It Could Happen Here Weekly 179

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool 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. Welcome back to It
could Happen here, a podcast about it happening here, which is,
you know, these days normally about the fact that it's
happening here, but today we're here to talk about a
show where it happens somewhere else, a place that people
aren't yet but may one day be in the future.

(00:45):
We're talking about the Martian Revolution, with the great Mike
Duncan of the Revolutions podcast Mia Wong joining me on
this interview. Welcome to the show, Mike, Thank you very
much for having me. So let's talk about this because
you know, I've kept up and been listen listening to
Revolutions for years, and I started seeing messages earlier this
year that, like Mike Duncan is doing this fictional revolution

(01:07):
podcast on the Martian Revolution, and it seems to map
really really closely a lot of stuff that's happening right
now in the United States. And I'm wondering, kind of
to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial
reaction to this when you started really finally laying down
like the text for these episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
I did not expect that at all, not at all.
What has been happening to me has been one of
the most surreal six months of my life in terms
of what I am writing and dropping out into the world.
And then I turn on the news three weeks later,
four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly what I

(01:47):
wrote down in the show come to life. It is
horrifying and I hate it. Yeah, welcome to the club.
Yeah yeah, I mean, you guys have to change in
the name of your show. Is that there's no good
about it, man, We're just here. It's just going.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian
Revolution series for years, Like I think I first came
up with it back during like the French Revolution days
is when I was like, you know, it would be
a really cool thing to do it's like, once I've
got all these under my belt, just like make up
a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many
of the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this

(02:24):
has been kind of like years in the making and
a lot of the sort of like plot points and
ideas that I wanted to do. You know, I wanted
it to be like a monopoly corporation, because I also
wanted to do some like social commentary and like what
are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now?
And you know, and then I'm like, Okay, then there's
this thing called the New Protocols that is going to
you know, help jump start the revolution. And this is

(02:46):
somebody coming in and just you know, implementing whole new
software programs and hardware programs without any care for like
what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that
are a part of this. And then deportations are you know,
like all a part of the story of how the
Martian Revolution gets going. And you know, this stuff was
plotted out in October. And I got to tell you, you know,

(03:08):
maybe I was naive, maybe I had my head in
the sand. I thought she was gonna win yeah, man,
Like I thought Harris was gonna win the election. That's
where I that's where my head was at in September
and October, going into November. I was like, it'll be close.
Of course it will. It's a toss up, but I
think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure
feels like it because they were running a terrible campaign
and like they didn't have any field operations, and like

(03:30):
the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was
going to win. So for Trump to win and then
start doing all of these things that were just supposed
to be fictional plot points, Oh they were references. Yeah,
Like now I'm just like Jesus Christ, this this is terrible.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Well, that's what's so so interesting is because yeah, so
much of so much of the initial like as you
imagine it, the opening stages of like the Martian Revolution
in your series are based on like a guy who
is a quote unquote like partly like an auto dite act, right,
like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas

(04:08):
are good because they're his ideas, and yet he can
kind of jump into any field of human endeavor and
make things work better than the people who have been
studying and working in that field for their entire lives,
and he just starts changing everything based on his whims. Now,
you don't have him staying up until four in the
morning on ketamine benders and then tweeting out his ideas

(04:28):
for how to change the government. But I guess I'd say,
like that's the one the one thing that doesn't map
onto right now. And I think this is this almost
just goes inherently with the act of crafting fiction. Even
your bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our
current ones. Yeah, which I think is to your credit.
But like I've enjoyed the degree to which the decisions

(04:51):
that are being made that are kind of making this
Martian Revolution inevitable are the kind of decisions that you
make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles
where you were expected to just sort of be able
to run things, because like that's the that's the strata
that you come from, and it maps directly to like
what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys

(05:11):
who have spent the last few decades getting impossible amounts
of money and having that convinced them that they know
how to do everything, but it also maps back to
like Versailles.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
I find that compelling. Yeah, and you know the Timothy
Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom
the revolution is going to start. Yeah, after he comes
in and starts doing all this stuff, like the number one.
Of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like,
this is just a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right,
and which I would point out the first thing is like,

(05:41):
actually no, because I very specifically wrote it so he
was a good husband and father. Yes, it's it's obviously not.
It's obviously not Elan Musk because he loves his kids.
He's allowed to be in the same room as all
of them. Yeah yeah, and they like they get along
great and everything. Yeah, so obviously it's not. But honest
to God, like it wasn't meant to be just must
but it was meant to be those tech guys, right,

(06:03):
Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys
who come in and they're like, we're gonna we're gonna
move fast and break things right, and then what they
break is like one hundred and twenty years of like
labor law, and that's the only thing that is actually
being broken here, like this is what you know what
uber is, and all of those kinds of like all
of that stuff that came at us in the last
like ten or fifteen years. And they think that yes,

(06:25):
because they can code well, or because they have this
one ability to like you know, market something in an
effective way, that that means that they are brilliant and
can do everything and everywhere for everybody, and like we're
going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that.
But they have no idea what they're doing or what
they're talking about. And you run into these people on
Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good

(06:47):
in one area, yes, and then becoming sort of all
purpose general knowledge experts when it's like you don't have
any idea what you're talking about. And so the line
there's a line that's in there where it's like we're Werner.
The way that he thought is I'm smart, Therefore the
ideas I have must be smart. Yes, And that is
something that's not about Musk. That's about like just people

(07:09):
I run into on Twitter all the time. That's a
phenomena that's a generalizable phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
No, I mean, yeah, We talk about that constantly on
the show, like we just did that four parterre on
the Zizians that who come out of like the rationalist
Bay Area tech industry cult, which is both influential that
a lot of the people who wound up working at
DOZE and just to the general tech mindset, and it
is it's the human embodiment of that idea that like, well,
I know it a code, coding's difficult. That means I'm smart.

(07:38):
This must mean I know how to run the schools, right.
This must mean I know how to replace medicare, right, yep.
And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles
without ever actually like having to sit face to face
with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you
do a great job of showing how that cascades into
a calamity and in a way that feels very realistic,

(08:01):
even though we're talking about Mars and there's also like
gravity generators in the life.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and what you know, what
Werner does here is so much of what Dose basically
started doing. When they start going into these systems, they
start changing coach, they have no idea what are the
key things that are actually underpinning our society. The most

(08:26):
recent thing I saw that made me think of this
is like they're shutting down all the regional offices of
the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now
going to be run through Twitter, right. And one of
Timothy Werner's things is the centralization of all decision making
and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind,
it would be more efficient if the company just had

(08:46):
one brain and that was his brain, and every decision
is made by the one brain. And so he's got
all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions.
Except that is that's crazy. That is not actually how
you can run anything, and it just creates all this
like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in
I know, I definitely did that. Like the dreaded like
request pending screen that YE started getting. They would submit,

(09:07):
they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order, and
it would say request pending, and like request pending would
never go away, it would just that's what it would say.
And then you look at what they're doing now and
that they are trying to centralize everything that it's you know,
it's a generalized authoritarian power grab. But you know they are,
they are doing these things. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:29):
One of the things that it reminds me the most of,
like from the other revolutions is I immediately went, wait, this
is our Nicholas, where you know, you have less of
the reform package. We're like, yeah, like the way that
all of the power gets concentrated and centralized and there's
one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do it
because like no human could possibly have done it.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
But they're not.

Speaker 4 (09:49):
They're you know, because of just there they're sort of
affective power and the way that they think about micromagic
anything they're incapable of, like letting their subordinates do things.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Yeah. It also sc with the loves his kid's part. Yeah, well,
I mean that's the thing is like everything that's in
the show also is like basically something that comes from history, right, like,
and I am trying to do that and it is
it is something that you know, like Charles the First,
Louis sixteenth Zar Nicholas, these guys are all great family men.

(10:20):
Their kids love them and they love their kids, right.
Like one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is
because Louis's son died like on the eve of the
Estates General, and he was just not there because his
son had just died. That's a real thing that happened.
And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization
of power is a lot like what I was trying
to get at. There was actually, like the reforms that

(10:40):
went in for the European colonial powers after the Seven
Years War in the Anglo colonies and the Spanish colonies
and the French colonies, all of those governments sort of
undertook a reorganization of their colonial structures after the Seven
Years War. It kind of like reshuffled who had what territory,
and all of those moves were about sort of an
in increasing presence of the metropol in colonial life. And

(11:04):
this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution, because
there was going to be like two more customs officials
in Boston Harbor and so like we went into refolt
about this. Yeah, but this is also true of like
the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America. Is that kind of
like centralization of a community of colonies that had grown
very used to managing their own affairs, and so they're

(11:25):
coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours and
we here on Earth should be making these decisions for
you Martians, and the Martians were like, well, we've been
making these decisions for ourselves for like seventy years now.
That's where that stuff is coming from. And then history
is always the place that I can point to and
then I have to watch it also on the TV.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I've had that same experience of like, I'm
writing out kind of like this possible, you know, this
story about what a future conflict is civil conflict in
the US might look like, and I'm I'm just taking
from stuff that happened in the last like ten years
in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries,
and people are like, how, you know, how did you

(12:05):
like anticipate this, And my answer is like, I didn't.
This is just stuff that happens all the time, right,
because people don't learn the maactory as a rule, Like,
no one's ever learned a lesson from history. Is the
thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few
years as I continue to fail to learn lessons from history.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, we all do and no, but like one of
the things that was getting kicked around the other day
was like, had I came to this point where Werner
is going to start firing people? He's going to start
firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your
employment status is being rated, and he's firing just people
essentially randomly, like you are firing the head of this
department and now that department can't run anymore. But he's like,

(12:45):
it'll be more efficient. And when I was writing it,
it was originally supposed to be like a kind of
a more dramatic ten percent across the board layoff, And
as I got closer to actually trying to type that
up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't
actually feel believable to me, Like people are going to
really push back, and I mean this sincerely, like people

(13:05):
are going to push back that nobody would be so
stupid as to just across the board to a ten
percent layoff of something so critical, as you know, Mars
is to Earth, because in the story, Mars is absolutely
critical to how Earth is able to function with the
resource that they're able to get from there. And so
I changed it around and actually look to like the
sullen prescriptions from Roman history to kind of give it

(13:27):
a different take where really it was like you woke
up every day and there was like fifteen more names
on the list, one hundred more names on the list,
and there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool
about that without this like unbelievable, you know, ten percent
across the board cut And I wrote a paragraph in
there being like I know that people are going to
think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have
to understand that, like throughout history we have seen these things,

(13:49):
like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to
it all the time because that is something that happens,
and life as we know it is actually less. Like
if I wrote up what was happening right now, like
if I was just got like a window into an
alternate world and we're living in a different world where
Trump loss and I brought all this stuff back, there'd

(14:09):
be like this is implausible, Like this is crazy. They
would never be allowed to get away with that. They
would never be allowed to do that. They would never
be so stupid as to blow up the global economy
with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anyone.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Wouldn't want the dollar is their reserve currency.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, yeah, none of nothing that is happening right now
is plausible in the in a storytelling in a fictional
storytelling setting. Yeah, yeah, you know this.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
This this also gets something that I've been saying on
this show that I want I want to get your
take on, which is, like, you know, one of the
things that you you wrote about in your sort of
like I guess like recap series of your experience going
through the revolutions was about like how how much of
the stuff is driven by like the great idiots of
history and my god, Elon Muskins Trump looked to me
like two of the gritty dyscy history and that doesn't

(14:55):
like guarantee that it'll happen, but like.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions is
a very simple thing, which is just saying that it's
revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and
they are intolerably oppressing their people, like people have been
intolerably oppressed for a long time. And like Trotsky's got

(15:20):
this quote that is, if peasant discontentment was the cause
of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every
single day because the peasants are always discontented. Right, So
what it takes to really have a revolution is for
somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to
start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get
out of hand and on top of that, really piss

(15:41):
off the other elites around them, because it's the mismanagement
of the state that allows the elites that are kind
of necessary for a full blown revolution, Like you need
their resources, and you need their money, and you need
them being close to a position of power to be
able to pop whoever's in there at the time. And
you've got to be pretty in competent to like wreck

(16:01):
an elite consensus, right, Like that's that is in and
of itself catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. Yeah,
and so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite
a workout lately.

Speaker 4 (16:15):
That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you
about in terms of like you see this in terms
of Mabel Door, right, where Mabel Door is this kind
of example of like the sort of local I said,
local colonial elite to some extent.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Yeah, I almost saw her as like, yeah, a lot
of these kind of American revolutionary figures right where you
have this person who holds a fairly high position in
the colonial state as a result of you know, their
birth and the family they come into, but also is
identifies more as a member of that state, of the
colony than of the colonizing state.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (16:48):
Yeah, And I think this is something this is a
part of the revolutionary process that I think is really
really badly understood on the left in terms of, in
a lot of ways, the necessity of parts of this
elite flipping and like the other the example I think
most people kind of are more familiar with is fleepygalite
like the Duke de orlone like funding a bunch of
these sort of revolutionary groups that eventually kind of like

(17:11):
get out of his control. But can you talk a
bit more about sort of the role of these sort
of like elite defections and how they end up sort
of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, I mean it's a mix of things, and I
mean you got it. Like Mabel Door is meant to
be sort of the colonial elite, and she's also meant
to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of
different revolutionary settings, and she is doing that like and
when she is like when I talk about her, like
funding the Society of Martians and like funding all these
like philanthropic you know, enterprises to help Martians. Like that's

(17:43):
a lot of philip a galatae like straight up, Like
that's what the Duke Doorleon was doing in you know,
seventeen eighty six, eighty seven, and eighty nine. And so
that's the role that she's playing. But you know, if
the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any
kind of like peasant or worker uprising to actually get

(18:03):
traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like peasant insurrections
have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support.
They have often accomplished great things. But when you think
about the great revolutions in history, there really have always
been people in the inner corridors of power who are
ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in

(18:26):
that moment. And you know, you can advance all the
way to the Russian Revolution, and this is you know,
this is the prototypical like the workers have risen up
and the army is mutinying, and it is the people
who overthrow this are and what that story misses is
all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself,
who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and

(18:49):
Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know
what to do anymore. But like he's, yeah, I guess
he's got to go, you know, Like we can't get
him to see reason, we can't get him to change course,
we can't get him to do anything. Like the situation
is completely out of hand and without those people leaning
on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say like,

(19:09):
we're not going to back you up. If you try
to bring the hammer down on all these people, then
that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yes, And I love that you bring that up because
it gets to the failure to see that. And this
is especially common with people who kind of idolize the
nineteen seventeen revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that.
I mean, in every revolution, you have people who are
fans of that revolution or who see it as a
model for what they want to do, and also ignore
the realities on the ground that made it possible. I

(19:39):
think one of my favorite examples is the quote that
like you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Well, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
In those pictures of the nineteen seventeen revolution, I see
a lot of mosins that used to be property of
the czar, right, Like it happens all the time, And
I think that we always need to be cautious of
like seeing just what we want to see revolutionary history
as opposed to seeing what was there.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
And the thing is is Lenin understood this right like
Lenin understood what the game was and he understood what
was going on. And you don't have to, like, if
you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in
nineteen seventeen, you don't have to say, oh, well, the
elites were necessary for this first revolution and we need
you know, we need a break inside the ruling class.

