It Could Happen Here Weekly 156

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):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm
joined by Mia Wong. It's a sort of a new week,
so let's start preparing for what these next few months
are going to look like. In the wake of Trump's
election victory last week, so one thing I was thinking
about after the results kind of rolled in and seeing

(00:47):
everyone's reactions online, you have a you know, a mix
of people going full doomer, some people trying to get
hopped up on opium, some people on copium right, just
trying to like find any psychological way to survive and
from kind of the way I like to survive is
just through information. So this episode, we're gonna get into
how we see life for trans people under a second

(01:08):
Trump term based on both what he's done in the
past what he's promised to do in the future. And
I know, in like the days after the election, like LGBTQ,
like crisis hotlines all saw a massive spike in people
calling in, to the point where some people were even
unable to reach someone. And like I understand, this is

(01:29):
a very scary moment in time. And as much as
it might not be fun to hear about how things
are all gonna get worse, there's also some misconceptions, and
I think there's also a degree of power in actually
being able to reasonably ascertain what things could look like
instead of just kind of feeling it out and just
going purely on vibes. So to kind of start, I

(01:51):
guess I'll mention some things that Trump did in his
first term that then got undone by Biden, which will
probably just end up being reinstated. We don't know these
for sure, but that's like a decent guess. So one
of the first things Trump did when he got into
office is he rolled back in Obama era memo directing
schools to protect trans students from discrimination.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Yeah, and that, by the way, discrimination protection is a
constant theme in this episode, it's going to get a
lot worse.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Trump later went on to ban trans people from serving
in the military. He also went after trans prisoners, making
it so that trans people usually would need to be
housed in prisons and jails according to their assigned sex
at birth, which is of course a very dangerous situation
for people incarcerated, specifically trans women.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, and I think there is good reason to expect
that treatment there is going to get worse. There's been
you know, we'll get into this more later in the episode,
but there's been a real focus on incarcerated trans people
getting health care. Yeah, and this is one of the
things that's kind of ambiguous as to how Trump could
go about trying to stop these people from getting healthcare.

(02:57):
So the thing about providing healthcare as people who have
been incarcerated is that they have to do it. Is
it is something that is required by the Constitution of
the United States. The Eighth Amendment holds that there is
a ban on cruel unusual punishment, and withholding medical care
is so obviously a form of cruel unusual punishment that
even staggeringly right wing Supreme courts have been like, no,

(03:19):
you actually have to give people medical care in prison.
So this is one that's going to be a little
bit difficult for him to do. I don't know, he
might find some way to do it. This is one
of the ones where there's a real potential for it
to get worse, and we simply do not know enough
about what legal strategy is going to be here to
say for sure.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
But it's also worth mentioning, like people have had to
fight for access to healthcare in prison, Like it's not
something that comes easily, Like people have had to sue
to make sure that they get the health care that
they are legally required to receive. And we can just
assume that that process will probably be slightly more difficult
under a second Trump term like it was under a

(04:00):
first Chuck term. Then it may kind of currently be now.
So that's kind of one shift in how things might
be slightly more challenging.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, and I want to also mention so that analysis
and a lot of the analysis, the policy analysis that
I'm going to be doing going forward, is heavily indebted
to trans policy expert Corinn Green, who we've had on
the show a couple of times before. Amazingly, she was
one of the people who ended up working on compliance
for that lawsuit where Kamala Harris tried to keep transprisoners

(04:29):
from getting healthcare, and she came in and had to
like ensure that the state of California was doing it,
and they weren't. So that's something that has been fought for,
and that's something I mean, the trans community is small
enough that that is the thing that has specifically been
fought for by people who I consulted to make this episode. So, yeah,
these these rights have been dearly one and it's going
to be very hard to protect them. If I'm doing

(04:50):
something where there's there's something about policy implementation, assume that
I talked to Krinn about this and that's why it's accurate.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
And while I'm.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Doing this, I want to plug a couple of the
projects that she works on. But there's something you can
do very immediately, right now, before we get into all
of the terrible stuff that's going to happen, which is
you can donate to the Trans Income Project, which is
the project that supports trans people and transsex workers in particular,
which is a lot of trans people and supports them
by just giving them direct cash transfers. They use some

(05:20):
of their work too, but yeah, and direct cash transfers
are one of the most effective ways that you can
help trans people. And if you give money to this organization,
they'll be links in the chat you can help do this.
So let's get into how things are going to get worse. Unfortunately,
trud administration, Congress, and state legislators have an enormous amount
of power to make everything worse. We're mostly going to

(05:40):
be focusing on what Trump and Congress can do.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
We'll get into the legislator's a bit at the end.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
So there are a lot of levers of state power
and sort of policy techniques that Trump can pull here
to make things worse. We're going to go roughly from
easiest to hardest to pull off. So the first lever
is federal funding. Probably the easiest place that this lever
can get pulled is in the education system. Trump can

(06:08):
unfortunately fairly easily implement what amounts to a don't say
trans ban on a federal level by threatening to withhold
federal funding for any school that doesn't mandate things like
misgendering and dead nighbing students and banned And this is
something he's explicitly talked about. Is like banning anyone in classes,
any teachers from talking about traditioning at all. He's also

(06:29):
threatened to have teachers who talk to students about being
trands like investigated by the Department of Justice.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
We'll get more into Department just investigations in a bit.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
He's also used an explicit threat, the same threat of
cutting state funding to stop schools some letting kids use
the right bathroom in the locker room. It's also possible
he will do that through Title nine. But there's a
lot of ways that he can do this very easily
that are probably not going to be able to be stopped.
And this is going to get extremely bad, very quickly.

(06:59):
Another sort of avenue that he has is I guess
what you'd call like the High Amendment for trans people.
So for people who don't know what the High Amendment is,
the High Amendment is a writer that bans federal spending
on abortion.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
It's been like modified.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
It's not like the one percent band that he used
to be because now there's like exceptions for rape and
incests and stuff life of their parents too. But it
is a very very effective Republican tool. It's actually also
Joe Biden helped implement that that's been used to limit
access to abortion, and we already have seen the start
of these kind of things even under Biden. There was

(07:36):
a version of this of a kind of high amendment
for trans healthcare that was an attempt to get the
DoD to not be able to spend money on trans healthcare.
That's already a provision that's been tacked onto one of
the most recent spending bills that went through because Joe
Manchin like defected and joined the Republicans to get it
onto one of the spending omnibuses, and that was again

(07:58):
just for the Department of Defense. We are very likely
to see versions of these attached to every single spending
bill that explicitly say that government funding cannot be used
for trans health care. It will definitely be used to
do to say you can't use it for trans healthcare
for minors. It is possible this will be expanded to adults.

Speaker 4 (08:15):
We don't know.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
It depends how far there's sort of anti trans I
don't know the derangement goes, but that is a real danger.
And this can also be expanded to refusing to allow
Medicare and Medicaid to pay for anything at a clinic
that does trans healthcare, even if the money isn't funding
the healthcare. That's also possible. That would be absolutely catastrophic

(08:39):
for the medical system. Even just a government band that
prevents things like Medicare and Medicaid and like government health
care from covering transition in the first place is a disaster.
But if they go further and prevent clinics who provide
trans health care from taking Medicare and Medicaid, that's bad

(09:00):
enough that I think that is in terms of what
is the thing we most need to be worried about
right now, I think that's the worst possible thing that
can happen very quickly, because.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
It could basically pressure medical clinics into refusing to offer
any kind of gender affirming care because it would threaten
their just base ability to operate as a medical clinic
taking Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, this is the thing I talked about a bit
in our Agenda forty seven episode on this. But this
is this effectually creates like Sophie's choice for these clinics,
because it's either you treat trans people who have private insurance, right,
or you can treat like people who have who are
a medicare medicaid. So it's like, okay, either either you
let trans people get fucked or you let like every

(09:39):
poor person or old person in the US like eat shit.
So there aren't good options here for that.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
How do we think something like this would be implemented?
Like is this an executive order or does this have
to go through Congress?

Speaker 3 (09:51):
So that's the other part about this that's very bad.
The way that this is being done is these things
are attaches to what are called writers to spending bills.
So any spending bill Republicans put in front of the House,
they will have this like provision in it, right, And
the really big problem for us is that spending bills
usually get passed now out of this thing called Senate reconciliation.

(10:13):
And the thing about Senate reconciliation is that you can't
fill a buster them, so these can just get rammed
through really really quickly, and there's not going to be
enough opposition in the House to stop it either. So
I mean, some of this stuff probably could be done
with executive orders, but it's quite possible if you won't
even need that because it can just be rammed through
in spending bills.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
Which is a little bit harder to undo. From my understanding.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, yeah, executive orders can be overturned by the next guy,
whereas getting these provisions out is going to take a
long time. Yeah, you know, this is another issue that
we have. The map for the Democrats retaking the Senate
is terrible in twenty twenty six and it's bad in
twenty twenty eight two. So I still don't think this
is being recorded Friday. I don't think we still actually
know what their majority in the Senate's going to be.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
But it's a lot.

Speaker 3 (10:59):
And also we know that Joe Manchin is willing to
vote for stuff like this because he's done it already,
So this is probably coming quickly. It basically depends on
how good their policy people are, which who knows. But yeah,
this is not going to be difficult for them to
implement and it is going to be extremely damaging.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Well, that was a lot. Let's take a little bit
of a break and will we come back, take another
look into what life could be like under a second
Trump term.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
We are back.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
So the threat to trans people does not only come
from Congress and the President. One of the things that's
almost certainly going to happen very soon is there is
currently a case about a trans healthcare band from Miners
and Tennessee in front of the Supreme Court. It's called
Scrmetti versus us. We are almost certainly going to lose this.

(12:02):
Not losing this requires a bunch of extremely unlikely things happening,
and this is very, very bad. What Scrimmetti versus Us
is probably going to cost us is trans people as
a group being protected by the fourteenth Amendment. So the
fourteenth Amendment is supposed to provide everyone equal protection under
the law. The way this has been interpreted is that

(12:23):
if you're passing a law that directly targets a group,
there are certain levels of scrutiny that have to be
applied to it to see whether or not it's discriminatory
and can be allowed to proceed. What's probably going to
happen here is that trans people aren't going to be
held as protected at all, which means that the fourteenth
Amendment will not protect us from things that are unbelievably
obviously discriminatory, like healthcare bands for youth, which is again

(12:47):
literally the same procedures that are happening for trans children
are done to sis children. All the time and it's fine. Yeah,
so this is very obviously discrimination. We're probably going to
lose it because the Supreme Court is full of a
bunch of the worst people in the entire world. It
is technically possible that Gorstch defects and drags someone else
over and we get a thing that says we have

(13:07):
intermediate scrutiny. That would be the best win we could
possibly get on this. It's extremely it's unlikely. We're probably
going to lose it. And this is also going to
overturn the landmark case Bostock versus Clayton County, which is
the one that rules that you can't discriminate against trans
people based on gener identity.

Speaker 4 (13:25):
Specifically for like employers as well.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah, for employees. Is specifically for employers. So what we
could very well be about to lose. And again, this
is another thing that's very high likelihood because this case
is they're ready in front of the Supreme Court, and
the Supreme Court hates us. We could be about to
lose employment discrimination protections now. To be fair, and I
think most trans people who are listening to the show
know this. I don't know how many SIS people understand this,
but the level of trans employment discrimination in the workplace

(13:51):
is unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, this isn't really enforced at all. Uh, yeah, it's
pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
It is something that right now is technically possible to you,
and you're not allowed to just straight up say it.
But you know, like there is a reason that the
unemployment rate for trans people is like three times as high. No,
it's actually I think's yeah, I think it's about three
times as high as the rate for SIS people. Right,
we don't have great data. There's some data from the
Translant Student Survey from twenty twenty two, but the full

(14:18):
report isn't out yet. But what I will say is
that the trans level of unemployment unemployment right now in
the US is very low. The level of unemployment for
trans people is nineteen thirty six, great depression levels. And
this is before we lose these these protections. It is
also worth noting this will not overturn like state level
of protections, So if you're in a state that like
has specifically banned it, you will have some more recourse.

(14:41):
But we're losing fourteenth MEDIT protections on.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
A federal level would basically allow explicit employment discrimination. Yeah,
if someone's trans.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
It's possible that case goes like marginally better for us
and that doesn't happen, But it's hard to see how
that would happen. The lawyers I talked to you will
say this is this is not a legal opinion, but
they seem to think that this is how this would go,
and the policy people seem to think going the same way.
There's some other things that can happen. Trump has been
promising We're going to get federal investigations into clinics that

(15:13):
provide gender affirming care, also into hospitals. You know, there's
gonna be enormous legal harassment. This has already been happening
on a sort of lower level, but from sort of
individual lawsuits and state attorney generals. But this is going
to be happening with the full backing of the Department
of Justice. You can look at like what Texas has
been doing the past four years. Yeah, with them investigating
not as clinics, but also like parents of trans kids. Yeah, parents,

(15:36):
like individual health care providers. He was also pledging to
investigate like the companies that make hormones, So that's bad.
There's also the Department of Justice has been making some
incredibly half assed attempts to try to go after some
of the healthcare bands.

Speaker 4 (15:50):
That's all going to stop. They're just going to give
all that up.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
There's also a bunch of bills that could be passed
depending on the Democrats' willingness to filibuster them. So Trump
has called for a ban of trans people like playing
sports that correspond with their gender, and that may well
pass because the Democrats are cowards and the Republicans are
going to have a large majority in the Senate. Trump

(16:13):
has also pushed for a ban on gender firming care
for minors, including Harts homo replacement therapy, which is like
one of the main ways you transition and puberty blockers.
That one is less likely to make it through the Senate,
but it also again depends on how cowardly the Democrats
are and how much they decide to cave. And this
is the moment that there is another thing that you

(16:33):
can do and you should start doing this right now,
which is this is the moment right now to start
pressuring your congress person about this, like start calling them,
start pressuring them, and start making sure that they don't
fully sort of turn on trans rights. This is just
something that you can concretely do right now, because these
people need to understand that there are consequences for turning

(16:54):
on trans people, because if there aren't consequences, they are
going to do it now. Trump has also called for
a ban on recognizing trans people at a federal level
on like all identification documents things like that also would
outlaw non binary markings on passports and stuff. That would
also be really bad. That's also something that probably requires
a law. And that's again and everything. Call your conresspeople,

(17:17):
like pressure them now, start doing it now, do not
wait until he's actually in office.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And like, all of these issues are things that public
opinion has been shifting on greatly the past like two years. Yeah,
these things used to be much more kind of seen
as like, yeah, this like makes sense, this is like
a humane and reasonable effort to include a group of
discriminated people. And now we see in a growing number
a majority of people pull on this issue do not
support these measures. They don't support having the ability to

(17:45):
have your gender marker match your gener identity. They don't
support your ability to participate in public life. And that
is the result of an intentional misinformation campaign and essentially
like a hate crime campaign and a hate speech campaign
that has been going on for the past like four
years because Republicans knew that they already lost the battle
on like regular gay people, so they moved on to

(18:07):
the next subjugated class. And that's something we've talked about
for a while. And this is like something that is shifting.
So you have to actually verbally express to to your
representatives that this is something that you actually do care about.
Otherwise they will look at these like general polls and
be like, oh, I guess this isn't popular anymore, and
shift and cave on it. They need to know that
their constituents actually do care about these things if we

(18:28):
want these things to not get passed through Congress.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah, and it's also worth mentioning that a lot of
this people just don't know anything about about trans people
because we're like one percent of the population right now.
Part of the reason the Republican campaign is working is
that people are susceptible to being told things about trans
people and believing them. But that also works for us. Yeah, right,
it goes both ways. Part of what's been going on
is that, like we haven't had the kind of giant

(18:52):
advocacy push outside of some trans people. But we have
no money, we have no resources, and we need there
to actually be large, widespread and vocal public support because
otherwise all of the stuff that's happening here is going
to get even worse. And you know the word when
we could get very well, the worst case scenario, things
which are full bands for adults. That's the thing that

(19:14):
they could pass through Congress, but right now they don't
have the support for it. Yeah, However, Comma ascarising is
going to get to there are signs that the Democratic
Party is deciding to throw us under the bus.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yeah, not as steadfast on this issue then what we
would probably prefer.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
And on the state level, I guess the important thing
for the state level is that once we lose Fourteenth
Amendment protections, it's going to be so much harder for
there to be legal challenges to any of this. And
this means we're going to see a proliferation of these
state level bands on healthcare, even sort of marching ahead
of where the federal government is.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Let's have our last break and when we come back.
We will close the episode by discussing Trump's focus on
trans issues during his campaign, as well as things that
you can start doing like right now to get ready
and prepare for these next four years.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
During the last few months of Trump's campaign, his team
shifted away from the key issues of the economy and
immigration in their national election ad efforts, and specifically honed
in on trans issues as a wedge against Kamala Harris
and the Democrats in general, the infamous Kamala Is for
They Them ad being the prime example of this. According

(20:39):
to a PBS report, from October seventh to October twentieth,
Trump's campaign and pro Trump groups spent an estimated thirty
nine million dollars on anti trans ads, and Trump ended
up spending more money on these ads than on housing, immigration,
and the economy combined. This was his main focus in
his final ad push, a specific after the September debate.

