace
Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut.
While she was a student there, she went through this
horrible sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her like this
racist death threat on her voicemail. That turned into like
a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the
student who made that threat via voicemail, did so in

(38:52):
a car with a group of students that included the
sun of the then mayor and then future Democratic Governor
of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy. So she got tons of support
from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family
ended up suing the Stamford Board of Education in federal
court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a
thirty seven thousand, five hundred dollars settlement. She went on

(39:13):
to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
This is like the early two thousands.

Speaker 9 (39:19):
Yes, this was like young, like baby Candace, high school
Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today. Yeah,
so I sort of like almost see a little bit
of myself and where she got her start. Like me,
She was an early adopter of using the Internet to
talk about things like race and politics.

Speaker 7 (39:39):
Like me.

Speaker 9 (39:39):
That also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot
of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early
days of blogging. Like in twenty fifteen, she was writing
blogs making fun of Trump's penis size.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Sure, many such cases.

Speaker 7 (39:53):
Yes, many such cases.

Speaker 9 (39:56):
So in twenty fifteen, Owens is running a blog called
Degree one eighty, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans,
writing about the quote that shit crazy antics of the
Republican tea Party. The good news is they will eventually
die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope, and
then we can get right on with the obvious social
change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog.

(40:18):
So back then she was really someone who had like
a progressive point of view and was doing a lot
of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing
in politics at the time.

Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people
might not know if they've only like become aware of
her through daily wires. Yeah, like in the pre twenty
sixteen like BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere. She was just
like one of like these people who would yeah, have
like like you know, progressive like ish takes, criticize embarrassing
like politicians, and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then

(40:52):
the degree to which this this like heel turn happens
is like one of the most stark examples I've seen
in like a cop I don't know, I'm trying to
think of it. If there's like any like exact parallel.
I don't know, like there's like certainly some like detransition
like a grifters. There used to be like ex gay
influencers or you know this like like proto influencers kind

(41:12):
of before influencers were a thing like x gay speakers.
But yeah, the switch around on Candace from these blog
posts is so concentrated.

Speaker 9 (41:23):
So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
There you go.

Speaker 7 (41:27):
Yeah, how it happened is like fascinating to me.

Speaker 9 (41:31):
So in twenty sixteen, when Gamergate was in full swing,
Owen's launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy,
which she described as a way to catalog the abuses
of trolls and cyberbullies. Fun fact that Kickstarter is still
up today, it is such a weird time capsule of
a different time. There's like a video of her speaking
earnestly about the need to like have the Internet be

(41:52):
a like.

Speaker 7 (41:52):
Safer, more equitable landscape.

Speaker 9 (41:55):
It is nuts, Like people shall go listen to her
speaking about this project. So the plan for this project
was essentially that she would create a way to de
anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their
real names and their real life employers. And what's so
funny is that, like that is the very same argument

(42:15):
that a lot of people use, people who like want
to restrict the open Internet still use today that like
problems on the Internet, online harassment and abuse would all
be improved if only everybody had to use their government
idea and government names to access the Internet. And so like,
it's very funny that that idea it was bad then,
and it didn't really die, it was just recycled into today.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
Yeah, I mean, like there's a version of this that happens,
or at least it kind of used to happen more
in regards to like anti fascist research, where like you're
like identify specific like extremely racist accounts or like explicit
neo Nazis and contact their employer in in an attempt
to get to get them fired so they can focus
on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than
doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like,

(43:02):
you know, a member of like a group, whether that
be you know, the Proud Boys back in the day
or many many other groups Patriot Prayer now, Patriot Front,
that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic
is soon to be by people like Candice and the
Daily Wire people. But here she's advocating it herself exactly,
and they just like post Anita Sarkisian kind of content

(43:24):
like world.

Speaker 9 (43:25):
Yeah, so pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea,
including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember
was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was
like viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and docs, and
she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and
said so publicly as you can probably guess, like people

(43:48):
like Milo Gyanopolis loved this. People who were promoters of
Gamergate really hyped up Owens's claims that like, yes, feminists
were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
Okay, I can see this is going.

Speaker 9 (44:01):
So this event is what Owen's credits with her turn
from progressive to quote becoming a red pilled radical. She says,
I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were
actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls. She starts
promoting right wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself
quote red pill black, which I gotta say is like

(44:23):
pretty good branding, Like, I'm not mad at the branding there.
I was like, Okay, black woman talking about like right
wing stuff, red pill.

Speaker 7 (44:30):
Black I get it. I get it.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was
a consideration here. Oh yes, how much your kickstarter god
versus how much she realized she could get if she
jumped on the other side of the content churn.

Speaker 9 (44:45):
Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder
of Turning Points USA Right, and he hires her almost immediately.
She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well,
that her videos really go viral. Video where she's doing
things like dismissing the twenty seventeen white supremacist Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co

(45:08):
host some of his info War shows. She's doing stints
on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like business is
booming for Candace Owens from this.

Speaker 4 (45:15):
Turn Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her.

Speaker 9 (45:19):
Yes, in twenty twenty one, she joins up with The
Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring
Candace like it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville,
fun fact, there was even a House joint resolution House
Joint Resolution three fifty, a resolution in the Tennessee government
to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for

(45:40):
her work at Daily Wire. That reads whereas miss Owens
has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans
through her activism in support of President Trump as a
black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and
leftist political tyranny.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Very cool stuff.

Speaker 9 (45:57):
Yeah, imagine it being like a joint resolution in your
local government when you move someplace.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
Yeah, the governor of Tennessee was like super excited when
the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought
in all these people. Like there was there was like
so many like private dinners meetings. There was like a
like a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to
Tennessee in this like twenty twenty one period as they
were just starting to like launch their own like streaming

(46:26):
service website, which is why they recruited Candice is because
they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.

Speaker 9 (46:33):
So you would think that this should be like a
match made in heaven, right, smooth sailing. They need insidiary
content creators. She's an insidiary content creator. Should be a
match made in heaven. Perfect Not quite, because things end
in like this really messy public fallout just a few
years later. So I know that you've done episodes on

(46:53):
this from my perspective, and I would love to know
what you think. It's not one hundred percent clear what
went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and
Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it
seemed to be like related to reactions around the situation
in Gaza.

Speaker 4 (47:11):
Yeah, totally so.

Speaker 7 (47:13):
Ben Shapiro is Jewish and Owens, as we.

Speaker 9 (47:15):
Said, has said and done like a lot of anti
Semitic stuff, like a lot and.

Speaker 4 (47:20):
Like actual anti Semitic stuff like that people use that
as a way to like shut down like very very
admirable like like like Propelstinian like activism. No, like Candas
owns just is anti semitic and this it's like the
same thing with like Jackson Hinkele, and she made it
like an escalating series of anti semitic claims after October seventh,

(47:43):
which which slowly kind of like broke with the company
and ben like more and more and more of an
over series of a few months. Yes, and it's it's
it's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this
like online fight she had with Stephen Crowder like a
year or so prior when Daily Wire trying to recruit him,
and then she got informed about like how like abusive

(48:04):
he was to his wife, and then she went on
like a media blitz like against him as like as
he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire. She's
like very willing to like stir shit up, like even
if it like goes against her own interests or the
interests of like whatever company she works for, Like she is,
she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind
of like chaotic spectacle regardless of her own like you know,

(48:26):
financial security.

Speaker 9 (48:27):
I guess yes, like she I'm so glad that you
mentioned that she is not afraid to get down and
dirty in public. And I do think, like, you know,
as a black woman who works with a lot of
white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking, like,
I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't
want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black
woman or whatever.

Speaker 7 (48:48):
She it's it seems like.

Speaker 9 (48:49):
She has no such qualms, Like she is like I will,
I will make this a public, messy fight, and I
am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah,
and so it is really important to note that, like
as you said, she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state.
She was like getting into like blood liable and like
deep conspiracy theories.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Yeah, no, it was. There was some really nasty posts.

Speaker 9 (49:14):
Yeah, Like one of the things that she said, She's
claimed that Judaism was quote a pedophile centric religion that
believes in demons and child sacrifice, and that she was
waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like.

Speaker 7 (49:25):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 4 (49:26):
Not great, not good, not good.

Speaker 9 (49:29):
So, as you said, like this starts to become like
a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter,
no one can serve two masters and ended her post
writing you cannot serve both God and money, which Ben Shapiro,
her boss, tweets like quote tweeted, oh my God, Like Candice,
if you feel that taking money from the Daily Wire

(49:49):
somehow that comes between you and God, by all means quit,
Like messy is there It's crazy.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
That instead of having like a company meeting, they were
just doing this on Twitter.

Speaker 9 (50:00):
Oh my god, and my messy ass was eating it up.
I was like, keep fighting, let him fight.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I'm totally willing to like watch this,
watch this go down. I do not want to get involved,
right right right.

Speaker 9 (50:12):
Owens like went on took her Carlson Show and said
that Ben Shapiro was quote acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged
for weeks now. She said that Shapiro quote crossed a
certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself
into it, I will not tolerate it.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Very cool.

Speaker 9 (50:28):
Yeah, So, at one point, Owens tweets that she wants
Ben Shapiro to have a public like debate with her,
moderated by podcaster Patrick Bett Davide. Ben Shapiro was having
none of this, he tweets, Candice, I can see why
you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who
said we should rename our company quote daily Jewish Wire
just yesterday.

Speaker 7 (50:48):
No Jesus one on one Monday at.

Speaker 9 (50:50):
Five, we can sit down and have a healthy debate
like adults, and we'll live stream it on x and YouTube.
Take it or leave it as to the true reason
why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down
with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back
in February. I have no idea what the hell you're
talking about. Like, this is employer employee going at it
on Twitter.

Speaker 4 (51:08):
I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not
just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer.
But it's a really it's a really tough situation here.

Speaker 9 (51:18):
Yeah, I feel the same way, because, like it's just
not a great look to have somebody that you just
hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this
on Twitter, like and I think, I mean, this is
just my opinion, so like take that for what it's worth,
just as somebody who has worked in media and been
around the block. The reason why I'm not comfortable saying
like their feud was entirely based on Owens's anti Semitic

(51:40):
comments and behavior is that she just went so hard
and so public that something to me, I almost wonder
if there was like a contract dispute here that like
she was like, oh, I can make more money on
my own totally gotta get out of this contract or something,
because like it just doesn't smell right.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
I mean, yeah, if she had like an inclination that
she could afford to lose his job because you might
make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely that
that would allow her to push this further than what
she might otherwise might Like there's been a lot of
a lot of discussion in the right wing contents fear
about like the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts despite still
getting paid like tens of millions of dollars, there is

(52:16):
like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization
because the Daily Wires like a company trying to make
a profit. So totally, I think there could absolutely be
other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more
like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one
thing or another.

Speaker 9 (52:32):
Yes, So, after Rabbi Schmooley Boteach criticized Owens for her
defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked to tweet asking Bouteach
if he was quote drunk on Christian blood again, And
I guess that was the final straw. A few days later,
Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owen's
tweeting the rumors are true, I am finally free. Okay,

(53:09):
So that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So
where is she now? Well, this is where the story
gets interesting because I had not heard from Candice Owens
in a minute, and my reintroduction to her appened recently,
and what I was trying to make sense of the
dispute between two Hollywood A listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
So the issue between Blake and Justin it's a little

(53:29):
bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting
story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy,
like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms
can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence
where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they
do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later.
Like that is my favorite thing in the world, Like,

(53:51):
please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that
my nosey ask and read it later and be like, ooh, messy.
So I do encourage like folks to read up on
it because it does go beyond just like two celebrities
having a feud, but you don't really need to know
the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version
is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a

(54:11):
movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover
called It Starts with Us. In December, Lively filed a
legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and
starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that
and has sued her. In response, both camps have released
information like emails, text messages, and video that attempting to
make the other look bad. So it has kind of

(54:34):
turned into one of those ink blot tests that changes
depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that
Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a
fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man, or
version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was
using her star power and a list celebrity network like

(54:55):
her husband Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool to control the narrative
around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody
on this project. Cool, yes, and so it's what's interesting
about this to me is that it's one of those
stories where algorithmically it depends on what silo or what
pocket of the Internet you're at sure to determine, like

(55:16):
what version of this story you're getting, like much like
Johnny Depp's deformation lawsuits.

Speaker 4 (55:20):
Sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing.

Speaker 9 (55:22):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and so like, for whatever reason, TikTok
thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over
every nuance of how she is a fraud right like,
but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively,
we should.

Speaker 7 (55:37):
Be supporting her.

Speaker 9 (55:38):
Like. It's one of those situations where just depending on
where you are on the Internet, you might get a
very different impression of the public sentiment, leaning one way
or another.

Speaker 4 (55:46):
Yeah, yeah, this is all the types of things I
try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So, yes,
I do not like you, you know.

Speaker 9 (55:55):
So I was trying to get to the bottom of
it because I kept hearing about it, like everyone was
talking about it. So I'm talking to my cousins, who
I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are
not super online. It's like they're not like you and me,
They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or
anything like that.

Speaker 4 (56:11):
No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun
Slash four works.

