It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

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

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Recording in progress. Okay, check this out now. I have
always been amazed by when I take a second to
actually tap into like my actual network of just friends.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
You know, you have friends in categories.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
You have to say it like it's just like this, yeah,
you always like you just don't really picture those things
colliding or when like your friends like meet each other
and turns out they know each other.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's the weirdest thing anyway for me and my like.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Podcast activists, you know activism world, you know a lot
of times overlast with the hip hop world because you know,
we believe with a lot of same stuff. But like
this one like really happened where I was just like
in my own network somebody I've known for a while
who I'm just now learning your name is Tristan.

Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know your name was Jason. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
You know what I'm saying. That's how wrap works. So
introduce yourself however you want to be introduced. Yeah, you know,
and then let's let's get into it.

Speaker 6 (01:28):
Hey, everybody, I'm a Tangent Wiggy aka Tristan Hacker. I
got a lot of other names too, but I'll keep
it to those for now. And I'm from sam Barnardino
and I'm an artist in the community with the with
propaganda as well as a state employee. I paid disability
claims for the state of California. And in my role
as a state employee, I am a union rep. And

(01:50):
I'm an elected member of my union's executive board. So
I represent state employees from Ontario Region, the Sam Bonardino
region and in between. And I'm on the bargaining team,
so I go up to second MENTO and help prepare
for bargaining against Governor newsm of his team as well.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Words.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
So this is like we're this is frontline energy, okay,
which I love about it because it's like like you said,
like your your day job is. In some ways it's
it's so crazy because it's like as far away as
that is from the actual like worker per se like
you have just this parasocial, like intimate relationship with everybody

(02:28):
that works for the state because like you seeing you know,
I'm saying what they're going through and how great it
is to think inside of such a hero a bureaucracy,
there's somebody there that's like, no, I'm actually like fighting
for y'all.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Yeah, I appreciate that word. So first of all, tell
them what the union is.

Speaker 5 (02:44):
Which union were talking about?

Speaker 6 (02:45):
Yeah, S isn't sam e is in everybody I is
an incredible you as in Union Service Employees International Union,
but one thousand, right, So s EIU is one of
the biggest international unions in the world. And and everyone
out there has probably seen the purple purple SEIU stuff
on all kinds of stuff, from nurses to state workers

(03:06):
to in home support services workers and home care nurses.

Speaker 5 (03:09):
And there's a.

Speaker 6 (03:10):
Lot of different people that are under SEIU. More broadly,
state employees in California are SEIU one thousand, So we're
Local one thousand, and that's the broader union that I'm a.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Part of all of Cali.

Speaker 6 (03:21):
Okay, you know, all all hundred thousands state employees that
are represented.

Speaker 7 (03:24):
Damn.

Speaker 6 (03:25):
Okay, and but I am elected to the executive board
of DLC seven O four, which is the Inland Empire,
well the Ontario Samarrardino part of the Inland Empire's chapter.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Where Ontario Samarandino. Okay, this is going to be very
Cali specific. Like obviously this everybody here who listens ain't
from here. So like I've I've cracked many LA and
I E jokes and just like you know throughout throughout
our time.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
I like to say that I have an IE passport
stamped like I have my.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
I worked in Pomona. See I didn't, I never lived there.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
Okay, but you mean what I'm saying.

Speaker 6 (04:01):
So my strong connection to Pomona as far as I've
seen I've seen you.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
You absolutely That's what I mean. Like I'm a naturalized citizen.
I got a green card. I got an I E
Green card because like I worked at Pomona. You know,
foundation was in Pomona. My condemn Lights was in Pomona.
For y'all listeners, these are like the hip hop and
poetry spots that I kind of grew up there because
since I'm you know, born in South Central, but I'm
from the six to six, so you come me coming

(04:24):
from La Penteve Linda Pomono was just so much more
closer than La Merk Park, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (04:31):
So yeah, so I.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Ended up just kind of like spending a lot of
time there.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
And then for high school, I got I got busted
to the Inland Empire, so I got bussed. I went
to school out of district because my parents split up.
It's a long story, but anyway.

Speaker 5 (04:42):
It happens a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
So that being said, like I have a lot of
love for the Inland Empire and spent a lot of
time there, you know what I'm saying. So that's what
I was like, I got, I got a visa, I
got a I E visa.

Speaker 5 (04:53):
Yeah absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
But that being said, what would you say, I mean,
if it's kind of like I'm kind of springing this
one on you, but like what would you say would
be something that's like unique, a unique thing that someone
from where you guys are at, like a service worker
where you guys are at, it might be a unique
issue that's specific to them that wouldn't be somewhere else.

Speaker 5 (05:17):
I'll do two because I feel like I need two
to kind of to answer it. Well.

Speaker 6 (05:22):
One is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is
a city kind of a little connected city to Sam Maerdino,
Highland has patent state hospital which is basically Arkham Asylum.
You know, it's basically Arkham Asylum from the Batman comics,
which is it's a hospital for the criminally insane. Okay, yeah,
you know it's like like in other words, like you've
committed crimes, but you have mental health issues. Yeah, so

(05:45):
you're not in the regular prison, but you're not in
the regular mental hospital. You are in the prison for
the mental papers. And it's a massive twenty four hour facility.
And I feel like, even though I work for DED
doing disability claims, because I'm in a regional chapter with
the past in state hospital folks, they get a lot
of the attention of what the union organization does because

(06:05):
twenty four hour facilities are very, very taxing, and they're
very right for abuse and for people to go through
really difficult things work. And then the second thing I
would say would be the fact that where we are,
we have a lot of we service a lot that
maybe more of my job, right, we service a lot
of undocumented people, Like a lot of the disability claims
I pay for the state I paid undocumented folks. So

(06:26):
which is one reason that the eye stuff has been
hitting so close to home. And also people may now
realize that California doesn't regulate about documented status the way
that the federal government does. Right, so, as long as
you could prove your wages to the State of California
in a legit, straight paper work kind of way, we
don't care that you're undocumented.

Speaker 5 (06:42):
We're going to pay you because you're a worker and
you need our services.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Facts, And like, I love that you said that, because
when they talk about like how the undocumented don't pay taxes,
I'm like, yes they.

Speaker 5 (06:51):
Do, Yes, they do, Yes, they do, Yes, they pay
a lot.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yeah, if you can think of just off the head,
Like obviously over the years, the negotiations, different things that
have come up varied over time. We'll get to the
ice raids, because that's obviously where everything got super ratchet up,
ratcheted up, But like what was some of the most
like I don't like, I don't know how would I
phrase this where you were like, this is the most
reasonable request we can ask for, Like this is just

(07:17):
like I don't this is so I don't understand why
this is so hard for y'all. Like this is incredibly
I just want to like calibrate because a lot of
times people here, they here to wear a union. They
got all these pictures about what the things are and
what this you know what I'm saying. They got all
these pictures. But I'm just like, fam, you ever heard
of a five day week work week? That's unions, my gi,

(07:38):
you know what I'm saying. So like that seems very reasonable,
you know what I mean. So, so if you could
think of like some of the things you've had to negotiaate,
what was some of the most Like this is, I
don't understand why this is so hard for y'all.

Speaker 6 (07:49):
So have you ever heard, you ebably heard the phrase
every crisis is an opportunity? Right, Yes, you've heard people
say that, right. So, my union and other unions have
been pushing for telework. You know, in my entire twenty
years with the state, I'll be seventeen years veteran with
the state as of December, right, Wow.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
The entire time we wanted telework.

Speaker 6 (08:07):
It took the quarantine crisis of twenty twenty twenty twenty
one to actually get the state to agree to mass
implement telework, and so that was like, that's a crisis
that we made an opportunity.

Speaker 5 (08:18):
That's like, hey, we needed telework.

Speaker 6 (08:19):
So many people are also caring for their kids, are
also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring
for a new baby, or you know, take you know,
just at the house so that contractors could come fixed
their plumbing. You know. It's like like tell of work
has been something that we thought was very reasonable for
a long time, that it took it took until the
COVID crisis for us to get telework. And we feel
like we're pioneers that in a workforce way, because now

(08:41):
there's lots of places that have telework, partly because I
think the work that unions like us.

Speaker 5 (08:44):
Have done that's dope, man.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
You know, obviously coming out of the pandemic and recently
like a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys
can come back to the office and people are like
absolutely not, Wow, Like why take it away?

Speaker 5 (08:59):
Are you taking away unless you got it?

Speaker 8 (09:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, why would we do that.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
I know my own Like my wife, you know, she
pre pandemic at the spot she was working. As she
was working at a nonprofit. You know, she was like, Okay,
I was touring so much, and she was just like, dude,
like you want me in this office at a certain time.
It's stressed on the whole family to get my daughter
to school. It's you know, just breaking her neck to
figure stuff out. She's like, I'm done with the stuff

(09:24):
that can be done at a desk within an hour.
She's like, I'm just I'm just scrolling the internet. Yeah,
Like I'm just like like I'm trying to.

Speaker 6 (09:34):
Tell you you're paying for lights, you're paying for.

Speaker 5 (09:36):
You're paying for audi.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
There's no reason, like I don't have to be here,
you know.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
And so she pushed.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights,
you know, figured it out and you know, without telling
her business. She uh, she actually helped the staff unionize there,
Like you know what I'm saying. She was like, look, man,
it's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 9 (09:59):
You got a real one, Yeah, don't don't don't google
it anyway.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
So yeah, so something that you had to you know,
you said, you actually go to the state, you you
interact with Gavin Newsom, you know, which is the whole thing.
Sure we have our opinions on mister Newsom, Sure you know,
and like how allied are you as an ally? Like
you say, and you know if you were complicated. We
can't always agree on the same things, you know what
I'm saying, Like, but like that's correct. There's been there

(10:36):
have been times where it's been like, hey, you know what, Sue.

Speaker 6 (10:39):
He's doing something dope, and then other times when he's not, yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
Doing something dope. The other times it's like, bro, who
are you?

Speaker 5 (10:45):
Yeah, right, like what is happening right now?

Speaker 2 (10:48):
So so obviously you know when you go up there,
you're you're not interacting with him, You're interacting with his team, right.

Speaker 10 (10:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (10:54):
The one time I actually met him, I went to
the California Democratic Party convention and shoot some twelve in
San Diego, and I just went with a friend, just
showed up.

Speaker 5 (11:04):
I was not a delegate. I was a union riff already,
but I had no official role.

Speaker 6 (11:08):
I just showed up and walked around the San Diego Hilton,
which is also where they founded San Diego Comic Con yeah,
and uh.

Speaker 5 (11:13):
And I got to meet a lot of.

Speaker 6 (11:15):
Officials, including some inland ones, including some really famous people
like Nancy Pelosi's daughter. But I went up to I
went up to at the time Lieutenant governor knew him
and basically thanked him because he had just voted against
the tuition hype for the Cal States and UC.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
And I was and I went to cal say Samary.

Speaker 6 (11:31):
Know, I have my master's in poetry by MFA and
poetry from Cal say Samardino. And so I was still
a student at the time, and he had just voted
against a tuition increase.

Speaker 5 (11:39):
So there's a picture of me meeting him from that
from that time. That's all. That's great.

Speaker 6 (11:42):
Yeah, so that and he had just done something good
and he and he said humble things about it when
I thanked him for it. So my one personal interaction
with him was good. But since then, when in the
capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team,
like my our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team Instacramento.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Were okay, so give me one something that's been like
that were what they were asking for. Yeah, it was
like this is completely unreasonable, guys, Like what are you talking.

Speaker 6 (12:05):
So every three years, every three years, our state employee
contract goes up, uh huh, right, And so around the
two year mark, we start gearing up negotiations, you know,
and the state Newsome has the power to summon us
for negotiation, and we have the power to summon his.

Speaker 5 (12:19):
Team for negotiation.

Speaker 6 (12:20):
Right, So at that two year mark we start negotiating.
So in twenty twenty two, we started negotiating about the
twenty twenty three expiring, you know, so that by the
end of twenty three we could have a new contract.

Speaker 5 (12:30):
When your state employee, it's difficult.

Speaker 6 (12:32):
It's hard to strike, right, Like, you have to have
an extremely high threshold to strike. Like if you're a
a a private company in you're union, it's a lot
easier to strike. You guys all want to strike, you
strike Like episode of the Simpsons, temer became the union.
They're just like devil plan, you know, and they started
striking right right with the state. Because we provide essential
services to Californians in need, it is an extremely high

(12:53):
threshold in terms of what it would take for us
to legally be allowed to strike, right And Newsome and
his team know that, so they could kind of like
really slow walk negotiations and stop negotiating in good faith.
But as long as there's like you know what, there's
signs of life on the hospital tickers the negotiations, then
they're stick. We're still obligated to not strike damn right.
So in twenty twenty three our contract expired, Newsom was

(13:17):
offering us one or two percent raised for the next
three years, and meanwhile he was going on TV saying, oh,
debate Ron DeSantis, Oh during that time, I want to
help the screen Actors Guild finish their contract and the
Screenwriters Guild, and I want to So it's like, well,
whoa bro, where are your kids?

Speaker 5 (13:33):
Why are you trying to go help their kids?

Speaker 10 (13:34):
Yeah, you know, it.

Speaker 6 (13:36):
Was like, why you're not negotiating with us, but you're
on TV talking about I want to help Harrison Ford
and I want to help, you know, I want to
help the actors get their contract. And it's like, so
I had something I made a TikTok recently about how
I think my lefty friends, and I'm lefty to help,
of course, but like artist friends, anti establishment friends, you know,
leftist friends, I think hate democrats in stupid ways, whereas

(13:57):
there are smart ways to hate Democrats right, Like, to me,
the stupid the stupid way to hate Democrats is to
be like, oh, both parties are the same. I'm going
to sit out and let Republicans win and hurt us worse. Right,
to me, the smart way to hate on Democrats is
to realize when they're doing a good thing here, they're
distracting you from a bad thing here.

Speaker 5 (14:15):
And then they're doing a bad thing here they're distracting
you. You know, it's like a good things right.

Speaker 6 (14:20):
So, like Newsome at times might be capitulating to Trump
on something federally, but then he does something good state
domestically in the state.

Speaker 5 (14:27):
To kind of keep his rep up. Or the reverse.

Speaker 6 (14:29):
Maybe he's fighting with Trump on something and that's good,
but he's doing some wax shit like slow walking our contracts. Yeah,
we're not Hollywood actors, right, so when our contract goes up,
you didn't get the news about it, like with the
Screen Actors Guild, because that's slapping your Hulu, that's stopping
your Disney.

Speaker 5 (14:41):
Plus, you know you hear all about that.

Speaker 6 (14:44):
When our contract expires, you don't hear about it unless
you're on disability.

Speaker 5 (14:47):
Unless you're on one of our programs and then.

Speaker 6 (14:49):
You can't go to the office because because we're understaffed
or because something's going wrong with us. Right, So twenty
twenty three was a pissed off time for us because
he's offering us peanuts. He is offering to help everybody else.
Let me help that actors, let me help the screenwriters.
Let me fight Ron DeSantis. Let me go go to
Washington and have federal fights. Meanwhile, we're our contract expired.
And when our contract expired, there's things we lose. There's
stuck things we lose, there's benefits we lose. And he

(15:11):
just so he had us, had.

Speaker 5 (15:12):
Us in a bind.

Speaker 6 (15:13):
So I organized a work site picket at my office
in San Bernardino one hundred and two degree weather.

Speaker 5 (15:18):
We can't strike, but we can picket.

Speaker 11 (15:20):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Okay, see I didn't know that.

Speaker 6 (15:22):
You know.

Speaker 5 (15:22):
So that's part of being a union rep is like
what are my tools?

Speaker 8 (15:26):
You know?

Speaker 5 (15:26):
Like what are my tools?

Speaker 6 (15:27):
Like you know your arsenal, know your weaponry? Right, And
so I organized a picket. We had signs me and
and I'm just I tear up and I think about
this because I had coworkers, but I didn't think we're
going to march in the heat with me.

Speaker 5 (15:37):
I thought it might have been me by myself. You know.

Speaker 6 (15:40):
I was one of only one or two union reps
in my office at the time. Now we have four
because I've been recruiting, you know, and I have good
people in my office, you know.

Speaker 5 (15:46):
But at the time, I was one of the only
union reps.

Speaker 6 (15:48):
There's people who I knew had legitis get the system
about the union. I didn't expect it. But every single lunch,
not just my lunch, at every lunch, we had people
picketing in front of my office with signs. People were
honking in support of us. Within a month or two,
we got an eight percent raise on that next negotiation.

Speaker 7 (16:04):
Let's go, you know.

Speaker 6 (16:05):
And so you know, when we fight, we went. When
we unite, we win, you know, like you don't. We're
not fighting for nothing. And and and that was a
duor die moment for me as a union organizer. Because
I hadn't had many real fights yet, and I had
I couldn't really point to my co workers and say, hey,
we did this and got this.

Speaker 5 (16:18):
We did this and got this.

Speaker 6 (16:19):
So the fact that I got my co workers to
march in one hundred two degree whether with me instead
of just sitting in the air condition having lunch, and
that we won that.

Speaker 5 (16:26):
A few weeks later, they said, you're gonna get a
eight percent rais.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
Now that's hard, you know, Like I was like, yes,
like proof of concept.

Speaker 5 (16:33):
I have proof of concept. I'm not just wasting my
co workers time.

Speaker 6 (16:35):
I could tell you there's a tangible result to when
we organized together.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
See, that's these are the type of like wins we
need to hear. Yes, we've been, we've been taking them
mails like yes, sir speaking to l so, y'all's y'all's
s CiU one thousand.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
You know David ware though, right, that's his.

Speaker 12 (16:51):
Name, m hm.

Speaker 6 (16:52):
David Wareth is from one of the California s CiU branches.
He's tightly connected to our union. But he's not one.

Speaker 5 (16:57):
He's not one thousand, okay where, but he is CiU
so he is part of us.

Speaker 12 (17:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
So when Ice, you know, invaded our streets, yes, he
was outside, you know, doing what he had to do.
I know SCIU set up the thing at Alvera Street. Yeah,
they set up a location there for like to educate.
It was just such a beautiful thing. But the first
thing that got me out. The house was the rally
for when he was detained, So like, man, tell me

(17:23):
what was going on, and as much as you can
behind closed doors. So most of the listeners here know
this story because this show is like pretty tapped in.

Speaker 6 (17:31):
But yeah, right, So what I would say is this
to me an opportunity to talk about like the cultural
differences with Inland and la right, because the Union is
very progressive, right, but the Inland is a much more
conservative area, right. And compared to Los Angeles, compared to
San Francisco, compared to you know, it's not as big
of a city.

Speaker 5 (17:51):
It's more impoverished.

Speaker 6 (17:52):
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of you know, even
just the geography of it, right, people grew up in
the city, like my mom grew up aroundhere.

Speaker 5 (17:59):
You're trying about day and a monthday.

Speaker 6 (18:01):
I was born in a Monthay, But there was a
suburban exodus in the late eighties of like people who
wanted to go from that east of late six to
six area to raise their kids in the Inland because
that was the more conservative suburbs.

Speaker 10 (18:11):
Right.

Speaker 6 (18:11):
So for me, every time something like that happens with
something like a David Watar or something in one of
the bigger cities happens, and we're fighting with the right
wing about things. It's a matter of me educating my
inland people about why we care.

Speaker 5 (18:22):
And while we're all come okay, you know, and then there's.

Speaker 6 (18:25):
Always some people and I got to respect us as
a union organizer. I really have to be able to
talk with my more conservative members because there are people
in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me.
They're just workers who want to be represented.

Speaker 13 (18:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
I was gonna say, that's actually a good point to
hammer down because like last year, one of the shows
on our network covered a union strike at a I
want to say, it was like a metal plant in Alabama,
like in the sticks of Alabama.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
These are good old boys from the South.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
But one thing we can agree on me is like
pay me what I'm worth, Like YO say, Like, it just.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
Seems pretty simple to me.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
I don't understand how you've got to be a progressive
to want to be paid what you worth, you know, So, sir, so,
I think that that's a good point to say that, Like,
even in a rather conservative place, all of us want
to go home and eat, you know, and earn the
wages that I that I should be pay me what
I'm worth. It just it seemed that simple, exactly.

Speaker 6 (19:18):
And so so that's a tension that happens, right, and
this is kind this is probably a discussion that happens
among a lot of progressive groups in general. That like,
there's people who want you to focus on your on
your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're
part of an interconnected society where it's like if the
immigrants are being harmed, then the laborers are being harmed,
if the artists are being harmed, then the nurses are
being harmed, if the teachers, you know.

Speaker 5 (19:39):
So there's always that divide.

Speaker 6 (19:41):
But in the Inland, which is a more conservative area,
there's especially that divide between people who are like, I
don't want my union fighting about immigration and ice. I
don't want my union fighting about the environment. Wow, I
don't want the union fighting about LGBT. I just want
the union to fight for my rais. I want the
union to fight for my telework and that's all I
want them to do. Right, So that's a that's a
big thing for me, is to kind of exlain to
people how no, given where the fighting for immigrant rights

(20:03):
is him fighting for you as a worker, okay, you know,
because if they came for then they could come for you,
you know.

Speaker 5 (20:07):
So that's kind of how I see that.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, did you feel like it landed?

Speaker 5 (20:10):
Well, it always does with some and it doesn't with some.
You know, I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 6 (20:16):
There are people who just left the union after the
Charlie Kirk killing.

Speaker 5 (20:20):
Oh wow.

Speaker 6 (20:21):
In my opinion, they're going to really weird logic jumps
when they're like, well, the union endors Kamala, and Kamala
has supporters that are happy about Charlie Kirk dines in
the union.

Speaker 5 (20:30):
Yeah, I'm like, uh so you don't want that raise.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
You really ran string in that joint.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
That is definitely the all way sunny in Philadelphia meme
of just you like tieing these strings together like brouh.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 5 (20:42):
Yeah, right, And so, to be honest, there's been some
of that.

Speaker 6 (20:46):
You know, I'll say this that Charlie Kirk gave us
more of that than that immigration stuff. But there's always
those few whispers from a few people who are like
they're just not down with the broader cause.

Speaker 5 (20:55):
Those of us who are in the leadership of the union.

Speaker 6 (20:56):
I think we have solidarity, you know, we have solidarity
not just with other states workers, but with anyone who's
in any SAU Yeah, with Team Stirts, for anyone who's
in any union, and with Californians, anyone who is somebody
who is in.

Speaker 5 (21:07):
A vulnerable group, you know.

Speaker 6 (21:08):
And so there's just always that difference of opinion. I
would say, over let's say sixty percent hits in a
good way and in my area, because it's so conservative,
let's say forty percent.

Speaker 5 (21:16):
It doesn't, you know in some way you work on.
That's interesting.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
My last two questions would be this, like I'll give
them both, Like, so, what are y'all currently kind of
like pushing for. I'm assuming it has a lot to
do with immigration and ice rays and stuff, but also
in what ways can we as just a broader community
help Well, how.

Speaker 5 (21:46):
Do I put this?

Speaker 6 (21:47):
So I work in downtown samur Dino, Okay, and my
disability office is next to the Mexican Consulate.

Speaker 7 (21:53):
Let's go.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
First of all, we need to paint a picture of
Sam Bernardino. I really feel like, yeah, for those that
don't know California, the nature of what Sam Bernardino is
is a part of this story that you might be missing?
First of all, like, Okay, all that you pictured, everything
that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was
in the nineties, all the pictures.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
That you think.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
YO said that, you go, oh, it's really Sam Bernardino,
Like YO say, yeah, So, I mean, I'm trying to
say this in a way that's a descriptive and not derogatory,
because obviously, like it's always KLi love for me and
you know, I'll of course, but there is a certain
there's a certain part of Sam Bernardino that feels like

(22:38):
like just a spirit of like we just gave up
the walking dead, the walking Deat's exactly it. It feels
like a zombie land, like just this dark I remember
the Carousel mall, like you walk by that mall.

Speaker 5 (22:51):
It's eerie.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
It just feels like when people talk about the Forgotten Man,
the Forgotten America.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
I'm like San Bernardino, like, yes, Winne gave up on.

Speaker 7 (23:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (23:01):
It has recently gone from two hundred and thirty thousand
people to only two hundred thousand people. But also probably
because a lot of people that left were the most
impoverised people. Our poverty rate went from let's say, in
the post Bush Too recession, like twenty ten, we had
a thirty percent poverty rate. We were the most impopulous
city in the state. We've gotten down to like seventeen
percent poverty, which is still bad. Yeah, you know, that's
still almost one one out of five people. What was

(23:23):
It's very diverse, I mean, and someone who pays anention
in the politics, it has all the problems exactly like
you said, all the problems that people talk about when
they say the important problems. It's post industrial. There's gun violence,
it's diverse, there's poverty. You know, there's environmental issues because
it's such a warehouse empire. Yeah, because it's such a
you know, area of freight and warehouses.

Speaker 5 (23:39):
It's like the air quality is some of the worst
in the state. Yeah, you know, we we have real problems.
You know, we got real problems.

Speaker 6 (23:45):
And in downtown downtown smer do you know, is a
lot of where the problems are. We want to get it,
like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and some of the
other NICs of downtowns.

Speaker 5 (23:52):
But it's just not there yet.

Speaker 6 (23:52):
And there are people absolutely working on that and like
there are a couple of alleyways in the city that
sounds so it sounds so humble, But we have a
couple of alleyways in the city that got five hundred
thousand dollars grants recently to kind of make them an
ARC's alleyway to kind of look like something more like
the Claremont Village.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Let's go, you know.

Speaker 5 (24:08):
And so yeah, you know, and so we are always
working on it.

Speaker 6 (24:11):
And I will always you know, as somebody who founded
co founded the Inland Empire Music Award Show and other
platforms that I put on not just my art, but
I helped put on other artists in the Inland. I
will always tell you about the amazing tacology could get
in my city, the amazing small businesses you could support
my city, the amazing art community, yeah, put on by
by my ogs like Judah one of Pomona, like Noah
James of the Inland and Lisa j and many.

Speaker 5 (24:32):
Others you know who helped build a really.

Speaker 6 (24:34):
Beautiful ecosystem like there's there's please come to summer, you
know and hit me up and I'll take you to
save beautiful sports of it, you know.

Speaker 5 (24:41):
But yes, it's it's rough to your point.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
I know, I want you to get to the next thing.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
But to your point, that was the same as that
picture of content to where it's like yes, like in
the sense that like we know it's dangerous, we know
there's poverty, we know there's that, but there's beauty here,
dope stuff you know, and let me come like and
again like just the hood rules where it's like, well
you and me like, oh, you're good.

Speaker 5 (25:01):
You know what I'm saying, Like, you know.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
And some of them may yeah, like we can, we
can definitely shine lights. Like I said, Like, you know,
I've talked about Noah James on this show.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
You know what I'm saying. I've talked about Judo one.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
You know that I talked about since here C four
like the people that like I came, I came up with,
you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Yeah, the Inland Empire.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
A lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to
LA is really ie.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
You know what I'm saying, Yes, sir, And we know,
like we know because they're not lying about it.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
We know that matter of fact, nobody has pride about
I he got pride boy.