(21:02):
A new report from journalist Casey Parks, using data from
Ad Impact, shows that Republicans spent nearly two hundred and
fifteen million dollars on anti trans ads this election cycle.
And this figure does not include cable or streaming ads.
This is just network TV. And these anti trans ads
weren't just focused on the presidential election. Other Republicans in

(21:25):
various Senate races picked up on the success of these
anti trans ads and used them in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Now,
initially some thought that maybe this would be a repeat
of twenty twenty two, Maybe this extra focus on this
small group of the population wouldn't lead to kind of
electoral successes, pointing to how a similar strategy failed during

(21:47):
the twenty twenty two midterms. But then election day came
and we saw that there was a degree of success
or at least these did not hurt them in any
substantial way, and Republicans won many of the Senate races
on anti trans campaign messages. I'm going to quote from
an article in The New York Times called it Trump
and the Republicans bet big on anti trans ads across
the country. Quote the kamala is for they them add

(22:10):
was rated as one of his campaigns more effective in
September in some Democratic testing. According to results reviewed by
The Times, Republican strategists said the focus on transunter women
and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a
key group of voters the party had hemorrhaged support from
in recent years, college educated women. One of the things

(22:31):
you see in the focus groups is that the moms
get really visibly angry on this issue, said Jim McLaughlin,
a Republican polster who works for mister Trump and other
Republican campaigns. Quote it's a fairness issue. They don't want
their daughters to lose a scholarship and they don't want
them to get hurt unquote. The enthusiasm for this issue
kind of lines up with what me, Sophie, and Roberts

(22:52):
saw at the RNC, where anti trans statements consistently got
the loudest applause. Though some state level Democrats Representative Steth
Moulton of Massachusetts and Tom Soulsey of New York, as
well as some other DNZ advisors, have jumped onto the
blame game, citing trans issues as if not the reason,
then a reason Democrats just completely fumble this election, claiming

(23:14):
that the Democratic Party is far to the left on
trans issues and the average American. But largely the Dems
were not out campaigning for trans people like Loud and
Proud the selection cycle, oh trans issues were intentionally pushed
off stage at the DNC, and the Harris campaign tried
their hardest to sidestep this issue, giving vague non answers
and whether trans people should be able to receive healthcare

(23:35):
by just stating that her administration would quote unquote follow
the law and invoking States rights type framing. And I
see this as just a massive failure to confront an
issue that Republicans have like slingshot into the spotlight, and
it shows a failure to do things because it's like
the right thing to do, not just necessarily for some

(23:56):
like electoral gain.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
Well even even on a strategic level.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Right, we saw this with border policy too, right exactly,
Democrats adopted their Republican's sport policy and then they lost exactly.
And it's like, yeah, if you just agree or refuse
to contest them on their core issues, then that's what
people are going to believe because people have a tendency
to believe what their elites are telling them. You can't
defeat these people's ideology by just agreeing with it or
start stepping out of the way of it.

Speaker 4 (24:21):
That just lets it spread.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
And I think this is going to be proven to
be like the biggest mistake Democrats made this election cycle,
like you can't just cede territory to the right based
on a massive disinformation campaign which is exactly what the
Democrats did on immigration and crime, and they showed a
willingness to do that on trans rights. Now, even if
some of these people that Democrats included claim to not
like hate trans people individually, that they have allowed questions

(24:45):
around access to bathrooms, sports and government fund and healthcare
to be used as a wedge against trans rights as
a whole, and the ability for trans people to be
able to exist in public life to close. I think
we should have just a brief discussion on what people
can do specifically during these next seventy five days and
even in the months after, like what people can do

(25:06):
to prepare for some of the worst aspects of this,
specifically on the healthcare front. Now, we did a series
of episodes a few years ago on DIYHRT. There are
both pharmaceutical and home brewed options for homones that can
be ordered online. Now since that episode, home brewed distribution
networks have spread throughout the United States. There's probably one

(25:26):
already in whatever city is closest to you. Now, access
to those networks does require a degree of, like in
person community, and I know that can be challenging. You
can certainly do organizing online on discord. You can certainly
find trans people on discord that can help you learn
where pharmaceutical grade estrogen can be ordered online. But that

(25:46):
type of online organizing will only get more dangerous under
a Trump term, especially if the legal status of these
hormones change. So I will always emphasize the importance of
in person community. And it might just like learning if
there's a trans band in the city you're in, going
to some shows, learning where trans people go, Where trans

(26:07):
people gather, is their community picnics?

Speaker 4 (26:09):
Is their book fares? Is their zine fares? Like?

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Is there like even gaming conventions? Right, just places that
there might be a number of trans people gathered and
talk to them about being trans, talk to them about
the issues that you're facing. It might take a few
months to gain trust and become friends, but that's just
how friendships work anyway, and that can be challenging. And
there may not be something like this in a city

(26:34):
super close to you, which is why online connections are useful,
and sometimes it might require a little bit of travel. Now,
what we can do, at least right now is stockpile
things in case things get harder to maintain or produce.
There's multiple forms of these hormones that can be stored,
and I do believe that there will be some form
of home brewed option that will most likely continue to

(26:54):
exist even if prescribed hormones get restricted. And part of
why I emphasize kind of doing this in person as well,
especially if you're a minor, that will just get more
dangerous to do under a second Trump term. I will
point people to the website DIYHRT dot wiki. It's currently
the best information source on dosing testing, how to find

(27:15):
supplies and options for ordering hormones now, because changing legal
paperwork on the federal or state level often takes a while.
If that's something that you want to do, now is
the time to start. There's still seventy days until Trump
takes office and some of these changes could start being
put into effect. You should absolutely apply for a passport now.

(27:40):
Depending on many variables, it may be advantageous to have
your legal name and gender marker match whatever you more
easily pass as, rather than your gender identity. Now I
understand why this is less than ideal and if you
think that this might just inhibit your transition progress and
push you further back into the closet, especially if the

(28:02):
option of changing your gender marker on federal documents just
like goes away during the next four years, then people
should just go ahead and get that stuff changed asap.
But it's something to reflect on and consider. Lastly, I
want to mention something about personal safety. Over the course
of the past week, I've heard from friends around the

(28:23):
country experiencing a spike in anti queer and misogynistic violence. Chuds,
frat boys, and just asshole men have been way more
willing to just to openly harass queer people out in public.
Some of this I think is just Trump supporters quote
unquote celebrating the election results. But once Trump takes office,

(28:43):
I expect this type of harassment to start slowly increasing
as truds feel like they can get away with more
just open misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. I know a lot
of people have been talking about or posting about buying firearms,
and firearms is one of the last things you should
buy in a panic. This is a very careful and

(29:05):
calculated choice for you to make about your own personal safety,
your own mental health, your own willingness to carry and
train with the gun. This is its own topic, but
I do recommend buying and carrying pepper jel for basically
all queer people and women. It's a great self defense tool.
It spreads less than pepper spray, so you're going to
be less likely to just spray yourself. Saber is a

(29:28):
good brand. Buy it for yourself, buy it for your friends. Uh, Mia,
do you have anything else you want to add?

Speaker 4 (29:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, two things. One, people have been asking for book Macrumentation,
so we're giving them to you.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
We're only given to you to you at the end
of the episodes. You got to stay around.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
And I think something that's good to read in this
moment on trans issues is Julius Serrano's book Whipping Girl.
I've had Julius Runno on the show before. She is
one of the most important, I mean, honestly like feminist
theorists of the last of this century. And there's a
new addition, Whipping Girl, that's come out recently, and it

(30:03):
is it is one of the fundamental sort of texts
to understand the experience to transfend people in this country
and why things have gotten the way that they've gotten.
So yeah, go go read Whipping Girl. It's spectacular. And
then I want to plug one more thing that you
can give money to. So I mean again, another very
effective way for CIS people to support trans people is

(30:23):
give them money, because all of us are unbelievably broke
like all of the time. Another place you can give
money to is the Trans Justice Funding Project. We'll have
that in this too. When they base, they give out
grants to other just like transgroups who are doing organizing
or doing other kinds of sort of support work, mutual land,
et cetera, et cetera. So that's money that goes directly
to trans people.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
And then obviously, as we've said, this is the forces
people part of the episode. After our after our four
trans people part, go call your congress people, Go pressure them,
Go show up to their offices and make it extremely
that it is unacceptable to write off trans people and
that they need to be willing to successfully stop these

(31:05):
writers and successfully do whatever they can to chant out
the works to make sure that the Republicans cannot pass
bills that will harm us even more than the things
that they're already going to do with.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to it could happen here.
I'm Robert Evans, and you know, along with all of
their correspondents, I'm looking forward to what we can expect
from the Trump administration, which is a broad and far
reaching question given the ambitions that Trump and the others
who I think will be involved in this new administration

(31:56):
have already expressed. And the elevator pitch theme of today's
episode is what's going to happen in Gaza once Trump
is president again? Will things get better or worse? Obviously
the expectation is worse. I think that's where certainly the
safe money goes if you're putting money on this. But
the short answer to that question is no, one fully

(32:19):
knows now. The first thing that I did when trying
to prepare for this episode was tracked down as many
articles as I could that included interviews with Gazin's about
their expectations, and those expectations were largely negative, but a
little more mixed than you might expect. A Reuter's reporter
interviewed Abu Osama, living in Conunis in the southern Gaza strip.

(32:40):
He called Trump's election a quote new catastrophe in the
history of the Palestinian people, adding despite the destruction, death
and displacement that we have witnessed, what is coming will
be more difficult. It will be politically devastating. This essentially
agrees with what a Palistinian from Batel lahis in the
Northern Gaza Strip, Ahmed Jerad told Al Jazeera quote. Trump

(33:05):
and Netanyahu are an evil alliance against the Palestinians, and
our fate will be very difficult, not only in the
fateful issues, but also in our daily concerns. This is
a sad day for Palestinians. Trump will endorse Netnah who's
free hand regarding the possibility of the return of settlements
to the Gaza Strip and even the displacement of large
numbers of Palestinians outside it. We hope to return to

(33:27):
the north, and now all of our hopes have been shattered,
and unfortunately Jerad's fears here have been immediately proven well founded.
On November sixth, as the rest of the world reeled
from Trump's victory, IDF Brigadier General Itzig Kohen told Israeli
reporters there is no intention of allowing the residents of
the Northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Humanitarian

(33:51):
aid would only be allowed to enter through the south.
His justification was that there are no more civilians in
the north reporting from the Guardian interviewed several international humanitarian
law experts, and the members of that likely dying field
described Israeli actions here as war crimes. The forcible transfer
of civilian populations and the use of food as a

(34:13):
weapon are supposed to be banned. Despite this, we can
safely assume that there will be no serious consequences as
a result of any of this. Now, the timing of
this announcement was predominant, and it is not unreasonable to
suggest that Israel might not have been as bold as
they're currently being if Harris had won Another Gosen seventy

(34:34):
year old doctor Zakia Hilal told Al Jazeera it is
true that American administrations do not differ in supporting Israel,
but some are more severe and more intense than others,
like Trump. You can find numerous gosins expressing feelings along
these lines if you read long enough, But you will
also find a number who feel like what's coming won't
be worse, or at least won't be very different from

(34:57):
what they've already endured. Jehad Malaka, a researcher at the
Palestinian Planning Center, told Al Jazeera he does not expect
Trump's administration to be wildly different from Biden's In this regard,
Trump uses rough tools and Biden and the Democrats resort
to soft tools, but the politics.

Speaker 4 (35:14):
Are the same.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Biden did not make any decision in favor of the
Palestinians and was unable to achieve a ceasefire. He did
not change the reality of the decisions of his predecessor
Trump at all. The positions of the two administrations regarding
Israel are the same and identical, and they put its
interests above all other considerations. You can also find some

(35:35):
Gosins who see a sliver of hope in Trump's new administration.
Reuter spoke with the owner of a grocery store in Gaza,
Khaled Desuso, who told their reporter, I think Donald Trump,
if he wins, he promised the Muslim people in America
to stop the war in Gaza. We hope that happens,
and it's not necessarily absurd to hope that there may

(35:56):
be some positive effects here. Trump has said many horrible
things about Palestinians, obviously, several weeks before the election, he
had a phone call with net Nyahoo that may have
been a viihilation of the Logan Act, although laws don't
really matter anymore. Here's howslate dot Com summarized what happened
in that call. According to Trump, the Israeli leaders said
he disregarded President Joe Biden's warning to keep troops out

(36:18):
of Rafa in southern Gaza, a decision that resulted in
the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a shootout
in the area. Trump also said nat Nyahu asked him
for advice on how to respond to Iran's missile attack
on Israel, to which Trump said he responded, do whatever
you have to do. Now, that's a dire sign, and
it is impossible to imagine that a new Trump regime

(36:38):
won't restart the sale in shipment of specific munitions that
Biden banned for export to Israel this July. Biden halted
the shipment of two thousand pound bombs to the IDF
because quote, they cannot be used in Gaza or any
populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage. Now,
the fact that munitions like this will very likely be

(36:59):
used is hideous, and I think it's extremely unlikely that
we do not see an immediate rise in the death toll.
But at the same time, Israel's extant acts have caused
great human tragedy and damage. The munitions they have have
already been responsible for calamitous death and destruction on a
fairly wide scale. So where's the cause for any optimism

(37:20):
on this at all? It comes from Trump's own self interest.
As Khalide Desuso noted, Trump ran promising to end wars.
This means he does have some vested interest, even if
only in his own ego, in forcing NETANYAHUO to draw
things to a close in short order. And there is
indeed reporting that Trump has told net Nyahu to wrap

(37:41):
things up by January so that he can take office
with an end to the conflict and ideally use that
as a way to kind of bolster his early popularity
and gain some political capital for the other sweeping changes
he wants to make.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
Now.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
The fact that Trump is pushing net Nyahu on ending
things in January doesn't mean a sudden, peaceful ceasefire. For
one thing, nothing is going to happen in the months
between then and now to reduce the level of bloodshed,
and almost every likely theoretical ends with Israel massively escalating
violence and using new, more destructive weapons before bringing an
end to their campaign. But it does mean that Trump

(38:18):
might be able to pressure bb to bring things to
an end. There's a good article on this in the BBC.
No guarantees Trump will give net Yahoo all he wants now.
In that piece, Mid East correspondent Lucy Williamson writes, Donald
Trump's first term in office was exemplary as far as
Israel is concerned. Said Michael Oran, a former Israeli ambassador

(38:39):
to the United States, The hope is that he'll revisit that.
We have to be very clear sighted about who Donald
Trump is and what he stands for. Firstly, he said,
the former president doesn't like wars, seeing them as expensive.
Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.
He's also not a big fan of israel settlements in
the occupied West Bank, has set Ambassador Oran, and has

(39:00):
opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts
of it. Both of these policies could put him in
conflict with far right parties in Netanyahu's current governing coalition,
who have threatened to bring down the government if the
Prime Minister pursues policies they reject. Michael Orrin believes net
Nyaho will need to take a different approach with the
incoming president. If Donald Trump comes to office in January

(39:22):
and says, Okay, you have a week to finish the war,
net Yahoo is going to have to respect that. And
we'll continue talking about what this means. But first, here's samants.

(39:43):
So it is possible that we will see a quick
end to the violence in January, and perhaps a quicker
one than we would have seen under Harris. That's the
best case scenario and not necessarily the likeliest one, and
I should re emphasize here that best case scenario still
means that we will probably see a massive escalation in
violence as the IDF seeks to force more people out

(40:06):
of northern Gaza and in the conflict, with a large
slice of Gaza permanently wrenched from Palestinian control and handed
over to Israeli settlers, there is no version of what
comes next that is not a calamity to the Palestinian people. Now,
the signs from within the Israeli government on what a
new Trump administration means for them are certainly bullish, you

(40:28):
could say, and reading these tea leaves provides very little
fuel for optimism. It Mar ben Vere, the Minister of
National Security, posted yes with several less's and an emoji
of a flexed bicep in a post on social media.
When the first good return started coming in for Trump
on the day of the election itself, and a sign
of confidence in the coming results, bib netanyahuo fired his

(40:52):
Defense minister Jove Gallant, who had been his primary point
of contact with the Biden administration, and it's harder to
imagine a much more direct sign of what he wants
to do than that.