Speaker 9 (56:16):
Yes, yeah, and my cousins are like, oh my god,
there is this black girl journalist who has been following
everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea
will tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens. Okay, so
all right, you know, Candace has been making so many
videos off of this and like her coverage, if you

(56:37):
coverage in quotes, has really taken off online. As The
Cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens has
gone mainstream, they write the right wing commentators coverage of
the Blake Lively Justin Baldonnie case has reached millions of viewers.
Owens podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case,
deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds'

(56:58):
recent snl Fiftheist Anniversary Space Secal appearance. One listener said,
she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies
and some of the things Blake Lively said, rather than
us having to go through it on our own.

Speaker 4 (57:08):
Ah. Of course, it's the woman who's lying about being
sexually harassed of course.

Speaker 9 (57:14):
One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen
seems to have a pro Buldani bias, but she doesn't
care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the
fact that this is not a feminist issue at all,
that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here,
she's uniting the left and the right.

Speaker 7 (57:30):
The right wing Women's.

Speaker 9 (57:31):
Magazine also published a headline about this, saying how Candice
Owens is uniting conservatives and liberal with her it ends
with US coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has
really allowed her to attract.

Speaker 7 (57:44):
A lot more viewers beyond her like normal right.

Speaker 9 (57:47):
Wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot
of white men like that who was really listening to
her content before when she was with Dailey Wier. Now
she has really branched out. So like normy, like my
cousins who have no idea who Owens is, have no
idea her background, her past, the work that she has done,
and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist,

(58:09):
like digging and getting the dirt.

Speaker 4 (58:10):
I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I
assume YouTube as well. She also just like trying to
like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reachs. Is
this kind of part of how she's trying to like
expand her reach.

Speaker 9 (58:22):
It is like she's everywhere, and then she has her
longer form podcast than YouTube. But then clips of her
like you know, breaking down the top lies or top
inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said. Those go
super viral on social media. The short clips yeah okay,
and all of this has been just gangbusters for her

(58:43):
growth and engagement.

Speaker 7 (58:44):
Here's how The Cut put it.

Speaker 9 (58:45):
Since Owen started covering the Lively Baldani case, her YouTube
channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a
much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives
she is amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively
racks up at least one point five million views. In
the past month alone, Owens has i asked more than
four hundred and fifty thousand new subscribers on YouTube, and

(59:07):
her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year.
This is according to data from the platform's social blade
oh No. Over the past three months, her audience on
YouTube has almost started skewing sixty five percent female according
to data provided by a spokesperson, a market shift from
her past fan base. So yeah, she's exploding in popularity.

(59:27):
She's everywhere, and now she's attracting like normy women who
are just coming in for the celebrity dispute.

Speaker 4 (59:33):
Yeah, that's probably not gonna end well.

Speaker 7 (59:36):
Huh, well, I don't think it will end well.

Speaker 9 (59:39):
You know, I was like racking my brain trying to
figure out, like, why has this story taken off so
much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons.
I think this is like working for her. One, I
hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting
to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive
voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point

(59:59):
of view when a clear voice and a perspective, and
that really that really comes through when she's breaking down
Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of
speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to
the listener like this person is really breaking it down.
It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media
when someone is like story time or like I'm about

(01:00:19):
to tell you all the details of something. Those videos
always perform very well on social media, and I think
that Owens is is just very good at knowing how
to hold somebody's attention online, Like I have to say it.

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
Sure, I mean she's been doing the content churn for
almost a decade now, Like, yeah, you you do get
good at it on like a technical proficiency level.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (01:00:42):
Also, you know, we just love good old fashioned misogyny.
And if that misogyny can be laced with like a
conspiracy theory, oh yeah, I think.

Speaker 7 (01:00:51):
That's it's even better.

Speaker 9 (01:00:53):
So, like I think that part of this is just
like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny.
I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, massage noire,
or racism, all of that is like baked into the
experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug.
And I think that Omens takes it even further because
she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy.

(01:01:16):
Like it's not just let's talk about about Blake Lively,
it's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm gonna
I'm gonna expose Blake Lively's dark truth, right, and so like,
of course that's gonna take off.

Speaker 4 (01:01:28):
And she does gain this element of authority because she's
a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better
about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay
to I mean, this is this is the same thing
that she was able to weaponize for all of her,
like like yo, anti black lives matter stuff for all
of her, like like racism isn't real things. She tries
to use it to her advantage, mostly to make like

(01:01:51):
white members of her audience like feel good about their
own racism because a black woman told them it's actually
okay and like that. That's been like a big part
of her career the past few years exactly that.

Speaker 9 (01:02:03):
And I think like she really understands that the inviting
power of taking what you might think of as like
a contrarian stance on something like yeah, totally, like after
the Me Too movement, how many women got engagement by
taking a contrarian stance, right, Like, I think going against
the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to
automatically support the woman in this in this dispute probably

(01:02:26):
makes people tuning into omens's breakdowns feel like they're like
free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know,
by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects
to her more odious stances on things like trans people
and women and Jewish people.

Speaker 3 (01:02:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
No, I mean, like you see the same thing with
like you know, like the gays against Groomer's thing, right
wing trans influencers, detrans influencers. It's the same, like gambit.
And certainly I think, like, yeah, like your identification of
her as like a professional contrarian is like very very
key to her success exactly.

Speaker 9 (01:02:59):
I also think like part of the reason why people
are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for
like fantasy world building, and I think I really see
the ways that she injects that into her coverage, even
the word coverage I put that in worlds because like
she is like a wild person. To her coverage is
like also wild. She does not adhere to, as she

(01:03:19):
puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting.

Speaker 4 (01:03:22):
You know, I'll take her word for that one, you
know what, I'll.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
Believe her on that that single point.

Speaker 7 (01:03:27):
Yeah, I believe her.

Speaker 9 (01:03:29):
I believe that, you know, she amplifies rumors and even
once she read a letter that she said that she
got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach
when he was twelve, and to Kenneth Owens, his acting
coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
You know what, I also believe it.

Speaker 9 (01:03:48):
I oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like
her coverage, it includes like side.

Speaker 4 (01:03:54):
Characters, Yeah, things that have this whatsoever? I mean, yeah,
I feel like this, this focus on like this like
conspiratorial ben is like the same. She's using the same
tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for
like most of our political work, like it, it's she's
using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually
she like reaches this like stress point or this like

(01:04:14):
threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she
can't see a way to surpass it, and then she
does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog, this
happened even at the Daily Wire. She does not she
doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And like this,
this new pivot is learning. Hey, it's sup super lucrative
to be like a tabloid entertainment quote unquote journalist. Very easy,

(01:04:35):
super lucrative, and all of the tactics you learned on
the right wing media sphere work great here, Like all
of this, like conspiratorial thinking really uh, a disregard for
like like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort
of like rumor based reporting, and it spreads like crazy,
And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you
aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right.

(01:04:59):
This this can be so much more broad to like
the giant audience of like you know, quote unquote like
a political people go to these platforms for a form
of like of like escapism and entertainment rather than just
hearing about politics yet again, because that's you know, very
very tiring.

Speaker 9 (01:05:15):
Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it
is sort of sort of connected. Like Ben Shapiro, nobody
cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than
Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like I don't
care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with
like Beyonce and Meg thee Stallion, Like it was just
like a negative obsession. Like yeah, you know, anti fandom

(01:05:37):
is still fandom when you make video after video about
how much you don't like Meg thea stallion in a
kind of way, you are a fan, just in the
opposite direction. And so I think that Candice Owens really
took that and learned how to perfect it because she
is much I think that she is much better at
this than Ben Shapiro is.

Speaker 7 (01:05:53):
Like the evidence being that, like.

Speaker 9 (01:05:54):
Her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would
never watch any any of Ben Schipper here, I was content.

Speaker 4 (01:06:01):
The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wires
first film, Lady Ballers left us on a cliffhanger with
with Candas Owans and Matt Walsh sitting in a car
talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot
of the film as like as like some kind of
scheme or like social experiment, and you know, it was

(01:06:21):
implied there would be more. You know, it was like
a you know, like Avengers Nick Fury type post credit scene.
And now we're never gonna learn what Candae OANs and
Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company.
She's now doing her own thing. So now we just
had this dangling plot thread that's just gonna bug me forever,
Like what does the Candae Owan's character at the end
of Lady Ballers Do next. I'm gonna be thinking about

(01:06:43):
this for like years.

Speaker 7 (01:06:44):
America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that
out there, I think we do deserve closure.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
I just think my closure is gonna be a little
bit different.

Speaker 4 (01:06:54):
I am. I'm very fine having all of these plot
threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see
that in the cards immediately.

Speaker 9 (01:07:12):
So in terms of where she's at now, like you know,
my question is like, has Owens has this kind of
like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass. Has
she changed her views she is she trying to do
a rebrand or a pivot. In an interview, she said,
in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've
been anti METO since long before it was cool.

Speaker 4 (01:07:34):
Sure, I mean that can be true. It's also true
that she is getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint. Which, yeah,
then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able
to slip in more things that I would find on
Savory to a larger audience over time, But she also
might be content to keep growing that and be slightly
less off putting in the meantime, but no, like there's

(01:07:57):
also just a huge audience for like the anti woke backlash,
antiemetwo stuff right now. Like that's kind of that's kind
of like the new mainstream frankly, so I am certain
that she's going to try to continue to like flex
that and grow that in the in the next few
months years.

Speaker 7 (01:08:12):
Yeah, so I agree with you.

Speaker 9 (01:08:14):
I believe Owens when she says that, like her stances
have not changed much easy to be like, Oh, well,
she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these
like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity.
And you can, honestly, you can sort of see some
of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like she
was sort of known for having very severe hair, the

(01:08:34):
joke being that she had alienated herself so much from
her fellow black people, but like, no black person was
going to do her hair, and that's why it looks
that way. But lately you've really seen this like softening.
She's kind of going for like a softer public look.
She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched
out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and
some kind of a fitness program.

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
That makes sense. Yeah, totally, like the health Guru fitness
entertainment bubble. Yeah that's huge.

Speaker 7 (01:09:02):
That's such a good grift. She's gonna make so much money.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
Yeah, yeah, she is.

Speaker 9 (01:09:07):
But I really agree with you, gaire that, like, I
think that these new followers are certainly going to be
walked down a pipeline that includes for extremist attitude just
using celebrity scandal as a hook, because, like as you said,
celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for
a lot of people. So like, people who care about
extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as

(01:09:31):
a space that they need to pay too close of
attention to about these stories that you might see on
the cover of an US weekly. But these stories actually
can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash
them in a whole new audience.

Speaker 4 (01:09:43):
I'm like, yeah, like.

Speaker 9 (01:09:43):
You were saying, if you are just like watching a
podcast because you're want to be entertained about a story
about two celebrities, you might not have your like bullshit
detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content,
because it's it's seen and treated as a less charge space.
And so you know that line of thinking that says
that you know, this is just fluff, It doesn't really

(01:10:04):
matter what happens in celebrity news is not incorrect. It
is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more
susceptible to to it when extremist content is slipped in
without even really realizing it.

Speaker 4 (01:10:15):
I mean, and like that relates even to like the
originator of this gamer git stuff and the whole like
anti woke like media fandom content sphere right where so
much of like the anti book backlash has been built
on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke. Now
there's too many women in movies, there's too many black
people in commercials. Where do all the white people go,

(01:10:36):
There's too many gay people in TV, there's too many
trans people in TV, and like that is it is
definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons,
and you can very easily pivot back to that sort
of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively,
like this is this is a very small jump where
you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this

(01:10:58):
like anti woke framing like, you know, why is all
these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids?
You know, whether that be talking about you know, transactors
in the business, whether you be talking about you know,
like female lead or like diversity casting, like all all
that kind of stuff that especially Candice can use her
like contrarian position to speak on authority about talking about

(01:11:21):
why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people
of color? Or why is a woman the lead of
this thing when it should be actually a man? You know,
just like very very basic stuff that's been a part
of like the YouTube slop for a decade now, but
it's still like still takes in a lot of a
lot of clicks and it is it is a lot
of like the Daily Wire and like right wing content

(01:11:45):
still still does. It's all this like weird like culture
warst stuff. It's very very tightened with Hollywood. Like you
were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims, you know,
like hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative
to it, but he can't stop talking about it, like
he can't stop complaining about Disney's snow White. And I
can see Candice doing like the exact same thing, but
now with like an honestly like a bigger, a bigger,

(01:12:07):
more like a political audience that's much more malleable and
can be shaped around these like larger cultural trends. When
you think about this like perception of this backlash against wokeness, I.

Speaker 7 (01:12:17):
Absolutely think that's what we're gonna see.

Speaker 9 (01:12:19):
And I can tell you we can finish by I
can tell you about her next big pet issue, which
is going to be yes.

Speaker 7 (01:12:27):
Championing Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 9 (01:12:29):
Who she is no, no, no, So She's been interviewing
him since twenty twenty two, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
She explains, while he is quote an immoral man, he
is also a justice system.

Speaker 4 (01:12:43):
A victim, sure victim, And she says.