Speaker 5 (25:34):
Like they're like no, no, no, no, we are to Inland.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
And I love that about y'all.

Speaker 5 (25:37):
Anyway, I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels check it out.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Yup, yup, yop yup.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
You know, yeah, because the I he got a hide,
I gotta hides.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
So yeah, okay, So anyway, so your office is next
to the Mexican Consulate.

Speaker 6 (25:48):
Mexican Consulate, right, and so I've actually spent my you know,
I've been at this office in Samuray, you know, since
twenty fourteen, and five years before that I worked in
the Riverside office.

Speaker 5 (25:57):
But I've been in my office in Chemuary No.

Speaker 6 (25:59):
Twenty fourteen, and I have gone to so many I've
infiltrated so many right wing protests that are in front
of the Mexican Consulate.

Speaker 5 (26:05):
Yes, and like and like, so I'll go hang out
with them. They're like, oh, what do you guys, what
are you guys doing?

Speaker 6 (26:10):
And then I'll like take their markers, I'll take their
posters and I'll just kind.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
Of be like, oh, yeah, maybe you have a point there.

Speaker 6 (26:14):
And then I'm like I'm in my office and then
my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office.

Speaker 5 (26:19):
Is like, oh, where did you get these markers? Loot.

Speaker 6 (26:20):
I got you some mark because it's you know, and
so I'll infiltrate right wing protests. But but on the
flip side, lately, you know, Ice knows they could come
to my corner. And my corner in downtown has the
Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican Consulate, the
Disability Office, the old city Hall building, like it's like
the hub. It's one of the downtown hubs of the city.
And Ice has been coming in snatching people up in front.

Speaker 5 (26:42):
Of my office. It happened.

Speaker 6 (26:44):
It's happened twice at least in the last month. And
one of the days that it happened, I was in
the office. I called my congressman, I called the mayor.
I got all the local authorities involved. By the end
of the day, the horse mounted unit of my city's
police was like patrolling to make sure Ice wasn't messing
with us. And tell you, homie, what a weird place
this is. I've never been so happy to see the
regular cops right right right.

Speaker 12 (27:05):
You know what is this?

Speaker 14 (27:06):
What is this?

Speaker 7 (27:06):
Timeline?

Speaker 12 (27:07):
Are you doing to me? What are you doing to me?

Speaker 6 (27:09):
We're like, I'm I'm in seven eleven six in the morning,
getting my getting my coffee, and I see regular cops.
I'm like, thank you sir for at least showing a warrant. Yeah, yeah, exact,
rest me, yeah exactly, you know, because Ice is doing
none of that. None of that. They're not doing warrants
to do it. They took I want to cry.

Speaker 5 (27:26):
They did.

Speaker 6 (27:26):
They pushed a wife out of the way. She's like,
what are you doing. They took the husband, tossed him
in the band and drove off. It all happened so
fast that no one was able to film it. Damn
you No, in this era, no one was able to
film it.

Speaker 5 (27:37):
And they know that. How that they're doing it that fast.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
That's the trick. Yeah, that's the trick. That's what we've
been telling.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Like a lot of people have asked me, just friends
from out of town, like dude, has it has it
toned down? And I was like, no, it just went underground.
It's like they just they're a lot more sneaky now,
Like it's not this big.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
Display of power.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where like you said,
you just getting your gas, I usally how your pumping gas?
And then somebody just and it's so fast I can't
film it, you know what I'm saying. Yes, And the
hard part for me is like is to your point
to where it's like since you know, identifying yourself, like
you might not even be an ice agent.

Speaker 5 (28:13):
And that's a thing that happened.

Speaker 6 (28:15):
That's the thing that there are people who impersonate law
enforcement officers and go harassed people just on a racist basis. Yeah,
you know, and and and it's arguable that the Trump
administration is empowering people like that.

Speaker 5 (28:25):
M man. Yeah, so so yeah, it absolutely is happening.

Speaker 6 (28:30):
To be honest, my union, Uh, we're going to always
support the actions that are fighting back against it. But
the but the only things that we really have jurisdiction
to actually fight.

Speaker 5 (28:39):
H is the labor related word, you know.

Speaker 6 (28:42):
And so you know, we we actually just got telework
extended in exchange for delaying our rais you know, because
the states really broke right now for a lot of reasons. Yeah,
we delayed for two years a raise that we were
about to get in July, so there were already a
couple of months past not having that raise. But in exchange,
we got our telework agreement extended for two years. So
what I would tell people who want to get involved

(29:02):
is like, if you are in a workplace that has
a union, get involved, you know, or if you had
someone in your life like me who does union stuff
outside of work, next time they invite you to a
phone bank, or next time they invite you to an event,
go support because we're absolutely we were at the No
Kings protest, we were at the anti Ice protest like
like like, we're in the unofficial capacity, we're we're gonna
do all those kind of things to.

Speaker 5 (29:23):
Support the broader community. And even though it's my union.

Speaker 6 (29:27):
For example, on Wednesdays we have a lot of our meetings,
we're doing a phone banking for Prop fifty right, which
is the whole redistrict, which gives us the power to
take some seats away from the Republicans. I know there's
a lot of there's a debate to be had there,
but ultimately it's us trying to take keep some power
away from the right wing. And you don't have to
be in my union to go to those phone banks
if you want a phone bank to help Prop fifty
pass so we could take some Republican seats away from

(29:47):
the federal House representatives.

Speaker 5 (29:48):
Hit me up.

Speaker 6 (29:49):
Hit up anybody you know in the Inland Empire chapter
of SEIU, and we can bring you to a phone
bank in Ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever,
and we.

Speaker 5 (29:57):
Could phone bank against these dang Republicans. Yeah, man, Man Tangent,
I appreciate this, man, I appreciate you.

Speaker 14 (30:03):
Man.

Speaker 6 (30:03):
I've wanted to have wanted you to have me on I.
I love your show and I love you man. I
think you're such a cool dude.

Speaker 5 (30:08):
I think wise.

Speaker 6 (30:09):
I think that you're engaging in the community in a
cool way. You're an artists I respect a lot, and
not just me. I mean people friends like Sincere, like
explain to me why you're significant to them and why
you're an influence and.

Speaker 5 (30:19):
Stuff like that. So I appreciate even being on your radar. Brother, Man,
stop it, stop it some more.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
I'm just kidding. My wife says that, okay, so perfect.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Well, then tell us how people need to hear your music,
how they can get in touch with you, how they
can follow you.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
Give me all the links.

Speaker 5 (30:34):
Oh yeah, yeah yeah, So T A n J I
n T is Tangent.

Speaker 6 (30:38):
You know you can find me on everything on Twitter, Instagram,
you know Facebook, what was it The Inland Empire Music
Award show that I'm a co director and co founder of.
Is that it's only Empire dot com. That's its only
Empire dot com. And also I want to encourage Inland
Empire artists. You know, you still have from now to
the end of September to submit to the award show.

Speaker 5 (31:00):
And we've been doing it for three years. We partner
with nonprofits and businesses.

Speaker 6 (31:03):
We throw a dope ass it's pretty gala, you know,
award show at a little art center in downtown sammer
Deane with the Garcia Center for the Arts. Or We
give away real trophies and real awards and we have
red carpet media and performances. It's like it's like the
Grammys for the Inland Empire. So you know, please get
involved in It's only Empire dot com. That's only Empire now.
Famli Likely is my group with Diesel. We got a

(31:24):
new album out that's like scam likely on your phone,
but fam Likely because it's likely that your family's hitting
you up.

Speaker 5 (31:29):
Fam Likely. West Coast Avengers is.

Speaker 6 (31:31):
My first group, the more nerd core Inland Empire stuff,
and we got an album that came out just under
a year ago.

Speaker 5 (31:36):
Now the Harvest. So I'm everywhere. You can catch everything
all over the place. Yeah, yeah, tangent.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Wiggle, thank you so much, my brother, Hey, thank you
man much love.

Speaker 12 (32:02):
Welcome in to that and here a podcast about why
everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I'm your
host Vi A long and oh boy, thing feel bad.
I don't know. This is my bost This is my
most Robert a while with me to talk about why

(32:25):
everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between
the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump and the
way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that
you interact with. Is Vicky Ostrowell, who is a writer
and editor at the collective journal Call You were of
many things agitated.

Speaker 15 (32:48):
I'm very busy, I.

Speaker 12 (32:49):
Think it says bricklayer.

Speaker 15 (32:52):
That's right.

Speaker 12 (32:55):
Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended
Universe out April fourteenth next year that is about the
way that Disney sort of took over the world through
the deployment, expansion and usage of the violence of the
copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again
in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours, So we'll be talking
some more about that and about Disney's long history of

(33:19):
fascist bullshit towards the end.

Speaker 15 (33:22):
Of the Yeah.

Speaker 16 (33:23):
Yeah, well it's it's it's a pleasure to be hearing
me at thanks, and yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel,
you know, in this moment, I think, oh.

Speaker 12 (33:29):
God, oh no, Jimmy's Kimble.

Speaker 15 (33:32):
Oh that's that.

Speaker 12 (33:39):
Okay. So I think that the place I wanted to
start is with this like question of like, why does
it feel like this? Yeah, And I think part of
the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval
rating is really low, Like people don't actually like him.
It's like forty one's reading is forty one percent. It's
down like a point in September, even with all the

(34:01):
Charlie Kirk stuff, it's still down. His most popular policy
is immigration policy, which is terrifying, But his most popular
policy is pulling at forty two percent, So no one
actually likes him or anything that he does, right, and
like forty one percent is still like a lot of people,
but it's not the majority of the country, notably, like

(34:22):
biol math works.

Speaker 15 (34:23):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 12 (34:24):
Yeah, There's been a few things I think are interesting
about this. There there are signs that this is actually
really really there's something substantive happening here. One of them
was a special election that I think people have paid
attention to for about two days and then forgot about,
which was a special election in Iowa which prevented the
GOP from getting a two third supermajority in the state legislature.

(34:50):
And the Democrats somehow, miraculously, even though the Democrats are
hideously unpopular, they won a special election in a district
in western Iowa that was plus eleven for Trump this year.
And this is not like a like this is a
district that is like just Sioux City or something, or
like you know, this is a this is a jerrymandered

(35:11):
ass district that is like a little bit of Sioux
City and then stretched out all the way into a
bunch of rural areas like tofuse the vote. They won
this district by eleven like last year, they lost this
election by eleven points in Western Iowa.

Speaker 15 (35:28):
Yeah, unhinged.

Speaker 12 (35:30):
They're doing like all elections like this like that. It's
it's being ridiculous. Like again this this is like this
is again like voting for people who are like not popular,
but it's like literally any alternative people are like, holy shit.
Western Iowa is like nah fuck this, this fucking sucks ass.

Speaker 15 (35:46):
Like it's yeah.

Speaker 16 (35:49):
A thing that you know, I've been following a bit
is that farmers are freaking out. Yeah, soybean soybean crops
and corn crops are gonna be rotting in the fields.
You know, I think soybeans, so soy in particular, something
like fifty percent of the US soy crop is traditionally export.
And by traditionally I mean every year exported to China.
This year China is not buying any American soybeans yep.

(36:11):
So literally half of the market is going to die.
And I don't know, you know, people sometimes these numbers
don't don't really do justice. If half of an economy collapses,
that's the whole economy collapsing. That's not that's not like
oh yeah, they just like took you know, a haircut,
Like that's massive.

Speaker 12 (36:27):
Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed out class
of people who are not like major corporations in the
entire world, and it's not working. Like they keep being like,
oh it's okay, we'll just like give you a bunch
of money, and it's not enough because China has decided
not to buy any of this, so I mean crop.
But it's like okay, yeah, And this is something we
talked about like at the beginning of the administration, which

(36:49):
is that like this administration has been going through and
systematically alienating every single part of the coalition. Yeah, they're
pissing off like the farmers, they're pissing off like the
major pharmaceutical companies, they're pissing off the military. They're pissing
off a whole bunch of the parts of government bureaucracy.
Like they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones
over like comey stuff that they're still mad about. And

(37:12):
then the guy they put in charge of it is
just like completely incompetence, and it's like, Okay, there's only
so long you can sort of go like systematically alienating
every party of your coalition, just like basically attempting to
drop a bomb on the economy every single week, and
sometimes it drops and sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 15 (37:29):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 16 (37:30):
I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here
with tech stocks and with like the economy in general
that has been sort of you know, on the ground
for most of us has felt like it's been in
recession since twenty twenty. Yeah, right, you know of different
sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while.

Speaker 15 (37:45):
Now it's really bad.

Speaker 16 (37:47):
No one can get a job, yep, right, Like things
are really like, prices are going.

Speaker 15 (37:50):
Up, up up.

Speaker 16 (37:51):
Everyone feels bad, and yet the stock market is still
achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized
equivalent strategy of like make it look like things are
normal and good, and like that will actually just support
things materially, and like, yep, I mean maybe it will forever.

Speaker 15 (38:08):
Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know.
I don't think that's I think that's not bad bad,
but like, okay.

Speaker 12 (38:17):
Yeah, well but and I think the interesting part of
this too is if you look at what's going on
with the economy, and it's also word noting, right, Like,
the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms, looks fine.
They're not fine, but it looks sort of okay, right,
the stock market is still growing. There's technically like economic growth.
But comma, we both saw this chart a couple of

(38:40):
weeks ago. That is the most unhinged thing I've ever
seen in my entire life, which is there is a
GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst which shows that
tech in the last year roughly and like in the
last sort of like short and window, it's been thirty
five to forty five percent of all US GDP growth. Yeah,

(39:03):
and what I say tech, by the way, like to
be clear about this, it is technically a composite of
like all sector, right, but like it's basically just the
like the top like the five big tech companies, right, yep,
it's like Apple, its Microsoft, but pasifically. And this is
the one that's like unhinged right now, is that like
the most valuable company in the world is in video,

(39:25):
a company that makes graphics cards yep, yep. And this
is all because this is all of his GDP growth
quote unquote is AI boom stuff? Right, it's like massive
fix capital investments. Sure, it's like, yeah, there's like incredible
fixed appal investments, but the fixed capital investments are just
We're building a diesel powered AI data center somewhere in

(39:46):
Tennessee that is going to poison the entire population for
no benefit. Yeah, And it's like all of these companies
like have gone just completely totally all in on AI
A think that doesn't make anybody, can't make anybody instructurally
will not make any money. And this is like a
third like the growth of the economy.

Speaker 16 (40:01):
We are actually living through the famous old tweet the
drill Is it drill about the candles? Someone out fixed
my economy living in the candles street. The whole economy
is candles.

Speaker 15 (40:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (40:11):
Yeah, And this is thing that our colleague at this
run argues that there's just there is not enough money
in the world to just continuously bail these companies out. Yeah,
Like there just isn't right the cash flow of these companies.
It's like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate
that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is

(40:32):
just unbelievable. And I think this is one of the
disconnect things, right because like it's interesting You're starting to
see a little bit of stuff crop up from like
local level politicians where offy once in a while you
get them to be like, oh yeah, no, it is
like a recession economy, like on the ground in like Wisconsin.
But I feel like in the media and this is
one of the things that I think makes everything insane.

(40:53):
It's not being treated that way.

Speaker 16 (40:56):
Yeah no, and I think you know you you went
exactly where you know, hitked about going, but we're gonna go.
Which is that like part of what is so crazy
making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between
sort of the on the ground experience that everyone's been
having for years now. But it is like especially intense
and like the fact that like AI is very obviously

(41:18):
not interesting or good and no one likes it, and
like even that people who sort of are I think
mostly in good faith like trying to take it seriously,
and who are like, yeah, it's going to change everything,
Like you know, like normally people in work stuff, like
they don't really use it very much, or if they
do use it, like it's not effective. There wasn't a
campaign to force everyone to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened,

(41:41):
everyone wanted one because it was like obvious what it
did for you. Now you know, they're obviously whatever's this
is not a defense of the smartphone, but like there
is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right, that
like the AI economy is nonsense, that like the economy
that everyone says is doing fine, feels bad. And this
has been going on since you know, Biden campaigned on

(42:03):
you know, oh it's just a vibe session. The you know,
the economy is fine, and like the economy wasn't fine.

Speaker 17 (42:09):
No.

Speaker 16 (42:09):
One of the charts I really am obsessed with is
a chart from like Bloomberg, which is like a small
business owner confidence from like twenty ten to twenty twenty five,
and like if you look like from twenty sixteen to
twenty twenty, which is the first Trump term, it goes
up like five hundred percent, right.

Speaker 12 (42:25):
She's just goes up.

Speaker 15 (42:27):
It just just as huge.

Speaker 16 (42:28):
It's the highest that's been by huge margin, and it
just drops again in twenty twenty. So it finally made
me understand why so many Libs were like so committed
to the vibe session analysis, because there was a massive
vibe inflation under the first Trump administration. So the reason
people felt like the economy was good was because small
business owners. And this is the classic analysis of fascists, right,
the petty bergs, Wow, the small business Yeah, they were like,

(42:50):
these are the best times you've ever lived through, based
on no evidence. And if you work for a business
and your boss is like things are booming, We're doing great.

Speaker 15 (42:57):
You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely
to believe it.

Speaker 16 (42:59):
You know, like if if everyone around you is saying that, like,
there's no reason to doubt it, unless I mean, you know,
you don't you don't really believe your boss at the time,
but you know what I'm saying, Like it just has
it has an effect of making everyone feel.

Speaker 15 (43:10):
Like things are better.

Speaker 16 (43:12):
That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election
November twenty twenty four, before Liberation Day, but on the
announcement of the Liberation Day, traffs tanks.

Speaker 15 (43:20):
So that's gone.

Speaker 12 (43:21):
Yeah, it's gone. Yeah. And I think that's a really
vital sort of component of what's happening. Is like, you know,
we talk a lot about how so there's sort of
these like self contained like reality tunnels that people are
gone down. But it's also really diffused by class. Yes, yes,
And this ties back to the AI stuff for example,
where it's like, if you are in the tech sector,

(43:43):
AI is kind of useful because the one thing you
can sort of kind of do decently well is programmed, right,
and you're and if you are in this sort of
like world which is again, enormous portions of all of
the economic growth right that is happening is coming out
of these places, and it's like, oh, this really does
look like like the future is here. If you've you
suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you.

(44:05):
And it's like, well, maybe coding, which wasn't that hard
to begin with, maybe, but like you know, like guys,
I say this as someone who learned to code and
hated it, but like, you know, but like it creates
these sort of like self reinforced like reality tunnels. But
every the thing about the reality tunnels is like every
once in a while, like the actual world comes in

(44:26):
like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it. And that's
what happened to those all business people was they were like,
oh shit, what do you mean they got rid of
the deminimist sicccession? What do you mean they're putting all
these tariffs up? What do you mean They're like just
straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistic system
that have been Like that's the basis of like most
America's all businesses are like are shipping businesses right like
or they're either either directly shipping businesses or they rely

(44:48):
on on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries.
This even goes into like the grift economy, right, Like
massive portions of the grift economy are just like yeah,
like drop shifting.

Speaker 16 (44:57):
Grift bulls, supplements, stacks, Yeah exactly, Yeah, Like you know,
it's another reality Tonnel mea.

Speaker 12 (45:03):
Oh these products and services, dammit, that was a better
one than I was. I was gonna do. You know
what else is a scam, But these products and services
that support this podcast. We are so back. We have

(45:27):
never been more back. I want to kind of also
talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as
this has been going on, which is that Trump and
his party has staged a pretty successful takeover of a
lot of it. You know, you had, I mean Elon
Musk obviously buying X but like they're in the process
of taking over CBS basically by using the fact that

(45:48):
quote unquote free media is actually capitalist media, and you
can just buy them out and bully them by threatening
them with losing money. You can, in fact just completely
get them to fall in line or have your own
which backers just buy it. And I think this is
refueling the disconnect right where there was also this this
post twenty twenty, all of like this. The senior management

(46:09):
level of all of the newspapers kind of lost their
minds in twenty twenty because their staff was like, no,
we don't want to print Tom Cotton calling for the
US Army to be deployed against protesters, and these people
were like, Okay, fuck it, We're we're like, you know,
you see as like the Washington Post, they were like, yeah,
we will literally rather burn the Post than have that

(46:29):
happened again. And the Post obviously is like under the
control of Jeff Bezos. She was a style war Trump ally,
and I think this has been contributing to it because
like they've been able to take over social media platforms,
and they've been able to take over the sort of corporate
like bourgeois media, and it's created this incredible unreality of

(46:50):
this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular
leader and that the things he do are popular, and
that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff,
and it's like, well, I mean, they're kind of has
been a cultural shift in terms of like you know,
elite liberals are allowed to be racist again, Like all

(47:10):
of the people who always wanted to be eugenicists are like,
you know, on that shit now.

Speaker 16 (47:15):
And they you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed
up under COVID, right like this this is also contiguous
in a way, and yeah, yeah, no, I think that
that's exactly right. And I think part of what we
saw in the last week, I mean, I know we're
going to talk about this a bit that like the
last week when we're recording this, which was the week
of the Charlie Kirk memorializing when everyone pretended that ventilating
a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had the

(47:36):
fallen American heroes. And I saw a lot of people
who had been up until then relatively level headed suddenly
really start to panic that week and feel like things
were really And I think part of that was because
with a man as absolutely risless and as obviously malicious
and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk getting that treatment like he was,

(47:57):
you know, Robert Redford or whatever he was about it,
I think that happening in Unison across all the media,
I think people finally realized, like, oh, everything is totally captured,
and the people who hadn't really thought that felt like
that there was sort of this unanimity, the unanimity you're
talking about, because they're able to project this unanimity through

(48:18):
this one sort of media voice, and like the fact
that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel getting fired, and
they're being like a genuine upswell of popular attention about
the man show guy, like like who hasn't been funny,
like probably since he was fourteen or whatever. I think
a lot of people have focused on that as being
extremely embarrassing in cringe, which like, yeah, accurate, But I
think like also like they couldn't even hold it together

(48:41):
for a week, right, Like they couldn't even hold this
full court press together for a week.

Speaker 15 (48:45):
They had that Charlie Kirk documentary.

Speaker 16 (48:47):
They were like, we're gonna film it on you know,
on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing
Jimmy Kimmel.

Speaker 15 (48:52):
They just canceled it. They put it on YouTube.

Speaker 12 (48:53):
Yeah, twenty six thousand views. This means I am very
very proud of this. More people listen to me complaining
about the way that everything everywhere, all at once, was
spreading the porschwise patriarchal ideology of the family. More people
listen to me talk about that on this show that
watched the stupid fucking Charlie gud worry.

Speaker 15 (49:15):
Sorry to that man, but people do not care, Like people.

Speaker 16 (49:18):
Don't care about that guy and and it didn't And
also as you said the opening, his poles have gone down.
People are like shut up about this, like they don't care.
It doesn't work like this, like poles aren't everything. But
like I think this disconnect. It's so hard is that
if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment,
which all of us do, Like that's how most of
us get all of our information. That's this is not

(49:40):
a judgment. It feels like everyone is like, you know,
is at like half mast, you know, for their for
their beautiful their beautiful boy. Look what they did to
my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his
huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and
caught bullets. Like a Fox News article said that he
was like particularly strong bodied and he kept saved other people.

Speaker 12 (50:01):
Okay, I didn't talk about this for a second because
this is so fucking un hite. What Okay, so his
like surgeon or whatever was like, oh yeah he was.
He started his surgeon wrote a thing about like this
bone that doesn't exist, yeah that he was like, oh yeah,
he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet.
And this got like picked up by like Fox News,

(50:21):
who's that running a story about this magical iron bone
in Charlie Kirk's neck that like God put there or
something to save I just.

Speaker 15 (50:33):
It's it's so I can read the headline for you.
Hang on, I've got it here.

Speaker 16 (50:36):
Oh god, this is Fox News on x There's a
picture of Charlie Kirk that says surgeon says, Charlie Kirk's
body stopped bullet in quote absolute miracle that saved others,
TPUSA says, and then quote man of steel, Charlie Kirk's
body stopped a bullet that would typically quote just go
through everything and it was quote an absolute miracle. Nobody
else was killed his surgeon. Tod's turning point, us, So

(50:59):
that's weird behavior that people don't like.

Speaker 15 (51:02):
That's not yeah.

Speaker 16 (51:04):
No, So I think like basically they have this capacity
to do this like really really intense, unified message across
the entire spectrum of the media, and we're seeing it
again right now with like NPR publishing basically does tile
it all actually cause autism, so the science.

Speaker 15 (51:20):
Isn't out yet, you know, or whatever like as their headline,
you know.

Speaker 16 (51:23):
Yeah, So like obviously, like that's scary if you're used
to a reality which is shaped largely by the media,
and and Trump has gotten into office twice based on
a media reality shaping effect.

Speaker 15 (51:35):
The media has been the.

Speaker 16 (51:36):
Main tool, both social and mainstream, for putting him into power.
So it's understandable to take it seriously because it does
need to be taken seriously.

Speaker 15 (51:45):
But there's other stuff going on.

Speaker 12 (51:48):
Well, And like the funniest version of this was just
how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimmel back, yes,
which was like sub one week.

Speaker 15 (52:00):
Yeah, no, it was sub one week.

Speaker 16 (52:01):
And you know, to me, that says that actually the
boycott spread real fast and real far. Like there was
a Disney adult on TikTok right who was sort of
like giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney
World vacations and was like canceling his Disney World wedding,
you know, and like this was like all happening really
really fast. People were really mad. And you know, yeah,

(52:22):
it's again it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel. But
it's not really about Jimmy Kimmel, right, it's because everyone
hates this man.

Speaker 15 (52:28):
They hate this.

Speaker 12 (52:29):
Yeah, and people don't actually want this in dipshit to
just literally and you know, and he's trying to do
this again, right, he's apparently trying to sue Disney, like
they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able
to just straight up say what is legal to say
on TV. Yeah, which is the thing that he is
attempting to do right now.

Speaker 16 (52:48):
And the other thing about it that I think is
really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't
go to the press and fire this man. They pull
strings behind this. They get him to retract like on
his show in a way that causes no attention, and
the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand
that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they

(53:10):
probably don't really think much about it.

Speaker 15 (53:12):
Right.

Speaker 16 (53:12):
That is how like real, really smooth smooth repression of
a free press into a bot press involves a lot
of strings being pulled behind the scenes, and in fact,
it has been happening for twenty years in America. There
has been a lot of that going on. Part of
what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain
way is that Trump just needs to do less. Things

(53:34):
have been set up for fascism for a while.

Speaker 15 (53:38):
He just needs to do less. And he can't help himself.
They can't help themselves because they're you know, because they
need it to be in this sort of public mode.
And also he's lost his you know, his juice.

Speaker 12 (53:47):
But yeah, yeah, well and it's also just like, I mean,
this is so partially Trump is just like pathologically obsessed
with late night comedy, right because he's a TV guy
and so he's just mad on Red and maden nude online.
Except like the previous version of it were like you
were just like throwing shit at your television set in
like nineteen fifty five, which is a real really terrified

(54:09):
thing to have in the presidency. But you know, speaking
of speaking of having things in the presidency, these products
and services, look, if they've painted more, you get better transitions.