Speaker 5 (41:03):
Now.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
I've struggled to present the sweep of possible results of this,
and it bears reiterating that the bulk of predictions from
Gazans who are plugged into the politics of the region
are incredibly negative. Ahmed Fayad, an independent researcher in Israeli
affairs who currently resides in central Gaza, told Al Jazeera
that he felt Trump's influence would be entirely negative, adding

(41:27):
that Trump was a quote more dominating figure than Biden,
and his influence would allow net Nyahu to quote conquer
Gaza quote amidst the weakened Palestinian front and absence of
any Arab unity and solidarity, the whole Palestinian cause faces
its worst threat yet. Now what does bear watching is

(41:47):
the degree to which Biebe might face threats from his
own right flank. Netniahu himself is almost certainly on the
side of doing what will please his patron Trump all
the more, and that would be forcing a quick, violent
end to the fighting and taking Northern Gaza as the
spoils of war. But this might bring him into conflict
with radicals on his own side, who can't be placated

(42:09):
by anything but what they would see as total victory.
In the event net Nyahu feels pushed, it is not
impossible that he will wind up in conflict with Trump.
This has happened before, as BB's sense of self preservation
led him to take actions that enraged Trump. The best
example of this took place in the immediate aftermath of
the twenty twenty election. If you want to think back

(42:31):
to those happier days, b B was again the first
world leader to call and offer Biden congratulations on his victory,
as he was with Trump. This is a habit for
the man, who, among other things, is an expert at
toadying for favor with US leaders. Trump was livid, and
he spoke out about this, telling Israeli journalist Barak Ravid

(42:51):
that he believed that he had saved Israel from destruction,
and in response, net Nyahoo had stabbed him in the back.
I'm to quote now from an article in the BBC
six Mister Trump accused mister net Yahoo of congratulating too
quickly mister Trump's successor Joe Biden on winning the twenty
twenty US election. Mister Trump disputed the election result, though
his claims were never upheld. The first person who congratulated

(43:14):
Joe Biden was Bebe, the man that I did more
for than any other person I dealt with. Bibe could
have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake. He
was very early, mister Trump said, like earlier than most.
I haven't spoken to him since.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
Fuck him.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
I actually don't know that he said fuck The actual
text of the article says expletive him. But I'm assuming
he said fuck him. I think that's probably a fair
assumption for me to make. Now, some evidence does suggest
that Trump and Bebe don't personally get along, as that
quote I just read implies, certainly not to the degree
that net Yahou and Biden once did once. I should

(43:51):
say this may hinge partly on the fact that Trump
really only believes in himself and his own benefit, whereas
Joe Biden was a strong and committed bl in Israel
and was willing to take actions against his own political
self interest in furtherance of that belief. And we've all
seen where those actions got him. Just last December, Trump
attacked Netnyahoo at an early campaign rally in New York,

(44:14):
saying bb had quote let us down by pulling Israeli
support for the operation that killed Iranian General Cossam Solomani
at the last minute. He also criticized the Israeli leader
for not being prepared for Hermas's October seventh attack. Now,
I want to be clear here that these divisions between
both men are blisteringly unlikely to mean anything that approaches

(44:37):
relief for the Palestinian people, at least in the near term.
The immediate and probably long term future of Gaza is
much bleaker today than it was a few weeks ago.
The Guardian recently published an article interviewing former CIA director
and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He predicted Trump would give
Bibe a blank check for aggression which might invite the

(44:58):
possibility of open war with Iran. Now that's the kind
of thing that can lead one to panic, especially when
you assume a guy like Panetta is privy to a
lot of inside information. We may not be, but I'm
actually not really sure that he is. I don't see
any evidence from this article that Panetta is speaking from
direct personal knowledge about extant plans to carry out an attack. Instead,

(45:20):
he quoted Trump's description of the call that Trump had
had with BB before the election, telling net, yahou do
whatever you have to do. So Leon may just be
working from the same information the rest of us have
and coming to a somewhat different conclusion. I'm not as
sure as he is about an imminent attack on Iran
because Trump campaigned heavily on ending wars, and while I

(45:43):
don't credit Trump is a particularly honest man, I do
think he sees his personal benefit right now in being
able to portray himself as a peacemaker, in part because
he has so much domestically he wants to do, and
so much else internationally he wants to do. Right, Expending
a bunch of political capital d with the kinds of
protests and unrest and even anger from his base that

(46:04):
a war with Iran would mean, especially once it gets
bogged down in the kind of violence that would come
with that, He may not and likely doesn't see that
as being of benefit to him. Now, that doesn't mean
it will never happen. It doesn't mean his calculus won't change.
I do foresee some situations in which Trump might decide
that his personal benefit is in there being a wider

(46:25):
ground conflict with Iran that US forces get drawn into.
You know, we'll talk a little bit about some of
the possibilities around this, and we're getting outside of the
realm of kind of established fact at this point, but
I do think it's worth considering some of this. But
first consider these ads. So, when we talk about the

(46:55):
possibility of a ground conflict with Iran starting between Israel
and ira but almost inevitably drawing in more US forces,
the known unknowns and unknown knowns in this situation are
pretty staggering. If I let myself analyze every possibility, my
mind can go to some dark places. Trump sees war
with Iran as a negative, now, I'm quite sure, But

(47:16):
how would he feel about it in the wake of, say,
a Musk centered plan to in the Federal Reserve and
tank the dollar in the wake of the changes that
all of his immigration policies would make on the price
of food, the Pression era levels of inflation and unemployment
returning to the United States, and the attendant social unrest
that that would cause. If Americans find themselves on the

(47:36):
verge of food rights, perhaps Trump would gamble on war
being the best distraction he could manage. It's certainly not impossible. Now,
I don't know how useful it is to bury myself
in theoreticals and probabilities. The known threats are dire enough,
and they demand full time awareness in order to attempt
to counter and endure. So instead of spiraling, I'm going

(47:58):
to leave you today with the words of another Gazan,
Mohammed R.

Speaker 5 (48:02):
Mausch.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
He's a journalist who wrote an article for MSNBC right
after the election titled My family and I Survived the
War in Gaza. We know Trump's America won't save us,
and here's Mohammed for us. The election of Donald Trump
isn't just a blip on the political radar or a
shift in foreign policy. It's a challenge to sustain existence.

(48:23):
While the world seems intent on erasing us. It's about
surviving seventy seven years under occupation and over a year
of ongoing genocide, the very genocide I barely survived last December,
when my family and I, including my elderly parents and
three year old son, were buried under the rubble of
what was once our home after it was struck by
an Israeli fired US missile. The date December seventh, twenty

(48:45):
twenty three. Our bones were crushed between layers of concrete
and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark,
buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece.
The trauma of that night, in both its physical and
emotional toll, of my son's small, fragile hand and clinging
to mind, comes back to me now as Trump prepares
to take power once more. I've seen how American political

(49:08):
leader's toy with the idea of change. How they dress
up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice,
yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised
hope and change we could believe in, yet we got
more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging and
yielding support for Israel, leaving US to live through even
more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris's niceties included no concrete

(49:31):
promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue
financial support for Israel, and Trump's blundness as he promises
to come back swinging reminds us not to hold out.

Speaker 4 (49:42):
Hope for change.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
So, you know, not much optimism here, but I do
really recommend reading that article that MSNBC published. You know,
it's bleak, but important, especially given the fact that you know,
we may be soon entering a world where it would
be harder for people like Muhammad to express their feelings

(50:05):
and their truth to an audience. I don't think it's
unlikely that a clamp down is coming on some of
these things. It's hard to say how extensive it will be,
but there's a threat that Israel and their backers see,
and the way that public sympathy has built so quickly
for Gaza in a way that wasn't present with a
lot of previous stages of violence between Israel and Gaza.

(50:30):
Right now, this is the result of a lot of
videos spreading on social media. It's the result on voices
from Gaza getting out and getting to people in a
way they really hadn't before. And so one thing that
does worry me greatly when I think about what's going
to happen in Gaza under President Trump is not just
what's going to happen to the people living there right now,

(50:51):
but what's going to happen to their ability to tell
their story to get information out to the rest of us.
That is very much an open question at this moment,
but it's certainly one that should be on your lips,
and it's one that we will be investigating here at
Cool Zone as long as we're able to continue doing
that until next time. I'm Robert Evans. We'll be back

(51:11):
tomorrow and every other day reporting on you know the world.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
Welcome to It Happened Here, a podcast that's about trade policy.

Speaker 4 (51:39):
Now I'm your host, Bia Wong.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
This is amazingly going to be the fun one of
all of these episodes.

Speaker 4 (51:45):
It's about working tariffs. So it's gonna be a long week.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Yeah yeah, That was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis,
the one the only.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Yes, Hello, I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff
here and it could happen here. One of my favorite
favorite topics I guess now, all.

Speaker 4 (52:05):
Right, Garash, we're putting you on the spot. What is
a tariff? It's basically googling tariff.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
No, A tariff is when Trump says China's bad, so
he makes China pay extra money to sell their goods
to Americans, and luckily China pays for all of it,
and the American consumer gets off with a boosting economy.

Speaker 4 (52:31):
That's at least what I've heard.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
Yeah, So unfortunately for every one I don't know, I guess,
I guess there's some acceleration this who are probably really
excited about this most certainly. The way this actually works is, okay,
so the government sets up a tariff, and that means
if anyone is bringing a good into the US, they
have to pay the tariff on it, and that money
goes to the government. So, okay, There's been a long

(52:54):
history of tariffs in the US. This is a huge
domestic policy think, particularly in the eighteen hundreds.

Speaker 4 (53:00):
Be fucking boring.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
The incredibly short version of it is that the thing
about tariffs is that, especially like tariffs on a specific sector,
is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing kind
of mostly, and they're bad for anyone trying to buy
that good because it's now more expensive. So Trump's plan,
and we're going to get into a bit more detail
about this, because there's parts of Trump's tariff plan that

(53:22):
everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that
I don't know why they've forgotten about. But the basic
plan is to impose something like a ten to twenty
percent tariff on all goods that enter the US from anywhere.
There's specifically one for Mexico, but the numbers on what
the Mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth.
Sometimes it's like twenty five percent. There's one where it's

(53:45):
like two hundred and fifty percent. Of course, two interchangeable percentages. Yeah,
and then for China, it's supposed to be a tariff
of somewhere between sixty sixty percent is the most commonly
sided number. But he's also set one hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (53:58):
Tariff once again and basically the same thing.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah, And so you know, part of what we, unfortunately
the rest of us who live in the normal world,
have to do is figure out what is actually going
to happen if we get, for example, twenty percent tariffs
on all goods entering the US. And a sixty percent
tariff on goods from China. So the first thing you
need to understand. I think most people kind of get
this now. But the thing about a tariff is that

(54:23):
you pay for it. So the way that it works
in general is that this is just an additional cost
for the company that's doing it, that's doing the like
moving the good around, right, and so they are almost
always going to just pass that cost directly on to you. Obviously,
sometimes we've talked about pricing the way that pricing works
a lot on this show. Companies tend not to want

(54:43):
to raise prices, largely because of their effects on consumer
happiness and brand loyalty and stuff like that. So sometimes
people will just eat shit on it. But if you're
talking about a sixty percent tariff, like you, the sixty
percent tariff is going to be paid for by you.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
So that means that anytime we buy something that's either
from Mexico or China or any of the other countries,
that this will be applied to the easiest way for
these for these companies to get around the tariff is
just to pass off the cost of the consumer.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah, And it's actually worse than that because and This
is something I don't think people really understand when you
think about global trade, right people tend to think about
trade as something that happens between countries, and this is
something that was an old you know dreamlike the anti
globalization movement.

Speaker 4 (55:26):
People sort of understood this.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
And kind of don't now. Trade doesn't actually really happen
between countries. Most trade is one company, an international company,
moving a resource from one country to another. Right So,
like trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse
in one country to warehouse in a second country.

Speaker 4 (55:44):
Right now.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
I've seen a lot of people, and this ranges from
like very very serious sort of you know, news sources
and economists trying to sort of just directly model what
the price increases are going to be. I've seen people
be like, oh, your shirts are going to cost sixty
percent more, or video games will stop existing because they're
too expensive, and who gives a shit? Why are we
even trying to do sectoral modeling of the impacts of this.

(56:08):
If you try to impose a sixty to one hundred
percent tariff on goods from China and a twenty percent
tariff on all goes into the country, the economy will collapse.
I don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't
fucking happen. We're going to get into it a second.
I guess the reason why people are pretending this is
happening because the way they're doing the modeling kind of
assumes that it won't, which is baffling, incomprehensible nonsense.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Well, and that's especially amusing because the seemingly biggest issue
this year around politics has been inflation, which has impacted
every country around the globe. The US is actually whether
that decently well, although there's been a catastrophic failure in
communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from people
on how they're still struggling with rising inflation. But still

(56:55):
a big reason why Trump was elected is because he
simply is not Joe Bideneh, and he's not from the
Biden Harris administration, and there's this perception that he will
be able to fix the economy, he will be able
to get around inflation lower prices, when seemingly his main
economic proposal will lead to what's probably going to be
an economic collapse if it happens in the brutality of

(57:17):
which he proposes.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
And there's another element of this right when I say
that the likely result of Trump actually trying to implement
his tariff policy is a global economic collapse. There's another
part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten. And
I don't know why they've forgotten this. I guess it's
because nobody actually reads any of the things that Trump
puts out on his website.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
Which is true. No one actually reads that stuff. It's nuts,
especially his own supporters. Yeah, a majority of his own
supporters do not pay attention to like Daily News.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Yes, and now I remember this because I did an
episode about these tariffs like six months ago. And one
of the things about this, he has a thing called
Agenda forty seven, right, which is his agenda for what
he's going to do when he takes.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
Power, which no one has cared about.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
And now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals
from like fucking two years ago with the headline breaking
news Trump announces a new plan. They're like, no, he has.

Speaker 4 (58:04):
This, This a our old plans.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
This stuff is like two years old. He's been openly
talking about all that.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
Yeah, Frages, And one of the important parts of this,
I'm just gonna read this quote because it is a
part of this has been ignored by every single fucking
analysis I've seen from like fucking the Center for American Progress,
who obviously we're gonna screw this up to like Stamford's labs,
Like everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored
this part, which is quote as one of his top
economic priorities. President Trump will stop the flow of American

(58:30):
jobs overseas by passing the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. Under
the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff
on American made goods that is higher than the tariff
imposed by the US, President Trump will have the authority
to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. Okay,
So what this would do again is that any country
that has a tariff already or imposes a tariff, And

(58:52):
this is important if we get into a trade war
where countries start imposing tariffs on each other in retaliation
for their other terrorists, which is what happens when he
did this trade war, which in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
That means that we're also going to impose a tariff,
which means that the tariff rates don't stay at ten
to twenty percent. They cyclically spiral upwards.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
That's just like an escalating series of terrorifts.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
Yeah, and the thing is right, the policy process that
they have on his page are like, well, okay, we're
gonna do this, do like a presidential act, right, But
the thing is the president actually has really, really, under
a number of different acts, has extremely wide discretionary authority
to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort
of like cobble together some kind of bullshit excuse for it.
And at that point you're relying on the Supreme Court

(59:34):
to stop literally anything that Trump does, like don't give
a shit.

Speaker 4 (59:38):
Well, I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (59:39):
Maybe someone will like go up to like can Clarence
Thomas and go like, hey, if we do this like
importing new like windshield wipers for your RV is going
to cost ten million dollars more or whatever, But like
there's no shot of this stuff getting stuff. And the
thing is right, the reciprocal tariff stuff. He could just
do this through his existing teriff authority. He doesn't Actually

(01:00:00):
you need to pass something through Congress. W should actually
be I think tricky for him, but he doesn't need.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
To do you know what we need to do right now,
Thomia just badly, badly put to a bunch of companies
that are going to be absolutely fucking viscerated if this
goes through.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Donald Trump stands for anti capitalist action. He's going to
destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can. Okay,
we are back Mia. Let's hear how Trump is going

(01:00:35):
to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of
escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy and in doing so,
but about the opportunity for Marxist to size power and
change the world economic system.

Speaker 3 (01:00:45):
Yeah, so I'm going to read another quote from that
same agenda forty seven thing quote. For example, food items
like cereals, your other preparatory goods are tariffed at thirty
two point nine percent by India and nineteen point five
percent by China, and only three point one percent by
the US. India applies a tariff of twenty five point
three percent on transportation equipment, while the US only terrorists

(01:01:06):
goes at two point nine percent. Now, those exact numbers
are debatable, but it doesn't matter because these these are
going to be vibes based ones based on how pissed
off Trump is at a country.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
Yeah, as Trump is usually a vibes based guy. Yeah,
especially when it comes to the economy, especially when it
comes to like these numbers he's pulling out like between
sixty to one hundred percent. He doesn't know what any
of those numbers means. He's just thinking of a number
and saying it out loud.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
And the thing about all of these things, right, even
just the base twenty percent, or let's let's go to
the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a ten
percent tariff on all goods and a sixty percent tariff
on Chinese goods. Right, that in and of itself blows
a smoking crater in the world economy. And none of
the assessments that you will read are talking about this.

(01:01:52):
One of the things that they will mention that is true,
but they're not, you know, getting to the importance of
is that this affects stuff that's made in the US.
Because the thing about things that are made in the
US is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere,
because that's how international supply chains work.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Oh wait, even though we have through tariffs and moved
all manufacturing of Toyota into the United states. You're saying
that still some of the materials are not all solely
made him produced within the country, and it actually requires
unfeign trade.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
Yeah, and part of the problem I think of, like, Okay,
so if you logically think out the conclusions of what
that means.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
Right, first mistake Abia that you're trying to solve this
problem through logic.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Well, but here's the thing, right, Obviously Trump is not
going to think through this, right, But I kind of
expect people who are like writing about this for a
living to do mildly better than this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
And possibly some of the people that he like hires
onto his cabinet and team.

Speaker 6 (01:02:44):
Maybe, but we'll.

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
Say, no, I'm not talking about like his critics. Oh sure, sure,
one of the numbers will see all the time. The
Center for American Progress has this line of how the
terrofts will function his attacks that cost the America consume
for like seventeen hundred dollars a year.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Right, which was the line that Kamala used pretty often. Yeah,
framing as tariffs as like a sales tax.

Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
This is fucking horseshit.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
The only way you can think that the net effect
of this would just be a seventeen hundred dollars tax
is if you don't understand how the economy works at all. Right,
So I went through and read this, and the way
that they model it is just by like they find
the like net dollar value of imported goods and then
apply a tax to it, and then try to figure
out like how much of those goods that the average

(01:03:25):
person would buy in a year, and then increase the price.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
But and this is the thing that's very important.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
At the end of the analysis, right right at the
very end, there's a little section where they say that
they assumed this would have no other effects on the economy.
This is unbelievably fucking stupid. Can I emphasize enough? Can
you explain why that doesn't make any sense?