(20:25):
We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean
you have to say and what those people want out
of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what
we're going to accept, right you know, obviously, like the
cousins of the of Zar Nicholas and the people who
are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him
out of there just so they could run the empire
a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly
the empire was being run. They didn't want a social revolution,

(20:47):
but if you're going to take down that whole system,
creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary.
But you don't have to support the ultimate aims of
those people. It's just it's an ingredient. And this is
and you see this in the course of revolutions, and
you see this in nineteen seventeen, You see this seventeen
eighty nine, and then seventeen ninety two, where there is

(21:09):
that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign,
and then there is a second wave that overthrows the
people who did it first. And so you know, you
can hold out hope for you know, getting the job
done without thinking that elites do play some role in all.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Of that, right, Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (21:41):
One of the things that I wanted to ask you
about sort of shifting gears a little bit, was about
how you were thinking about the deportations when you were
writing it, and how you were thinking about the way
that kind of this like generalized antideportation organizing like turns
into that, and the sort of mutual aid networks that
the Society Martians are doing like directly turns into this thing.

(22:02):
And that's just something that I don't know, it feels
very prescients in ways, even though it was written out
before a lot of this stuff happens.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, the deportation stuff is just because of my own
personal political commitments over the course of my adult life, right,
which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system
in this country, you know, and and you know, we
they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders,

(22:31):
Like we do not have open borders. It is actually
really really hard to like navigate your way properly through
the American immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken.
And we did all of this, you know, we did
the worst of the horrors with Trump, right, Like obviously
that is on my mind with you know, with family
separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and

(22:53):
rounding people up, like all of this stuff which happened
under Trump, Yes, but it also happened under Obama for
eight years, and it happened for another four years under Biden.
It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it
because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there
is a through line of cruelty inside of this system
towards immigrants, So that issue of deportation and like rounding

(23:17):
people up and evicting them, especially those who have lived
in this place their entire life. Like that's one of
the points that I make, Like the people who are
being fired are like born and raised on Mars. Like
one of the main characters, Alexandra Clare, she is a
fourth generation Martian and she just gets caught up in
these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through.

(23:38):
And now the only choice that she has is to
either hide or get deported to Saturn where and nobody's
ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what
happens on Saturn, because all they know is that nobody
ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing
like taking people who have born and raised in America.
This is the only place that they have ever known,
right even if they came here when they were like one,

(23:59):
like okay, born here, but like they here since they
were one, and then you're like, okay, we're going to
send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They
don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak
Spanish half the time, you know, And doing this to
people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do to people.
And so yeah, like so when I was thinking to myself, Okay,

(24:19):
I'm all right, this like fictional revolution and it's going
to be on Mars. What are some of the things
that I want to do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah,
some of this does is like a little bit of
like this is these are Mike's political interests and the
deportation issue, and trying to highlight the horror of the
deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people

(24:40):
and help those people and bring those people food. Like
the bravest people going are the ones who like go
out and leave you know, water jugs out in the
middle of the desert so people don't die, right, And
the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and
then break those knowing that people are going to knowing
that people are going to like die of dehydration and
die of starva, but just not care because they don't

(25:02):
care about those people.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
That's one of the sickest things to me, Like, it's
just that there's information coming out now that there's that
horrible video of that ICE agent smashing the window of
that woman's car to deport her, and then the informations
come out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy.
And you know what's really happened if you look at it,
is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the

(25:25):
eindset Skrupa, right, like, instead of having a centralized state
having to raise these organizations that are going to be
carrying out this kind of violence. Like it's it's largely
become something that vigilantes have gotten into on their own
as part of like just their's special interest in hurting
people at scale. And it's it's such a uniquely it's

(25:47):
so uniquely tied to like this American individualism. It's such
a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here
that that's happening, Like that wouldn't have happened, not that
Germany is you know that German culture in the thirties
was better, but it wouldn't have happened because it was
a different kind of culture.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, for sure, and then it's really important to remember
that this is not just a Trump problem, Like what
he's doing right now is like, of course, like we
are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing.
And even you know, just this morning, we've got an
American citizen who has been held and they are not
being released despite the passport and the Social Security card

(26:26):
being shown to the judge, and the judge is like,
I don't I can't actually release this person. Yeah, that's
sort of where we're at now. But this has been
an ongoing thing for twenty years, across both parties and
both administrations, and nothing really has like sort of churned
my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of

(26:46):
the Democrats and people doing like sort of post mortems
on the election and being like, well, you know, we
really should be tougher on the border, and we really
should sort of like buy into this framing that there
is this like invasion and we just need to do
border enforcement better. Like and they're then even moving and
positioning themselves to a place where it's like Trump's not

(27:07):
even doing a good job protecting the border, and like
there was somebody I forget even who it was, but
somebody one of them senators like tweeted, you know, this
time last year, Biden had deported this many people and
Trump isn't even deporting that many people. And he was
like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't
following through on his promises or something was like do
you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah? Yeah,

(27:28):
it really is. And I can't you know, stomach the
fact that Democrats are are going to take away from
all this that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants
and that that we need to lean into that. Yes,
And then you see the polls before all the tariffs
stuff and all this stuff is going on, and he
Trump is still sitting at like fifty percent approval, and
it's like, I don't maybe they're right, Maybe the American

(27:50):
people really do just love this.

Speaker 4 (27:52):
So I mean, I think the other the other side
of that though, and this is, you know, part of
the reason I brought up specifically like the resistance to
it was it like the other aspect of the kind
of individualism of American culture was that it also meant
that there, you know, a bunch of people went out
to the desert. Like our coworker James, spent a lot
of time during the Biden administration like at these I
mean just like the open air prisons they built in
the middle of the fucking desert, like on the border,

(28:14):
and you know, and like like one of the stories
that he covered extensively was that like probably most of
these people would have died if it wasn't for like
literally border volunteers like passing food and water to the bars.
And that's something that I was thinking about a lot,
looking at the mutual aid networks and looking at the
kind of mutual aid networks that trans people are building
up right now, and like, I mean, I okay, like

(28:34):
there's I mean, there's always been a million mutual aid
networks because it's just impossible to survive if you're trans
without like getting stuff from other trans people.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
We're not supposed to do anything alone, man, We're not
supposed to do anything at Yeah. Well right, yeah, that's nothing.
We're not supposed to be doing anything alone.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah. And that's honestly, the most optimistic thing about your
podcast is that, like Martian society develops this very communal
because it's we're living in like an art artificial habitat,
and if shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once.
You have to have this more collaborative, collective attitude towards
safety and security that is just so completely absent from

(29:11):
American culture. It's the thing that continually sends me into
the darkest spirals is because there's there's no fixing the
fundamental underlying problems without fixing that.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, and like on Mars, you know that that sort
of communal stuff is like they're also living in close quarters,
so you can't really be somebody who needs to be alone, right,
That's the thing. And then also like in terms of
like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have
to do this stuff together. And like there's there's a
like when I was doing like cultural like there's cultural

(29:43):
background like like works and and you know, like music
that was going on that the Martians were creating. And
I can't quite get into this, but there is a
song that I've got like half written called the Ballad
of Lonely Joe, which is like a it's like a
Martian folk song about lonely Joe who went off and
tried to like do it himself, but and then he
never comes back and now lonely Joe like wanders the
red sands of Mars because like he tried to go

(30:05):
out and not do it like with the group and
not do it with the community, because you can't survive
alone on Mars. Yeah, but to your other point, Like,
one of the things that I definitely wrote into the
show is that everybody on Mars has a skin chip
in their hand, and the skinship in their hand is
what opens door. It like literally opens doors, and it
gives them access to the Commissary, and it gives them

(30:27):
access to restaurants, it gives them access to food and employment.
Like everything goes through that skinship. And when the people
get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned
off effectively, and it doesn't it doesn't open doors anymore.
They can't get food anymore. They are living inside of
a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And

(30:48):
so it took other Martians around them, and so there's
a thing in the show called the no Doors movement,
which is Martians jamming open doors so that the people
who have they were called the annulled because their contracts
were annulled. Yeah, but so so that the annulled could
get from here to there without needing their skin chip. Yeah,
those are the kinds of things that you know are

(31:09):
are necessary, and those are the kinds of things that
are going to protect people. And I hope that those
things are going on out there, and I hope that
none of us publicly state right now what we may
or may not be doing that front. Yeah, let's just
go ahead and keep that words at.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on
social media or in your podcast thing.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Yeah, something you touched on there, I think is interesting
about about the way that I being forced to live
together like creates this consciousness. It reminds me a lot
of I was a student. I was an anthropology student,
and one of the things that we read was this
the sort of classic of I guess, I guess you'd
call it like structurals, Marxists, like anthropology from the eighties.

(31:54):
It's this book called Wet the Minds and the Minds
Eat Us, which is about these indigenous bolivion Tins. And
one of the things that I always struck me about
that was, you know, like because they're all they're all
literally like sleeping next to each other, like in these rooms,
you can literally hear like the stomach of like the
child next to you, like rumbling at night because I
don't have enough food, and that like turns them into

(32:17):
like one of the most militant sort of like working class.
I mean, for like a hundred years they are like
like they're syndicalists and then their communists and like they're
they're one of those Miltont things. And I, I don't know,
it's it's interesting to me that that this is like
this aspect of the society that that you've you know,
you've sort of drawn out of of these historical revolutions
where a key element of it again is is this

(32:39):
sort of collectivity. And also there's this like if you
look at like the trajectory of like the modern American
state and like the modern just the modern development of capitalism,
it's been specifically trying to make that stuff not happen
by like kicking people into suburbs and like trying to
physically alienate people. And I was, I don't know, I
was wonder how much you were sort of thinking about
that kind of stuff when you were like writing the

(33:01):
cultural aspects of this.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Sure, No, that's that stuff is all in my mind,
and like I said, like, we're not meant to do
anything alone, Like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't
go anywhere in history, like all the way back to
the dawn of the species, you do not find individual
humans like living by themselves. We have always done this
as a group. This has always been a group project.

(33:24):
And like when you go back, because this is something
that comes out of sort of like I study a
lot of like political theory in school and those state
of nature sort of works, you know, these thought experiments
that like Thomas Paine would do or Rousseau would do,
and you know it's like, how did we come together?
Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like
an individual human wandering through the forest and like they
encounter another one, so they come together for defense and

(33:45):
they come together, you know, to share food and do
some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no
such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing.
Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what
human society is, like, whether it's defense or the division
of labor, begins with the fact that we are already
a group. There is a mother, there is a child,
there is a father, there, there are aunts and uncles

(34:08):
and others, like whatever the group is there, we are
always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and
hyper adamization of our society is something that is trying
to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what
it means to be human. This is something that I
thought about a lot too, because when I started having kids,

(34:29):
and you know, I have two kids, and the model
for like having a family at this point is like
you have a mother, a father or whatever, you have kids,
but the point being that they are a unit that
is unto itself, and they live in their own house,
and they have to supply their own food, and they
are in charge of getting their own money, and everything
that happens is just up to that little nuclear family.

(34:52):
And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever
done it before. Now. There's always been a broad network,
a broad fad family friend network that has been a
part of you know, raising our kids and having our families.
And you know, if something bad happens, we don't just say,
oh wow, bad luck for them. You know, you support
that person. Yeah, And that is something that we've really

(35:13):
gotten away from as a society.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Obviously, and it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully, right,
like the atomization isn't isn't just a byproduct of incentives,
right like it is a it is a directed move.
I mean, you just got to look back to some
of the shit Thatcher was saying. Right, there's no such
thing as a society. There are men and women, and
there are families. Right, this is a directed change. And

(35:37):
I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial since I'm
saying this a a This is what a lot of people,
a lot of the worst people in our society believe
because it's convenient for them, and they have pushed to
make that belief more common and done so by funding
think tanks and funding media organizations.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
In part right, I was actually.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
About to quote literally that exact thing. But the interesting
part to me about that Thatcher line is that everyone,
almost everyone who quotes that line only quotes the part
about their are only individuals and then leaves out the
part about the family, yes, which which I think is
a really important connection to to what you were saying,
where it's like their vision of the family is also
still fundamentally this isolated group because yes, they still need

(36:17):
some kind of collective because again, you literally you can't
just like leave it, leave a baby like out in
the woods.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
It just dies.

Speaker 5 (36:24):
Right.

Speaker 4 (36:25):
But like they had, they had to like create this
version to to be the like the political base of
their thing. They had to create this, this one collective
that would be cut off from everything else that had
normally made it a collective.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
You know people think these days that that atomized nuclear
family is like the law of nature, right, that this
is like this is the way it's always been, and
like that's not true. It's just not true. There's a
great line I don't have it right in front of
me at the moment, but in uh in Tokeville's oustieon
regime in the French Revolution, which is really dynamite but

(37:00):
everybody should read. At the end of it, he lays
it out. He's writing this in like the eighteen forties
and eighteen fifties, and he straight up says that like
what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean,
he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on
the left or anything, but he's he's watching as the
atomization of families and individuals is happening, and He's like,

(37:23):
and that's how that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives
when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is
in competition with everybody else. Because that's the other key
part of it is your family is now pitted against
every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs,
like getting that, getting this other thing. Like we're all

(37:44):
scrambling out there in a competition to get a little
bit more, a little bit better, or just you know,
have enough. Like I feel this every time I have
to sign the kids up for like summer camp, you know,
like I'm at war with every other family in the
neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into
this camp and some people aren't gonna make it and
other people will, and you got to be there, and
you gotta have strategies about when to log onto the thing,

(38:04):
like because they because they they're pitting us against each
other like all the time, in all those little subtle ways.