Speaker 18 (54:19):
Yeah, but they don't, so vote for them.

Speaker 12 (54:33):
We are back, So you know, I think it's worth
noting that, Like yeah, no, like like the immediate financial
pressure of you know, just just the collision of weight
hold on like the people who buy things, which is
most people admittedly, like Disney adults are a very narrow
subset of people, but like the speed and rapidity of

(54:56):
which reality, which is people don't like this guy hit
the like sort of you know, just just like just
like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of the
Charlie Kirk stuff was just unbelievable, you know, and like
part of this this is something that Marissa Cabas from
uh the Handbasket reported, which is that part of what
was going on with Disney was about to roll out

(55:17):
a price increase. Yeah, and so they had to bring
it back so they could do their price increase, which well, brother,
just delay the price increase if we're trying to do
authoritaries whatever. Okay, you know, I am happy these people
suck at doing this. It's great, we like it. We
like that they're bad at it, right, Yeah, you know,
like Disney is being pressured here, but I think it's
worth talking about something that you have been spending a

(55:41):
ungodly amount of time in the minds of, yeah, which
is Disney and fascist Oh boy.

Speaker 16 (55:49):
Hey, yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny
about this week for me personally, and that's what really
matters obviously, is that is that is that, like you know,
when we went into this administration and we started seeing
what they were doing, I was like, I can't believe
I'm writing a book about free trade and law fair right,
like warfare by law, like you know, like sort of

(56:09):
this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by
global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart right like that,
Like the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow to
the IP regime. Sorry, the intellectual property regime. The IP
regime is what I analyze in the book I've just
written and is coming out in April, and it's about
how Disney really was like a sort of pioneer in

(56:31):
understanding the value of intellectual property and manipulating it and
how you can see that through the entire corporate and
artistic history of Disney Studios. So it's about like Disney
movies and how they're all connected. They actually all sort
of tell stories about IP in certain ways, and how
we sort of miss that angle on them very often,
very frequently, and misunderstand how much IP functions in the
broader society because, for example, fast fashion companies, Now I

(56:54):
know you said talk about Disney, I'm.

Speaker 15 (56:56):
Talking about something else.

Speaker 16 (56:56):
Say fast fashion companies, they actually own very very read
little materially, so their offices are leased. Mostly their factories
are contracted. You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted.
They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores. Right,
They like have very few direct employees other than like
store level if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise.

(57:17):
They might not even employ the store level people, but
they probably do store level people corporate employees. And then
they own their IP and maybe they own a headquarters
building somewhere right like that's a fancy building, and everything
else is quote unquote owned by them, controlling the designs,
the logos, the images, and they can guarantee that they
can make almost infinite money off of that. Because the

(57:41):
global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that
would make people who would like to see any human
rights thing enacted blush with shame, and it is incredibly effective.
It is the one thing that international law does quite
well is enforced copyright YEP and trademark and patent. So
when you have stuff like the you know, you can
no longer ship under eight hundred dollars without tariffs. Like

(58:03):
those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move
these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because
they don't own ships, they don't own factories, they don't
even really own the you know, they they own the
shirts only when they arrive on American shores.

Speaker 12 (58:16):
Really, this has always been the dream of reproduction of capital,
which is to have a company with no assets that
makes money exactly, and they're so close, they're so cleanly.

Speaker 15 (58:24):
Close, and all this stuff is destroying it.

Speaker 16 (58:26):
So I was like, well, great, now I've written this
whole book about how Disney you know, is actually really
like a state actor, and like they have they have
like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about
a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District you
may or may not know about.

Speaker 15 (58:40):
People talked about Celebration Florida a bit.

Speaker 16 (58:41):
When that happened in the two thousands, which is like
a weird creepy company town that they run. They actually
own a huge section of It's like two counties it's
larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida. Jesus Christ,
what the conflict with the Santis over that don't say
gay bill, which people you know, interpreted largely through the
lens of the you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics.

Speaker 15 (59:03):
Who's pushing, which is understandable.

Speaker 16 (59:05):
Is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida because they
don't pay taxes in the same way, they make their
own laws, they have their own police force.

Speaker 15 (59:13):
So basically, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 12 (59:16):
Is they made the first networks.

Speaker 16 (59:18):
They did it, they did it, and they've been doing
it for thirty years. That probably sixty sixty nine is
when they get the deal for READI creat They've had
it for a long a long time. People don't love
to talk about this for some reason. I think it's
really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting. But the reason that
that's all really really connected to intellectual property is because
one of the things that Disney did, despite you know,

(59:41):
having literally their own statelet in the middle of Florida,
is maintaining themselves as the magic kingdom. They are associated
with childhood nostalgia magic. Even as they've grown and grown
and grown. This behemoth. Like they've managed to largely stay
connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood.

(01:00:01):
And there have been moments in the nineties they overreached
a bit. There's been like you know, there have been problems,
and you can read all about that. But basically they
did image management on all these different levels. So they
managed Mickey Mouse, They managed the law around copyright, like
copyright extensions famously were largely driven by Disney lobbying in
nineteen seventy six and then again in nineteen ninety eight. Anyway,

(01:00:22):
so all of these things, I'm trying to reduce a
very big argument to a very small package here, But basically,
Disney designed and the and the other IP businesses that
work around it have figured out that if you can
control the way your product appears in the market, and
you can control the images and the feelings people have
about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you

(01:00:44):
can really do whatever you want materially behind the scenes,
right like that, Like controlling an image is so powerful.
And part of why like what's happening with Disney, weh
it's falling apart so fast, is because if they give
in to Trump at all it requires shattering that image
that has been a century in the making, right, Like,
like part of what was so brutal about the thing

(01:01:05):
with Jimmy Kimmel was like, it's just obvious that Disney
did that, that the corporate people did that, and they
did it because Trump did it publicly. Trump is humiliating
these these corporations publicly. Right, He's humiliating them. He's forcing
them to come to heal. It's not working popularly, He's
not capturing anti corporate sentiment.

Speaker 15 (01:01:24):
Really, people are.

Speaker 16 (01:01:25):
Like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel, Like
that's weird, You're a creepy Yeah. But then also he's
also destroying legitimacy of everyone. It's pulling everything down around him.
It's a family annihilation, right, He's so angry about twenty
twenty and like being tried that he's just going to
rip everything down around him.

Speaker 12 (01:01:41):
Wow.

Speaker 16 (01:01:42):
I just said a lot of different things, but all
of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about
like the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship
to Disney is that Disney has for so long built
this image of America that has managed to persist like
across and against you know, a century of increasingly violent,
ineffective and visible imperialism like in Korea and Vietnam and

(01:02:04):
then Iraq and Afghanistan. It was so crucial to the
image of what American capitalism was. And then Trump, a
man who is just as built by images as the
Disney Corporation, comes and is just like just is ripping
it all down because he's sort of you know, one
gaping narcisstic wound right like and running a country.

Speaker 15 (01:02:24):
Right yeah. So if you look at the history of.

Speaker 16 (01:02:26):
Like Disney in general, Hollywood, and intellectual property management in general,
what you can see is the way that we have
that this this media apparatus has been built. When I
say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know,
when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever,
they just think about.

Speaker 15 (01:02:42):
Stuff on TV.

Speaker 16 (01:02:43):
But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate
through society. And it's like the way that you get
paid for your job with you know, like the idea
of clout is like actually part of that, Like it
does function as a form of payment, right, Like it's
not like people make fun of that, like oh good,
but like then everyone acts as though it's real, right,
and when everyone acts though.

Speaker 15 (01:03:01):
It's real, it's real. It's a social relation.

Speaker 16 (01:03:03):
So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on
images that rely only on being forced through a sort
of massive group thing from the top of the economy
and the political class, was built by these corporations, but
it was built explicitly to you know, reap as much
wealth as possible for their shareholders.

Speaker 12 (01:03:22):
Yeah, yeah, have to make money. Yeah.

Speaker 16 (01:03:24):
Trump is too perfect a product of that, and this
regime is too perfect a product of that. And now
it's all it's all you know, it is its own
grave digger.

Speaker 8 (01:03:32):
You know.

Speaker 12 (01:03:33):
Yeah. The port has a line about like the way
that the spectacle sort of like intrudes into and like
becomes reality. And like if Disney is sort of like
the stage manager of this, right, Like Trump just is
the thing like come to life and powering through it,
and she doesn't because he is the image and not
the thing that creates the image. He has different interests, yes,

(01:03:55):
than the people who create the image. Who are you know,
trying to make money. Trump is trying to like satisfy
all of his like vindictive sort of versissistic rage.

Speaker 15 (01:04:10):
Exactly.

Speaker 16 (01:04:10):
It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's
doing is extremely real. Yeah, he genuinely is fighting over
the election and over like Komi, Like he is like
he really believes these things. This is a regime that
believes the things that for example, Carl Rove would teach
people to say to get away with doing what they
wanted to do. Right, these are these are as you said,

(01:04:32):
they are the image itself, they are true believers in
the spectacle, and as such break the fourth wall, right
if we're going to use a theater metaphor here as such,
they end up they end up like just destroying it.
And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture
the spectacle, right, and then there were all the people
you as you describe, and the people who make the spectacle,
maintain the image, make the image.

Speaker 15 (01:04:54):
They were around him.

Speaker 16 (01:04:55):
So they would just they would just close up the puncture,
they would close up the susture. They'd work really really hard, right.
So what I mean by that is like Trump would
say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would
be like the controversial statement from President Trump, right, which
like completely normalizes it, and like everyone would sort of
pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatication.
And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right,

(01:05:15):
Like people would just pretend that it was normal.

Speaker 12 (01:05:17):
Yeah, that he was speaking of four seasons total landscage.

Speaker 16 (01:05:19):
Yeah, right, like just like shit would happen exactly and
everyone would sort of try it would normalize it. And
that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle. And it
made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch
August institutions such as the Washington Post going over backwards
to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim. Right,

(01:05:43):
So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him
as he punctured it. Right, But he he has actually
too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair.
He actually thought they were his enemies, the Rhinos, right,
the Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media.

Speaker 15 (01:06:01):
They have been purged.

Speaker 16 (01:06:02):
They have all been purged and controlled, and now they
all just repeat what he says. And what ends up
happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people
see through it like it's just not working anymore. And
I think what's scary is that it still feels like
they're repairing the spectacle around his claims because the entire
media is speaking as one, and the Democrats are speaking

(01:06:23):
as one, and the Republicans are speaking as one, and
they're all agreeing. You know, we imagine someone else, John
Q Public sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay,
it's all pretty normal, Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a
good guy. You know, we sort of project that that
person is there. But actually more and more people who
would have been like that in the first regime are like, well,

(01:06:43):
I don't believe any of this shit.

Speaker 12 (01:06:44):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also we're saying, like
the way that we're talking about this in terms of
his and popularity and reality, and you know, in terms
of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that
there's not horrible shit happening constantly, right, And that's the
other part of his ability to sort of eliminate that,
the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that
it was to some extent restraining him, right, Like, that's

(01:07:05):
the reason why there wasn't just like there were a
bunch of deportations in their Trump There are a bunch
of deportations under Biden. The thing that's happening now is
not the thing that was happening before, right, Yeah, the
Secretary of the Interior wasn't showing up at like five
thirty in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to

(01:07:27):
blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American
citizens out of their house. Like that was like not
happening yeah before, And that's off. It's just you know,
it's unbelievably horrifying. And it's also not popular, like even
those approval rating numbers, right, Like, you know, like his
immigration policy in theory is the most popular thing he's doing.

(01:07:49):
And also ICE can't do mass, large scale raids because
if they stay in one place for too long, so
many people will show up. They can't do it. And
you know, and the lightning raids that they've been doing
have been really brutal and really effective, but like those
are not the tactics a stormtrooper force that broadly has

(01:08:10):
the has popular consents. Yeah, right, they don't move like that.
And you know, I talked about this. I guess it'll
be like two weeks ago on executive's order. But like
people are like stopping these raids in like Wheton. Like
Wheton used to be literally the center of the base
of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit.

(01:08:31):
For like forty years, this was like the center of
the Christian Right. And they have lost Wheton. It's been
like electing democrats, and it's not just leatin democrats, like
the speed of which has moved from electing democrats to
like a bunch of people showed up and are stopping
like lightning ice raids, which is really impressive, genuinely, very
very impressive organizing. It's very hard to do. Most times

(01:08:53):
it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough.
And somehow again like the place that used to be
the capital of the moral majority, it's like Jerry Well's
fucking like home domain, right, like the epicenter of like
of the Christian Right is in doing the anti ice
raid shit like what like and this is the thing
as we're going on for like you know, probably like

(01:09:13):
four or five years, but like them do it like
really serious, very good direct action. The entire terrain of
the world is shifting beneath us, while all of these
people constantly try to like paint over this like little
tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like no, no,
the ground's still there. There's all these holes in the
middle of it, but like, you know, we're gonna put
us some tarp that like looks like the sky beneath

(01:09:35):
it. It's like, wait, why is the sky down? Yeah, don't
ask questions to keep walking exactly.

Speaker 16 (01:09:41):
And I think that's like, I think that's really important
and a thing that I think happens sometimes when I
sort of make this analysis with my friends. I think
they think that I'm saying that like fascism isn't here,
or that like this isn't a fascist regime, or that
like they don't want to like.

Speaker 15 (01:09:53):
Do Nazism like they very clearly do.

Speaker 12 (01:09:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:09:56):
My analysis has been like since February.

Speaker 16 (01:09:58):
I mean part of what's happened is in February, when
the dose stuff was going on, I was like, well,
the American Republic is over, like we'll never be able
to go back, Like now what do we do? So
I think like a lot of the disjuncture and the
confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is
because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines.
Because it's really hard to accept it's a hard and
complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually, like

(01:10:21):
this is dying, Like this is a dying regime and
a dying empire, and like that does not mean it's
less dangerous. In fact, historically it's often more dangerous and
it's death throws. And it does not mean when you
and I talk about him being ineffective, it does not
mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying. We're both
trans women who organize with other trans women, Like we

(01:10:42):
know about it, okay, y'all, Like we are dealing with
the fallout all the time. But like the situations that
we could be going through, the situations that they could
be achieving that with the public that they were handed
by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID,
that had created an effective red scare around Gaza, that
had like you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten

(01:11:04):
liberals to like say that that was normal and good, right,
Like that was a very very scary public yea to
hand to Nazis two now with nukes, right, And like
I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when
the only fascist regimes, we think about are Nazism and
we think that like it's inevitably like going to be
just like the Nazis, or even if we just say, well,

(01:11:25):
it could be more like Italy. Like there are dozens
of different dictatorships. Yeah, across the history. I don't expect
everyone to study all of them, but like, but like
it's worth understanding.

Speaker 12 (01:11:34):
Learn a third one, pick one, literally pick one, fucking
anyone that's got the maid too. There are so many
like you have you are.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
Spoiled for exactly.

Speaker 15 (01:11:44):
Yeah, yeah, you can do. You could do if you know,
pick a decade.

Speaker 16 (01:11:47):
You know, you like the seventies, go for swat though
in Indonesia, you like the eighties Brazilian military dictatorship, no problem, Like,
or you could do Korea in the eighties. You've got
lots of choices. Oh, the fifties, go for Greece, no problem, don't.

Speaker 15 (01:11:57):
Worry about it.

Speaker 16 (01:11:57):
The reason that I bring all that up is just
to say that, like, things are really bad and if
we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build
an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia
of the power that they have available on the time
that they can wait. But as you're saying, and as
I've been sort of seeing, also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance.

(01:12:20):
It is completely uncovered. It is not being seen. But
because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made,
they also don't see and understand their level of resistance.
Like they've just organized the FBI, right they fired about
like was it like a fifth of FBI agents like
headed agents, and then like a bunch more are now
doing like street crime and are like being put into

(01:12:41):
ice raids.

Speaker 15 (01:12:42):
And people talk about that as being terrifying, and it
is terrifying.

Speaker 16 (01:12:44):
The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids
and to use every resource available in them is scary.
But also if they don't have the FBI's eyes on
the ball.

Speaker 15 (01:12:53):
Which they clearly don't anymore.

Speaker 16 (01:12:54):
They have redirected the FBI, they are not nearly as
cognizant of what's going on in terms of distance as
they were even six months ago.

Speaker 12 (01:13:01):
No, like if you look at the guy who shot
Charlie Kirk, right, this is like Carly Kirk is like
their guy. Right that the FBI is so stripped down
right now that with a full court press, the only
reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand
that discord wasn't private, and he like dropped his gun
and didn't pick it.

Speaker 15 (01:13:20):
Up again, and his dad recognized it.

Speaker 12 (01:13:21):
Right, And if he had done those two things, they
wouldn't have found him, Like they didn't catch him. He
turned himself in, right, And that's again someone assassinated like
their guy and they couldn't find him. Like this repressive
apparatus it is really really scary and very good at
doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now,

(01:13:42):
which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at
like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors
down and like dragging them away to a prison. Right,
It's not good at anything else. And the thing, right
that is a very very good way to create an
engine of you know, like immense human misery that who's

(01:14:02):
spectacle they can sell, But it's not actually a good
way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship. We have seen
very very successful sort of dictatorships in the last like
twenty thirty years, right, yeah, And you know, like they
take a bunch of forms. I think, like the most
classically like nineteen thirties Nazi Party one is Modi in India, yep,

(01:14:24):
and Modi India has done the thing in the sense
of like has really really successfully transformed the consciousness of
people in India to this sort of like unbelievably unhinged
right wing fascist version of like Hindu supremacy that hasn't
happened here.

Speaker 16 (01:14:40):
Right, you know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which
is his brown shirts, like has four.

Speaker 15 (01:14:46):
Million people in it.

Speaker 12 (01:14:47):
Yeah, yeah, right, Like, I mean you know it has million.

Speaker 16 (01:14:49):
They have millions of brown Shirts, right, Like Ice is
having trouble hiring twelve thousand extra agents in a continent
of four hundred million people. Again, this doesn't mean it
everything's fine, but yeah, like if you look at that,
if you look at Ernolan and Turkey, or you look
at Putin and Russia, or even Orbon to a different degree,
in Hungary, like they slow rolled it, right, They went

(01:15:11):
through a few elections that were like slightly sketchy but
basically normal, like they like, and they just slowly built power,
and it took them a decade to get to the
point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that
Trump was trying to do. And like, again there's no rules,
it might work what Trump is doing. But like compared
to Milay in Argentina, right, who they all loved so much,

(01:15:33):
who came into power similarly to Trump started throwing truth
bombs everywhere, you know, because like ripped apart and has
now had to come hat in hand begging for a
bailout to the United States yep, because his whole thing,
his regime, fell apart within twenty four months.

Speaker 12 (01:15:49):
Yep.

Speaker 16 (01:15:49):
There is ultimately a material limit to what you can do.
You can't just speak reality into existence for that long.

Speaker 12 (01:15:57):
Yeah, And that's the thing, right, if it was possible,
did you speak reality into existence, we would all be
living on a neo conservatism, right, there would be like
a pure, well functioning oil extracting American client state in
a rock right now. And I don't know what the
fuck they would have done with a guinnessent, but like if, if,
if you could just do the thing. And I talked
about this on the show. I talked about this on
the show all the time, right, the thing the neo

(01:16:18):
conservatives thought they could do with evidence based reality thing, right,
where like they they thought that what they could do
was just instead of observing reality and creating your positions,
from it. They thought they could just purely influence and
manipulate reality to become whatever they wanted it to be,
and they couldn't. Right, like where is George Bush right now?
Right like where is Dick Cheney? Like the Trump administration

(01:16:39):
somehow staggeringly has managed to like they finally found a
war crime so bad that John wu the art like
the guy who wrote the torture manuals, was like, wait,
hold on, you can't just blow up random like boats
of people in Venezuela, Like what what? Like I literally
had not even occurred to me that it was possible

(01:17:00):
for you to commit a war crime so bad that
the guy who off the torture memos was like, hold on,
hold on, hold on, Well, I ain't set up for
this shit.

Speaker 16 (01:17:07):
Like it's yeah, they're absolutely like unhinged. They're horrible and
thank god they are so unpopular and so bad at this. Yeah,
because if they were just a little bit better at this,
I think it's very clear what they want.

Speaker 12 (01:17:23):
We're different. We're screwed. Yeah, like we go we go
under like four months, but that hasn't happened because they're
not good at this and they're tearing apart the very
institutional apparattus like Disney, like they're tearing apart the very
institutional apparattus is that were designed to like propagate them.
Like Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right,

(01:17:46):
Like Trump could have just used you know, like like
basically like the way that every other being, like like
the way literally the Nazis did right like until like
literally until they were forced to break it off dream
like World War two, right, which is like used Disney
as a propaganda apparat is for you.

Speaker 16 (01:18:00):
And Disney was gun shy because of the fight with
the fight with Santas didn't go that well for them, Yeah, surprisingly,
you know, like they had some trouble with that, and
so they were gun shy, like going into the administration,
like they were very quiet, like they were not rocking
the boat.

Speaker 15 (01:18:13):
They were making lots of statements about how like, you know, we.

Speaker 16 (01:18:15):
Support it, Like he didn't have to goad them into
taking a position in the culture war, Like they were
just very glad that they weren't fighting off Da Santis anymore,
and that they weren't fighting off you know the Daily Wire,
you know, claiming that they were you know, whatever the
woke mind virus or whatever the hell, you know. Yeah,
Like they were just they were just putting their keeping
their heads down, trying to rebuild after the disaster of
the pandemic, right, like trying to like get their cruise

(01:18:37):
line back up and like as profitable as it could be.
You know, Like they were they were working on like
they were just doing their thing, and they were like,
no reason Trump should stop that.

Speaker 15 (01:18:44):
There's no reason trum should spped that. They is what
they thought.

Speaker 12 (01:18:46):
No, It's like they were implementing like a lot of
the culture wars they wanted in terms of like Okay,
we're going back to white people. We're never having another
non white character again, like eat shit.

Speaker 16 (01:18:56):
Like they canceled they they're canceling TV shows with just
like quick your character is Like they're just they're just
doing stuff like that. They're they're doing everything that the
regime wants. But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there
watching TV and like like throwing his remote around and
like unfortunately his remote like dictates US policy.

Speaker 12 (01:19:15):
M I think that's an important note to close on
because like his remote dictates US policy to the extent
that everyone pretends that it does. And one of the
things that can start happening in the in the end
stages of these kind of regimes, is that like the
levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state.

Speaker 5 (01:19:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:19:35):
Right, So he just like declared that antifas like a
domestic terrorist organization. Right, We're gonna be talking about that
later this week, possibly earlier this week. Got to know
when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything
in and of itself. He's just like waving a magic
wander round. But if he doesn't have the repressive apparatus
to make that matter, then okay, then then him throwing

(01:19:57):
the remote around isn't like gesturally controlling the arm of
like one of the most sophisticated, what's supposed to be
one of the most fiscated pressed apparatuses ever. Right, And
they rely on both the compliance of the state bureaucracy,
which they've been decently good at pulling in line, but
also they rely at our compliance for this, and you

(01:20:18):
don't have to comply with them. That's the fun thing
about about existence is that they can't just they can't
just make it real unless you help them.

Speaker 16 (01:20:28):
And as we saw, as you're already talking about the
Charlie Kirk Special doesn't go up, right, they say like
the yeah, the COVID vaccines are like, we're going to
restrict them. And most of the pharmacies are just like
just check a box saying you need it, like you know,
like not in every state. But again, like these massive institutions,
they can't really get them in line, So why are
you letting them get you in line?

Speaker 5 (01:20:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 12 (01:20:47):
And remember, you know, like they had better control of
their institutional apparatuses in twenty twenty and the outcome of
that was there was a giant uprising and they put
the president in a bunker or a thing that he's
still mad about to this day. Right, even when it
looks like they have total control, they don't. And I
don't know if he's gonna like end up in a
Hitler bunker. But look, as of right now, as it stands,

(01:21:11):
the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in
a bunker is one hundred percent. So you know, if
if if the past is to be a prediction of
the future, we could see it again when all of
this ship goes to hell and the economy collapses and
everyone's like, oh, this was all lie. The whole time. Wow, damn,
hey look like you know, and oh god, but I

(01:21:38):
don't know if we can. Uh, we're just gonna, we're
just gonna, we're just gonna put a really long leaf
over that entire sentence and we're gonna, we're we're gonna
leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader, completing
the sentence, just figuring out what it was saying, not
doing the thing. Okay that this this, this has been.
It could happen here, Vicky. Where can people you order

(01:22:00):
your book?

Speaker 16 (01:22:01):
Oh, you can go to Haymarket and that's who's putting
it out and they have a list of links. You
can also go to my blue Sky account vickyacab dot
b Sky dot social and you can find a link there.

Speaker 12 (01:22:12):
Yeah, And where can people find you in your work?

Speaker 16 (01:22:14):
Car Shiny things dot com. It's the Collective Anarchist Writers
or any other acronym you like.

Speaker 15 (01:22:19):
C AW. That's where I'm working the most regularly.

Speaker 12 (01:22:22):
Now, good crowth, heming. That's great, that's great.

Speaker 15 (01:22:24):
It's Corvid based.

Speaker 12 (01:22:25):
Yeah, we love a Corvid based economy.

Speaker 15 (01:22:29):
Thanks so much for having me Amiya, Yeah, thanks for
coming on.

Speaker 13 (01:22:48):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me James today,
and I'm very lucky to be joined by a couple
of people who I am about to introduce to discuss
the very important topic of does Tyler and O'll give
your baby autism? I think we probably already know the answer,
but nonetheless we have half an hour to talk about it.
So you were here doctor Carve Hodeth laughing, that's uh me,

(01:23:13):
that's cave. Yeah. Many of you will know him, but
he's a medical doctor and host of the House of
Pod podcast. And I'm also joined by Tyler Black, who's
a psychologist in British Columbia. Welcome Tyler, chiatrist, psychiatrist.

Speaker 7 (01:23:26):
Fucked it up? Them fighting words, James, them fighting.

Speaker 13 (01:23:29):
Yeah, no, I know, yeah, this is yes. Like when
people call me a sociologists, I understand, or even worse,
an anthropologist.

Speaker 7 (01:23:37):
It's a pleasure to be here and no worries. Tyler
is Canadian, so to see him correct somebody on something
makes me happy. I'm very sorry, yeah, but that's why
we get him on.

Speaker 14 (01:23:46):
He's very sorry, he's very sorry about that. I love
Tyler very much. He comes on my show not infrequently.
And one really pleasant thing that's happened, one little bright
spot in the last I don't know five years of
terror that have been happening medically is seeing Tyler gradually
over time become grumpier and more willing to fight.

Speaker 7 (01:24:10):
That's the only bright spot I've had. Thank you Tyler
for that.

Speaker 13 (01:24:13):
Yeah, I imagine that's the side effect of your consumption
of a seat to metaphana may Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:24:20):
Got a cut back, bro got cut back? Yeah?