Speaker 7 (01:03:41):
So?

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
Okay, So here's the thing. Right, prices go up. Now
people can buy less things. What does that do to
the economy, Well, it slows its growth rate. Right, Companies
start to go out of business. And we're gonna get
me into more of the ways that this plays out
in a second. Right, But a bunch of people in
a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly
the reduction and consumer demand means that there's a fucking

(01:04:03):
reduction necessary production, and this has cyclical effects throughout the
entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs.
And also, you know, the thing about those people who
lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand
because those people are now even less able to afford
the stuff that's been increased by inflation prices, and this
this spirals through the entire world economy.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
In order to.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
Understand what exactly this is going to do, I think
we need to understand why, you know, because like if
Kamala Harris, I don't know if it makes any difference
in the election, but Kamala Harris walks of the stage
and says this is going to cost you seventeen hundred dollars.
She does not walk on the stage and say this
is going to cause an economic collapse, right, And I
think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into
this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works

(01:04:48):
at all, in a way that's even worse than it
was even in like the twenty tens. Like in the
twenty tens, I think people sort of had a vague
understanding the thing that was happening to the economy was uberization,
whatever you call it, was the expansion of gigwork. Right,
there was sort of an understanding and a focus on
the very sort of low level parts of the economy,
like what are you a poor person doing for your job?

Speaker 4 (01:05:08):
Right? How does how does your income work?

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
And not purely on these sort of like high finance
or in the case in the case of what's been
happening here, everyone has been unbelievably completely focused on like
the Chips Act and like state led industrialization and all
that stuff is fucking bullshit. It's it basically hasn't done
anything yet, it's not going to do anything for like
a decade, and it's not mostly what's going on in

(01:05:31):
the economy. I've been holding my tongue on this for years,
but the people who have been writing about the economy
don't understand how the fuck it works because they've been
completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this
new era of state capitalism and no like the actual
thing that's been happening in the economy. And I think
if you are like a person who buys stuff, you

(01:05:53):
probably understand this. But for some reason this has never
made it to like economists or like people who fucking
write about the economy for a lot. Thing is consumer
to manufacturer sales. So this is stuff like Temu, This
is stuff like shean who and I mean invented. It's
a strong word, but they're one of the first people
who sort of popularized this model, right, And this is

(01:06:13):
the thing where you have a platform that lets people
like nominally buy directly from the factories or from you know,
the people who are producing fruit, right, and these factories
aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods
or like analytics tells them to order it, so they
don't have a lot of the problems that other kind
of like distribution models have. You have a bunch of

(01:06:35):
good sitting in a warehouse, like you just don't have
that because you don't start production until your sort of
orders come in, your analytics come in. And the theory
here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman.
But of course a new kind of middleman emerged, and
that is the drop shipper.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):
God.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
So the drop shipper is just someone using the consumer
to manufacturer pipeline. Right that the platforms that are supposed
to let you the consumer sort of just like buy
directly from the thing and cut out mailmen. It's just
someone doing that but then turning around and selling you
the result. And this has become just utterly fucking ubiquitous
in the American economy. It's it's sort of like an

(01:07:11):
integral part of the American scam economy now too, as
the American economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and
consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of
like people trying to capitalize on like some fucking meme
or some political thing. You know, you have all these
people doing like drop ship t shirts right where they
can immediately come in and.

Speaker 4 (01:07:28):
Ye sell all of this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
These like short lived like trend meme based either like
fashion or even like goods. You know, you can talk
about like the amount of like content creator merch that
is all funneled through these like drop shipping companies.

Speaker 3 (01:07:42):
Yeah, and it's it's also what's been it's a thing
that's enabled like fast fashion to function in.

Speaker 4 (01:07:46):
The way that it is right now, right absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
And this has become what consumption is in large swaths
of the world is from this sort of like direct
to consumer drop shipping shit, right. Yeah, Now, the thing
about about these drop shipping things is that their profit
margins are really really low. They don't make that much money,
and in fact, a lot of these things like hemorrhage
money until they've basically you know, they do the thing
that Amazon did, right, where like you lose money for

(01:08:10):
a million years, but then eventually you have enough market
chourney you start making money again.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
Yeah, because you make it so all your competitors basically
can't function because you have prices that are so low.
And then when you're the only one in the game
with a sizeable power influence, you can raise prices and
then you make tons of money. Also the Uber model,
although Uber still is improfitable. Yeah, well so yeah, Uber
will never make any money.

Speaker 4 (01:08:30):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
But the other thing here that's important is that, you know,
so the margins of a company like Temu, right, which
is like probably the biggest of these sort of companies now,
are low. But Temu technically has tech money, Like they
have money to back them up, right, you know, who
doesn't have an unbelievable amount of just like capital sitting
around that they could just instantly pull from if suddenly
there is I don't know, a sixty percent fucking price shock.

(01:08:53):
Oh wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing you know,
like tiny manufacturing firms that these drop shipping things use
to produce all their stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:09:00):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
That infrastructure is very fragile. It's it's margins are very bad.
And oh guess what happens to that shit if you
impose sixty percent terrafs on it?

Speaker 4 (01:09:09):
Right, it just shuts down because that's the easiest option, right.

Speaker 3 (01:09:12):
Yeah, And you know, and presumably I think one of
the other parts of this would be part of the
reason this has been happening is that all of this
office are being imported like under terriff loopholes. But like
that loopholes not hard to close, right, What terraf loopoles
are you referring to? Oh yeah, so I talked about
this in the ten episode. Those loopholes on American terriffs
were like, if you're if you're bringing stuff into the

(01:09:34):
country that's below a certain value, it has to be
above like a six hundred dollars something to like trigger
a threshold, okay, to like activate the teriffs applying to it.
So people just ship a bunch of like one billion
boxes individually that are like five hundred and ninety nine
dollars to go under the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
So you're saying I can still maybe buy my new
Sonic the Hedgehog PS five game, though, that should be fine.

Speaker 4 (01:09:59):
I'll be totally good. Oh god, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
So the other part of this that's important, right, So
this is the kind of I don't know of news
the right word, but this is the kind of recent
part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right,
that gets just liquefied if these terrorists go through. These
are enormous companies that you know are going to just
eat shit, and those companies eating shit have these sort
of effects we talked about earlier, right, which is it

(01:10:24):
caused people to get fired, it causes growth collapses, it
causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy things, and
then also like demand decreases because people can't buy things.
But this is like the new school supply chain stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Temu's a product of really the last six or seven years,
and it really only functions the way it does now
in the lasts about four but the previous two eras
of supply some logistics, right, which is sort of wal
Mart and Amazon are both also almost completely dependent on
Chinese supply chains.

Speaker 6 (01:10:53):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Yeah, there's a good JD super article which is they're
like a business intelligence website, right, you know, talks about
how Walmart imports seventy percent of all of it's goods
from China.

Speaker 4 (01:11:04):
Yeah, that track seventy percent seven zero, right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:07):
And the reason that it works like this is because
Walmart's entire business model, all of their supply chains, all
of their logistics, everything that they do, right was was
designed basically hand in hand to be integrated into Chinese
economic production.

Speaker 4 (01:11:20):
And you can't just move that shit instantly, right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
And this is also true of something like Amazon, right
where Amazon, like sixty three percent of independent sellers on
Amazon this is from the same source are Chinese.

Speaker 7 (01:11:30):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
So what you're dealing with is vast parts of the
American economy, right, The parts of the American economy that
you interface to buy things are based on goods that
are suddenly going to have like sixty to one hundred
percent tariff stapled onto them. Now, the thing that people
have been talking about as the like, oh well, here's

(01:11:51):
the thing that will happen instead instead like, instead of
the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this
have happens, which is just that the economic bubble we're
in pops and everything s to go to shit. People
have been like, oh, well, this will just accelerate the
shift of production of goods out from China. And like
I've been talking about this for like a fuck decade, right,
Like the journal Chwung is something that I talk about

(01:12:13):
a lot that I record on. People really has been
talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages.
So people have been trying to move production out of
China for ages. I mean, like one of the first
big attempts to do this was in twenty eleven when
there is there's a series of riots in China, and
people tried to move production of goods out of China
and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they
couldn't do it was because you have to find a

(01:12:34):
country that has both like a relatively skilled and educated
labor force and also has the infrastructure to be able
to like match Chinese production. And so they we're talking
about things like they have to have like a functioning
electrical grid that is stable enough for.

Speaker 4 (01:12:50):
Production to function.

Speaker 3 (01:12:51):
And this rules out an enormous number of countries and
it's just really really hard. And yeah, like Chinese capital
has been moving away from its sort of old centers
and the prop of delta to.

Speaker 4 (01:13:00):
Places like Vietnam.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Right, but and this is the fucking big one, right,
A lot of a lot of what's been happening for
people have been talking about this thing called quote quote
unquote decoupling, which is which is this the separation of
the US and Chinese economy so that they're not like it,
they're trying with each other. People think this is good
for ideological reasons, or they think it's just something that's happening,
and it's not. It's not happening. You know what else
isn't happening. It's us not plugging these products and services.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
I think we do legally have to plug them. So
here they are. Here's the plugs for the products and services.

Speaker 4 (01:13:40):
All right.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
Now, now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to
buy these products and services, let's let's talk at at
bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit.

Speaker 5 (01:13:47):
One.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
And I've been to something I've been saying on the
show for years, like people have this sort of fantasy
that what's happening is that, Okay, instead of making your
thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And
this means that American companies no longer have the supply
chains running through China. That's not what's happening at all.
On the financial front, where you have is actually increasing
integration as as China attempts to sort of like you know,

(01:14:09):
has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types
of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to
actually come in and invest and put capital in China. Right,
the second thing that's happening is a lot of these
supposedly like we're cutting China out of the supply chain things,
have been a bunch of Chinese companies starts starting to
set up production in Mexico. Now, the thing about that, right,
if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea for

(01:14:30):
getting us out of these tariffs, remember that Trump was
talking about two hundred percent tariffs on Mexico, and that's
the country that's supposed to like fucking get us out
of this mess by like, oh, we'll be fine because
like production will to shift away from China to like
to where like a lot of the assumptions I was
reading was like people were talking about, oh, the production
will like twenty five percent of production will like.

Speaker 4 (01:14:49):
Shift to Canada. It's like, no, it won't do.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do They're like,
what are you talking about, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:14:55):
Canada doesn't have the population to do that. No, it doesn't.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
This is this sort of problem, right, you know, on
the one hand, you know, China has been de industrializing
for like a decade and a half now, right, and
kind of slowly, but the percentage of the population that's
working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and
years and years and years. But the problem is that
when you move production out of a place, you actually
have to have a second place to produce it, and

(01:15:21):
there just haven't been right, Like you It's it's pretty
easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right,
Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been has
been moving to places like.

Speaker 4 (01:15:29):
Bangladesh and Vietnam for a while.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
But once you start getting into the stuff that China
produces like the most of right, which is things like
fucking cell phones, sort of mid tier commodity production that
gets way way, way, way way harder.

Speaker 4 (01:15:41):
No, but the Chips Act will save us.

Speaker 3 (01:15:43):
Me.

Speaker 4 (01:15:43):
I heard it from everyone on the television. I just
got this.

Speaker 3 (01:15:46):
This is the sort of thing about this, right is
if you look, if you read the analysis that people
are doing of this, they just sort of assume that
you can just like, oh well, like naturally a bunch
of the consumption that Americans are doing will stay the
same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in China.
It's like, okay, like where where are you finding these
goods from? Like what production facilities are you just like
suddenly that have just been like sitting there fallow are

(01:16:08):
just suddenly gonna like a PEERI out of nowhere.

Speaker 4 (01:16:11):
And the answer is like, that's not going to happen.
And it's not.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
It's not going to happen, partially because they don't exist.
Partially because again, the immediate consequence of this is a
massive economic labs. China's economy has already been slowing for
the like basically, I mean it's been slowing since like
two thousand and eight.

Speaker 4 (01:16:27):
Really wow, I see.

Speaker 3 (01:16:28):
Has an eleven kind of but it's especially been slowing
in the past two or three years because of sort
of COVID restriction stuff and also just a kind of
lackluster rate of returns on their own, like they had
their own version of the two thousand and eight housing bubble,
and that's annihilated and unbelievable amount of money because it
turns out investing in real estate doesn't work as is

(01:16:50):
basis for your economy. But like that's the thing, right,
if the Chinese economy fucking goes down, right, that's like
that's seventeen percent of the world's GDP. Seventeen yeah, of
the total GDP, right, And it's like the economy isn't
national in a way where you can have an economic
collapse in another country, in just a country that's that
large and ignore it. And the thing I want to
close on, and the reason we know that this is

(01:17:11):
true is that it is actually possible kind of to
restart america domestic manufacturing.

Speaker 4 (01:17:17):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
Reagan was able to do it in the eighties. And
Reagan did it through this thing called the Plaza Accords
where he basically he didn't literally put the prime ministers
of Japan and West Germany at gunpoint, but he basically
put them at gunpoint and forced them to increase the
value of their currencies so that the US currency would devalue,
which would admit which makes it like a more competitive

(01:17:38):
export economy. And this actually brought back American manufacturing for
a while until it had to all be reversed under
the Clinton administration and the Reverse Plaza Accords, because the
problem was when you sort of nuke to the zero
sum manufacturing of a country like Japan, their fucking economy
didn't work anymore. And in order to sort of bail
out the Japanese economy and stop just a sort of
world running economic collapse, I would have just like tore

(01:18:01):
the absolute shit out of the economy. The US had
to fucking reincrease the value of its currency and lose
its whole domestic production base. Right You can't actually increase
a production base in the world right now without decreasing
it somewhere else, and that has sort of staggering, ripple
economic effects for the entire global economy, which is why
even if Trust's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause

(01:18:21):
an economic collapse by like the direct effect on American consumers,
it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on
fucking people in China.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
So well, Mia, I think you might be overreacting here
a little bit because at least food will be available, obviously,
and I learned this on X My main source for
news is that agriculture almost all done in the States,
so we should be fine, Like, we'll still be able
to eat food, right, I say, staring.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
No to the voice, No, you can't, because, unfortunately, think
about American agricultures, it's all fucking mechanized agriculture. The thing
about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part,
and that's all fucking produced either in other countries or
the John Deere fucking like tractor factories in the US
are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that

(01:19:12):
are made overseas.

Speaker 4 (01:19:13):
So also, we do import a great deal of food,
well we do.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Yeah, even just talking about the food that we produce here, right, like,
that's also gonna be fun.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
I wonder, I wonder where your strawberries in November are
coming from. I think the other thing to keep in
mind here is that this is only one aspect of
how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies
could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole

(01:19:45):
bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of vanish, and farms
and other processing plants just to go out of business
due to a lack of workers. And even some people
on Trump's team have started to acknowledge this, mostly Elon Musk,
who has opened said that Trump's term will involve some
quote temporary hardship, so between tariffs and mass deportations. Like

(01:20:09):
even people on his team know that this is going
to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not.

Speaker 4 (01:20:14):
The like forever term.

Speaker 2 (01:20:16):
Yeah, and yet he was still elected as the economically
viable candidate.

Speaker 7 (01:20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:21):
And I think the last part we should say, and
this is it's not that you can't like fucking obliterate
a giant portion of the American economy and still come
out extremely popular because you've crushed the American working class
like that That's what Reagan did, right, Like Reagan and
the Vulgar Shocks did this enormous, I mean, just put
a crater in the American economy and in Reagan's first term,

(01:20:42):
like the skyrocketing unemployment, just like real, real sort of
economic devastation. But the thing about the vulgar shock was
that the way he blew up the economy was really
really good for people who like fucking owned assets, like
people who who like owned bonds, like people like people.

Speaker 4 (01:20:59):
Who held other people's debt.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
He was great for those people, and like the burgeoning
investment economy, which now kind of dominates our entire economic system.

Speaker 4 (01:21:07):
Yeah, and it was incredible for those people. And so
it was fine.

Speaker 3 (01:21:09):
But think about this economic collapse, that this is also
going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a
bunch of extremely wealthy and influential capitalists. So including by
the way, Elon Musk, who's tesla's are produced in China,
Like he has a gigafactory. He's a gigafactory in shing John.
So we'll see if Trump actually is able to implement

(01:21:29):
this stuff. I think he's able to on a policy level,
it's just politically, can he actually do these tariffs?

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
Yeah, it's unclear. It's also unclear what exact numbers he's
gonna run with. A ten percent tariff will still be bad,
but it's nothing compared to one hundred percent tariff. I
think Trump by and large just says whatever comes into
his head without thinking through the actual logistical ends of
what he's saying. And I think most Trump's supporters do
not take him literally as a person, at least they
don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time.

(01:21:57):
They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally.

Speaker 3 (01:22:00):
Yeah, so we'll have to see how this actually plays out.
If it does play out in the ways that Trump
has said that it is going to play out, it
is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways
that absolutely suck. So, yeah, that's that's happening here in
the future. Maybe that's the name of the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
Right, So stock up on your PS fives now before
they get harder to buy, and it'll be fine. Yeah,
there'll be nothing else bad that happens to the economy
as long as you have your PS fives.