Speaker 9 (01:12:45):
I've always had faith in our court system, and now
it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder if
our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made
her think this is Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
It's wild. I mean, like Ben Shapiro is starting his
own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's gonna
be a lot of pressure on the courts right now.
I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump
as well. I think undermining the authority of the court,
I think is actually kind of part of this larger
concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now,
because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving

(01:13:16):
their right wing utopia is the court system. And I
you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part,
like Ben Shapiro, candastones aren't aren't like intentionally collaborating on this,
but they may be copying each other's trends. And if
they're seeing this this wider push across a large amount
of like the right wing content people to put pressure

(01:13:37):
on various aspects of the courts, including by using like
high profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Shouvin's, that's
not a great sign. And I can I can definitely
see them trying to trying to do that in conjunction.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
I guess yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:13:52):
I think we're going to see a lot more of it.
Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that
apparently tells his side of the story. Look out for that,
And I think that's the thing, like I think with
her content, like when asked why it was she thought
that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off. She
says that she believes her new fans on the left

(01:14:13):
quote have just kind of gotten wise to the fact
that maybe women lie just like men. And so I
just implore folks that, like, even if you think that
you're just like retaking in this content because you're following
fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to
go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted,
or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs, a stance

(01:14:34):
at Candace herself that's actually advocated for despite very obviously
being a working woman. And so I don't think we
should trust Candace Owens even if she does this rebrand, Like,
don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity
investigative journalist. Like she put all of these odious views
out into the worlds, and I don't want her to
be able to like soften it or you know, soften

(01:14:56):
what it is that she advocates for, what it is
that she believes in, if that is truly what she's
trying to do to just sort of like a mass
a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it if
you're if you're getting tagged in Candace Owens videos, just
know what she actually is about.

Speaker 4 (01:15:10):
I mean, yeah, I think I think for our audience,
it's it's more likely that you'll have like family members
who are going to be finding this stuff, and you
should find a list of sources. Maybe this this episode included,
but probably you know, you can find some articles as
well that theyk of some background on Candace's history and
and and previous beliefs. Can pick and choose some of

(01:15:30):
her most like outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends
you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively
are kidnapping children or something, you can you can maybe
inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything
this Candice Owen's character is saying.

Speaker 7 (01:15:48):
Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money,
might not be on the level.

Speaker 9 (01:15:53):
No, yeah, inform an Auntie today, Yes that's right, and.

Speaker 7 (01:15:58):
Uh, that's all I got. That's it. I don't know
how you usually end these episodes.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has
been an interesting dive into the life of a woman
with many, many careers, many a chameleon many personalities, A chameleon,
a chameleon of contrarianism.

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
Oh I like that.

Speaker 7 (01:16:21):
If I ever write a book about her, that'll be
the title.

Speaker 4 (01:16:24):
Jesus Christ. Oh what a nightmare that would be. Man
scary bridget Where can people find you online?

Speaker 9 (01:16:32):
You can find me on my podcast. There are our
girls on the internet on this network. iHeartRadio. I mean
you can find me on Instagram at bridget Ran DC
or on Blue Sky at bridget Time.

Speaker 4 (01:16:41):
Well, thank you so much, good luck in d C.
Thanks for holding holding the line out there as Elon
puts a kildozer through your entire city.

Speaker 7 (01:16:51):
We're doing our best.

Speaker 4 (01:16:52):
I would would love to talk again about a DC update.
Maybe maybe next time you come on the show. Oh
my god, yes, please, there we go. Well we will
talk then, goodbye everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
It could happen here.

Speaker 4 (01:17:26):
I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top
fifteen highest endowment universities in the country, but I am
not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert
Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news
of students having their visas and or green cards revoked

(01:17:50):
by US customs in relation to anti genocide protests. James,
this is something that you've been putting together a piece
on for a while.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra like to no avail.

Speaker 1 (01:18:04):
Yes, yes, I do feel like we kind of saw
this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean
it's not bad. And specifically the case we're talking about today,
I think is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve
someone's student visa. Right. So I've been working for a
while on people who actually, under the Biden administration were

(01:18:28):
potentially facing deportation, right, But the material difference between that
and now is that those people were facing deportation because
the university removed their visas or the university removed them
from the university, and therefore their visa was no longer valid.
In this case, it seems that the order came directly

(01:18:48):
from the State Department to deport a guy whose name
is Mahoud Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in
the encampment Columbia, Right, But what's notable is that and
the events here, as best we can tell, went down
like this, referencing an ap article here that will link

(01:19:11):
in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door,
which is on university property, and told him that they
were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported.
He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa,
that he was a legal permanent resident right colloquially referred
to as a Green card holder. They then told him

(01:19:32):
or his lawyer. At some point, he got his lawyer
on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer.
They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the
green card, and at some point it's reported that they
attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen,
which of course is not a thing that ICE can do.
So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a

(01:19:53):
student visa is like the place I want to start
this because they are materially very different. Right. Student visas
are pretty fragile. People lose their student visas for lots
of things all the time. A green card is a
much higher barrier, and the revocation of his green card.
We spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly

(01:20:15):
kind of where this comes from. In Trump's missmatch of
executive orders and speeches, right, because after he was detained,
we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card.
We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right,
Rubio being a secretive of State, normally the green card

(01:20:35):
wouldn't be a state department thing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Now, it seems.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
The most likely course of events as far as we
can tell from what we know right now today's the
tenth of March, is that Ice came thinking he had
a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ice raids
to not have all the information on someone. From what
I understand, I mean, this is just a police thing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
Yes, it's not just like the caps who are doing
raids reoff and don't have all or accurate information.

Speaker 1 (01:21:03):
Yeah, Ice in particularly very often don't have a judicial warrant.
They have a warrant that they made they assign themselves,
which is a different thing. They're supposed to require warrant
to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now,
I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have,
and I think the apology also allowed for them to
allow Ice onto campus in like exigent circumstances. So we'll
have to see what exactly that warrant was for why

(01:21:25):
exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like
they came a temperature evoke this guy student visa, realized
you didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and
then kind of expos facto, the these tweets and statements
came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in. I mean,
Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right,

(01:21:47):
he uses the word aliens a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:21:49):
Yeah, So we've been trying to kind of figure out
the exact details of like what is going on, what
justification they have for doing this, and how we can
like extrapolate this out to larger trends because deporting like
legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also
the rhetoric coming out of the White House and like

(01:22:10):
the White House like social media accounts around this incident
is like extremely worrying, Like the way they're basically putting
up like wanted posters for protesters and in general, the
way that the White House account has been doing this
like own the Libs, like mimetic nationalism that the past
few weeks has been has been really upsetting. And this

(01:22:30):
has continued around this issue, and I think it is
worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation because
you had people like mamad U Tall, who I think
Cornell tried to revoke their student visa and then he's
in some way negotiated back into that to stay on.
The interim provost John Ceciliano eventually ruled in Tall's favor

(01:22:55):
so he did not end up getting deported last year.
And now this new development in relationship to the Columbia
protests is a significant escalation. Yeah, because not only is
this not just like the university revoking n F one,
which they do have the you know, authority to, this
is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they
are going after specific students without the involvement of the university,

(01:23:19):
and students who may be legal permanent residents.

Speaker 1 (01:23:21):
Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on white House dot
gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote to all
resident aliens who joined in the pro Jahadist protests, we
put you on notice. Come twenty twenty five, we will
find you and we will deport you.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
And that would seem to include the legal permanent residence. Yes, yeah, right,
like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like,
I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the
language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are
other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to
use that vagueness for things like this, right, like who

(01:23:56):
might see that as a benefit.

Speaker 4 (01:23:57):
Yeah, well, and you've seen that with other things, like
with like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people
right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They
leave the enforcement up to like individual actors, and then
they can eventually like figure out the logistics like in
court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal,
So like, yeah, it is vague because they want to

(01:24:18):
test the actual like full authority of their power. But
I think the specific like fact sheet, which is like
a sister article towards this executive order, says like James
was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in
the pro gihattist protests, we put you on notice. Come
twenty twenty five, we will find you and we will
deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas

(01:24:40):
of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses which have been
infested with radicalism like never before. So there you have
him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably
refers to Green cardholders, as well as student visas. So
these are two separate things that he a specifically named

(01:25:01):
as going after. And now you see more direction from
Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday. You see
more direction from Rubio and the State Department in like
specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and
targets for ice actions, which is not something that is
extremely common.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
Yeah, where I've seen it before was like in cases
of material support for terrorism, which but that has quite
a high bar of proof, right that's like a listed
organization proving a material ie financial or physical support, right
like in kind donations like I've written about a guy
who is providing material aid to the Islamic State called
Siki Remy's HODGEI sending stuff from bass pro actually like

(01:25:43):
thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But
that has a much higher bar than this, which we
will see you because we have a legal permanent resident
here and they're seeking to revoke that. I imagine we will
see a court case and we will see exactly the
justification for revoking his green in that court case. That
will be some time in the future.

Speaker 4 (01:26:04):
Let's go on a quick break and we will come
back to discuss some more of the details on what
Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all
end up. Okay, we are back. I would like to

(01:26:25):
talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has
been using since this arrest and a little bit of
what he was saying before. Like we were saying before
the break, some of this kind of vague language can
kind of be used to their advantage. And this is
certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump
would do on the campaign trail, right where he would
talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general,

(01:26:47):
regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or
just US citizens. Right like Trump has made statements about
wanting to do all of that, and campaigns like off
the cuff statements and the actual like government policy are
two different things. And right now, like they're trying to
figure out where the line between that is, like how
much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy.

(01:27:09):
And we mentioned like the fact sheet from the executive
order that I believe was signed in January, which is
you know, to quote unquote combat anti Semitism. And then
like last week, so before this arrest happened, we had
a post from the Secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account official quote,
those who support designated terrorist organizations, including HAMAS, threaten our

(01:27:32):
national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign
visitors who support terrorists. Violators of US law, including international students,
face visa denial or revocation and deportation unquote, So that
one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty pretty firmly on
people who have student visas. Right, he names like visitors,

(01:27:53):
And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different
statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be
revoking the visas and or green cards of HAMAS supporters
in America so that they can be deported unquote, sharing
an ap article. And then the Homeland Security DHS gov

(01:28:14):
account posted on March nine, twenty twenty five, and supported
President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti semitism, and in coordination
with the Department of State, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
arrested Mahmud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil
led activities aligned to hamas a designated terrorist organization ICE

(01:28:35):
in the Department of State are committed to enforcing President
Trump's executive orders and protecting US national security unquote. And
there's now been a flurry of posts from both the
White House account and DTS accounts basically posting like a
picture of this person saying that he's aligned with hamas
in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but

(01:28:58):
instead of just reads like arrested. And that is like
the that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now
on their official accounts, something that like James I think noted,
it's it's important to like think about if ICE was
just freestyling this action or if there was a directive
beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right, And it
seems like at least for the people like doing the raid,

(01:29:20):
they did not care nor did they like, no, they
weren't informed. They just were told to go after this
person from someone higher up, right, and that that very
well could be Rubio. I mean a lot of DHS
is being ran by Steven Miller right now. A lot
of this feels very Miller esque.

Speaker 1 (01:29:37):
Yeah, we got an update as of the time of recording.
I've just discovered that Mahud Khalil's lawyers filed the lawsuit
challenging gives attention and a judge in New York City,
federal judge obviously or that Khalil shouldn't be deported while
that court then considered his case.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
Yes, I was going to bring that up so that also, like.

Speaker 1 (01:29:57):
His case will we considered in New York City, which
is for me, good for him, as opposed to a
more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere.

Speaker 4 (01:30:03):
Right, totally like this happening in Texas, Like in all
of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set
up his corporations, because there's friendly judges, this would be
handled quite differently, right.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at
least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter
into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less
favorable to them, and they'd say the ninth circuit where
they would be avanted in California. I'm sort of surprised
if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone
like U T. Austin or somewhere like that.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
Now they're going directly after this individual in part because
he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise
be like up in arms about a move like this,
would say because of some of his connections and some
of the things he said in the past. Well he's
you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like I
think they're really trying to find the first case is

(01:30:53):
they want someone that they can have a lot of
like liberals off from being too scared to support because
he said some things that like they don't want to
have attached to them, Like that's that's how they're and
they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time.
You find some folks who you can scare off a
lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise
natural support base because you can point out this thing

(01:31:14):
or that thing they did that was that was not
great acou types like when I'm not I'm not insulting
or is trying to say bad things about this guy,
I'm just saying, like that's that's the tactic here, right,
just to try to paint this guy is like, well
this guy did this bow you do really want to
support that, which is why you have to take an
incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to
do this, The State department doesn't get to do this.

Speaker 4 (01:31:34):
Yeah, regardless of of any things that this person may.

Speaker 1 (01:31:36):
Have said, the First Amendment is for everyone. I don't
care what he said, you know, so, Like, it's also
worth noting that Colombia, specifically the Intercept is reported on
this that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumnife Israel,
and they have been explicitly trying to identify the students

(01:31:56):
and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution
if students like And I think the Columbia encampment was
particularly objectionable to a lot of people, and that was
kind of the one that got a lot of the
national focus in the reporting, right, So it's understandable that
that's where they went for this.

