It Could Happen Here Weekly 185

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to it could happen here a show about things
falling apart this week. The thing falling apart is the
US healthcare system science in general, but specifically the healthcare system.
I'm Garrison Davis and today I'm joined by a very
special returning guest, doctor Kappa Hoode.

Speaker 4 (00:46):
Hello.

Speaker 5 (00:46):
Hey, Yes, the thing falling apart is you, the listener.
So it's very important that you listen up. You were
going to do anyways, but in particular, you should be
paying attention here because this is important stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
So in mid May, we got some news in the
FDA CDC Human Health and Services front. As there's been
there's been a lot of news in the health front,
but specifically we're going to be talking about the new
guidelines for COVID vaccines that the FDA is trying to
push through in the United States. So the new FDA Commissioner,

(01:23):
Marty mccaray and the top vaccine regulator of an APRISAD
have published a quote unquote study you pushed back on
on the use of the word study in the New
England Journal of Medicine about the COVID vaccine booster shots. Yeah,
and are going to be changing the guidelines for how

(01:45):
these are going to be administered and who has access
to them, particularly those under the age of sixty five,
might have a harder time getting the COVID booster that
they have like the past few years, requiring certain existing
conditions to qualify. And they have a whole bunch of
arguments for this. They say they're trying to make this

(02:06):
more in line with the vaccine guidelines and other countries
they're proposing for their studies on the necessity of COVID
vaccines for those under sixty five. Yeah, and for someone
like me who tries to keep up with COVID boosters
and you know, doesn't like it getting infected with COVID,
some of this can seem a little bit both confusing
and worrying and considering, like the anti vaccine takeover of

(02:28):
the FDA and like the federal Health services in general,
it's a frightening move.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
I guess yeah. I think you're right to feel concerned.
It is something I am a little concerned about for
a couple of reasons. One, I mean, I just don't
flatly agree with limiting the use of the vaccines the
people they're planning to limit it to. I mean, this
is coming from the medical freedom crowd. I feel like
people should at least have the bodily autonomy to have

(02:55):
the vaccine if they want it.

Speaker 4 (02:57):
That's a part of it.

Speaker 5 (02:58):
But I'm actually even more concerned about the bigger sense
of what this represents. You know, on the surface, making
some changes is not totally unreasonable to our vaccine policy,
and we generally reassess our COVID vaccine policy annually, so
that's not too abnormal. But the thing is, we have

(03:18):
this whole system set in place to do it in
a efficient, smart way that is public, and there's a
process to it. If I can give you a little
bit of a sense of how it normally runs and
what's going to happen now, I think it'll explain why
I might have my concerns.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, that would be very useful to hear. So normally there.

Speaker 5 (03:38):
Are some clinical trials, there's some studies that happen, some
real world data, some points that can be looked at,
and then the FDA uses this advisory committee. Again, these
advisory committees are not career politicians. They're scientists, their public
health officials, their doctors, people volunteering their time. I don't
think they get paid other than maybe food and their expenses,

(04:01):
but other than that, they're not paid for just this job.
And what this group. The first group is called the
VRBPAC and they determine if it's a safe and effective vaccine.
If it is determined that way, then the FDA grants
a license and approval. From there. There's another group, the ACIP,
and that's an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it's

(04:25):
the same sort of thing. It's a group made up
of scientists, healthcare professionals, public health professionals, and people will
come together. They'll determine who should get it, and then
the CDC director signs off and then it gets out
there to the world. Now, basically what we have is
two political pointees, both of which have these massive axes

(04:46):
to grind on the subject, have some severe chips on
their shoulder about what's happened so far to them in
this conversation and this dialogue. Who are going to bypass
this whole scientific system, who aren't to be looking at
these questions like what is our growing immunity? Is Annuel
Booster still warranted? And they're going to take this outside

(05:07):
of that and basically make the decision. And I find
that to be very concerning, even past like this, this
basic premise of like, you know, does this mean that
my friends or myself I won't be able to at
the vaccine that I want to get? So I find
it to be very concerning. And you alluded to that
article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It did

(05:28):
not alleviate my concerns.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
One of the guys here, the guy who's heading up
the vaccine regulations, has compared the US COVID response to
Nazi Germany. He has boosted anti vaxx claims from Robert F.
Kennedy Junior.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
And he's blocked me on Twitter. Come on, and truly
his most heinous offense. How could you block me I'm lovable.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
No. Me and this guy Robert Evans were joking yesterday,
never heard of it. Vot about how some of your
like personal nemeses have been have been put into positions
of like government power, and how you're upset about that,
And I remarked, oh, first time, because this has unfortunately

(06:14):
been the trend of our work the past few years.
These these weird online figures who we've developed personal a
grievances against for being bad people suddenly now are like
in the p echelons of power in the US government.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
Hey, I like them, they just don't like me.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
I don't know if that's true, but regardless, do you
have any other notes on mccari and like specifically, Uh.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
You know what I'll say.

Speaker 5 (06:40):
So A big thing about this article that they put
in there, and what they talk about a lot is
trying to get more farm companies to do large studies,
which you know, on the surface totally reasonable. But the
thing about it is not every problem can be solved
with what's considered the quote unquote golden standard of studies,

(07:03):
the double blind randomized control study. Some studies just can't.
They want to see that these companies are doing these
studies to say that it's good and safe and beneficial
for younger people. But there's a couple problems with this, Okay, One,
I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Like, if we have
something that works, if we know this vaccine helps, and

(07:24):
we do CDC studies have shown that these boosters help
for at least four to six.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Months, possibly life saving medication.

Speaker 5 (07:30):
Exactly is it ethical to deny somebody that, Like, would
I want to be a part of that study.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
I wouldn't.

Speaker 5 (07:36):
I wouldn't want to get potentially the placebo. So that's
part of it. But even beyond that, to do these studies,
it's lengthy. They are long studies. If you want to
do it and you want to do it right, it
takes a while. So by the time they do this,
by the time they do the study, even if I'm

(07:57):
being very generous in how long it takes them, by
the time we get the results, we'll be onto a
different mutation. We know that this thing mutates, we know
it's going to change into a different virus, and we
won't even know if that study that we just spent
all the time doing works on it. So we have
other options for studying these things. They're not double blind,

(08:18):
randomized controlled studies. But we have other studies at work,
and there are plenty of epidemiologists out there, vaccinologists, people
who know way more about this than me, and to
be fair, know more about this than Prasad and McCary.
They're the ones saying this is not a good idea.
So I'm like saying, let's listen to them. Let's listen.
They know what they're talking about. They're smart people. I've

(08:39):
met some of them. They're great, and it doesn't make
sense to me on an ethical or practical level to
do it that way.

Speaker 4 (08:45):
Do you know what doesn't make sense to me? Cave?
I know? I do? I do? I do? I can
I say? Kind? I guess you can guess.

Speaker 5 (08:52):
I'm guessing that commercials don't make sense to you, But really,
at this point in your career, they should make sense.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
I should know by now. But still the concept is
is a little bizarre. Here they are.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
Okay, we are back.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
I guess let's get into more how this will affect
the average listener, Like what these things could mean like
both in I guess the short term and then like
the long term, if you're trying to plan out your
you know, your health a journey. What kind of like
risks you have if you're you know, compromise, what that
means for you versus if you're magical, perfectly healthy, you know,

(09:34):
twenty five year olds, Yeah, prancing around with with no issues.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
France and as the kids do. Kids love to prance.

Speaker 5 (09:42):
So in the short term, it's not clear. In a
month that advisory committee I mentioned the ACIP is going
to meet, or they're supposed to meet, I don't know
if it's all going to happen, and they're supposed to
determine who should get this, so first things first, they
could they could disagree. It would be the first time
I've seen it. I've never seen the FDA and the

(10:04):
ACIP not be in lockstep in this regard. And maybe
it's happened, but I can't think of it in like,
I don't know, I don't know what'll happen. That'll be
a little bit of chaos and it'll be interesting to
see what happens to that point. But if it goes
as the FDA now plans, it will limit who can
potentially get these vaccines if you're not over sixty five,

(10:26):
if you don't have a what's considered a risk for
serious disease like asthma, cancer, kidney disease, certain types of
liver lung disease, diabetes. If you don't have any of
these things, then it's not clear to me. Will the
pharmacist not give it to you, Will the pharmacist check
if you tell them you have one of these things?
Will insurance cover it? I don't know, and that's really concerning.

(10:48):
I think the price is going to go up, and
that does relate to the bigger concern, the long term
problem in this, which is, I mean, Kennedy has said
he's not taking away vaccines. Great, he doesn't actually need
to take away vaccines. He just needs to do things
like this so that nobody wants to pay for it.
Nobody wants to go through the process of studying it,
nobody's going to make them. Insurance companies aren't going to

(11:10):
pay for it. People aren't gonna end up being able
to afford it. They're gonna be lesser and fewer of them,
and they will go away naturally on their own because
of this. That's really the long term concern that I
have with this. The short term concern, I mean, I
don't know, it's going to be interesting, you know, like
there's certain things on this list that the CDC has,
Like for example, physical inactivity is on this list.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
I mean, how who could argue with you on that?

Speaker 5 (11:37):
Like, you know, if you tell the pharmacistre having physical inactivity,
like will they I don't know, will they check that?
How will they check that? So I don't know what
will happen in the short term and the long term.
Definitely big concerns.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
It seems like part of their strategy here is just
putting as many roadblocks in between you and vaccines that
could save your life as possible to further whatever like
conspiracy driven worldview that the people at the top have
and just like the inhumane side effects that's going to
have across the entire population.

Speaker 5 (12:09):
Absolutely, I mean to also put this into context, COVID.
We're in a better situation than we were years ago.
That's certainly true. But at least from the CDC records alone,
forty seven thousand Americans died from COVID related diseases last year.
At least two thirds of that number were directly due

(12:30):
to COVID, and amongst that there are about two hundred
and thirty deaths from kids. That is a significant number.
And at least you can say at least one hundred
and thirty of those kids were directly related to COVID
and not from some other problems. So this is significant
stuff that we're still dealing with. In long COVID can
affect people. Long COVID can affect all groups. It can

(12:52):
affect young and old. So it is concerning and it
bothers me in particular that the group doing this, as
I said, getting is the medical freedom group, and this
is this is sort of the exact opposite of this.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
I think this demonstrates how much a medical freedom has
actually just been a dog whistle for like this conspiracy
theory driven belief this entire time. Like people clamoring for
medical freedom don't actually believe in it. They're against trans healthcare,
they're against vaccines in general. They want to put autistic
kids into like behavioral like therapy programs to try to
make them not not autistic. Like it's it's it's not

(13:29):
actually about medical freedom. It's about it's about advancing a
very specific conservative and conspiratorial worldview that actually controls what
other people are allowed to do with their bodies. This
is like a massive, a massive part of their project,
and like, I don't know how else you can like
interpret moves like this which are just going to jeopardize
people and put them even in more danger.

Speaker 5 (13:51):
Yeah, and it's going to get worse. We can see
the effects already. Just today, Moderna withdrew their application for
a covid flu combo vaccine, a one shot vaccine that
would have both, and the studies on that so far
were really good. Actually they showed they looked really promising
and they're just doing this because you know, okay, now

(14:12):
do we have to have these double blind control studies
for this?

Speaker 4 (14:16):
And they know it's going to be a hostile environment.
And now it's.

Speaker 5 (14:19):
Withdrawn and there's going to be more and more of that.
Like way way before your time or my time, there
used to be more pharmaceutical companies making vaccines. There used
to be a lot more than there are now there's
only a handful now, but there used to be a lot.
And then there was like this CBS show about the
protessis vaccine and it was called like Russian roulette, this

(14:41):
could give you, like this could end your life. And
there's like one like made for TV like show about
it. It wasn't a movie, but it was like a special
they did, and it raised such concerns that letters started
pouring in to the network, and they then started pouring
into Congress and there was a whole hearing and after

(15:01):
that we had a significant drop off in regards to
the companies that make these vaccines, and we have a
few now, and I am worried that this could be
another sort of inflection point in that in that history,
in that.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
Arc of vaccines, and we're going to get even fewer now.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
I mean, it's been devastating watching the advancement of the
HIV vaccine, which seemed like it was nearing completion, gets
tolled for a number of reasons, including like DEI policies
getting pushed across these health departments because the HIV vaccine
research uses, you know, terms like gay and trans and

(15:40):
it mentioned gender. Yeah, you know, all all that kind
of stuff, which is which people focused on in the
first few months. I'm super nervous about the COVID nasal
vaccine getting basically shelved, and every like new thing we
see come under the FDA just makes those fears heightened.

Speaker 4 (15:59):
Yeah, it's it's pretty rad.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Not to be too depressing, but that is kind of
the that is that is the mood of this show
in some ways. Yeah, like people people can still you know,
wash hands mask up at this point, people can still
get the vaccine. But like the way that the way
that we've been like treating like the widespread health of
this country has has has already been pretty bad the

(16:23):
past few years. Yeah, and this is like trying to
intentionally make it worse.

Speaker 5 (16:28):
Yeah, it does. It does feel like that sometimes. Yeah,
I am concerned about it all, but you're all right,
we still have as of now. I mean, there's still
some options going forward in terms of vaccines, and hopefully
we'll continue to have them totally and we'll see how
this plays out. I am really curious. The next month
will be very telling when we have that ACIP Advisory

(16:50):
Committee again. If it's allowed to happen, and they allow
people like Paul offit, people who are real vaccinologists, people
who know about vaccines, not just pointed political people, but
people who actually study this and know it. If they
come on and they can provide enough pressure, if people
can support them, then I do think that there is

(17:11):
there is some hope that the pushback will will help
us alleviate some of this restriction.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
I hope would the people on the like ACIP panel
be like political appointees, Do they have the same risk
of all these other people put in under RFK junior
where they're very clearly politically there versus like careerists who
are actually actual experts in the field.

Speaker 5 (17:38):
Well, unless they change it. The ACIP is not set
up like that. The ACIP is just you know, these
really great group of independent doctors and scientists, public health
experts that are using real world data. They're looking at
how the immunity shifts over time. They're looking at the
virus and seeing if it's changing. Really volunteers that come

(18:02):
from the world of science to do so. So as
of now, they're not. That's not how the group works.
I don't know if that'll hold. I mean, I don't
see any reason why they couldn't if they wanted to
scrap the ACIP get rid of the people on it.
You know, people who are vaccinologists who are of great
significance to the community, like you know.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Peter Hotez or your Paul Offits.

Speaker 5 (18:26):
These scientists who really study and look at these things
and put in just people who are already in line.
I mean, unless I'm missing something about it, I don't
see why they couldn't do that.

Speaker 4 (18:35):
I hope they don't.

Speaker 5 (18:36):
I think there's enough scientific background in Prasad and McCary
that they would recognize the importance of an independent council.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
But yeah, I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Well, that's good to know. We don't need to be
fully doom or pilled on that, but it's a good
thing to watch out for.

Speaker 4 (18:55):
Do you know what I'm gonna be watching out for, Kava,
I do, I certainly do.

Speaker 5 (18:59):
You're gonna be listening more than watching, but you're going
to be listening for some really great ads.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
Okay, Cob, I guess I'd also like to touch on
this actual piece in the in the in the New
England Journal of Medicine. Yeah, they're quote unquote to evidence
based approach to COVID nineteen vaccination, which is more of
a blog post, right, it is not a study, it is.
It is a blog post. And specifically they talk about

(19:37):
how the United States has a much more like severe
vaccine strategy than other countries in Europe, and they try
to use this to justify their own beliefs, saying that
they're trying to bring things in line with the vaccine
policies in other countries.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Is this real?

Speaker 3 (19:56):
Is this true? I don't live in Europe. I'm not
super familiar with the European vaccine guidelines. I don't expect
you to be an expert either.

Speaker 4 (20:06):
No.

Speaker 5 (20:06):
It's really funny though that you mentioned it, because it's
so funny what they decide to endorse about European policy,
like will socialized medicine. Most of these European countries have
socialized medicine. They will have nothing to do with that,
and then they'll nitpick certain things. So there is some
truth to the fact that we are doing things differently.

(20:28):
And again I'm not opposed to looking at that and
being like, Okay, what are the countries doing, does it work?
And could we do that? So there is a difference
are currently until now in the US, it was generally
recommended for anyone over six months. People weren't being made
to have this. By the way, again, medical freedom, you know.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
No, I was pretty sure that Joe Biden will send
a swat team to your house and shoot you unless
you get the COVID vaccine. That's what I was told
on the RFKJ and your podcast.

Speaker 5 (21:01):
I mean he is somehow simultaneously a decrepit old man
who's certainly confused, but somehow able to orchestrate an incredible
from the depths darkness, deep state espionage. So I guess
it's possible, and that's how we do it. It's how Canada
does it. The UK they do do it a little differently.

(21:22):
They do it for people greater than sixty five. They
do it for residents and care homes. They do it
for people greater than six months and high risk and
people who are greater than twelve years of age but
are in a house where someone's demo compromised. They do
it for anyone who's over sixteen who helps care for
someone who's vulnerable. And they do it for all social

(21:42):
and healthcare workers. I mean, they have a different system
in place. They have, as I mentioned, socialized healthcare in general.
They're very good about their vaccines, so it's hard to tell.
It's a little bit of apples and oranges. But it's
funny what they decided to pick and not pick about that.
And it's also funny why some groups are missing under

(22:04):
our care, Like a lot of places will vaccinate anyone
who's overweight. Here they don't consider being overweight a risk
for COVID, so that it is funny how they're choosing
their nitpicking certain things that are recommendations common recommendations in
other countries and not using them here, so they do
it a little differently in Europe. That is true, and

(22:26):
again this is the kind of stuff that they're going
to evaluate every year. The ACIP will evaluate the look
at the emerging data, to look at the other countries,
to look at what's being done, and they'll discuss it.
So it is true, and it does seem reasonable on
the surface when they say it like that, hey, we're
just trying to get and they mentioned this in the
New England Journal of Medicine article, we're just trying to
get more in line with the rest of the world.