Speaker 4 (01:22:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:34):
People always want fucking books to the end of episodes,
so I'm just putting books at the end of episodes.
This is my plugging Chwang Chu a n G'll help.
We'll put it in the description. It's a bunch of
stuff about Chinese economics. Mostly it's the sort of economic
history of visionally the socialist period and the transition to capitalism.
But it also has a bunch of very very good stuff.
I'm trying to understand the Chinese economy. And so if

(01:22:56):
you want to be about ten years ahead of like
guys who write for the econ hoymist if you read Schwang,
you will end up being like ten years ahead of
those guys.

Speaker 4 (01:23:04):
So yeah, great stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:23:25):
All right, welcome to it could happen here. And what
it is today is me James and Mia Wong Hi, Mia, Hello, Hi.
What we're here to talk to you about today is
something else, which, despite my positive tone of voice, is
sad and depressing.

Speaker 4 (01:23:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:23:42):
Yeah, it's just a lot of that, and like we
don't want you to be too sad. It doesn't bear
moping around, you know, like we've got time to get
organized and that's what we should be doing. And also
like just get out and go outside and see your
friends and do things that bring you joy, Like we'll
work out how to get through it. So you know, like, yep,
I think it's really easy. And I found myself doing

(01:24:04):
this stay at home and be sad, but don't like
I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday,
and I feel so much better. So I would advise you
to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That
would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking,
I would I would skip this one and listen to
the birds and uh, you know, enjoy the outdoors.

Speaker 3 (01:24:21):
Well, I mean, you know, if if you want the
ideological framing event, the ideological framing of it is that
morale is a charade of struggle. Yes, and it is
very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible.

Speaker 6 (01:24:34):
So, yeah, we got four years. We can't be being
moping around like we will get through it. We will
find ways to make it better. And part of the
way we do that, yeah, is keeping Amarell up and
doing things that bring us joy. Thing that brings me
joy is talking about roch Java, the Autonomous Administration of
North and East Syria, and we're going to talk about

(01:24:56):
that today. We're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy in
his second term. So his previous foreign policy was a
pretty mixed bag, and he bombed the shit out of
the Islamic State, right cool. Based he also bombed the
shit out of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi civilians. Not
so cool. Also, we should note, not so different from

(01:25:16):
every other president this century. Bombing civilians has been pretty
much the through line of American foreign policy in that
part of the world for a very long time, in
particular in the Trump administration. I want to talk about
there was a single US strike cell called Talent Annvil.
I think they were mainly like CAG guys from what
I read, so Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys

(01:25:39):
who were making these decisions. They hired a office building
in Syria, and these guys were constantly looking at drone
feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes
on various targets. Right, I'm not sure if they had
the CAAG guys in the watching computers. I'm not entirely sure,
and like, well he didn't have someone else who knows,
But this strike sale dropped more than one hundred and

(01:26:02):
twenty thousand bonds, and Jesus Christ, yeah, yeah, the amount
of ordinance we dropped on Syria, it is insane. It
circumvented procedures are in place to prevent Philian deaths. In
order to do so, they had embedded lawyers who were
supposed to approve the strikes. But these lawyers tried to
raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless.

(01:26:23):
They weren't hitting things that were actual targets, and they
sort of ran into an organizational brick wall. At some point,
pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think Jesus, Yeah,
which it's not usual.

Speaker 3 (01:26:37):
Yeah, like that'd be pretty fucked for a fighter pilot
to be like, No, I don't think I've ever.

Speaker 4 (01:26:44):
Heard of that before.

Speaker 6 (01:26:45):
No, So I found this out in uh well, I
think it was the New York Times. In New York Times,
a pretty good investigation which we linked in our sources.
And yeah, it's like a throwaway line, but I would
love to hear more about that. It could have been
a drone pilot, which is slightly different, gig. I guess
you know, if you're seeing north of Las Vegas there

(01:27:05):
fling a drone, kind of a different scene. So in
the battle to defeat the Islamic State, thousands of innucent
people lost their lives. As we reached the end of
that battle, Donald Trump, who's president at the time, personally
called erda one, who's the president of Circuit at the time.
Right in late twenty eighteen, Trump asked the one, if
we withdraw a soldiers, can you clean up ISIS. That's

(01:27:26):
the quote, According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters,
at One replied that Turkish forces were capable of a mission. Quote,
then you do it, Trump told him, and US as
National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was also on the
call to quote start work for withdrawal of US troops
from Syria. What this resulted in was US troops putting

(01:27:48):
out from some locations in Syria right local people threw
tomatoes at them. Even worse than the tomatoes were the
fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey,
of course, free reign to attack the Autonomous Administration North Nessyria,
which it did in twenty eighteen it did again in
twenty nineteen. Those two operations to claim considerable ground in

(01:28:10):
Syria cost countless civilian lives. Continue to perpetrate human rights
abuses to rehabilitate people from ISIS and other Jahadi groups
as Turkish free Syrian Army, and they kill some people
who were people I care about, and I continue to
care about the cause of Rajava or Autonomous Administration in

(01:28:30):
North Nessyria very deeply. And it really fucking sucks to
think about the potential of the US abandoning those people. Again,
not that Biden has done very much. Yeah. Now, I
think this anecdote, right of what Trump does with one
tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy,
which is he really sees it as very transactional, which

(01:28:50):
is not different from everything else he does. I guess
like he's a very transactional person, and he seems really
only to be concerned about what he can get out
of it. So like in this case, I guess he
wants to say he bought US troops home from Syria,
like he's anti war. This is one of his things,
he says now, right, but he's prepared to also in

(01:29:11):
the case of the bombing, Right, he's not so concerned
with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that
he'd he was the one who defeated isis right? A
bomber couldn't do it. He did it, and he did
it on a pile of civilian remains, and also using
chiefly the Syrian Democratic Forces, right, not US forces. There
were US forces on the ground. They were engaged in combat,

(01:29:32):
but in minuscule numbers compared to SDF, who lost fifteen
thousand of their children in a battle against ISIS. And
I think Trump would be very willing to admit that
he's transactional, right, Like, that's kind of his brand, is
like America first and fuck everyone else. So I think
he'll probably be similar in this term.

Speaker 7 (01:29:52):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:29:52):
He will act unilaterally, He'll pivot whenever the fuck he
feels like it. He will continue with his affection for
strong men and dict caters all around the world. But
a lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term,
and I think it's illustrative for us to think about
how he will engage with things that have changed. So
what has changed. There's a much larger conflict between Russia

(01:30:13):
and Ukraine now, and that conflict has been seen massive
and overt support both from the USA and for the
rest of NATO. There's been a revolution in Memma. I
suppose he doesn't know that.

Speaker 3 (01:30:25):
Yeah, I really doubt maybe some of the like weird
pro coup meaning from the right guard to him, Yeah, perhaps.

Speaker 6 (01:30:33):
Or like, I mean, the parallels between the COO and
Memma and January sixth are pretty obvious, right, Okay, Look,
if January sixth to the landing, it lived a lot
like that, except that it was a military party, not
just a political party. The Islamic State doesn't exist as
a territory identity, but it very much does exist as
a terrorist group, which continues to and has actually increased

(01:30:54):
its activity this month with sleeper cells continued, suicide bombing
has continued, and the SDF continue with their anti ISIS operations.
Without US support, those would be harder. And so we
have to ask, I guess on what Trump's going to
do with these things? And I want to look at

(01:31:14):
a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said
on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on
the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed
so far. We're recording this on Tuesday to twelfth, so
if someone gets appointed before you hear this, that's why
we've missed them out. So I guess to start with
Trump's foreign policy, we should talk about his number one

(01:31:35):
like peer competitor, which is China in his eyes right,
not a big China appreciator. So I looked at his
campaign website for this, which really has some just incredible
use of capital letters. He just fucking does what he wants.
It's wild to see. So chiefly one of the things
that he's been on about for a while now is
tariffs on Chinese made goods, right, as means the feign policy.

Speaker 4 (01:31:57):
Yeah, we just we talked about this last episode.

Speaker 6 (01:31:59):
Yeah, you will have heard about tariffs at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:32:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:32:03):
So as we've previously mentioned, right, he's talked about these tariffs.
These tariffs would cost a lot of money, and they
would increase the cost of you going shopping.

Speaker 3 (01:32:11):
Yeah, and they would probably destroy vast whilest of the
global economy. Yes, both the Chinese and the American economy, Yes,
sort of implode. And then all these countries in Africa
and you know, me and lar for instance, exports a
lot of these rare earth metals to China, right, and
a lot of countries in Africa do too. Aside from
the economic sort of aggression, it stands on, Taiwan is weird,

(01:32:35):
which is normally where we would like expect to see
the most like physical friction between US and China.

Speaker 4 (01:32:41):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:32:42):
Mike Pompeo has pressed for the USA to formally recognize
Taiwan before, which would be a step you know, there'd
be a pretty big swing. Trump, on the other hand,
seems to want Taiwan to pay the United States for
being its ally right now, Yeah, then this is like
one of his big.

Speaker 4 (01:32:59):
Sort of foreign poles super principles, is.

Speaker 3 (01:33:01):
Like trying to get people to pay him for stuff
because that's sort of the only way his brain works.
But I remember this was NATO a lot, whereas this
whole line on NATO that like NATO should be like
paying us because people like you're not spaying it off
on defense, so we're like paying all the defense budgets.
This is like one of his kind of Yeah, it's
been his hobby horse. Yeah, like floats around at his brain,

(01:33:22):
sort of colliding with its walls. Yeah, empty space. Yeah,
like a pink bung ball.

Speaker 6 (01:33:28):
Ironically, like in the time that Trump's been out of
of is Russian aggression has led NATO members to spend
more on defense, yeah, rather than Donald Trump lambasting them.
So one of his big things is that Taiwan should
pay the United States. But it would seem very unlikely
that he if he's not going to abandon Taiwan, I
think because it gives him a place to grand stand

(01:33:49):
on China.

Speaker 3 (01:33:50):
Yeah, and also, like you know, I mean, one of
the things about Trump is that one of the best
ways to sort of influence him.

Speaker 4 (01:33:55):
Is just get a world leader in a room with
him alone. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:34:00):
Unfortunately, well fortunately for us, Trump does not speak Chinese
and she doesn't seem to like him very much.

Speaker 6 (01:34:08):
So yeah, yes, we won't be here. We won't be
joining the PSC anytime soon. China, along with Russia right
to countries we've spoken about most of both make big
plays in Africa. Russia has rebranded what was Wagner as
the Africa Cores, and they're sort of providing support to
regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise. Yeah, they

(01:34:31):
are like sort of classic mercenary shit, like it's your state,
illegitimate and does it lack the capacity to do the
violence it needs to maintain itself? Don't worry. Here are
some heres, some psychopaths from Russia.

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
Yeah, and there's just a lot of people, I think
because like a lot of these sort of governments will
kind of like do their like like put a red
Bereton and start doing their anti imperial as cosplay and
then you like read the like the fine print of
the contracts they've signed with like Africa Korra, thing that
like you expect to be spelled like Africa and Core

(01:35:04):
with a K like Kalo rps like and it's like,
oh okay, so, like they've signed away a bunch of
the country's mineral rights and like they've signed away a
bunch of these specific minds to these mercenary groups. It's like,
oh okay, so this is like awesome. This is also
just imperialism. It's just new management.

Speaker 6 (01:35:22):
Yeah exactly, Yeah, it's just different imperialism. And then China
has big plays in Africa too, Like I've personally seen
a lot of Chinese owned minds in Africa, Chinese roads
in Africa. China does also like offer infrastructure. Chinese does
a kind of quid pro quo. It doesn't come in
like with the violence like Russia does. It comes in
with that will build your hospital if we can have
all your natural resources. US policy in Africa is pretty

(01:35:46):
much to stop those two countries getting too much influence.
The Biden administration is as many liberals are right, like,
there's actually not that much difference between what Biden and
Trump will do in Africa. The difference is Biden is
smart enough not to say it. Trump's ability to do
anything useful in Africa is going to be masked by
his massive racism, Like when he says things like shitthhole countries,

(01:36:08):
it becomes a lot harder for the US to do
anything in Africa that isn't tinged by that, right, Like
that doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious.
US politicians rarely talk about Africa, they rarely campaign on
what they were going to do in Africa, and so
pretty much the only things we're going to hear from
Donal Trump at Africa, I would imagine, are going to

(01:36:29):
be when he lets his racism out. Yeah, that will
have results for like US credibility. Also, my guess is.

Speaker 3 (01:36:35):
We see intensifications of sort of US drone strikes, particularly
in the Horn, and we see like like all of
the stuff that Biden is doing, but worse and killing
even more people.

Speaker 6 (01:36:45):
Somehow, Yeah, I would imagine that we will see these
more aggressive throne strike especially against like Islamist groups in Africa.
That US has special forces deployments in a few places
in Africa, which will probably maintain I would imagine, Like,
I don't think those are things that Trump would He
wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them, I guess, And
it may not even know about them. So yeah, I

(01:37:07):
think we will see little change in Africa would be
my guess.

Speaker 4 (01:37:12):
Mildly worse.

Speaker 6 (01:37:14):
Yeah, yeah, I talk of mildly worse. Mere The thing
that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to
pivot to advertisements, which we must do now.

Speaker 3 (01:37:24):
That was that was a great one, holding out on
you for three years, the good ad pivots.

Speaker 6 (01:37:29):
Yeah, well, there it is. That's what we've got for you.
All right, we're back. So I want to talk about Europe.
As you've heard in the Tariff's episode, right, he wants
to put tariffs on European goods. European Union is going

(01:37:51):
to slap tariffs right back on American goods. That doesn't
really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA
very very hard. One thing that the USA might stop
exporting is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear Trump
he called Olensky the greatest salesman on Earth, but it
was also claimed that he can personally end the war
in twenty four hours. I don't think that means that

(01:38:13):
he will be deploying himself to the down bas a
like a gun dam, but he claimed he can do
this with his negotiating skills, this seems unlikely. To put
it mildly, I don't think that it would be possible
to end this war in twenty four hours if both
sides declared peace right now, getting communications to their frontline
troops would be a challenge in twenty four hours in

(01:38:34):
some places. Yeah. So the way I interpret this, and
I may be wrong here, is that he is likely
to leverage the support that the United States gives to
Ukraine in order to force Zelensky into an unfavorable settlement,
which would achieve his goal of a being able to
say he stopped giving American money to Ukraine, which has

(01:38:56):
been a big talking point for the Like every time
you sat with the Western North Carolina right after the
hurricane or these Republicans sort of talking points were like, oh, well,
all the money is in Ukraine, so we can't have
fucking MREs for people in Western North Carolina, Like FEMA
has no money because we sent Ukraine some memphors. This
is very silly, right, This is it's not a zero

(01:39:18):
sum game. It's not really a reasonable critique, but it's
one that Trump has kind of managed to stick in
the culture was his base seems to see the money
going to Ukraine is directly coming from things that would
otherwise be going to them, which he would benefit from
it if he could bring this war to a close,
right jd Vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between

(01:39:41):
Russia and Ukraine, which yeah, he's going to minister the
DMZ like yeah, like this did we really want this?
Are we going to have troops out like we do
in South Korea? For you know when was a career
around the nineteen fifty seventy years, right, And I don't
think that's really really.

Speaker 3 (01:39:59):
What they The thing what DMC is no one actually
likes them. No, this sucks, It sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:40:04):
Yeah, they're awful.

Speaker 6 (01:40:05):
It's just a bit of land that you can yeat
weapons over each other. Like especially in link modern warfare,
they're not that effective at stopping to be bull fighting. Right,
But very funny that North's career will be two for
two on DMZs in wars it has been involved with
huge dubb for them. He essentially seems to be advocating

(01:40:26):
for exactly the peace settlement that Putin has proposed and
that has been rejected multiple times. Several sources I've seen
suggest that Trump has spoken to Putin quite a few
times since leaving office. This has planned for Ukraine certainly
seems closer to the Russian one than the Ukrainian one,
the Ukrainian one being stop invading us and go home,

(01:40:47):
and the Russian one being, well, we'll just keep all
the stuff we've taken so far and then add a
buffer zone in between, and Ukraine can keep whatever's left
of its country. Right. What's interesting to me is what
other than NATO members will do in the event of
the US reducing its AID. I would suspect that they
will try and step up and meet that gap. It

(01:41:09):
might also result in the US put certain restrictions on
its AID.

Speaker 4 (01:41:13):
Right, how it can be used, where it can be
used crucially.

Speaker 6 (01:41:15):
Right, they don't like Ukraine using things to attack in
Russia proper. They don't mind am using them to attack
Russian forces, but not within Russia. I did see a
picture yesterday of a I think it was three guys
from Rogue I think it's called, which is a unit
within the International Legion who had been killed within Russia.

(01:41:36):
And they had a lot of like eighty fours and
things like that, right, like US anti tank weapons, but
the United States doesn't want Ukraine using the long range
artillery and stuff it's given it to yeat projectiles at Moscow.
I can see a situation where if the US draws
down some bit aid, European allies of Ukraine might not

(01:41:57):
play some of those restrictions on their aid. That could
lead to some interesting complications for Russia. Right if Ukraine
is more effective, like if they get more aid from
Europe and Europe doesn't place restrictions on the aid, they
could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going
to be good for Putin and it's probably not going
to be good for like bringing I mean, unless they
can deal some really crippling blows. It might not be

(01:42:19):
good for bringing the war to an end. But maybe
it will. Maybe they've done some pretty effective things with
not a huge amount so far.

Speaker 4 (01:42:25):
I don't know. Maybe they get lucky on a strike
on the Kremlin or something.