Speaker 6 (38:10):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
I think that's what's optimistic kind of about the Martian
Revolution is like, you know, on the one hand, there
is this kind of like collective society, but on the
other hand, you know, this is a this is a
society entirely ruled by corporations, right and it is it
is literally every single aspect of it is specifically designed
to get to do this pitting each other like being
people against each other. And yet anyways, somehow they you know,

(38:45):
even even if it is by accident, which is to
be fair, how a lot of revolutions start, they they
do it.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
I think the key thing is here is that we
see throughout time like really extreme societies that try to
mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently
changing them. And what happens in the past, at least
to every one of those societies, is that the society
dies and people go on being people, right.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Mm hmm, yeah, Yeah, there's no there's no year zero,
there's no creat new There's there's no there's no new
Man right now, that's not ever going to happen. That's
actually I mean, just I wouldn't even have thought that.
I'm going to tie this back again to Tokefield, which
the reason I would recommend Onnian regime is because that
is a book about how much of the revolution was

(39:33):
a continuation of what was going on before it and
not actually caused by the revolutionary break And even if
you believe in the revolution and believe it was this,
I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these
great things, but there was no year zero thing that happened.
A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum.
And you know, like I don't want to get in

(39:54):
a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a
thing that exists or doesn't exist, like like as an
as an abs tract thing, because because I'm not sure
that it's true, but there sure are a lot of
things that keep popping up, right, Like we're interested in sex,
and we have to eat food, and we live in shelters,
and we make music, and there do there does seem

(40:14):
to be some very like human qualities that exist across
all time and across all space. And if you just
say to yourself, like, well, like I mean, this is
one of the things. I'm very sympathetic to anarchists, but
like there's a point with anarchism, like especially the early stuff,
where their idea was that if you smash the state,
and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed
to flourish in their natural goodness. And communalism, which is,

(40:38):
you know a little bit what we are moving towards
right now. But I'm not sure even that exists, because
if you if you crash the state out, it's not
the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is
there is stuff inside of human nature that's that we
created the state to begin with. So the whole, the
whole thing is like a very it's a balancing act
that has gone way too far in So yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
And I think that's something I always I always try
to keep in mind, Like it's not that societies can't
alter or improve aspects of like how things are right
by changing the incentives, but by altering like the way
things work, you can reduce the prevalence of certain problems.
You can make things better in some ways. But there's

(41:21):
certain stuff that you're just never going to Like when
I look at when I look at what the white
supremacists want to do, right, well, you're never going to
get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
You simply can't.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
It's never worked and it never will right like that,
that's an impossible dream. So I can just say, like
that's a thing, no matter what how tightly you grab
a hold of the reins of state, and how many
weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the long
term of doing this because it's just not something we
can do. You can't stop people from mingling.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
This is actually one of my points about immigration and migration, yeah,
is that no matter how tightly you try to control it,
no matter you could build every all you want, you
can make it as hard as you want, people are
still going to move here. People are still going to
move away from here. People are still going to go
from here to there and from there to here. And
that is something that is going to happen no matter what,

(42:12):
and especially if we're going into the twenty first century
with all of its various climate disasters that are you know,
facing us really and yeah, is going to make such Yeah,
it's gonna it's gonna it's already making some places less
habitable and other places will be more habitable. And what's
going to happen is that people who are living in
less habitable areas are going to want to go to
where there are areas that are still habitable. And so

(42:32):
there there is there's going to be movements of people.
And the question before us in the twenty first century
is not you know, can we keep people in the
places that they are now and you know, like sort
of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states
and that will actually stop those migrations from happening. Or
do we open ourselves up to the idea that this

(42:54):
is going to happen and simply make it more humane
and more more rational. That's the question. It's not whether
the migrations will happen or not. It's simply how cruel
they will be when they happen. And right now we
are choosing maximum cruelty.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yep, sucks, Yeah, it does. Like that's that's so much
of our present society is like, well, yeah, this is
the cruelest way I can imagine this happening, you know,
like and we are we are staring down the barrel
of the worst case scenario, right like that. That's the
thing everyone's had to make peace with. You know, even

(43:29):
once Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well,
I guess we'll see and we've seen, right, and we
do just kind of have to guide off that without
pretending it's otherwise. Like the That's one of the few
things that does give me hope is that the people
who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting
increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see Gavin Newsan still hasn't

(43:51):
been sort of choked off of access to the public,
but you know, the statements he's been making recently about
Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't. I
can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic
Party if this is just looking at where popular discourse
is right now.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Right, and there's a lot of them who would like
it to be the future of the Democratic Party because
they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about
the lives of these people who are living on this earth,
who are living, breathing human beings who are just someplace
else and living in a world where like, yeah, the
United States and Europe, we suck up the world's wealth

(44:34):
and resources, like that's where the imperial center of the globe,
and people are like, oh they And even when people
say like, well, why do people come here, and you know,
there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion which
is like, well, they come here because they want their
because they want freedom and freedom is what America offers,
and like the American dream and all that stuff, like
the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's

(44:56):
because this is where you can come and get the
world's money. Yeah, this is where it all is. It's
sitting in my pocket, it's sitting in your pocket. Right,
we are the ones who have all of the world's money,
and so that is why they are coming here. Yep.
So you just have to like fit that in your brain.
And what is happening is is this this constant division

(45:17):
between like Americans being more important than anybody else, And
I understand why that exists politically, and even these questions
are like citizens versus non citizens. Like one of the
things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was
like he had it was a throwaway line, It wasn't
even like a point he was making, but he referred

(45:37):
to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me
because I grew up very liberal, Like I come from
like the liberal suburbs of Seattle, and I had very
liberal notions and citizenship, in sort of the liberal imagination
is the highest thing that you can be, be a
citizen of a polity with rights, there's a constitution, you
get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship

(45:58):
are these words that had great, profound meaning and really
kind of like knock me sideways to have and be
like mere citizenship. Right, You've been reduced to simply a
part of a polity, and your humanity has been taken
away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a
human being. You're being recognized as a citizen. And if
you're not a citizen, then you just don't count at all.

(46:20):
And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only
do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part
of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a
human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other,
to non citizens and the idea like and you just
see this very casually, like right now, like all over
the place. It's just like they're not citizens, so they

(46:42):
don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so we can
just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons and it's
fine because they're not citizens and therefore they don't have rights.
It's like what about you know, just being a person
thinking about other people. And one of the greatest, one
of my very favorite. I know I'm steamroll in here.
I'll let you get a word in edgeways here in
a second. But the I forget what the court case was,

(47:06):
but there was a court case out of Texas, you know,
like back in like the sixties, when they decided that
the Texas school districts had to open the schools to
undocumented children. And they said that because it says in
the Fourteenth Amendment persons, it doesn't say citizens. And they
were arresting a lot of this on the notion that

(47:27):
like it's it says person has these rights, not citizen
has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate,
hate hate, this is why they're going to try to
undo the fourteenth Amendment. But to have the Supreme Court
at one point in the past be like, no, you
have to do this because you owe an obligation to
them as a person, not just as a citizen, that's
like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme Court

(47:48):
today making that same decision. But like, that's that's the
kernel of something really good I think for the future
of humanity. Rather than like clinging to this like citizen
or non citizen thing.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
I guess kind of for me, the most important belief
I ever came to was the understanding that, like, I
don't care about citizenship and I don't care about who
is supposed to be in a specific place, right, I
think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that, like,
your rights as a person are dependent on where you

(48:21):
were born. Yeah, that's just the thing I'll never believe.
And it's the fight we've lost the worst as the
left or you know, I should even say getting beyond
left and right, because I really think those are not
the most useful ways to look at things.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
It's like human beings.

Speaker 1 (48:35):
The fact that that battle, the battle to just see
people as humans with inherent value as humans, regardless on
their place of birth. The fact that that has been
botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity of the
twenty first century. Although there's a few contenders, don't get
me wrong.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
Yeah, there's a lot well, and it's so it's so
deeply ingrained. Something I'm going to talk about more like
different place. But like, one of the things that's been
driving me the most up the walls is like, so
I've had to read like every single piece of terrorists covered.
Tariff coverage has been written by like fucking all these analysts,
all of these media people, like, and every single one
of them only fucking talks about its impact on Americans, right, yep.

(49:16):
And if you look at the like the Liberation Day
like turf tariff package, right, the single country that is
the most fu from this is Sri Lanka yep. And
if those tariffs go back into effect in like in
like fifty days whatever, like eighty days, like, the entire
country of Shri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed, They're completely fucked.
And all of these countries, you know, all these countries
need US dollars in order to like literally to buy

(49:37):
fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh wait, hold on, you
can't do experts of the US and like the entire
this is something that affects literally the entire world.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (49:44):
You can look at the terariff rates on every single
country like in the world, and everyone writing about it
only writes about its effect upon the US because there's
this just like like there's this this this pure sort
of Americ centrism thing where like people and I see
this on the left too, wherechs like they fundamentally don't
see anyone who's not in the US as human, and

(50:05):
the people in the US who who are seen as
like people who seems like humans, who you know, like
think and feel and like act and like hurt in
the same way. So we do, like that's only a
thing that happens if you're a very specific kind of
American citizen. And if you're not, or God help you, you
were born in like most of the like the rest

(50:25):
of the world, which is again it hitteous super majority
of everyone on Earth. You just you don't matter, and.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yep, they don't, yeah, not in all this. And like
I mean to bring it back to the Martian Revolution,
like that one of the things that is happening right now.
Like in the series, I'm you know, it's going to
be thirty episodes long, and I'm writing episode twenty three
right now. But like we've gone through the revolution, there's
been I don't want to give away too many spoilers,
but obviously like they win, you know at certain points,

(50:56):
otherwise it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And they're
is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries
about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and
this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have
just declared they're no longer a part of a corporation.
They're going to be this thing called the Republic of Mars.
And there's a guy who is passionately committed to Mars

(51:19):
and to the Martian people, and he hates earthlings and
he doesn't trust earthlings. And there's no reason for him
to trust earthlings. They have tried to screw them over
a bunch of times and it cause nothing but pain.
And so, but there are a bunch of earth born
Earthlings on Mars, and he wants to exclude them from
the Republic of Mars. And if you're born on Mars,
then you should get to participate. And if you're not,
then you shouldn't have rights, you shouldn't be a part

(51:40):
of this project. And I would love to just I
would love to deport you. That's what he's going to
be arguing. And then there is another side that has
a more universalist take on this, and my character Alexandra Clair,
who is like a d class. She comes out of
the warrens. She can just that's basically like the working class.

Speaker 7 (51:59):
You know.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
She's like when Earthlings come here, Yeah, I don't like
it when they bungle things because they're new and they
don't know what they're doing. Like I'm as annoyed by
the new guy as anybody, but like they've suffered right
alongside me, like suffering the same conditions. Like the fact
that they were born on Earth doesn't mean that they're
not suffering right now, that their contracts weren't annulled, that
they are not suffering from the new protocols. Like and

(52:22):
you know when during these revolutions, did they hold neutron
guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars? Yeah?
They did, And so probably we should say that it's
not Martian good, Earthling bad. But like, let's just open
it up to everybody and we will sort out, like
you know, who's you know, who's in on this and
who's who's actually trying to undermine us, because you know

(52:42):
there is there are loyalist fifth columnists that they are
gonna have to deal with.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
Yeah, well, I think we're encroaching on an hour here,
so we're I think we need to probably uh call
this for the day. But Mike, I really appreciate your time.
You've been so generous, and I can't wait to see
where you end. I know that you're also can't wait
to see where you land on all of.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
This, right, right, right, I've got all the plot points,
you know, I know where it's going, but just getting
there is. Yeah. It's weird because sometimes when you write fiction,
characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that, and
now I've got to deal with that, and like, what
do you? Well, she wouldn't do that in this moment,
So I guess I was going to have her do it,
but I just can't believe that she would ever do

(53:24):
that in that situation. So I guess she can't do it,
and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my
weekly struggle these days.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yeah, Yeah, that's that's the struggle of releasing fiction before
you're entirely done with it.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Yeah, well, I write it. I mean I wake up,
I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece
of paper and have to have that week's episode done
by Sunday night, and so I'm writing these in real time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an
exquisite hell I'm enjoying listening to it. I know everyone
else's as well.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
I love it all right, that's the episode everybody, Thank
you fight.

Speaker 8 (54:16):
What's so, y'all's your favorite cousin? I just came over
you feel me? Y'all don't have no cousins that just
kind of pop up, just be at the house like
a ninety sitcom where you don't knock on the door,
you just be walking in. That wasn't my life, mainly
because most of the cousins on my mother's side lived
on the other side of the country, and then my

(54:36):
cousin's on my father's side, since we lived in gang
infested areas, you didn't.

Speaker 6 (54:41):
Just pop up.

Speaker 8 (54:43):
That was just not the safest thing to do. But
I'm doing that at youall house. And you know what
happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now, a
small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot of
percentages y'all grew up poor, which means that you got
whooping just like we did. So you know, usually when
your cousin comes over, somebody's getting We all somebody getting

(55:05):
in trouble, and it's usually you because you're supposed.

Speaker 6 (55:08):
To know better. I never got more spankings.

Speaker 8 (55:13):
Than when my cousins came over because we would just
get into stuff. And then since I'm the one that
lived there and I was cutting up in front of company,
I ended up getting into most trouble. Anyway, this isn't
where I'm working out trauma, although it is called it
can happen here podcasts, so I feel like we all
collectively working out trauma of being Americans. And lastly, on

(55:34):
the rambling preamble, I got a dog. Now, well, my
daughter got a dog. And to all the parents that listen,
you know when your child gets a pet, who's pet
that actually is? So I find myself doing a lot
more chores than I signed up for. But it's a pug,
and it keeps trying to eat the cat's food. Therefore

(55:57):
it's got liquid doodoo and I'm not a fan of that.
And since I get to work in my pajamas because
I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems
to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doodoo.
But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog,
eat your own food. Anyway, I'm here to talk about

(56:19):
something that you can do nothing about.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
All right, y'all?

Speaker 8 (56:23):
Ready, here we go, a brother like me who bleeds
Los Angeles. You cut me open and Pacific Ocean salt
water comes out. You poke my lungs, and small pours
out of me. I could work for the Tourist Department
of Los Angeles. I love this city at an unhealthy level.