(22:48):
And that's not really true. It's like they're just picking
certain things that they want to agree with and ignoring
all the other stuff about their healthcare system that we
could benefit from.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
One of the more wide aspects of this, again Glorified
blog post is talking about how the COVID vaccine booster
program has actually undermined public trust in vaccinations, which is
like again, this is like a we're all looking for
the guy who did this moment wearing the hot dog
cost you I quote. Even healthcare workers remain hesitant, with

(23:21):
less than one third participating in twenty twenty three to
twenty twenty four fall Booster program. There may even be
a ripple effect. Public trust and vaccination in general has declined,
resulting in reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital
immunization programs such as that for these hills mumps and rebella.

Speaker 4 (23:39):
Oh so weird.

Speaker 5 (23:41):
I wonder if it's the people that have been talking
about how corrupt and terrible the FDA and CDC.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
Are for like the last five six years.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
It's insane that they're like able to like do this
like it's yeah, I don't.

Speaker 5 (23:53):
I mean, it is an ongoing inside joke amongst people
in the medical commune unity.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
The hot dog meme guy.

Speaker 5 (24:02):
That's a very common like attribute to these to these
characters who talk about, you know how how they're clearly
sowing the seeds of mistrust and then capitalizing off of it.

Speaker 4 (24:13):
I don't know if they even mean to or not.

Speaker 5 (24:15):
And people ask me a lot they're like you know why,
why are they why why do they do this? And
I that's a tough one for me. That's your friend,
Robert Evans. I ask him that every time I'm on
his podcast, as there's a point in the podcast where
I earnestly and I don't do this on purpose, where
I just don't understand, and I need to understand why
it's being done. And in these cases it's hard, you know. Previously,

(24:39):
Vne Persod had a podcast that people really like called
The Plenary Podcast in the medical community. I never listened
to it because I don't listen to medical podcasts.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
Why would I.

Speaker 5 (24:47):
And what it did basically was it would break down
like studies and go over them in a very sort
of skeptical way. And I think it's good as a
doctor to be skeptical. I think that's a good attribute
for us to have, and it was useful in many ways.
But then I don't know if it's audience capture. I
don't know if it's true belief. I don't know what shifted,

(25:09):
but it does seem that it was a steady growth
into this contrarian perspective from the medical community that doesn't
totally make sense to me, Like they all kind of
feel like they're Galileo or samulwise, that they had this rare,
contrarian opinion that made them special and they were attacked for.

(25:29):
But in my mind, it's not so much that as
it is. You know, there is a scientific process that
we have. Galileo followed a scientific process and that's how
it came to those conclusions. These people, I don't feel
are following that, and they are strict to their method
idolatry to what they feel needs to be done, and

(25:50):
I don't feel like they're listening to the experts in
the field explained to them why that's not the case.
That's how every hero probably feels in every situation. But
they have somehow become the victims in this story, and
I am very curious to see now that they're in power,
how that shifts and if they maintain this sort of

(26:13):
victim mentality.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Well, how can you be a victim when we have
beef Tallow back at stake and shake everyone. We did it,
Beef t We did it, Joe, We're back.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
We sure did. Maga coated coconut oil.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Now I'll be completely healthy again.

Speaker 5 (26:29):
Yeah, Yeah, that is so funny to me that be
I mean like, we could talk about seed oils, we
could talk about the quote unquote hateful eight, we could
talk about all that stuff. But it's it's pretty clear
that oils are better than tallow for your health, and
beef tallow there's very little, Like there's a little proof

(26:50):
to prove that it's good for you, and a lot
of proof to say that animal products are bad for
your heart. Yeah, so it's it's absurd that that's an
argument that we're still having at this in twenty twenty now.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Instead of frying in theef tablet oil, instead, I just
drink a full eight ounces of grape seed oil every
morning to wake up. It does wonders for me. It
just gets the whole body up and run in lubricates
the whole system.

Speaker 4 (27:13):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
I know you can't give medical advice, but do you
have any advice to give listeners before we close?

Speaker 4 (27:21):
At least people who are like.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
You, afraid of what these changes from rfk's FDA will
mean for them in their community.

Speaker 5 (27:30):
Yeah, I think it's okay to be concerned about it,
but I do think there is some time to go.
There's going to be a lot of people from the
medical community fighting to try and fight these restrictions on
the vaccine. So we'll see how that goes. You will
probably be able to find ways to do it. You
should talk to your doctor about it because your doctor
probably can see a risk factor that you don't. If

(27:52):
you don't see one that automatically fits that list from
the CDC, your doctor might be able to find one
that is. And I'm not talking about fraud. I'm talking
about like real things. Your doctor may be able to
look through your chart, look through your history, talk to
you and find a risk factor that you didn't think
was a risk factor, like, for example, physical inactivity or
you know, smoking. So there are things that we can

(28:15):
look for. And as they shift those goalposts, which I'm
sure they will, we'll also be trying to find ways
around that as well. And you know, when the ACIP
comes out, there's going to be a lot of pressure
on them, and I think we can pressure our Congress
and we can pressure our representatives to support them at

(28:38):
least nominally to discuss it, if nothing else, because I
don't think this is getting talked about that much, So
I think if we can bring it to the public attention,
I think we can shift the narrative on vaccines. I
do believe that the narrative has shifted on covid and
vaccines in this terrible way, this revisionist way, where everyone

(28:58):
pretends it's not it wasn't a big deal and that
we didn't lose millions of people. And I think if
we can keep that in the public discourse, I think
that alone will help.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
I think that's important for us to do.

Speaker 5 (29:11):
And that's what people you know on Reddit and people
on the Internet and Facebook and all that stuff can do,
is they can help keep this in the public eye
and fight that incipient I don't if that's the right word.
Insidious is probably the right word. It's this really subtle
sort of reconstructing of the narrative of what covid was
and how important these vaccines are. So that's how people

(29:33):
can help in the immediate future. And then you know,
stay tuned, talk to your doctor about vaccines and when
you can get them, and get them as soon as
you can. I do think that's a good idea for
both flu and for COVID boosters when available.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Cave lovely talking with you as always. Where can people
hear you talk more on the internet.

Speaker 5 (29:57):
I am on a podcast called The House of Po
and it is a humor adjacent, fun ish medical podcast.

Speaker 3 (30:06):
I would say it's not adjacent to humor. I would
say it is on target.

Speaker 4 (30:10):
What we're next door to humor. We next door to humor.
We speak a little humor, not a ton. But you
will like the show.

Speaker 5 (30:18):
If you like this, I think you're gonna recognize a
lot of the same people. Gear, for example, has just
recently been on an episode, and you know, you'll we'll
get Gear on again, I hope, and you'll find people
that you like. There a lot of the same sorts
of people. We take a skeptical look at medical grifters
and the wellness community. So a lot of the same
stuff you love from these shows and the extended behind

(30:41):
the Bastard universe. You'll also get into I think our
podcast the House of Pod and find it anywhere The
House of Pod, the House of Pod.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
The first time I met you online, I was invited
onto this show. And you know, it was a pretty
busy year twenty twenty. There's a lot going on for
me with you know, riots and such, and you know,
whatever damage was done to my brain via all that
tear gas and for some reason, and I don't quite
know why. I wonder if I was just conflating two messages,

(31:10):
but I thought I agreed to go onto a medieval
history podcast, not a medical podcast. So as things just started,
I was a little bit confused, and then I went
back to reread the message of like, oh no, I
definitely says medical, and I still don't quite know how
I did that.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
Like I said, a lot going on that idea. Great,
whatever it was. Whenever you thought you were doing, you
did it well.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
But whenever I think of your podcast, I now also
think about medieval history.

Speaker 4 (31:41):
So there you go. Yeah, hey, okay, that's cool. I'll
take it.

Speaker 5 (31:44):
I'll think we did do an episode one. I mean
not every episode is strictly like medical stuff. Like I
did an episode with these these guys who wrote this
book on Sparta and the battle with the Persians and
how this story has been sort of turned into something
grossly that's not partially because of three hundred and partially

(32:05):
because of other reasons.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
Yeah, and so there is a little bit of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, you would like that episode.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

Speaker 5 (32:13):
I don't I think about how the Persians kill the
lot of them, over them thermophully.

Speaker 4 (32:17):
That brings me a little spark of joy. Okay, good
to know.

Speaker 5 (32:21):
Just kidding listeners, don't I don't approve of people being murdered.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
I don't. I don't even if they're jerks. Good to
say this day and age. Thank you so much, Cafe,
thank you, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
Welcome to take it happen here. I'm your host, Na Wong.
Today is the day before the thirty sixth anniversary of
the Tianneman Square massacre. We're doing something a little bit different.
Three years ago I wrote a pair of episodes about Tiannemen,
democracy and the International Workers Movement, expanding off a piece

(33:16):
I'd written for laos On a year before that. That
was a long time ago. The world is a fundamentally
different place than it was in twenty twenty one. Europe
has been consumed by war. Whole revolutions rose and fell.
The fact threat we defeated in the streets, returned to

(33:36):
power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new,
uglier and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tianeman,
to return to one of the great horrors of another
age to see if we can take anything new from
the wreckage of the Death of Hope. I'm no longer

(33:57):
the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes,
and so today and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were
really three Tienemens. The first and most famous Tieneman was
a student protest inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard
the word Tienemen before this story, you know. The second

(34:22):
Tienemen was the Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around
the square, blocks sees and transformed by Beijing's working class.
If you've heard about this Tienemen at all, it's probably
in the context of the tanks rolling through them on
their way to the square. And then there was the
third Tienemen, the protests in other cities, of which we

(34:45):
still years after I wrote the original piece. No distressingly
little about our focus today is on.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
The first two.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
The students of the student protests were a weird ideologue
go grab back that cannot simply be reduced down to
the simplistic pro democracy label they've been settled with in
the three and a half decades since Tienemen. The short
version is this the students were pissed off about what's
called reform and Opening not going fast enough, and we

(35:19):
should talk about what reform and opening actually was. On
the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions
on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and other people were so
called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse.
This was paired with market reforms. I started to bring
capitalism back to China. This was a shit show in

(35:43):
a lot of ways. If you want to hear about
the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt peonage about five years
into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastard's
episode about the poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening
is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression,
golden age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed

(36:04):
like they could be different. This is not entirely accurate.
Reform and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian
crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the One Child Policy,
a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of
social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations, and the reimposition of

(36:25):
patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule
in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's
decision making and control over the process of their own labor.
In these horrors you can see the beginning of the
fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly already forming.

(36:46):
The students wanted market reform to go faster, They wanted
more freedom of speech, They sort of wanted democracy, but
mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party
so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market
reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of
these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism,

(37:08):
which holds that the strong central party should take full
control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It
was an ideology that survived the death of the protests
and went on to become a major faction of the
CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this
is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman
comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly

(37:32):
hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders
were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones,
and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal
of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual.
The guy they were trying to defend inside the party
wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for

(37:52):
the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded
failed to occur. But Tianemen, as I mentioned earlier, was
also the workers, and for most of the protests, the
students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the
square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried
to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and

(38:14):
relations were in general extremely bad. This raises the question
what were the workers doing there in the first place.
There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one
is that the workers were pissed off at how badly
the party was treating students in the square. But there
were other things going on too. The late in eighteen
eighties in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation. The rapid

(38:37):
price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed
a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers. Meanwhile,
marketization was accelerating, and suddenly you had CCP princelings racing
down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers
on their bikes, and spending a year's salary gambling at

(38:58):
the racetrack. And this pissed people off, so they started organizing.
I'm going to read a section from a piece by
Uron saying about what the workers were doing during the
struggle to obstruct the military. Workers started to realize the
power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self

(39:18):
liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self
organization ensued. The worker's autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and
other workers' organizations both within and across the workplace mushroomed.
The development of organization led to a radicalization of action.
Workers started organizing self armed quasi militias such as Quote

(39:41):
Picket Corps and Quote Dared to Die Brigades to monitor
and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi militias were also
responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide
any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Beijing became
a city self managed by workers. It was reminiscent of
petrograds self armed workers organized in the months between Russia's

(40:03):
February and October revolutions. At the same time, Beijing workers
built many more barricades and fortifications on the street. In
many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns, A possible general
strike was put on the table as well. Many workers
started to build connections between factories to prepare for a
general strike. This was unaccepsible to the party, and so

(40:26):
for the third time in seventy years, the CCP fed
its own working class to the machine guns. On the
night of June third, the army began to slaughter its
way to the workers defending the square. It was the
workers who bore the front of the massacre. Most of
the casualty and lead of political repression were against members
of the workers faction. The army soon reached the square itself,

(40:49):
for the Western press Corps bore witness to what became
known as the Tianeman Square massacre. This is where you
get tank Man and the most famous accounts of the massacre.
By that point it was almost all over. The protests
were crushed and the Chinese working class died with it.
But before the last bullet had even been fired, every

(41:10):
faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives
about what had just happened. The most common narrative is
that Tieneman was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, and
to some extent it's not exactly wrong.

Speaker 4 (41:24):
There were a.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
Lot of other pro democracy movements in this period. You
see them in Taiwan and Korea. They swept across huge
swaths of Latin America and eventually spread to places like
the Philippines. But the real question of the pro democracy
movements was what kind of democracy. The students at Tieneman,
to the extent that their democratic principles were sincere and

(41:47):
not simply cover for a deeply authoritarian version of liberalism
that demanded rule of law by a new class of
intellectuals to oversee market reforms. Believed in a narrow conception
of political democracy. This political democracy operates at the level
of the state. It's based on free citizens equal before
the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass

(42:11):
laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This
model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate
economic sphere into which democracy does not extend. The capitalist
firm or its state owned equivalent remained the absolute dictatorship
of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive

(42:35):
wings of the pro democracy movements in Taiwan and South
Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights
under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to
the welfare state, limited protections from the worst physical and
psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how
progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship

(42:58):
of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them,
democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The
workers of Tianmen alone disagreed. They stood against not only
the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but the
tide of history itself. By applying the principles of the

(43:18):
pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt,
rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression,
Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten
traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers' self management. This is,

(43:40):
to a large extent, what Tianmen was actually about. It
was the culmination of a century and a half long
war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement
and essentially every other ideological movement on Earth. The workers's
movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies
and republics, social democracies and theocracies, and at Tienemen they

(44:04):
would lose one final time. That defeat is the origin
of the modern world. One man rule in the factory,
in its thousand thousand forms is the author of the
hell of the twenty first century. And when we come back,
we're going to look at the international part of the

(44:24):
struggle that ended at Tienemen. To fully understand the magnitude
of Tianemen, we need to go back to the revolutions
of eighteen forty eight. If you want a detailed accounting

(44:47):
of eighteen forty eight, go listen to the Revolutions podcast.
It's great. It's also many many, many, many, many many episodes.
The short version is that there were a bunch of
revolutions across Europe in a eighteen forty eight, collectively known
as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was the first
wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction.

(45:08):
Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and Engels fame
was on the barricades with a rifle fighting in Prussia.
There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed
the king, and the question of how far democracy was
going to go came for the first time to the forefront.
Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split

(45:29):
between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original
French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but dictatorship in the workplace,
and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations
and the question of class itself, and most importantly for
our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere

(45:51):
and directly into economics. This prefigure is a split inside
the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control
over them that means of production meant that workers would
control the production process directly through free associations of workers
direct democratic unions, a position later known as cynicalism or
workers councils, but more conservative factions of the socialists became

(46:14):
enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. They watched
with envy as the industrializing powers of the eighteen sixties
and eighteen seventies engaged in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, first
of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities with
complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began

(46:36):
to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association
of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative
commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed faction began to
encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home
to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided

(46:56):
between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who
renounced Marxism and revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism
in the state from within, and Karlo Okotski's orthodox Marxists. Basically,
the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other,
agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over

(47:17):
workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously
working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its
own workers, but were still The person who became most
obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one
Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out,

(47:41):
Lenin's obsession with the German postal Service was such that
he included this passage about the future socialist state in
his famous State and Revolution, a text written between the
February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German
social democrat of the seventies of the last century called
the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

(48:04):
This is very true. At present. The postal service is
a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.
Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a
similar type, to organize the whole national economy on the
lines of the postal service, so that technicians, foreman, bookkeepers,
as well as all officials to receive salaries no higher

(48:27):
than a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control
of the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's
idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of
a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy.
This would set off a massive series of confrontations with

(48:48):
the part of the workers movement who wanted workers control
over the means of production to mean workers making decisions
overworked themselves and not just working for a different set
of bureaucrats. The struggle bureaucracy and democracy in the workers
movement mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the
capitalist state. By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had

(49:09):
created variable states within a state in countries like Germany
and Italy. These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions,
ranging from as Grape had described, free schools, workers associations,
friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops,
neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties,

(49:34):
ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to
workers and their families, and served so the workers hoped,
as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the
popularity of these democratic workers institutions, Otto von Bismarck created
bureaucratic state run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare

(49:54):
services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote, my
idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say,
to win them over, to regard the state as a
social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
And this works. It was enormously successful. Socialists themselves came

(50:14):
to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself, and
when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of
many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the
older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had forgotten
the democratic core of the Rowan ideology, workers themselves never did.