Speaker 6 (01:42:29):
Yeah, yeah, just the one like I mean, yeah, I'm
sure that would be their strategy if they wouldn't have
they didn't have restrictions, would be to just keep pounding
places they think Putin might be.

Speaker 3 (01:42:40):
This is the history of Russian warfare. Dumber things that
have happened and have lost Russia wars. So yeah, yeah,
a lot dumber than that. So yeah, I don't think
that Ukraine will be screwed if the US pulls out.
I do think it will be a lot harder for them.

Speaker 6 (01:42:55):
Yeah, And you know, if that's something, there are a
lot of US sits and still fighting in Ukraine. Would
be pretty devastating to abandon Ukraine. And I think also
just from the sort of stopping Russian aggression standpoint, it's
much better to stop it here than somewhere else. But yeah,
we will see. I guess European countries are really ramping
up their defense, but right now the US is like

(01:43:18):
the heart of the military industrial complex and Europe really
can't keep up with the US production. Of course, the
US being the heart of the military industrial complex does
mean that a lot of Trump donors will probably be
able to leave ridge of their donations to his campaign,
and so we might not see as much of a
drawdown of Bay to Ukraine as we're worrying about here.

(01:43:38):
May talking of launching things from a long distance at
a very small target, I would like to launch these
advertisements from iHeart mean the advertising department directly to your ears, Heiger.

Speaker 4 (01:44:00):
It's all so bad.

Speaker 3 (01:44:02):
As we were recording this, it's come out that the
new Secretary of Defense is going to be Pete Hegseth,
who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs
are real.

Speaker 6 (01:44:11):
Yeah, this guy who has not washed his hands in
ten years.

Speaker 4 (01:44:15):
Great. I mean at least he might die of COVID. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:44:18):
I was gonna say he made it. Wow. Sorry that
that that hair is really something. Oh that's not good
at all. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:44:27):
Wait what On June fourteenth, twenty fifteen, hag Seth accidentally
hit a west poind juror with an act a live
cube like, oh, I think it was incredible.

Speaker 6 (01:44:43):
Let's have that link pulled up. Alright, this video is unavailable,
all right, No, we're finding this video that nothing disappears
from the internet. All right, here we go. No, my god,

(01:45:08):
this is just clown ship. Like I need to write. Listen,
if you were hit in the dick and balls by
an act thrown by future Defense secretary, please contact cool
Zone Media. iHeartMedia dot com. I hope the VA is

(01:45:34):
paying for this man's benefits.

Speaker 9 (01:45:36):
It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen someone do. Like,
in the course of reporting for this show. Yeah, it's amazing,
like very funny. Again, please contact us. I hope you're okay.
Service related injury. Yeah, so that's that's peak.

Speaker 6 (01:45:54):
Hegg Seth, right, future sec def also former reservist who
who deployed to Guantanamo as an Indiant try platoon leader
at Guantanamo. I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in
twenty twelve, and previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He
did voluntary two voluntary deployments or he's in two locations
in IRAQII. So he's hit the greatest hits of US

(01:46:16):
foreign policy in the last twenty years. I guess he's
made his career as a Fox News pundit.

Speaker 4 (01:46:21):
Yeah, he's just like a right wing gooul.

Speaker 6 (01:46:23):
Yeah. I mean in the last Trump administration when he
was punditing, he advised Trump had been considering pardoning several
war criminals and did pardon several war criminals. Right, and
Hexseth was one of the people who A he talked
about on Fox News, well he was advising Trump to
do it, and B he was advising Trump to do it.
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (01:46:42):
Yeah, you can read up about the Trump partons of
war criminals.

Speaker 3 (01:46:45):
It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in
by his own Special Forces unit, Like do you know
how bad?

Speaker 4 (01:46:51):
How like fucking hideous?

Speaker 3 (01:46:52):
The shit you have to do is for like for
like your own guys in a special Forces unit to
be like, holy.

Speaker 4 (01:46:59):
Shit, we have to stop this guy. Yeah, Like it's awful.

Speaker 6 (01:47:03):
Yeah, I mean if you should look up Clint Laurance's
stuff as well, like l O I NC if you're
interested in this stuff. He was convicted I think of
two murder accounts for ordering his soldiers to fire and
unarmed people. And then yeah, the other one was a
Green Beret named Matt Goltschin who was also charged with
the murder of someone in Afghanistan, someone who had been

(01:47:25):
making IDs. So like, I think we can see where
this guy is going. We've just found this out as
well as we're recording for context. Like that's quite troubling. Yeah.
His other two foreign policy appointments that I've seen so
far have been less so look, i'd say less so.
Marco Rubio is a third right, Like, I think we

(01:47:45):
all know that I share very little with Marco Rubio
on Turkey and Rajaba. He is good. He is not
a fan of Verta one. He's in contact with Googlanists.
He kind of puts Turkey in the in the bricks
box is a good yeah, which which leads us to
the very funny idea of Marco Rubio ordering a drone

(01:48:07):
strike on airicc Adams.

Speaker 3 (01:48:08):
I mean, well, here's the thing though, Good's dead now,
so so like there's like a secession crisis of like
who's gonna.

Speaker 6 (01:48:14):
Have the goodinist anti pope Mark Rubio. Yeah, that could
be very good for Rajava at least right the big
concern among those of us who carry deeply about Rajava
has been that Trump will abandon them as he did
in the past. Right, And so I guess we're looking

(01:48:35):
for glimmers of hope. And I think Rubio kind of, oddly,
weirdly was one. Compared to I was expecting more of
the hegths, like Fox News commentator type people in foreign
policy positions, because Trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy,
and like it's an area where he can kind of
give something to those kind of like insane far right

(01:48:57):
commentator types. He all also did appoint Mark Waltz. I
think could be Wolls He's one of the first special
Army special forces guys serving Congress, maybe the first as
a national security advisor. Walls is a member of the
Kurdish Caucus in Congress, so again positive for his JA there.
Talking of Army special forces, there's one more insane Trump

(01:49:19):
foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss, and that
is his desire to use the United States Army in Mexico.
I'm just going to read from his campaign website here.
President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as
he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval
embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict

(01:49:41):
maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, and designate cartels
as foreign terrorist organizations and choke off the access to
the global financial system. President Trump will get the full
cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels or else
expose every bribe and kick back allows these criminal networks
to preserve their rain. He will ask Congress to ensure

(01:50:02):
that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty.
There's a lot there. The way that Donald Trump helped
defeat ISIS was exclusively by bombing things and with some
small contributions from US grand troops, but we don't really
have a partner force in Mexico like that, and I think,
especially with the new administration in Mexico and especially with

(01:50:22):
Trump proposing one hundred percent tariffs on Mexican goods, we're
unlikely to find one. Which leaves the very strange kind
of prospect of US troops carrying out like unapproved, undeconflicted
hits on Mexican nationals in Mexico, which like it's an

(01:50:43):
act of war.

Speaker 4 (01:50:44):
Yeah, you are.

Speaker 6 (01:50:45):
Invading Mexico, is what you're doing. I should point out
that the Bortac under Biden did shoot one Mexican national
this year, who was he was holding up migrants with
a gun. He's rubbing with a gun. It wasn't It's
a place where I've been dozens of times where they
shot here and they didn't seem to be much fuffle
about that. But that is not invading Mexico.

Speaker 3 (01:51:05):
Yeah, like if they're invading Mexico, like you knows, as
close as American Mexican sort of security cooperation has been
and as many people as that's killed from the Mexican side,
like that's oh boy.

Speaker 6 (01:51:17):
Yeah, Like it remains to be seen how much of
this actually happens. Right, Mexico has a new president, the
United States has a new president. They're not exactly politically
fellow travelers, I'll say that.

Speaker 3 (01:51:27):
But yeah, I mean, I will say, like Armlow and
Trump got along like decently. Well, yeah, largely off of
Omblows like anti immigrant policies, but I don't know if
that's going to work with China bomb.

Speaker 6 (01:51:38):
Like and like in the final year of Armlow, like
they definitely they did a lot to help Biden within
effectively enforcing US border policy by deporting people's South people
I spoke to me the Darien series have been sent
so off again this week. But Biden's had actually some
pretty high profile cartel arrests right within Cineloa cartel. He's
destabilized that cartel, but has happened within the US. They

(01:52:01):
didn't send teams into into Mexico, and the way that
the US has traditionally got hold of cartel leaders before
is going to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with
Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then
extraducted them to the US trial and that doesn't seem
to be what Trump is proposing. But again, like the
bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different.

Speaker 4 (01:52:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:52:24):
I have some vague memory that he, like last time,
he wanted to like send Special Forces guys to do this,
and his advisors were like, what the fuck are you
talking about. We can't send Yeah, like people in New Mexico.

Speaker 4 (01:52:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:52:36):
Look, just to be real, those organizations have reached inside
the United States and that would be an extremely messy situation. Yeah,
and like the way this would have to be done, right, Like,
I don't think you can do this with drone strikes.
That you have to do this with boots on the ground,
and that's going to be contrary to what he's promised
to do, which is not risk more US soldiers' lives.

(01:52:58):
Who knows what this will actually look like.

Speaker 3 (01:53:00):
Yeah, my guess is you will find a way to
get the maxim umousivilians killed.

Speaker 4 (01:53:04):
Yes, yeah, yeah, we would himself. Yeah, it's that's probably
would be the result of this.

Speaker 6 (01:53:09):
Yeah, exactly. And I think as you sort of wein
this down, like civilian deaths are probably going to increase. Right,
He's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things.
He doesn't see that the problem. The second thing the
US will lose is what Joseph Nay called soft power, right,
which is like the power to influence people without projecting force,
cultural power, cultural capitals. Body. You might have called it

(01:53:32):
really getting heavy on the university shit at the back
half of this episode. The US lost a lot of
that in the first Trump term, right, and it will
lose more of it in the second Trump term. Some
of that is, you know, the the US maybe shouldn't
be influencing, and the US has had some pretty malign
influence around the world. You can listen to a song
called Washington Bullet to learn more about it. But it

(01:53:54):
will mean that, like there will be a space for
other bad actors, right, Russia, China, You know that le
Russia has not shown itself to be any more concerned
with human rights, and probably less so than than the
United States went in in and it's time in Syria, right,
it's been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people. The
Russian cooperation with your side regime. We do not need

(01:54:15):
more of that around the world. The Wagners to Africa
Core deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of
human rights, and this will open more spaces for that.
So yeah, I mean it doesn't look great this secretive appointment.
Maybe we'll learn more about that in the coming days,
but that doesn't look great. There are some bright spots

(01:54:37):
for a Java. I guess there's some glimmers of hope there,
which is a nice thing. Trump's policy on Gaza fits
with this general model of like he wants to end conflicts,
and the way he sees of doing that is doing
away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties. And
so the way that he went after isis was to
just say bomb them all. I can see him doing

(01:54:59):
the same thing in Gaza, right, just saying like he
wants to claim that he bought an end to the
war and he doesn't care how many bodies he's standing
on when he says that. Yeah, same thing in Lebanon, obviously.
So yeah, these are not great things. These are things
that we will have to deal with for decades to come,
whatever happens. And I guess the way that you can

(01:55:20):
do something here like why a little glimmer of hope,
It's like you can reach out to people all around
the world and let them know that, like, even if
America's foreign policy is shit, you're not. I have sat
in ro Java and I have seen them taking the
children to the hospitals, and I've watched the US soldiers
sit in their bases and do nothing, and like it
didn't help. Really I didn't. I wasn't able to do

(01:55:42):
very much. I couldn't even give blood. But I was
able to be there with them, and maybe they're meant something,
and like you can, you can do little things to
show your solidarity around the world because there won't be
much of it coming from the government.

Speaker 7 (01:56:12):
What have y'all welcome to It already happened here because
this was the goal of this show, was to tell
you that things was probably going to happen here, and
then it did.

Speaker 5 (01:56:25):
I am not one of the normal hosts, as you
can tell.

Speaker 7 (01:56:28):
I am your your friendly cousin that shows up every
once in a while during the holidays. And if your
cousins are anything like my cousins, which means we're immediately
going to get in trouble because parents are gonna blame
you since I'm the cousin, because it's not my fault,
because I'm the guest.

Speaker 5 (01:56:46):
Anyway, we want.

Speaker 7 (01:56:47):
To talk about some stuff that, like, in some senses,
is a bit absurd to talk about, because like the
American understanding of pan ethnic terms and demographics are.

Speaker 4 (01:56:57):
Just oh god, sir, yes, it.

Speaker 5 (01:57:00):
Just don't make sense.

Speaker 7 (01:57:01):
Like nobody in the group identifies as what the group
is called, but that's still the group, right.

Speaker 5 (01:57:07):
I recommend a book called white Fish Don't Exist. It's
a great book.

Speaker 7 (01:57:10):
I'm here with the brilliant, brilliant meta wong.

Speaker 4 (01:57:17):
What's up, miya, It's it's all happening. It's it's all
happening here.

Speaker 3 (01:57:22):
It sucks, but at least I'm getting great interests, the
best what I've ever gotten.

Speaker 5 (01:57:28):
Best best interest.

Speaker 7 (01:57:29):
That's what I come for, you know what I'm saying,
Like I come for us to be able to have
pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here. You
know what I'm saying, So you get to have like
pancakes for breakfast, and you know, stand in your pajamas longer,
like it's great when your cousins are here.

Speaker 4 (01:57:42):
Yeah, yea.

Speaker 5 (01:57:44):
Anyway, so let's do this.

Speaker 7 (01:57:45):
We want to talk about Well, the thing is, like
I don't know if y'all have admitted. I admitted this
on our show that like we kind of had to
have all hands on deck discussion here as to like, Okay,
let's get to our organized like, let's figure out what
we're going to say as a network and kind of

(01:58:06):
brainstorm things to talk about, because I'm pretty sure like
a lot of us are still like wait, what the fuck?
I'm sorry what like, you know, and us holding down
the DEI section of cool Zoe, you know, we are
the diversity, equity and inclusion over here. Figured you know,

(01:58:28):
there were some things that were super shocking around some
of the data that was coming back from the exit polls.
As we thought about like okay, so who actually voted
for who.

Speaker 5 (01:58:38):
And how much?

Speaker 7 (01:58:39):
And so we kind of wanted to talk about the
Asian vote, right yep, which is again from the intro,
it's an absurd category to.

Speaker 4 (01:58:48):
Say that, yeah, totally, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:58:51):
The Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as
a category.

Speaker 5 (01:58:56):
And yeah, just.

Speaker 7 (01:58:57):
Where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some
of the numbers that were in some way shocking. I
will say, as far as holding down the black man section,
I am very proud of us for eventually coming back home,
right and voting in the upper eighty percent for the
black woman, you know, which was encouraging. Now, granted our

(01:59:20):
number of how many of us voted shrike immensely, you know,
But either way, we just wanted to talk about those things.
And I think one caveat for me, I would say,
and then I'll turn it over. I think Mia, like
you know, you can take it on from there. Is
I am, in fact a black man, So I think
I can speak from a certain level of experience. Obviously

(01:59:43):
not the experience of every human, right, but I can
speak from a certain level of experience. Now as we
talk about the Latino vote, I am, in fact, news flash,
not Latino. You know what I'm saying. My wife is
from East LA. But obviously proximity is not the same
as being a member of so keep that in mind

(02:00:03):
as we discuss these things.

Speaker 5 (02:00:07):
So let me turn it over to turn it over
to me.

Speaker 3 (02:00:10):
Yeah, and you know this is one of these you're
talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here, right,
And like one of the things about the way this
is aggregated is that so Asian Americans as a whole
went about five percent to the right in this election,
but that doesn't capture what was going on, because every

(02:00:31):
part of the demographics were just sort of flying in
every direction, and unfortunately, most of the actual right wing
pull was very specifically from my people, which is to say,
Chinese Americans who went right.

Speaker 4 (02:00:44):
In staggering numbers.

Speaker 3 (02:00:47):
Yeah, I don't know, I'm not really surprised by because
this has just been the way that sort of specifically
Chinese American communities have been shifting for the past I
mean really like eight years, but particularly intensifying since twenty twenty. Yeah.
And so if you look at sort of where these

(02:01:08):
things happened, the biggest ones were New York and LA,
and you know, places like Seattle had some shifts, But
I think New York in particular, UK and LA in
particular are important for this because a huge part of
the reason that this happened was the sort of crime
panic stuff. Yeah, and the crime padic didn't one hundred
percent start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the

(02:01:29):
earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the
sort of trajectory of this is that in twenty twenty
you have this sort of like whole stop Asian hate campaign, right,
and you know, yeah, you have all this race like
sort of like racist like ascitement.

Speaker 4 (02:01:45):
Of violence, and you get sort of two responses to it.

Speaker 6 (02:01:48):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:01:48):
There's the kind of like liberal ish response, which is
stop Asian hate, but it's kind of vacuous and doesn't
doesn't really have any political content at all. It's kind
of vaguely anti Trump, but like there's not much there.
And then there's the right ring response. And the right
ring response is just okay, like there, we're just gonna blame.

Speaker 4 (02:02:08):
Black people for this.

Speaker 3 (02:02:09):
Yeah, and that's like fucking horseshit. It's like, no, it
was almost everyone which is getting killed by white people,
because that's almost all the way racial violence works in
this country, right.