(56:45):
There are things about this place that is absolute trash.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot wrong with
this city. With this place, the ground shakes up under us.
We've been such a horrible steward as to how to
take care of this land. I'm gonna include myself, even

(57:07):
though I am not the invasive colonizer. But there are
really only nine native trees to California, two of which
are not the palm tree or the eucalyptus. The plants
that are here naturally are drought resistant and fire resistant.

Speaker 6 (57:27):
They don't burn that easy.

Speaker 8 (57:28):
The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores
and the palm trees.

Speaker 6 (57:32):
And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit.

Speaker 8 (57:36):
A bit of a dry spell recently and had quite
the disaster. Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into
what we're gonna talk about right now, which you should
probably know if you have already read the show title
when you clicked play. But I'm gonna back that thing
up into it. California catches fire every year in some location. Now,

(58:01):
my mother, you know, Mama prop she worked thirty years
for the La County Fire Department, you know, in the
city of West Covina.

Speaker 6 (58:10):
Because I'm at six two.

Speaker 8 (58:11):
Sixer and I have vivid memories of the different firemen,
fire chiefs. I think I talked about this in the
La on Fire episode. Block is literally hot on the
Hood politics show, which hopefully you guys are supporting and
listening to also.

Speaker 6 (58:29):
But even my boy Chris.

Speaker 8 (58:31):
Who's you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires
out here. Everybody knew that one day this day would
come and that, let's just say, all of the bureaucratic
failures had not happened. If the water was as full
as possible, the fire hydrants were fined, if everything was

(58:53):
the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going
to happen.

Speaker 6 (58:58):
This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm.

Speaker 8 (59:02):
We were had a specific type of drought, lack of rain,
the Santa Ana winds and then a fire sparking, and
that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It
was every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day
it's gonna happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah,
like you know, we could find ourselves a time machine

(59:25):
and practice the indigenous practices.

Speaker 6 (59:28):
Oh.

Speaker 8 (59:28):
Actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area
Alta Dina that was actually given back to the Tongva
tribe many years back. There was a first like actual
land back given back to the tribe and they started
taking care of the land the way that their elders
and ancestors did.

Speaker 6 (59:46):
And guess what, that area didn't burn anyway in the.

Speaker 8 (59:49):
Midst of this disaster that we were having a desperate,
desperate man who I completely understand is desperation. On Tuesday
night on January seventh, while the fires were just rumbling
through the Palisades, a man named Keith Wasserman, who's the

(01:00:12):
co founder of a real estate investment firm, desperately took
to Twitter and said, does anyone have access to private
firefighters to protect our home? Need to act fast here
all neighbors houses burning will pay any amount. There was
another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in a multiverse situation,

(01:00:36):
is our mayor, a billionaire developer who owns the Grove
on the West Side. Just that if you ever watched TMZ,
whenever somebody's walking out of a place, it's probably at
the grove and was a you know, real estate magnate. Anyway,

(01:00:57):
there are videos of him driving through an area that
he had with his private security and private firefighters where
it's smoke billowing all around the place, but his situation
was fine. Why because he had private firefighters. They shaved
his shopping center, but he tried to unsuccessfully save nearby
homes as well, which reminded everybody about the time that

(01:01:19):
Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being saved by
fired fighters.

Speaker 6 (01:01:25):
And which made people be like, wait a minute, you
can buy fire department, man, What the hell is this?
What type of shit?

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Man?

Speaker 6 (01:01:37):
What we over here arguing over firefightrants.

Speaker 8 (01:01:41):
And tanks running low and somebody just paid them?

Speaker 6 (01:01:45):
Where they get the water from?

Speaker 8 (01:01:48):
How the hell you can just oh my god, what
the hell water are you using, nigga, that's not your water?
And what you gonna do? Are you gonna help out
the neighbors. Okay, So if I buy a fire department,
fire apartment show up from my house, but the neighbor's
house is burned, you just gonna lead a neighbor's house.

(01:02:09):
You gonna tell them to call the city's fire department.
What the hell is happening? How does this shit work?
Is there any other way rich people can be evil?
What is happening right now? Which is basically what happened
and how most of the regulars felt. So this episode
is not just about private fire departments, because that would

(01:02:33):
not be a very interesting full episode. It's about the
question that private fire departments bring up, which is like nigga,
whose water is that?

Speaker 6 (01:02:43):
Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water
private too?

Speaker 8 (01:02:47):
And if the water is private too, what else of
my utilities are private?

Speaker 6 (01:02:52):
And this is what I mean by there is nothing
you can do about it?

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Now.

Speaker 8 (01:02:55):
If there is any of you that are built like
Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't got to worry
about this. Maybe you could dig your own well and
find the groundwater. However, there are things called water land rights,
which I will talk about into this. So even if

(01:03:16):
you move off the grid to live on a mountain.
You find somewhere in the backwoods, you know, four acres
away from Magpie wherever the hell Magpie live, and you
dig to find some water. Somebody owned that water. It
already happened here, y'all. Let's go all right, this may
or may not be a shock to y'all. I know
in the first the block is literally hot episode I

(01:03:39):
did way way, way way back when I first joined
Wellkools on media first launch, when I first joined the team,
my first episodes, it was one of those things where
it's like the thought has probably never crossed your mind,
and and some of it's like sitting I'm talking to
y'all who pay bills. Some of this stuff is sitting
right up under your nose, Like Southern California Medicine is

(01:04:01):
one of our power companies. But then there's PG and E.
This isn't the City of Los Angeles providing this. That's
a company. In the same way that your internet come
from a company. What makes you think your power don't
come from a company. And if your power come from
a company and an internet come from a company, why
wouldn't your water come from a company? I like, well,

(01:04:22):
I don't know what would make you think that that's
just a city municipality. Well, because duh, because water fall
from the sky.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
What the shit?

Speaker 6 (01:04:31):
So what I'm paying for you to pump it through
the through the dog on pipes for me?

Speaker 8 (01:04:37):
I understand that that's a service, But what the hell
of my taxes for you? Somebody like I don't know
if you noticed, you can own the rain. So the
water that fell inside the lake, somebody bought the lake.
This is the episode that I'm going to tell y'all.
Right now, so your utilities, most likely your city has

(01:04:58):
sold your water and your sewage processing to a private company.
And the bills that you're paying your water bill is
not going to the city for the service you are receiving.
It is paying the company back the money that the
company paid your city to get this gig. Let me

(01:05:19):
back up here first, let me cover the private fire departments.
Now here's the thing. Private fire departments usually are hired
by insurance companies. So what they do a lot of
time is like prevention. They'll come in here and you know,
clear out shrub, make sure that your house is not
like set up for failure. You know. In California, I mean,

(01:05:42):
people always talk about our strict laws and building codes,
and it's like, well, nigga, do you see why every
time you got a bureaucratic law, like there might be
a historical evidence as to why we need that, one
of which is my nigga, California ain't got a lot
of water. So if you're gonna build a house, you

(01:06:05):
can't just have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why
because you just basically put a box of matches just
around your house. So yes, bam, like that's why you
can't do that.

Speaker 6 (01:06:19):
Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash
in your house? Nigga?

Speaker 8 (01:06:22):
What I mean, what the hell you think? Because this
shit will catch on fire. So these private companies, private
fire companies usually come through and again they hire body
insurance companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure
that your length, your dryer is cleared out, make sure
your h VAC is good. And usually they got their

(01:06:44):
own little tank right, So they come in with their
own little tank of water that stay private water that
basically they bring in their bottle water, you know what
I'm saying, while the rest of us is using tap right,
But eventually that little tank go run out. You feel
me and then at that point you got to tap
into the fire hydrant. Right now, what most of these
companies will say is, like the guys were not monsters, dude, Like,
if if the neighborhood is on fire, of course we're

(01:07:07):
going to help. What do you like, what are you
talking about? Which I truly believe for this reason. If
I'm paying to protect this house, but the neighbor's house
is on fire, that probably means that the neighbor's house
is going to cause my house to catch on fire.
So of course it would be in my best interest
to help put that one out.

Speaker 6 (01:07:27):
According to the New York Times.

Speaker 8 (01:07:29):
They reported that, yeah, good, forty five percent of all
firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately
right now. A lot of those are like wildlife suppression. Now,
there's such thing as called the National Wildlife Suppression Association,
which represents more than like three hundred private firefighting groups,
and a lot of them work more as like government contractors,

(01:07:54):
right as far as like again supplement for like wildfires,
right and like I said, the others are hired by
private companies. Yo, and peak this like a little two
person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle.

Speaker 6 (01:08:09):
I mean it could cost like three grand a day.

Speaker 8 (01:08:12):
Like a large crew of like twenty firefighters and four
trucks can run ten thousand dollars a day. This is
according to Brian Weelock, the vice president of the Gray
Back Forestry. It's a private firefighting company in Oregon. But
most of the time, like I said, these people don't
really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's the

(01:08:33):
interesting part of this story to me. The interesting part
of this story to me is the reality of the
utilities that we live in. Now, let me go ahead
and run off some statistics to you. I just want

(01:08:56):
to go ahead and add to the dystopia that we
live in because we need to say, we need to
change the name of this show too.

Speaker 6 (01:09:03):
It has happened here.

Speaker 8 (01:09:05):
I'm going to link all this data to the show notes.

Speaker 6 (01:09:11):
Now you're ready for this.

Speaker 8 (01:09:14):
Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends. More than
forty percent of drinking water systems nationwide are private regulated
utility systems, of the sixty percent of the systems owned
by local governments. Privatization by contracting of operations management has
grown rapidly since two thousand and one, nationwide, the privatization

(01:09:37):
of water wastewater group by thirteen percent after growing eighty
four percent over the decade in the nineteen nineties. Right,
so what that means is almost half of y'all are
paying a private company for your water. Now, let's make
some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities. And

(01:09:59):
you know what are we even talking about. So public
utilities are owned and operated by your local, state, and
federal governments on behalf of the citizens and customers in
that area. So a public utility would be your municipal water, sewage,
sanitation services, like if you have a public electricity providers, government,

(01:10:20):
government ran public transit systems, state owned telecommunication companies, public utilities.

Speaker 6 (01:10:27):
Right now, listen, here's where it's interesting.

Speaker 8 (01:10:30):
Have to balance serving the public interests while remaining financially
sustainable since they are not profit driven, any revenue earned
is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure of the operations,
which seems like a big old dug. We're not here
to make money. This is not our money making interest.

(01:10:52):
This is living, right, It's a utility. Like It's just
I'm not trying to make money off it. I'm trying
to keep the lights on, right, But as we know,
it costs to do those things, so the temptation becomes
easy to be like, how do I offload this cost
right and make sure that this service is there? Because

(01:11:14):
as you know, oftentimes public utilities don't be very good.
You know what I'm saying. Flint still ain't got fresh
water right now. Altadena is in a situation where they
was like, look, don't even boil the water, like whatever
coming out of your tap is just not good.

Speaker 6 (01:11:35):
Boiling is not good enough, Like do not drink this water?

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
Right?

Speaker 8 (01:11:40):
Is the situation that they in, and it's like we're
where the money at, Like, how are we going to
fix this?

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Now?

Speaker 6 (01:11:46):
That's a public utility.

Speaker 8 (01:11:47):
Now, private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by
private companies. So that would be an investored owned electricity
company like a private telecommunication, private owned oil gas and pipelines,
and private owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because

(01:12:08):
it's a company, is still to make profit for their
shareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument their
defense would be if we don't give you a good product,
we won't have customers, So it is in our best
interests for our own money to give you a best service. However,
are you seeing the truck size hole in their logic? Nigga,

(01:12:32):
we don't have a choice. Do you have a choice
as to what water company provides the water to your house?
Who go run the sewer? I don't have an option anyway.
So the key differences are very obvious.

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:12:45):
One is the ownership and motives. Like publicly owned utilities
serve the public interests rather than pursue profits. Right, private
owned utilities are there for their investors in the maximize returns.

Speaker 6 (01:12:56):
Regulation and pricing.

Speaker 8 (01:12:58):
Public utilities are regulated by the governm in imported commissions
that oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually
more flexible in their rate setting, because what the hell.

Speaker 6 (01:13:10):
You gonna do?

Speaker 8 (01:13:11):
Get you a called a water company? Be like, I
ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, ooh, no problem.
Service areas most publics utility service customers are within municipal boundaries.
Investor owned utilities often are defined by regional monopolies with
little overlap or competition with customers.

Speaker 6 (01:13:28):
Listen, if you ever.

Speaker 8 (01:13:30):
Moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all, I'm
trying to like, you know, install cable and they was like,
or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's AT and
T over here. I was like, oh, but I have Spectrum.
They're like, Spectrum don't serve this area.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
Nigga.

Speaker 6 (01:13:45):
It is the Internet, it's the air, it's wires, this polls.

Speaker 9 (01:13:50):
I'm not allowed to.

Speaker 8 (01:13:51):
U can't come over here because it's a private company.
Now I'm in a situation where AT and T knock
on my door every day being like, yo, we laying
fiber optics. You know, we lay we laying new pipes
down here, up under your up under your street.

Speaker 6 (01:14:05):
We can move faster than Spectrum.

Speaker 8 (01:14:07):
I done ditch them both, and then Spectrum still email
me every day. Spectrum sent somebody was like, we heard
you left Spectrum. We're trying to figure out why. I'm like, nigga,
because I don't want to use either of y'all, but
we're the area you serve. When I first moved into
the house that I'm in now, like, I made an
account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga, Edison

(01:14:31):
don't serve here. You had SoCal Gas and I was like,
who the hell is so cal Gas? They was like
that's who that's who else gonna give me the gap?
I don't have no options. Oh, I got to live
in La. These this is who serves LA infrastructure spending.
With public utilities, they might find it easier to raise
funds for long term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively,

(01:14:56):
while privately owned businesses and utilities answered to share seeking returns,
which impact investment decisions. Meaning if I'm like, yo, somebody
gotta clean this sewer pipe because this water ain't good
in this neighborhood, it would behoove the city of Los
Angeles to fix this, and it would be easy for

(01:15:16):
them because I am a Los Angeles resident.

Speaker 6 (01:15:18):
This is a public utility. If I have private water,
they might be like.