Speaker 13 (01:24:23):
All right. For those not familiar, where are we talking about?

Speaker 7 (01:24:26):
Thailan All?

Speaker 13 (01:24:26):
Might be the name you're familiar if you, especially of
your American people, like to use brand names a little more.
I still find that very confusing, and I've lived here
for a better part of two decades. But why are
we talking about tail and all?

Speaker 12 (01:24:37):
Tyler?

Speaker 7 (01:24:38):
Do you want to introduce this concept? Sure so, Yeah.
Talent All goes by Paracenamol in UK and other places
in the world. It's a ceta minifin here, so it
really is not talking about talent although the shorthand that
the political people who've been talking about it have specifically
called out the brand Talentol, which is bizarre. But this

(01:25:00):
stems from both a mission that RFK Junior when he
took over as the HHS sort of had, which was
to find the cause of autism, which is his political
quest to find some environmental cause. I mean, he started
as an environmental lawyer. I don't think he's doing this disingenuously.
I think he truly believes there was an environmental cause

(01:25:23):
to autism. But of course RFK wheeled science probably driven
by the brain worm, and so he has this way
of having a conclusion that and finding the science to
support it. And it was very clear that he was
going to point towards vaccine vaccine schedule, and at some
point this is definitely coming. I think this might be

(01:25:43):
a roundabout way to do it through fevers and talinol.
But the talent link is something that has been a
question mark. So a really quick aside will be that
when drugs are regulated, the drug companies have very little
natural interest to study it and pregnant people it only
brings the risk. There's no reason to do it. You
are required to submit what studies you have on animal

(01:26:05):
toxicity in utero and these types of things, but not
really that much for humans, and so the drug companies
usually put their hands up and go talk to your
doctor about using this, and then the rest of us
in medicine have to take that information that's been generated
about this medication and try and interpret it on pregnant people.
And it creates this system where we create the evidence

(01:26:26):
over the next twenty years in what we call pharmacal
vigilids or post marketing studies, where we basically has there
been a problem, did we find any birth effects?

Speaker 5 (01:26:36):
You know?

Speaker 7 (01:26:36):
And we kind of do it backwards. It kind of
makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCAT on
pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any
reason for the for the drug. So it's one of
those sort of loopholes. And so this natural conversation has
resulted in science that points in a number of directions.
Does the seed of Menifhite cause autism? Can't be answered
by the current science because it's all cohort data, it's

(01:26:59):
looking backward, it's looking at populations. It's confounded. How are
The best study was published in twenty twenty four, which
makes the timing of this announcement really awkward. There was
two point five million people. It was a believe it's
a Danish study, Swedish study, okay, And in that study
there was a small link found, But because they had
two point five million people, they could check that link

(01:27:21):
by looking at sibling pairs within that two point five million.
So in that group they had sixteen thousand sibling pairs
both exposed to and not exposed to acetaminifin, and lo
and behold, they found that there was no relationship there.
So this really is one of the more definitive correlational
studies that says pretty much, any effect we're seeing is

(01:27:42):
probably confounded. It probably isn't due to the assineminifin. Though
there are some animal studies that might hint at it,
it appears to be minor and Caves are about to
say something, Yeah, first of all, that's exactly right.

Speaker 14 (01:27:53):
I think that there are a lot of things that
Maha and RFK Junior talk about there are just insane
and you can dismiss out of hand. This is a
topic that is not complete rubbish. It is something that
has a little bit of nuance and we can talk
about as Tyler was just mentioning, there is some evidence
that there might be a small relationship, but the real

(01:28:16):
key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative.
Are they just related for some reason or another, or
are they caused by each other? And that study that
he talked about, that Swedish study looked at about one
hundred and eighty thousand infants that had parents that were
exposed to sudemenafin. What's really elegant about that is that

(01:28:36):
it looked at the siblings. That's why it's such an
important study. And that's what I say, it closes the
door on the matter. No, I agree with Tyler. I
think the preponderance of evidence now is that there is
no connection between town law and autism. But I don't
know if this study totally closes the door. It is
really well done though. So they showed that if you

(01:28:57):
look at siblings, if you look at a family, there's
no connection. You take out some of the variables, you
take out some of the confounders there that can obfuscate
or confuse an issue. You take those out of the picture,
and you see that there's no relationship between town and menaphin.
What's interesting in that same study that we just study,
if they then put those back in, if they didn't

(01:29:20):
account for the siblings, then yeah, showed that there is
a little bit of evidence, a small basic relationship between
you knowcedomenaphin and developing autism. But once you start accounting
for some of these these really tough to account for variables,
then you start to see that that falls apart, and

(01:29:40):
that implies that most of these other studies are not
causal but correlative relationships.

Speaker 7 (01:29:46):
The sort of twenty twenty five update is and I
think this might have I think, as that we learn
more about it, this might have been something that was
either solicited or developed in tandem with RFK and his goals.
But there was a publication in twenty twenty five by
I think the Harvard Dean of Medicine, who has been
a plaintiff's witness for attorneys battling talentol in developing autism.

(01:30:11):
So there is a bit of a financial conflict of
interest there.

Speaker 13 (01:30:14):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:30:15):
Baccarelli, Yeah, doctor Buccarelli, who published a study called a
Navigation Review, and it's basically a science y version of
let me tell a story, and here's the evidence that
supports it. Basically, what they did is they took the
number of studies, they counted the number that pointed towards
talinol as a factor, and they counted against it, and
they found about twenty something in total. The majority of

(01:30:37):
them found a link to talent al and autism, and
then a minority found no link. But of course that's
not really how we do science in twenty twenty five.
If we had two studies and you can actually look
at his studies, and some of these studies are two
hundred people, three hundred people, five hundred people, and then
you have this other study that's two point five million

(01:30:58):
people in the real world, that larger study would dwarf
the significance of the other ones. But in the way
that this navigation study was set up, they're all equal.
In fact, he treats the non confounded sample that Cave
was mentioning as its own study, and then he treats
the controlled sample with siblings as its own studies. So

(01:31:20):
the same study from Sweden was cited twice, one four
and one against. You can see how you could shape
a narrative, which is what a narrative review is. It's
when you shape a narrative. It's not a very sciencey
way to do things. We like to do systematic reviews,
and this did provide a bit of cover because now

(01:31:40):
everyone in AHHS can point towards this study by the
Harvard Deed of Medicine published in BMC Environmental Studies, Peer reviewed,
showing that a navigational study shows that there could be
a link, but it really if you read the study,
any scientists reading it like, yeah, there could be a link,
but the largest study in that group suggests there is
no link.

Speaker 13 (01:32:01):
Right, yeah, in terms of someone's playing games with evidence
when they've already decided what the completion would it be. Yeah,
let's talk about this fascination with autism that exists in
the MAHA. Right, make America healthy again. For those who
are not familiar what's happening here, people are probably diagnosed
with autism at a higher rate now than they were

(01:32:22):
when these people were young. Right, that is not however, well,
I will let you guys explain that. Explain how that
doesn't mean that we're giving children autism if that, if
my understanding is correct.

Speaker 7 (01:32:32):
Sure, I mean I'll jump in first. So there's a
number of ways to test whether or not the rate
is truly increasing. So the first thing to say is,
over the world, we've seen a gradual increase in the
global population that has autism from about zero point eight
percent of the population to about two percent of the population.

(01:32:53):
That's what's happened over the past twenty five years of
studies across the world. Now, that's not exactly the exponential
rise that you are and hear about in the United States.
The United States has a lot of unique features though.
You have a ton of people working in this area,
you have a ton of researchers, lots of people have
access to healthcare. There's many reasons why global numbers might
not look like American numbers, but the general idea behind

(01:33:15):
this increased rate of autism. Most of that increases due
to our change in diagnostics and the way that we
label things. So when RFK was a kid, there were
kids that were excluded from school because they were literally
called retarded. They were not allowed to come to school.
They were known as spass and goofs, and they were
the ones that were made fun of and they struggled
throughout life. Now that were they called autistic? No, did

(01:33:38):
they have the same symptoms that the kids today that
are being diagnosed with autism have probably, And the way
that we can control for that are there's some really
elegant studies. One is we take diagnostic criteria from children
and then we ask adults currently living today to go
through a structured interview looking for those things, and yuess what,
we find the same rate in adults that we see

(01:33:59):
in kids. Okay, this idea that it's an exponential right now,
I think the rate is also increasing, but I think
it's increasing gradually, and this is because the extreme of
ages are having kids more often, especially at the older end.
And we do know that older age is related to autism,
especially older age of the father. And we also know
that premature babies and babies with significant developmental disabilities are

(01:34:24):
surviving their postnatal period as soon as they're born. Instead
of instantly dying or dying during childbirth or not being
able to be resuscitated, they're kept alive and survive and
this is good. But this does mean that there's more
neurodiversity in the world because of course these children have
encountered significant harm. Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 14 (01:34:43):
I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded and
that's part of why we see more.

Speaker 7 (01:34:49):
But yeah, I think the.

Speaker 14 (01:34:51):
Two things we know that are related are some genetic
predisposition if there's people in the family that have it,
and the older age of patients as we get older,
I'm an older father myself. You know, you see more
with older patients, and that's more common now than it's
ever been before.

Speaker 7 (01:35:08):
So these are all a part of it.

Speaker 14 (01:35:10):
Once you take a look, for example, going back to
that Swedish study in twenty twenty four that was so good,
that sibling study looks at the genetics of it, and
once you count for the genetics of it, you start
to be able to say, Okay, maybe this's other stuff
like tile mall isn't important?

Speaker 7 (01:35:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 13 (01:35:26):
Yeah, is there a gender element to this as well?

Speaker 7 (01:35:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 13 (01:35:30):
I may have misremembered here. My understanding is that women
FEN people tended to be diagnosed at a lower rate
until relatively recently.

Speaker 7 (01:35:38):
Yeah, so not only is there a gender component, but
I do think that the biological sex of the child
has an impact on the genetic expression, because it seems
like the transmission to males is higher than the transmission
to females. So there might be something buffering about that
extra X chromosome. You know, we have this shrimpy little
Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates. You only have

(01:35:59):
one Y chromosome? Sorry, are you a superman?

Speaker 13 (01:36:04):
I have two whys caves y why you know, Harry,
my ears are so.

Speaker 7 (01:36:08):
There are a number of disorders that the extra X
chromosome is protective for, and I do wonder if that's
the case for autism. But what's also true is we
have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys
should be, and that leads to boys being diagnosed with
autism more frequently than girls. So the girl that's quiet
and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid

(01:36:31):
a lot more quickly than when you see that in
a boy that the parents think autism or the clinician
thinks autism. So there could be some social reasons for
that discrepancy as well. And then the last thing I
really wanted to say is that the really tragic thing
about all of this is profound autism, which autism is
the spectrum. Profound autism is extremely disabling for people around

(01:36:53):
the person. Generally, autistic people enjoy their lives, especially if
the world is set up in a way so that
they can live safely without impediment. Autistic people are perfectly
content to be autistic. And this whole idea of autism
being this travesty, this epidemic, this blight on society, is
really doing a disservice to the wide variety of people

(01:37:15):
that we're now calling autistic, because when our criteria expanded,
we created a whole space of autistic people who are
very what we would call non profound autism. These are
people that have difficulties in social communication or do the
same thing over and over despite you know, it being
at an abnormal level, but it's what they need to
soothe themselves. You know, that will be called autism. Now, Now,

(01:37:39):
would a parent want a child who's in a home
constantly rocking back and forth and just soothing themselves by
licking their fingers or whatever, you know, some very severe
autistic behavior. No, that probably wouldn't be the parent's ideal.
But I've worked with so much autism in my life.
I'm a child in nodicston in psychiatrist. I've seen so
many autistic kids live happy, happy, happy lives artistic. So

(01:38:03):
I'm not a fan of the blight sort of messaging
of it either.

Speaker 13 (01:38:06):
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because that's one
of the worst things about In a sense, one of
the most damaging things about is where people who are
living happy, healthy and fulfilled lives are being like slandered
or pathologized to rided by the government of this country
and that's fucked. Yeah, and I'm sure will have an
impact on those people, because it would have an impact

(01:38:26):
on anyone to see this condition that, as you said, right,
like maybe difficult for people who are not familiar with
it to navigate, but it doesn't mean that you can't
have a fulfilling and happy and very pleasant life. Suddenly
suggested it some kind of massively disabling and terrible travesty
and that the person who gave birth to you is
to blame for this, right right.

Speaker 14 (01:38:49):
That's what really bothers me, is like we're always trying
to find ways to blame mothers. This is yeah, this
is a mantle and I apologize for that. Listener, Please
don't at me for that. Yeah, but part of what
this is like control over women. And while that Swedish
study of mention may not completely close the issue, I

(01:39:09):
think it's pretty clear that the evidence pretty strong against
there being a connection between tel nal and to make
a whole sale governmental recommendation that as a country, for
us to move this way, to make such strong claims,
to have a president come out and just say grit
your teeth and bear it. To women in regards to

(01:39:30):
the one medicine that we've told them they can use
during a pregnancy is insane to me. So there's the
autism issue in the insult essentially to that community, but
also to women in general. It's insane to me that
this is happening right now. Again, there is a bit
of nuance to this issue. As I mentioned, it's not
like totally insane to ask about and question it, but

(01:39:52):
to make a wholesale directional change in how we recommend
managing patients with our pregnant is is nuts?

Speaker 7 (01:40:02):
Is just nuts? Yeah, And to piggyback on that, you know,
like it's really normal. It was normal advice in twenty
twenty four for us to say, yeah, you can use
talent all, but try to use it sparingly. We're not
really sure use it when you need it though, because
we do know that pain and fever and these types
of things are bad for the baby, right, you know,
So this this kind of way in which it's now

(01:40:23):
been massaged. So I saw a letter from doctor Marty Mackeriy,
who's another grifter who's now in the American political system.
There has written a letter basically saying at the bottom,
use it judiciously, and it is the only one that's approved.
So but that's exactly where we were before. There was
no need for a past conference. Every doctor was saying,

(01:40:43):
use talent all sparingly, but you can use it. James Tayley,
what's driving me crazy about this? Yeah?

Speaker 13 (01:40:49):
Please?

Speaker 14 (01:40:49):
This administration has done something. Trump in general has done
something that has blown my mind, which is somehow, time
and time again, I find myself the FAI people and
things that I would never want to defend. Like, first
of on watching Jimmy Kimmel, I don't know how that happened. Yes,

(01:41:10):
I blame Trump for that. Second, like, tylanol is a
dangerous medication. I'm a liver doc. Yes, I feel like
talanyl overdose is causing acute liver injury and acute liver
failure is a massive, real issue across the world, and
it is it's it's a real thing. So there are

(01:41:31):
reasons that we should be watchful of talanol, but this
is not one of them.

Speaker 8 (01:41:35):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:41:36):
Yeah, Personally, I'm a champion of all talanol should be
like the UK, it should be in individually wrapped pieces
because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of
intentional overdose and even ic overdoses that cause liver failure.
So yeah, take away freedoms and right this is the
medical freedom crowd. It's amazing.

Speaker 13 (01:41:54):
Yeah, we should take an advertising break and then come back.
So we'll do that.

Speaker 14 (01:41:58):
Oh god, that would be fantastic if I could take
it now advertising. I could use an ad right now.

Speaker 12 (01:42:01):
So bad.

Speaker 13 (01:42:03):
It's going to be for fucking lemon pepper water, which
is the only pain treatment you.

Speaker 7 (01:42:09):
Should be taking. Bark to put between your teeth.

Speaker 10 (01:42:14):
For sure.

Speaker 13 (01:42:15):
Go get some leaves and fucking eat them. What can
get wrong? All right, we're back. Thank you for that
message from Leaf Pain Relief.

Speaker 7 (01:42:33):
Hit the spot.

Speaker 13 (01:42:34):
It's good. Don't eat leaves. I saw someone posing with
a they were taking their graduation pictures. Very nice setting.
I'm not going to say the flower, I guess just
in case, you can call it quite remarkable hallucinations and
it is not a good idea to be like half
in it. It's a nice looking flower. If you didn't know,
you might have.

Speaker 7 (01:42:51):
Well, now I want to know what the hell you're
talking about. You're going to tell me later.

Speaker 13 (01:42:54):
I'm assuming lived in California. Your whole life.

Speaker 12 (01:42:56):
How do you not know this?

Speaker 13 (01:42:57):
Yeah, I'll text you afterwards.

Speaker 7 (01:42:58):
The dandelions?

Speaker 5 (01:42:59):
Is it d I've been told not to.

Speaker 7 (01:43:04):
It reminds me though there was a TikTok video of
there's been a few of women proudly being pregnant and
ingesting talanol. And to be clear, that's an insane response
to this problem, like please don't take talanol. As a point,
as k was saying before the break, right, helenol does
deplete the glutathione in your body, and it is toxic
to your liver. If you're a deliver, doesn't have the

(01:43:24):
glue to thion necessary, it directly injures the liver. And
this is what happens when you take an overdose, is
it overwhelms the amount of gluteothion that your liver has
and it causes liver damage.

Speaker 14 (01:43:36):
And most pregnant women who want to keep the baby
are very judicious to begin with, not just like downing
shit willy nilly, you know what I mean, Like they're like,
oh God, this is really bad, I bear take something.
It talan all, by the way, sucks, you know, as
a pain medicine. You know it's not gonna it's like
the thing you take when they won't give you anything

(01:43:57):
else is not a great one. So to take it
from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism.
If you're going to make extraordinary claims, you have to have,
if not extraordinary evidence or ponderance of it. So this
is really bothering me, as you can tell, because it
does not exist.

Speaker 13 (01:44:16):
Yeah. I think something you mentioned earlier, like when like
you said, you're back to to a corner where you're
defending like a big farmer and tynel specifically, is the
one thing that they've tried to do is like inhabit
nuance and then disingenuously use it absolutely.

Speaker 7 (01:44:32):
Yes, yes, that's the entire anti vaccines.

Speaker 13 (01:44:35):
Yeah, yeah, right, and then it leads to people responding
in a way that it raises nuance entirely. I understand
where we get that response, but like it's it's not
the correct response, right, Yeah. People want you to be
like this is one hundred percent safe. Right. They want
you to say this is actually the perfect medication and
it's fine and you should have it for breakfast.

Speaker 7 (01:44:54):
And the HHS tweeted out statement that Talanold did in
twenty seventeen basically saying we don't recommend talent All and pregnancy.
But no drug maker recommends any medication. They all say, specifically,
talk to your doctor about this medication. They're not allowed
to recommend the medication. Only doctors can't. So when they're

(01:45:14):
using that language and then HHS tweets it out, HHS
is tweeting it out specifically to give the illusion that
we don't want pregnant people to be taking this medication.
They specifically said we don't recommend it, and that's a
nuance and that's how they use it. And it just sucks.

Speaker 13 (01:45:28):
Right, that's exactly right. And tile Mall, the makers of it.

Speaker 14 (01:45:31):
By the way, I am curious about the fact that
Johnson Johnson spun Off can view. I wonder if they
knew this was coming and that's why they did it
the same way that DuPont spun Off.

Speaker 7 (01:45:40):
It was only three years ago that they did that,
but you didn't know.

Speaker 14 (01:45:43):
Like DuPont spun Off, the company in charge of all
their pfasts they're Forever chemicals, because they knew it was
coming down the pipeline.

Speaker 7 (01:45:49):
I wonder if that was the same reason here. Tal
Mall did this. Well, they put band Aid and nutrigena
in the same group, so I think it was more
just to consolidate home stuff. Interesting.

Speaker 13 (01:45:59):
Yeah, got a press conference coming next week about banding.

Speaker 7 (01:46:03):
It's can sick cause anxiety.

Speaker 14 (01:46:06):
Anyways, It's very interesting to me that this is happening
at all. Really, I mean, what I thought was interesting
about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys
picked up on this too, was you know, I was wondering,
why is this pivot happening? How can RFK Junior be
happy about this? He can't be happy about leaving his
crusade against vaccines. The MOHA community behind him clearly doesn't

(01:46:30):
love that aspect, and I wonder why they were pivoting
to that, and I wonder what you guys think about that.
I did feel that during that press conference, Trump really
went out of his way to sort of give lip
service that we should we should talk about this too,
about vaccines. He talked about vaccines a lot, even though
there's no new evidence about vaccines causing problems. And Trump

(01:46:51):
gave this terrible advice about breaking up the vaccines, which
we know is a terrible idea because that's going to
lead to decrease uptake overall. The more visits you have
to go back to us like you're going to do it. Yeah,
so the more likely you're not going to be vaccinated.
But but it made me wonder why this is happening now,
why they decided to make this pivot, and I wonder
what you both think about that.

Speaker 7 (01:47:13):
My theory is the link with fevers. If I'm being
really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try
and link vaccine induced fever to autism, and they're going
to say, oh, we thought it was the title and all,
but it turns out to be the vaccines. It's the fever,
and the fever is caused by the vaccinees. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:47:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:47:34):
My theory is gender. I think that telling pregnant people
to suck it up is when you've got you know,
your dude's all standing on the podium there right, Like
the majority're pregnant people are going to be women. It's
something that men have been doing to women for millennia,
Like it's a safer bet then yeah, your kid might die,
but you know, you never know.

Speaker 14 (01:47:54):
Yeah, yeah, which actually is you know that brings up
another thing I think we should talk about, which is
what Trump kept saying. Trump kept saying don't take it,
but what's the worst that happens? Nothing bad will come
of it, So it invokes this precautionary principle, which is like,
you know, why not avoid the talent all, what's the
worst that can happen? And that doesn't work here, No,

(01:48:16):
because we know that people are taking this for a fever.
Talme law is not good for inflammation, doesn't work on
inflammation the way advilabbiprofen does it, but it can work
on a fever. And we know that fever can have
some risk at least as much, if not more than
tilnol in harm to the baby and harm to the pregnancy.

(01:48:37):
So to me, the precautionary principle just doesn't apply here.
And to hear the president, I never heard a president
give medical advice before like that. It blew my mind.
I felt like I was disassociating while I was watching this.
I'm like, this cannot be realized. He said it so unequivocally,
don't take talentol, just sec it up. And I tweeted
something that I read from doctor Glockenplocken, who's one of

(01:49:00):
my favorite medical comedians. But he said this will kill people,
and I do agree. I think people were very incredulous
when I said this will kill people, and they were like,
what do you mean people dying of a fever. I'm like, yeah,
kind of like fevers can be really bad for you,
and if you're not going to hospital and the only
thing you have is talentol, it's a really good idea
to take the talentel. And there's some people that don't

(01:49:21):
go to hospital for lots of reasons, and fevers can
kill you.

Speaker 7 (01:49:24):
They just can't.

Speaker 5 (01:49:25):
Yeah, So I.

Speaker 7 (01:49:26):
Disapprove of the Canadian and englishmen referring to the hospital
as hospital. They need you guys to refer to it
as of the hospital.

Speaker 13 (01:49:34):
I've forgotten about that. Yeah, always for the definite article.

Speaker 7 (01:49:36):
Yeah, taking it to a hospital, Thank you guys.

Speaker 13 (01:49:39):
But yeah, I think you're right, Like there is no
like no harm option here, right, Like that is a
damage is done when people don't take this, right.

Speaker 7 (01:49:47):
I just imagine this poor mom you know at home,
you know, doesn't have great healthcare but does have a
bottle of talentol and is battling a sorry I'll americanize this,
like one hundred and four degree fever. Thank you don't
make me do mad? Yeah, you're going to make me
do mad, you know, And and you know it's it's
around that one hundred and three hundred and four mark
where we actually get really worried about the person's brain.

(01:50:09):
We get really worried about their health and what's going
to happen, and what would happen to that person in hospital?
They would absolutely get talent al right away, prescribed by
a doctor right that moment. And so I worry about this.
I worry about this mom presenting a hospital with her fever,
she's pregnant, and the doctors say, okay, we're going to
give you talanol and she says, noah, right, what because
I don't want I don't want my child to have autism?

Speaker 14 (01:50:31):
Because people are listening to this guy. First of all,
again the hospital. Second, they're going to listen to this guy.

Speaker 12 (01:50:37):
It's insane.

Speaker 7 (01:50:38):
People are really going to take this advice. And I
could see, you know, especially the more Trump following people
saying you will never give me talinl not in this hospital,
right And so so it does sound silly that not
taking talanol could kill you. But if you're so scared
of talinal because it causes autism, that you don't take
it when it's recommended to you by where it's prescribed

(01:51:01):
to you by dark you could die. And I won't
be surprised when there are more fever induced deaths in
twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six in the United States.
I already have the CDC Wonder Data search ready to
go because I study mortality all the time, and I
am absolutely sure we're going to see a few more
fever induced deaths than we would have previously.

Speaker 13 (01:51:21):
Geez, yeah, maybe like we can finish up by explaining
to people, like, you know, if you're talking to someone
in your family, right, someone who maybe isn't a listener

(01:51:42):
sadly to either of our podcasts. I know this isn't
directly the area either of you specialized in, but from
what I understand, pregnant people like the way that drugs
are categorized, as we spoke about earlier on. That's not like, yeah,
go ahead and take all of these right, there's like
probably fine if you have to, probably a bad idea
unless you really need to, like maybe some straight up don't. Yeah,

(01:52:06):
can you explain that for people?

Speaker 7 (01:52:08):
Sure? So there's a classification system and it's technical, but
it's exactly like that. There are very few medications that
are like totally fine. These are medications that are given
during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy. But
for the most part, pretty much everything else in my
world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodazepines

(01:52:30):
and whatnot, they all have the same classification, which is
basically contraindicated. Don't take it unless your doctor persuades it
for you. Now, we still get pregnant people with depression
and psychosis and who need all these medications, and so
we do have to interpret it based off of the
data that we have, and the data that we have

(01:52:50):
always comes late, so if we find a problem, it's
found too late, and generally it's precautionary. So typically I
don't know cave if there's a similar thing in GI work,
But like for me, I'll get a call all the time. Well,
we have this woman, she's thirty two, she's really worried.
She normally takes antidepressants, but she's thinking about stopping them
because she's really worried about passing into her baby or whatever.

(01:53:13):
And I'm like, how bad is the depression? Well, it
was really bad. She was hospitalized three times and nearly died.
I was like, probably want to keep antidepressant treatment going
and just let her know that there could be some
harm to the fetus. But depression is way worse. And
if we just go with God, you know, do your best.

Speaker 14 (01:53:30):
There are certain medications where we are going to say you, absolutetion,
take these during pregnancy.

Speaker 5 (01:53:35):
Yeah, and you should.

Speaker 7 (01:53:36):
Discuss that with your obstrician. You to talk that over
with your.