Speaker 5 (02:02:20):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:02:22):
But unfortunately, you know, this was an area where the
left kind of just did nothing. And if you look
at left response, you know, there's there's there's some people
who did stuff, right there is you know, like some
sex worker orgs like Red Canary Song did some great work.
But most of the rest of the American left saw

(02:02:44):
this and was like, Okay, the thing that matters here,
and the actual problem with anti Asian violence is that
people are criticizing the Chinese government too much and that's
what's causing this, and so we need to defend the CCP.
And this is just politically, this is fucking radioactive to like, yeah,
eighty ninety percent of like fucking Nasian Americans because like, yeah,

(02:03:05):
there's a sort of sort of combinations of factors, right.
You have on the one hand, us sort of immigrant
communities where most of this shit doesn't work because you're
dealing with people who were like, I don't know, we're
fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to
like do Malthusian fucking population control.

Speaker 5 (02:03:20):
Have no love for the CCP none whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (02:03:22):
Yeah, yeah, right, and then this this is all this
is too reductive, even with Cubans. But it's like this
isn't something where you could just sort of brush this
away with like, oh, all of these people were like
reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like, no,
like a lot of these people came here very recently,
and there are you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities.

Speaker 4 (02:03:38):
There's people from Shingjen here.

Speaker 3 (02:03:39):
Yeah, and all of those people, like all of the
sort of pro CCP shit is radioactive and that's what
was coming out of the American left. And the same
thing with like sort of with with the Hong Kong
movement right where there was like, you know, there was
this really broad consensus amongst sort of American social democracy.
You know, you're sort of like people who were like
marginally she left of Birnie right, that stuff was all

(02:04:00):
CIA stuff and it was bad, and that you should
support the CCP, you know. I mean there are some
tenet organizers, you do good work. We've had on the show, right, like,
there are there are people trying to organize the communities,
but like the mainstream left was just like fuck it,
we don't care, we don't give a shit about you.
Like the important thing about you being killed is that
we can defend this fucking state that we like. Yeah,

(02:04:22):
And so what happened to the stop Asian hate thing
is that it got folded into the crime panic because
the product of this was both the sort of right
wing we're going to give you anti black racism as
you're like, this is this is going to be your
solution quote unquote to this, yeah, and the sort of
stop Asian hate, like mainstream sort of liberal thing both
just fed directly into carcuralism. And you know, so you

(02:04:43):
started like it turned into this rallying cry for like
hate crime bills, and then like increasing police presences and
you know, like the fucking cops were like all over
the place of this shit was happening, and you know,
didn't do anything because they're cops, right. Like all of
this fed into it went sort of seamlessly into the
crime panic, where you could just feed all of these

(02:05:04):
people of the sort of memory of the fear and
the anger over like Asian people getting killed, and you
could just lump that in with crime.

Speaker 4 (02:05:12):
And then these communities also.

Speaker 3 (02:05:14):
And when I say these communities, it's it's kind of
important here to do like class breakdowns here too, because
the big part of what's happening here is an alignment
that I think, like if the Republicans could be like
fifteen percent less racist or figure out how to channel
the racism against one target at a time, a lot

(02:05:35):
of these people would have fucking fled right in the
first place.

Speaker 5 (02:05:37):
Because yes, yes, so I was gonna say, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:05:40):
It's like it's like rich people, professionals and like small
business owners. It's like, well, yeah, of course those people
are like unbelievably sort of turbo hardline reactionarias. It's like, yeah,
those are the guys who are like shooting at people
from the rooftops and fucking LA and ID two.

Speaker 5 (02:05:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:05:54):
But these same people in China, like in Taiwan, in
Hong Kong, like, these are people that if you were
on the left you would just be fighting every day.
But you know, they kind of had been lumped into
the Democratic Party because of the just unbelievable racism from
the Republicans, and now the sort of crime panic stuff
has finally given them this thing where the Republican deal
is basically like okay, if you're okay with sort of

(02:06:16):
being anti black with us, if you're okay with massive
expansions of police presence, you're okay with us running on
that right and also on anti homeless politics. That's been
a huge, extremely effective thing Chicili among business owners.

Speaker 4 (02:06:28):
And I remember, God, I think I've.

Speaker 3 (02:06:29):
Told the story on air, but back when I was
in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I
used to like, you know, it was an extra a
bunch of shops, and so you could sort of you
could get bakery food and you could go sit at
these benches, and I came back to them in twenty
twenty and the benches literally had had a thing drilled
into the table threatening to arrest you if you sat
at them for too long a right, and this is

(02:06:49):
this is.

Speaker 4 (02:06:50):
Like twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.

Speaker 3 (02:06:51):
Yeah, so you know that the sort of anti homelessness
stuff had started really really early there, and it's just hideous.
And you know, these places of going to the right,
they're electing Republicans and they're doing it because this kind
of like Asian American petitqueourgeois like small business class and
some of the sort of richer tech people, et cetera,
et cetera, are swinging really really hard to the right.

Speaker 4 (02:07:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:07:15):
Man, that actually connected so many dots for me. Like,
first of all, like even to like the anti homeless thing,
like you know, you start seeing that weird middle of.

Speaker 5 (02:07:24):
The bench arm rail yep.

Speaker 7 (02:07:26):
You know, like, well it's like that's so you won't
lay on it, you know, That's that's why you did this.
But like I hope what I'm about to say is
not a trope, you know what I'm saying. It's just
it's because of like the proximity that I've had with
the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino.
You know, all the DJs I've all worked with, all
these just hip hop. At some point in the nineties,
the Filipinos took over. Yeah, I'm saying, so like that's

(02:07:48):
been a lot of ways our community. But I found that,
you know, the like proper Asian in the jungle Asian
thing where it's like pending on your relationship with the
United States is almost even. And if you identify as Asient,
because you sit down ten Filipinos, like half of them
going to say a Pacific islander, you know, the other
have gonna say to Asian. The other have is gonna

(02:08:08):
say the Asian Pacific Islander. And then and then my
lord Cambodia right next to them, who are all in
Long Beach and their crips, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 5 (02:08:16):
So like that sort.

Speaker 7 (02:08:17):
Of world like they were with us, you know, as
far as like they were just a part of our community,
whereas the sort of northern kind of proper Asian world,
like it's cities is like Alhambra, Monti Roy Park, this
is very California stuff. But they stuck to themselves, you know,
and they they saw a lot of the American things
like this is pragmatic, like we're here to win, like

(02:08:41):
you know, like so when you started having the Asian
hate thing, like it's almost like now that you say it,
it's like we just tied that community up into a
bow and then handed them to the right, because this
all happened at the same time as like the the
anti affirmative action you know.

Speaker 3 (02:09:00):
Although I do want to say in the anti affirmative
action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on
with that. Asian Americans as a whole and as subgroups
support affirmative action.

Speaker 4 (02:09:10):
Yes, very consistently.

Speaker 3 (02:09:11):
Every time they're polls, there's like sixty percent support for it, right, yeah,
but there's like forty percent of these fucking dipshits who
are like, yes, I don't know, you know, I'm like
my sort of like classic age response to this is
like I fucking did it.

Speaker 4 (02:09:24):
I was a terrible student. I fuck I got into
the University of Chicago.

Speaker 3 (02:09:26):
Like you didn't take a fucking study harder, Like you're
you're not the reason the reason you're not getting into
these universities isn't because like black people are being allowed
in it's because you suck, like fucking skill issue.

Speaker 4 (02:09:37):
What the fuck is wrong with really?

Speaker 3 (02:09:38):
Yeah, but like like there's there was this like class yeah,
you know the sort of class.

Speaker 7 (02:09:41):
And I was gonna get to is this class distinction
in the sense that from a black perspective, it was like, Yo,
we rallied for y'all over the like stop Asian hate thing,
you know what I mean. And then to come back
around and see this again from a class perspective because
kind of the same thing. And in a lot of
ways in the black community, because the reasoning, as you

(02:10:04):
say that, that's why I say it all makes sense.
The reasoning is the same, like the system is not
for me, so I'm just gonna get mine, Damn the community,
you know what I'm saying, Like, I'm just gonna go
get mine, you know. And so in the again in
the black community, for those that swung right, it was
just like like in some senses, they're like, well, why no,

(02:10:26):
y'all are fucking racists, like you know what I'm saying.
So I'd like as far as like the rights, like
I know you are with the left, it was more
like you're just gaslighting me yea. So well, if you're
just gonna gaslight me and I already know that you
hate me, well fuck it, I'm just gonna get mine,
you know.

Speaker 5 (02:10:39):
And that becomes the thing.

Speaker 7 (02:10:41):
But as a community, like you said, you know, in
the same way as far as like the beef between
like the you know, the historical la riots like Chinese
and Korean communities. While their parents were on this on
the roofs of their of their shops shooting at us,
they kids was breaking into the city.

Speaker 5 (02:10:58):
They was with us like that, breaking it to the
same story.

Speaker 4 (02:11:00):
We'll just break it into you know.

Speaker 7 (02:11:02):
So that that class distinction was something that made us
kind of be like, bro, like, don't you understand You'll
never be one of them, They'll never really love you, you know.
And I feel like even that sort of like appeal
would lurch this group even further to be like, don't
tell me who you are, don't tell me where they're

(02:11:23):
They're giving me what I need, you know. So yeah,
like I never thought about tying all that together and
being that it being like a specific a Chinese lurching.

Speaker 5 (02:11:31):
Wow. I never thought of that.

Speaker 3 (02:11:32):
Yeah, And okay, you know you know what else sells
products that are from China.

Speaker 4 (02:11:36):
It's these products and services support the podcast.

Speaker 7 (02:11:40):
We sell products from China.

Speaker 4 (02:11:54):
And we're back.

Speaker 3 (02:11:56):
So I think that there's one more thing I want
to make sure I get to about the Chinese American
stuff before we move on. And that's one of the
things you kind of brought up earlier, was the insolarity,
because part of what's going on here too is that
there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who you know,
you get communities there speaking like they're uspeaking like Kenzanese

(02:12:16):
or Mandarin, and in a lot of cases, it's like
you'll get these very very small, tight knit communities with
people who are speaking like the provincial dialect that's like
semi incomprehensible to other people, right, because it's like effectively.

Speaker 4 (02:12:32):
Its own language.

Speaker 3 (02:12:33):
And one of the problems here, and this is one
of the places where the left shit the bed like
wasn't doing a good organizing, right, And the consequence of
this is that in these a lot of the things
that we're getting put out in these spaces, the media
is all unbelievably right wing. Yeah, right, there's Miles Guah
who whatever, God like twelve years from now, when I

(02:12:55):
finished the lab Leak episode, which is gonna be He's
gonna be a big part of this was he was
this Chinese billionaire who defected to the US and came
here and ran one trillion scams and is currently going
to prison for Like, yeah, I'm pretty sure he was
the guy who's boat Steve Bannon was on when Steve
Bannon got arrested by the Post office cops.

Speaker 5 (02:13:12):
So like this varsity level bad guy.

Speaker 4 (02:13:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was here.

Speaker 3 (02:13:17):
He was issuing passports from like a fake government in
exile that he set up. He's running every scam in
the entire world. But he's also you know, he's also
one of the people. He started the whole lab Leak
thing and he so he was flooding the like all
all the sort of traininge language media with this hardline
right wing sort of pro Republican, hardline anti China stuff.
And then you have a very similar thing coming from

(02:13:40):
the Falling Gong, who are everywhere in any every China town,
there's Fallen Gong guys everywhere. They're posters, there are people,
so they are cult. They run shan Yu. They run
a newspaper called The Epak Times, which is just a
pure fascist propaganda outlet, and those things kind of just

(02:14:00):
like devoured the entire Chinese language media ecosystem. And it
wasn't good before because like there are also a bunch
of other weird right wing groups. Like part of the
problem here too is it's possible for in sort of
Asian American community for you to have two people who,
in by American standards, have identical politics, right, they're identically
right wing on things like racial politics, and they're like

(02:14:23):
edi crime stuff, you know, who are incredibly sexist and
like humblophobic, but they absolutely fucking hate each other because
one of them is a pro CCP Chinese nationalist and
one of them is an anti CCP Chinese nationalists.

Speaker 4 (02:14:33):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (02:14:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:14:35):
But this kind of like you know, what's been able
to kind of weld that shit together is is this
sort of like republican anti black off on crime campaign
combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:14:47):
Wow.

Speaker 7 (02:14:48):
Yeah, you know, it's Shad's rebellion all over again.

Speaker 5 (02:14:51):
Like just that at least you're not them, yeah, you know.

Speaker 7 (02:14:54):
And and yeah, like the simplicity of that right wing
message of just like here's all your problems all your problems.

Speaker 5 (02:15:01):
Are those fools, and I'll just get rid of them.

Speaker 4 (02:15:03):
Yeah, and we can solve this with more cops and
Donald Trump. We just solved war.

Speaker 5 (02:15:07):
Yeah, yeah, man.

Speaker 7 (02:15:09):
So form my end, I looked at the black and
Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty
quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story and
also because you know, we did an episode with Garrison
Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters.
And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact

(02:15:29):
of like the frans fer anand thought of like, okay,
what is what is liberation?

Speaker 5 (02:15:34):
Like what is freedom?

Speaker 7 (02:15:35):
And is it you know, my ability to flourish without
any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering?

Speaker 5 (02:15:44):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (02:15:45):
So like, in other words, it's like this, this plantation
would be better if I ran the big house rather
than being like, burn the fucking big house down because
there shouldn't be slavery, you know I'm saying, So like
that sort of approach to a gain and the reality
of why know, the system's not for me in a
lot of ways. That's what's interesting about the understanding of it.

(02:16:07):
So when you would look at somebody like a black person,
like why would you vote for this racist man? And
it's like, well, the same reason I would vote for
every other racist man, you know what I'm saying, Like, which,
find me one that ain't you know, so, like that
attitude is already there, so you know, obviously all of
us would push back and say that, like, well, you
choosing yourself is also a vote against yourself and is

(02:16:29):
destroying your community. Clearly, it's never worked at some point,
you know, which I'm sure y'all can relate to. It's
like I feel two ways when I see like black people,
specifically black men, sit at this table, because I'm like,
I can imagine the first joke that you kind of
let slide that was like, I was kind of weird,

(02:16:51):
but I don't know, it's no big deal. I'll get
over it. Maybe maybe they didn't mean it, you know.
And then that joke gets more and more intense, and
then all of a sudden, you sitting in a room
and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets and that
Puerto Rico's a track, you know what I'm saying. It's
like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting
and just being like all lighten up, and at some

(02:17:13):
point somebody said something to you and you made a
face and they went, dude, just it's a joke, man,
it's a joke. Come on, bro, you know me, You
know me, right, you've had that. You know what I'm saying,
and I know that happened a year ago, and now
look at you. You know, so like eventually, the point
I'm making is like, at some point you are going
to have to lay down all of your identifying factors

(02:17:36):
to be able to stay at this table.

Speaker 5 (02:17:38):
And I hope that. I hope that thirty year fixed
mortgage was worth it.

Speaker 6 (02:17:42):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:17:43):
So the black story is that it's like, what is
going to get us the financial or get me specifically
minds the financial freedom that the Democrats kept promising but
never get to us. But that's, like I said, that's
a much less interesting story, in my opinion, than the

(02:18:05):
Latino vote, which we.

Speaker 5 (02:18:06):
Could talk about after this break.

Speaker 7 (02:18:20):
All right, so we're back now, sixty four percent right
of air quotes, Latinos voted right wing this year. Now
I feel like this, well I don't feel like I
know this needs a lot of unpacking, because first of all,
what the hell is the Latino, right is the first
question that you have to ask. And essentially I find

(02:18:41):
I figure, I think I've come to the fact that
what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain,
so in some way you kind of speak somewhat Spanish,
unless it's Brazil, in which case you were colonized by
the Portuguese. Right, So it's like, you don't even know
what you mean, Like y'all don't even know.

Speaker 4 (02:18:58):
What you mean.

Speaker 3 (02:18:58):
It's sort of it's agree that, like one of our
primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like
Maoists and like Vietnamese Merxist Leninist that fell apart immediately
the moment that China invade Vietnam. And that's only our
second most incoherent democratic category.

Speaker 5 (02:19:17):
It's completely incoherent.

Speaker 7 (02:19:19):
Right, So you have exactly you have my wife, my
life partner, who is born in la but she is
a first gen she grew up in southern Mexico.

Speaker 5 (02:19:30):
She is first gen Mexican.

Speaker 7 (02:19:32):
But she's like, I identify as indigenous and it's and
it's true. She is like even when we did the
DNA test, if you believe in that stuff. She's like,
but you could just look at her and I'm like,
you're incing, Like you know what I'm saying. Just I'm
just you're looking at her, and she's like, yeah, you're right,
Like we are overwhelmingly vast majority of her DNA is indigenous.

(02:19:57):
So for her, if you check a demographic box, it's
like are you Are you Hispanic? She's like, why would
I identify with the colonizer? So no, I'm not Hispanic,
Like they're the colonizer. Right. Whereas you ask a Puerto
Rican or a Cuban or Dominican, they say Hispanic, but
they just mean it differently. One because the island was

(02:20:18):
called Hispanola, y I'm saying, so like they just mean
something totally different. And Dominicans as black as hell, yo said,
And then what about a Cuban. The way that they
relate to America is also incredibly different, especially because of
like you know, I'm pretty sure y'all y'all room knows,
is if you could touch dry ground, right, And that
really just had to do with the fact that we

(02:20:39):
just ain't fuck with Castro. So the way that they
relate to even immigration is completely different. Because if you
could make it to the Soy, if you go back
to Florida, you're a citizen. So they just didn't go
through the same things that people from Central and South
America went through to be able to become a citizen.
And on top of all that, California, Arizona and Texas

(02:21:01):
is Mexico. So like so some of them a and immigrants.
They was here, like the border move we didn't cross
the border, the border across US. So you put all
that together mixed with a group of people who might
be ninth generation Mexican that people that don't speak Spanish,
they're no samples as you call it, like, well't even
speak Spanish. You know what I'm saying that, Like you

(02:21:24):
love all these people who speak so many different languages
and have so many different understandings of who they are,
and you just call them Latino and then you get
this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity
of it, then then we could talk about the actual
Like what actually happened here and what you find are

(02:21:47):
two things that are seem so reductive. But as you
look at the exit polls and even like interviews that
I that I personally conducted. If you set aside the
person that has been just cooked by just the right
wing information, like set that person aside, that is just
you've just your brain's been cooked.