Speaker 8 (01:15:22):
H how much money that's that neighborhood give us? You
know if we fix the water up there in Palace
verd aids you know what I'm saying, Like, we got
to talk to them because they know, I mean, they
kind of give us the bread, so they're not incentivized
necessarily to fix my infrastructure. Right, and then the customer
service focus right. Public utilities often focus more on customer

(01:15:44):
satisfaction and addressing community complaints, while private entities have profit motives.
I mean, I don't know what else I need to
explain to y'all. Right, now, let me show you how
this works and what the allure is for a public
city council to make this decision. Are y'all here to

(01:16:05):
more perfect union? It's another one of those podcast folks
that just got more money than us. They're able to
produce things that we had bread we would produce it anyway.
They did one about investor own water companies and how
they lobby to give them the contract to run their
sewage and water, right, And it's a super dope stuff.

(01:16:28):
It's a super dope study. It's a good, like focused
study to show like as sort of an example of
how it could happen anywhere. And they focused this one
study on this city in Pennsylvania, right. And here's the
ill part about all of this is that how would
you know this is happening?

Speaker 6 (01:16:46):
I mean, are you really looking at the logo on
your water bill?

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
I mean.

Speaker 8 (01:16:52):
No, you just like looking at the costs, right and
hoping that it don't be that much. Now again, if
you've written it, if you rent in an apartment, I
don't know what utilities you gotta cover, right, let's say
you are renting in an apartment. You know what I'm saying,
Like a lot of times, Joe utilities, It's like that's
like they cover water and gas, you cover electricity and
internet and then whatever it is. I'm not thinking about

(01:17:12):
who the company is. I'm just like paying the bill.
But if one day your bill triple, I mean, who
do you call you? Like, I haven't used more water.
I don't understand why it costs more. Now you might
call the city the city like, oh, we don't even
run the water no more.

Speaker 6 (01:17:30):
And that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 8 (01:17:31):
So in twenty twenty in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold
their water to get this Agua, Pennsylvania Jerks, a subsidiary
of Essential Utilities, they sold.

Speaker 6 (01:17:45):
They water for thirty million dollars.

Speaker 8 (01:17:48):
And just for you to get a grasp on how
much money can be made by doing this. If you
a company, that company made two point zero five billion
dollars in twenty twenty three. And essentially, if you the city,
the city runs up. Are you having all kinds of problems?
You got people not paying bills on time, you got
all these different you know, all this stuff you gotta
hire the workers.

Speaker 6 (01:18:07):
You gotta do all this stuff.

Speaker 8 (01:18:08):
And this company runs up and was like, yo, we'll
take all this off your hands. Not only will we
take it off your hands, we'll pay you for it.
So to the city and they saying, look, I do
a better job than y'all do. Why because this is
all we do. You got all this other stuff you
gotta take care of. We gonna only take care of
the water. Look, we'll give you thirty million dollars for it.
That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it.

(01:18:30):
All you gotta do when people call complaining about they
water is just say please hold and transferred to us.
You ain't got nothing to worry about it. And the
city say, okay, that sounds good. Now are you going
you're gonna change your prices? It's like, why would we
change our prices. We won't need to change our price.
Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we
ain't got the same things y'all got, well, at least

(01:18:52):
for the first few years. Kind of like the phone
bill when they like, oh, you sign up for this
much money a month for the first three months. Are
your cable for the first first two years, and then
one day, your cable bill come in and it's just
psycho and you like, I don't know why to hell
this costs so much more. And they're like, oh, yeah,
the contract was for this long and then after that
it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening.

(01:19:15):
That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy,
who you're gonna call? Like what you gonna say?

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Like?

Speaker 6 (01:19:18):
Uh?

Speaker 8 (01:19:20):
They could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now.
So for the city, the city is like, look, it's
free money. We could put this money into other stuff
we've been trying to work on, and y'all gonna get
a better situation. And again, no one looks at the
logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right a
few years ago, I think in twenty sixteen, got this

(01:19:41):
law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's
called the fair market Value laws. One example is in
Pennsylvania was Act twelve, which was in twenty sixteen. And
the concern is cities feel like they can't keep up
with dunt dunt dun environmental laws and keep up with
city growth. Cities are growing so fast, so many people

(01:20:04):
are moving in, We're destroying the Earth at a particular
exponential rate, and the government wants us to not destroy
the planet.

Speaker 6 (01:20:16):
Ho home. So I got all.

Speaker 8 (01:20:18):
These laws I got we just you know, he's a
hat of the money for it.

Speaker 6 (01:20:22):
He's out of the money for it at the time.

Speaker 8 (01:20:27):
So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth,
you can include, because of Act twelve in Pennsylvania, the
median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means
it makes that water worth way much more. Right, And

(01:20:47):
a lot of times when you selling this, when you
selling this disutility, the price tag what these people be
paying you be six times the city budget.

Speaker 6 (01:21:01):
So think about this. I'm just trying to make this
real for you.

Speaker 8 (01:21:05):
Let's just say somebody comes in and says I'll buy
your car. You say, word for how much? And they say,
I tell you what, I'll pay you your year's salary
for this car. The fam you gonna add I add
another car in there for that. You know what I'm saying, Hey,
you know, throw throwing another six months for the stalary.

(01:21:28):
I'll make you some dinner. Like it's it's kind of
a no brainer. You like, you our entire year's budget
just for the water. No brainer, But who pays the company? Nigga,
you you paying the company? What do I mean by that?

(01:21:49):
The company cuts cuts the city at check. Now the
company gotta make their money back. How they make their
money back? Nigga, your bills?

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
What is you like?

Speaker 6 (01:21:57):
What is you saying? Of course they gonna make their
money back now.

Speaker 8 (01:22:00):
Again, they're incentivized to make that money back as fast
as possible, which means they're not going to spend more.
They hadn't already spend thirty million dollars to get the thing.
But then they'll promise to like fix their systems, their
promise like you sold the city saying I'm gonna be
able to spend some time to upgrade and do all
this difference. And they don't have a upgrade nothing, because

(01:22:22):
it's kind of a no brainer.

Speaker 6 (01:22:24):
This is easy money to them.

Speaker 8 (01:22:26):
In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority
that went straight up bankrupt. So like the city's water
authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, yo, we
gotta sell it. They got offered four hundred and ten
million dollars. Well the city did, and the city says, nigga,
Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell

(01:22:46):
because you are not a company. You are part of
the City of Philadelphia. Chester Water Authority is like, my jig,
I mean, what the hell you want us to do?
How does this stuff become legal? Well, like saying, way
any other stick come legal? They just you lobby candidates
all the time. And the only way to stop this
is you got to sign up to some sort of

(01:23:08):
city council news led us something to be able to
walk up in there and protest the shit. Nigga, good luck.
Now let's talk about specifically California. All right, I bring

(01:23:30):
up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire,
hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that
the water that water's Los Angeles comes from the north right,
It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California
Aqueduct that was put together by this man named maulhulland

(01:23:52):
so the mulhulland passed mulhulland drive that was all based
on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because
he just went up there just like any other colonizing
was like a buy your water, and they was like
water ain't for sale.

Speaker 6 (01:24:09):
He was like, uh, yeah it is.

Speaker 8 (01:24:11):
And went over their heads and bought the water, built
a whole Basically like when you was a kid at
the beach and you dig a little thing in the
sand to make the water go a certain way. That's
basically what he did through the middle of California to
bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did have
one river, that was the San Gabril River that starts
in the top of the San Gabriel Foothills and comes

(01:24:33):
into what we call the La River, which is paved,
which there is a movement to unpave that because that
would probably help us with a lot of climate issues.
But either way, that was an actual river. It was
enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't
that many people here and they had sense enough to
not plants that need the water that they ain't got.
They wasn't trying to build a city in the area.

(01:24:54):
They ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, Have you
ever been to Las Vegas. There should not be a
city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There
should not be that many humans there. According to the Earth,
unless you pump water over there. The natives were fine
the indigenous communities figured out how to live in the
shit for thousands of years, but you know, we had

(01:25:18):
to do our thing. Now some vocabulary. California got a
thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there
first gets the water, Like basically, it's my land, di
licted right. But they only got them rights when it
started from the gold Rush. So they was like, well,
who was there first? Was this white man?

Speaker 6 (01:25:35):
Not the people that already lived there, but these white men.

Speaker 8 (01:25:38):
So if you happen to have a farm, you know
up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer
than somebody else's family, then that water is yours, right,
that's senior water rights.

Speaker 6 (01:25:51):
And then there's.

Speaker 8 (01:25:51):
Junior water rights, which is like the second person. So
whatever water you don't use, they get to use right now.
Why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley,
is because Cali provides everybody's produce. I mean, for the
rest of the country, the vast majority of the fruits, vegetables, nuts,

(01:26:11):
and lagoons that you eat come from California.

Speaker 6 (01:26:14):
We gotta have water. It would be hoof.

Speaker 8 (01:26:17):
Of rest of America to make sure that Cali got water.
So those are water rights. Now, the water that gets
pumped down into our fire hydrants, here's the situation like
that had to do a water pressure. Now you could
refer to the block is literally hot episode where I
go into detail as to what happened with that. But
there was this whole thing about the water being owned

(01:26:40):
by some billionaires. Now I would love to run with
that one, but the fact is, that's just not true.

Speaker 6 (01:26:46):
It's not that simple. Let me go ahead in fact
check that.

Speaker 8 (01:26:49):
So the wonderful code which is who they were talking about,
it's Steward and Linda Resnik. They do have a majority
steak in a water bank that can store up to
one point five million acres right, which is close to
five hundred billion gallons of water. But the realness is
that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California.

(01:27:15):
California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than five hundred
and sixty six times as much water, with a storage
capacity of eight hundred and fifty million to one point
three billion acres of feet across the California Department of
Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than forty
million acres On top of that. So there's two types

(01:27:40):
of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater. Groundwater
obviously that's stuff that you would dig in for a well,
that's a whole other thing.

Speaker 6 (01:27:46):
Right now.

Speaker 8 (01:27:48):
It is true this family owns brands is like wonderful pistachios,
Fiji water wonderful, land halos, wonderful halos, and palm wonderful
and that's a you know, I don't know if you're
in a pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway,
let me quote from politiffect. The water the Resinics use

(01:28:08):
gets stored underground initially before the water that is delivered
to the roots of Resinic's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate orchards. Specifically,
it's stored in the Kerrent Water Bank that is the
most valuable water resource in the region and critical to
America's fresh flood supplies. The water bank, which is watch
This the bank itself a public private partnership with the

(01:28:32):
Resnic's owned fifty seven percent of the steak is thirty
two square mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands from
the street that essentially stores again the one point five
million acre feet of water five hundred billion gallons. The
resins storage arrangement is very controversial.

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:28:51):
They've been banking on the water by using public and
private dollars to corral public resource. Because of their water
rights and their wealth, they are insulating themselves from this
type of drought, which, of course that's what rich do, right.
This is what Chas Miller says, the director of Environmental

(01:29:11):
Analysis at Pomona College. Private capital has no problem with
the drought, while the rest of us are looking at
deep social divides. Somebody bought the water, but water isn't
the only thing, like I said, as somebody else owes,
you know. According to Publicpower dot Org, utilities that were

(01:29:34):
sold since nineteen eighty have ranged dramatically in size. Although
many had a small number of customers at the time
of the sale, with the median of fewer than six
hundred customers, less than thirty percent of utilities sold had
more than a thousand customers at the time of sale. Right,
so back then it was a small amount of people.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:29:55):
Watch this, Only five public power utilities with ten thousand
or more customers have sold, right, and four of those
five sales occurred were approved since twenty fifteen. Now the
largest sale of such electric department was the city of Murphysboro, Tennessee,

(01:30:16):
which had about sixty eight thousand customers and when it
sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Cooperative in twenty twenty.
Other utilities substantial size include those serving the cities of
Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah, and all together
we are talking about eight hundred thousand citizens today have

(01:30:39):
their electricity. Private sales have occurred in twenty six states,
and almost all of Kansas was sold, and it was
sold in the nineteen eighties. Now, why even make an
episode on this? And it's because of this last thing.

(01:31:00):
Corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns is as old
as companies are. You know, you had trained things and
stuff like that, you know, where like a company moves
in and it just it just made sense for the
company to make sure that they were providing housing and
you know, saloons and stuff like that for the people

(01:31:21):
that you know, lived.

Speaker 6 (01:31:22):
In their area. It just made sense.

Speaker 8 (01:31:24):
That was just it was just good business, right, you
wanted to attract more people to stay in this area.
If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas, city called Bentonville.
It's actually very dope to be in, but it is
the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in
corporate Walmart, you gotta live in Bentonville.

Speaker 2 (01:31:42):
Now, the city's dope is that.

Speaker 8 (01:31:46):
A corporate town, not in what I'm talking about. It
is a company that said we're gonna dump a kajillion
dollars to make this city as dope as possible. That's
one thing I am talking about, a brand duh making
a city.

Speaker 6 (01:32:02):
I wish I was making this up.

Speaker 8 (01:32:04):
Google got One is working on a community called North
Bay Shore in Mountain View, California that'll have seven thousand
housing units, and another called Middlefield Park that'll have two
thousand units. Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in
Menlo Park, California, and they'll have seventeen hundred housing units,

(01:32:28):
a hotel, and plenty of retail. Disney is developing a
fourteen hundred thousand units across eighty acres in Kissamee, Florida,
right near Walt Disney World. Elon Musk is building his
city called in snail Brook outside of Austin, Texas for

(01:32:49):
employees of his constellations of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing,
but the most ambitious is California Forever. It's supposed to
be Silicon Valley two point zero. It's this group ran
by the former Golden Sacks trader Jane Samark and is

(01:33:09):
backed by investors like the Lincoln co founder Reed hofsman
Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist name Loreene Powell. And it
plans to create this new city in Solano County, sixty
miles north of San Bernardino, with tens of thousands of homes,
large solar energy orchards, with a million new trees, and
one hundred thousand acres of new park space. And they

(01:33:33):
hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs
in a wockable Paris or West village in New York.

Speaker 6 (01:33:40):
And there was this.

Speaker 8 (01:33:42):
Reporting of this unknown group that was coming up in
just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates,
And for years nobody had any idea who these people were.
They purchased fifty two thousand acres, spent eight hundred million,
paying five times a market rate, and.

Speaker 6 (01:34:03):
Nobody knew who they were.

Speaker 8 (01:34:04):
It's a little po dunk town people selling their little farms.
It's because these billionaires is building a city.

Speaker 9 (01:34:12):
Now.