Speaker 14 (01:53:41):
Gynecologist and your primary care doctor. You should talk it
over with your medical team. That's great, but every medication
has some small amount of risk, some larger than others.
But it's really about the risk versus the benefit. And
this has been well studied by the experts, and what
you've heard, what those people have heard from Trump and

(01:54:05):
RFK Junior is well outside of the normal recommendations right
from the experts like the ACOG, the American College of
Obstetricians and kind ofcologists, the people who have been keeping
our pregnant patients alive and relatively well for many, many years.
This is well outside of those recommendations. And while it's

(01:54:26):
an interesting topic and I think maybe you know, sure,
i'd like to see more studies on it. I'm never
going to say don't study this more. I would say
that the preponderance of evidence and scientific belief and medical
belief in this one goes against what they're saying, and
I would say, at least talk it over with your doctor.
If you have a question, talk it over with your doctor.

(01:54:47):
And that's you mentioned it before. Town Law has sort
of like, you know, try to hedge its bets by
saying talk it over with your doctor. But the reason
they do that is they know most doctors are going
to be reasonable about this and follow the scientific evidence
that's there. So I would say if they really have
a question, they shoul talk about with their doctor.

Speaker 7 (01:55:05):
Because Trump, whether or not they love.

Speaker 14 (01:55:07):
Him or not, this is well out of his range
of understanding, and he is getting It's like a game
of telephone. He's getting a version of the medical information
transmit to him by RFK Junior, who is getting a
weird version of it from his belief system. And it's
being supported by people who are there solely just just

(01:55:30):
there to do the back and call of Trump at
this point, and that's super dangerous. And so if they
can keep an open mind about it, talking over with
their doctor, continue to do what their parents did. I
think they're going to be okay.

Speaker 13 (01:55:45):
Yeah, real quick, because like for reasons that if you
related to the way that we do healthcare in the
United States, people sometimes are retident to talk to their doctor,
unable to talk to a doctor, reliable sources of medical information.
That is the shit that you find on Google. Give
us a a five minute primer.

Speaker 7 (01:56:01):
Yeah. So you know, in almost every jurisdiction there is
an official health agency that you can go to their
website and get good health data. So in BC we
have Health Length BC and there's a number that you
can call to speak to a nurse. In America, you
have great I would say it used to be great.
Like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they
got a little hokey. I would still say, you know,

(01:56:23):
there are some really good American places that you can go.
Male Clinic has a lot of public facing information that
has pretty good general descriptions. But just make sure it's
from a place that is official, because there is a
whole space now that's going to be opened up because
the second part of this presentation that RFK gave was

(01:56:44):
about a generic medication that might help some people with
a very specific form of autism. And I promise you
the amount of huckstering that's going to happen based on that.
The alternatives. You know, we made a joke about lemon
water before the ad break, but there are to be
people who are going to be selling the alternative titalinol
that is autism free, and that's really worrisome.

Speaker 14 (01:57:07):
Yeah, Be wary of anyone that has something in their
Instagram there to talk their wellness post that uses the
words detox. Be wary about ancient remedies. Be wary about
anyone that is selling something like doctor Oz, who, by
the way, sells a version of the full linic acid

(01:57:30):
or the lukovorin that they're talking about here, So be
wary about that.

Speaker 7 (01:57:35):
We don't sell shit.

Speaker 14 (01:57:36):
Be wary about people like doctor Baccarelli, the dean of
Harvard Epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a
good doctor from the friends I have in Harvard, they
say he's not a bad guy. But be wary about
the fact anytime you see someone's making one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars off of court trial to sue tailanol
and has a vested interest in these things, so you

(01:57:58):
should be wary about those things. That's definitely something to
look for in if you're looking for trusted source. Speaking
of hucksters, you could listen to my podcast The House
of Pod anywhere you find podcasts where we're going to
talk about medical stuff just like this, and I will
bring you trusted sources.

Speaker 13 (01:58:15):
Beautiful. That was all a long play to get to
listen to Kave's podcast, But.

Speaker 7 (01:58:19):
I'm in it for the long con. I'm in it
for the long con, buddy.

Speaker 13 (01:58:21):
Yeah, thank you for helping us clear that up a bit.
I think it's a real rough time for healthcare in general,
and especially people with autism, like like well nero divergent people.
It really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government
bad mouthing people. So, yeah, we are thinking of you.

Speaker 7 (01:58:40):
Very similar to the issue with trans kids. Like I'm
a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door
to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the
route of Florida and other things with respect to trans policies,
and it's just got to suck to be a trans
kid in Florida right now. It's got to suck to
be a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing

(01:59:01):
what's coming down the pipeline, and it'll be the same
for people with autism and families with autistic kids.

Speaker 5 (01:59:06):
Yeah, yep.

Speaker 14 (01:59:08):
I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours.

Speaker 13 (01:59:12):
Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14 (01:59:13):
We didn't even talk about hepatitis B. By the way,
we didn't talk about hepatities people. We can talk about
this on the point. There's just so much. There's so much,
and it's so terrible, and you're absolutely right, it's really
like for that community right now.

Speaker 7 (01:59:26):
By the way, I wanted to debunk something because it's
been said multiple times.

Speaker 13 (01:59:30):
Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 7 (01:59:31):
RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I
didn't know anybody autistic when I was you know, when
I was a kid or whatever. I've never met someone
autistic my age. Donald Triplett was the very first person
diagnosed with autism in nineteen forty three, I believe nineteen
forty three. He just died last year. I think he
was something like eighty ninety years old. Okay, autistic people

(01:59:56):
are old too. This idea that there aren't old autio
fistic people is so asked backwards. It was just not diagnosed. Yes,
and and and it's it's such a shame because when
when when Donald Tripplett passed, you know, like people in
psychiatry notes, that's not the type of thing that people
in the world noticed. But he was the very first
autistic person. He lived a full life, he was an engineer.

(02:00:20):
He had autism, it was diagnosed. He was the first
ever case diagnosed. And he also lived a life. And
and so for for RFK to just erase him completely
and say I've never known an old person to have autism,
it's just ridiculous.

Speaker 13 (02:00:34):
Yeah. And if you conduct yourself as Rskade does, but
being a piece of shit to neurodivergent people, then even
people who who have been diagnosed, I'm just going to
be like, hey man, yeah, I wanted to talk to
you about more because you're being a turd to them,
and like you're being unkind. Yeah, Like what do you expect?

Speaker 7 (02:00:50):
Yeah, I mean yeah, Tyler grand In is like how
old is she now, like in her seventies. I mean,
it's it's absurd to think that this is a totally
new thing.

Speaker 14 (02:01:02):
I mean it it also tells me that he was
probably a bit sheltered and it probably didn't meet enough people.

Speaker 7 (02:01:09):
Wow, Kennedy sheltered.

Speaker 8 (02:01:10):
Wow.

Speaker 13 (02:01:11):
Yeah. Yeah, he's had a different experience of life than
any of us. It's fair to say.

Speaker 7 (02:01:16):
I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler
and All pun. I'm very proud of that. I usually
do pretty much every time, and it kisses my wife
off so much. I'm really proud of you, man. I
showed a lot of growth.

Speaker 13 (02:01:27):
Yeah, yeah, that's great. I was gonna make one, but
I thought I didn't want to want to offend. Yeah,
thank you very much. Where can people find both of
you on the internet if they'd like to, oh, you know,
in person?

Speaker 14 (02:01:41):
Don't find that as You can listen to my podcast,
The House of Pod. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll
hear people like James, you'll hear people like Tyler. Last
time Tyler was on was actually for episode two eighty four.
We did an episode on Adult ADHD with author Rex King.
She's Brad so that's a good episode to listen to.

(02:02:03):
And you can find me on Blue Sky at CAVEMD.
I still have a Twitter account and Instagram account, but
I don't really use those that much, so find me
on Blue Sky, Blue Sky by the way, as a
shout out, as a plug. I think it's good for
science if you're interested in science based stuff. It may
not be that much fun for everything else, but at
least in terms of like if you want to follow

(02:02:23):
doctors scientists, that's a good place to go. That's where
a lot of us have gone. So I'll be there
at Blue Sky.

Speaker 7 (02:02:30):
Yeah, and I'm I am still on Twitter Tyler Black
thirty two. I'm slugging it out. It is a lot
of hate and a lot of death threats now, especially
as I've I've been on a few trans podcasts, I've
been on quite a few medical anti vacs and vaccine podcasts,
So you know, I'll pop up from time to time
on a podcast or something. But I'm not really have

(02:02:51):
anything to plug anymore. I'm just really hoping that we
can continue to fight this sort of It's a really
disgusting reality in this decade that misinformation has won the
day and literally misinformers are the political leaders now, and
misinformation has just eroded science to the point where I

(02:03:11):
don't know if America is ever going to get it back.

Speaker 14 (02:03:14):
Yeah, if we do. This has set us back many years.
This has set us back many many years.

Speaker 13 (02:03:18):
Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

Speaker 7 (02:03:21):
Well that was fun.

Speaker 13 (02:03:22):
Let's send on that hopeful note. Yeah, all right, hey everyone,

(02:03:44):
it's James here. We promised that we would get you
something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's
series of executive orders targeting certain groups, and we reached
out to a lawyer, Moe, who is a fantastic lawyer,
and we asked he into you them. They said they
had just done an interview with Final Store Radio, which

(02:04:05):
is an excellent show, and they suggested that I take
listen to that. I took a listen to that, and
I think it's a fantastic interview and I don't think
as much as that we can add to it. So
we're going to re air that interview in full. The
one thing I would add to it is that there
have been a number of cases recently where grand juries
have not returned an indictment. That's relatively rare, but we

(02:04:29):
are seeing that more frequently, and that just enforces everything
that most says here, which is that at this time
we still have separation of powers, and at this time
the executive cannot simply make law. One still has to
be prosecuted according to a statute by a district attorney
or a USA attorney. Right, they President cannot just make

(02:04:51):
law in this instance pertaining to the First Amendment by
executive order. That doesn't mean that they will not be harassment.
And as you're here here, there's two distinct things, and
I think MO gives an excellent outline on how we
should think about and conceive this moment in American history. So,
without any more of me taking your time, this is

(02:05:11):
an excellent interview that bursted with MO. I hope you
enjoy it, and if you would like to check out
Final Store Radio, you can do so using the link
that I will put below this episode.

Speaker 19 (02:05:23):
Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location,
or other contexts that would help us understand who you are.

Speaker 10 (02:05:30):
Good morning. I'm Moura Meltzer Cohen. Everybody calls me MO.
My pronouns are they are MO. I'm an abolitionist, an educator,
and an attorney in New York. Primarily I represent people
who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and
do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements.

Speaker 19 (02:05:52):
So we're here to talk about the recent White House
statements following the assass I mean, I mean following the
reelection of Trump, but more recently the assassination of Charles
Kirk that Antifa is domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 7 (02:06:08):
Can you talk about what.

Speaker 19 (02:06:09):
Legally changed with the executive order of September twenty second
of this year or yesterday ism when we're recording this
National Presidential Security Memo number seven titled countering Domestic Terrorism
and Organized Political Violence. Again, it came out on September
twenty fifth, What changed with those?

Speaker 10 (02:06:28):
Well, Before I answer that question, the first thing I
want to say is nothing that I say on this
program is legal advice. This is information. If you want
legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged
conversation with a human attorney who is admitted to practice

(02:06:49):
in your jurisdiction. As to your overall question, what changed
legally is essentially nothing. I think the top level takeaway
here is that these exists executive orders are frightening. They
are a frightening contribution to an already dangerous political discourse,
and they may very well end up being quite disruptive

(02:07:11):
to left movements, including I think primarily centrist liberal movements.
But nothing that was legal last week is illegal this week.
Certainly not because of those statements. And the state cannot
prosecute you for things that were legal when you did them.
So yeah, I mean, I can't see the future, but

(02:07:34):
as of right now, the law and the constitution have
not changed. So if this administration wants to in any
meaningful legal way designate anyone, any group as domestic terrorists,
they can change the law, which is not going to
be quick or easy, or they can dispense with the law.

(02:07:56):
But under the current legal regime, there is no mechanism
that would make it illegal to be and to whatever
that means, or to hold anti fascist values, or to
assemble or to petition the government. And you know, to
be clear, not that doing any of those things or

(02:08:19):
being any of those things are necessarily effective at creating
social change right now, but my point really is they're
not illegal.

Speaker 19 (02:08:28):
Just to sort of throw this back your way, So
there was when you were responding to that, it made
me think of there's a veteran who lost a bunch
of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know,
about a year ago hit this region. He was recorded
like he went pretty viral calling out and shouting down

(02:08:48):
a state politician who had a like public meeting here
in the area, just saying there's been like total like
lack of support after the storm and hear all the
needs and you're just a lying politicans and this sort
of thing. The same man, right after the executive order
that Trump made about burning US flags, went out and

(02:09:09):
burned one across from the White House and then he
got arrested for it. Like I thought that there was
a Supreme Court decision back in the eighties that said
it's not actually illegal to burn a flag. So does
that make his executive orders now law?

Speaker 5 (02:09:23):
No, there is.

Speaker 10 (02:09:25):
A Supreme Court decision. It's called Texas v. Johnson, and
it is still law. And in fact, after Texas v. Johnson,
Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning
the American flag and it was found on constitutional It

(02:09:46):
is astonishing and illuminating that that man was arrested for
burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct.
I will say, I'm not sure what he was at actually.

Speaker 20 (02:10:01):
Charged with, right if he was charged with, you know,
creating a fire hazard, I suppose that apart from the
fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation.

Speaker 10 (02:10:13):
I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating
a fire hazard in a public place or something like that,
but no flag burning remains protected regardless of what the
President or Congress says about it. It would take either
an amendment to the Constitution or a very serious change

(02:10:37):
in Supreme Court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal.

Speaker 19 (02:10:42):
Okay, Yeah, so this is the distinction I'd love for
us to get back to in a moment between like
legality versus what, you know, the sort of like box
that that powers decide to put a thing into. Like
I know, I've I've definitely been totained, not for being
an annoyance to the cops, but within my legal rights.

(02:11:03):
But they'll say, ah, but your shoes untied on a
Tuesday whatever, and then waste my time.

Speaker 10 (02:11:11):
Let's talk about that. And because I do want to
talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements,
and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are
and can be and have long been used to surveil
and disrupt and target the left. But actually, before we

(02:11:33):
do that, why don't we talk about sort of some
of the categories that are played in playing here and
be really clear about definitions, or at least understand that
there are differences between these categories, right, because there is
a difference between the law and political discourse, and there
is a difference importantly between law and power. And there's certainly,

(02:11:58):
at least on daylight, between the legal constraints on state
power and the state's power to ignore those constraints. And
then I think what will be significant to this discussion
is there is a significant difference between antifa, which is
a set of practices or beliefs that are not necessarily

(02:12:22):
even all that well defined, and what this administration refers
to when it uses or deploys the word antifa. And
there is yet more difference between the booking man that
is being invoked by that word and the individuals and
organizations that the administration actually intends to target. There's a

(02:12:43):
difference between political targeting, surveillance, disruption, and prosecution, right, those
things are all different, And there's a difference between prosecution
and conviction. And there is an important difference between someone's
political belief and associations which are and remain protected by

(02:13:05):
the First Amendment and politically motivated conduct that is illegal.
So you know, executive orders and these kinds of statements
on national security are policy statements. They don't in and
of themselves make things happen. They don't in and of
themselves change the law. And an executive order that is

(02:13:25):
inconsistent with the constitution or existing law at least ought
to be unenforceable.

Speaker 19 (02:13:31):
Okay, but yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know,
cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate,
and those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting.
They can affect your job prospects, they can affect your
housing stability. They can affect whether or not some unhinged

(02:13:53):
person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy
theory about you. But so that distinction of like, well,
you might get exonerated by a court after you've been
held in pre trial for a year, I guess that
is an important distinction, right, because it means you're not
spending you know, an extra thirty years or twenty years
or whatever behind bars.

Speaker 7 (02:14:14):
With the terrorism enhancement, well.

Speaker 10 (02:14:15):
I mean that is also called comfort. I'm really not
trying to be dismissive. I think it's important to recognize
what these distinctions are and the primarily because I want
people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared
for and what we need to be worried about, and
what tools we have and what tools are effective at

(02:14:38):
resisting what's coming down the pike. And in order to
do that, we need to know what's coming down the pipe.
We need to know who actually has power in this situation.
The fact that an executive order doesn't change the law
does not mean an executive order will not result in
a lot more state repression, or that it won't disrupt
movements or even ruin lives. It doesn't mean that Trump

(02:14:58):
is not going to a comp the thing that I
think he's actually trying to accomplish here in the immediate
short term, which is broadcasting to his base that non
state action against people identified as or perceived to be
part of the despised group you know is desirable by
this administration will be condoned by this administration. I think

(02:15:22):
that is important to recognize. Saying that it doesn't change
a law does not mean it is dangerous. I just
want to be very precise about I think the ways
in which it is likely to be dangerous, and some
of the ways that it might not might not be.
And again I'm not trying to be dismissive, but state
repression exists all the time. State repression against leftists and

(02:15:43):
anarchism in particular has been ongoing the whole time. This
is not a Trump thing, And in fact, I think
it's important to note that the executive who's probably most
responsible for having laid this groundwork is Biden, who set
forth a policy strategy that focused on funding the federal
targeting of what at that point he was calling political extremists,

(02:16:05):
which was a label that was being applied to groups
on the left as well as neo Nazis and all
right groups. So this administration has already been engaged, and
not just this administration, right, we have centuries at this
point of targeted disruption of left movements. The way that

(02:16:26):
it's currently being rationalized is a little bit different. The
way that it's being broadcast normalized is a little bit different,
but it's I will say, I don't think this is
actually anything all that new or different, And the difference
in how dangerous it is is one of scale maybe

(02:16:48):
rather than it's a difference in scope, Rather than nature.

Speaker 19 (02:16:52):
I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction. I
think that like sometimes people in the center and even
sometimes people on the left will look in particular things
that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory, they're like confusing,
and they're bombastic, and there's a part of us that
we'll say like, no, but that's that's not what's actually happening,

(02:17:15):
that's not what actually was the motivation for that person,
or like that person voted you know, Republican in the
last election. Whatever. And so I think that that distinction
that you're making of you know this, this may not
this may be like an approach to motivate the base,
it may prove not to be legally like standing, but
that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on people.

(02:17:36):
And what we should be looking for out of this
is a projection of not only like all call to
action or red meat for the base or whatever, but
also like a clear proposition of that's meant to chill
us and chill some society, that these are the intentions
moving forward. This is the narrative, and this is the

(02:17:58):
story that they're going to be going.

Speaker 10 (02:17:59):
With right absolutely, And I think it is important to
point out. Right now, we're seeing a lot of people
pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact
that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality. And
I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing

(02:18:21):
out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful.
I mean, I think it's part of the point, right
Manipulating the facts, making narrative claims that are totally unsupportable,
and muddying the waters in this really fundamental way is
part of the project.

Speaker 19 (02:18:39):
There was a German jurist I guess who became the
highest jurist during the Nazi regime in Germany, but continued
writing theory like was writing it before as a member
of the Conservative Revolution that they called it, and then
afterwards he survived the war and continued living in Germany
writing Carl Schmidt, who talked a lot about like the

(02:19:02):
limits of liberal approaches towards legality and liberal governance, with
a belief that like it makes sense to push it
to its limits and beyond break it and recognize that
governance is about the imposition of power and the sheltering
of those who are under the controller or in the

(02:19:23):
protected community of the state with a consideration of war
through the state's power against internal enemies as well as
external enemies. And this is the devil's bargain that we make.
It's like Hobbs on steroids. And it feels like a
lot of the stuff that the Heritage Foundation and Project
twenty twenty five has been pushing is that they have this.

(02:19:44):
I know that there are some theocrats in that movement.
There's the unitary executive theory that a lot of them
have been pushing, and they'll play with this idea like
the Trump administration will play with this identity of the
King King Trump or whatever the on as it were,
like making these executive decisions and being unbeholden to anything else.

(02:20:04):
And they've actually been like, you know, saying to courts,
you can't stop us from deporting these peoples who with
unsafe third country whatever, stop us. I wonder if, like
I wonder if you have any comments on this, if
I'm coming out of left field or what.

Speaker 10 (02:20:20):
Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt as opposed
to the Heritage Foundation, he was at least intellectually honest.

Speaker 11 (02:20:27):
Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where
they're trying to normalize what we Schmidt would have called
like a state of exception, where they're sort of unbridled
executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints
on state power.

Speaker 10 (02:20:41):
Right. And it's funny because I've been in conversations over
the last months where I'm talking with a bunch of
my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the
current legal regime, and we're talking about how dangerous it
is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law,
you know, And it's sort of amusing for a bunch

(02:21:02):
of anarchists to be like, oh, no, the rule of
laws collapsing. But when I'm talking about the rule of
law in this way, I'm really talking about constraints on
state power, and those are what's collapsing. And that's exactly
what Schmidt envisioned and argued for. Frankly, and I do
think we're seeing that. I think one of the things
that I noticed in some of these eos, especially the

(02:21:22):
couple of statements from the last few days, is he
keeps talking about things like love of God and Christian
anti Christian sentiment, which is I mean, you know, this
is entirely incompatible with the First Amendment, which provides no
state shall establish your religion, right. I mean, we really
are outside the contours of recognized you know, legal norms,

(02:21:49):
constitutional norms, and I think a lot of this stuff
is functioning and is meant to normalize this kind of
discourse and to inject it not only into the exercise
of government power, but to normalize it in terms of
what people understand to be legitimate legal discourse.

Speaker 19 (02:22:21):
Kind of shifting a bit like let's get into some
of the implications of this. So if it hasn't changed law,
but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted.
I've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and
getting docsing attention. There's a website now I think called
like who Killed Charlie Kirk? Are the people who killed
Charlie Kirk or something like that, and maybe an app.
It's kind of like the post Charlie Kirk assassination version

(02:22:45):
of Canary emission. Does this mean that police are coming
after people for sharing memes? Is that happening? Is that
what's happening in these cases?

Speaker 10 (02:22:54):
I mean police have always been coming after people for
sharing memes. I would say, I get calls at least
every month from people who have been visited by federal
agents because they said something on the Internet that was
upsetting to somebody else and then they reported it, and
the FBI is just following up on a tip. But

(02:23:15):
that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment. Let me
say that in human.

Speaker 12 (02:23:20):
Language, thank you.

Speaker 10 (02:23:23):
This does not undermine the First Amendment. The First Amendment
still exists, and all of the legal framework around having
the right to say things as long as those things
are not true threats, that still exists. So it is
not unusual for people to be targeted or monitored or

(02:23:48):
visited by law enforcement, but typically that stuff doesn't actually
really go anywhere. I am concerned about people being subject
to doxing and having negative social content sequences and fallout
from this kind of stuff, and it certainly is you know,
can be life ruining. Again, I don't mean to trivialize
the effects of this kind of retaliation social retaliate, but

(02:24:12):
it is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution
or a criminal conviction. It's a different set of mechanisms. Now,
one thing that I do think is interesting is that
these eos and the statement that came out on the
twenty second and yesterday particularly identify certain modes of that
kind of social conduct that you're talking about, like dotsing swatting, right,

(02:24:36):
which is making a false report of like an ongoing
violent crime so that a swat team shows up and
raids somebody's.

Speaker 12 (02:24:44):
Home, which could be deadly right, This is.

Speaker 10 (02:24:47):
Very dangerous and interestingly to me anyway, there are these
specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements,
and those specific behaviors are largely tool of the right.
People on the left are not notably interested in sending
law enforcement to someone's house. So there is a perverse

(02:25:07):
way in which this may end up being sort of protective,
I suppose, because I think it would be very difficult
for the government to go after the people who are
exposing ICE agents, which again is not illegal right now.
Even if it were to become illegal, it isn't right now,
and it would be very hard for them to go
after those folks and not also go after the folks

(02:25:31):
who are running that silly website about people who say
something mean about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 19 (02:25:37):
Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, And this is
the speculation outside of like legal advice or any not
that we're giving legal advice, but outside of like the legal.

Speaker 10 (02:25:44):
Framework, definitely not giving legal advice.

Speaker 19 (02:25:47):
I mean it kind of points to a thing that
already this hypocrisy or this difference between what it's called
when one party does it versus what it's called when
another party does it, like outside of the fact that
the government gets to do what it was wants to
until the government stops itself from doing a thing. I mean,
it feels like it's a part of the creation of
a differentiated subjectivity. Like there's the subject of the state

(02:26:09):
that falls under the values that are being attacked Christianity, whiteness, heteronormativity,
these like patriotism in these certain ways versus the people
that are doing these same things but are corrupt, are dirty,
are outside our internal enemies, are Soros funded. However we

(02:26:33):
want to like that. But yeah, I guess that's not
I mean, that's this is nothing new. It's just an
amplification of that same right.

Speaker 10 (02:26:41):
Yeah, very much. And you know what is changing a
little bit, although all of these threads have been present,
is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of
targeting with respect to in particular Palestine, solidarity movements, gender
and unconforming people, and what they're calling anti buzz. So,

(02:27:01):
you know, we're seeing we've been seeing congressional investigations, the
allocation of funds to federal law enforcement, purging not just individuals,
but whole agencies that the administration feels are insufficiently aligned
with its priority replacing federal law enforcement that and I
mean ranging from FBI agents on the ground to doj

(02:27:22):
with people who will enthusiastically and blindly pursue these priorities,
and using a lot of resources to target the nonprofit
text status and funding of groups identified as being aligned
with any of the disfavored movements. And one of the
things that they're doing is kind of it's this real spaghetti,

(02:27:46):
you know, throwing everything at it, and it's very overwhelming.
It's overwhelming for movement infrastructure, it's overwhelming for legal for
people on the ground, and it's all happening at once,
and I think it's all being it's mutually compounding, it's
mutually reinforcing, it's demoralizing, and in particular, the stuff that's

(02:28:08):
happening with immigration is so devastating, and because immigration is
so wholly under the control of the executive. That is
an area where he's able to sort of make a
policy and make it so and have it be carried
out by FIAT. And he has made his own private

(02:28:28):
army with ice. And I think one of the effects
that I in just in my observation, that that has
had is that people see that happening and assume that
he has that level of control over everything else. And
I do want to point out, like, again, it's absolutely

(02:28:49):
devastating to see what's happening in the immigration space, but
in fact he does not have that level of control
over the ret of government and over non immigration laws,
and I think that's really important to remember.

Speaker 19 (02:29:06):
Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting. There's a
lot of people that have talked and not to get
too far down the road with this, but like with
the like attempt to normalize sending national guard or sending
active military to different states, or federalizing national guards to
be present from different states in these places, almost like

(02:29:28):
if it's constant and like overlapping enough, then eventually just
military being on the streets generally rousing houseless folks is
going to be a normalized thing.

Speaker 10 (02:29:39):
Man, I'm in New York. There's military people in all
price like that got very normalized post nine to eleven
in certain places. And so you know, again this is
not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new.

Speaker 19 (02:29:54):
So to get back to antifa, Sure, Antifa, Antifa. How
is the administration identifying Antifa and the left and what
are they actually dismantling and attacking. I'm thinking like he
loves talking about bilfunds or like lgbt QIA, youth advocacy organizations,

(02:30:16):
secularist groups, like yeah, what's going on?