(50:36):
As the nineteenth century drew to a close and the
twentieth century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively
began to form democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils. The most
famous of these councils, of course, were formed in the
spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh five. In nineteen seventeen,

(50:57):
these councils, called soviets, were originally formed in nineteen oh five,
out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected
bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to
coordinate the general strike. The revolution of nineteen oh five
was crushed by the Czar, but in nineteen seventeen, the
Russian working class would once again form workers councils as

(51:19):
another revolution commenced. This time, the councils would take control
of production, directly coordinating between various factories and industries, as
well as serving as a worker's counterpower to the new
revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of
open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the
forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed

(51:42):
anti democratic alliance of social Democrats, Bolsheviks, capitalists. Between nineteen
seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine,
and Ireland and were matched by revolts of syndicalus unions
in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings wereal crushed in Italy,

(52:02):
which saw some of the most intense conflict been synicalists
and the Italian state. The famous occupation of the factories
was ended not by the Italian government but by the
Italian Socialist Party in their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This,
in large part was how fascism won in Italy and
in Germany. Faced with workers movements on the verge of

(52:23):
seizing power, social democrats turned on the working class slaughtered
their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically,
the worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come
not at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats,
but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at
the workers' councils had put in power. Lenin began to

(52:47):
undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere
days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers'
Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and
authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated
trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance
from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be

(53:09):
modified before they could be implemented, but while publicly declaring
his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was
after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to
trip away at their power until he finally admitted his
real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen
in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government quote,

(53:31):
unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for
the success of labor processes that are based on large
scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands, in the interests
of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will
of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously

(53:55):
one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. But
to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what
one man rule in the factory actually entails, the system
he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule and
any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would
be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even fascist rule.

(54:17):
The movement for Democracy in the Factory now faced four
implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to
ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly, and
as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties, the
movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a haale
of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode,

(54:40):
our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will
be back. They will do many, many more revolutions, and
we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what
the ruling class did to stop them. And then returned
to the lead up to Tianneman Square to see the
final stand of the Chinese working class. Welcome to seek

(55:23):
it happened here. I'm your host, Miya Wong. When we
last left the story of Tieneman One, Vladimir Ilias Lenin
had in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction
of the workers movement that actually wanted democracy to extend
into the factories. Unfortunately, for the Leninists, no matter how

(55:44):
many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the
factory simply refused to die for over one hundred years.
The development of the mass factory system and the logistical
infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly, coal mines
and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an

(56:06):
especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the
workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically. As
the Journal and Notes pointed out, this manifested in a
series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working
class and class society, all of which were necessary for
the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest themselves in

(56:29):
moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid
technological expansions of the Second and third Industrial revolutions, workers
came to see themselves as the creators of the new world.
This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers movement.
The producers of this new world should also be its inheritors. Thus,

(56:51):
the goal of the workers movement was to take control
of production in itself and manage it for the common
benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs in and of
themselves were not unique to the democratic wing of the
workers movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement
as a whole, and by this point the workers movement

(57:12):
was extremely brought, stretching from social democratic trade unionists the
intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the
democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation
of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to
an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools.

(57:33):
For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a
product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working
class would be found in its productive capacity, not in
its innate humanity and creativity. Before the democratic wing of
the workers movement, this solved nothing as long as the

(57:53):
fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one man
rule in the factory persisted. Changes and owners of structure
and health benefits missed the entire point that degradation could
only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the
working class, by giving it the class itself control over
the production process that for so long had controlled them.

(58:19):
In nineteen thirty six, Spanish workers decided to take matters
into their own hands and seized control over their workplace's
end mass. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known,
would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic
worker self management before or since. Everything from public utilities
to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the

(58:42):
control of the direct democratic unions, and once the former
bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set
about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines,
pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically the benefit
of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in

(59:05):
democratic self management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically,
social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by
their own self organization developed a universal health care system
that dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was
previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst a violent

(59:25):
civil war in Spain and under the guise of an
anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist forces brutally stamped
out any attempt at democratic self management and returned the
factories to their owners, before losing the war to the
fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty
tolls of promannagerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers' councils and

(59:51):
mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in nineteen fifty six,
and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen
sixty eight. Hungary, in particular is an interesting revolution because
over the years it has been subjected to so much
of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tienemen, but
this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as

(01:00:15):
a liberal democratic revolution. But if you talk to the
actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like,
and this is a direct quote from a member of
a Hungarian workers council quote, the time when the boss
decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply
instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their

(01:00:38):
factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and overthrew the government
before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal
democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across
the capitalist world as well, in Italy, in France and Chile,
communes broke out and colonized Vietnam. They spread everywhere, and

(01:01:00):
to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike. The development
and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts
provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places
without established workers movements and the political education effects typical
of such movements. Was the course of the revolution in Algeria.

(01:01:21):
The political education Algerian workers had received was from the
nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front f l N, which had
prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The Afalen's ideology
emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development.
Upon taking power, however, Ahmed BenBella, Algeria's first president, discovered

(01:01:43):
the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already
been answered for him. Production would be managed by democratic
workers councils built on the properties seized by Algerian workers
after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the
country following independence, left much of their property uninhabited. Then,
Bello's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and

(01:02:05):
publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them. But the
whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two
years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one
man rule in the factory. Still, even by the late seventies,
it was by no means clear that one man rule
in the factory would triumph as a political system. Workers

(01:02:26):
and students almost took Italy in nineteen seventy seven, and
the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much
of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco.
For a brief fleeting moment in the late nineteen seventies,
it really looked like they were going to do it.
The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure

(01:02:46):
military repression caused capitalist managery elites to look for ways
to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts
without giving up their power. As author and friend of
the show, Viciostre Wild points out, the instinctive embrace of
democracy in the factory was only possible so long as
the factory remained a point of encounter, a kind of

(01:03:08):
dark agra that at once both exploited workers and facilitated
the interactions allowed them to identify with each other as
a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the
fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self management would
take the form of an attack on the shop floor
as a site of collective identity formation and as a

(01:03:32):
space that could be seen in any way as liberatory.
This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself,
as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban
centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from
each other and turned to homeowners bought off with the
combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new

(01:03:54):
homes would also function as assets.

Speaker 4 (01:03:57):
The quote unquote.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
Democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory, as
the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market,
thus tying remained of organized labor to the fates of
capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an
immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to
promote identification with the corporation itself and not the working

(01:04:21):
class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of
capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics,
networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a
world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand,
capitalists could simply move elsewhere As the total size of
the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option

(01:04:45):
in the left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional
workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement,
But in order for the anti democratic counter revolution to succeed,
it needed somewhere to move their production to somewhere with
a large, exploitable labor supply. The capitalist class found that

(01:05:06):
answer in China in the wake of the CCP's victory
in the Chinese Civil War in nineteen forty nine. The
Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that

(01:05:26):
existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state owned firms
virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social
sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything
from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food to
often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece rate system,

(01:05:46):
a system in which people were paid per unit they produced,
which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant
that in order to get people to work, bosses had
very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a
degree of participant patient in the labor process and the
ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible
to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this

(01:06:09):
problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic,
semi democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that,
while raked by the party, ensured that managers would at
least be somewhat popular. Till the process was strictly managed,
workers had the ability to criticize the cadra to govern them,
and combine the work unit's system of folding home and

(01:06:30):
social life into the factory system. The product of this
system was that because there was already a greater degree
of workers' participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and
because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands
for democracy became delinked from the workplace, and it meant
that the system, at least in the cities worked sort
of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it

(01:06:54):
is time for me to do the culture revolution. Rant
everyone gets the Culture Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets
of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood,
the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds.
These people were heavily persecuted. And you can make arguments

(01:07:15):
about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch
collaborates with the Japanese imperialists. But this extends to the
children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and
that term is extremely loose. I know people whose families
were declared of black class background, who had quote unquote
black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because

(01:07:37):
her family had made bird feeders before the revolution. It
was as a system, absolutely nonsense. So what the early
phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch
of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new
system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted
for stuff that was literally not their fault at all.

(01:07:58):
They had no way to control who their parents were now.
The initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven
by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party,
but as things became more and more chaotic and the
attacks on CCP, Bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled
nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called
the January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai

(01:08:21):
and drove out the CCP, and this caused what I
would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now,
despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had
to actually deal with a workers controlled city. And I
found this incredible line from Joe and Lai in a
meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out

(01:08:44):
what to do with this new revolutionary Shanghai quote. When
asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the
bottom up, Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism
is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election
at the Paris Commune style. And this was obviously a
problem for now because there was no way for the

(01:09:05):
party to maintain its long term control if you know,
you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of
the Paris Commium. And so instead we saw a full
on counter revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers
and students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the
stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards,

(01:09:28):
was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the
cultural revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a
significant amount of time studying the actual death records city
by city and province by province in the Chinese Archives quote,
more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local
annals are due to the actions of authorities in this

(01:09:50):
third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted
for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight
onward is to the people, and the culture revolution gets killed.
And this is the opposite of the way that the
Culture Revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the
product of student radicalism gone out of control. It was

(01:10:12):
the state slaughtering its way through various rebel factions that
did most of the killing and the political persecution. And
this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history. It creates
a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even
smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most
radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state.

(01:10:34):
And by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics in China
that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control
of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face
of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more
intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the working
class entirely, as danzhel ping unleashed the horrific one child

(01:10:56):
policy and in draconian an ultimately successful attempt to established
the state's patriarchal control over the household and stripped hundreds
of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they
had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution. But the beginning
of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state,
and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic

(01:11:16):
changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg. By
nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers' movement globally was on
its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it

(01:11:37):
latched onto a series of other social and political movements,
most notably pro democracy movement in China. But democratic self
management and its critique of one man rule in the
factory was utterly alien to the pro democracy movement, which
meant that its development by the workers of Ganemen was
a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of

(01:11:58):
democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that
would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations to the workers' movement.
One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in
the factory. Why do a lot of workers agree with
democracy and freedom in the workshop? Does what the workers
say count or what the leader says. We later talked

(01:12:18):
about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator.
What one man says goes. If you view the state
through the factory, it's about the same one man rule.
Our objective was not very high. We just wanted workers
to have their own independent organization in work units. It's
personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs,

(01:12:39):
the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought
to go home at five, but he tells me to
work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll
cut my bonuses. This is personal rule. A factory should
have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs,
they ought to have a system of rules decided how
to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon
by everyone, and then afterwards anyone who violent and we

(01:13:00):
punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now,
we don't have this kind of legal system.

Speaker 4 (01:13:06):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
This is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical
critique of one man rule in the factory couched in
the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law. But
any attempt to actually implement this system, that which workers
controlled the factories they work in, how long they work,
and what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization,
could only end in democratic, self managed workplaces. As Walder

(01:13:30):
and jang If pointed out, the workers at the Beijing
Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or
no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles.
This was as pure a workers we've met as any
in Chinese history, and for one final time, the instinct
of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory.

(01:13:51):
This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the
army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class
wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy
in the factory would be scrubbed from the records that
the CCP and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring
the meaning of the events would be lost. What then

(01:14:14):
was Tianemen In some sense, it was a transition point
between two different Chinese working classes. The protests were the
high water mark of the political mobilization of the old
industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tienemen mounted
the final attack of the classical workers movement. Their defeat
ended the old working class as a political force, and

(01:14:36):
they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructure of the
nineteen nineties, which crushed the last vestides of workers' autonomy
in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese
welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class
drawn from the rural and semi urban under classes of
the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities

(01:14:56):
to fill the ranks of the two hundred and seventy
seven million migrant works that today comprise the background of
China's working class. This new working class, with rural household
registration in no way into the remaining state owned factories,
would have none of the benefits of the previous one.
It would instead face a full raft of capitalist ideology

(01:15:18):
baked into every aspect of workplace culture, and a massive
attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class
could at least pausit a democratic form of the factory
to which life could be improved. This new working class's
greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become
a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to

(01:15:38):
be a temporarily embarrassed petie bourgeoisie. Such ideological selfconceptions are
inimical to the formation of the classical workers movement, and
indeed the new Chinese working class has largely failed to
find the collective identity in the workplace. The situation is
not unique. The death of the classical workers movement has
seen the collapse of their demands democratic self management everywhere

(01:16:02):
in the face of a working class it refuses to
cohere itself in the factory. China was just late to
the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economic
system has lurned from crisis to crisis for the better
part of my lifetime, setting off in its wake an
increasing number of revolutions, even as the darker gore of

(01:16:25):
the factory ceased to function as a place to form
identities for this new working class. If a collective identity
couldnot be forged in the factory, it would be foraged
in the street instead, lacking a positive identity to cohere
itself around workers were only able to mobilize on a
mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens

(01:16:46):
it on a cross sectoral basis. The state, with its
ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash
welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant
fights against the police became the sole basis for new
collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form
of mass street movements in almost continuous confrontations with the states.

(01:17:08):
Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the
squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced
by running fights with the police. But this placed the
new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without the leverage against
the state the classical workers movement's control over the workplace,
provided they lack the ability to bring down a government

(01:17:30):
firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over
the last five or six years to carry out general
strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong and Sudan were
as Mela Testa predicted in the early twenties, easily defeated
without the accompanying factory occupations, but with current labor conditions
exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations. The

(01:17:52):
way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce
democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is
the greatest legacy of tienemen The workers who assembled outside
Tieneman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that
they spoke the language of the old workers movement, they
stood and fought and died like we do in the streets.

(01:18:16):
They were the bridge between the world of the workers
movements and the world we live in today, and thus
faced the same revolutionary crisis we face today, the crisis
of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia and Iran, of Mien
Maar in Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon
that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped. The workers of tienemen I, suspect,

(01:18:40):
have no answers to give us now, But expecting answers
from the dead is demanding too much of those past
and present who died fighting for liberation. All we can
do now is find our own way, and, with the
names of the dead on our lips, build the world
they died fighting for.

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):
Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where
anti British discrimination is a way of life?

Speaker 4 (01:19:28):
James, are we.

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
Allowed to say that? Do you remember the training? I
haven't done yet.

Speaker 4 (01:19:34):
I was giving that training my full attention throughout the
duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's
good various employees for the last half decade or so,
there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination.
Yet again, another example victimized.

Speaker 1 (01:19:51):
Last time I took that training, there was a straight
up anti Asian racism in it that they didn't address
at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti
British racism was fine, like some shit in those videos.

Speaker 4 (01:20:01):
Which is wild. Okay, there you go. I think that's
a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her
wrong in the in the in the video. See I am.

Speaker 3 (01:20:10):
I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get
a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's
it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor
keeps you from the full might of my wrath frankly
the greatest.

Speaker 4 (01:20:27):
There we go. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case.

Speaker 3 (01:20:29):
I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stub
and Robert Evans. This episode we are talking about babies.
Should there be more?

Speaker 4 (01:20:37):
Yeah? Hm, we're on a pro natalist kick.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
We're going to have that off putting couple who look
like vampires but like not any of the good kinds
on the show.

Speaker 4 (01:20:48):
Very excited to have those people on. They seem nice.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
But before we do that, we all decided maybe we
should talk about other pro natalist policies in world history
and how well they've worked generally.

Speaker 3 (01:21:01):
We're going to start by talking about what the US
policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy,
and then we will discuss how those policies went historically. Yeah,
so like to start with Trumps. Besides one executive order
in February supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to

(01:21:24):
tackle pro natalist concerns on the policy front, but a
collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers are vying for the
president's ear while proposing a multitude of plans to grow
the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth. The pronatalists
certainly think that the new administration is at the very
least ideologically sympathetic, if not in cahoots with their agenda.

(01:21:49):
The main inns on the pronatalist front have come from
the Peter Thiel tech right wing of the White House Right.
This is like JD. Vance and previously Elon Musk yep.
Musk has been doom posting for years about how a
drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large
scale population collapse, and at an anti abortion rally this

(01:22:09):
past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying quote, I want
more babies in the United States of America. I want
more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful
young men and women who are eager to welcome them
into the world and eager to raise them.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
Yeah, and you got to like whatever you're listening to
one of these things. You got to like have a
little parenthesis anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little
parentheses there that says white this is this is real
Nazi shit.

Speaker 3 (01:22:37):
Like a lot of the stuff that is certainly like
based on like like great replacement rhetoric that the alt right,
like Trojan Horst and like pushed forward in like twenty eighteen,
which is now so widely normalized thanks to. I mean, really,
Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great
replacement stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:22:56):
Yeah, Tucker calls into Carlson of course, well, and mus
Musk's family goes into this, right, like this is the
kind of thing like his grandparents where were involved in,
Like it was a little bit less of like the
standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused
on like we need to be breeding high IQ white
people together.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Yeah, you change, but like that that is that is
what he inherits. He comes by it, honestly, I guess
you could say.

Speaker 3 (01:23:21):
Well, and oftentimes pinatal stretoric is also tied in with
like the tradwife and like loss of traditional family structure
type stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:23:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred
to our quote unquote broken culture that tax masculinity and
turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.

Speaker 4 (01:23:38):
Hey shout out. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:40):
I've also started referring to women with kids as catless
child ladies as a result.

Speaker 3 (01:23:45):
Of this.

Speaker 4 (01:23:47):
Reactions, I don't know people very negatively.

Speaker 3 (01:23:57):
A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women
in the workplace who are not getting married and raising
kids at home.

Speaker 4 (01:24:03):
From an early enough age.