Speaker 8 (01:34:12):
I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce you
to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be a
future bastard pod person or either way, one of these
shows is gonna cover this man, because this man, in
a lot of ways, is the patient zero, the contagion

(01:34:36):
number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this
new extremist that's been kind of been trying to.

Speaker 6 (01:34:45):
Tell everybody, here's why it's so poisonous.

Speaker 8 (01:34:47):
He's like, because not only is democracy dead, democracy being dead,
and whatever you think you have now ain't a democracy,
to which all of us would be like, nigga, Yes,
That's why it's so dangerous, because I'd be like yeah.
He's like, the system's failing you, and I'm like amen.
So his solution is a monarchy, but.

Speaker 6 (01:35:10):
He mean a monarchy like a CEO.

Speaker 8 (01:35:13):
So this man says if the country was ran like
a tech company, everything would be cool, we would all
be better. And his example of that is he would say, Okay,
look at that laptop you use it.

Speaker 6 (01:35:26):
Look at that phone you got.

Speaker 8 (01:35:27):
Do you think you would have got to that phone
to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had,
if it was done by the City of California's Tech
Municipal Department. He's like, nigga, no, you got that because
of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone, because
that nigga was like, Look, this is what we're doing.
This is how we're doing it. He would argue that

(01:35:48):
Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro.
He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga,
this is what we're doing. We building freeways.

Speaker 6 (01:35:56):
I don't care what y'all say. We building freeways.

Speaker 8 (01:35:57):
He's like, if the country ran like a tech company,
then maybe this country would work better. And he's like,
in newsflash, whatever the hell you think you got now
ain't working anyway. We might as well just lean into it.
All I'm saying is I don't know what I'm saying, fam,

(01:36:19):
it could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin
swooping in and signing off ruining another thing for you.

Speaker 6 (01:36:27):
Don't catch me at the hood of politics, Pop.

Speaker 10 (01:36:51):
This is it could happen here. A show about things
falling apart, and this episode is about the people who
want to make it being the United States fall apart faster,
allowing them to install a white supremacist ethno state, though
it kind of feels like that's pretty much already happening.
This episode is also about the people in government who
categorize and classify want to be terrorists, who want the

(01:37:13):
country to collapse faster, and what these changes in categorization
methods can tell us about the future of the country.
I'm Garrison Davison today I'm joined by a very special guest,
philosophing comedian Michael Burns of the YouTube channel Michael o'burns
and formerly wiscrack rip. How you doing.

Speaker 3 (01:37:34):
Pretty good, you know, besides living in the world that
you just described past that everything's going great.

Speaker 10 (01:37:41):
Yeah, that's kind of been my mood the past three months,
maybe longer. There's a tad, a tad like liminality. But
I don't know if that's just like living in denial
and trying to cope. But hey, you know what's wrong
with a little bit of coping.

Speaker 3 (01:37:58):
Especially if it helps one simple survive these times. So,
you know, I encourage a healthy dose of of coping
or sort of a you know, mental bifurcation. If that's
what we need to do to get up in the
morning and get through it all. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:38:11):
Now, unfortunately, this episode that I have prepared today is
uh not a super cheery one for you, Michael. Uh,
which is which is maybe kind of kind of appropriate
because the reason why I have you on this episode
today is because the FBI and the Department of Justice
have come up with a new terrorism classification acronym which

(01:38:32):
name drops the internet's favorite and sometimes least favorite philosophy, nihilism.
They're they're calling these guys nihilistic violent extremists. Oh boy,
we will, we will get into this. Do you want
to give like a philosophy one oh one definition of nihilism?
A super well known and universally agreed upon term that

(01:38:55):
always means the same thing to everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:38:58):
So yeah, it's not confusing at all. And yeah, I
mean I think the root of it, at least in
like a modern philosophical sense, is Nietzsche. At least that's
a common reference point. And when Nietzsche is talking about nihilism,
especially in a book like The Genealogy of Morality a
lot of other places, he is making the argument that
sort of Christian European culture, and particularly a Christian European

(01:39:21):
culture influenced by idealist philosophy, creates nihilism. The reason he
says it creates nihilism is because people care more about
Heaven than they do about earth. They care more about
the life they're going to have an eternity than the
life they have in the here and now. So for him,
it's like this devaluement of life that happens if your Christianity.

(01:39:42):
More broadly speaking, nihilism has a I guess more positive usage,
which is the you know, disbelief in the inherent or
necessary meaning in an overarching.

Speaker 10 (01:39:53):
System, like in like the existential sense.

Speaker 3 (01:39:56):
Yeah, so you kind of have this this distinction, and
some people use of positive and negative nihilism, and to
be really crass and simple here, negative nihilism is nothing
means anything, So I don't give a shit. I'm just
gonna hang out and do whatever. Positive nihilism is there's
no inherent meaning in reality.

Speaker 2 (01:40:13):
But cool.

Speaker 3 (01:40:14):
Now, me and the homies can construct meaning as we
see fit, which is more like the existentialist response. We're
going to create meaning where maybe there wasn't natural meaning
in this like old school platonic or Christian sense.

Speaker 10 (01:40:28):
And I'm not sure how much the FBI agents who
are doing these federal court filings have read Nietzsche or
the French existentialists and instead are probably using a colloquial
definition of nihilism, right this like no nothing matters, you know,
this like apathetic postmodernist like idea to go a little

(01:40:49):
Jordan Petersony, right, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (01:40:51):
Mean I think there's the sense in which it is
the kind of weird Jordan Petersony alt right philosophy version
of nihilism, which just means like people that think the
dominance of the West is bad. And it also reeks
a little bit of like big Lebowski nihilism for totally
you know. And of course in that movie, nihilism is
represented by a crew of I think Austrian techno producers

(01:41:16):
called Autobond, who are also nihilists, and they say throughout
the film like we are nihilists, we believe in nothing,
which is a really and obviously the Coen Brothers made
that film, at least one of them was a philosophy major,
so they know what they're doing. That's kind of the
really basic, not good enough version of this thing that
it seems like the FBI is operating with like people
who don't believe in the goodness of the Western project.

Speaker 10 (01:41:38):
Correct, and that's what they're really honing in on. I
will read an expanded definition of nihilistic violent extremism. This
is from a Federal court filing dated March eighteenth, twenty
twenty five. Nihilist violent extremists are individuals who engage in
criminal conduct within the United States and abroad in furtherance
of political, social, religious goals that derive primarily from a

(01:41:59):
hatred of societ at large and a desire to bring
about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.
Nihlis violent extremists work individually or as a part of
a network with these goals of destroying civilized society through
the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include miners. Now,

(01:42:20):
this is where it's going to get into some kind
of weirder stuff that we will kind of explain later.
They have like a second definition here quote Nihilistic violence streamists,
both individually and as a network, systematically and methodically target
vulnerable populations across the United States and the globe. They
frequently use social media communication platforms to connect with individuals
and desensitize them to violence, among other things, breaking down

(01:42:42):
societal norms regarding engagement violence, normalizing the possession, production, and
sharing of gore materials, and otherwise corrupting and grooming those
individuals towards committing future acts of violence unquote. And that
kind of outlines some of the strategy of these groups,
the groups that they're kind of gonna mention here. I've
been doing like freelance research on for about four years now.

(01:43:07):
I've been trying to publish a few articles on these
guys over the years, but it's always it's always tricky,
and we will get to kind of the darker corners
of that in a sec But let's let's first kind
of talk about what this new term, this nvees nihilist
violent extremists, What this is kind of replacing in the

(01:43:28):
in the FBI lexicon. Now, it seems that that this
term is being used in place of two previous FBI
terrorism categories. This is from a November twenty twenty FBI bulletin.
Quote anti government or anti authority violent extremism. This threat
encompasses the potentially unlawful use or threat of force or

(01:43:50):
violence in furtherance of ideological agendas derived from anti government
or anti authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social,
or racial hierarchies, or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.

Speaker 3 (01:44:05):
Can I say something that stood out to me about
those definitions? The hatred thing I found really interesting in
like the very first definition you give that nihilism is
defined as like in a motive state, because again, I
think nihilism is classically conceived totally is almost more like
ontological or metaphysical, And by that I just mean looking
at these structures of belief in the world. So rather

(01:44:28):
than being like motivated by hatred or love or fear
or whatever, a more classically nihilists few is just again like, oh,
I've been sold a bill of goods on what the
meaning of existences or what the undermining underlying principles of
political reality are, And now I see that they are
maybe bs.

Speaker 10 (01:44:45):
Not the hatred of society and wanting to collapse it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:48):
Yeah, I guess there's just like this negativity associated with
all that language. And of course I was having never
heard the definitions that you were just bringing up, you know,
the way in which it just quickly zigs and zags
to like some very dark stuff in terms of like radicalization.
That seemed like there was a reference towards like a
like like pedophilia or something there.

Speaker 10 (01:45:07):
Child sexual abuse materials, Yeah, come up a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:45:10):
Yeah, Yeah, so it just getting from A to B.
There is more like getting from A to Z or something.
It's just not a connection that I think would be
obvious to anyone who has thought about, read about written
about nihilism as more of an intellectual or even like
a political and philosophical.

Speaker 10 (01:45:26):
Concept totally, because there is like political nihilists and like
the Russian tradition and more recently in like the American
Aniatest tradition or the Greek anarchist tradition, where they believe
in this like idea of like intigation and trying to
trying to like in negate to government institutions.

Speaker 3 (01:45:42):
Yeah, but which is still a far cry from believing
in causing active harm psychologically, physically whatever to human.

Speaker 10 (01:45:51):
Being vulnerable populations.

Speaker 8 (01:45:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:45:53):
Yeah, there's a sense in which it's painted as like
if you knew nothing else and you were to read
those definitions and you were just just scared suburban insurance
salesman or something. It would sound as if it was
like a death cult infecting the minds of the children,
like zombie esque little super soldiers.

Speaker 10 (01:46:09):
That's actually what they're going for. And I have a
lot of mixed opinions on this term because I think
this term is trying to describe a group that does
kind of defy classification. But I think the use of
the nihilist term is also not good. So I'm kind
of in a rock and a hard place here as
someone who does a lot of extremists and research. Now,

(01:46:31):
the other term that the FBI is probably seeking to replace,
at least in part with this new nihilism definition is
racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism. Right, this is like
your what term assists your neo Nazis. The FBI defines
it as quote. This threatning compasses the potentially unlawful use
or threat of force or violence and furtherance of ideological

(01:46:52):
agendas derived from bias, often relating to race or ethnicity
held by the actor against others or a given population group.
Racially or ethnically motivated boid extreamists purported to use both
political and religious justifications to support their racially or ethnically
based ideological objectives and criminal activities. This was the group
that saw like a massive, a massive explosion and growth

(01:47:15):
the past ten years, really starting around twenty sixteen to
twenty seventeen, with you know, the neo Nazi mass shooting
like epidemic, especially around like twenty seventeen to twenty nineteen.
This is the most lethal group and it grew exponentially
during that period, and we're kind of seeing some of
these groups start to reform now. Now there's been some

(01:47:35):
reporting that this that this anti government or anti authority
violent extremism, which I'm just going to say AGAVE, which
is the acronym which does make me a little bit
hungry for a glucose syrup. That it's fine. Now, there's
been some reporting that state agave is specifically like a
Biden era term, but it actually like predates the Biden

(01:47:56):
presidency and was in use under Trump. In fact, a
lot of the internal FBI reforms that are being reported
on right now are actually undoing changes and counter terrorism
strategies that started under the first Trump presidency. But we'll
get more on that later. We're gonna go on an
ad break real quick and return to talk about a

(01:48:17):
gruesome act of violence in Wisconsin last month.

Speaker 1 (01:48:30):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 10 (01:48:32):
I'm gonna get more into how the government is using
this term and like what they are applying it to,
what they're applying the nihilist of violent extremism labeled to.
Earlier this year, a Wisconsin teen male named Nikota Cassup
killed his parents in an attempt to gain the financial
means and autonomy necessary to carry out a plot to

(01:48:53):
assassinate President Trump and accelerate the collapse of the United States.
I'm gonna read a quote from a federal criminal complaint
filed last month.

Speaker 5 (01:49:04):
Quote.

Speaker 10 (01:49:04):
On March third, twenty twenty, five County sheriffs obtained a
search warrant for casp cell phone. During the review, they
identified material on the phone related to quote unquote the
Order of Nine Angles. The sheriff's review of the phone
identified possible usernames for Cassup, including Accelerationists fourteen and Awoken unquote. Now, Michael,

(01:49:25):
are you unfortunate enough to be familiar with the Order
of Nine Angles?

Speaker 3 (01:49:30):
I am not so.

Speaker 10 (01:49:31):
This is a group that was originally based in the
UK and now is primarily active in Eastern Europe, though
there are branches or spin offs called nexions in the
United States. This is a group that is kind of
hard to find. People often call it a Nazi Satanist group.
I think it's more accurate to call them a like
white supremacist, a cultic group who essentially try to cultivate

(01:49:56):
evil for the sake of evil. They're like a left
hand path a cult group that has orchestrated multiple terrorist attacks,
especially through radicalizing US soldiers. At this point, they're pretty
mythic with their writing and tactics, leaving a strong lingering
presence across the left hand path fascist occult milli U.

(01:50:17):
We also have a reference to quote unquote accelerationism here,
which kind of similar to nihilism. Is like this philosophical
term which has kind of been like warped and changed
VIA's people's application of it in politics, and specifically kind
of the way that we're going to be using this
word here is this idea of trying to like accelerate
the collapse of the country, mostly to install like a

(01:50:38):
white supremacistats in a state after the country has collapsed.
This is how most Nazis use the term even though
it has a slightly different cultural background with the work
of Nick Land and Fisher.

Speaker 3 (01:50:48):
When I was growing up, acceleration just men accelerating the
contradictions of capitalism.

Speaker 2 (01:50:52):
But kids these days.

Speaker 3 (01:50:54):
That's right, not a good one.