Speaker 10 (02:30:19):
Yeah, well this is this is where things get really fun.
Most of the groups that are actually being targeted are
not remotely related to antifa. George Soros is not antifa,
the various legal defense funds are not Antifa. Antifa is
the rationale, but not the reality. So one of the

(02:30:39):
interesting issues here is that a significant group of the
people who really need to be very worried are people
who work in the nonprofit sector, in extremely normal and
liberal community advocacy organizations and NGOs. And these are people
who have nothing whatsoever to do with Antifa by any
stretch of the imagination, who are being attacked, whose funding

(02:31:01):
is being attacked who are primarily I would say at risk,
not because they have engaged in anything approaching unlawful conduct,
and frankly, I think the biggest risk for many of
those people is the anticipatory compliance of their funders. We
have seen a really similar thing happen with universities, where

(02:31:22):
universities have been targeted by the state, by the federal
government and have been accused in particular of anti Semitism,
and frankly, I think it would be the work of
an afternoon for general counsel at any of these universities
to point out that, in fact, there is a legally

(02:31:43):
established difference between anti Semitism and anti Zionism, that criticism
of the nation state of Israel is in fact entirely
legally distinct from criticism of or threats against Jewish people.
And if any of these universities actually bothered to challenge

(02:32:07):
these allegations, I think that they would win in court
on the law.

Speaker 5 (02:32:13):
And what we're.

Speaker 10 (02:32:14):
Seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge these allegations,
settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to
the allegedly aggrieved parties, and capitulating in ways that are
unnecessary unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and seed more ground,

(02:32:40):
not just more ground than is legally called for, but
more ground than is even being asked for in these cases.
And so you know, this is to me one of
the great dangers of normalizing these discourses is that these
large institutions are engaged in acts of self preservation that

(02:33:01):
actually undermine civil society, when even a small amount of
courage would go a very long way to preserving it.

Speaker 19 (02:33:10):
I think we also sort of saw this in the
early days of the administration with legal firms that had
brought challenges to the administration in the past backing down
or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration.
And we're seeing it now also with some of these
large media corporations silencing some of their pundits or whatever,

(02:33:32):
or in some cases, I mean it's clearly quid pro
quo because they've got, you know, a merger that's being
discussed by the FCC at the moment.

Speaker 10 (02:33:42):
Well, what we've seen, though, we have seen a lot
of that sort of craven capitulation. But what we've also
seen is when we fight, we win. Now, I'm not
trying to be a Pollyanna about this. What I'm trying
to say is the demands that are being made by
this particular administration are actually so far beyond the pale
that based on our legal regime as it currently is,

(02:34:05):
when we fight, we win, and so I think it
is very worth reminding people that, however imperfect the law is,
the current state of the law forbids much of what
this administration is doing, and it is actually worth standing
up to it. There are other groups of people similarly

(02:34:26):
who are not related to Antifa, and one of those
groups is toasters, like including boomers, who are on Facebook
and Twitter making jokes about how the right it's so hypocritical,
and those people are getting targeted, and I would just
gently remind everyone that the First Amendment does still exist
and that the solution to repression is not self censorship

(02:34:49):
but courage. And also, as I have said many times,
including to you on this program, discretion is the better
part of valor, and not everything needs to be said
on the internet, so maybe think about it before you
post something that you would not like to hear read
back to you by a humorless prosecutor. Then we have
these other groups that are engaged in exposing law enforcement,

(02:35:10):
which I referred to a minute ago. And I think
the groups that are exposing ICE are definitely going to
be targeted have already been targeted for that activity, but
it sort of remains to be seen how that can
happen while also protecting Canary mission. Right then, we have
groups that are being perceived as or identified as Antifa,

(02:35:34):
who are the people who are like doing food not
bombs and community gardening and cooperative bookstores and prisoner letter writing,
all of which are extremely First Amendment protected activities and
all of which are not only likely to be highly surveiled,
are already highly surveiled. And this is the group of
people who I think are actually probably most used to
this and best prepared for it, and also might be

(02:35:56):
really hard to prosecute effectively because they're not doing crimes.
And you know, like the NGOs that we were talking about,
the biggest point of exposure for all of these groups
is likely to be financial. We can certainly anticipate that
the state is highly interested in looking at all of
our bank records, to the extent that our bank records exist.

Speaker 5 (02:36:17):
With all the.

Speaker 10 (02:36:18):
Money we have, right like, we're all handing around the
same staff of twenty singles to each other. But hey,
you know wirefraud. What I can say is that you know,
something like a bail fund, and you know, community support
funds do need to be very cautious. That has already

(02:36:39):
always been the case, And this is a really good
time to hire a CPA to go over your books
and to make sure that you have kept really meticulous records,
to make sure that if you have raised money for something,
you have only used it for the thing that you
said it was going to be used for. And this
is once again something that largely is a feature of

(02:37:03):
far right organizing.

Speaker 20 (02:37:05):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:37:05):
I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon was
actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money
to do something.

Speaker 5 (02:37:13):
Build the wall.

Speaker 12 (02:37:13):
Build the wall.

Speaker 10 (02:37:16):
He was raising money to build the wall, but not
using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud.

Speaker 11 (02:37:20):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:37:21):
So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already
know that you have to be very careful about how
you raise that money and how you monitor and track
and use that money. So most of the people, I
would say, the overwhelming majority of people who are sort
of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring
A have already been subject to it, and b haven't
actually done anything unlawful. And you know that doesn't mean

(02:37:44):
this won't be disrupted. It just means, Look, I'm not
naive enough to say that your innocence will protect you,
but it's a good start. And then we have folks
who maybe actually do engage in unlawful conduct or revolutionary action,
or people about whom that claim could somewhat credibly be made.
And that's actually just a different a different group, right,

(02:38:05):
And those things were illegal last week and they're illegal now,
and they're not more illegal because they're politically motivated. Right,
Although you know there are terrorism enhancements and sentencing enhancements
and things like that. The fact is, like, you know,
it can't be more illegal to spray paint Free Gaza
on the side of a building than it is to
spray paint I Love Trump on the side of a building. Right.

Speaker 19 (02:38:28):
I mean, what whether or not this like pans out
in the courts, right is one thing. But I know
that like, say, for the library case that happened here
where people were arrested because some people were filming in
this like Palestine related workshop in a public library and
they were asked to stop filming, and then a scuffle

(02:38:49):
broke out and a phone got knocked to the ground
and people got apparently dragged outside. Again, I was not
there for this, but like now the people are facing
like people who were in the crowd, who are not
the people who were filming or facing charges of ethnic intimidation.
That's a very specific case in a different jurisdiction from
where you are practicing law. But it's not just about

(02:39:09):
like what's being charged against them isn't about assaults per se.
It's this enhanced politically driven statement based on the rhetoric
that's you know, based on the politics.

Speaker 8 (02:39:21):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:39:21):
Absolutely, And I'm glad you pointed that out, because I
certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions
don't happen. They absolutely happen. These reset statements don't change
the way in which they happen, right, And there are
ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics,

(02:39:45):
and those have those are again not new. I think
the point that I'm trying to make is that I
don't think this has changed substantively. Yeah, like the fact
that the President said at a domestic terrorist organization just
doesn't really change the legal landscape. This has been the

(02:40:06):
targeted surveillance of the left, whether you call it anti FA,
whether it's the Green Scare, whether it's the Black Liberation Army.
This has been a priority for decades of administrations. More
and more legislation has been developed to criminalize garden variety
protest conduct. We saw that a lot around Standing Rock
and BLM. More and more resources are allocated to testing

(02:40:28):
creative strategies for monitoring and criminalizing political activities. You know, again,
state repression and the tools that are used in the
service of state repression are just not new. And the
fact that you put out these statements is maybe a
good reminder that we should be circumspect and aware of
repression and prepared to bear up under it.

Speaker 19 (02:41:00):
So is the RICO sixty one Atlanta case a model
for what we see moving forward at a federal level
in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering, the
focus on bail funds, and other abolitionist infrastructure, civil liberties
organizations like Section H of that September twenty fifth statement

(02:41:21):
refers to the Attorney General pursuing quote, politically motivated terrorist
acts such as organizing docs and campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault,
destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. Like,
I know those are all things that you know, they've
already got charges attached to them. It's just these are
now being framed within the framework of being terrorist acts.

(02:41:44):
But you know, you said, like these practices of attacking
adjacent like supportive movement and civil society organs is. It's
not in and of itself new, but it seems like
the framing, especially with the Atlanta case where the process
Cuters brought up at the beginning Eric like they gave
a Merriam Webster Dictionary definition of anarchism and then said,

(02:42:06):
all these people fall under this umbrella because they all
have this ideology, therefore they are a conspiracy. Is that
what the administration is trying to do? And is that
different from what they've already done at a federal level.

Speaker 10 (02:42:19):
So, first of all, I do think that that's very
likely that they will try. I think this is signaling
a real interest in that. I don't think that's particularly new,
but I think that it's clearly being prioritized. So let's
talk about Rico Rigo. Let's talk about Rigo Briefly, RICO
is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and it

(02:42:42):
was enacted in I think nineteen seventy to go after
the mob. Right, it was to go after crime families.
But it's been used against so called gangs and other
politically motivated prosecutions for a long time, and so RICO
has really used to kind of criminalize whole communities. But
it requires that an actual crime has happened. Right, Association

(02:43:07):
or ideology in itself is not sufficient, So it requires
an actual crime has happened. And it also requires an
quote an enterprise, like a coordinated enterprise. And because the
First Amendment protects association and a large diffuse group of
people sharing values is not an enterprise. You know, I'm

(02:43:29):
not sure. It's not a straightforward path to say we
want to use REGO in a politically motiv motivated way
and to actually be able to capture this group under
a net. Right. That's like, you know, saying we want
to go after Antifa is like saying we want to
go after people who like cats. Right, there are people

(02:43:51):
who like cats, but they certainly aren't coordinating together. I
suppose that there are actually people who would say, like, yes,
I identify strongly with this set of values, but it's
not a membership organization, and it would, I think, be
very difficult to mount a prosecution, or to mount a

(02:44:11):
successful prosecution on the basis of what are clearly First
Amendment protected beliefs and associations. And there's pretty good law
on this point, actually, and it comes from an effort
to prosecute a bunch of anti abortion protesters under RICO
and the court said you can't do that. The fact
that there's a large group of people who happen to

(02:44:33):
believe the same things does not mean that they are
an enterprise. So look, don't get me wrong again, this
would be hugely disruptive, but it would be very difficult
to sustain an effective prosecution or obtain a conviction if
there was one competent investigator, prosecutor judge or jury member
anywhere along the way. But yes, hugely disruptive if they

(02:44:55):
managed to do it. I would like to know something
about the Stoff cups city Rico. That's important. So first
of all, yay, all those all those charges, those Ricos
were dismissed for legal reasons of being utter bolts. And
I know that. You know, there's some concern that that
will be appealed, but I think it is worth noting

(02:45:18):
and celebrating that when we fight, we win.

Speaker 5 (02:45:21):
But sort of more to.

Speaker 10 (02:45:22):
The point in this context, I do want to note
that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute,
and it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute,
and it still couldn't be effectively used in this way.
And also federal RICO has often failed. Right, Efforts to
use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed.

(02:45:43):
So if you look up like the Ohio seven, which
was a fairly early effort to bring a politically motivated
RICO that did not go great for the government. So yeah,
I think that's important to note about RICO.

Speaker 19 (02:45:54):
So you mentioned this like FBI designation earlier, it had
been for a while, I think under I thought this
came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under
Biden for the prosecution of January sixth, But anti government extremists,
which included militia movements and also anarchists, it's been shifted
to far left extremists. In the verbiage of the boj

(02:46:17):
and who they're pursuing. Anti law enforcement and anti conservative
attacks have been framed as you know of considered effort
by far left extremists in the media and also like
by these institutions as they're you know, moving forward before
they actually make any arrests or whatever, and through their prosecution,

(02:46:38):
sometimes using terms like you know, antifa or trantifa or
whatever sort of motivations they're giving. I also wonder if
you could say a thing specifically about this sort of
framing that is being given again, that is, like, like
I was thinking about this before more recent mass shooting
events that have happened, or before the hullabaloo around Charlie

(02:47:02):
Kirk's assassination and the shooter, the alleged shooter's relationships to
other people, that there seems to be this considered effort
around clinically framing and politically flaming, framing transness as a
mental health issue but also as a political extension of
woke gender ideology that's coming for your children. And it's like,

(02:47:25):
it's it's interesting because like, in order for people in
a lot of cases in the US to be able
to gain access to medical care that they desire or
need around maybe gender dysorio or some other experience. They
often have to use these like clinical terms for what
they are experiencing and why they need medication for it,

(02:47:47):
and not faulting people for making that approach, because you
need the medicine that you need.

Speaker 12 (02:47:52):
But now this is.

Speaker 19 (02:47:53):
Being turned around and reframed as therefore, if people need
this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have
some sort of mental deficiency or some sort of issue
which is being used in order to challenge people's right
to keep in bear arms under the Second Amendments, or
saying that people are like because of their transnits being

(02:48:13):
motivated towards this attacks like I don't know if you
have anything to again, not exactly like not exactly a
legal issue, but I don't know if you have any observations.

Speaker 10 (02:48:22):
Well, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it.
Just to be very clear, the DSM makes it very
clear that for that being trans is not a mental illness,
that gender dysph you is distress caused by discrepancy between
the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist

(02:48:47):
if any CIS person were being treated as a gender
that they didn't identify with right, that would be a
distress that would arise for any person. I think that
there are real problems with the sort of clinicsization or
medicalization of gender affirming care. But I do want to
be very clear that that does not have to and

(02:49:09):
does not formally or officially include pathologizing trans identity. That's
something that's being imputed and being imposed, but it has
no basis in clinical practice. Not that that necessarily matters
to the government, but I do think it's important to
point that out. I think, given that previous efforts to

(02:49:32):
restrict gun ownership on the basis of previously diagnosed mental
illness have not been super successful, I don't know that
this one will be either. But again, this is an
issue of power and less an issue of law or
logical coherent legal philosophy.

Speaker 19 (02:49:51):
So this term has been coming up a lot of
you know, with Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists,
there's been a lot of pushback back from the legal
community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are
you talking about? Can you talk about, like what it
means to be called domestic terrorists? What changes that makes

(02:50:12):
in like how the law approaches he or how you
can be convicted.

Speaker 10 (02:50:14):
Yeah, gladly. So at this point, what it means to
be called a domestic terrorist is actually nothing. There is
no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or
for designating a domestic group a terrorist organization. And given
the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court,

(02:50:35):
I think it would be very, very difficult to change
the law in the way it would have to be
changed in order to make that designation. There are ways
to freeze the assets of a domestic group. There are
ways to posit or show a connection between a domestic
group and a designated foreign terrorist organization, which is a

(02:50:59):
real thing that has legal effect. There is a way
to financially designate a group or an individual, as you know,
having this kind of relationship to a foreign terrorist organization
or an FTO.

Speaker 5 (02:51:15):
So, but there's no legal.

Speaker 10 (02:51:18):
Mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group. That's not a thing.
So this is a place where the government could simply
dispense with the law. But I do not think this
is a place where the government can use the law
to create a category of domestic terrorist organizations. And just
to like explain FTOS a little bit, there is a

(02:51:42):
category of organization that are designated by the State Department
as quote, foreign terrorist organizations ftos are designated by the
State Department, and they are listed on the State Department website. Right,
it's not a secret who they are. You're not going
to suddenly find out that, you know, you gain money
that to I don't know the Greek equivalent of the ACLU,

(02:52:05):
and now it's you know, it turns out it's an FTO.
There are certainly cases where the government has successfully claimed
that a connection between a domestic group and an FDO exists,
even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
And if you have a connection to an FDO, you

(02:52:28):
can be prosecuted for what's called material support for terrorism.
And it's a very serious charge. It's a very frightening charge,
and it does criminalize a lot of things that most
people understand to be protected by the First Amendment right.
It criminalizes providing things like medical care to certain groups.

(02:52:49):
It criminalizes providing education or legal support to certain groups
that are designated foreign terrorist organizations. And frankly, this is
the idea that on pens material support for terrorism charges
is offensive to many people because it does feel very
much incompatible with constitutional norms under the First Amendment. It's

(02:53:11):
an important thing to be aware of, but it would
be very surprising to me if the government were able
to successfully make broad claims connecting quote Antifa to foreign
terrorist organizations.

Speaker 19 (02:53:25):
I was when you were saying that that had me
thinking a little bit about the Holy Land five case.
I was trying to remember that example. I guess like
to be labor this. Can we talk about the distinction
between domestic terrorist organization, which is a classification that doesn't exist,
versus the charge of committing terrorism because people who get

(02:53:47):
terrorism enhancements at least like the Marus Mason one example
that comes to my mind, right, who is a member
of cell that was associated with the Earth Liberation Front,
like so that that person got over two decades in
prison based on being convicted of crimes that existed and
then getting enhancements based on the definition that those were terrorists,

(02:54:12):
amplifying the amount of time.

Speaker 8 (02:54:13):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:54:14):
The difference is the difference between criminalizing conduct or defining
conduct as being terroristic, and criminalizing a group. The First
Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression, and that
means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations,

(02:54:38):
and expression. We cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides
our conduct, our actions, And so there can be terrorist
offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct
that you are convicted of. If you engage in se

(02:55:00):
illegal acts and a judge determines that those acts were
motivated by desire to do terrorism, that the penalty for
engaging in those acts can be enhanced. But you cannot
designate a group, a belief, or an expression as being

(02:55:21):
a crime in itself unless there is conduct associated with it.
Because we don't criminalize people's identities. I mean, we do
criminalize people's identities, but it's we don't say the impermissible
to prosecute people for having those identities.

Speaker 19 (02:55:40):
I guess I have note as I understand the terrorism
enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Luis gim
Angioni case have been dropped. Is a thing that I heard, yes,
which I mean at the same time, this is referenced
in one of those documents that came from the White
House as being a terroristic act.

Speaker 13 (02:55:59):
So yes, what are.

Speaker 12 (02:56:00):
The courts know?

Speaker 7 (02:56:01):
Okay, thank you? For making that distinction more clear.

Speaker 19 (02:56:05):
All right, So, how might those of us on the
left or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive
of the state's view of us. How do we rally
support for our identities and positions? What are some good
practices understanding, like, having had this conversation, the terrain on
which we're operating.

Speaker 10 (02:56:26):
Absolutely so, I guess what I would say about best
practices is understand whether you are at risk, even if
you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even
if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing
that the system works and that this particular administration is
like an aberration. I would say, Look, this administration is

(02:56:49):
preoccupied with the funding streams for very mainstream liberal causes,
and the fact that it's sort of lumping everything under
the banner of antifa, you know, is probably a big
surprise for some of these groups, like you know, suburban
white moms against guns or whatever. But they are very
focused on things like wirefraud and money laundering and stripping

(02:57:10):
nonprofits of their tax status. If there's even a whisper
of the possibility that those nonprofits are pursuing goals that
are in any way antagonistic to state interests. So if
you are in a group that has a bank account
or raises money, the best practices here haven't changed. Keep

(02:57:30):
very precise track of your funds. If you raise money,
use it for that theyk you said you were going
to use it for. Have an accountant, you know, be
very very careful about your money. And again the best
practices for the rest of us also haven't changed. This
is political discourse that reaffirms what we already know about
targeted surveillance, and we have for a long time known

(02:57:54):
how to deal with this. If you are approached by
law enforcement, remember that the Fifth Amendment protect you're right
not to speak to them. You have no obligation to
speak to law enforcement. It is a crime to light
of federal agents, and that means that it is safest
not to say anything. Besides, I'm represented by counsel. Please

(02:58:14):
leave your name a number, and my lawyer will call you.
There is truly never a compelling reason to speak to
federal agents before consulting with an attorney. The Energy Anti
Repression Hotline can be reached at two one two six
seven nine two eight one one. You can call to
have a free privileged conversation about your rights, risks and responsibilities,

(02:58:37):
and to be connected with appropriate legal resources in your area.
And at the end of the day, we keep ourselves
safe by refusing to submit to this fear, refusing to
comply in advance, refusing to second guess whether we actually
have rights, and more importantly, we persist by being confident
in the fact that, no matter what, our communities are

(02:58:59):
going to rally around and care for each other.

Speaker 19 (02:59:02):
I think that would be a great place to tie up.
Thank you so much for having this conversation and for
the insights that you've shared, and for the work that
you do.

Speaker 10 (02:59:09):
Mo. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 17 (02:59:31):
Happy g October everybody.

Speaker 13 (02:59:33):
Oh, shut the fuck up, we can't.

Speaker 12 (02:59:35):
This is that could happen here?

Speaker 17 (02:59:36):
Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm garouson Davis Today, joint by me along Jamestown and
Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of September twenty
first to October first, and what a week it was. Yeah,
it does not feel like it should be October but
who cares. I guess the government's shut down right now,

(03:00:00):
So all of the dozens of anarchists around the country
are rejoicing, uh huh, as the Senate has failed to
pass a short term funding bill.

Speaker 1 (03:00:08):
That's right, everyone, we did it. We defeated the state
using the power of the state.

Speaker 5 (03:00:13):
State.

Speaker 17 (03:00:14):
Yeah. In many such cases, as the government shut down,
Trump is threatening mass layoffs, and Republicans are framing this
whole shut down as being caused by Democrats who are
trying to defend healthcare for quote unquote illegals, which isn't real.
Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care. That's not

(03:00:35):
even what the Democrats are fighting for. Would be cool
if they were, would be cool if the theory of
this country you could just get health care, that sounds nice.
Wouldn't that be a cool, almost utopian place to live.
But that's not what's happening. And the rights confronted with this,
but they just do not care. Here's a Mike Johnson,
Speaker of the House, on CNN, having a little debate
about this.

Speaker 21 (03:00:54):
If that counterproposal was enacted, is illegal aliens would be
paid for American taxpayers hard earned dollars would be paying
for benefits for illegal aliens.

Speaker 1 (03:01:03):
Again, we're not doing that, but it's.

Speaker 5 (03:01:04):
Against federal law for people who are here illegally.

Speaker 8 (03:01:06):
To get yes.

Speaker 21 (03:01:07):
And that's why our reforms are so important to enforce
all that. What the important thing to remember is what's.

Speaker 10 (03:01:12):
Happened the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally.

Speaker 21 (03:01:14):
Again, because they don't have the level of specification that
we had in our bill, it will unwind that and
all those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed.

Speaker 3 (03:01:22):
We can't afford to do that.

Speaker 21 (03:01:23):
But that you're making right, No, that is a red
herring in this in this debate.

Speaker 17 (03:01:28):
So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is
they're trying to extend the current currently enacted federal subsidies
for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people
able to access healthcare. And Democrats are also trying to
reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid,
which happened under the One Big, Beautiful Bill earlier this year.

(03:01:51):
That is what they are actually fighting for. The White
House is retruthing and retweeting proposals from the Democrats that
include a health care for aliens. But that's legal aliens,
that's like legal documented residents, And they're framing this as
health care for quote unquote illegals.

Speaker 13 (03:02:10):
It's a bad faith representation, as it always is. Like
people can go all the way back to the episode
that I made with Robert Sophie last year about what
Trump might do to learn more about the public charge
rule and how that pertains to people who are not
US citizens. I don't think we really have the time
noise as the place to go over that here. But
there is not, and there has never been a massive

(03:02:31):
federal free health care plan for undocumented people. In fact,
people who are undocumented are not going to see the
doctor right now because of the persistent and untrue rumor
that ICE are taking people from hospitals. That is not
something I'm aware of ever happening. ICE do take people
who are already in their custody to hospitals, and they

(03:02:53):
will wait for those people while those people are treated.
That it's not the same as entering the hospital and
grabbing peace people based on the immigration status. And I'm
aware of several cases where people whose life was genuinely
in danger were afraid to go and seek medical attention.
Because they were afraid that they would be targeted for
their immigration status.

Speaker 17 (03:03:13):
So we'll see how long this government shut down last.
The last one started on twenty eighteen, lasted thirty five days.
If this shutdown is still happening next week, I'm sure
we will include some details about government services being affected.
But this could resolve in a few days, a few hours,
or in a few weeks.

Speaker 7 (03:03:29):
We do not know.

Speaker 17 (03:03:31):
But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country.
There still is a ray of hope. And that ray
of hope is named Jimmy Kimball, who was thankfully back
on the air. I know we've all been watching. We've
all been watching this certainly, and next our En Sinclair
have ceased preempting his show. That's back on air across
the country. Free speech is hashtag. So back in America, provert,

(03:03:53):
Do you want to talk about the Disney plus Voika?

Speaker 1 (03:03:56):
Yes, So we've gotten some data finally on the damaged
on to Disney's result of the boycott. After they fired Monsieur.

Speaker 12 (03:04:04):
Kimmel suspended, suspended, Monsieur kim.

Speaker 1 (03:04:06):
Il suspended, suspended, they were definitely going to fire They
wanted to fire his They definitely wanted to fire him,
and you know, there was a lot of posting online
about there was a lot of posting, a lot of
posting about people canceling their accounts and people being like wow,
and it's I always it's always very frustrated to me
because like people get very excited and it's impossible to

(03:04:27):
tell with the moment, is this actually anything?

Speaker 7 (03:04:29):
Right?

Speaker 5 (03:04:29):
Yees?

Speaker 1 (03:04:30):
Sixteen thousand people shared this thing about how the website
for Disney was down, but that doesn't mean anything other
than like someone saw the website down and a bunch
of people shared and posted it. So it was very
difficult to tell, like, is there actually any follow through
on this is Disney's bottom line being hurt? And thankfully,
I'm very happy to say that it does look like

(03:04:51):
Disney suffered a substantial financial setback as a result of
the boycott campaign. Something like one point seven million paid
subscribers canceled, and this was immediately before Disney was looking
to announce a price increase, So like, this is this
is like a serious I'm not surprised they reversed. Course,

(03:05:11):
this is like damaging to them. We're not talking about
the amount of money that a company like Disney would
just ignore.

Speaker 12 (03:05:16):
Yeah, And I think the most important thing here for
all of us, and this is the thing I talked about.
We did an episode about this. This is actually before
kim Old I've reinstated by Sinclair. But one of the
really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government.
They are hideously unpopular. All of the all of their

(03:05:37):
sort of legitimization stuff, all of the sort of media
complicity they've bought has bought them about four percent of
proof of rating bump from where they were this time
of the administration the first time, so he said about
forty one percent of poof of rating. Everything that he's
doing is hideously underwater. Like his most popular thing is
is immigration policy, which is horrible, but it's again like
forty two percent. Everyone hates these people, yeah, you know.

(03:05:59):
And it's it's very easy, because of their controlled and
media spear, to believe that they have this sort of
total hegemonic power over everyone in the US until the
exact moment where it gets challenged and everyone's like, wait,
hold on, no, it turns out most of the country
hates this. Does not what Jimmy Kimmel acts from Disney.

Speaker 17 (03:06:17):
Like comrade Kimmel has joined the fight.