Speaker 3 (01:24:06):
Yeah, and some of this writer are cavs rubbed off
on Trump right, and Trump at Seapack in twenty twenty three,
he said, quote, we will support baby booms, and we
will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.

Speaker 4 (01:24:17):
I want a baby boom. Cool.

Speaker 3 (01:24:19):
Trump has floated a five thousand dollars cash quote unquote
baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling
this proposal a good idea.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.

Speaker 4 (01:24:32):
Oh yeah, I'm sure that's enough.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
Not quite three months at a lot of pre schools, like,
not even great pre schools. It's very preschools unbelievably expensive.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
The actual cause, like of a declining birth rate, is
due to skyrocketing cost of living, so people aren't financially
stable to have kids in their early twenties anymore, so
instead they're waiting until their thirties.

Speaker 4 (01:24:49):
That's part of it at least.

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
Yes, if you want people to have kids more, you
should make the world more affordable. And a five thousand
dollars baby bonus doesn't actually solve the key issues that
would cause people to be a worried about, you know,
trying to like get buried and have kids at a
young age in a world where that seems kind of
like unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily, Trump does have a few
other ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The

(01:25:14):
new big, beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House
will create quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids.
And here Mega stands for money accounts for growth and
in for growth and advancement.

Speaker 4 (01:25:31):
Just fucking stop stop it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:34):
So when parents are guardians open a new Mega savings
account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one
thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty
four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.

Speaker 4 (01:25:48):
That that'll help, great, great. I believe California also does it. Yeah,
California have something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program,
which already gives children up to one thousand dollars. And
I think it's like a college savings account from what
I understand, Yeah, that's pretty much what this is.

Speaker 3 (01:26:06):
Although specifically in the for the Magia account, it also
lists home ownership. Oh cool, because this is like a
big this is a big part of this pronatalist thing
is you need to own a home, getting a straight marriage,
start having kids in your early twenty.

Speaker 4 (01:26:19):
Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly
like we understand. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
The big beautiful bludget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're
going to plan parent.

Speaker 4 (01:26:28):
Hut great yeah, let me tell you. One thousand American dollars,
even with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to
buy you a home anywhere in the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:26:38):
Now, the Heritage Foundation's Devasit Center for Life, Religion, and
Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the
child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.
This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed
in twenty twenty three by Republican Representative Brian Slayton of Texas,
who proposed increasing proper tax cuts for married heterosexual couples

(01:27:03):
who have never been divorced and have four or more
children starting after marriage.

Speaker 1 (01:27:08):
So there's a lot of caveats.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
There, Jesus Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this is
are we taking issue with this?

Speaker 4 (01:27:17):
That is some Yeah, this is part of my British
charity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes
could get divorced. It is it is. Yeah, it is
a bill of rights for British guys.

Speaker 3 (01:27:28):
Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there
so that you can have your little like tread Christian family.
But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten
kids would equal no property taxes at all.

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):
Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with.

Speaker 4 (01:27:42):
Yeah, this is property tax. You also have to own
the property to begin with to be paying property tax.

Speaker 3 (01:27:47):
Yeah, all of these all these people want you to
be like homeowners with a stay at home life.

Speaker 4 (01:27:52):
Is like, this is what they want, but they don't
want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership successible.

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
No, this is just like self selecting for like well
off white Christians, right.

Speaker 4 (01:28:01):
Like yeah, yeah, hundred percent.

Speaker 3 (01:28:02):
Yeah, Slaton said in a statement quote, with this bill,
Texas will start saying to couples, get married, stay married,
and be fruitful and multiply unquote.

Speaker 4 (01:28:12):
For fuck's sake, it's a disaster.

Speaker 1 (01:28:14):
And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this
stuff is too is it's there. This is their sort
of flailing reaction to like one of the things that
actually drives like declining birthrates, which is not having teen
pregnancies like significantly decreases birthrates because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right.
It turns out a huge part of like white birthrate
is so high is just direct social coercion. And if

(01:28:37):
you stop having that or like you know, the amount
of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are
gonna to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies
like and you know, and so they're trying to do
all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort
of like deal with the fact that if you don't
force people to have children as teenagers, they.

Speaker 2 (01:28:59):
Who yeah, because life they quickly realized there's things in life,
like you know, drugs and stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:29:09):
Yeah, we'll go back to the club.

Speaker 3 (01:29:12):
In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertilization President.
Oh my god, and the White House is expected to
soon release a report on how to expand access and
affordability of IVF. Now this is where things get sticky
insert pun. There is hot debate amongst advisors and think

(01:29:34):
tanks on the religious ethics of IVF.

Speaker 4 (01:29:37):
Right, there's no real.

Speaker 3 (01:29:39):
Consensus among the pronatals voices who are lobbying Trump. Yeah,
this sort of breaks down into like the new tech
right versus the more religious Christian family sector of conservatism,
and Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this,
but these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage,
the Heritage Fundation recommends a program use government funds for

(01:30:01):
education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women how
to track their mental cycles using charting courses to both
help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose
that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote unquote
natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage proposed

(01:30:23):
to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a
holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote horn balancing,
dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those
some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.
That's what you get to take. It's a holistic approach
to you get some raw milk, put a bunch of
random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated
supplement company.

Speaker 3 (01:30:52):
Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying
causes of infertility as well as you know, out of
concern for embryo personhood rights for fuck sake, So they
advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make
the production of embryo spares.

Speaker 1 (01:31:10):
Illegal embryo adoption.

Speaker 4 (01:31:13):
They believe that these are like full like people.

Speaker 3 (01:31:18):
Now on the other side of the you know, pro natalist, right,
you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned.
Simone Collins, a pro natalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate.

Speaker 2 (01:31:30):
She could still pull it off. Stay in line if
your vote hasn't been counted.

Speaker 3 (01:31:33):
People her and her husband are self described quote unquote
techno Puritans, and she.

Speaker 4 (01:31:40):
Is the talking super shit.

Speaker 1 (01:31:44):
Like what.

Speaker 4 (01:31:47):
God put these people on a boat and send it
across the Atlantic, Like, can they get scurvy? Have they
already got? They look a little bit like they may
already have scurvy. To be fair, they do look like
they have scurvy. Constantly they deprive them of lime juice
and save the world from a fucking ground.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
Put him on the next starship and see how far
up it gets.

Speaker 4 (01:32:07):
No, they won't get that. Let him try. I support
the human spirit.

Speaker 3 (01:32:11):
Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive
Peter Teele found in social club called a Dialogue Cool Now.
She has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist,
and has sent several draft pronadalist executive orders to the
White House, one of which would award a quote unquote
National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.

Speaker 4 (01:32:34):
This is some trijescu shit, Like, I know we're going
to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (01:32:39):
She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims
to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs,
which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes,
so they use IVF to specifically select embryos that they
think are like naturally predisposed have more desirable traits, including

(01:33:01):
high IQs. They have not discussed the exact method, That's
why it's called special technology.

Speaker 4 (01:33:07):
They're looking for one with a big head or something,
So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that
far along the IVF.

Speaker 3 (01:33:13):
So that's always pretty fucked up and then I guess finally,
one of the few things that actually has happened in
advancement of this ideology was way back like in February,
Trump's Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who is a father of
nine and has ten siblings, sent out a memo directing
his staff to prioritize transportation funds to quote give preference

(01:33:34):
to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the
national average unquote, which would, in ef fact, mean less
money for urban public transit and instead send it towards
like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.

Speaker 4 (01:33:46):
Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have a higher marriage traits
at least than like the national average. Yeah, I'm not
sure if.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that.

Speaker 4 (01:33:57):
Though, No, neither of I that's kind That's what I'm meant,
That's what I'm That's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel
Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's
his whole stick.

Speaker 3 (01:34:06):
If you look at the full memo, I think this
is this is just like a dog whistle for like
white Christians, like that is that is really what he's
saying sick.

Speaker 4 (01:34:15):
Anyway, that is what I have for the current the
current peroneals policies.

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
We should go on and ad break and then return
to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.

Speaker 4 (01:34:26):
M hmm.

Speaker 7 (01:34:37):
All right, we are back and we are spinning our globe,
our big ball of pro natalism, and it is slowing
down and is landed on Japan, where mir is going
to explain pronatalist policy.

Speaker 4 (01:34:53):
Yeah, and I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:34:54):
I want to open on a kind of global thing
which is a concern over like birth rates, for like
fat just is a really old thing. I mean, it
predates fascism. Like this is like like if you go
to like the eighteen seventies, every single person is complaining
about like, oh my god, the birth rate is the right. Well,
the white race keeps declining and we're gonna get like
overwhelmed by the Asiatic Chords. And then you go to

(01:35:15):
like the Asiatic Chords and it's like Japan has been
having the same fucking panic for literally so long. Like
I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through
newspaper archives and you just it's you're literally reading the
same article over and over and over again, going back
just decades and decades and decades, So like the first
big modern freak out about birth rates is in like

(01:35:37):
nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have the first big like
japan birth rate.

Speaker 4 (01:35:43):
Declining freak out.

Speaker 1 (01:35:45):
This has been happening longer than like most of the
people here have been alive.

Speaker 4 (01:35:48):
I can remember from like my child. It's just been like, oh,
they're panicking about their birthrates again.

Speaker 1 (01:35:54):
Yeah, So like the running thing with Japanese politics. So
we're roughly doing these in order of life like most
to least hinged in terms of like in terms of
these like natalist policies, Japan I think has an interesting
series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind
of pro natalist Paul Walls if they have, they have

(01:36:14):
political contradictions in their pro natalist politics and political contradictions
in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a
one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the
one party. This is a party established by a World
War two Nazi, but that means that they run all
of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them.
They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on

(01:36:38):
the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is
like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're
going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we
can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs
so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're
going to promote this. And this is sort of one
of the first places you see this huge intra intraclass
conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to just

(01:37:01):
like send every woman back to the household to raise children,
and the business people who are like, no, you can't
do that. We need to exploit these women's labor to
like make money. And so the fight that starts to
break out is this fight between like paying for childcare
leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally that their
plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the

(01:37:22):
daycare stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:37:23):
That doesn't work.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
Like, none of these things they're going to do does
jack shit, right.

Speaker 4 (01:37:26):
Like that's going to be a through line here. Yeah, yeah,
Like no, none of that stuff works.

Speaker 1 (01:37:31):
And so like like shinzo Abe, I think is the
most famous person who spends much of time trying to
deal with this and like again. So they have started
worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now
twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzawabey rest
and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to like
cook something. Right, I'm gonna read this quote from the

(01:37:52):
Archives of Clinical Pediatrics shortly after the formation of Abbe's
second cabinet, the quote. Task Force for Overcoming Popular Relation
Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three key strategies,
supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage, pregnancy
and childbirth. So you can do these are going to
become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pro

(01:38:14):
natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused on
this sort of social push stuff to like promote the
traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really
worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is
going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.
There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce

(01:38:36):
the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see
them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this,
the one that's actually interesting is reforming work styles. So, like,
part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone
in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably

(01:38:59):
staggering over work, right. I mean, it's one of these
things that's like a persistent social crisis. It's that there's
a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long
everyone is working all the time. So Shinto Abbe's plan
for this was to put into place a soft cap
of you can only work one hundred hours a month
of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right, Like one

(01:39:21):
hundred hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like,
you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.
But this is again this problem that he's having, which
is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe
like people maybe would have more children if you weren't
working literally all the time and you weren't just like being.

Speaker 4 (01:39:40):
Worked to death.

Speaker 1 (01:39:42):
But that's really bad for Japanese business. And like quote
unquote Abbey NoMix, which is like Abe sort of you
know economic plan like relies on maintaining this extremely high
level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population.
And it's also based on putting more women into the
workforce to expand the size of the workforce, to know,
extract more hours so they can all these people can

(01:40:02):
make more money. Right. They were also supposed to do
free preschool for all children, and this just like didn't happen,
which over and over again they're like, we're gonna do
these kind of like these these kind of like okay,
we'll give we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit,
but only in order to like have kids, and it
just doesn't happen. And so you know, this is one

(01:40:23):
of Abe's big initiatives. But by the time he's like
assassinated in twenty twenty two, he what he was uh
bye by time his political coalition was finally detonated, bye
by one by one guy with an electric plunderbus.

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
My favorite politics.

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
Oh god, it's so good. It's so good. We have
covered this extensively on the show. If you want to
hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, including
the day after Kissinger died, go find the episode I
did right after shinz a wha.

Speaker 4 (01:40:55):
It was assassinated.

Speaker 2 (01:40:56):
The Holy Trinity of Great days on the internet. Is
that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all
those bills?

Speaker 4 (01:41:02):
Yes, oh it was amazing. Yeah, people said Biden gave
us nothing. Bang is on the timeline. Mm hmmm, here
you go.

Speaker 1 (01:41:14):
So all right, shinzowape successor is a guy named Fumio
Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida every
single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like
somewhere between twenty and fifteen and twenty billion dollars on
pronatalist policies and mostly doesn't happen, but Kishita promises that

(01:41:36):
he is going to spend twenty four and a half
billion dollars. A lot of this money is going to
be just straight up like child allowance. So Japan has
the system that they've been you know, they've been sort
of implementing over the course of like all of these
fucking reforms, which is just like all right, we're just
gonna like hand you cash. It's still not enough money
to like substantively change stuff. But there's a lot of

(01:41:58):
different kinds of cash policies. They have cash transfer policies
that are just straight up like okay, here, you had
a baby we're gonna give you this amount per month.
I think it's like ten to fifteen thousand yen which
hold on, yeah, so it's like like seventy dollars a month,
which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense

(01:42:18):
date research on. They're supposed to have these like counselors
that like come check in on you and like give
you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like
give you a whole bunch of basically like childcare equipment
stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's
supposed to come out to about like seven hundred dollars
ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort

(01:42:40):
of plan that they're doing. And then in twenty twenty four,
Kishita is replaced by like some other dipshit who you know,
if he lasts more than like two years, I guess
I'll tell you his name. But he's you know, attempting
to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right,
which is his plan involves a bunch of things like
childcare subsidy and very importantly like tuition free high school.

(01:43:04):
So one of the continuous plans, if you like, if
you go back to like what I was talking about
with they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right,
that never got implemented except in like the last two years,
like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city,
because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know,
the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:43:26):
Sure, I imagine custter living is also really high.

Speaker 1 (01:43:29):
Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also
just like you know, if you're working in an urban
like an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous
number of hours.

Speaker 4 (01:43:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:43:41):
Yeah, there's also this these supposed to be these massive
like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can
see these kind of like this this this point where
they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the
sort of pro business like okay, fuck, it will pay
for your child care and also we will raise taxes
to like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And

(01:44:03):
also they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this,
but they're they're they're trying to set up a system
where you can get full pay for couples who both
take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right,
They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll
just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.
They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying

(01:44:24):
for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And
none of this shit has done anything at all, right,
like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and and and
if you want to look at like, okay, so, like
what what's sort of actually happening here?

Speaker 4 (01:44:40):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:44:41):
A lot some of it is just like over work.
Some of it is just if people who can have
children have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just
decide not to. And so part of this is also
just like and then this has been one of the
social pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is
they've been trying to get people to marry younger, because

(01:45:02):
people are marrying later, and thus they are like, you know,
they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and
this is not working at all, right, But you can
look at the series of structural contradictions in their political collision,
and then you can look at the fact that like, again,
one of the important ideological things here is that these
people hate immigrants, right, and they don't.

Speaker 4 (01:45:23):
They don't want immigrants.

Speaker 1 (01:45:24):
They want they want like Japanese babies, and so this
is kind of like if you look at like, Okay,
why is not of this shit working?

Speaker 4 (01:45:32):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:45:33):
They're trying all these things to just avoid having more
immigrants in the country, and none of it is fucking
working at all. But you know, like, insofar as it's failing,
it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're
doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff, and it is
going to get so much worse when every other country
tries this.

Speaker 2 (01:45:52):
Yeah cool, Well you know what else is gonna get
worse totally.

Speaker 4 (01:45:57):
The Products and Service says, it's simple of this show.

Speaker 8 (01:45:59):
Yeah yeah, all right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (01:46:11):
It's me And predictably, I suppose I am talking about
Franco as Spain, so Franti's got Franco attempted to rebuild
Spain after Civil War, both through explicit eugenics and through
the nationalization of women's bodies, abortion and contraceptual bands. Abortion
had been legal, Spain was one of the first countries

(01:46:33):
to do that. Right when federally gon Monceni, anarchist minister
made that legal minister of I guess public health that
was made illegal. I think it didn't become legally again
until about twenty ten. In Spain, abortion and and less
it was like a serious health issue, elective abortion. I guess.
Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence
as or weapon, and we can see this as a

(01:46:53):
kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right, yeah,
who is a Francoist general? Right makes a speech in
July nineteen thirty six, quote, Our valiant legionnaires and regulades
have shown the red cowards what true men are. And
they're women as well. This is totally justified because these

(01:47:13):
communists and anarchists anarkate free love. At least now they
will know what real men are, not the militia gaze.
This is a translation that I'm reading to so people
can go to the original document. But gays is not
the word he used. A better translation would be a
word that begins with f Yeah. Okay, yeah. They will
not escape, however much. They kick their legs and scream

(01:47:36):
like this is a general in their army making explicit
rape threats. Right, They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the
Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a
Cecion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Radcliff
is written extensively about this. The group very much served
as kind of the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught

(01:47:57):
women from a young age they were inferior and you
get to men. They had to go through the organization's programs.
To do anything, any engagement with the state, they had
to first go through the women's section. Right. If they
wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a
driving license, if they wanted to engage with the world
outside of their homes in any way, they had to
go through this program, which indoctrinated them that their highest

(01:48:20):
calling and only value was to have children. Women's role
in the Francoist project then, was child bearing a child
rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here in like
quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology to justify
women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology. Right. It's

(01:48:41):
great to go to antiques markets in Spain because you
could always buy like a phrenology head. You can acquire
like an og one, you know, like better if you
know the replace to let you could find some find
the calipers. That's the dream.