Speaker 5 (02:22:05):
Like you set that aside, and you look at this.

Speaker 7 (02:22:08):
There are two very reductive things that just continue to
just be true. One is, Latin America is very religious.
It's still Catholic, and machismo is a big part of
their culture. And it just it seems so reductive, but
it's but it's what happened. You know, this is still

(02:22:29):
a very patriarchal culture. And you know, as anecdotal and
as running joke as it is that like if you
have a Latina daughter and she's bringing because again they're
very traditional. That's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things.
It's like you bring a boy over your grandma, all
your theas are watching you make him a plate. You

(02:22:52):
have to go over there and make him a plate
and sit it in front of him or you going
to be judged. This is just the culture, you know,
so it's no surprise that that is not going to
play into how you vote.

Speaker 4 (02:23:05):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:23:06):
And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that
like this actually like really blew my mind. And a
couple interviews I had I wanted to talk to specifically
Latina women, because I was like, it just seemed as
though there was just a triple layer of shit you'd
have to swallow to be able to go this route, right,

(02:23:29):
And my main question was like, what was the non
negotiable and was there a line that Trump and by extension,
the Republican Party could cross, like's the where's the line?

Speaker 5 (02:23:45):
What is the too far line? Right?

Speaker 7 (02:23:47):
And they landed on a few things. It was crazy, like,
after talking to three different women, they all kind of
landed on the same things.

Speaker 5 (02:23:54):
It was abortion, right.

Speaker 7 (02:23:57):
They were like, at the end of the day, this
is untenable, and to which I pushed back where I
was like, well, Trump's not anti abortion. And what they
all said was like, we could deal with the sixteen
week like I could deal with the sixteen week thing, obviously,
because again they are women and they're not completely pilled.
They're like, we understand that there are situations that happened

(02:24:20):
right that just are untenable.

Speaker 5 (02:24:24):
And then the next thing that they said was.

Speaker 7 (02:24:26):
Like, which was the part that like really just kept
putting my brain in a pretzel, was we are really
big on anti sex trafficking and the the idea for
us on this knowing that like, okay, so the right
wing stole that, like they don't believe it. They stole
that concept and they wrapped everything around it, right. But

(02:24:49):
one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for Hillary
because she heard rumors about child stuff, and she's I
mean she's referring to pizzagate, you.

Speaker 4 (02:24:57):
Know, yeah, yeah, it's just cute shit.

Speaker 7 (02:25:00):
Of which I was able to push back to be like,
well that was, you know, it was debunked, like, and
she was like, I just don't want to I just
don't like I just don't like how they move. I
don't trust Bill and how he behaved in the Oval office.

Speaker 5 (02:25:12):
And it's like you're looking around, like are.

Speaker 4 (02:25:14):
You They were both of that played like I'm like.

Speaker 7 (02:25:19):
She even said she was like but the Epstein thing,
and I'm like, well, they're all I don't.

Speaker 5 (02:25:25):
I don't understand.

Speaker 7 (02:25:27):
I don't understand how you don't see this connection, right,
and to which they both said, oh, no, we see it.

Speaker 5 (02:25:34):
You're again.

Speaker 7 (02:25:35):
Find me someone that's not nasty, is their answer. Find
me someone that's not corrupt, Find me someone that's not nasty.
At least he's going to save the babies, was the thing.
And then the next question I had about them was
the anti immigration thing, the borders, right, and we're talking
to people who are one in two, some of them

(02:25:57):
three generations removed.

Speaker 5 (02:25:59):
And one of one of them gave me an example.

Speaker 7 (02:26:01):
Of a family members in law who got deported fifty
years old, got deported from something they did when they
were nineteen. It's like it's tough, like this was a
hard working man who's done his best, who you know,
has has done everything they could and it's got it.
So I asked her, like, yo, do you think that
so do you think that that's unfair? No, she was like,

(02:26:25):
our family waited in line, Our family did everything they
needed to do. We fought. We came to this same thing.
We came to this country because we believed in the
dream and we fought for it, you know, and we
and we did it right, you know obviously like with
the Mexican like sort of like work ethic of like
no excuses, just work. We can't stand for no cheaters.

(02:26:45):
We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to
work for yours right, And we come here. There's no
cuts in front of the lines. There's no shortcuts. You
do the work right, and if you cheat, you go
to the back of the line.

Speaker 5 (02:26:57):
That's just what it is. So she's like, like, he's
talking about criminals.

Speaker 7 (02:27:02):
I'm not a criminal. He's talking about criminals. Yeah, you know,
that's not me. I'm a hard working citizen, you know.
So that sort of mindset, and then she said, at
the end of the day.

Speaker 5 (02:27:16):
We came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know.

Speaker 7 (02:27:20):
And if I put in the work, if my family
puts into work, we succeed. That's what this country's for.
You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating
the system is fucking it up for all of us.
And so that sort of like I can swallow the
racist shit because I don't give a fuck about you anyway,
because I already know you don't give a fuck about me.

(02:27:41):
I'm just here to get mine. So for them, at
least according to the way they're explaining it, is like
the prejudice line is not a line they worried about.

Speaker 5 (02:27:48):
That's something I've already accepted, you know.

Speaker 7 (02:27:52):
But what is a line is oddly enough, treatment of
women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish.
And then lastly for the men, it's what we know,
like just the Mano spheares cooked our kids.

Speaker 5 (02:28:07):
It just cook them, you know.

Speaker 7 (02:28:09):
And it dovetailed so well into the Latino machismo and
even on the black shit. Like I knew we were
in trouble when the hood niggas was talking, was running
around here saying they was gonna vote for Trump because
it's because they understand it. It's like you either get
on or get out. Like I'm here, I'm gonna get

(02:28:29):
with my You either form me or against me.

Speaker 5 (02:28:31):
This is what we're doing. You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (02:28:34):
Right, I'm gonna let you be you know, as as
derogatory as this is, like, I'm gonna let you be
a man. You go fight what you gonna fight. And
the Democrats are gonna turn your sons and the daughters.
I don't rob like that's the that's the thought.

Speaker 5 (02:28:47):
You know what I'm saying. It's like, okay, well well
fuck it, let's just get ours. You know what I'm saying.
That simplicity of a message.

Speaker 7 (02:28:54):
It just resonated while you have which didn't bother me,
but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like
somebody's uncle.

Speaker 5 (02:29:02):
Basically like you.

Speaker 7 (02:29:03):
Young niggas need to turn pull up your pants, stop
acting like thugs, and get in line.

Speaker 4 (02:29:08):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (02:29:08):
It's like, all right, okay, uh you know, to me,
I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're
somebody's uncle, like you are that oh you of course
that's how you talk, you know. But the street dudes,
it's like, look, man, I don't need this, Like I
don't need this Harvard grad like pretty ass like rich
nigga to tell me what it's like. You was never
out You weren't out here, you weren't in the trenches.
You know what I'm saying. Like you're a millionaire. I
don't like you. You barely want to oh because you

(02:29:30):
can hoop? Oh so you like basketball? You one of us,
you know what I'm saying. So I just think that
that like you've already got yours, so let me get mine.
Is like, at the end of the day, was so
appealing to this particular demographic and it just made sense.

Speaker 5 (02:29:49):
So that's why they voted that way.

Speaker 4 (02:29:51):
Yeah, And I think there's there's sort of like angles
of this two that connect with what was going on
with the Datian Americas, so partially also the religion angle
is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also
isn't talked about enough with Asian Americans, like particularly Chinese Americans.
There's a whole bunch of how do I explain this
in a way that.

Speaker 3 (02:30:11):
You know, the sort of like zeal of a convert shit,
where like the first generation converts are the most nuts. Yeah,
so that's like a huge portion of like Chinese Christians
or these like first generation evangelical converts, and so you
get these just like really terrifying, like ferociously right wing
stuff that there's just kind of like just kind of

(02:30:33):
eats everything around it. And I think the second part
is I think it's an interesting distinction here too, because
I think there's like a kind of differing parts of
the storysness of the kind of like we came here
to work thing, because that was the Asian American thing
from maybe twenty years ago, and the last ten years
and especially post twenty twenty has been people realizing that

(02:30:57):
it's not real, yeah, and that you know, you work,
you work, you work, you work, and this is this
is actually also funny enough, exact same thing happening in
China with sort of different political results because it's less
it's you know, we're not dealing with yeah, like the
same kind of sort of immigrant culture stuff. But the
Chinese American version of this was like, Okay, we need
to figure out who to blame for this, and they
were like, well, yeah, okay, it's because of like all

(02:31:19):
of this crime shit, because like people are going to
prison for one million years, and like I see a
black person and there's like a homeless person who I
have to like walk past every day. This is the
reason why like our fucking dream died. And that was
a really sort of appealing message people. And it's the
same kind of thing with the people who went for
the affirmative action stuff, where it was like the people

(02:31:40):
who you know are like in all seriousness, like we're
running into kind of like oh no, there actually is
a sort of wall that you hit, yeah, where it
doesn't matter how hard you work, like there's only so
many spots at the university, there's only so many totally,
you know, there's only so much so far you can go,
And hitting that wall drove a bunch of people you.

Speaker 7 (02:32:01):
Make a good point, you know, and and I imagine
the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese
community is going to be the same with ours, where it's like, okay,
you gon' learn that you are not welcome to that table.
You know, they will always choose themselves. And you know,
you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to

(02:32:22):
the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors.
For us, it's like to the degree for which you
can remove your blackness is to the degree for which
you're welcomed in this table. But at some point you
can't take it off. It a'll rub off, you know,
dress your kids up.

Speaker 5 (02:32:39):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:32:39):
That was like for us with respectability politics, like teach
your kids to speak proper English and dress them up
and don't let them wear hoodies. Okay, good luck, you know,
like jay Z's seminal work. Look, OJ said, I'm not black,
I'm OJ okay, Like you know, it's just they will
never accept you. The world you're trying to get into

(02:33:02):
will never accept you. And this step towards trying to
be accepted by this world is working against you and
everyone else behind you.

Speaker 5 (02:33:10):
You know, But this is America. You can vote whatever
you want to.

Speaker 3 (02:33:14):
Vote well, and I think twenty twenty eight, like for us,
was that moment right where like, you know, everyone kind
of got knocked out of the.

Speaker 4 (02:33:21):
You know, whichever way you sort of fragmented politically.

Speaker 3 (02:33:25):
It's like, that's when we got knocked out of the
sort of obamam multiracial dream. Was when you realize that,
like all of this fucking progress you've made isn't going
to stop people from killing you in the street. Yes,
And the reaction to that was like, and I saw
this on the left where like a bunch of people
basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because
they were afraid, and they were like, Okay, well, you know,
here's this thing that we have, this like strong state

(02:33:45):
that will protect us, and we just have to fight
for it.

Speaker 4 (02:33:47):
Here it's like, well that didn't work, right, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:33:49):
And then you have a lot of other people who
started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen right,
that like the thing that they had bought into was
a lie. But the part of it that they believed
they were just like, well, okay, if we can just
like fucking get the black people out of here and
like we can get the cops in yea, you know,
we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world. Yeah,

(02:34:10):
And that's been just the sort of dominant response to it.
And I don't know, it's bleak, but it's it's not
something that can't be overcome, but it's gonna require like,
it's going to require organizing, and it's going to require
the left to not be about fucking making white people
feel more anti imperialist, which has been what fucking politics

(02:34:32):
ordizationan Americans has been. And until that shit at Shedison's like,
you're gonna keep seeing this shit accelerate.

Speaker 7 (02:34:42):
Yeah, man, has there been any if the right term
is like vision casting among this community, because like I
say that to say, albeit a very small, very small
fraction of voices, but among some of the black thinkers
is like a serious consideration of pursuing like creating a

(02:35:04):
third party of just like like but let's like take
it serious this time, like for real, for real. Yeah,
you know, like there's you know, it's, like I said,
it's very small and like obviously, like my grandchildren will
probably be the ones to see any sort of beginnings
of that actually taking route but it's still like, you know,
people are some of the things that are being talked

(02:35:25):
about right now, like we should like really like really
consider it.

Speaker 5 (02:35:29):
Is there anything like that going on?

Speaker 3 (02:35:31):
No, Like, and this is this social part of the
problem is like the Asian American intellectual class is like
one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country.

Speaker 6 (02:35:39):
There's nothing.

Speaker 3 (02:35:40):
It's a wasteland out there. Like it's oh my god, yeah,
like it's it's so bad. It's it's like all of
the art in the media, the culture and the sort
of analysis is all I've talked about in this show
a decent amount, but it's all wrapped up in this
sort of like oh, you two can like integrate and
become a small business owner. And those people, you know,
the people who leave that and people who did that,

(02:36:01):
don't actually have any interesting ideas. Yeah they have. They
have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class. The incredible
narrow idea, incredibly narrow ideas of their class are completely
useless for the sort of task we have ahead of us. Yeah,
And and it's kind of working for them, yeah, I
mean it's working for them, it's just it isn't working
for anyone else.

Speaker 5 (02:36:18):
Exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:36:18):
Yeah, and like God, like I don't know, like the
people who are supposed to be like Wesley Yang, who
was supposed to be like the great sort of like
new Asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked, right
winger Like some of some of the people have been
like turning on like some of the like the big
podcasters have been like turning on trans people, and I'm
just like, well, fuck all you guys eat shit basically,

(02:36:41):
So yeah, it's it's the situation's bad.

Speaker 4 (02:36:43):
It's also the fragmentation is so powerful because you're dealing
with so many kinds of like linguistic lions and lines
between people who've been here for ten generations and people
who just like walk off the boat yesterday. There's you know,
and so the fragmentation I think helps prevent a more
coherent sphere. But like it's it's bleak out there.

Speaker 5 (02:37:06):
Yeah, yeah, you know.

Speaker 7 (02:37:10):
Obviously, like the black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant
and strong and organized, and you know, at least from
the part of the intersection that I'm a part of,
you know, the voice coming out of that that space
of like a lot of times of like very much
prophetic and like you know, very much like truth telling

(02:37:31):
that you hear from again, Like, you know, black queer
community is like from our perspective, they continue to be
like five steps ahead of us, you know of like
where we need to go as as a as a people.

Speaker 4 (02:37:43):
Yeah, this was like the sex worker orgs for us.

Speaker 3 (02:37:45):
But then because this is another thing with left just
kind of shit the bed right, Like this is a
thing with Bernie where Bernie voted for SIS to Falster
right and there's never been a reckoning about that at all. Yeah,
and so you know, like the stuff that could have
come out of that just kind of never did, and
we never got the kind of integration and the kind

(02:38:06):
of politics that we could have had if people had
been like five percent, well not five so they would
be able to require them to move their positions a bit.
But like people had actually cared about sex workers, we
wouldn't be here right now.

Speaker 5 (02:38:21):
But you told a different story. Yeah, yeah, well that
was informative.

Speaker 7 (02:38:26):
This has been, Uh, I don't know, how do I
how do we describe what.

Speaker 5 (02:38:31):
This has been?

Speaker 4 (02:38:32):
Well, miya, you know, I think I closed this right,
Like this situation isn't hopeless.

Speaker 3 (02:38:36):
Yeah, right, there's there's been a lot of good tenanted
organizing going on, Like there's a lot of kinds of
stuff that can and do work. It's knows to the
grindstone time, right, it is time to lock in, time
to organize, and these communities can be organized.

Speaker 4 (02:38:51):
Yeah, we just haven't yet.

Speaker 7 (02:38:53):
And you know, yeah to your point, like for me,
like all information is helpful, like like somebody's lying to you,
like it's it's good information to know that this person
thinks that that's something worth lying about, you know, like
you just you just told me something about yourself that
the fact that you think that that's worth lying about.
So I say all that to say this understanding a

(02:39:16):
better understanding of like it's hard to reason reason with
somebody when they're hungry, you know, so just a better
understanding of what are these communities actually prioritize, what do
they actually value? And obviously, like you know, the dims
and and unfortunately even the left was just like just
swinging a miss guys, Like this type of thing, like

(02:39:39):
you said, is not hopeless. It's like, now there's an
understanding of like, okay, so you value the hustle, all right, well,
let me tell you in the ways for which the
choice you just made is working against your hustle, you know,
like or now now here, Here are ways for which
you can, like you said no to the grind and
accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detri

(02:40:00):
mental to the people around you. Yeah, you know, I'll
with it. Like, I'm not hopeless either. I think that
we just need to think about the word our word
choice and what hells we willing to die on and
be like, this is what we meant when we said this.

Speaker 1 (02:40:12):
Yeah, hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
week from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 4 (02:40:19):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (02:40:22):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 6 (02:40:36):
Thanks for listening.

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