Speaker 4 (01:32:13):
Yeah, it's it's high visibility. And I think it's also
very likely that they're just looking to have a test
case for this to see if they can create legal
precedent for removing people's green cards for you know, anti
genocide protests, right, And the specific details of that will
become more and more or less important based on like

(01:32:34):
the results of the case, as long as they can
create that precedent, right, and specifically like the president for
revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. Yeah, they
want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like
the most favorable towards their outcome. So I mean that's
part of what they're trying to do with this specific case,
and it is it is very much in line with
with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has

(01:32:56):
said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone
who's you know a little bit more policy minded, taking
steps towards this outcome.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
Yeah, which I think is like the other thing they
didn't get to do, I guess is that they weren't
able to like deport the guy at hyper speed, which
they have been doing with some people. Yeah, he was
detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana, and
people were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing
him from easy access to his lawyer and to his
family and to his eight month pregnant wife. Right, that's

(01:33:26):
all things that should have be done. It's also something
that a Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes
on this actually, especially in San Diego, where we have
some funding that allows people who are detained access to
legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants
to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with
migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for

(01:33:47):
them in the ICE Immigrant Detention Locator and They've been
moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's
bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened
under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We
should have let it happen. Then we should support it
when it happens now.

Speaker 4 (01:34:01):
And I think before we go and break again, I
do want to kind of close this section by by
talking about how like they don't necessarily need an executive
order specifically allowing Trump to do this like like or
like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order like
explicitly for this based on like immigration deportation law, like
there will be an argument made in like in court

(01:34:23):
that that they they have justification for this action already.
This is something that I've already been through when I
immigrated to the country and like did like my citizenship interview, right,
like if you if you have discussed in the past,
you know, something that can be construed as support for
a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from US citizenship.
And right, so there's gonna be a lot of arguments

(01:34:45):
like around like specifically these terrorism statutes that will make
someone like this a subject for removal. Yeah, and like
that that's gonna be like the angle in which they
they go about this, And I think that's like worth
keeping in mind.

Speaker 2 (01:34:58):
I also think it's worth because I I don't want
to make this because a lot of people online have
this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediately primary
concern should be mood and the other people like him
who are in situations like him be targeted. But I
don't think it's unreasonable to say that, like if they
get away with this, at some point that we'll start
saying like look to support palast the government describes like

(01:35:19):
or any support for any group that the government considers
a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here
as a citizen. You know, we can start like that
that is a potential in state of this, which is
again not should not be on your front burner. It
should be the people being targeted right now. But also
an awareness of like this is part of why you
have to draw such a hard line. Like if if

(01:35:40):
the situation was reversed and this where a democratic administration
coming after an anti vaccine student activist who is a
permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to
disappear them, right, Like that has to be like where
the line is drawn.

Speaker 4 (01:35:53):
Yeah, yeah, the state should not have this ability, Like
we should not let them get away with this, and
we should put as much support and legal support into
preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way
this will go, Like immigration law is the one of
the most like headache conducing things I've ever had to
go through in my entire life.

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
Ah, Like he will be spending a lot of money
on immigration lawyers now.

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
Also be really clear, I'm not equateing support for Palestine
to being anti vax I'm just saying, like, if you know,
if this was like a shitty guy, right, it would
still be wrong.

Speaker 4 (01:36:24):
People, if it's something that we like to like laugh
at for getting measles in Texas, disappearing people bad if
you thought Russia was doing anti fascism in Ukraine, it
would still be important, right, right, you know, to to
do this, And should we take a break and come
back and discuss some.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
More, Yes, yes, I wanted to give a little bit
of background here some other stuff that I've been looking into.
So in the fifth of February, Attorney General Pam Bondai
issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing

(01:37:05):
a quote October seventh task for so I'm going to
quote from it here to prioritize seeking justice for victims
of October seventh, twenty twenty three terrorist attack in Israel,
addressing the ongoing threat post by her Mass and its affiliates,
and combating anti Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights
violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items

(01:37:25):
for the FBI. Right among them is investigating and prosecuting
acts of terrorism, anti Semitic civil rights violations, and other
federal crimes committed by her Mass supporters in the United States,
including on college campuses. The final point is quote supporting
efforts by the Israeli government Department of Defense and Department
of Treasury to pursue non criminal responses to the October

(01:37:47):
seventh attack and other terrorist activities by her mass. There's
a couple of things that are can Obviously, the non
criminal responses could include deportation, right like the person is
not being accused of a crime, but none less have
their visa evoked. Also that the idea of cooperating with
a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide,
potentially against US citizens or US residence, is quite concerning.

(01:38:13):
It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive
order that we've already discussed. Right. One of the parts
of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I
haven't seen any reporting on was the quote infantry and
analysis of all the Title six complaints sort administrative actions
including in K through twelve education related to anti Semitism

(01:38:34):
pending or resolved after October seventh, twenty twenty three.

Speaker 4 (01:38:38):
Can you explain what Title six is?

Speaker 1 (01:38:41):
Yeah, I can in Garrison, and I would love to so.
Title six is part of the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four. Right, it prohibits discrimination based on race, color,
or national origin. Yes, it applies to federally funded programs, activities,
or institutions which receive federal funding. Right, which were almost
every institution of education in this country, apart from some

(01:39:04):
religious private schools. I guess maybe they still get some
federal funding. There have been a number of Title six
cases filed for anti Semitic discrimination and anti Palastinio or
anti Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October seventh to twenty
twenty three. The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem
to be covered by this, but the other ones do.

(01:39:24):
The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and
resolve some of these in the last few weeks of
his tenure, and normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It
was like some more trainings, the review of policies. Anyone
who's who's been an educator at one of these institutions
will have already been very familiar with the sort of

(01:39:44):
anti discrimination training video that you have to watch, and
they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos.
I'm not really convinced that that is the way we
deal with hatred, but that's why they recommended. The Emory one.
I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it
had to commit to a quote equitable hand of protests
after its campus police were so violent towards anti genocide protesters.

(01:40:05):
A lot of the other cases are still pending, but
it seems like the Trump administration is going to go
back and review all of them anyway. It does seem
like whether it's spread organically or whether it's some kind
of campaign to file Title six complaints. A lot of
Title six complaints were filed after October seventh, and during
this time when we saw like campus protests, when we

(01:40:26):
saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right,
and we saw some faculty who may or may not
have supported the protest but felt very strongly about the
right of students to have freedom of speech on campus.
And I'm sure they would have been kind of wrapped
up in this big drag net too. That this potentially
raises the specter of like at least career threatening. And again,
lots of faculty are not US citizens, right. They might

(01:40:49):
be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they
might be here on a visa. There are a number
of different immigration statuses that they could have that are
not US citizen that they could pretendally lose.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
So what is Trump trying to do about these cases
which could be pending or have already been resolved.

Speaker 1 (01:41:08):
Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize
institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility, so that that's not
allowing someone to enter the United States. Right, and read
out the section of the United States Code that a
section of the United States Code quote so that such
institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students
and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that

(01:41:29):
such report about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with
applicable law, to investigations and comma, if warranted, comma actions
to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right, This
is in Trump's late January executive order. Yeah, this is
the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking

(01:41:50):
universities to do some of that legwork for them. It
seems I imagine that this is the same section of
the United States Code that we'll see us with reference to,
but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which
is people coming into the country. But I guess they
could make an argument that like he disguised his inadmissible

(01:42:10):
status or became inadmissible.

Speaker 4 (01:42:12):
Sure, I mean, there's these two sections, right, There's this
one that revolves around who can be like admitted, who
can be accepted. There's that one section which is a
section one two two seven sub section A four a
dash C, which is the section specifically on deportation as
relating to like supporting quote unquote terrorist activities. So I

(01:42:33):
think they will try to use these both like in conjunction.
And I think it's also important to not doubt here
the use of the word like aliens as opposed to
the word that like Rubio was using previously, which is
like visitors, right, Like visitors, I would say, probably applies
more to like student visa holders, yeah, non residents versus aliens.

(01:42:53):
Aliens can be anyone, right, like aliens, you can be
visa holders, can be Green card holders, right. And so
at least in like the official wording here, these are
the word I think aliens is important as opposed to
like Rubio's like you know posts on x dot com. Yeah,
which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.

Speaker 2 (01:43:14):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:43:15):
Yeah, that refers to like just like you know, visitors
to this country.

Speaker 7 (01:43:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
The right has used aliens for a long time, right,
because it differentiates them from people.

Speaker 4 (01:43:22):
Yeah, it's like it's very basic like dehumanization like this.

Speaker 1 (01:43:25):
Yeah, right, in this case, it's I think it's important.
It's pivotal, so like we have a sense of what
will happen there. And maybe I could just finish up
by saying, if you are faculty or a student, if
you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using
our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out
to us, it's cool zone tips at proton dot me.

(01:43:47):
It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as
well as a recipient, so that would mean using a
proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than
using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again,
cool zone tips at proton me. Obviously, this is something
we're going to continue taking an interest in, and obviously
it's something that we can't report the entirety of now

(01:44:08):
because we're still waiting on the court case, but we
are very interested in learning more about it, so please
feel free to reach out.

Speaker 2 (01:44:13):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:44:15):
Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying they
will be taking a continued interest in. He is promising
that this is the first arrest of quote unquote many
to come, so as they could do to focus on
this we will as well. James, did you have anything
else you wanted to say, like re lawyers.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Yes, So, as I mentioned before, right, people under by
administration had been moved away from their lawyers. This is
very common. It seems that now people are being moved
away from their lawyers and having teleconference request denied. I
let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a
client detained to San Diego. They moved to Texas, and
now you can't tele conference in for a ten minute hearing,

(01:44:56):
so you would have to fly right for that ten
minute heref which is going to make it impossible both
in time down to financial terms. What I'm understanding. I'm
still digging into this a little bit more, but that's
what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an
ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer in
one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas,
you can help. But you probably already know that, and
you're probably already doing that, and you're probably already very

(01:45:18):
very overworked. Do you work asylum cases? So yeah, I
think now is the time for groups like the ACLU
to step up or shut up, and we'll see well.

Speaker 2 (01:45:27):
In the ACOU has come out against Mamod's arrest. Okay, good.
The ADL obviously totally for it. Shocked at the ADL,
an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not
see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in
order to disappear as political enemies. So we love the
ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did. I mean, we'll

(01:45:49):
see if they do anything, but they did, like make
a statement.

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
Yeah, they've been very good. I should say, the ACLU
has been pursuing a lot of litigation. It's Trump administration.

Speaker 2 (01:45:57):
This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently.

Speaker 1 (01:46:00):
Yes, especially at a national level, they've been very good
at this. And so yeah, you know, shout out to them.
I guess, I don't know. We don't need to shout
it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars,
Like this is literally why why you're there?

Speaker 3 (01:46:13):
Do a good job or else you'd better.

Speaker 2 (01:46:16):
Do something else too, like yeah, yeah, you'd better show up.

Speaker 1 (01:46:20):
Yeah, don't donate to the ad L. I guess if
you were thinking of doing that after listening to.

Speaker 2 (01:46:25):
This podcast, Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here,

(01:46:51):
meaning our podcast, it could, it is, It's happened.

Speaker 4 (01:46:57):
Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast it is happening here?

Speaker 7 (01:47:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:47:01):
Uh huh, that's that's a fun joke that I only
hear forty seven times a day. And the whole point
of the podcast was, well, initially I was a crazy
person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and now
it's a bunch of that stuff happened, and even more
of it looks very likely. And so now I just

(01:47:22):
feel bad all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:47:24):
It's going to be called I fucking called it. I
fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.

Speaker 4 (01:47:29):
Why don't you redad the podcast? I just feel bad
all the time?

Speaker 2 (01:47:33):
Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have
bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did. And
DGI jeez, should I have bought stock and DGI?

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
Yeah, I'm gonna buy her a little DGI drone.

Speaker 2 (01:47:48):
Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going
to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James.

Speaker 1 (01:47:55):
I should point out that I'm buying one. It's not
capable of carrying a payload.

Speaker 4 (01:47:58):
It's definitely a s for investments to pull out your
furrow one k. Now, when the market's crashing, use that
money by drones. Those drones will be worth a lot
more in five years.

Speaker 1 (01:48:10):
Or what is that?

Speaker 7 (01:48:12):
That is?

Speaker 1 (01:48:12):
That is a sound of a sound investment, a box
of bullets.

Speaker 4 (01:48:17):
It's like how boomers used to like invest in like
silver or gold as like a stable current. No, we're
investing in DGI, like physical DG hydrones.

Speaker 2 (01:48:28):
We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.

Speaker 1 (01:48:31):
Yeah, you gotta get it in a bottle. Rubbed it
in a box. It can get light struck or get moist.
You want to get it in a special black black bottle.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And uh, you
know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping
it in toilet paper and swallowing it.

Speaker 5 (01:48:46):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:48:47):
Sure, okay, Well did you say somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:48:51):
Speaking of toilet paper? Nate Silver has a newsletter and
it would be useful as toilet paper more so than
it is as a newsletter.