Speaker 3 (01:48:55):
There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.

Speaker 2 (01:49:00):
Yeah, shocking hand sclasping me with francoism, and I found
a lot of uses for those calibers.

Speaker 4 (01:49:09):
Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenology skulls.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down Yeah.
But I bet you, I bet you are replicas. I
bet they're not like o G phrenology skulls.

Speaker 2 (01:49:19):
There's a market in France im to that just had
a bunch of monks skulls, like real real, it seems fine.
There was one that had been turned into a holder
for a bible, like they'd cut like an L shaped
cut in the skull of pretty cool. It was like
three grand you make a courtesy for the Qoran. But
but like this was a while ago, but seemed like
a good prod.

Speaker 3 (01:49:37):
Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums.

Speaker 4 (01:49:41):
Yeah, using the discount code, it could happen here. You
can get ten percent off the skull Bible holder, Yeah,
that's right, Okay. So one of the things they did
was to increasingly marginalized midwives and instead like have male
doctors taking control of the child birthing pros because midwives
would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't

(01:50:03):
feel that women belonged to work outside the home. Right.
A big part of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation
of an Arco feminism that had been relatively important to
the Spanish Revolution. Right, the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage
and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right,

(01:50:23):
So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,
the unions took on the role they would assign women
I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right, So,
like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.
Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union
had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers

(01:50:46):
or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position,
so that in order to achieve more gender equality within
that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated.
It also had its own kind of unique take on
eugenics that that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't

(01:51:08):
really do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that
doesn't really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw
leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something
of a pathogen that spread within society. Welcome mind virus.
Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's.

Speaker 3 (01:51:28):
Pulling from the same type of fascist right.

Speaker 4 (01:51:32):
It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at
this time, so there was a very very small Jewish
population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about
Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et
cetera as completely antithetical to spanishness, and of course they

(01:51:53):
blame us for their national declient right something little fascists
like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and proNT
extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan. These
children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when
their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the

(01:52:14):
parents had been killed. Sometimes it was when the mother
had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's
Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was a
way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women who
were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way
to force any woman you want to into an institution.

(01:52:36):
These children who were taken from their mothers were often
trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns
and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty
three at the time and not long married, gave birth
to what she was told with a healthy baby boy,

(01:52:57):
but he was immediately taken away for what were called
routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who
was a nurse called in for me that my baby
had died. She said they would not let her have
her son's body, nor would they tell her when the
funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far
as to keep the body of a dead baby in

(01:53:17):
a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers.
They even dug grave for babies, but many of those
grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These
babies were then given or sold to other families and raised,
and in some cases they lived their whole lives and
died without ever knowing who their parents were. Right. I remember,

(01:53:40):
like I was doing my PhD when the initial research
into this was being done, And it is fucking horrible
for people to find this out, right, like, because the
people who were stolen from their families and in many
cases are like still alive, right and in most cases
their birth ctificately exists with say mother unknown. And that
was a process that existed to protect women who have

(01:54:02):
had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in
twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who
was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've
linked it as an article. There was also like a
I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where
one of their reporters had recently had a baby so

(01:54:23):
it was able to make an appointment with the obgyn
who was stealing these babies, and when she confronted him,
he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing it at her.
In Jesus, the first incredible country. The reason that they
did this right was because their fascism was of a

(01:54:43):
unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that
Franco wasn't fascist, you with something worse. They had what's
called national Catholicism right, which prevented them from doing sterilization
or abortion. So instead they felt that they could steal
these children and sort of raise them outside of the
leftist kind of pathogen.

Speaker 2 (01:55:02):
I do love just I'm working on the Salazar episodes
right now. I love how often Iberians are like, we're
gonna do fascism just but like we're gonna put some
spins on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're
gonna do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone,
we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the
fact that like that makes us the good colonizers because

(01:55:24):
of all the sex assaults. We're not racist, guys, It's fine,
We're communing.

Speaker 4 (01:55:32):
God. Iberia Baby Spain is different, as the slogan used
to go m was a Francoist tourism slogan back in
the day. Yeah, so the discourse, the quote true Catholic
womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women. They were
raised to serve the patia right, the fatherland, with their bodies,
not their minds. In the Republic, Spain had used secular

(01:55:54):
education to fight it's perceived in real backwardness compared to
the rest of Europe, the Francoist predictive opposite. It returned
for its inspiration to sixteenth century Catholic texts, and they
saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a
risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood.
In terms of I guess birth rates like they did have.

(01:56:15):
You have a post war baby boom rate. You have
that everywhere that is affected by a large war, Like
you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this, and
then birth rates do go up until like the nineteen seventies,
nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly and Spain
is once again in like a sort of not so
much a birth rate panic. I didn't think, but it

(01:56:36):
is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since
the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates never more
particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe
because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to the economy, right,
which made it harder for people to have more children.
But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to
read more on Ninio Strobados, I think there's a TV

(01:56:56):
series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm sure you can
find it wastitles. But someone made a documentary on this
that was presented in academic conference I did, and if
I find the link, I will put it in the
show notes. Hell.

Speaker 2 (01:57:07):
Yeah, well, I think it's time to talk about Romania now.
When it comes to who is the worst at doing
pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but I feel
like we got the usane bolt of natalism right here,
and it's s chi Jescu regime. So we got to
peel back a little bit here and talk about you know,

(01:57:29):
when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind
of the end of forty seven, early nineteen forty eight,
and in the first years of the communist regime, it
brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all
tended to bring in the post war period, obviously earlier
for the USSR. And a lot of these are good actually, right,
not to deny all the horrible things that were happening.

(01:57:50):
But life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for
a lot of women. This is true in Russia as well.
Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises,
And this happened across society, right. A lot of the
poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right.
And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically. Rates of

(01:58:10):
accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases. And again,
it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant
for women.

Speaker 4 (01:58:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:58:19):
And this is all lovely, These are good things, right. However,
it comes with a problem for a lot of the
leaders And this is not just true in Romania, but
we're talking about Romania here. It comes with the problem
for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party,
which is that one of the things we see in
every society when people have more and are doing better
and live longer, is that they start having less kids, because,

(01:58:44):
among other things, all their kids aren't dying.

Speaker 1 (01:58:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:58:46):
One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well,
like the three of them might live, right, you know,
I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up them
and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right,
And when that stops happening, women are like, well, maybe
I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right, Like
if they're all going to live to adults, I don't
need in children to be adults, right, So birth rates
start to fall. This freaks out though a lot of

(01:59:08):
these these communists, because the kind of communists who are
like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And Marx
was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is a
term that I found for the first time in a
Journal of Family History article, But it's a term you
can find other places. And the basic idea is that
and this is an idea that then it goes back
to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,

(01:59:30):
equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as a
potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't
how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates
falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period
of time. But this is like a thing that they think,
right then that like if we don't bump up these
birth rates we're going to deal with like an actual

(01:59:52):
economic disaster. So by the time Nikolaichichesku takes over as
party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six, the
problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had
become a crisis and the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously.
In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty five point
six life births per thousand people in Romania, and by

(02:00:12):
the time to Chescu takes over, there's about fourteen live
births per thousand people. Right now, for reference, both of
those are still higher than the US birth rate. Right now,
we're at about eleven a little less than eleven live
births per thousand people in the country. The only reason
why the US population continues to grow is immigration, but
that's a topic for another day. Cichescu stated that women
needed to use their influence to rebuild the family, and

(02:00:35):
per that article in the Journal of Family History, Cichescu
declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the
family must be combated with determination because they result in
an increase in the number of divorces in the disintegration
of the family. And then the neglect of the children's
education and training for life. And this is something that
had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a lot
of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the

(02:00:58):
family in the society that it existed before. And a
lot of people are like, well, but you know, we're
becoming more scientific, you know, we have like women have jobs. Now,
maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family
should be are kind of outdated. And he's saying, no, no, no, no,
they're not, they're not you need to go back to
having a shitload of kids, right, And he announces a
new initiative to increase the population of Romania by thirty

(02:01:21):
percent by nineteen ninety so, which I don't know if
the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot.

Speaker 4 (02:01:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:01:29):
So that's that's a massive change in society. But Chichescu
isn't a logic thinker guy, right, He's not like running
the numbers hardcore here. He's just sort of throwing out
some shit that sounds good. And so to encourage the shift,
he leashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards
like pro natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate. The

(02:01:50):
first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all
women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example,
you can qualify for an abortion if you've had if
you already have five children under eighteen in the house concurrently.

Speaker 4 (02:02:04):
Which is nice.

Speaker 2 (02:02:05):
There's one or two other exceptions based on your age,
but there aren't many exceptions per an article in PubMed.
In addition, employed women under age forty five years are
required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces, and
any pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over
twenty five years of age and childless married couples without

(02:02:25):
a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty
percent tax on income. Jesus Women who refuse to have
children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro natalist policies.
It has been estimated that forty percent of the seven
hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty five had
illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the

(02:02:45):
State Security Police to combat this practice. So we're so
close to this, we are we are not They really
want to do all of.

Speaker 4 (02:02:53):
This we're like knocking on the door.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
They are like that is the thing that I really
want to drive home is that the closest that I
have found in all of my rings, the closest direct
graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting
for US policy is Romania.

Speaker 4 (02:03:09):
Like and it's also the worst that has ever worked.
When I was a lot younger, Like when I was sixteen,
I volunteered in an orphanage venure diverting kids in Romania.
Jesus fucking Christ. Well, I mean they created a culture
of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah, we'll be talking
about that. That shit fucked me up, And yeah, you

(02:03:29):
shouldn't send your sixteen year old children to do that,
to be kod, but like.

Speaker 2 (02:03:33):
No, and you're you're encountering it after the worst of
it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize
the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at
its worst. So it's worth noting that while women did
start working at a higher rate after Communist takeover, that
started to plateau by the time that Chicheski, because obviously,
like there was still a lot of Communism doesn't get
rid of men being shitty to women, right, it does

(02:03:56):
do things do get a lot better.

Speaker 1 (02:03:58):
Right, sometimes it empowers shit And at.

Speaker 2 (02:04:01):
The start, like kind of right around when he announces
the set of fertility laws, he does try to institute
a policy with the goal of increasing the number of
women working at high positions in different state departments. Right,
there is an initial like we're going to break the
grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long.
He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on
the policy. After his wife, Elena, is made a member

(02:04:21):
of the party executive committee. He's like, women have gone
fired up. Look at my wife. Classic chichesku. Yes, classic
guy who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So,
as is always the case with shit like this, women
were not equally impacted by the abortion ban.

Speaker 4 (02:04:43):
Largely.

Speaker 2 (02:04:44):
The impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level
of wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote
from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted
a deep investigation into all of this immediately after the
regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro
natalist pos policies. Members of the urban middle class managed
somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market.

(02:05:04):
Oh I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal,
with the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain
medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that
several years ago, when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion
had cost him five thousand lay or about fifty dollars
on the black market, and several women with professional degrees
reported matter of factly that they had simply refused to
cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes

(02:05:28):
without suffering any reprisals. Nor were the most rural segments
of the population deeply affected. The Orthodox Christians had long
shunned birth control and abortion, and others like the ROMA
had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell
on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women,
urban ROMA, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none
of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations.

(02:05:50):
Their options were as limited as they were life threatening.
Some used a variety of would be aborta fascians. Others
availed themselves of the services of a back alley abortionist.
Still others carried to term and the number of deaths,
the mortality rate for women as a result of this
did right, Like, there's a lot of hideous stuff there.
We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, But
I don't mean to paper over that a lot of

(02:06:11):
women died and suffered lasting injury in fertility and a
number of other things because of different back alley abortions
and weird drugs that they were given.

Speaker 4 (02:06:19):
But it's important to.

Speaker 2 (02:06:20):
Note that women who had money and opposition in the
social class could still gain access to this shit. And
that's how it will work here too, right, Like, these
Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from
having access to this stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:06:35):
They'll be restricting poor people. Right.

Speaker 2 (02:06:37):
Yeah, Now, the first thing I should know about this
whole raft of policies Toichescu introduced is that they did
not work. That Journal of Family History article that I've
quoted from a couple of times. Here ran the numbers
to try to analyze how well did this, like, how
did these policies correspond to birth rates in Romania? And
it is true that after the first major laws were
pushed in sixty seven and sixty eight. There was a

(02:06:57):
brief surge in birth rates, but that very quickly and
had completely disappeared. By the nineteen seventies, things were back
to baseline. So in nineteen seventy four, Toichescu launches another
push to increase birth rates, and again they briefly increase
and then fall a year or two later. This process
plays out a couple times throughout the administration, and one
of the things that's important to note is that the

(02:07:18):
increase that happens after every new sort of like focus
on birth rates is less each time, Right, it gets
less effective every time. Now, the analysis in that paper
concluded the birth rate would only rise when the state
applied direct pressures on the population. Otherwise it dropped, right,
because this just doesn't work, Like, you're not fundamentally changing anything,

(02:07:40):
and none of these incentives because they're expensive, and in
Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide
much of the way of incentives, right, but they never
are going to work. Like, as we went over earlier,
the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal
with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch
of fucking kids, and none of the people in charge
of the Republican Party have any interest in making life

(02:08:00):
affordable for people who are not rich.

Speaker 4 (02:08:04):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:08:04):
The situation that this led to by the time that
Chicheske regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic
because there had been surges in births, right, in births
of kids to parents who because the people who can't
get away from this tend to be the poor, could
not take care of these kids right. And there was
also a surge in kids as a result of the
general surge in birth rate, but also as a result

(02:08:25):
of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania,
a lot of kids who had different physical and mental
disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their
parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety
there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children
in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that
had been set up in Romania, And there were like

(02:08:47):
posters that were going around that were part of the
pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have
a kid you can't take care of or that's not
like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle
it better than you, So like, who cares have another
kid and we'll just drop it off with us if
you can't take care of them, right Like that was
literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again
like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.

Speaker 1 (02:09:08):
Oohar fucking Christ.

Speaker 2 (02:09:10):
Yeah, that hell sinky article I found quoted from a
different piece of western news media, like a team of
journalists that went to a town called the dell lefter
Chichescu fell. And this is how that article opens. On
the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed
toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and close stuffy rooms.
Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and

(02:09:30):
bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on
crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear
bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory
animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons,
suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day,
several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets from
one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.

(02:09:52):
Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton
stirves turned onto its and groans, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:10:03):
There's worse.

Speaker 2 (02:10:04):
This is not the worst like this like Helsinki article
goes into like how in the homes for the handicapped,
the children are just ignored. They can go months without
any real human contact within the bare men of being fed.
There's no one watching these kids like this is some
of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of

(02:10:26):
children I've ever heard of.

Speaker 4 (02:10:27):
A lot of children die.

Speaker 2 (02:10:29):
AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I
really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions. If
you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll
recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up
from now because we're already going long enough. But there's
the Romanian Orphans are Adults Now, an article in the
Atlantic that's the title. You should check that out, and

(02:10:51):
then Chichescu's Children and The Guardian. Both of those articles
do a good job of providing additional context and horror
on this, But I think it's important to note that
what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to
the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst
this has ever got.

Speaker 3 (02:11:08):
I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior's policies. Yeah,
that is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for
me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.

Speaker 4 (02:11:19):
Yeah, but that stuff is grim. It's some of the
worst shit. Yeah. Yeah, oh boy, I remember that the time,
there was like concern if the kids were really nonverbal, yeah,
like or they just had never been talked to. Oh
my god, because right, they've been institutionalized from such a
year Like I was there probably about twelve years after

(02:11:40):
the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
in their teens, I guess, oh my god. Yeah, I
remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had
never really been able to play outside very much, and
it was fucking yeah. Yeah, that shit will fuck you up. Yeah,
that's a good museum. I'll see if I can find
bradio Is, because if they've maintained one of the old
orphanmagic as it was like with the eye and cribs

(02:12:00):
and shit, and they have like projections on the walls
the kids rocking and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah,
that shit is disturbing. Like I uh, I wouldn't read
any of those articles before getting to bed.

Speaker 2 (02:12:13):
Yeah, anyway, this has been it could happen here.

Speaker 3 (02:12:18):
All right, bye, this is it could happen here. Executive

(02:12:46):
Disorder our weekly news class covering what's happening in the
White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by Mia Wong, Jamestowte, and
Robert Evans. Yes, Taco Trump sweeps the nation, Musk is
out with Steve Miller's wife, Liberation Day, tariffs or fought
in court. This episode covering the week of May twenty
eighth to June four.

Speaker 2 (02:13:06):
So much good stuff this week also a terrorist attack
not good. But before we get into that, I want
to let you guys know I watched the movie Mountainhead,
and then I had a dream starring all of you
in the movie mountain Head, and it went a lot
better since we were just skiing and enjoying the woods.

Speaker 4 (02:13:23):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (02:13:24):
I didn't know nobody launched an AI that destroyed civilization.
Steve Carell wasn't there. Actually, I wouldn't mind hanging out
with Steve Carell, but not the Steve Carrell from that
movie anyway. Interesting movie.

Speaker 4 (02:13:35):
Uh yeah, interesting dream too, bet it sounds of it. Wow.