Speaker 10 (01:50:58):
So this eddial criminal complaint alleges that Cassup was communicating
with people on the messaging app Telegram, and these people
were possibly in Ukraine and or Russia, and these people
helped him plan this attack. The FBI found TikTok messages
on his phone where he discussed the struggle of telling
his friends that he quote unquote follows O nine A

(01:51:19):
teachings that's Order of nine angles, and he discussed a
previous FBI visit to his home in twenty twenty three.
In other exchanges on TikTok, he shared information with a
user named Nihilis about how to find Nazi telegram channels.
I'm gonna I'm gonna read through some of this, some
of this uh chat transcript Nihilis, Hey, dude, do you

(01:51:41):
know any telegram groups where niners that's O nine A
and drex can interact and exchange info? Awoken, that's Cassup. Sorry, No,
I'm mostly in NSWP telegram groups. L ol. If you
do find any, it'd be nice if you tell me. Nihilis,
what's WP? Awoke, Wikipedia dot org, slash national underscore, socialism underscore,

(01:52:06):
white power, nilus oh, white power cool? Awoken? Do you
know any on nine a telegram groups? Nihlis? Oh, not
a group, but a channel. You can find documents there. Awoken?
All right, send awoken? Can you send me the link
to the account? Awoken, It says, I can't access the message, Nihlis,
How can I do that? Wait a second, awoken? Here's

(01:52:28):
my telegram user name accelerationists fourteen. Nihlis. I sent a message,
So there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:52:33):
That's the man.

Speaker 10 (01:52:36):
Just There is some later telegram messages that are archived
in this in this complaint as well, where at accelerationist says,
what country do you think will get the blame for this?
Meaning his planned attack? An unknown user replied Russia will
be blamed for it. This is the goal, accelerationist said.

(01:52:56):
Quote when the time comes for you to send my
manifest to you so you can spread it online? Should
it be a pdf? Also?

Speaker 3 (01:53:06):
Sorry? I just like that when the contexts of all
that they're discussing file types.

Speaker 10 (01:53:11):
And also, you won't anyhow change or modify the manifesto,
The unknown user replies, write it on a piece of
paper and take a picture.

Speaker 3 (01:53:19):
Wow.

Speaker 10 (01:53:20):
The FBI personnel performing the preliminary review saw images of
a three page document titled Accelerate the Collapse. The images
are screen grabs displayed on a phone, and these images
were created on February twenty eight, twenty twenty five. This
document is the manifesto referred to by at Accelerationist. The
manifesto calls for the assassination of the President of the

(01:53:41):
United States in order to ferment a political revolution in
the United States to quote unquote save the white race
from quote unquote Jewish controlled politicians. The third page of
the document contains images of Adolph Hitler with text that reads,
quote Hail Hitler, Hail the White Race, Hail victory. Now,
from what I can read it, this manifesto, it's pretty basic.

(01:54:01):
It's heavily plagiarized, like most of these kind of white
supremacist accelerationist manifestos are. It talks about how Jews control
white countries and are promoting white genocide and degeneracy. Talks
about the need to quote unquote collapse Jewish occupied governments.
The manifesto states that his motivation for wanting to kill
Trump was to sow chaos and raise public awareness that

(01:54:24):
quote assassinations at accelerating the collapse are possible things to do,
unquote not that possible, since he's arrested and did not
accelerate the collapse. But he also advocates that people unable
to commit to taking direct action instead make connections with
other white supremacists and grow a network to take over
the country once America collapses. He recommends the writing of

(01:54:45):
Nazi accelerationists, including James Mason, who wrote the influential Nazi
book Siege, and the Terror gram Collective, a group of
white premacists from around the world who organize on the
messaging platform Telegram to share guides on how to do terrorism.
He also recommends the writings of former Adam Waffen members,
an American accelerationist group, writing quote, there's much to learn

(01:55:07):
from the successes and mistakes of Adam Waffin. I think
it's worth noting that Adam Waffin was also either like
infiltrated or partially co opted and inspired by some nine
A teachings. This is kind of how the more bizarre
and occultic influence of on nine A seeped more into
the kind of general American accelerationist Nazi mill you this

(01:55:29):
was like in like twenty eighteen. Now, Cassip advises that
if the reader of the manifesto is already like pilled,
that you should just skip the theory and just read
practical how to guides for terrorism and bomb making, since
quote unquote, there is no political solution. Huge amounts of
violence will be required long past the days where we
can vote for a Hitler to save us. White revolution

(01:55:52):
is the only solution, unquote, which is I guess I'm
kind of desensitized to this sort of stuff. In fact,
I just find this slightly funny considering kind of the
victory lap that like Steven Miller and like white nationalists
are currently having in the government where many of them
do think they can just vote for a Hitler to
save us, and that Hitler may may already be in
office forever.

Speaker 3 (01:56:12):
Well, that is, it's so shocking hearing all this as
someone that doesn't know all these details. I mean a,
I feel like the blinders just got taken off me
and now I'm seeing the world anew but be shocking
that from a more normy perspective, in my mind, I
would think all of these types would be pretty excited
about how things are going politically, not trying to tear
things down further. It's like you guys won you know,

(01:56:34):
accept it.

Speaker 10 (01:56:35):
Even Trump is not actually enough for a lot of
these guys. Yeah, they really go places now. Cassup was
coordinating with multiple telegram users, likely in Ukraine and Russia,
on how to build a drone that can drop an
explosive and paid some individuals for some of the required materials,
and also had a plan to flee to Ukraine after
his attack. That he was coordinating with Ukrainian Nazis on telegram.

Speaker 3 (01:56:58):
Tough look for telegrams.

Speaker 10 (01:57:01):
It's always a tough look for telegram. Not great, not
a great platform, pretty much only used by these guys.

Speaker 8 (01:57:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:57:10):
No, he was talking about how he probably needs to
quote unquote brush up on my Russian Oh yeah, definitely
before he flees to Ukraine after trying to kill the president.

Speaker 3 (01:57:20):
Yeah, you download due LINGO after you do.

Speaker 10 (01:57:22):
That, that's right, that's right. He had plans to meet
up with with ten people with similar beliefs in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 (01:57:30):
My mind is just so blown by all this. I
thought I knew things. I know nothing now.

Speaker 10 (01:57:35):
On March tenth, Sheriffs interviewed a classmate of Cassup, and
the classmate told them that the Cassup would send quote
unquote gore edit videos that includes flashing like gore like
bodygore imagery and war images put to Russian music sent
via Snapchat. This is a common tactic done by these

(01:57:57):
sort of like teenage extremists. This is this is a
whole like subgenre of video that has like changed and
altered in aesthetic multiple times. Frankly, if you spend enough
time on Twitter now in the comments of blue Check
Neo Nazis, you can find some some of these edits
where they have like you know, like techno techno, like
fast paced sometimes like Russian music set to like you know,

(01:58:18):
glorified images of like like like Rome or Nazi Germany,
or a large variety of stuff. But the gore genre
is specifically unique to kind of the to the oh
nine to a like a culti Nazi branch, because they
think that like viewing these images like increases your power
level of like evil. Right, It's a very video game
view of like of like spiritual development of like you

(01:58:40):
have to you have to like raise your evil stat
by looking at Gore and this will make you more
able to commit like big acts of violence.

Speaker 3 (01:58:47):
WHOA So just desensitizing yourself. So the image just makes
you a more violent person and capable of doing these
things yourself.

Speaker 10 (01:58:53):
Correct correct, And that's like a big part of their process. This,
this is why they send this type of to a
lot of kids on the internet, because they hope that
if they decenitize these kids, it'll be easier to convince
them to then do acts of violence themselves. Cassup told
his classmate that he intended to kill his parents by
shooting them, but could not because he didn't have access

(01:59:14):
to a gun. He later told his classmate that he
would befriend someone with a gun and then steal it,
and told him that he was in contact with a
male in Russia via telegram and that they were both
plotting to overthrow the government of the United States and
assassinate Resident Trump. Cassip told the classmate that when he
saw ten consecutive attacks in the news, it would have

(01:59:35):
to be him.

Speaker 3 (01:59:36):
I've already transitioned to this sort of person who can
now laugh at this because of the absurdity.

Speaker 10 (01:59:41):
Oh my gosh, and get those laughs in now, because
the next section is much more dark. Oh no, because
it's funny to laugh at a guy like this who
mostly failed. I mean, he did kill his parents, that is.
Oh no, he did kill his parents. He did flee
through a different state. He wasn't smart enough to he
at least tracked him on him and his parents' cell

(02:00:02):
phone and their car who he still had with him.
So yet not a very good attacker, I guess. But no,
like this, this kid murder of his parents sat in
the house with their decomposing bodies for twelve days before
trying to carry out the rest of his attack on
the United States. So yeah, though he did not succeed

(02:00:24):
in his larger goals like these, these people still absolutely
do get like groomed into doing violence. And this is
something that happens at a pretty frequent basis, honestly, to
the point where these types of things don't make giant
headlines anymore. They would have maybe in twenty seventeen, but
now a lot of journalists are desensitized to this, and
because it happens so frequently, it is less newsworthy, which

(02:00:48):
is a very unfortunate place to be in for a country.
Do you know what else is unfortunate? Michael?

Speaker 3 (02:00:53):
Oh, what what's that?

Speaker 10 (02:00:55):
Having to pivot to ads actually necessary evil.

Speaker 3 (02:00:58):
It's way better than killing your fend.

Speaker 10 (02:01:00):
Yes, yes, I will go on record. I will go
on record. Eat me get aboord. Sorry, I love ads. Actually,
as it heads up, the next section will reference online

(02:01:23):
exploitation and child sexual abuse material. All right, we are back.
Let's get more depressing. Unfortunately, but I think we will
find a way to turn this around. Well, not like
in an optimistic way, but in a way that it's
like useful. Well, well, we'll learn something together. So at
the end of this section of this complaint that attempts

(02:01:45):
to describe Cassip's collapse driven political ideology is the appearance
of this new term, nihilistic violent extremists right now. This
was actually the second time this term has appeared in
court documents. The earliest appearance of this term was in
a March sentencing memo for a child sexual abuse material
case first filed in November of twenty twenty four, which

(02:02:06):
was linked to the seven six four child extortion and
exploitation network. Ken Kleppenstein, who first reported on the use
of the nihilism term, missed this first appearance and attributed
the origin to the cassup case. Michael, are you similarly
unfortunate enough to be aware of seven six'?

Speaker 3 (02:02:24):
Four this is another one where my brain is more
pure than. YOURS i guess at this point for dad
to get, Ruined so let's still let's do.

Speaker 10 (02:02:32):
It, YEAH i mean it has been for a lot of,
people Like I've i've been doing like extremism, research And
i've been aware of these guys for about four. Years
THE fbi think first did their like public announcement like
warning parents about this in twenty twenty. Three seven six
four is like a network of groups that operate either on, Discord, Telegram,

(02:02:53):
instagram social media. Apps they're kind of inspired by some
aspects OF oz NINE, a but they are much more
focused on the production and district abution of child sexual
abuse materials and trying to manipulate groom and like blackmail
and extort miners into producing this. MATERIAL a lot of
it's done by other miners, Too like a lot of
this is teens targeting other teens with adults kind of

(02:03:15):
helping this process. Along it's a pretty big. Problem there's
been some good reporting on it In wired And The
guardian the past few, years if you want to read. More,
now This march sentencing memo for the seven six four
case describes seven six four and related groups as quote
nihilist violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct within The

(02:03:36):
United states and engage with other extremists. Abroad the seven
six to four Networks accelerationist goals include social unrest in
the downfall of the current world, order including The United states.
Government members of seven six four work in concert with
one another towards a common purpose of destroying civilized society
through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable, populations including. Miners. Quote,

(02:03:57):
NOW i think this this definition may be a bit to,
generalizing but it's not. Incorrect like, this this is correct
in what the explicit goals of this group, are maybe
not just every individual member of this. Group BUT i
think it would be a mistake to kind of dismiss
this definition as outlandishly, grandiose. Right it kind of it

(02:04:19):
calls into like my you, know like conspiracy, theory like,
framing because it sounds very like extravagant and, complicated and
it kind of, is but it's it's also like. Simple
it's it's people trying to automate the process of producing
and distributing illegal. Materials BUT i do believe it is
a mistake to completely dismiss, this both in terms of
like the government trying to ascribe political motive for the

(02:04:41):
distribution of these, materials and also the ideological justifications held
by some members of these. Groups now there have been
two more seven six four cases From april of twenty
twenty five that have used the nihilist of violent extremism
designation in court. Documents, now part of kind of the
struggle with this, is Like Ken kippenstein, reported, quote it

(02:05:02):
sounds to me like some demented philosophical justification for just
being a, pedophile and like it, Is but that doesn't
mean the political motivations shouldn't be, discounted because those motivations
impact how they, operate how these groups, spread which targets they,
pick and other political actions members might, take like mass

(02:05:22):
shootings targeting racial, minorities TARGETING lgbtq. Individuals so, yeah this
is kind of WHY i push back a little bit
on this kind of dismissive tone towards this like, larger
almost conspiratorial kind of matrix put onto groups like seven
and six. Four, now part of the tricky thing with
use of this new nihilism term is that it's being

(02:05:44):
used to rope in a variety of horrific incidents under
a singular nebulous. Category, Right so let's take the case
Of Cassip. Here Cass up that the guy who killed
his parents in a plata collapse The United, states is
a relatively bog standard like Neo nazi accelerationist with seemingly
no direct ties to seven to six four activity besides
an interest IN o NINE, a which was just one

(02:06:05):
of the inspirations that influenced seven to sixty four as
it evolved into its own complex machine about five years.
Ago But cassup openly admitted to being radicalized By nazism
and the White power movement, online and yet in his
criminal complaint contains an expanded version of the nihilist violent extremism,
definition which is literally copy and pasted from a child

(02:06:26):
sexual abuse material sentencing memo from five days. Before so
they just used this same thing despite it not really.
Applying reading. Quote individuals are targeted online often through synchronized group.
Chats nihilist of violent extremists frequently conduct coorinated extortions of
individuals by blackmailing them so they comply with demands of the.
Network these demands vary and, include but are not limited,

(02:06:46):
to self mutilation online or in, person sexual, as harms to, animals,
sex sexual exploitation of siblings and, others acts of, violence
threats of, violence, suicide and. Murder so very very dark.
Stuff the definition goes on to state how Vulnerable india
are targeted and members of the group attempt to gain
notoriety throughout the network and spread fear among those targeted

(02:07:06):
individuals for the purpose of accelerating the downfall of society
and otherwise achieving the goal of nihilist violent. Extremists so
while that does accurately describe groups like seven six, four
it doesn't really relate to the case Of. Cassup it's
tricky because a lot of these seven and six four
guys are Also, nazis and a lot Of nazis are also.
Pedophiles some of these guys start off as like evil

(02:07:30):
occultic pedophiles who associate With nazism because it's a pretty
universal symbol of, evil and sometimes it's the vice versa
where they start off as like an antisemitic right, winger
A nazi or A, fascist who then associate with this
weird pedo occult stuff for a variety of reasons like,
spiritual perverted pleasure or tactical network, building and usually usually

(02:07:51):
it's a, Mix klippenstein, writes. Quote the warrant Alleges cassip
was in touch with The order Of Nine, angles A
satanic Neo nazi group that spouses except, racism a fancy
word for the belief that destabilizing the social order allows
for radical. Change that is pretty heady stuff to ascribe
to a seventeen year old and ends up having the
feeling of an episode of altered carbon, unquote AND i

(02:08:13):
kind of like reject this dismissive, Framing, like, no these
seventeen year olds are thinking about, This they are getting
convinced of this material. Online that is the motivation for
this isn't like a science fiction. Thing this is real
and it's pretty common among like extremists this. Age there's
a lot of young teenage male extremists that's kind of
their main, demographic and this type of stuff is popular

(02:08:36):
like this is at least popular within this small group of.
Extremists so, yeah it is a little bit, heady but
this is what they are genuinely thinking about. It it's
not incorrect to like ascribe that to. Them cassap openly
admitted to this connection well.