Speaker 4 (01:49:01):
Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from twenty twenty
four whend you said that it's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:49:05):
Normally my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting
in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly
fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or
four times in a bucket, and then head over to
Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.
And I do this. I hate that I keep having

(01:49:27):
I have regularly on election the years people were like but.

Speaker 5 (01:49:30):
He was always wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:49:31):
It's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually
if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the
reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read
him during elections and I hate it because he's never
been right about anything else. But he's he's a gambler.
He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking

(01:49:52):
about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by god, election polls
are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists worth reading.
And then after the election, no matter how well or
badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years.
And I didn't get to do that this year because
on February twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, Nate wrote a

(01:50:12):
column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence.

Speaker 4 (01:50:17):
Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right?

Speaker 2 (01:50:19):
Spiky intelligence? Yes? And it very helpfully starts with a
drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he
must have used some AI like video software to do that,
just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking
thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I
can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like

(01:50:41):
we needed this illustrated.

Speaker 4 (01:50:42):
I have to see this.

Speaker 1 (01:50:43):
Yeah, yeah, I would like it to be shared.

Speaker 2 (01:50:45):
Look at this? Why did you, like, oh promise of
AI we couldn't yes, wow, yeah yeah, it just it
looks like maybe an amoeba if you looks like an amoeba,
and then like a poorly drawn star.

Speaker 3 (01:50:58):
Is it's to keep this is? This is an actual thing.

Speaker 1 (01:51:02):
This sifts you wait, this is a thing.

Speaker 4 (01:51:04):
This is This is Boba and Kiki with a weird
like digital fuzz over the.

Speaker 2 (01:51:09):
Fucker Boba and Kiki.

Speaker 1 (01:51:11):
Yeah, okay, Garrison, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:51:12):
It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask
people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these
shapes are, like.

Speaker 2 (01:51:19):
Which was oh, it's like a then sure?

Speaker 4 (01:51:23):
Like like which one looks which one looks nicer, which
one looks meaner, you know that sort of thing. I'm
a Kiki type, like like I I am a Kiky
in terms in terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.

Speaker 2 (01:51:34):
Now that you bring up Rorshak, all I can think
of is how cool it would be if Rorshak from
The Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house and did
his thing.

Speaker 4 (01:51:43):
Unfortunately, I think Rorshak and Night Silver might get friends.

Speaker 2 (01:51:50):
Actually yeah, no, no, Nate would. But after them getting
along for like forty five minutes, Nate would take him
to an illegal card game, and Rorshak would murder everybody
in the room because they were gambling without a license.

Speaker 4 (01:52:05):
So I'm assuming Theate's going to try to argue that
that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drug here
as opposed to like the empathetic right there.

Speaker 2 (01:52:16):
Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there.
He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I
don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer
it from the image or if he's Okay, we'll get
your opinion on it is. Is he ripping these people off
because this doesn't count as enough for him to be
crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea,
which he credits to his stupid book that he came
up with later. But I'm just going to start reading

(01:52:37):
the stupid column. Well hit us with the second paragraph,
because that fuck Kevin gotten paragraph one JAKA.

Speaker 1 (01:52:43):
That radicalized me immediately.

Speaker 2 (01:52:45):
There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can
run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the
platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest and
then there's a little ie in parentheses because we need
that Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then the two
eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment.
Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay, you'd

(01:53:08):
think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves
Elon and intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded
or co founded Tesla, SpaceX, open Ai, neuralink Xai, PayPal,
and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself
into a position where he's now the de facto chief
of staff to the President of the United States. I
do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.

(01:53:29):
Some of these were long shot bets, and Walter Isaacson's
biography of must documents he thought he'd be ruined if
there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success
of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter
was a candy play for cultural and political influence, but
it probably And he doesn't bring up in this whole
thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies,
not a word about the boring company, not a word

(01:53:52):
about hyper loop.

Speaker 1 (01:53:53):
Right, Well, any of the failed on his.

Speaker 2 (01:53:55):
Record does seem better if you ignore the two massively
publicized and invest did absolute failures.

Speaker 4 (01:54:01):
Yes, well, and last week, I know there was a
space X lunch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure
it didn't fling debris all over lower.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft, also
crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co founded open ai,
but not in a way that mattered. He just shot
down money in there and then get kind of edged out. Sure, Yes,
and is actively in a conflict with everybody who did
make open ai as prominent as it is. Again, Natela

(01:54:31):
has to leave a lot out in order to start
making this case.

Speaker 4 (01:54:34):
But so he's going to argue that, you know, we're
going to see how how well this co presidency goes.
But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all
of this stuff done. R.

Speaker 3 (01:54:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:54:42):
And he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't be profitable,
but we'll see how you know, he could probably profit
from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a
word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like that,
just breaking the law. So why are why are we
Why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that
get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels,
Because yes, if you are breaking the loss, sometimes that

(01:55:04):
goes well for you financially.

Speaker 4 (01:55:07):
Well, Walter White, they've done some bad things.

Speaker 2 (01:55:09):
Yeah, but but you can't deny he was a brilliant
method cook. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is.
Fourteen hundred. According to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of
outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably
even a genius. And yet when my first off, it

(01:55:29):
becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a
fourteen hundred to be an impressive SAT score and would
normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score
of fourteen hundred if it weren't for all of Elon's
other genius accomplishments. And yet, when my partner and I
were heading to dinner the other day and we saw
some tweet that Elon sent I forget which one because
he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's

(01:55:51):
such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius
and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spikey intelligence.

Speaker 4 (01:55:57):
Here we go.

Speaker 2 (01:55:58):
This gets to like the core or what's annoying about
Nate is his need to He's one of these guys.
You know, you know what it is. He's an intellectual
enclosurist right where he's not confident to be like everyone
is very aware of the fact that no one is
good at everything, and that people have holes in their competence,
and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad

(01:56:20):
fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence.
This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate has to
give it a name so that he can sell his books.
So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual.
Now it's my idea. I'm the one who came up
with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate,
it's annoying.

Speaker 1 (01:56:38):
Capital ask Capital I rights to trademark spike intelligence.

Speaker 2 (01:56:42):
Yeah, yeah, Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original,
and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly,
many of the instances online refer to people of the
on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he
has Asperger syndrome. But the concept is simple. All intelligence
is a multi dimensional phenomenon. The scientific consensus is that

(01:57:04):
there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also
called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd
associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and
verbal skills and the gire are correlated. The correlations are
loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of
different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's
just going into like he talks about like the absent

(01:57:24):
minded professor, Like it's all just these these very common
ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more
things than they're good at, right, Like it's there's no
need to explain how elon Musk has been successful at
certain things, but Nate does and he has to keep
going back to. Like he makes a comment later and

(01:57:45):
here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He
doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, Like, well,
if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he
obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves,
which ignores the fact that, like he's not making any
of these decisions, Like he bought a company that already
had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket
engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring

(01:58:10):
in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right,
Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he
was very very good at hyping people up and getting
people to believe in him until he was too big
to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of,
among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is,

(01:58:33):
who is a guy who was really good at one
narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything,
and he can't that's like a dangerous thing for Nate
to think too hard about.

Speaker 4 (01:58:47):
Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very
soft and soothing ads.

Speaker 6 (01:58:53):
Yeah we're back.

Speaker 2 (01:59:05):
I want to talk a little bit about the danger
of being a guy who gets famous for being really
good at one thing and then gets a job talking
about everything, because I've had a version of that experience,
and let me tell you, you're not ever going to be
competent to discuss all of the things that you can
make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No

(01:59:26):
one ever has been and no one ever will be,
which is why what you ought to do is the
thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on
a bunch of people to like, run a website with
you right where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately,
it turns out five thirty eight was a bad business venture.
It got massively overvalued, a company spent a shitload more

(01:59:48):
money on it that it was capable of making, and
now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago
to do his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic
case in the problem of like hubris and the fact
that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't
run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking
about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that

(02:00:09):
maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at
was being the guy from the Music Man, because I
think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period
of time, right, he still clearly does. Yes, Yeah, there's
been this thing lately where a lot of folks on
the left have been like the Oh, you couldn't always
tell that he was a con man, You couldn't always

(02:00:30):
tell that he was this bad, like he was always
the worst. I was like, no, Like back in twenty
fourteen fifteen, when I was writing about the billionaires and
rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie
Diamond because he had helped create the two thousand and
eight financial collapse and he seen it. He just seemed
obviously much worse than this guy who up to that
point was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know,

(02:00:52):
you have two companies doing that. Musk was not top
of most people's radars for very good reason, which gets
to like, there's this thing that's been created because of
some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had
and his like family background which has a lot of
white supremacy in it, to that that this has been
Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning, and

(02:01:13):
that it's all come together for him, like as if
he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond
villain who's been executing this like thirty year plan to
get where he is.

Speaker 7 (02:01:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:01:23):
Yeah, well, I.

Speaker 2 (02:01:24):
Think when you look at his cognition, like he's not
the same man he was ten years ago. He's not
the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes.
And I'm saying he was a good man before then.
I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly
his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter.

Speaker 4 (02:01:43):
And well yeah, and you can like measure this through
his posting as well, like yeah, like that the types
of posts he would make in twenty seventeen are like
completely opposite to the way that that he would talk
about certain social issues. Now, oh yeah, he's not like
meming about like anarcho syndicalism.

Speaker 2 (02:01:59):
Yeah, to a few of those things. But I want
to read another quote from Nate's article, because he's going
to talk about his book On the Edge, which quote
describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call
the River. These people who occupy a range of professions
from AI research to poker to venture capital, are bright,
but in spikey ways. In Baron Cohen's dacotomy, they lean

(02:02:21):
heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good
at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms
of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self awareness. They also
have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example,
they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrariant. And again,
what you are talking about all of these people number one,

(02:02:41):
When he says AI research, he's not talking about people
who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking
about Sam Altman, right, ye, poker, venture capital. This is
all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The River is
just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money
on bets, and they are contrarian and competitive because that's

(02:03:06):
how gamblers are. That's the intelligence, that's the river. Like
he's thinking about it as like the specific chunk of
intellectuals who have You know, there's some dangers, but they
have great potential to make the world Brilliant're like, no, no, no, no,
these are just people who like wind up shooting themselves
outside of a sports betting facility.

Speaker 4 (02:03:25):
Like that's the river, mate, I have been turning into
a monster during our friend poker nights recently.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
It's it's tough garrison.

Speaker 2 (02:03:34):
By the way, I've been meaning to talk to you
about wearing the full data makeup, because you know your
skin can't breathe. If you coat your whole body, you're
only supposed to put that on your face.

Speaker 4 (02:03:42):
I don't do that every time I play. Get a
gold finger yourself, gar, I don't put on the data
makeup every time I play poker, just that one time. Actually, no,
I've done that twice nowt never minds.

Speaker 3 (02:03:56):
Okay, okay, it's becoming I also have the little hats.

Speaker 4 (02:04:00):
I ordered a twelve pack of like of like the
little like poker visors to complete the outface.

Speaker 2 (02:04:04):
She did, of course she did.

Speaker 1 (02:04:06):
Yeah, it would be rude, not too for better or worse.

Speaker 2 (02:04:10):
This typology the river is associated with high achievement in
certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is
also associated with high variance. Makman free built FTX into
a company that investors valued at thirty two billion before
the House of cards collapsed again because he was a gambler. Yeah,
and again Nate can't just accept oh, he was never

(02:04:32):
actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a
while and then gave it and then gambled it all
away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.
Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book,
and I can tell you that he very much falls
into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbassy,
lucky dumbass.

Speaker 1 (02:04:51):
It's not hard.

Speaker 2 (02:04:52):
What's the genius? Where did he prove that?

Speaker 4 (02:04:55):
I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate silver a
man who probably yeah, value his own intelligence like a
great deal.

Speaker 1 (02:05:02):
Yeah, I mean that's the whole thing, right, Nate Silva
kan and like it would be ego death to admit
that there were just some lucky, dumb white dudes.

Speaker 6 (02:05:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:05:09):
If a guy had won like one of the lotteries,
was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got
crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks
because he just kept putting half a million dollars at
a time on twenty one black at a roulette table
in Vegas, and I would be like, well, obviously he's
a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How
else could he have made the money in the first place?

(02:05:31):
And I was like, no, he got lucky, and then
he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have
good judgment. Yeah, So it's important to avoid two pitfalls
when encountering people with spiky intelligence, namely, neither there are
worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless
statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah,

(02:05:53):
but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way, because only I
think the undercurrent here is that only people like this
It's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring
the world forward, right.

Speaker 1 (02:06:04):
Yeah, no one else to serve empathy?

Speaker 2 (02:06:07):
Yeah, yes, like you're just addicted to putting money on
sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, So here's the
two things he wants to warn us up or wants
people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent, in several ways,
but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.
Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and
we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd

(02:06:30):
to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just
because he isn't in others. And if he has merely
very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's
not high school. Nobody cares about SSAT skills.