Speaker 1 (02:13:38):
Thanks for that that quick Robert film review.

Speaker 4 (02:13:41):
Thanks for sharing, Bud. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:13:42):
I guess side piece of news that we weren't focusing
on like much today, but we will do a piece
on in the future is Trump has coud a deal
with Palenteer to create an extensive new database that compiles
information on everybody in the country. This covers bank number,
is student debt, medical claims, disability status. I think this
summer myself for a few other people on this episode. Well,
we'll work together on an episode just about surveillance, like Flock,

(02:14:05):
Gideon Foundry. These these surveillance systems that are getting like
spread all across the country. So we will do a
whole episode on that in the future. But let's start
with that and then pivots to Robert Evans to discuss terrorism.

Speaker 2 (02:14:19):
I hardly know herorism. Someone else should continue the episode now, No, this.

Speaker 4 (02:14:25):
Is your this is your going back. Sorry, that was
a perfect segue nobody's bailing you out of this ship.
We're fine.

Speaker 2 (02:14:37):
Oh my god, all right, pull let me pull up
the right the proper doc because I did this on
my Chescu doc because we recorded both of those episodes today.

Speaker 4 (02:14:45):
What a hotwarming day you've had, Robot.

Speaker 2 (02:14:47):
Oh yeah, chi Chescu, a guy fire bombing, a rally
in Denver. It's it's all been really good stuff. Yeah,
mostly mostly chill.

Speaker 4 (02:14:58):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (02:14:59):
So on June second, there was a rally in Boulder,
Colorado for a group that was protesting for hostages that
were taken by Hamas on October seventh. There's like, I
think fifty somewhere around fifty who are still unaccounted for
for varying reasons. And that was that was what approach
was for. And there was like there was like a

(02:15:20):
gathering and they were supposed to be doing like a run,
right in order to raise awareness about the hostages.

Speaker 4 (02:15:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:15:25):
So that's that's the event that happened on the second
and a man approached during that gathering, Mohammed Sabri Soloman,
and he started throwing molotov cocktails. Every story I have
gives slightly different numbers for how many molotovs he had
prepared and how many he had when he was taken.

(02:15:47):
Like an AP news story said that he had sixteen
unused molotovs that were covered by law enforcement after the attack,
but I think CNN said fourteen, Yeah, fourteen unlit molotovs,
So it's kind of clear to be.

Speaker 4 (02:15:57):
How many they were.

Speaker 2 (02:15:58):
But he threw a number of these at the group
of demonstrators. He also had what's described in most of
the articles I find as an improvised flamethrower. And so
you know, when I heard that, my first question was,
like a makeshift flamethrower.

Speaker 4 (02:16:14):
Sorry, it was the exact term the police used.

Speaker 2 (02:16:16):
And when I first heard that, I was like, well,
that could mean a lot of things they could literally
just do. Like he had like a cand of like
spray that's that's flammable that he like looked a lighter.

Speaker 4 (02:16:24):
Up to it have link steeredrow.

Speaker 2 (02:16:25):
No, it was apparently like a fertilizer or pesticide sprayer
type deal that he had fuel in. Right, So it
actually was a makeshift flamethrower he was attempting, but he
did not use it on the demonstrators. He did burn
himself pretty badly. He had like body armor on that
he took off after he like, basically what seems to
have happened is he throws something like half a dozen

(02:16:46):
firebombs at this crowd, and he injures a number of people,
several of them quite severely. There's at least last I checked,
six people who are still in the hospital, one in
critical condition, although that may have changed since we recorded
this podcast. The victims who were wounded range in age
from fifty two to eighty eight. And yeah, so he

(02:17:10):
hurts a number of people with these molotops, and then
the way he described it, he like felt like he
couldn't continue going through with the attack. He had been
planning this thing for more than a year, we know,
or at least that's what he claimed. And he basically
said that, like, yeah, once I actually started it, I
found it very difficult to continue. So it seems like

(02:17:32):
he kind of like didn't go as far with this
thing as he could have, because it turns out, lighting
people on fire, even when you're very angry, is something
that most people cannot bring themselves to do past a
certain point. He is on video screaming Palestinas free, and
he stated to the authorities that when he'd been planning
this for a year. His goal was to kill Zionists.

(02:17:52):
So you know, this is very it's very clear, like
what this is motivated by, right, Like what his motivation was.
His background is interesting. I guess you'd say he and
his family come from Egypt, and yeah, he attended like
high school in Egypt and later moved to Kuwait. He
has a history of like it seems like he kind
of got politically active during the Arab Spring. He posted

(02:18:16):
a bunch of pictures of Mohammed Morsey, the leader of
the Muslim Brotherhood who served as Egypt's president from twenty
twelve to twenty thirteen. He protested against the military coup
that removed Morsey from power, and he and his family
entered the United States in August of twenty twenty two
as a non immigrant visitor, and in twenty twenty three

(02:18:37):
he received a two year work authorization, which expired in March.
He had tried to come to the US in two
thousand and five. His primary goal in coming here in
twenty twenty two was to get his daughter, primarily into
a good medical school. He moved there with his wife
and his kids. His daughter was on the process of graduating.
They had been living in Kuwait, but for a variety

(02:18:57):
of weak reasons, especially the fact that they were not
st She was like, I'm not going to be able
to go into medicine in Kuwait. His daughter seems to
be a very gifted medical student, and so they moved
here and she got into a medical school. And in fact,
he seems to have waited to carry out his attack
until her graduation, like he wanted her to be started

(02:19:17):
on her path to becoming a doctor before he carried
out this attack. I think, both in the hope that
it would protect her and she wouldn't get forced out
of the country, which we'll talk about in a little bit,
and I think probably just because easier to dad and
he wanted to see her graduate, right. But then he
carries out this attack. His family does not seem to
have known. He basically left some messages for them as

(02:19:38):
he left to carry it out. His wife took his
phone into the authorities, which I read as her being like,
I'm at this point trying to do whatever I can
to make the government less likely to prosecute the rest
of my family. Like he's a writer, right, Like he
like like I can't be concerned about him. Right, I've
got kids, you know.

Speaker 4 (02:19:59):
Like potential trying to stop anything else happening. If he
was you know, like maybe he had other people who'd
been playing this with who are planning other things.

Speaker 2 (02:20:06):
Right, she doesn't know did he build a bomb?

Speaker 4 (02:20:08):
Right, she has no idea. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:20:10):
I should also note here that when he was planning
this attack, he initially planned to do a shooting. He
took a concealed carry class, or at least he told
investigators he took a concealed carry class.

Speaker 3 (02:20:19):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:20:19):
He could be lying about some of this. This is
what the police are reported.

Speaker 2 (02:20:22):
Yeah, but he took a concealed carry class. But he
was not able to buy a gun. The AP News
article says was denied because he's not a legal US citizen.
You don't have to be a citizen to buy a gun. Yeah,
that's not correct, But you do have to be in
the country legally, right, Like you do not have to
be a citizen to purchase guns in this country, but
you do have to be illegal.

Speaker 4 (02:20:39):
I think you have to be a resident, like certain
visa categories. There's a number of ways to get a gun.

Speaker 2 (02:20:44):
Whim not a citizen, but he was not able to yeah,
and thank goodness, right, Like it's horrifying, Like obviously burning
people is horrifying. Like the injuries that these people suffered
are pretty are deeply like there's no pleasant burn injury.

Speaker 4 (02:20:56):
But people would have.

Speaker 2 (02:20:57):
Just died if he'd shot them, right, Like, Yeah, that's
just the reality of the situation.

Speaker 4 (02:21:02):
That's already happened in Boulder once, like Bulder had a
mass shooting at a supermarket right now, so long ago.

Speaker 2 (02:21:07):
Yeah, so that's the that's that's the bones of what
happened here now.

Speaker 3 (02:21:11):
I mean, having this like less than a week after
the Embassy shooting is pretty notable.

Speaker 4 (02:21:17):
Not great.

Speaker 2 (02:21:18):
Yeah, speaks to the contagion way these kinds of things spread.

Speaker 4 (02:21:22):
Right exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:21:22):
Mean las last week we talked about how like this
displays into like media that only benefits the actions at
Israel's continuing to take and how much a media attention
was going towards the shooting and like the immediate aftermath.
And something that I found a little bit interesting is
how fast that story kind of went away, which which
I wasn't really expecting. I thought it would it would

(02:21:45):
they would be you know, relevant for a little bit longer.
People try to keep it relevant for a little bit longer.
I think part of the reason why maybe it went
away faster than what we thought is so that it
would not encourage like copycat attacks, and that still seems
to happen to a degree. And I mean it's sounds
like this guy was planning something for a little bit long, yess.
But certainly having that other shooting in a close time

(02:22:05):
proximity is notable.

Speaker 2 (02:22:07):
Yeah, I mean, the unfortunate reality is that, like, I'm
sure there's someone else, multiple other people who have been
planning for different periods of time, other kinds of attacks,
and we will continue to see stuff like this happen.

Speaker 4 (02:22:20):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:22:20):
Some of this is when something as terrible as the
jatocide happening in Gaza is happening on a small screen
in front of your face, and you are consuming hours
of the curated worst footage of it every day. People
are going to react, and they're not always going to
react in the most like thoughtful way. Sometimes they're going
to make a bunch of fucking fire bombs and attack

(02:22:42):
a group of people who there's not really any argument
that these particular groups of people.

Speaker 4 (02:22:47):
Had any at any influence, any any material consequence.

Speaker 2 (02:22:50):
Any power in the Israeli government, but.

Speaker 4 (02:22:54):
One of them's a Holocaust survivor, and.

Speaker 2 (02:22:55):
People are going to take irrational, terrible action that's just
going to happen, you know, breaks people.

Speaker 4 (02:23:00):
Yeah, kind of prolonged vicarious trauma especially is not good
for you.

Speaker 3 (02:23:05):
I think a lot of this loan Wolf attack is
almost a way that people like cope with themselves after
watching this thing unfold on your screen, right, and then
as a response.

Speaker 2 (02:23:15):
I have to do something, is what he said, right, Like,
I'm never gonna be able to live with myself.

Speaker 4 (02:23:19):
I do something.

Speaker 3 (02:23:20):
And then as a response, you use the violence of
a gun to carve your name into history.

Speaker 4 (02:23:25):
And yeah, as someone who did something, I did something. Yeah,
this is this is something and you know it's.

Speaker 2 (02:23:32):
It's it's it's bad, like it just has it's just
some number of people. This is how they're they're going
to react, and to an extent I don't know, I
don't know how you seek to stop this. You know,
the authorities have have like confirmed this guy was not
on anyone's watch list. I'm sure neither will the next
guy or gal who does something right like this is

(02:23:54):
the world quite quite frankly, this is in part the
world the Internet has made, right, Yeah, not that, not
that it would be good if horrifying footage of the
genocide and Gaza wasn't getting out to people. But like,
this isn't the first time we have watched a series
of attacks carried out and copy attacks and copycat attacks
like carried out and spread as a result of things

(02:24:15):
that are spreading in digital media, right, Like this is
a This is like a thing that's happened over and
over again. This is just kind of how the internet
and radical violence works well.

Speaker 1 (02:24:25):
And it's one of those things where like, you know,
there is a clear way to end the violence, which
is to end the genocide, which is the other benefit
of ending the genocide. But these people have no interest
in that.

Speaker 2 (02:24:33):
No, these people, and I don't I don't know how
to write like like like I don't like if you're asking, like, well,
how do we end the genocide? Where like I guess
you could get the entire international community to stop trading
or selling weapons to Israel and also blockade the country,
but like, well, then how do we do that?

Speaker 4 (02:24:47):
They're not god a right, Like I can't I can't
make them.

Speaker 2 (02:24:50):
I can't make the US shoot down Israeli missiles or aircraft,
Like I don't have the ability to like yell our
government into doing that.

Speaker 4 (02:24:58):
Yeah, it's how do you write as a person potentially
a person who's isolating. I don't know, man, If this
person isn't part of a community, right, I hasn't found community?
Like processing that trauma and feeling like you have to
do something, some people's brains will break in a way
that leads to violence. Yeah, I want to talk about
state violence now, if that's okay, because I think, look,

(02:25:21):
what he did was fucked up and wrong, and no
one should obviously be firebombing Holocaust survival. I think that's
something we can agree on. What has happened to his
family is also wrong, right, like it you shouldn't be
punished for being related to someone who did a bad thing.
And oh god, and this is yeah, this is also horrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:25:37):
Yeah, the whole thing is a story of like collateral damage.

Speaker 4 (02:25:41):
Yeah, so the White House on four twelve PM on
the third of June, tweeted zeated just In Colon the
wife and five children of illegal alien Mohammed Solomon, the
suspect in the anti Semitic fire bombing of Jewish Americans
have been captured, captured and are now in ice custody

(02:26:01):
for expedited removal. Next part is in block capitals. They
could be deported as early as tonight. This is heartbreaking,
right again, Like we've talked about habeas before, but the
foundation of everything that legal systems based on English common
law hold is you have to have evidence that the
person did something wrong, not that they're related to the

(02:26:22):
person who did something wrong. Right. You know, Robert and
I are both intimately familiar at least you know. I've
received calls from young people in Burma who we've interviewed,
whose families have been captured because of their participation in
the revolution, and like, yeah, this is not a part
of you. I should be going down. I want to
explain very briefly what expedited removal is, because I have

(02:26:44):
seen some shit that suggests maybe folks don't understand it.
That's fine, It's complicated. So expetitive removal is supposed to
be reserved for people who arrive at a land border
port of entry or EWI. EWIE is an acronym entering
without inspection that means entering between imports of entry right
over the wall. Under the wall over the beach. What

(02:27:05):
have you? Right entering without going through a port of
entry and they're supposed to have been here for less
than two years. The Trump administration has been massively expanding
the use of expected to removal recently. Why they're doing
this is because in an expected to removal proceeding, lower
level immigration officials can remove people without them seeing a judge.
Those people can still make a credible fear claim, which

(02:27:28):
has to be assessed by an asylum officer and then
approved by a judge. But this is a lot harder
right than then going through the asylum process, and they
have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. I guess I think
it's a reasonable fear frame. I think incredible fear is
a highest standard for another removal praceeding that they are
likely to be tortured by the government or with the
acquiescence of their government if they're sent home. Right, its

(02:27:50):
use had previously peaked with one hundred and ninety seven
cases in twenty thirteen that was under a Bama right
and surprisingly didn't see people writing about it. Then it
was used even more extensively by the Biden administration, especially
in twenty twenty four, with Biden passed his asylum ban
right by executive order. The first Trump administration did use it.

(02:28:11):
They used it in a more broad range of cases,
but they didn't use it in as many cases as
either the Obama or the Biden administration. Right expertited removal
is supposed to be for the most serious cases, for
things where the person is a threat or a danger,
or for other reasons need to be removed quickly. It
was never designed. It was passed in I think in

(02:28:34):
the early two thousands to first decade of this century.
It was never supposed to be used like this, right, Robert,
you mentioned these people had entered the United States in
twenty twenty three, I think.

Speaker 2 (02:28:46):
Twenty twenty two, and then he got a visa two
year visa to work. In twenty twenty three, the entered
on a tourist visa.

Speaker 4 (02:28:53):
Essentially, Yeah, they're not within that two year window. Right
to the extent that that matters, I don't know. So
they will now, having done nothing wrong in the case
of his wife, having attempted to cooperate with law enforcement
to stop her husband or anyone with him hurting anyone else,
they will be detained in the nice detention center. They

(02:29:13):
will have to make a claim of credible fear right.
They will have to say it is dangerous for you
to send us back. I presume that citizenship is Egyptian,
so I presume they will be sent there. That's a
very high hurdle for them to clear. And I mean,
I'm sure that there are national immigration nonprofits who are
willing to fight their case because the abuse of expert
to removal in the last two years, to be very clear,

(02:29:36):
by dedministration as well, has seriously undermined the due process
rights of migrants. But this is still a further step,
at a significant step in removing those So I'm going
to follow this case. I'm sure i'll update you on
it next week. I also just want to note that
this has dominated a news cycle. Yesterday, twenty seven people

(02:29:56):
were killed in Gaza attempting to obtain humanitarian aid. The
IDF is still denying that. I don't really care that
the Red Cross, as well as health authorities in gard
they have confound that twenty seven people were killed en
route to one of the humanitarians or the humanitarian aid
distribution point where they've concentrated it. In the sudden end
of the Guard the Trip. We will have an episode

(02:30:18):
on Palestine next week. I don't want one person's kind
of stupid action to overshadow the killing of many more
people and that tragic loss of life. Right so, I
don't think that we won't be covering that. We will.
What we will also be doing is pivoting to advertisements
right now.

Speaker 9 (02:30:33):
That's right, baby, Let me let me maybe get up
my guacamole.

Speaker 4 (02:30:50):
Fucking algorithms of it?

Speaker 1 (02:30:53):
How could it becomes a joker?

Speaker 4 (02:30:57):
Is that the pivot to the Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:30:59):
Okay, yeah, yeah, oh god, okay, let's let's talk about
Taco Trump.

Speaker 3 (02:31:05):
Who oh yeah, finally, finally, get out your hot, get
out your block, let's go Taco Trump party.

Speaker 4 (02:31:14):
If you're doing getting full DNC style, pick a slightly
racist Mexican costume or somethink I guess, like so many many.

Speaker 1 (02:31:22):
Years ago, I was, I was a professional StarCraft two fan,
and this meant that I was exposed a gunguan style
a full two weeks before everyone else. And this was
my experience with Taco because I started hearing this from
like financial news outlets, and like my friend Vicky was
sending me things. They're like, yeah, they came up with
this thing, they're calling it taco, and then like four

(02:31:43):
days later, all of the like regular news outlet's caught
up to it. And I didn't want to say ship
in the nation.