Speaker 5 (03:06:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:06:21):
Yeah, there are more of us than there are of them,
and there always have been, and.

Speaker 17 (03:06:24):
By more of us, Mia is referring to herself and
Jimmy Kimmel as a coherent political class.

Speaker 12 (03:06:28):
Just for the record, there no.

Speaker 1 (03:06:30):
The only two members of the coherent political class.

Speaker 5 (03:06:35):
But that's good news.

Speaker 12 (03:06:36):
Just the state which holds me up to Kimmel and.

Speaker 1 (03:06:43):
Entirety of the fourth Estate. But I don't know, there's
a little bit of good news for you. A bunch
of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti First Amendment,
anti democratic, massive overreach of the state, thought crime, nonsense,
and the company suffered such dramatic within like literally in
the space of a week. That's three hundred and thirty
million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost

(03:07:06):
that even Disney can't ignore that kind of money.

Speaker 12 (03:07:09):
Oh looks like regular people.

Speaker 13 (03:07:10):
Yeah, yeah, like people who subscribe to Disney bluss.

Speaker 17 (03:07:14):
Yeah, an army of ordinary liberals, the actual like silent
majority in this country. Yeah said no Disney, Like.

Speaker 1 (03:07:20):
Well, that's gross and scary. I'm not paying Disney anymore. Yeah,
and it's good that they did that.

Speaker 17 (03:07:25):
Currently, the rights trying to manufacture a counter boycott against
Netflix for having children's shows with non binary characters, mostly
using clips the children's shows that are like two or
three years old, clips that Limbs of Talk Talk has
already posted years ago. Now try to write check and
others are recirculating these clips to be like, yeah, look
a look at how Netflix has gone too far as

(03:07:47):
pushing woke nonsense down the throats of your children by
using like ancient clips from like the Jurassic Park TV
show Like okay, guys, good luck with that.

Speaker 7 (03:07:56):
Have fun.

Speaker 5 (03:07:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:07:58):
In other news, the Department of War. This actually happened
last month. On September fifth, Trump signed an executive order
approving the name the Department of War as a secondary
title for the Department of Defense to use an official correspondence,
public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non statutory documents within the

(03:08:19):
Executive Branch, while the administration also works on changing the
name officially through Congress. Hag Seth nearly immediately switched all
of his accounts and his office name plate to read
Secretary of War.

Speaker 13 (03:08:32):
Yeah, you know, he pushed hard for this one.

Speaker 17 (03:08:36):
Defense dot gov now redirects to War dot gov and
they're just referring to this in all public appearances as
the War Department, something that we've talked about on the
show before of them wanting to do and they're going
to continue to push this and using this kind of
war framing for domestic operations.

Speaker 12 (03:08:54):
Yeah, not just international deployments.

Speaker 13 (03:08:58):
This was its historical name right like way way before
it was a DoD Yeah. Yeah, it was, so just
to be clear for people, that doesn't mean that it's
like a good reason to change it back.

Speaker 17 (03:09:09):
Trump truthed last week quote at the request of the
Secretary of Homeland Security, Christ you know, I'm directing Secretary
of War Pete Hagsath to provide all necessary troops to
protect war ravaged Portland and any of our ice facilities
under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.

(03:09:30):
I'm also authorizing full force if necessary. Thank you for
your attention in this matter. War ravaged Portland. How's it
hanging out there for our Portland correspondence.

Speaker 1 (03:09:40):
It's fine. It's kind of rainy. I had a nice
tapas dinner on Sunday. It was pretty good.

Speaker 12 (03:09:45):
The crows are really nice.

Speaker 17 (03:09:47):
What it does, does someone want to mention, like the
nature of the anti ICE protests happening in like one
square block in like the south water front of downtown Portland.

Speaker 1 (03:09:55):
Yeah, it's in the South water front McAdam is what
people here call it, the neighborhood where the ICE auxiliary
facility is. And there have been protests off and on
pretty much since Trump took office. Usually on like a
good night you get maybe one hundred and fifty two
hundred people. There were some nights kind of around where
things blew up in LA that there were more like

(03:10:16):
five or six hundred people out for a couple of days.
There really hasn't been any of the like what we
were seeing in twenty twenty in terms of like the
mass mass gatherings. And you know, there has not really
been much in the way of like people getting arrested.
Generally getting arrested for crossing a line that separates federal
property from like state property so to speak, and like

(03:10:36):
step over it and then a bunch of guys run
out and grab them, right. That's that's mostly what the
arrests are for a lot of people have had charges dropped.
I mean, people get fucked up charges when they get charged,
but a lot of them are not really sticking because
they're not very strong, like because it's just not much
going on.

Speaker 17 (03:10:53):
Right, Yeah, we'll talk more about why Trump thinks there's
this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland. But yeah, so
far the protests have been relatively mild.

Speaker 12 (03:11:03):
Yes, Yeah, the vibe is very much like the classic
Portland thing of people with like holding doughnuts on fishing
lines out in front of the cops. Right, it's like that,
not like molotovs.

Speaker 1 (03:11:13):
The response has been crazy, Like there's a video going
around that's a bunch of federal agents. I think they're
fps rolling in up from a van from outside of
the ice facility and arresting somebody who again probably crossed
a line or through something generally is why people have
been getting arrested. So that the response has been nonsense.
That that video is from recently, and I'm seeing it
attributed to Trump's declaration of war. But like I saw

(03:11:37):
stuff like that three months ago, four months ago, Like
it's been happening every day, like they do roll up
in their vans when they because they periodically throughout the
day will have Feds come in to go grab a
couple of people. And that this is a thing they've
been doing, so they've been so far at least, I
have not seen either an escalation on the ground really
in terms of like what protests, what the protests are doing,

(03:11:59):
and the numbers of protest since Trump's declaration. And I
also really haven't seen an escalation in what's being deployed
on the ground.

Speaker 17 (03:12:06):
We have not seen the Oregon National Guard presence that
is being promised now this has just been DHS officers.

Speaker 1 (03:12:14):
I can confirm, just based on some information that's come
my way, that there do seem to be an increased
number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their transponders off. Yes,
there's a couple of reasons they can do that. Some
of them is for if they are transporting like high
value quote unquote deportees, right, people who are being deported

(03:12:35):
for some sort of serious crime. Some of it is
if they are feel like they are under threat and
are doing like emergency personnel transfers. They're not generally supposed
to fly without their transponders, although again, you can't really
trust anything to work the way it's supposed to work.
But there is some evidence that they have been ramping
up and they have been flying more MQ nine's over
the city reaper drones for surveillance purposes, so that I

(03:12:59):
can say to it does seem to have been a
degree of escalation, but in terms of we're not seeing
troops marching through the city yet, and I honestly can't,
it doesn't seem to me, as of the moment that
we're recording this, that there has been an escalation and
the level of force used on the ground right now.
That said, the level of force use on the ground
before Trump declared his war on Portland or whatever, it

(03:13:19):
was still pretty extreme. That has continued. I just it
doesn't seem like what's happening right now is a massive
increase over where we were two weeks ago, you know.
That's all I'm saying.

Speaker 12 (03:13:28):
And I think the place where that has happened is Chicago,
and we will get to that later.

Speaker 5 (03:13:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Well.

Speaker 17 (03:13:34):
Trump has continued to talk about deploying quote unquote troops
to US cities, including at a meeting of top brass
on Tuesday, September thirtieth, where Pete hag Seth basically ranted
to top of generals and admirals about no more wokeness
in the military, but Trump also spoke telling top military

(03:13:56):
officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal run city,
calling it a quote war from within. Let's play the clip.

Speaker 8 (03:14:05):
But it seems that the ones that are run by
the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago,
New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're
going to straighten them out. It will be a major
part for some of the people in this room. That's
a war too, It's a war from within. Controlling the
physical territory of our border is essential to national security.

(03:14:29):
We can't let these people.

Speaker 13 (03:14:30):
In the two separate issues they have that he conflated, right,
protests in cities and people crossing the border.

Speaker 17 (03:14:39):
Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been talking about this
for a while. I mean, same thing with like DC right,
combining this like crime issue with undocumented immigration, and also
with protests against ICE operations targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind
of bundled together into this into this war from within.

Speaker 10 (03:14:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:14:59):
I mean the ration issue, right, is one that gives
him a much broaderly way and the powers the constitutionally
available to him as the executive than policing with the military,
which is on the facefoot of thing that shouldn't happen
in the United States. It makes sense from a tactical
perspective for them to conflate those two things together, I
will say, even if it's not particularly real.

Speaker 17 (03:15:21):
During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders quote, last month,
I signing an executive order to provide training for a
quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This
is going to be a big thing for the people
in this room talking to the generals, because it's the
enemy from within, and we will have to handle it

(03:15:43):
before it gets out of control. It won't get out
of control once you're involved.

Speaker 7 (03:15:49):
Unquote.

Speaker 17 (03:15:50):
They're directly addressing admirals and generals about them having to
help form a quick reaction for us to quell civil disturbance,
which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling
it again the enemy from within, align that Trump used
a lot during the tail end of his presidential campaign
in twenty twenty four.

Speaker 12 (03:16:07):
Yeah, which is just it's every single element.

Speaker 17 (03:16:11):
If it is just fascist, it's it's pretty it's pretty
blanket authoritarian stuff. Like there's no like sugarcoating it here.
Oh yeah, Yeah, they don't need to use coded phrases, right,
they just say this stuff.

Speaker 12 (03:16:19):
Yeah, No, they're just yeah, they're just this is this
is just fascist, Like they're just trying to do it.

Speaker 13 (03:16:24):
Yeah, they're just saying the thing.

Speaker 17 (03:16:25):
In the meeting, he explicitly labeled these dangerous cities as
a training ground for our military National Guard.

Speaker 8 (03:16:33):
But I want to salute every service member who has
helped us carry out this critical mission. It's really a
very important mission. And I told Pete we should use
some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our
military National Guard. But military because we're going into Chicago version.
That's a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor stupid.

Speaker 12 (03:16:55):
And I think it's worth noting both the mayor of
Chicago and the governor Prits have been very unhappy about this.
Like as much as Pritzker has kind of not been
doing anything about like CPD aiding ice in raids, he
is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National

(03:17:16):
Guard troops in. So if they're very serious about following
this through, we're going to see some kind of large
scale confrontation.

Speaker 7 (03:17:21):
Yep.

Speaker 12 (03:17:22):
And Pritzker is not the kind of like knock needs Uh,
Gavin Newsom type governor.

Speaker 13 (03:17:33):
Yeah, he's not Gavin Newson.

Speaker 12 (03:17:34):
He's not simply just going to let Trump do this.
And yeah, that's going to be a major source of
confrontation assuming this, assuming this specific like we're going to
send the National Guard in the Chicago stuff like happens soon.

Speaker 17 (03:17:45):
Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotec, governor of Oregon,
about deploying Oregon National Gardener, and her pushing back against that,
but ostensibly acquiescing in some way because there's been an
announcement from the organ National Guard that they will be
deploying and people in Oregon probably aren't gonna be happy
about it, they won't understand the mission. But during this meeting,

(03:18:06):
Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor.

Speaker 8 (03:18:10):
Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone, and
I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please
don't come in. We don't need you. I said, well,
unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War two.
Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding, sir.

(03:18:31):
We have it under control. I said, you don't have
it under control, Governor. But I'll check it and I'll
call you back. I called it back. I said, this
place is a nightmare. Probably it's certainly not the biggest,
but it's one of the worst. Is brew They go
after our ice people, who are great patriots and tough
job too, but they love it. They love it because

(03:18:52):
they're cleaning up our country.

Speaker 13 (03:18:55):
And I think because there's a fifty thousand dollars sign up.

Speaker 17 (03:18:59):
Well, unless they're play false tapes, so the tapes aren't
necessarily false. But if you're watching Fox News twenty four
to seven, what Fox News is doing is they're playing
a lot of clips not from the Year of Our
Lord twenty twenty five, but in fact from twenty twenty
when Trump's last federal invasion of Portland happened, where he
deployed Bortac, which looked much more like a war scene.

(03:19:21):
Do you know why, because of the massive amounts of
chemical munitions that Bortac like caked downtown Portland in which
made it look very similar to a war scene. So, yeah,
those are the clips that are playing NonStop on TV.
I've been watching Fox News clips. They're just playing clips
of Portland twenty twenty to make this look like a

(03:19:43):
different situation than what the current on the ground situation is,
which may have some intense moments, but not nearly the
intensity of five years ago, which again was stoked by
Trump's own military police force, which was deployed to the city.

Speaker 1 (03:19:58):
So, yeah, there's information that Trump got corrected. Internally, I
don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything,
but yeah, six year old footage, five year old footage
being used to justify military deployments about you'd expect.

Speaker 17 (03:20:13):
Really literally, yesterday I saw footage circulating on x the
Everything app of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into a street.

Speaker 1 (03:20:20):
Yeah, I remember that Molotov. I remember that molo, that
malotav getting thrown half a decade ago.

Speaker 17 (03:20:29):
It only hit another protester whose feet got very badly burned. Yes,
And that's the type of footage circulating that makes it
look like, you know, once again, Portland's burning down, Portland's
always burning down, using like one or two select clips
from yeah, half a decade ago.

Speaker 1 (03:20:43):
Again, no buildings actually burnt down.

Speaker 13 (03:20:46):
Yeah, they've created a reality around what happened important in
twenty twenty that you will never change with facts or evidence. Right,
Like to people who watch Fox News. Portland was burned
to the ground in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (03:20:59):
And on the worst nights in Portland, we could go
three blocks and get food from a food cart.

Speaker 12 (03:21:04):
Yeah, we got a lot of great Chinese food.

Speaker 5 (03:21:06):
That stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:21:06):
We've got great Chinese food, schwarma, you know in La.

Speaker 13 (03:21:10):
When the city was whatever under siege. I went to
Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings
at two am on a Wednesday scene.

Speaker 1 (03:21:18):
That's a war zone. That's a war zone.

Speaker 13 (03:21:20):
I had my plague carrier on. I was ready to go.

Speaker 12 (03:21:24):
Here's some ads.

Speaker 17 (03:21:25):
We'll be back to talk about Chicago. But enjoy these
possibly Buffalo Wild Wings sponsored ads.

Speaker 13 (03:21:31):
I doubt it. No vegan food. All right, we are back, sweet,
and it's good to be back. I want to talk
very briefly about Pete egsass sec war as he is

(03:21:55):
calling himself now right in the little speech he gave
Pete Pegs he's he's working on his physical fitness for sure,
his bod that he put a big emphasis on physical
fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit.

Speaker 17 (03:22:11):
Male standards.

Speaker 13 (03:22:12):
Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the
various role of their combat roles that if they want
to do that, right, So that would mean, you know,
the Army Physical Fitness test, right, whatever the male standard
quote unquote was would be everyone's standard. I don't want
to go deep into hegseth career that would be that
would be another episode, possibly of another show. But I

(03:22:33):
do want to talk about the stuff. Did you notice
he said no more. He listed number of generals, but
one of them was Milli, Right, he said no more
Millis Chiarelli, and I forget who the other one was,
But I thought that was interesting given what we saw
Trump say about a QRF. Right, Milli had a long
career in the military. Right, he saw plenty of combat
and all that stuff. But I think he's most well

(03:22:53):
known to most people for his cooling effect on the
use of the US military against protests in twenty twenty ls.
I think that is what that was referring to, Right
that Hegcess was talking about removing that kind of person
from command.

Speaker 1 (03:23:09):
And Milly also said no to Trump when he wanted
to deploy for and he was also working behind the scenes.
He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to
have a plan if he tries to use the nukes
after the election.

Speaker 13 (03:23:22):
Yeah, Milly was doing everything he could to mitigate what
he saw as a massive danger of Trump responding in
a completely disproportionate.

Speaker 17 (03:23:32):
Way, a legitimate national security and danger.

Speaker 13 (03:23:34):
Yeah, yes, yeah, like, yeah, someone whose job is protecting
the United States like that, that's some reasonable concern. Was
a reasonable concern at that time. Obviously, the Trump administration
does not want people like that in command anymore, and
that was something that hegxcess spoke about at length. The
rest of his speech focused on shit like fitness standards,

(03:23:56):
shit like grooming visible tattoos, a bunch of stuff that
you would expect from a mid career infantry officer who
hasn't had a particularly distinguished career, right, Like, that's the
shit that mid career infantry officers do.

Speaker 17 (03:24:09):
I think you mean war fighters, James, which is Haig
Seth's preferred term for soldiers.

Speaker 13 (03:24:14):
Yes, fuck me. Yeah, Well, because it's gender neutrals start that.

Speaker 1 (03:24:20):
They've been doing that for a while.

Speaker 13 (03:24:21):
But yeah, it's on the MRIs, it's been on the
Emeris for a while. But yes, Haig Seth does like
the phrase war fighters. His stuff was, like I said,
not something you would expect from someone who I think
he was an O four in the national card, right.
I don't think any of that is particularly new. He
issued a number of directives. One thing I did want

(03:24:42):
to talk about was this change in grooming standards. So
the War Department has issued a new directive on shaving profiles.
What this does in practice is we can see from
their announcement, which features prominently a black soldier shaving, is
it takes away long term shaving profiles for soldiers with

(03:25:05):
medical conditions such as pseudopholic gulitis or exma, or other
soldiers who experienced skin irritation by shaving.

Speaker 14 (03:25:14):
Right.

Speaker 13 (03:25:14):
Previously, those soldiers may have had a like a waiver
which they could show to their officers, and their officer said, hey, soldier,
why haven't you shaved? Soldier, sailor, emon, Space Force guardian, whatever,
why haven't you shaved? They could say, well, I'm on
the shaving profile because of this condition that I have.
Now you will only have a year and then you

(03:25:37):
will have to somehow rectify that condition. They talk about
treatments a little bit in this, So now it's on
which you can read if you want, not going to
read them out for you, but this will very clearly
target black service people the most, and I don't think
that's a coincidence. And as we see from the picture
of the black soldiers shaving in the in the release
that they sent out there, this is happening at the

(03:25:59):
same time as arrested his stuff, right, and at the
same time as we've seen trans folks removed from the military.
As heg Theft, seems to be going pretty hard on
removing women from combat roles. He's previously been more out
right in that this time he's in his speech he
was talking about how women, if they could meet the
same standards as men, would be welcoming combat roles, but

(03:26:21):
they wouldn't quote unquote lower the standards. The whole thing
was pretty remarkable to see, heg Theft lecturing, you know,
people who have spent collectively maybe hundreds of years in combat.

Speaker 17 (03:26:33):
Right, people have spent decades losing wars. Yeah yeah, decades
of period of time.

Speaker 13 (03:26:40):
Yeah yeah, I mean centuries between them, right, But explaining
how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience
in it than him, yes, and basically telling them it's
not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before. Right,
the soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the
politicians in the generals. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is nothing new. Yeah,

(03:27:01):
but it was still kind of remarkable to see Heigfast
delivering it to the generals.

Speaker 17 (03:27:06):
And specifically, both he and Trump made statements about if
the generals and animals do not like what Trump and
Heksa were saying, they should just resign, they should just leave.

Speaker 22 (03:27:16):
I've never walked into a room so silent before. This
is very don't laugh, don't life if you're not allowed
to do that, you know what, Just have a good time,
and if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if
you want to do anything you want, you can do
anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying,
you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank,
there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay,

(03:27:40):
because we're all on the same team.

Speaker 17 (03:27:43):
Part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists
in the upper grass of the military, like that's part
of this process. That's why he doesn't want millies. He
doesn't want people that will deny him. He wants just
a complete loyalist government, and that includes the military.

Speaker 5 (03:27:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:27:57):
And if that means that we're going to have a
whole bunch of generals and animals resigned because of hig
Seth and Trump's anti woke granting, then that's a desirable
outcome for the administration at this point.

Speaker 15 (03:28:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:28:10):
Speaking of war Chicago, Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:28:15):
I mean the scenes that I have seen the most
frequently described as war or looking like a war this week,
have come out of Chicago, where on Tuesday the thirtieth,
there was one of the most brutal raids that we've
seen from the FEDS yet in any city. This took

(03:28:37):
place in South Shore, which is a ninety percent black
neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, where a whole
bunch of immigrants who I don't know if people remember
when Texas and a bunch of other states in the
South started busting immigrants up to cities in the north.
Chicago is one of the ones where that happened. A
lot a lot of these people ended up in South Shore,
and there was a massive rate on an apartment complex

(03:29:01):
in the South Shore. Agents showed up in a combination
of moving vans, sort of unmarked vans and armored vehicles
it's still unclear exactly how many people were taken. We
so don't know. Estimates at the time suggested about forty.
It's very unclear. What we do know about the raid
was that it was absolutely brutal. A bunch of a

(03:29:23):
bunch of the initial reports thought that they had been shooting,
but there hadn't been shooting. What there had been was
that they blew into this apartment complex with flash bank grenades.

Speaker 1 (03:29:30):
Yeah, pretty common for people to mistake those two.

Speaker 8 (03:29:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:29:34):
Yeah, and these are just you know, these are just
regular people who suddenly at one in the morning, a
bunch of explosions start going off. There's a whole bunch
of pictures that you can see in various articles about
this of doors torn off their hinges. The agents did
a I think this is a classic Chicago police tactic,
but you know, they just went through and just started
grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it

(03:29:56):
onto the ground. There were black Hawk kilicops optors like
constantly circling this just random apartment complex. There was a
massive FBI presence alongside border patrol and ice.

Speaker 10 (03:30:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:30:11):
It's also worth mentioning that Independent book Club Chicago, which
is one of the very sort of prominent independent local
media outlets. There obtained a picture from a neighbor who
was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police
Department on the scene, which they are there expressly forbidden
like by state law from assisting in immigration enforcement. It

(03:30:31):
is worth reading this article in order to see this
quote quote. We did not participate in or assist with
any immigration enforcement, spokesperson Maggie he Un said in a statement,
followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CPD car
on the scene of this raid. Yeah, this raid is
a really significant escalation of force in a cy that

(03:30:54):
has I mean, I've already seen ice literally shoot someone
and kill them. But yeah, I'm going to quote this
from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet in collaboration
with unraffled Press. Veronica Castro off the Illinois Coalition for
Immigrant and Refugee Rights, at a press conference said quote,
this looked like hundreds of masked agents knocking down doors

(03:31:15):
and dragging families out in the middle of the night,
holding babies that were unclothed. Castro added, so they are
dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night,
holding naked babies because people haven't had time, Like they're
not giving people time to like even put clothes on something.
You see a lot in the accounts of this. I'm
going to read some more from an account from ABC.

(03:31:37):
As I got to my unit to stick my key
in the door, I was grabbed by an officer and
I said, what's going on? What's going on? He never
actually told me. He said I was being detained, said
Alicia Books. Neighbors like Ebony Watson, say they ducked for covers,
they heard several flashbangs. They was terrified. The kids was crying.
People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out

(03:31:58):
there when I seen the little girl coming out around
the corner because they was bringing the kids down too,
had them zip tied to each other. Watson said, that's all.
I kept asking, what is the morality? Where is the
human One of them literally laughed he was standing right there,
he said, fucking kids. So that is what these raids
are looking like now. It is again also worth noting

(03:32:21):
that like this is this is a very significant escalation
of force. They are zip tying children to each other
as they dragged them from their homes at one in
the morning and saying fucking kids. Yeah, and this also
marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away
from the areas they've been targeting before, which had to
be the suburbs in the outlying areas, and into very

(03:32:42):
very majority, the majority black parts of Chicago. And we're
gonna talk more about this next week with journalists who's
been on the ground. Yeah. I mean, for example, a
couple of hours before we recorded this episode. So there
are sparse details, but there is a video that shows
the fat just two hands on neck choking a black

(03:33:04):
man in East Garfield Park. It's deeply unclear why this
is happening, but they are just doing this now, and
what we have so far, we don't know why they
were doing this. But this is also one thing I
think is very alarming. This is also reported by Tribe.
There is a video from the scene where an agent
is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is

(03:33:27):
not an immigration enforcement action. The agent goes on to
say they were responding to a robbery in progress. All
we know about is there was a car crash and
they just started choking this guy. It's unclear exactly what's
going on with this. There probably will be more details
by the time this episode is going out, But the
Feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago,

(03:33:49):
I mean, just randomly choking black people on the street.
And this massive, hideous raid and sashore are pretty significant
escalations in places that haven't been targeting before or and
it's and it's hard to see this ending anytime soon
or there you know, things getting any better from here,
especially with the sort of you know, as you were

(03:34:11):
mentioning earlier, there hasn't been really any sign of like
an intensification in federal violence in Portland, but in Chicago
there absolutely has been. And yeah, it's horrible.

Speaker 13 (03:34:23):
Yeah, So talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess
according to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS
is going to use the Cultural, Environmental and Historical Protection
Waiver that we reported about that came out this spring
to fall through wall construction in the San Diego sector.

(03:34:43):
I am guessing that in part we will see this
used to wave one of the one of the acts
that is where it's the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act. And I'm guessing in part that this will
be used to waive that right because Kumei ancestors are

(03:35:04):
in these areas and in at the end tail end
of the previous Trump administration. I reported on this for Sierra,
which is a magazine of the Sierra Club. Kumii people
were using ceremony. So they were participating in ceremony every
day at construction sites in order to slow down the clock,
and they also filed a lawsuit. Right, But they were

(03:35:26):
trying to basically run out the clock on the Trump administration.
In twenty twenty, they successfully in some areas prevented some construction,
but with the waiver of nagpray, it's hard to see
how they will be able to do that. They also
wave a bunch of other acts that Eagle Protection Act,
Environmental microturt Bird Treatise, a bunch of other acts.

Speaker 7 (03:35:47):
Right.

Speaker 13 (03:35:48):
This comes on the same week as Secretary of War
headthst restored medals of honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee.
If people are not familiar, this is the episode where
I do a history of things sort of happened at
Wounded Ney Creek. But this was the largest mass shooting
in US history.

Speaker 12 (03:36:06):
This was just a slaughter.

Speaker 13 (03:36:08):
Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lacachas. Civilians were murdered by the
United States military in the battle.

Speaker 12 (03:36:13):
This was just a massacre.

Speaker 13 (03:36:14):
There were significant casualties for the US military, most of
them were caused by the US military, a friendly fire
and a completely disorganized slaughter of civilians. There was a
standoff at Wounded Ney later in the nineteen seventies in
which two Indigenous people died one went missing. You can
read Mary brave Bird's book about that if you want

(03:36:35):
a first hand of cautfet. It's very good book. But yeah,
Hegseth is doing this, I think because Lloyd Austin had
previously ordered a review of those medals because they weren't fighting,
they were just killing people. Therefore, it makes sense, you know,
that led to to strip these these medals of honor,
in that there was very little honor in what they did.
Hegseth has restored those very amusingly. He said, this is final,

(03:36:58):
like another sec def couldn't just order review like in
four years and change it again. CBP has also issued
a request for comments here in San Diego about its
plans to build seven point six miles of wall west
of Dakat, as well as one point three miles of
wall east of Dakat, more secondary barrier east of O
tim Mesa, and install or maintain fifty one miles of

(03:37:22):
quote barrier system attributes, which may include fiber uptic cables,
lighting poles, artificial lights, power cables, surveillance cameras, access and
patrol roads, and utility shelters. What this would do. I
think most people who haven't spent time at the border
in not aware that there are vast gaps in the
border wall right, and this would close some of those.