Speaker 4 (02:06:41):
Elon's what like like like fifty, like fifty five or
something like what are we doing?

Speaker 5 (02:06:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:06:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are a middle aged man. I
don't even know what my SAT score was.

Speaker 1 (02:06:52):
I'm gonna say like, I never took our SAT, but
I spent more than a decade in full time education,
and anyone who ever told me that SAT schools I
immediately hated and never took them.

Speaker 5 (02:07:01):
Seriously.

Speaker 2 (02:07:02):
I've been almost twenty years asking people questions for a living,
and I've never asked anyone there A sorry, Garrison.

Speaker 4 (02:07:08):
Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for
evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.

Speaker 2 (02:07:15):
Absolutely not Garrison, just how much well he doesn't.

Speaker 1 (02:07:18):
He doesn't have an alternative method and seeing what you
might quote an infographic because the next section of the
article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence.

Speaker 2 (02:07:28):
So first he admits he tried to track Elon down
for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to
talk to him. Because even I have to say, Elon
does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver,
because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree,
and that is a better use of his time than
talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk

(02:07:52):
to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from quote
many other Silicon Valley big wigs I have met, okay
helping him in the This is the fact that quote
Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into
a running diary of his innermost thoughts, and in addition
to that, the biographies of the guy one more caveat.
Here I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of

(02:08:13):
Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go
down here and the next segment is dimensions were Musk
has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally Nate's
going to prove it, and I'm gonna I'm going to
show you guys, how he how he chooses to do that,
what the evidence he gives us here is, and I
think this is.

Speaker 4 (02:08:32):
Something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads.

Speaker 2 (02:08:36):
Good point here, all right, we're back. So let's look
at what Nate shows as is the chief dimension where
Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. I'm just
reading that first line, man, So the first words under

(02:09:00):
this are cognitive load capacity in overall horsepower slash ram.
He's always on, I mean literally look at how often
he's tweeting, and then a huge graph that shows the
density of tweets posted and win which has been used
by other people to prove that since sometime in late
twenty twenty two, he's almost never gotten more than about
three hours without posting a tweet, Like it's just a

(02:09:23):
solid red after he buys the site. This like graph
of like when he makes his post, he's never offline.
Now he's not sleeping.

Speaker 4 (02:09:31):
So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from
twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four showing the time of
day and when a post is posted, represented by small
red dots and yes, at around twenty twenty two, the
thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a
straight red like the period of where he must be

(02:09:52):
sleeping in this, Yeah, is very concerning.

Speaker 2 (02:09:56):
No, he sometimes sleeps from about six to nine a
as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often.

Speaker 1 (02:10:04):
It's like a streak at twenty twenty three where he
just isn't sleepy, he's not sleeping.

Speaker 2 (02:10:08):
And again he's on drugs. People. I think they're probably prescripted.
I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.
When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you
want to do recreationally prescribed.

Speaker 6 (02:10:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:10:22):
But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that
to judge drug users. I say that as someone who
had a drug problem, like this is drug user behavior.
And specifically Silver he's using the sobriety as possible. Sorry,
and specifically Silver is using this as an evidence of
MUCKs intelligence. Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 4 (02:10:43):
He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he
must be like a special type of person.

Speaker 2 (02:10:49):
He's railing adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day.
That's what this is a sign of, and no one
is allowed to take his phone away anyway. Here's how
Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA term, we
say this as a player with an exceptionally high motor,
and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world

(02:11:10):
becomes more complex. Lack's fall. I was simultaneously doing an
extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to
build up Silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even
if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was
an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would
only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon
is taking on I don't know, approximately a thousand times
more stress than that, and has done so for years. No,

(02:11:31):
he's not. He just tweets he has a massive number one.
All of the businesses are being run by people who
are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to
sit in meetings and say yes or no, toe stuff
and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right,
and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now

(02:11:53):
than it gained after the election, and SpaceX just had
a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not
done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas,
and the hyper loop is nothing right like this. This
is just full of shit, Nate. Like what you have

(02:12:14):
just described, running an election model that's functional, going on
a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is
more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.
Oh yeah, more actual effort work.

Speaker 4 (02:12:27):
Risk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting doing
drugs and injecting random women with his sperm yes and
sending tweets.

Speaker 1 (02:12:33):
He doesn't do the injecting.

Speaker 2 (02:12:35):
I think, oh, god, Garrison, that comes up to no no, oh,
and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts
the graph of how much Elon tweets.

Speaker 1 (02:12:46):
Okay, good there it is, okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (02:12:49):
Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.
Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating,
especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded
more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities,
doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which
would be stressful on their own, while still managing to
father thirteen children. I'm tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again,

(02:13:11):
equivalent efforts tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering
thirteen children. He's not a father to them, No, he
just he contributed by it.

Speaker 7 (02:13:22):
He didn't even have sex y.

Speaker 1 (02:13:24):
Yeah, it's neually the lowest possible effort way to have
a child.

Speaker 2 (02:13:28):
Wait, Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with
penises listening to this come like, that's not a big effort.
You wouldn't include that. It's like, what did I get
done this week? Well, in addition to working forty hours,
I jacked off.

Speaker 3 (02:13:41):
That's a little transphobic.

Speaker 7 (02:13:45):
This is a joke.

Speaker 4 (02:13:47):
Anyway, continue it said.

Speaker 2 (02:13:50):
I'm just saying it doesn't count as work, you know,
yeah from us, unless you're a sex worker, than it does. Okay,
Like especially I know a lot of male porn stars.
That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's
why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that
kill their hearts.

Speaker 4 (02:14:07):
I would like to get into more of Silver's like
justification for why why he associates this this high tweet
load with like intelligence.

Speaker 2 (02:14:18):
Well, because it shows rapid cognition in thin slicing ability.

Speaker 1 (02:14:22):
Okay, hmm right, yeah, sure sure.

Speaker 2 (02:14:26):
Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium, I'm
being first to market. Making decent judgments fast is often
more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, vcs imagine
themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders, as though on Shark Tank,
relying on well known gut instinct. But this also gets
people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is
shark Tank's success rate? Yeah, I bet there's a quick

(02:14:51):
answer to that. Yeah, and that's consinuering.

Speaker 1 (02:14:54):
The air has built in free television advertising for any
product means.

Speaker 2 (02:14:58):
It's than fifty percent of the they're successfully closed. God, yeah,
so I died out. All this tweeting also shows abstract
problem solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity,
though in Musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest itself an
artistic prowesslyevingly.

Speaker 4 (02:15:19):
You know what, I'll give it to day. There, I'll
give it today.

Speaker 2 (02:15:23):
I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course,
instrumental rationality philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types
of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ens, basically
figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want.
For this category, I think you have to point towards
the scoreboard, must have some unparalleled accomplishments, and isn't about
to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a

(02:15:44):
category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole,
not one for nice guys.

Speaker 10 (02:15:49):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:15:49):
And again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal
getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is
actively doing as much damage to the bio fear as possible,
ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary
to make any kind of off world civilization likely, I
would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually

(02:16:11):
want us to get to Mars, right, He just wants
to be in charge of everything.

Speaker 4 (02:16:15):
No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference.
That's that's really it, yesh.

Speaker 2 (02:16:19):
It is yes, yes, yes, and he has been very
successful at that. But again it's the successive brute force.
It's the same way as like if you hire a
thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps
of a guy who annoys you. Like you could say, like,
I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who
annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of
dudes who can beat people up for you. Like is

(02:16:40):
that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to
hire thugs?

Speaker 3 (02:16:44):
Or are you just a mob boss?

Speaker 2 (02:16:45):
Right? Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss?
No one is allowed to attack because it's going to
be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon,
you know. Anyway, we need ghost dog.

Speaker 4 (02:16:57):
It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know, a few
weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a
resist Live moment and I actually ashed my clothes cigarette
on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But
now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.

Speaker 2 (02:17:12):
Now, No, you can't.

Speaker 4 (02:17:13):
I could face substantial charges.

Speaker 1 (02:17:15):
You might want to text resist to a certain five
digit number or something. That's probably the best way to
solve this garrison.

Speaker 2 (02:17:21):
I just text resist to every single person in my
phone book every day. I mean, it takes about seven hours.
I have fallen behind on work.

Speaker 1 (02:17:29):
You know, it's the only thing we can do to
five FasTIS.

Speaker 4 (02:17:33):
The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep
deprivation and drug problem apparently, or at least that is
how you show for it. It's funny because I saw
Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood or
now plasma. Oh we had a dead guy posted his
only self study on like the damaging effects of sleep deprivation,

(02:17:53):
and I'm pretty sure Musklake retweeted it with like with
like an emoti or something like, yeah, dude, You're brain
is completely sure.

Speaker 2 (02:18:02):
Now you you are you are fried. You are the
most cooked a ban has ever been.

Speaker 1 (02:18:06):
It's an interesting study, like there there is legitimately interesting
things to look at Elo Musk's brain.

Speaker 2 (02:18:12):
Well yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data
put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just
sleep deprivation but like wealth and power impact the brain.
And like all of it makes a strong case that
Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to
his brain than like a career one of those career

(02:18:32):
WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then
shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their
brain later.

Speaker 4 (02:18:39):
Yeah, I mean, well before before we close, I do
want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like
linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know boba and
kiki is is is? This is a shape language like
correlation test I myself as well as Nate here, I

(02:19:01):
have kind of expanded it's it's it's usage to like
projecting even more like human or like like emotional qualities
onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please,
sociologists leave me alone, do not do not do that
message me like.

Speaker 1 (02:19:16):
Your favorite French don't call.

Speaker 4 (02:19:23):
I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already
hear like twelve different reddators typing. But yes, I think
Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor
to like show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative Musk's
own intelligences as symbolized by by a kiki as opposed
to you know, maybe like maybe like a Bill Gates,

(02:19:44):
which might be more of like a boba intelligence type. Okay,
a little softer, a little bit more philanthropy.

Speaker 2 (02:19:50):
You know, I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist
and zizion literature for two straight weeks, about a quarter
of a million words by my last count. Garrison I
don't have an enemy to do this again. I'm going
to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where
things make sense, where the world's safe.

Speaker 1 (02:20:12):
Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War,
which is my comparative happy place.

Speaker 2 (02:20:18):
Ah, the Syrian Civil War.

Speaker 1 (02:20:21):
Yeah, it's a really great world. I do wonder if
he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing
by using that little filter that he used over the
boom BERANKI no.

Speaker 2 (02:20:31):
Because it would be if it's actually not fair use
now as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing.

Speaker 1 (02:20:37):
He doesn't, Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them.

Speaker 2 (02:20:39):
Then it is fair use, right, and he could use
like a little clip of it is and illustrate the point.

Speaker 1 (02:20:44):
Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.

Speaker 2 (02:20:46):
Anyway, this is all I want to say again about
Nate silver until twenty twenty eight. And if you know
what the upside if democracy really does die is, we'll
never have to talk about him again.

Speaker 4 (02:20:58):
If Trumpet must really take over fully into a full coup,
we never have to talk about Nate Silvan.

Speaker 2 (02:21:03):
Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt.
They'll be doing a.

Speaker 1 (02:21:10):
Sod numbers and he will still be analyzing that data.
They straight regime capture of Nate SILVERA.

Speaker 2 (02:21:16):
Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten
one hundred and four percent of the vote.

Speaker 1 (02:21:20):
But there's a spiky percentages.

Speaker 2 (02:21:22):
There's a spikey percentages.

Speaker 4 (02:21:25):
Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino
or something? Right, this is just like just like put
him away.

Speaker 2 (02:21:32):
I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need
to do the other stuff. And if he was like
just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well,
that's what he loves.

Speaker 4 (02:21:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:21:42):
If I had Nate's Silver money, I'd probably just write
novels for the rest of my life because that's what
I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps
writing about politics. He's not good at it, and he
can't like it. He needs to feel special.

Speaker 1 (02:21:55):
He wants to feel like a special boy who knows
the answers that no one else does.

Speaker 2 (02:22:00):
All right, Well, anyway, this is us making fun of
Nate Silver, so you don't Well, you can still make
fun of him, but you don't have to read him.
We did that for you. Good night.

Speaker 4 (02:22:31):
This is It could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling
of the world, and what it means for you. I'm
Garrison Davis today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.
This episode recovering the week of March five to March twelve.
Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Junior eats beef tallow

(02:22:53):
French fries at Steak and Shake, and Sam Sedter commits
a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today?

Speaker 2 (02:23:00):
I'm very happy to join you for ED this week.
Huge fan of ED, just like just big big ED guy,
So yeah, psyched to be here. I feel like we
should mention up top.

Speaker 3 (02:23:10):
There's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the
most like electing fucking Caliguli's horse to the Senate thing
I've seen in a long time, So stay tuned for that.

Speaker 2 (02:23:19):
Lots of good stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:23:21):
Yes, we will get to it.

Speaker 4 (02:23:22):
First, I would like to give a little bit of
an update on a story that we talked about a
few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a
green card for a Palestinian activist Mamood Khalil. As of Wednesday,
his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client.