Speaker 4 (02:31:48):
May I liked it before it was cool.

Speaker 1 (02:31:51):
So Taco is this like unbelievable delusion that the finance
people have had to like like program into their brains
in order to like keep themselves from believing their own
eyes about what's happening with the economy. So Taco stands
for Trump always chickens out. And it's these people's belief
that Trump will like always inevitably in the end back.

Speaker 4 (02:32:12):
Down from the terrace.

Speaker 1 (02:32:13):
And I've been seeing this a lot, right, Like I'm
seeing this some people who are like who's analysis I respect?
Who are talking about how like, yeah, the structural conditions
of the economy are saus the Trump will always be
forced to like roll the terariffs back. And then it's like, okay,
like the fifty percent deal tariff, what did you affect
like today?

Speaker 3 (02:32:30):
Right Like I I don't know, I'm gonna get some kumi. Oh,
I'm gonna get some coriander. We're gonna mix that up.

Speaker 1 (02:32:38):
Oh god, Yo, this is a financial thing, right, This
is the thing that like all the day traders like
have to convince themselves in order to keep the stock
marketing going.

Speaker 4 (02:32:46):
Yeah that like, no, no, no, it's gonna be fine.

Speaker 3 (02:32:49):
This is a magic spell that's being like waved over
the economy to keep it kind of holding together.

Speaker 1 (02:32:53):
Yeah, they're like, whooh, it's gonna be fine. Ignore the
thirty percent tariffs, So all Chinese goods, ignore the terriffs
of the Yeah, fifty percent steel turf.

Speaker 2 (02:33:02):
Today, you might say, these economists are saying to Reef,
we don't like it.

Speaker 10 (02:33:08):
Sorry, locking jazz bomb, rocket jazz Bot, Sorry, locking, locking
jazz bomb, rocky jazz Bob.

Speaker 2 (02:33:24):
God, we had to make up for it. Garrison wouldn't
let us last time.

Speaker 4 (02:33:27):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know the royalties are getting
too much.

Speaker 3 (02:33:30):
I took an entire week's pay cut so that we
could pay back the royalty.

Speaker 2 (02:33:34):
Now, now, the good news is everybody we did manage
to work out a new healthcare plan for everybody. It
is the next time you need to go to a doctor,
there will be an unmarked car with a loaded thirty
eight special in the glove box. So it is a
step up from United Healthcare. We we've actually significantly improved things,

(02:33:56):
that's true.

Speaker 4 (02:33:57):
And I'm actually taking to pay for a year so
we can do a a white riot, which is just
white genocide. It's about the genocide of the of the
ball people.

Speaker 1 (02:34:05):
Real and so okay, speaking of United Health one of
these tarriffs that all these people have convinced themselves is
not going to happen is the pharmaceutical tariffs, which are
still like coming, right. But what sort of happened with
this taco shit, right is the Democrats were like, Okay,
I have found a way to criticize Trump.

Speaker 4 (02:34:26):
That is racist. They're all just calling him like that.

Speaker 3 (02:34:30):
Also does it actually critique his policies like they're they're
calling him taco and Trump in relation to like the
negotiations with Iran.

Speaker 4 (02:34:37):
Yeah yeah, shit that he should chicken out of it.
It's good if he doesn't do it.

Speaker 1 (02:34:40):
Yeah yeah, Like I'm watching them do like like fucking
Chuck Schumer is out here tweeting about how Biden deported
more people than Trump did, and like the thing that
this reminds me of the most is like the Chavez
era of Venezuelan opposition, where every single year they would
haul some dipshit out and their platform was like I'm
gonna do Travizel better than and every single year they

(02:35:01):
would lose by forty points. And it's like the Democrats
are like those guys, those people are real fucking winners.
We're going to adopt every single one of his platforms
and then we're gonna run on he's not doing it
well enough, and then we're gonna get fucking annihilated in
every single election until like democratic process itself simply ceases
to exist and this will be good.

Speaker 4 (02:35:20):
For us somehow. This is just it's pure cope.

Speaker 1 (02:35:25):
Like the entire our entire economy is being supported by
the just collective delusion that these people have built. But
they fucked up right. And the thing about Taco and
think I remember from like the first time I heard
about this, it was like, if this gets out, these
people are fucked because Trump is going to see this
and it is going to piss him off and he's
going to like like now that it's like the democratic thing,

(02:35:47):
it's like no, no, no, Like the next the next
series of terrorists is scheduled to come off. Is I'm
pretty sure that China won in like the beginning of
July could have.

Speaker 4 (02:35:55):
The math wrong.

Speaker 1 (02:35:56):
I don't know, I hate math, I prob but I'm
pretty sure that's the next one.

Speaker 3 (02:35:59):
I mean, it's it's this is the thing that I'm
still like questioning about, and like we've talked talk abouts before,
is like one of those thirty d deadlines for tariffs
on Canada and Mexico expired. Yeah, he just forgot about
that one and no one was keeping count or they
were like distracted, like I think specifically they were putting
in some like European Union like tariffs like like that
day and then just nothing like happy Yeah, And like

(02:36:20):
I am wondering how much of that is, Like he's
just gonna announce tariffs, put them on hold, and then
just forget about them, but still announce new different tariffs
in the future that may cover some of the same stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:36:32):
Well, so here's the thing. Here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (02:36:33):
I some of these you remember, something doesn't because so
so the steel tariff doubled from twenty five to fifty, right,
and that one of the.

Speaker 4 (02:36:39):
Rolling date ones.

Speaker 7 (02:36:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:36:40):
Yeah, So I think it's it's like there are some
that he like cares about and there are some that
he kind of doesn't.

Speaker 3 (02:36:46):
I mean I feel the same way when I'm getting
tacos like pork tacos, No, thank you, fish tacos.

Speaker 4 (02:36:51):
Maybe I don't. I don't endor Scarceon's opinion on tacos.

Speaker 1 (02:36:55):
This, this taco Trump shit is like I long for
the days of orn Man bad dr was better than this.
This is this is the worst it's ever been, Like,
oh god, get give me comedians cutting his head off
live on stage again, Like sure.

Speaker 4 (02:37:11):
Yes, that was fine.

Speaker 1 (02:37:13):
This is just like, what what are we doing here?

Speaker 4 (02:37:16):
Oh my god?

Speaker 3 (02:37:17):
Yeah, I mean it's really tough because cilantro prices are
gonna spike to these tariffs too, so I mean we
can't even call them talk about.

Speaker 2 (02:37:23):
It's okay, you know, Garrett Garrison, that's actually just good politics,
right because some people have some people have a disability
where they can't test taste cilantro.

Speaker 4 (02:37:32):
Not a disability.

Speaker 3 (02:37:36):
Associated with pre statements. I will not be canceled by this.
I do not buy the cilantro gene. I don't think
it's real.

Speaker 1 (02:37:42):
But you don't think the cilantro Oh my god, Okay, Okay,
I don't think.

Speaker 4 (02:37:45):
It's a gene.

Speaker 2 (02:37:46):
It's just I don't think people without the cilant with
the cilantro tastes bad gene. I don't know if we'd
call them people right, if it tastes like soapid.

Speaker 4 (02:37:54):
I just don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:37:56):
Talk talks with China have been breaking down. Both sides
have been in each other of violating the agreement they
had come to to roll the tariffs back, which they'd
like both have. I believe both sides on that. Actually, Yeah,
and again this comes to like the actual fundamental structural
problem of this, which is that and I think this
is why a lot of people think that everything will

(02:38:16):
sort of eventually go back to normal and I'll try
to just sort of like bluster like I did the
first time. Is that like, Okay, again, Trump's actual goal here,
which is to not have a trade deficit with China,
is unachievable, right, There's nothing that can actually be done
in order to do that, and there's no good way
to claim victory either.

Speaker 4 (02:38:36):
And so what we're sort of escalating.

Speaker 1 (02:38:37):
Towards is July, like the one hundred and thirty percent
of teriff sort of like coming coming.

Speaker 4 (02:38:42):
Back into effect.

Speaker 1 (02:38:44):
So people are building up I think this, like I
don't know the sort of like psychological wall to the
fact that this could happen again, and the fact that
like these negotiations are breaking down, I think is just
making it increasingly likely that it is just going.

Speaker 4 (02:38:58):
To explode again.

Speaker 1 (02:39:00):
The steel tariffs also are just a shit show for
a whole bunch of different manufacturing sectors. It's very bad
for US auto industry. There's already been a report on
the effect of twenty five percent steel tariff has had
on like on the construction industry. This has been tied
into sort of like, oh yeah, the US is like
not replenishing its housing stock because you.

Speaker 4 (02:39:19):
Know, but it's it's fucked.

Speaker 1 (02:39:23):
It's real bad. I don't I don't have a I
don't know. I don't have a better thing to say
about it than that, and that it's going to continue
to get worse and at some points, probably the taco
is going to be fucking over and people are going
to realize that he's going to do this, and especially
now they just pissed him off.

Speaker 4 (02:39:42):
Oh god, yeah, well what will they do then with
their giant inflatable chicken.

Speaker 1 (02:39:49):
This is this is.

Speaker 4 (02:39:53):
The biggest limbrain stuff I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (02:39:55):
I am I am living in a world where like
a group chat that I make on signal when I
was a manic last year has had more policy effect
on like like preserving trans healthcare in that fucking budget
build in the entire Democratic Party and they are spending
their money fucking like holding out chicken, fucking chicken inflatable.

Speaker 2 (02:40:17):
Now, don't don't listen to me a Democrats. For just
twenty million dollars, I will guarantee you the youth vote.
Not a guarantee.

Speaker 3 (02:40:24):
I propose that we renamed this segment from tariff talk
to Mia Molay the next I don't know twenty.

Speaker 2 (02:40:33):
Episots garrison as a Canadian?

Speaker 4 (02:40:35):
Are you allowed to use that word?

Speaker 1 (02:40:37):
Yeah, let's go on to that break.

Speaker 3 (02:40:43):
Before I lose my job. Okay, we are back. James
stout me. What's been going on?

Speaker 4 (02:41:02):
Hey everyone, James, it's Thursday night here and I'm just
recording a little pickup to update you that the Trump
administration has issued another travel ban. This travel ban bans
travel or bans all new visas for people from twelve countries.
One of those is Myanmar, and travelers further restricted for

(02:41:22):
seven other countries. There are exemptions people who are already
in the country with a valid visa. There are exemptions
for Afghan people have an SIV especial immigrant visa. There
are other smaller exemptions for the Olympic Games and sporting
events for example. We will do a whole episode on
this because we need longer than we have to explain it.
But I just wanted to make people aware that we

(02:41:44):
are tracking that, planning on getting something out about it,
but we don't have enough space in this episode or
time to edit to address it in full. Today, Well,
some things have been happening Garrison here in sunny San Diego.

Speaker 1 (02:41:56):
With from what I hear actually great tagos.

Speaker 4 (02:41:59):
Yes, tacos are actually very good in San Diego. Yes, oh,
excellent tacos. Some of the best tacos in southern California.
Which you saying something, Come and visit us, eat our tacos.

Speaker 2 (02:42:09):
Across the border, get some extended release Mexican tramadol. Let
me know where you were anyway, continued jam.

Speaker 4 (02:42:15):
Or tacos whatever you want to want to get across
the border. So ICE agents raided Buonafortetta, which is pizza
place in South Park. I used to stay like just
above here. I would get late night pizza there all
the time when my job was riding my bike and
my hobby was drinking at Hamilton's Rip, which was a
craft bn next door. In this bungled raid, they entered

(02:42:36):
drin in a late afternoon and the evening of Friday,
and ice agents soon found themselves surrounded by an angry
crowd at local people, patrons from the Vegan Small Plates
cocktail place across the across the street, and the brewery
it's now South Park Brewing, as well as folks from
the neighborhood. Right, this is one of those neighborhoods that
like South Park of the concept was kind of invented

(02:42:57):
by real estate agents so that it wouldn't seem like
Golden Hill or Bankers Hill, and it would have like
a more upmarket branding. So you have these very nice
bars and restaurants, but then you also have like a
laundromaut on the corner, and like a like a food market,
like a non chain supermarket that serves a primarily Latino
clan tel. I would imagine it's one of these very

(02:43:17):
sort of like class diverse neighborhoods, I guess. But people
came out en mass. They surrounded these vehicles right, they
were chanting let them go. ITTSI agents decided to defuse
the situation by throwing flash banks and then leaving with
four employees. I should add here that, as KPBS put it, quote,
flashbanks were thrown, which is a cowardly use of the

(02:43:40):
passive voice to obscure culpability.

Speaker 3 (02:43:42):
I think flash bangs spontaneously were deployed, right.

Speaker 4 (02:43:46):
Yeah, right, who can say, Garrison, maybe the people at
the Death Metal Vegan restaurant bought the flash bangs.

Speaker 3 (02:43:52):
Well, and I also do want to say I have
gotten word from some exclusive sources that these were actually
secret militia members asperating as ICE agents.

Speaker 4 (02:44:01):
Yeah, let's just fucking address it because it's very silly.

Speaker 2 (02:44:04):
The understandable degree of it is that like.

Speaker 4 (02:44:06):
They are dressing like Proud Voice.

Speaker 2 (02:44:07):
They look exactly like Proud Boys in Portland in twenty nineteen, right,
Like they are indistinguishable visually.

Speaker 3 (02:44:13):
Their uniform standards have like kind of gone away. They
seem like they don't have standards anymore. Yes, and now
they are just dressing like how Proud Voices and three
Percenters used to dress.

Speaker 4 (02:44:23):
Yeah. So, like I think this kind of conspiracy theory
stems from the initial MISI identification of the ginger ice
agent who smashed someone's window as Michael Meyer a ka
Lewis Arthur, who's the one of the veterans on patrol leaders.
He was live streaming in Oklahoma at the time that
that rate happened. It's not him, Yeah, it's just two

(02:44:44):
people who are ginger that that is possible that there
are lots of them. Then I've seen this in multiple
other cases, often from the kind of more lib sky
people you see on Blue Sky right, who seem unable
to comprehend the fact that no, they are cops and
they are doing evil and cops do evil shit, cops
can do bad things.

Speaker 3 (02:45:03):
And now, yeah, cops are more likely, especially immigration officers,
do not have their names on their kit.

Speaker 4 (02:45:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:45:11):
And it's something that we saw like in Portland and
twenty twenty and it was incredibly worrying. And now it's
spreading all around the entire country to the point where
most most like people enacting these raids are both hiding
their identities and also obscuring what agencies they are actually
like from, which is why people are like concerned that
you like, what if these guys aren't even from the government.

(02:45:31):
What if these are just like some kind of right
wing militia, And yeah, with a little bit of checking
you can usually tell that they are in fact from
usually dhs.

Speaker 4 (02:45:39):
Yeah, I mean the California one was somewhat ridiculous, right,
There is not an exemption to the California assault weapons
ban for militias. These guys had guns, which would have
been about four felonies each. Yees saying people don't do
felony things they do, but you'd have to be a
bit of a tool to just stand on the street
with your felony select fire MPX.

Speaker 2 (02:45:58):
Part of this is a very and a lot of
leftists fell for this too, But this is fundament mentally
rooted in a liberal delusion, which is that the danger
is unaccountable groups of civilians with guns, not the police.

Speaker 4 (02:46:09):
The danger is the cops. The danger has always been
the cops. Yes, we need to push back on this, right,
Like the prow Boys are not like the be all
and end all of eve when I'm but they're.

Speaker 2 (02:46:21):
That's sure, of course, I've like, I've had my hand
broken by one. I don't like them, but I'm not
as scared of them as I am of just the
cops like.

Speaker 4 (02:46:29):
Yeah, we need to push back on this because it
fundamentally misidentifies the problem. And until these people wake up
and realize that they're they'll going to respond in the
correct manner.

Speaker 1 (02:46:37):
Yeah, And I mean, like, you know, one of the
things that you can point out here is is like, yeah,
there were a bunch of police in Nazi Germany, and
the moment that they started carrying out the orders of
the Nazi government, they became Nazis.

Speaker 4 (02:46:50):
Like that's that's.

Speaker 1 (02:46:51):
Just how this works, right, You'll get a pull a like, oh,
I was just a whimart police guy, just enforcing the
laws of the of the Nazi government. It's like, okay,
you are, sir, you are a Nazi, and you are
a Nazi because you are an agent of the Nazi state,
not because you were like you know, you were like
necessarily in some perimilitary or whatever, like.

Speaker 4 (02:47:10):
Yeah, a member of the party.

Speaker 1 (02:47:12):
Yeah, like that that's what happens when you work for
a fascist state. So you're now a fascist.