(03:37:44):
There are still gaps east of this area. When a
lot of people were entering in twenty twenty three, they
were coming east of here in a more mountainous area.
But this will close existing gaps in the wall around Takata,
around Marin Valley. I imagine that after that they will
continue to move east the areas where there are gaps.

(03:38:04):
Some of the areas where their gaps, for the rest
aren't that hard to access. Some of them would be
very hard to access with construction machinery, and therefore they'd
have to spend a long time building a road before
they could even begin building the wall. Reuters has conducted
a review of more than two million court records and
concluded that federal prosecution of drug cases, especially those of

(03:38:27):
high profile traffickers, have dropped to the lowest level in decades.
Fell forward again a Ward, Yeah, yeah, I mean normally
you would see things like racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy charges, right,
but these are down twenty four percent compared to last year.
Even ongoing investigations have stalled as a federal law enforcement

(03:38:48):
apparatus is focusing the vast majority of its people on
deporting people who have not been accused of any crime.

Speaker 17 (03:38:53):
Really, and even just like the regular FBI investigative capacity,
it has been shifted massive large extents towards just immigration enforcement.
So they're not they're actually just not going after as
much like actual crime.

Speaker 8 (03:39:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:39:06):
I think some agencies, like the Bureau of Alcohol to
Back of Firearms and Explosive for example, I think have
the majority of their agents tasked to immigration raids right now.
The FBI one agent described what he had been tasked
with as quote photo op bullshit, which was taking photos
of their teams on and before raids for use by

(03:39:28):
the ADF and the White House in social media posts.
So they do appear to have I've lost the support
of even some federal law enforcement. Talking of federal law enforcement,
we have also learned this week about an FBI operation
during the Biden administration during which Tom Homan allegedly accepted
fifty thousand dollars in cash. What you didn't hear about

(03:39:51):
the Tom Homan back? What a joy to be able
to share this with You tell me going to get better?
Just just keep it, keep sim adown a Simma down,
Sima down, Sima down. So Tom Homan, for those who
are not familiar, is Trump's borders are and a longtime

(03:40:13):
border security official dating back to the biad administration. Let's
find out about how they got on to Tom Homan.

Speaker 12 (03:40:21):
Said that there was fifty do dollars in cash, but.

Speaker 13 (03:40:23):
For what Just wait, wait, wait, wait wait another Obama
era I stuffer. Julian Calderas, who agents undercover agents had
contacted as part of a separate investigation, repeatedly suggested to
the agents that they may wish to bribe Homan in
order to obtain government contracts. Cayl Deris repeatedly suggested this

(03:40:45):
to the undercover agents, so much so that they diverted
their investigation and set up this investigation. They gave home
and the money, but waited to see what he would
do in office in order to see I guess they
felt would have a stronger case if he came back
to them and said, you know, I have these five
federal contracts, which one would you like? The Trump DOJ

(03:41:06):
took no further steps to investigate and has closed the investigation.
According to NBC, the Trump administration is claiming this was
a set up by the FBI. But of course the
investigation occurred in September of twenty four, so before the election. Again,
it was not an investigation that they started on. It
branched off because Carderus repeatedly suggested that they should continue

(03:41:27):
to they should try and bribe home. The agents who
did this operation were posing as businessman trying to get
government contracts. Right, This might explain so Homan was a
big time Trump affiliate, right, big time Trump supporting people
were suggesting that he might be made Secretary of Homeland Security.

(03:41:49):
This might be why we will never know official right,
This might explain why he's been given a slightly less
formal role which I don't believe he has to pass
through Congress, which is quite unquote border CZA.

Speaker 17 (03:42:01):
This is like the level of normalized corruption which exists
in every level of this administration is like remember when
they just could not stop talking about Hunter hide In.
It's like every all the time. And meanwhile you have like,
like you know, like all of like Jared Kushner's dealings
with like Saudi. Is the Tomhoman getting fifty thousand dollars

(03:42:22):
in cash, Yeah, like undercover and he's just posing us
businessman to help obtain like government contracts. It's like an
absurd comical cartoon world.

Speaker 13 (03:42:33):
So it's Keystone cop shit. We don't know if he's
given the cash back.

Speaker 12 (03:42:36):
Oh that cash is oh god, so much cocaine. Like
I could either confirm her today it was spent on cocaine. Yeah,
a wild instance of corruption. Oh God.

Speaker 13 (03:42:50):
Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela. In Venezuela, it
seems that Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on
strikes on a leged drug smugglers. According to a Guardian piece,
the strikes have been authorized by the Homeland Security count. Sure,
that's a body that Miller leaves, which has massively grown
and influence since the Trump administration. It seems like most

(03:43:10):
people in the administration were pretty much kept in the
dark about this until very shortly before the strike took place.
They were just fined under the Article two Powers, which
give the president authority to use force in limited self
defense engagements. But it seems like Miller is pardoned the
pun driving the ship on this increased violence that we're

(03:43:32):
seeing against Venezuela.

Speaker 17 (03:43:45):
All right, br back for our final story this episode,
We're going to talk about the National Security Presidential Memorandums
number seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,
which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September

(03:44:06):
twenty fifth. This relates in many ways to the Antifa
Domestic Terrorism Executive Order from last week, but this memo
is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes
that will affect law enforcement investigations. So let's go over
the four sections of this very, very long memo. I've

(03:44:28):
tried to condense it down as much as possible, but
there is some good information in here too.

Speaker 10 (03:44:32):
Now.

Speaker 17 (03:44:32):
Section one asserts that there's been an increase in political
violence in recent years, with assassinations and quote unquote riots
in Los Angeles and Portland, which have resulted into more
than one thousand percent increase in attacks against ice officers
since Trump's inauguration two point zero. The memo states that
riots and violence aren't organic events or isolated incidents, but

(03:44:53):
in fact, quote a culmination of a sophisticated organized campaigns
of targeted intimidation, radical threats and violence design to silence
of posting speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes,
and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.

Speaker 12 (03:45:09):
Quote.

Speaker 13 (03:45:10):
We've spoken about the statistic about attacks and ice officers
before and how that's very misleading.

Speaker 17 (03:45:15):
Yeah, I mean an ICE officer is attacked when of
ice officer's fist encounters the face of a child, Right, that's.

Speaker 13 (03:45:24):
Yeah, Latino grandmother, Yes, uh, Latina grandmother in that case.

Speaker 17 (03:45:29):
Well, and a lot of this talking about, you know,
riots is not organized events or us at an incidents.
What they describe here is this like a culmination of
the sophisticated campaign. This is just describing like the process
of like what protesting is, right, trying to direct or
change policy outcomes, which comes up a lot in these
like domestic terrorism laws, which when over applied to just

(03:45:50):
nonviolent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard
First Amendment activity.

Speaker 13 (03:45:55):
It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment.
Right like the right to assemble the it was several
of them, actually, the right to assemble, the right to speak,
the right to petition the government like these are fundamental.

Speaker 17 (03:46:05):
The right to twitch stream at a riot as a
free member of the press.

Speaker 13 (03:46:08):
Yeah, definitely, that's not a right that I choose to exercise,
but I guess it is one that exists. But you
and I have you were important and I was in
Los Angeles. Like the idea that these cities were fundamentally
like damaged by these protests, it's just not true.

Speaker 17 (03:46:22):
Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots,
they're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens.
This memo describes how these you know, organized campaigns start
by quote isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder
or other violent action unquote, claiming that this process happens
across quote anonymous chat forums, in person meetings, the social media,

(03:46:46):
and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized
docsing with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate,
or violently assault targets en quote.

Speaker 13 (03:46:57):
I mean, this is what the Right has done to
like exp especially migrants and trand people right for for
a very long time. Anonymous chat forums And do they
mean a Reddit credits telegram maybe, yeah, I know, I
know that some subreddits have been closed since the issuing

(03:47:20):
of this memorandum, which I'm wondering if it is related.

Speaker 17 (03:47:25):
Not explicitly, but like I think this memos would be
in this section like referring to things I can't to
ice watch, Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of
sense as well as you know standard like you know,
anti fasted action against like legitimate neo Nazis, which yeah,
the Right is not against a doxing as a practice,
as we have seen a few weeks with the state

(03:47:46):
sponsored organized doxing harassment campaigns against people for their comments
about the death of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 5 (03:47:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:47:53):
The memo goes on to list a collection of quote
common recurrent motivations and indica or indicators that unite this
pattern of violence and terroristic activities under the umbrella of
self described anti fascism. These movements portray foundational American principles
support for law enforcement and border control as fascist to

(03:48:13):
justify and encourage acts of a violent revolution common threads
animating this violent conduct include anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism
on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who
hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. So

(03:48:36):
in so far as this memo has been reported, it's
mostly been on this specific section here, listing the indicators
that could be driving terroristic acts under the umbrella of
anti fascism, including all of these beliefs that people are
allowed to hold in the United States due to the
rights granted to us and the Bill of Rights in

(03:48:58):
the Constitution.

Speaker 13 (03:48:58):
Yeah, I mean that the hypocrisy is the point, and
it's sometimes not worth it. It's not a point, but
it's not particularly you know, it doesn't change anything I'm
pointing out, But I will just point out that like
the idea that border control is a foundational American principle
is not true. That it was not until the Chinese
Exclusion Act that the United States began to exclude anyone
from coming here, and that was in the nineteenth century.

(03:49:19):
History understanders will have noticed that the United States began
at some point before the nineteenth century.

Speaker 17 (03:49:27):
One thing I will say regarding like this section, some
reporting around this memo is framing things like you know,
anti capitalism or anti Christianity is now that is going
to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist.
That is not the explicit way is written about in
this memo. These are indicators which if some investigator sees

(03:49:48):
on a Twitter account or a blue Sky account, could
then cause them to investigate further into this person or group.
But it's not like just expressing these things will itself
deem you terrorist and be putting you in jail.

Speaker 12 (03:50:02):
And this does rely on action.

Speaker 17 (03:50:04):
Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying
to prevent crime before it happens. I think this would
be more in the way of how the FBI tries
to set up like sting operations or catch people who
are planning a violent act before they actually do it,
as we've even seen the past few weeks with people
being arrested for planning retaliation attacks following the death of

(03:50:26):
Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 12 (03:50:27):
This has happened now.

Speaker 17 (03:50:29):
The memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy
to quote investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic
conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence,
so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before
they result in violent political acts unquote. So that is

(03:50:51):
the pre crime aspect of this order, which they could
use some of these beliefs like extremism on migration or
race or gender, or anti americanism as justification to start
investigating groups, which then arrests could follow prior to imminent
violent act as deemed by federal law enforcement.

Speaker 5 (03:51:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:51:13):
I mean, in theory, the role of the effectially federal
law enforcement has always been to investigate people who were
planning violent or terroristic acts. The difference here is that
this is being specifically framed around a certain group, and
this probably will lead to more attempts by their more
surveillance on people within exactly groups.

Speaker 17 (03:51:33):
Right now, this is very worrying in terms of like surveillance,
suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent
or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity first, mental
protest activity, non government organizations that support progressive causes or values.
That's the real concern here.

Speaker 13 (03:51:53):
It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example,
a number of grandeuries did not return indictment of people
who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand
jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them
for right. This is unusual. Most federal prosecutions do result
ultimately in a guilty plea right because they bring very

(03:52:14):
strong cases when they bring them that It's worth noting
that the specifically, like the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles,
has not struck the landing on all of its attempts
to indict people for things that they did during that
time of protest in June.

Speaker 17 (03:52:29):
In terms of like implementation, the memo says, quote, law
enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities and organizations that
promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other
efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society unquote networks,
entities organizations. These refer to like established organizations like actual

(03:52:54):
like formed groups that have political activity.

Speaker 14 (03:52:59):
Now.

Speaker 17 (03:52:59):
Section two lines how the National Joint Terrorism Task Force
will quote unquote coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national
strategy and orders the local Joint Terrorism Task Force around
the country to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to
acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of

(03:53:21):
political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation
of any citizens' rights unquote. The GDTFS Joint Terrorism Task
Force will also investigate institutional and individual funders, including employees
of organizations which are quote responsible for sponsor or otherwise

(03:53:41):
the AID and EVET the principal actors engaging in the
criminal conduct as previously described. That's a broadet, right, There's
a lot of this stuff, Like the Anti for Order
also alluded to this. Trump's statements made in the Oval
Office have alluded to this going after funders, foreign funders,
whether that's the groups like the ACLU or like bail funds.

(03:54:03):
They mentioned George sorows very often. Yeah, the Open Society Foundation, right, Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:54:08):
I think the right has had a fascination with sorrows
for a long time. Right, They've been looking for a
reason to either exclude sorrows from participation in US politics
and just to be like obviously I think most people
realize this, but that that fascination is rooted deeply in antisemitism.
George Soros is a Holocaust survivor, and there has been
like an attempt to find reasons to exclude sorrows from

(03:54:30):
from US political activity for some time. I think it's
reasonable to see this in that trend.

Speaker 17 (03:54:35):
This sort of like big organizations foreign organizations is also
mentioned in this memo and saying the investigation will include
NGOs and American citizens with foreign ties that could be
in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act or quote
money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage
in activities that support or courage domestic terrorism unquote. The

(03:54:56):
memo states that the Attorney General shall issue guidance which
ensures that domestic terrorism priorities include quote politically motivated terrorist
acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault,
damage of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. The
guides shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns,

(03:55:20):
recurrent motivations, or other indica common to organizations and entities
that coordinate these acts, in order to direct efforts to
identify and prevent potential violent activity.

Speaker 7 (03:55:28):
Unquote.

Speaker 17 (03:55:29):
This is a worrying list of things that are not
domestic terrorism that they're going to try to claim our
domestic terrorism trespass. Yeah, like trespassing is now domestic terrorism.
That's not a great thing for the Attorney General to
be issuing guidance on. Yeah, civil disorder is a very
broad and somewhat nebulous term, right, Like, are they gonna

(03:55:51):
call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing
right now domestic terrorism? No, of course not right, These
things are just taking form for explicit like political prosecution,
for the political ends of Trump administration.

Speaker 13 (03:56:05):
I think the goal here, like some of these are
reason even a statue, right, Like, I'm not aware of
a broad federal doxing statute aside from certain specific instances
where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address.

Speaker 17 (03:56:16):
Violent intimidation of probably like federal law enforcement would be
one thing that they go after.

Speaker 13 (03:56:21):
Yeah, federal law enforcement people with protective orders, that kind
of thing, right, And yeah, there are probably ways of
doing that, But I think a lot of this is
intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing.

Speaker 17 (03:56:35):
Absolutely, the Treasury Secretary will work with ETERN in general
to quote identify and disrupt financial networks that funded domestic
terrorism and political activity, and shall deploy investigative tools examine
financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit
funding streams unquote. Again very obsessed with this idea that
there's tons of money that is funding ANTIFA, which if
you know anyone under the antifam umbrella, you know that

(03:56:57):
they are extremely bro Yeah, yeah, this is left wing
protesters are not the most financially stable budget. Yeah, there's
there's not this illicit funding streams. This is a huge,
a huge idea that the right has like latched on.

Speaker 13 (03:57:11):
Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the
authoritarian left. Actually, the idea that people can't act independently
unless there is a large, well funded actor motivating them
to act is something that because the authoritarian right and
the authoritarian left agree on some things, and one of
them is that like people can't take the initiative to
act right, that there has to be some kind of

(03:57:34):
vanguard in the case of the authoritarian left, or nefarious
funder in the case of the authoritarian right. And so
this this lines up with the way that they understand
the world.

Speaker 17 (03:57:43):
I mean yeah, and I was talking specifically here in
terms of like regular people on the ground attending protests.
There's like big, big groups like you know often like
you know, communist line groups that may be receiving funding
possibly from foreign sources. Yeah, yeah, yeah for real, But
I do not believe that is what this order is,
at least this section is actually wanting to go after.

(03:58:06):
That might be what they in the end actually end
up targeting, end up sweeping up because it's the only
thing that actually has like you know, foreign funding. But
like you know, capital a Antifa teenagers with like umbrellas
showing up in front of an ice building are not
receiving money from like Iran, China or Russia.

Speaker 13 (03:58:21):
Like, yeah, as you say, it might be large as
some policy law center, the ACLU, Open Society Foundation, build.

Speaker 12 (03:58:29):
Gate Network for Strong Community.

Speaker 13 (03:58:30):
Yes, like some of these organizations might be what they're
trying to drag a net over here.

Speaker 12 (03:58:36):
Or nonprofits.

Speaker 17 (03:58:37):
The next section instructs the IRS to quote take action
to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or
indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and calls
for the IRS to refer suspect organizations and their employees
to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

Speaker 13 (03:58:59):
It's probably worth the context here that there was this
is after a twenty ten congressional investigation that found out
that the IRS had gone after some tea party groups. Right,
do you remember the Tea Party? Garrison? You or seven
at that time?

Speaker 12 (03:59:12):
I remember the Tea Party?

Speaker 13 (03:59:13):
Yeah, yeah, So the feeling here Biden, if you remember,
Garrison also hired a number of new IRS agents. There
was a conspiracy theory that these were to provide some
kind of armed, massive, armed element to the IRS that
was going around in the Biden administration. I'm sure the
IRS had an armed element, right. There is not a
federal investigative agency that doesn't, like the Postal Service has

(03:59:37):
cops and probably a swat team. But there was a
feeling on the right that Biden mobilized the IRS against
right wing individuals, and I could see this being the
old panting I'm swinging back in the other direction a
little bit.

Speaker 17 (03:59:51):
One of the more interesting sections that I've highlighted of
the memo instructs investigators to quote question individuals engaged in
political violence or lawlessness regarding the entity or individual organizing
such actions and any related financial sponsorship prior to perfect

(04:00:13):
communication or initiation of a plea agreement unquote. That's directing
like the interrogations of people arrested at protests, like specifically
go after who's funding them to be a protest. I'm
sure some very fruitful information will come out of referring
back to our discussion of like, you know, the common
motivators are Indica, including things you know, like anti capitalism,

(04:00:35):
anti Americanism, and how those beliefs in and of themselves
I do not think will be sufficient for declaring someone
a terrorist and like locking them up. Is because later
in this memo, the memo directs investigations to quote prioritize
crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees,
conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit

(04:00:59):
a crime of violent money laundering, funding of terrorist acts
or otherwise facilitating terrorism, areson violations of the u Rico Act,
and major fraud.

Speaker 12 (04:01:08):
Against the United States?

Speaker 17 (04:01:10):
Quote So could the government use these indicators to then
find groups to target, to stick some of these crimes
onto groups or organizations. Absolutely, that's probably what they're gonna do.
But these these are the things to like be aware of,
and they're gonna try to, you know, slap these on

(04:01:30):
people who are just arrested at protests, people who work
for NGOs, people who work for legal support networks, maybe
migrant assistance networks like that's that's gonna be the target
for a lot of these things. And we've seen some
of these, like conspiracy charges in San Diego with their
with their Antifa prosecution case. We've seen similar stuff in

(04:01:52):
Atlanta with Stop cop City. Right, there is precedent for this.
We've seen the state try to and to a degree
of success and failure, actually push these charges forward.

Speaker 13 (04:02:03):
Yeah, the panic that those two cases created. I think
we were still pre trial in the Atlantic case.

Speaker 12 (04:02:10):
Right, the trials in progress.

Speaker 13 (04:02:12):
Yeah, yeah, sorry pre uh, I guess the conclusion of
that trial.

Speaker 17 (04:02:16):
But the current indication is that most of these record
chargers are not going to stick.

Speaker 13 (04:02:20):
Yes, and most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego
did not, right, and most of those people ended up
not being convicted of all the things they were accused of.
I do see the major fraud against the United States,
and I think that's probably going to use against NGOs.
I do also wonder they have spoken before about the
Payroll Protection Plan and looking at PPP fraud.

Speaker 17 (04:02:43):
Yeah, I mean financial crimes are always are always really scary, right, like.

Speaker 13 (04:02:48):
Yeah, yeah, like a lot of nonprofits, you know, like
people undoubtedly given a scaled of the PPP people abused it.
I think nonprofits would be a lot more buttoned up
than almost anyone else in that regard, you know, these
aspectly these big liberal nonprofits. But that is an area
which I'm sure that the trumpires will be looking at.

Speaker 17 (04:03:10):
Yeah, and they might even try to slap these on
people making jokes or quote unquote threats online right solicitation
to commit a crime of violence.

Speaker 13 (04:03:17):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, people shouldn't be saying stupid chill on
social media.

Speaker 17 (04:03:20):
Right now, which which is absolutely like a chilling speech,
right that is, that's excting speech.

Speaker 12 (04:03:25):
That is a bad thing.

Speaker 17 (04:03:27):
But you don't want to give these people extra ammunition
to use against yourself right now.

Speaker 13 (04:03:32):
Fighting words are not always like First Amendment speech right
now now, Like I'm no expect in where that starts
and where that ends. But yeah, yeah, like in terms
of not doing stupid things, like this is not a
time to do stupid things on your posting websit of choice.

Speaker 17 (04:03:51):
Section two closes by calling for investigators in federal police
to quote adopt strategies similar to those used to address
a violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle
entire networks of criminal activity unquote. So yeah, especially with
all this financial stuff, money laundering, rico, conspiracy charges, they're
basically using or they want to use like tactics to

(04:04:14):
take down like organized crime rings. Just targeting their political enemies,
targeting political organizations and people who attend protests like that
is that is the real gist of this memo. Section
three instructs the Eterney General to designate qualifying groups or
entities under investigation as domestic terrorist organizations per the definition

(04:04:36):
of domestic terrorism in eighteen USC two three three one five,
and to submit a list of such groups to the
President of the United States. And Section four instructs the
Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to designate domestic
terrorism a national priority area and provide extra funding for
law enforcement to quote, detect, prevent, and protect against threats

(04:04:57):
arising from this area. That is the bulk of the
National Security Potential Memorandum number seven, promising to chill speech
and go after political opponents and organizations, entities, and individuals
and employees of organizations. Yeah, very very undemocratic, very very
on its face authoritarian. Yeah, you don't even need like

(04:05:20):
like allegations of political targeting. Like they're writing down how
they want to do political targeting, they're bragging about it.

Speaker 13 (04:05:28):
It's really what briefly want to raise the example of
the flag burning. Right, So Donald Trump signed an executive
order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier
this year. I can't quite remember when. Subsequently, someone called
jan Carey of North Carolina was arrested after they burned

(04:05:51):
a flag, an American flag. Just to be clear outside
the White House, I guess the flag burning executive order
doesn't apply to like you're you know, like anime flag
or whatever, specifically about the flag of the United States,
something which I think Johnson versus Texas is a Supreme
Court case, right, but there is a considerable amount of
legal precedent that is First Amendment speech. Kerry was arrested.

(04:06:13):
What is being missed in the discussion is that Kerry
was charged with two misdemeanor crimes. One was for lighting
a fire not in a designated area and receptacle. The
other was for lighting a fire in a manner that
threatened to cause damage to a resulted in the burning
of property, real property and park resources. These are both
offensives that you can be incarcerated or fined for. I

(04:06:34):
want people to know that, right, Like, he was not
arrested because of the executive order, although the executive order
may very much influenced the climate which led to his
arrest in charge with these other things, but he wasn't
charged with violating the executive order because that is not
how it works.

Speaker 17 (04:06:52):
They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums.
What they can do is direct how the law will
be in four or policy guidelines, right, and that's what
this is affecting right now. All of these branches like
the DHS, Justice Department, Federal Police are going to be
following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo

(04:07:14):
to then try to enforce the laws that we have
and some of which they will probably find ways to
do it and sometimes they won't.

Speaker 13 (04:07:22):
Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing
a very large range of things, and someone will find
some way in there to criminalize someone for something that
might seem on the face of it to be not nefarious.
But that doesn't mean that we have executive legiative fusion.
We don't write yourself too prior to the government, and
that is important to remember too.

Speaker 17 (04:07:43):
No, no laws have been changed criminalizing anti americanism, right, Yeah,
that is that it is an important thing to keep
in mind. That does not mean that this order is
not going to chill speech, suppress free speech, or be.

Speaker 12 (04:07:56):
Used to criminally target people.

Speaker 17 (04:07:58):
Yeah, criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for
years and years, regardless of the actual outcome, right, even
if they get off on the charges. And totally we
want to be clear that we're not like minimizing the
effects of this, but we do want to actually break
down what like the threat model is specifically for like
NGO's legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, Right,

(04:08:22):
these are probably going to be the first targets of
a lot of like the conspiracy fraud sections of disorder. Besides,
you know, protesters that get rounded up and get put
into into this like political war game that they're playing,
similar to how regular protesters in Atlanta then found themselves
suddenly admitst like a three year long reco domestic terrorism

(04:08:43):
case despite not participating in any kind of large organized
aspect of stop Coop City. They were just regular attendees.
So there'll be stuff similar to that that happens throughout
the next few months to years, and I think that
is where we should keep our attention focused on mitigating
the harms of government overreach.

Speaker 13 (04:09:02):
Yeah, so for the fun raise this week, something slightly different.
I wanted to read of this go fundme for the
emergency Circus. They are traveling south of the US border.
I believe they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to
hold circus acts circus performances for kids. I have obviously, obviously,
but I've spent a decent amount of my life in

(04:09:23):
refugee camps and migrant shelters and they can be pretty
hard places for kids, and it's something that I think
about almost every day. And so people bringing joy to
their children is something that I think is wonderful and
very important. People, you know, get the impression that like
legal funds are important and the kids having a laugh
is not important, But like children have a right to

(04:09:43):
be children, and that's taken away from them by the
immigration system. And so I would like if you supported this.
The website is ww dot gofundb dot com slash f
slash ec hyphen o f f hyphen ic. It will
also be in a show. If you would like to
email us, you can do so at our encrypted email address,

(04:10:06):
which is cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. Your
email will only be end to end encrypted if you
send it from an encrypted email address. Proton mail is
an example of an encrypted email address.

Speaker 17 (04:10:21):
Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode
for next week. There was a shooting at a Mormon
church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn
into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity,
and then once information about the shooter became more clear,
they quickly dropped the subject. So on Wednesday, I'll be

(04:10:42):
doing an episode talking about this shooting and a few others,
and how various outlets on the right end left are
only reporting on these big shootings insofar as they can
turn them into political weapons against the opposition party.

Speaker 12 (04:10:56):
We reported the news, We reported the news.

Speaker 1 (04:11:05):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 7 (04:11:10):
It could happen.

Speaker 17 (04:11:11):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 12 (04:11:13):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media.

Speaker 10 (04:11:15):
Visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

Speaker 17 (04:11:22):
Listen to podcasts can now find sources where it could
happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 12 (04:11:27):
Thanks for listening.

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