(02:23:42):
There was a large rally outside the First Court conference
in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this
a few days ago for some background, an episode with
James Robert and myself. Robert, do you want to like
briefly summarize the situation, and then I'll play a clip
from one of his lawyers.

Speaker 2 (02:24:01):
The situation is that this guy got taken into custody.
My understanding is it was at an apartment that he
lived in with his wife. He was a US citizen.
He became aware, it looks like at least about twenty
four hours before probably became aware that he was being
It's a little clear if he was just like being
surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off.
But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that

(02:24:24):
Ice was coming for him about a day before they
did when they entered the house. My understanding is based
on the claims being made by his wife that they
did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything.

Speaker 4 (02:24:37):
He's still not charged with any crime.

Speaker 2 (02:24:38):
No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just
took him and turned off the phone when they were
on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct,
So it's like none of this is the way this
should have gone, Like if this was an arrest, no.

Speaker 4 (02:24:52):
He was just like black bagged from campus.

Speaker 2 (02:24:55):
But it's not an arrest again, and they've been very
clear about this that, like they have specifically stated not
accusing him of like breaking the law, right, Like, that's
not what's going on.

Speaker 4 (02:25:04):
Here, correct, And we will get to some of that later.
I'm going to play a clip from a press conference
outside court that happened on Wednesday, March twelfth.

Speaker 11 (02:25:13):
This is one of his lawyers, Mister Khalil's detention has
nothing to do with security.

Speaker 5 (02:25:19):
It is only about repression.

Speaker 11 (02:25:23):
The United States government has taken the position that it
can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful, permanent
resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism, in
this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and

(02:25:44):
an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes
the position that because the Secretary of State finds his
descent unacceptable, contrary to US foreign policy, he can be deported.

(02:26:04):
As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents,
including the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

Speaker 5 (02:26:15):
That's what we're talking about.

Speaker 11 (02:26:17):
We're also talking about a period of repression that the
Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following nine to eleven,
when we were in the courts trying to get people
out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is
the legal infrastructure is so much stronger, and everyone out
here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in

(02:26:40):
the face of this amount of repression. We will be
fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to
bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading.

Speaker 5 (02:26:55):
To many others, as the administration has threatened to do.

Speaker 4 (02:27:00):
Was on Wednesday. For now, a Khalil will be remaining
in ICED attention in Louisiana, and ICE director Tom Homan
said Wednesday that quote, free speech has its limitations. Unquote Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:27:16):
I have found some stuff today of people on the
right attacking the judge who put out a I guess
called a stay on this in part because the judge
is Jewish, so it's nice to see the anti Semitism
being used in that way as well in this instance.
Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.

Speaker 4 (02:27:38):
A White House official did tell friend of the pod
the Free Press not necessarily our favorite publication, but they
do have an exclusive quote here that the basis for
targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations
against other students, saying Khalil is quote a threat to
the foreign policy and national security interests of the United
States unquote. Said the official that this calculation was the

(02:28:01):
driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here
is not that he was breaking the law. So we
have this official like openly say, like, he's not charged
with the crime. We're just wanting to see if we
can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident
for saying something that we don't like?

Speaker 3 (02:28:17):
Yeah, And I think that there's been a lot of
comparisons to this to direct Macarthyism. I think that's accurate
to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to
this is not Macarthyism. It's the Palmer Raids, yep, which
I think people tend to be way less familiar with.
That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted
at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition
to World War One, and they did basically the same shit.
A lot of people would give anti war speeches and

(02:28:38):
then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort
of like leftists would get fucking deported for it. So yeah,
that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the
line is not drawn here, and it should have been
drawn like two hundred miles back from here, but if
isn't drawn here, this is.

Speaker 1 (02:28:55):
Going to continue.

Speaker 3 (02:28:55):
This is going to continue to get worse.

Speaker 4 (02:28:57):
And I mean all of this is in relation to
Trump's executive order, you know about quote unquote anti Semitism. Meanwhile,
today in the Oval Office he said something incredibly anti
Semitic and also anti Arab somehow, like in this same
statement saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as
I'm concerned, he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish,

(02:29:19):
He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian unquote, which is
just an unbelievably anti Semitic and anti Arab statement all
at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they
act or things they've said, or things they believe in.

Speaker 2 (02:29:36):
Yeah, and it's one of those things. Again, Like it's
worth like covering this as it develops. There's not much
to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and
has to be opposed immediately and vigorously.

Speaker 4 (02:29:47):
Like yeah, yeah, no, it's really bad. And of course
you're not gonna have the ADL coming out against Trump.

Speaker 2 (02:29:52):
HEO, the acl you did, which I should note because
I heard some people saying they did not expect the
ACLU too they have. But yeah, the ADL is fully
in the camp of Lockgin, who won up who's ever
protested Israel.

Speaker 4 (02:30:04):
And they're not going to call Trump Andie Semitic for
making a statement like this, Yeah, because their interests are
fairly aligned at this point. Read what's happening in Gaza.
So I think now we're going to play a special
report from James, who can't be on the recording here today,
but he does have a report on deportations in Panama.

(02:30:24):
So James take it away.

Speaker 1 (02:30:26):
So something that we've seen in the last week is
that the people who the US government has deported to Panama,
who it can't deport to their home countries, have in
some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given
a thirty day visa or thirty days to essentially exit Panama,
and they're not really been given any support. So they're
in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in

(02:30:47):
Panama City, right just wandering around trying to work out
how to get home and trying to work out like
what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have
fled places like Afghanistan, Iran right where they can't go
back to they would face persecution just for the act
of having tried to lead, and they weren't already facing
persecution before, which many of them were. That that's why

(02:31:08):
they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down
the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads.
But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely
well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get
these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.

Speaker 4 (02:31:25):
Right, We're gonna go on a break and come back
to talk about the Department of Education and Tariff talk
with mi A Walng.

Speaker 6 (02:31:44):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:31:44):
Well we're are back, and you know it's everyone's favorite
time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we
get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical
guest to set this section of the program up.

Speaker 4 (02:32:00):
Lock Locking jazz, Rocky jazz bot sorry lot locking jazz bo.

Speaker 2 (02:32:12):
Locky jazz bob ah. Yeah, Oh my gosh. That was
worth the rest of our year's budget. Now everyone will
be getting paid for the rest of the year in
Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this.
But I think we can all agree worth it.

Speaker 4 (02:32:30):
Do you want to explain what that is because I
still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening
theme song is for tariff talk.

Speaker 2 (02:32:39):
Well, there was a great band called The Clash once
and they wrote one song that wasn't very good, and
in it somebody says something that didn't sound very much
like the word tariff, but if you mispronounce the word tariff,
it fit in. And that's where forty two thousand dollars
of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's
talk about tariff's.

Speaker 3 (02:32:59):
Yeah, now that I've they've gotten one of the two
things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So
since last week this has been an entire roller coaster
because right after we finished recording, in like the next
two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to
be that bad, because a lot of the tariffs that
were hit with Trump sort of general twenty five percent

(02:33:19):
Canada Mexico tariff got wave after Trump agreed not to
apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements.
But then everyone remembered that the twenty five percent steel
in a lune of tariff was still going into effect,
and so that went into effect this week. Now, there
was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump
was talking about doubling them to fifty percents. He backs

(02:33:41):
off of this in exchange for Ontario's dug Ford stopping
a like twenty five percent increase in electricity prices. However,
come the trade war is one hundred percent still on.
Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of
reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also terriffs and taxes
on a whole suite of other US goods. I'm just

(02:34:02):
gonna read this from the Associated Press because this is
no longer the trade war here is no longer limited
to the US, Canada, China, and to some extp Mexico.
For Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way
as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs,
or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.
But this week the EU officially joined the phrase. So

(02:34:22):
here's from the AP quote across the Atlantic, the European
Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles.

Speaker 5 (02:34:30):
Bourbon again.

Speaker 2 (02:34:32):
Yeah, yeah, Bourbon twice.

Speaker 3 (02:34:34):
Yeah, Bourbon twice.

Speaker 2 (02:34:35):
It's twice as important as the other thing.

Speaker 3 (02:34:37):
Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually you say this, There
was a whole like part of the whole speech that
was not a joke. Maya people the EU would like this.
This was this was part of the thing. Was yeah, like,
we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits
markets with the US backs down.

Speaker 4 (02:34:51):
It was also the only American product that Trudeau can
named during his big.

Speaker 2 (02:34:55):
Very funny, let's be honest, outside of music, this name
has produced one thing of value to the world, and
it's Bourbon.

Speaker 3 (02:35:04):
Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like
Bourbon was like our what attempts number was it at
making whiskey before we finally got one that was like exportable.

Speaker 2 (02:35:14):
Terrible, I mean yeah, it took it took generations. Look,
you know, Rome wasn't built in the day, and bourbon
is the ream of liquors produced in Kentucky.

Speaker 3 (02:35:24):
Yeah. Well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky,
this is actually deliberately Okay, well, all right, so the
EU in theory, the line that they're saying is that
these are deliberately designed to like target things that are
made in Red States. They also did do soybean tariffs too, though,
which is, you know, like you're dropping a new kin

(02:35:45):
Illinois here. Okay, So, the EU as and post reciprocal
tariffs on twenty eight billion dollars of US goods. Also
on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the
agricultural terrifts that we talked about last week, and notably
I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such
a critical part of the system of American agriculture as
the crop that you rotate out with coren to sort
of like preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now

(02:36:07):
in effect, it's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this
has I think in ways that are pretty predictable, at
least to me. This has caused a lot of panic
in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as
like more information comes in, but there's stuff that I
did not predict, which is so okay. Goldman Sachs has

(02:36:29):
downgraded its projection for us GDP growth. Their chief economist
is talking about how he thinks we're going to get
stagflation again, which is sort of While cyclation was the
thing in the seventies that was, you know, like you
have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time, this
is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state
and allowed to write take power in the first place.

Speaker 4 (02:36:48):
That's funny because when I google stag inflation, I get
very different results. That could just be my own No.

Speaker 2 (02:36:54):
That's that's stagfilation, Garrison, two very different things.

Speaker 4 (02:36:58):
Oh sorry, yeah, I think think, I think I'm anyway,
the things I.

Speaker 3 (02:37:05):
Have to deal with on this job, they never warned
me every single time. It's true, it's true, it's true.

Speaker 5 (02:37:11):
This is this.

Speaker 2 (02:37:12):
This makes up for a lot if you ever get
to fight the undertaker. You have a song to go
on too.

Speaker 3 (02:37:16):
It's true. So okay now now, so it's sort of
more surprisingly And this is something I have literally never
seen before with the US. Both City Bank, while City
which is the over the City Bank like changed his
name to City or something. But City Bank and ubs
the giants Swiss Bank downgraded the status of all US equities.

(02:37:38):
I have never seen anything like this in my entire life.
They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity.
So this is basically like this doesn't have like a
technical official effect, but this is like this is basically
their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you
should purchase right And this is also sort of applies
to bonds, So is that bad? This is like I

(02:38:03):
assume that the US would get its actual credit rating
devalued before this happens. I've never this is this is unreal.
Like the argument that they are making here is that
it is because of the instability in the US, like
because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's
going on, that like you should just fucking pull your
money out of the out of the US and American
companies and put it somewhere else, and they're they're specifically

(02:38:24):
boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is
astonishing because again one of one of the one of
the countries again who's whose equity status that they are
boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now.
They're dealing with like their fucking housing bubble going under.
They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer
based economy for years and years and years and years,
and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough

(02:38:45):
to actually like fuel an economy consumer spending. Like they're
you know, they're they're about to take giant damage from
the trade war. And also they like you know, like
it was only like three years ago the CCP faced
their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tianamen, right,
and these guys like and again these these are the
financial analysts of City Bank and ubs have looked at

(02:39:05):
that and went, you are better off putting your money
there than you are putting it in the US. I mean,
at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out
I'm reading four trillion from the US stock market just
in this past month.

Speaker 2 (02:39:18):
Now now trillion.

Speaker 1 (02:39:20):
Is that? Okay?

Speaker 2 (02:39:22):
So for example, I have thirty two dollars right now
in my pocket. Is it more than that? I think
it's a little bit more, Okay, Okay, okay, so it
is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay,
this is I'm trying to put this into terms I
can understand, Thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:39:39):
It is.

Speaker 3 (02:39:40):
Imagine imagine one burger, right.

Speaker 2 (02:39:42):
And a burger in Portland does cost thirty two dollars?

Speaker 4 (02:39:45):
So yes, yes, Now now imagine I thought you're gonna say,
does cost four trillion dollars?

Speaker 3 (02:39:52):
I mean probably tomorrow, right, like kudos. I don't know
if any plagues.

Speaker 2 (02:39:58):
That we're doing adding levity because this is it legitimately
kind of frightening.