Speaker 4 (02:47:16):
So in documents I've reviewed, I claimed that nineteen employees
at a restaurant were using falsified green cards. They were
acting on a tip from November twenty twenty and then
they received a follow up tip in late January twenty
twenty five. The tip claim that many of the staff
at Buonaforta Jetta were undocumented, that the owner made them
work long shifts and verbally abused them. I have seen

(02:47:39):
no evidence that this is true beyond that claim. I've
been to and past that restaurant hundreds of times. I've
never seen anyone who looks sad to be there. But
it doesn't mean that's not happening. But I've seen nothing
to lead me to believe that it is beyond this claim. Right,
HSI had been in communication with bonafort Jetta's lawyer since
February and they had been cooperating. Right Like one offort

(02:48:02):
had given them these documents, which they claim were fake
green cards. They applied for this warrant, which they got
an exceedingly broad warrant. One of the things that allow
was for everyone inside to be detained and fingerprinted if necessary,
even people who are not accused of any immigration offense, right,
people who are United States citizens. The warrant also detailed

(02:48:23):
that they had been surveiling the location. City councilman Shani
La Riviera called the HSI agent terrorists. In a social
media post, Bill Malougan got sad about this. Stephen Miller
quote tweeted Bill Milligan getting sad about this. Top Luria
came out with three paragraphs of total bullshit and continued
to unabatteredly support stripping our city of all its socially
beneficial services in order to direct a fire hose of

(02:48:46):
our money to the cops, one of whom earned four
hundred and thirty thousand dollars in twenty twenty three. Jesus
what yep? Yeah, San Diego's highest paid public officials of
cops by oh my god. Yeah, we are becoming a
police department with a city attached because of Todd Gloria,
someone who ran in twenty twenty on a reform agenda, right,

(02:49:08):
who owns himself two hundred and fifty thousand much less.

Speaker 3 (02:49:11):
That's that's that's an unhit football coach takes, which is
I thought that the Portland police were paid too much.

Speaker 4 (02:49:18):
That's that's wild. Yeah. Yeah, this person worked and alleged
three thousand hours of overtime.

Speaker 3 (02:49:25):
I believe it's like what scrolling scrolling TikTok in your car, Like,
come on.

Speaker 2 (02:49:30):
Keeping an eye, keeping an eye on kids.

Speaker 4 (02:49:32):
Yeah, yeah, you can't you you can't be three thousand hours.
I mean someone could do three thousand divided by fifty
fifty two weeks a year or whatever. Like it's it's
it's an unfathomable amount of overtime.

Speaker 1 (02:49:46):
It's it's just fifty eight hours a week.

Speaker 4 (02:49:48):
Whoa, yeah, so that's full time plus one and a
half full time jobs, hard worker. There's a KPBS article
on it. I'll linking multiple police officers I guess in
twenty twenty four are on track to earn over four
hundred thousand dollars with the bulckit coming from overtime pay.
San Diego never gets enough attention for being a complete

(02:50:12):
shit show of a city, right Like and Ron by
the Sea is the best way I've heard it described, right, Like,
our city consistently has massive corruption in scandals and nothing happens.

Speaker 2 (02:50:24):
It's it's a problem when it a place.

Speaker 4 (02:50:26):
Is that nice?

Speaker 9 (02:50:27):
Right?

Speaker 4 (02:50:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:50:27):
Like that's really the fundamental issue is like people were like, hey,
do you hear about that fucked up thing the meritd Yeah,
but like look at the look at the beach.

Speaker 4 (02:50:36):
Yeah, I mean that's yeah, that's literally the csis of
under the Perfect Son. Yeah, she's a book that should be, uh,
should be obligatory if you want to move to San Diego. Yeah.
I think it's one of the one of the earlier
Mike Davis books. But against San Diego, a place where
the politics are bad. It's also what happens when everyone
votes them no matter what. Right.

Speaker 2 (02:50:56):
Also, people, in general, if you want to understand why
Southern California be like a do read read Mike Davis.

Speaker 4 (02:51:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in general, just read Mike Davis.

Speaker 2 (02:51:07):
Actually, wherever you are read some Mike Davis.

Speaker 1 (02:51:10):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (02:51:11):
I seem to have used I want to get into
this because I think this is an important issue that
hasn't been raised any coverage. I see I seem to
have used AB sixty driver's licenses to identify the people
in Bonnafort Chetta, or at least use California DMV documents
of some kind.

Speaker 1 (02:51:27):
Jesus.

Speaker 4 (02:51:29):
Yeah, So there's this misunderstanding. People think that if you
have a driver's license in California, that information isn't accessible
to immigration, and that's not true. AB sixty licenses. So
that's Assembly Bill sixty, right, California piece of law allow
people to get a license without having legal immigration status.
This is a good thing. It means undocumented people are

(02:51:49):
less likely to drive unlicensed and uninsured, right, and therefore
it means that people are likely to stay at the
scene of car accidents, and people who getting car accident
to likely covered insurance. Right, I've been hit by an
unsure driver. It fucking sucks. Oh. DHS cannot access information
on whose license is an AB sixty license, but they

(02:52:11):
can access through a variety of databases and mechanisms other
DMV data, which may include things like photographs, addresses, or
thumb prints. So in this case, they were able to
look at the fake green card and then look at
other data, both in federal and local databases, from various things.
And some of these people had overstayed visas their claiming
right be like, Okay, well we found a guy with

(02:52:33):
this name and this date of birth, but the person
hasn't minisued a green card, that that's their claim right,
and the same with the driver's license database. So obviously,
just to finish up on that thought, I guess this
disincentivizes people from doing the thing which I've just said
is good, which is getting a driver's license. Right. It disincentivizes.
I mean, I'm seeing things from students right now being
afraid of going to their own graduations, being afraid of

(02:52:56):
having their parents at their own graduation. Right like two
blocks from a school, fucking chicken do not she's on
top of the fence. Sorry, I'm just going to leave this.
You're gonna fucking get out?

Speaker 9 (02:53:12):
Oh yeah, please chicken break.

Speaker 1 (02:53:19):
I really, I really truly thought that that was part
of the sentence, and I was trying to process in
my brain.

Speaker 4 (02:53:25):
What the fighting was going on.

Speaker 1 (02:53:27):
That's like, yeah, all.

Speaker 4 (02:53:33):
Right, we're back. Did you none commanded? Did you pick
up the chicken?

Speaker 1 (02:53:39):
Ye?

Speaker 4 (02:53:39):
Could you say that you were kind of a chicken jockey? Everyone?

Speaker 2 (02:53:45):
No? No, just another thirty seconds of silence, everybody, let's
really give that it's due.

Speaker 4 (02:53:51):
Anyone got a gong that we could find? No? No,
all right, pouring one out for Garrison. So right now,
both Bonifort Jetta locations are closed. They go Fundme for
the impacted employees and their families has already hit twice
its goal one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. As I've said,
there have been on sef gestions which, as far as

(02:54:13):
I'm were unfounded that a restaurant forced and documented employees
to work long hours. That doesn't matter, right, even if
they did, you shouldn't be punishing the people who are being,
in theory abused, right. I don't understand how you get
to that logic. And even if that is the case,
like having ice available on call to deport your employees

(02:54:34):
only plays into the hands of abusive bosses who don't
want to pay people, right, they can just call ice instead.
This is a tactic that's been used for decades and
into migrants. So yeah, that's all I got. Good times,
good times in San Diego.

Speaker 1 (02:54:46):
Yeah, Yeah, We're going to talk about this more in
another episode. There was also a rage in Minneapolis that
you know, there's like through the agents out multi agency
raid and like a hundred people just showed up and
got them the fuck off.

Speaker 4 (02:55:00):
And they didn't end up arresting anybody.

Speaker 1 (02:55:02):
Yeah, I think, well, so I think they wrest some
all the protesters, but like they didn't end up attaining anything.

Speaker 4 (02:55:06):
They did not detain the people they were going after,
they stopt them.

Speaker 1 (02:55:09):
Yeah, and there's there's this there's this great line that
fucking every single person from Minneapolis who I know now
is quoting where one of the people who got interviewed
in Sahan Journal said, that's Minnieappolis.

Speaker 4 (02:55:20):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (02:55:21):
We pull up, so you too could pull up and
stop the fucking you see for cowards, you can stop
them now. Speaking of incredible cowardice. One of the things
that's been happening on a sort of another immigration front
is the US's attempt to revoke student visas for Chinese
international students. We don't actually know what this means yet

(02:55:43):
and what's going to look like. All they've said is
that they're working to aggressively to revoke visas. As a
direct quote from them, and this this is this was
from uh Marco Rubio on fucking whatever social media app
and you also say, quote, we will revise visa criteria
to a hand scrutiny of all future visa applications from
the People's of Public of China and Hong Kong. So

(02:56:05):
uh fucking rip all of the Hong Kong liberals who
supported Trump.

Speaker 4 (02:56:09):
Yeah, bad shit.

Speaker 1 (02:56:11):
No one knows exactly what this is going to mean.
I've seen speculation that this could be a full ban.
I that's what Stephen Miller has wanted for a long time.
I don't know if that's going to happen. They've been
talking about like quote unquote critical fields like stems stuff.
It could also be a you know, the ceific language
they're using is like anyone who's linked to the Communist Party.

(02:56:33):
That's a lot and what's that mean?

Speaker 4 (02:56:36):
Yet? Who the fuck knows?

Speaker 1 (02:56:37):
Right, Like, you know, like there's some of these people
are the kids of like Chinese companies partaty members, but
like there are that's like seven percent of the population
of China, right, Like that's a lot of people, and
then linked can be fucking anything, right Like, yeah, you know,
so no one is entirely sure what this means yet.
I my guess is that it's going to be combined

(02:56:58):
with the other horrible thing I been doing right now,
which that they've suspended visits like consular visits to get
student visas while they try to figure out how to
like do this like implement this new social media policy
where they want to just effectively. What it looks like
they want to do is just like if you've posted
about Palestine, they deny your student visa. That seems like
the thing that they're trying to put in place, Yet
they haven't yet My guess is that these two are

(02:57:20):
going to end up being linked and they're gonna and
that that's gonna be what they're doing. It could also
just be some sort of large scale of rollback of
student visas for Chinese international students here, Chinese and national
students have been targeted under so many goddamn administrations now,
it's fucking horrible.

Speaker 4 (02:57:36):
These are just like people.

Speaker 1 (02:57:39):
It's interesting because when you read media accounts of this,
a lot of them will be like, well, people aren't
that Like, we're not that scared.

Speaker 4 (02:57:45):
That's okay.

Speaker 1 (02:57:46):
It's like, well, no, you you are talking to the
people who are stupid enough to talk to an American journalist. Right,
most people just say no because they're genuine. Is like
creating an atmosphere or fucking terror where people don't want
to people don't want to speak out about it. And
this and this has been something that's been used to
like great grad student unions, you know, like just over
the years, this has been a kind of repression.

Speaker 4 (02:58:06):
It's very useful.

Speaker 1 (02:58:06):
This is also I think part of their of just
the broader war against higher education because a lot of
Chinese international students like come in on full tuition, so
they're paying for a large percentage of like a bunch
of university budgets.

Speaker 4 (02:58:21):
But yeah, we will, we will.

Speaker 1 (02:58:23):
We will keep you informed as to what this actually
looks like. That's what we know about it for now.
It fucking sucks.

Speaker 3 (02:58:30):
Let's end with some semi good news. I guess we
will return into my horribly named segment Stinky Musk. Oh god, hey,
this is Gaere from the future, just cutting in here
at the beginning because help well hint. The twenty four
hours after we were recorded this initial segment, there has
been substantial developments in the Elon Musdonald Trump breakup story.

Speaker 4 (02:58:53):
It is getting quite ugly out there, folks.

Speaker 3 (02:58:56):
The girls are fighting Diva down jd Vance is high
in the closet as the parents are screaming down the hallway.
It is getting quite ugly. Trump's gotten rid of the
electric vehicle mandate and is threatening to terminate Elon's government
subsidies and contracts. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is talking about how
Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, like duh, Like

(02:59:17):
we don't already know this, but for some reason, this
is blowing the minds of people like Alex Jones, who
are now crashing out on the timeline, huge, huge shakeups
in the mega world, with some people trying to cope
claiming that this is a five D Chess move and
that Elon and Trump are gonna come back together in
the end, which is completely absurd. This is a huge

(02:59:40):
shift in the power balance in the New Right. We
will be doing a whole new piece in the near
future on the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story and
how it will affect the Republican Party. But the following segment,
which we recorded on Wednesday, will essentially outline how we
got right up to this point, all of these slow
microaggressions and fractures that led to this much more explosive breakup.

(03:00:03):
So enjoy that and keep your ears peeled for a
future piece on Elon Musk Donald Trump's messy situation ship. So,
Elan Musk donald Trump are now officially in their messy
breakup phase where they're both trying to kind of play
it cool, but resentment is clearly bubbling.

Speaker 4 (03:00:21):
So after report surface.

Speaker 3 (03:00:23):
Tobu the growing rifts between Musk and Trump, the White
House gave Musk a one last farewell hurrah on Friday,
May thirtieth, wear Musk sporting a black eye and a
T shirt reading the Doge Father, was gifted a gold
key to the White House by Donald Trump. A day later,
Trump withdrew the nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman as

(03:00:44):
NASA administrator, so as Musk's Special Government employee designation expired,
nothing was renewed. They did not try to push him
through as an more permanent advisor. He is essentially getting
the soft boot. According to Axios, Musk had asked the
White House about staying on as an advisor past the
one hundred and thirty day Special Government employee threshold, but

(03:01:08):
that was denied. Now, Musk has been reportedly disillusioned by
the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through
some of his Doge cuts, along with the growing frustration
regarding the Liberation Day tariffs which affect his businesses. To
add to the tension, according to The New York Times,
Musk has been upset that Trump has been negotiating deals

(03:01:30):
with Open AI instead of Musk's own competitor, Grock god.
In late May, Musk posted on x the everything app
quote back to spending twenty four to seven at work,
I must be super focused on x slash XAI and tesla.

Speaker 4 (03:01:50):
Well, to be fair, Garrison, have you seen ch gpt
ever speaking in the style of Jajjar Binks in such
a convincin you know that is true? Right there? Yeah?
Not well talking about the plight of the boors.

Speaker 3 (03:02:05):
So as Musk was preparing to exit the White House,
he began airing his beef with the new big beautiful
budget bill.

Speaker 4 (03:02:11):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (03:02:11):
I think a bill can be big or it can
be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both,
telling CBS News quote, I was disappointed to see the
massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not
just decreases it, and undermines the work that the Doge
team is doing unquote. After this, Steven Miller started subtweeting

(03:02:32):
Musk on x the Everything app outlining the different types
of cuts that Doge can make versus reconciliation bills can make,
and defend it the big Beautiful bill, calling it quote
the single largest welfare reform in American history, along with
the largest tax cut reform in American history, the most
aggressive energy expiration in American history, and the strongest border

(03:02:56):
bill in American history, all while reducing the deficit unquote,
which it does not reduce the deficit. But now that
Musk's White House exit has been more solidified, Musk's animosity
towards Trump's main palsy bill has just skyrocketed, posting on
June third on x Everything app, I'm sorry, but I
just can't stay it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork filled

(03:03:20):
congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

Speaker 1 (03:03:23):
Shame on those who voted for it. You know you
did wrong.

Speaker 3 (03:03:26):
You know it. Similarly, Stephen Miller has also been crashing
out on the Timeline, attempting to defend the bill and
push back on Musk's attacks in a flurry of tweets,
and one of which reads, quote the big beautiful budshet
bill will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale,

(03:03:48):
and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the
United States. For that reason alone, is the most essential
piece of legislation currently under construction in the entire Western
world in generations. Wow, now Steven seems pretty worked out,
And I think this could actually have to do not
just about Musk's tweets, but also maybe about Steven's own

(03:04:11):
personal life, because yeah, Steven's animosity could relate to the
fact that Musk seems to be stealing Stephen Miller's own
life Katie Miller.

Speaker 1 (03:04:21):
Katie Miller was working in a top position.

Speaker 3 (03:04:24):
At DOME as a special government employee, and now that
her designation has also expired, she is leaving the government
to continue working with Musk full time, including arranging Musk's
own interview appearances. It is not looking great, folks. The
cockchair is getting warmed. I am not thrilled about Elon

(03:04:45):
Musk possibly having a baby with Stephen Miller's life.

Speaker 4 (03:04:48):
This is really dark timeline stuff. I think all of
them should be doing better, different different.

Speaker 3 (03:04:55):
I certainly can critique the way polyamory functions in, you know,
and leftist anarchist faces.

Speaker 4 (03:05:01):
This is the most toxic.

Speaker 2 (03:05:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:05:05):
This this is a night of wrong wives too, and
hopefully it ends up for all of these motherfuckers like
it did for him Buck.

Speaker 4 (03:05:12):
So yeah fu.

Speaker 3 (03:05:13):
Stephen Miller went on TV last week to like talk
about how much he cares about his family.

Speaker 2 (03:05:19):
It's it's such it's such good timing.

Speaker 4 (03:05:22):
It's really dark for him.

Speaker 2 (03:05:24):
Yeah, if you marry Stephen Miller, it's because you're you're
both the same kind of evil, and if that's the
kind of person you are, Elon Musk is going to
give you more opportunities to be the kind of evil
you want to be.

Speaker 4 (03:05:36):
It's right, It's just obvious.

Speaker 3 (03:05:38):
Like this is like I I can't just tell if
Musk is an upgrade or a lateral move from Stephen Miller.

Speaker 4 (03:05:44):
It's really tough to say. Yeah, this is very funny,
but yeah, that is.

Speaker 3 (03:05:49):
This is one of the you know, last bits in
the White House Elon musk saga. He really tried to
like push forward this this this doge retire all government employees' agenda,
and it ran into way more roadblocks than what he
was expecting. And he seems really upset about that. And
now he has to return to the private sector to
save his failing businesses, which have only started to fail
more now that he damaged an already kind of a troubling.

Speaker 4 (03:06:12):
Reputation the past few months. Yeah. So, yeah, that is
the update on Elon Musk. Awesome, Well, everybody, we reported
the news. I love reporting the news and that you
did it. Goodbye, we reported the news.

Speaker 2 (03:06:34):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 (03:06:40):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 2 (03:06:51):
You listen to podcasts can now find sources for it
could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 1 (03:06:57):
Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

24/7 News: The Latest

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}It Could Happen Here Weekly 185