Speaker 3 (02:40:02):
No, like this is I have never seen the financial
press like yes, like the only times I've ever seen
the financial press react to something like this is like
they were kind of acting like this about the possibility
of Jeremy Corbin like taking power in the UK, like
they are like I watched a guy on CNBC, right,

(02:40:22):
this is not like like this is this is not MSNBC.
This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC literally
go on air and call what Trump is doing quote
insane and start talking about how this is and this
is I think what these people are worried about is
they're you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting
right now, and it's starting with these sort of these
downgrades US equities is capital flight, which is straight up

(02:40:43):
a butt like international capital taking their money from the
US and fucking literally moving out of the country and
moving at somewhere else because the US is so unstable.
This is like, I don't know if anyone knows what
mass capital flight from the US would do, because I've
never seen anything like this. So part of what's going
on right and part of the reason the markets have
kind of recovered in the last few days after the

(02:41:04):
tanking they did Monday is that, like the inflation data
came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is,
all of the inflation data we're getting right now and
all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's
going to take a little bit of time for the
actual effects of these tariffs to set in, right Like
these are these are things that like you know, it's
going to take It's going to take like six months,
maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that,

(02:41:25):
and but and when we do, it is going to
fucking lawsmoking creator into the economy. And the worst part
of it about this is this isn't even the most
unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this
is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of
this in Congress. So one of the few things the
Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one
of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationists,

(02:41:46):
but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a
vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular,
and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class,
who you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying
to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring
a state of emergency, and the Democrats wanted to use
the National Emergencies Act to force to vote in the tariffs.

(02:42:08):
I'm just going to read this in the New York Times.
The National Emergency Law lays out a fast track process
for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency,
requiring committee consideration within fifteen calendar days after one is
introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.
But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure

(02:42:28):
on Tuesday declare that quote, each day for the remainder
of the one hundred and nineteenth Congress shall not constitute
a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that
Trump declared on February first. So the point we are
at right now is is, in order to preserve a
bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate
the entire world economy, Congress has declared that days don't pass.

(02:42:54):
This is fucking this is completely unhinged. This is fucking
like caligulous horse in the Senate ship like they again,
they are literally, they've literally declared that calendar days passing
are not actually calendar days, so that Trump can just
keep doing tariffs shit and rule by fiat like the Israelites.

Speaker 4 (02:43:10):
They have stopped time in order to win the battle.

Speaker 3 (02:43:15):
It's it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this
has kind of just been swept under the rug. The
Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right,
and and and the fact that like the fact that
Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of
every day going that the Republicans are voting to stop
time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing.

(02:43:36):
It's this real like sort of admission by the Republican
Congress that like they're seating authority over policy like to
Trump completely right, Like the government now is Trump ruling
by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of
like run circles around him in courts, which is not
you know, working enormously Well, yeah, I we'll see and
and you know, and this, this, this is starting to
have effects on like investor confidence like in the US

(02:44:01):
as a political entity and the US is an economic entity,
which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth
noting is that these people like Elin Mus, Donald Trump
the people around them have been saying for a long
time that the plan is to cause a recession and
then after the recession things are going to get better,
and the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right
now is the period in which they're starting to realize

(02:44:24):
that they were serious about this. And I don't know
what the political ramifications of that are going to be,
because these are people who actually matter in the political system.
And I think we'll see the ramlications of this play
out and then the sort of coming weeks and months.
But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit, and
we're now like Wiley Coyote, like running off the side
and trying not to look down.

Speaker 2 (02:44:44):
But on the upside, we have a great new song
for everybody. So woo, who's to say if any of
this has been bad?

Speaker 4 (02:45:04):
All right, we are back speaking of running circles around
the courts. We do have a small update REUSA side.
Last week, in a five to four vote, the Supreme
Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a
case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuddering

(02:45:24):
of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS
Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White
House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for
work that has already been completed, and further details will
be worked out back in the district court. And it's
still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going
to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments.

(02:45:46):
But this is the first move from the Supreme Court
regarding you know, Trump's actions the past few months. This
has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close
other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department
laid off nearly half of its workforce, over one thousand
and three hundred employees. A late Tuesday night, Education Secretary

(02:46:08):
Linda McMahon went onto Fox News to say that this
reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the
entire Education Department, saying, quote, this was the president's mandate.
His directive to me clearly is to shut down the
Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work
with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what

(02:46:29):
we did today was to take the first step of
eliminating what I think is a bureaucratic bloat unquote.

Speaker 2 (02:46:37):
Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've talked about
on the show for a long time, how eliminating Department
of Education eventually destroying public education has been a long
running goal. Oh yeah, of the most absolutely unhinged of
these people who are the people now in charge, And yeah,
they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in
the US.

Speaker 4 (02:46:54):
It's incredible. Well, and so far, the way that they're
trying to close up the Department of Education is kind
of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping
certain parts of the department active.

Speaker 7 (02:47:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:47:07):
On March tenth, the Education Department announced that they were
launching investigations into sixty universities for quote Title six violations
relating to anti Semitic harassment and discrimination unquote. And this
is in relation to anti genocide protests on campus. And
this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancelation of four
hundred million dollars in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.

(02:47:30):
The Education Department is threatening that these other fifty nine
universities may lose their funding if they do not quote
enforce Title six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits
any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the
basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes
shared Jewish ancestry unquote. I don't know how to say here.

Speaker 3 (02:47:53):
You get to see all the threads of this admin
coming together, right, which is that you know, these people
are also attempting to effect if we destroy like the
secondary education system in this country too, for reasons that
are sort of unclear to me.

Speaker 4 (02:48:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:48:06):
But what we're seeing here, right is the ways that
the Democrats sort of like falling into lockscept with Republicans
on back of the genocide in Israel has sort of
led to this thing where the Republicans are using this
to just straight up obliterate like all of the US
is like political, economic, and social institutions.

Speaker 4 (02:48:26):
Well and specifically with this like investigation, they are they
are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in
efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the
genocide in Gaza. Right, this is this is the you know,
the same attack on free speech and free expression that
they're doing against Khalil, Like this is this is the
same exact purpose, and now they're trying to get more

(02:48:48):
and more universities to be complicit in like the selective
removal of people in this country who choose to express
their First Amendment rights regardless of whether they're a citizen,
a green card, or on a student visa. So this
is this is all deeply, deeply worrying.

Speaker 2 (02:49:06):
Robert.

Speaker 4 (02:49:06):
You have a small segment you want to discuss before
we start to close out.

Speaker 2 (02:49:10):
Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So
in the subredit for the five ZHO five oh one
protest campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in
all fifty states simultaneously, right, I think their next day
of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving
an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit,

(02:49:32):
somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier given
kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would
respond to orders to carry out violence against US citizens,
And I just wanted to chat about this book because
it's it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.
My opinion is that one of the likely ways things
come to a head, probably as early as this summer,

(02:49:55):
is that there is mass protests in DC and the
Insurrection Act it gets used, and you know, the Guard
at least are brought in to attempt to crack down.
I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before,
and Trump and his State attorney have both discussed using
the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think
they see DC as the place they want to do that.

(02:50:16):
So it's interesting to me to see a post like this.
This is not a thing where like I've been able
to verify this guy. Yet there's a couple of points
that make me that is probably is a National guardsman.
For one thing, there's a lot of them right like,
this is not like a National guardsman. Where'd you find one?
There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.
For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with
things that I have seen and talked to other people

(02:50:38):
who are in and we're in the Guard about There's
one little bit where he advises people on like stop
the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says,
only buy from NAAR and North American Rescue. It's the
same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive
thirteen forty four to ten, which is why he believes
he's he's well within his rights to make a post
like this, And in essence, what he's saying is that

(02:51:00):
it is his belief that most of the military chain
of command from NCOs up to officers would not be
down with following the legal orders to fire on US citizens,
but the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon,
would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right.
That's the gist of it is that I think, you know,

(02:51:22):
within sort of the officer class and the NCO class,
there are a lot of resistance to the idea of
the military being used for domestic policing. That is less
clear with kind of the enlisted class. Who are you know,
a significant chuck of them are very much down for Trump.
But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would
fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And

(02:51:45):
I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate,
and I don't really see a reason to doubt it.
There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this
is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind
that like, when you're looking at the military, it's not
the police. Like, if I have to have agents armed
agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm

(02:52:07):
less worried about people being killed if it's the National
Guard in general. But that situation can change very very
rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight. And
I do think like that's the thing we have to
consider right now, is the possibility that we have us soldiers,

(02:52:27):
whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in
shooting at American protesters. Like that's that's in the cards
as early as this summer. And it's not a fun
the thing to think about. But I'm seeing more and more,
not just posts like this, but I'm having more and
more conversations with people who are in the military or

(02:52:47):
who were are in the National Guard about their concerns
about what they might be called upon to do. Some
of this has to do with the border, but like
it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military
to worry about how they are going to be used
in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're
talking about this summer, right is when there's a very
good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head.

(02:53:09):
So these are things you should be thinking about. If
you're listening and you are in the military. These are
things that you should be thinking about because the people
who are in charge of our government right now have
made a lot of statements about how they want to
use the military to deal with protests, and the idea
that that's going to happen very soon is not not

(02:53:29):
fringe or crazy.

Speaker 4 (02:53:30):
Well, and although these people might have you know, slightly
more disciplined when it comes to actual firearms. There is
also incidents like in twenty twenty yep where the Kentucky
Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd
control absolutely munitions. I think that is this is also
worth stating. Even if you know, like a kent State
situation maybe is not not as likely in like the

(02:53:52):
modern day, there's certainly other other ways to cause grievous harm. Yes,
in these sorts of like protest environments and when we've
seen and.

Speaker 2 (02:54:00):
I mean even in Portland, when we have seen which
you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd
control devices are usually people in our case it was
federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and
have not trained on them. Yeah, because they're not. There's
certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them,
and these guys are just Hey, you know how to

(02:54:20):
use a gun. You must know how to use the
robotal thing.

Speaker 4 (02:54:23):
You know. No, if you use like less lethals the
way you would use you know, a regular firearm, that
actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences
or like life changing consequences. Yeah, which you know, police
are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control
munitions that necessarily you know, like bore attack or or
like state national guards. It's something that's also you know,

(02:54:45):
worth keeping in mind. Let's close by my least favorite segment,
Stinky Musk, which I still has a really bad name.
On Monday, a Central judge ruled that Musk's DOGE should
be the subject to comply with Foyer requests and public
disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge

(02:55:05):
ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and
the Office of Management and Budget and was ordered to
quote begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon
as practicable unquote now. Despite Musk's claims of quote unquote
maximum transparency, last month, the Trump administration tried to shield
DOGE from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents

(02:55:26):
as quote unquote presidential records, which carries special protections. This
specific case is super interesting. The judge of federal judge
by the name of Cooper also critiqued the way that
the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from
political quote the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way
of evidence about doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court

(02:55:47):
wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that
the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that
DOGE qualifies as an agency under some sections of law
but not others when it suits it. Thus, DOGE becomes,
on the defendant's view, a Goldilock's entity, Cooper wrote, not
an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient.

(02:56:11):
And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how DOGE
is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know,
benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one
other Musk story to close out. This episode admits Tesla's
plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of

(02:56:31):
vandalism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started
doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon
climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate,
Trump remarked, Wow, everything is computer So this was a
very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism. Where

(02:56:55):
Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models,
and Trump got to unquote, you know, pick the one
that he wanted to buy, as he just like sat
in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his
you know, company is losing a shocking amount of money
in the in these talk market.

Speaker 3 (02:57:14):
Yeah, and there, I mean there, there's literally there's literally
a picture of him with like the notes that he has.
There's like in a in like really really like a.

Speaker 4 (02:57:21):
Tesla sales note like bullet point of like how much
certain models are, what their different features are, which ones
have self driving features included, which ones you have to
pay extra for?

Speaker 5 (02:57:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:57:31):
No, he's he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch
as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best
friends and co president's company. Trump said on True Social
the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively
boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby,

(02:57:53):
in order to attack and do harm to Elon and
everything he stands for. Unquote. So now not only has
Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which which is, you know,
its own form of unhinged. But on Tuesday, Trump announced
that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism,

(02:58:15):
promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell. A
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous
acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are
nothing short of domestic terror unquote, So that.

Speaker 2 (02:58:32):
Would be fun to see how that blaze out.

Speaker 3 (02:58:35):
I feel like we're we genuinely are not that far
off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal
mandate saying you must buy a Tesla like this. This
is the this is the kind of shit that we're
in now.

Speaker 4 (02:58:47):
Now, this is one of the most like bizarre things
I've ever seen. If if Biden or any Democratic president
did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls
of people screaming for his impeachment, similar to like the
erg Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant
open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where president is
using his office to boost like the personal financial interests

(02:59:08):
of one of his top advisors who's also like running
government agencies essentially and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit
their ability to like investigate his own businesses while also
taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like
Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty
pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days,

(02:59:29):
and now Tesla shares have risen four percent after Trump's
support for Musk and Tesla.

Speaker 2 (02:59:36):
Great, well, I think that's gonna do it here at
us with the ed to play us out, We're gonna
refer back to our friend the Narcissist Cookbook who put
together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're gonna
hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore.

Speaker 4 (02:59:54):
We reported the news.

Speaker 3 (03:00:00):
Jazz Bob lot Jazz got lot Lock Jazz Bob Locking
jazz bo.

Speaker 2 (03:00:12):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 10 (03:00:18):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here
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