Speaker 3 (02:08:51):
And even speak to the flip side of. That you,
know over the years making philosophy stuff on, YouTube i've
gotten in touch with people who reached out to be, like,
Oh i've been watching stuff since high. School WHEN i
was like, FIFTEEN i was watching these like philosophy YouTube
videos on heady ideas and reading.

Speaker 10 (02:09:06):
Stuff so like, ME i was one of these.

Speaker 3 (02:09:08):
People, yeah there's like young folks out there who take
big ideas very seriously and they have, more absolutely less
than every of these. Things so it doesn't and it
doesn't shock me at all that some teen could go
down that rabbit hole or even could start reading like
A Kurtis jarvin Or Nick land and going down those
rabbit holes and, stuff especially now that some of these
people are you, know put on like The New York

(02:09:28):
times and stuff like. That so, exactly it seems weird
to dismiss. THAT i can understand the impulse to be,
like this just seems like a very, stupid evil teen. Kid,
totally it seems just as. Plausible like you're pointing out
that there could be an actual engagement with, ideas and
it's important to recognize that because then you have to
get at the root of that.

Speaker 10 (02:09:47):
Exactly and, like these people aren't necessarily like philosophical nihilists
or existential. Nihilists, yeah but they could be interpreted as
reacting to a general like passive nihilist culture with this
form of like pseudo political, nihlige this attempt at like social,
negation like total systems. Collapse but even still they aren't
total like political, nihilists since they have a very clear

(02:10:09):
system of hierarchy that they want the current world order replaced.
With though these individuals may be seen as like victims
of nihilism and like like in like The nietzschean. Sense, now,
like my main problem with the nihilist violent extremism term
is that it's so depoliticized and like in a way
that's rife for political. Abuse this term can be used

(02:10:30):
to cover what the government deems as violence stemming from
like apathy from frustration with, society as well as like
anti tech or anti civilization, politics and this is all
coming from like top down at the New Federal bureau Of.
Investigation for, Years Cash bettel has closely associated WITH, QAnon
has helped the legal defense campaigns For january sixth, insurrectionists

(02:10:52):
which Included Proud, Boys ousekeepers since Three, percenters and now
as head of THE, fbi he's INVESTIGATING fbi agents who
worked Those january sixth. Cases Joe, kent the new director
of The national Counter Terrorism, center has made media appearances
With Nick fuentes and Neo nazi YouTuber David. Carlson he
Hired Proud boys to consult in his failed congressional, campaign
and his friends With Patriot prayer Leader Joey. Gibson kent

(02:11:14):
has repeatedly called for THE fbi to INVESTIGATE. Antifa the
co founder of The Global Project against And, Extremism Heidi,
barrick has said That PATEL'S QAnon links And deputy Director
Dan bongino's public conspiracism and bigotry make taking the threat
of far right extremism quote unquote impossible for these two.
Men she, says, QUOTE i think it makes it very

(02:11:36):
unlikely that the far right will continue to be seen
as the threat it actually is in terms of hate
crimes and domestic. Terrorism all of this marks a huge
departure from the First trump, administration where THE fbi for
the first time Declared White premacy the country's greatest domestic terrorism.
Threat facts about violence and its perpetuators probably won't matter
this time, around, Unquote and these changes are already taking.

(02:11:58):
Place an old counter terrorism try guide was removed from
The White house website In. JANUARY a CURRENT fbi agent
was quoted In Vanity fair as, saying, quote the key
is The Domestic Intelligence Operations. Guide if they change, That
patel will be able to shift domestic terrorism investigations away
from the accelerationists and the right wing street fighters and
towards things LIKE blm And antifa. Unquote patel has cut

(02:12:21):
The Domestic Terrorism office staffing and reassigned agents and intelligence,
analysts with new SENIOR fbi officials reportedly considering to disband
the Entire Domestic Terrorism operations. Section in, addition THE fbi
has discontinued their previous Domestic Terrorism tracking, tool where they
take relevant investigations to identify and track trends for terrorism

(02:12:43):
probes across the. Country sources for outlets Like reuters say
that changes to the agency will reduce counter terrorism operations
against far right and racially motivated extremists and. Militias Jacob,
ware a domestic terrorism expert at The council On Foreign,
relations Told, reuters, quote there is a broader, DESIRE i
think within the administration to at best ignore data and

(02:13:03):
put their head in the, sand and at worst to
realign resources away from this battle. UNQUOTE a spokesperson For
Higher Representative Jim jordan Told reuters that the termination of
the domestic terrorism tracking tool is a quote great step
in the right direction of returning THE fbi to its
primary crime fighting mission. Unquote Representative jordan previously in twenty

(02:13:25):
twenty three ran a congressional panel that alleged THE fbi
terrorism case tagging tool was being improperly used to target.
Conservatives After january, sixth three FORMER fbi agents testified at
The republican led, panel and two of those former agents
admitted to being paid By, patel who at the time
was not director of THE. Fbi he was just a

(02:13:45):
right wing. Influencer after being kicked out of the government
after the First trump. Administration we've also seen The Joint
Terrorism Task force largely shift their efforts towards immigration, enforcement
HELPING ice with deeperas rotations and the so called wave
Of tesla. Terrorism and like the other thing is that

(02:14:07):
this new nihilist violent extremism term isn't just replacing A.
Gave it's not just replacing the anti government or anti
authority of biolin. Extremism because THE agave term itself has three.
Subcategories as reference to AN fbi document that outlines domestic
terrorism activity from twenty fifteen to twenty, nineteen this includes
militia violent, extremists anarchist violent, extremists and sovereign citizen violent.

(02:14:28):
Extremists and even in addition to those, three there's actually
a newer subclassification from twenty twenty three called A gave,
other which really isn't a great term at. All this
is the problem with trying to use these like tracking
and tagging tools is that they can get very. Convoluted
but now they've seemingly collapsed all of these and are

(02:14:49):
just using the term.

Speaker 3 (02:14:50):
Nihilism so would you, say like when you bring up
The tesla, example is one of to be very reductive.
Here the big risks at play that like someone who
Starts tesla on fire or causes some damage at A
tesla dealership largely for the motivation of trying to stick
it To Elon musk or something like that gets classified

(02:15:11):
in a way by THE fbi that is similar to
some of the folks you have previously talked about exactly
doing things that most rational humans can agree are deeply
more insidious than like set a car on.

Speaker 10 (02:15:21):
Fire they can frame this as like a rejection of. Society,
yeah the same, Way like there's been talk that they're
going to try to use this label to explain cases
like The United HEALTHCARE ceo, shooting ars attack At Josh shapiro's.
House they're going to be using this term to apply
to kind of any act that they see is like
a contrary to like society and civilization and anything that's

(02:15:42):
stemming from frustration with. Society and that's a huge. Problem
and in doing, so they're shifting focus away from like
right wing militias who do the majority of like actual lethal.
Violence when these reports from like the past five years talk,
about you, know militia violent, extremism it talks about how
there is an increased to lethal threat from these militias

(02:16:03):
to law, enforcement the government personnel due to factors related
to grievances from the perceptions of fraud in the twenty twenty,
election government measures related TO covid nineteen and legislation to
restrict firearms or expand immigration or manage public. Land and
these are the people that do the vast majority of
planned attacks or executed. Attacks this report between twenty three

(02:16:24):
outlines two attempted bombings by militia violenctreamists in early twenty twenty,
one one by an individual targeted against data center thought
to provide services to THE fbi AND, cia the author
by two people against a State Democratic party headquarters In, Sacramento,
california as well as the quote unquote t do dozens
of militia violenctarymists arrested for their involvement In january. Sixth

(02:16:45):
so even though we're going to take the gas off
of groups like those as well as as racially motivated,
violenceremists this definition can still include a lot Of like
anarchist violent, actremists which the fbidmits into twenty twenty three,
report are most likely to engage in non lethal criminal
activity and just impact law enforcement.

Speaker 3 (02:17:03):
Operations, yeah it makes me think of like climate activism as,
well and you, know the work of those in the
climate community that call for like the destruction of equipment
and not the harm of human life.

Speaker 10 (02:17:13):
TOTALLY i.

Speaker 3 (02:17:14):
Mean and the irony of course that you could call
someone you, know disabling an oil pipeline a nihilist extremists
when the act they're doing is precisely for the purpose
of ensuring the continued existence of human civilization on a large.

Speaker 10 (02:17:27):
Scale that's the big issue, Here like The trump government
still wants a term that focuses on what some people
would like colloquially refer to as like accelerationist, terrorism and
that does encompass some of the extremist violence from the
weirder corners of the far, right like in the case Of,
cassup but as well as as like leftists or post

(02:17:47):
left like anarchistic. Extremism but in the administration's, mind the
previous terms for this were tainted by crackdowns on right
wing or patriot movements After january, Sixth and like the nihilist,
violence streamism is not replacing the term terrorism, Necessarily like
the Way clippenstein's suggested in his, article the word terrorism
appears frequently in these very documents that we've been. Discussing

(02:18:10):
nor does the term terrorism have quote unquote limitations in,
law As clippenstein said that like prevent its use in political.
Prosecution if, anything it carries kind of special powers of
punishment which can be over applied to increase the, sentences sway,
juries and strip. Rights we've seen bills to Label antifa
as terrorists introduced to this, year the Whole tesla terrorism,

(02:18:30):
thing and, historically like the use of terrorism has been
used as a repression tool In Atlanta's Stop Cop city,
movement which similarly has like a climate focus like you.
Mentioned and what this new nihilism term lets them do
is it allows The drop administration to signal to their
base that they aren't going to be going after like
right wing malicious style groups, anymore not anti, government anti authority. Chemists,

(02:18:53):
instead they're just going to target zany weirdos who want
to destroy. Society it's a, looser more flexible term that
can be applied to a much wider swath of. People
and like the kind of final THING i want TO
i want to note here is that four groups like
like seven six, four we really don't have a good
term for them like sometimes some people have defended this
nihilistic term specifically four groups like seven six, four since

(02:19:14):
that was where it originally appeared in an industry that
these groups kind of defy classic. Categorization some of them
are certainly motivated by racial bias in the case Of,
cassup who's like tied WITH o AND, a but not
specifically seven six. Four but a lot of these other
seven six four guys who are mostly in it for the,
pedophilia still do have anti government ideologies that they are
roped in. With, NOW i have seen a few alternative

(02:19:36):
terms lofted by certain independent researchers that don't really do
a good job but are gaining influence Under trump's. Government
there's this like freelance researcher Named becca or Bicks wrights
who mostly operates On. Twitter she's proposed the Term satanic
accelerationism or s act not Good and this kind of

(02:19:57):
outlines my problems with this person's research now out because
all of the legitimate extremism researchers have kind of moved
away From twitter and are just On Blue. Sky, now
people like this have like exploded in influence Under elon's
shepherding Of, twitter and like this this person just spreads
like satanic panic style writing that appeals to Conservative christian.
Audiences she boasts about how many mutuals she has with

(02:20:19):
These nazi. Terrorists she posts On, rumble she went on Info,
wars so that kind of tells you everything you need
to know about this. Person and like a big part
of her work is trying to downplay the right wing
and a white supremacist influence in. Extremism she excitedly posted,
quote THE fbi has coined a new term for this
type of, individual nihilist bilin. Extremists this makes me so

(02:20:41):
happy because it indicates that law enforcement are listening to
researchers on the ground and are no longer considering these
groups Neo nazis or quote unquote white. Supremacist so, yeah
this is a big part of this push is appealing
to these types of people who don't want their weird
pedo freaks to be labeled as right, wing even though
they all are pretty far right wing terrorists in most.

(02:21:04):
Cases this researcher also a falsely linked cast up with
A ukrainian A nazi a group CALLED. Mku she later
retracted this claim on, substack but left the original viral
tweet up online Because, hey. Engagement her substack post reads.
Quote WHEN i first heard the news Of nicota cast,
up my mind immediately darted to another NINE a AND

(02:21:25):
mku linked individual Named. Nicota this turned out to be
a mere, COINCIDENCE i, know because the Other nikota reached
out to me personally to. Clarify it's moments like these
that cause me to reflect on just how big this
movement really is and just how close to the FIRE i. Am.
Unquote this is not how you do extremism. Reporting this
is not how you do. Journalism but this does demonstrate

(02:21:46):
kind of the problem with this term is, that, yeah
groups like this do need a different, term maybe like,
accelerationists violent. Acreamists that's a term you could use that
if you're going to remove all the other. Acronyms but
certainly the nihilism label just kind of complicates things and
allows for the targeting of just a massive swath of
the population that could become like political prosecutions that then

(02:22:08):
get linked to these child sexual abast material. Cases, okay
that is my that's my that's my. Script, Michael how
do you feel about that?

Speaker 3 (02:22:17):
Info.

Speaker 10 (02:22:17):
Dump i'm so, sorry.

Speaker 3 (02:22:18):
TRULY i you know you've AND i can send it to.
It you've extracted a part of my soul and put
it into a cosmic. Toilet, TODAY i know more Than
i've known, before as a as a, human as An,
american as a. Parent i'm terrified on every. Front and you,
know my simple guy takeaway here is the, yeah like

(02:22:40):
the idea that this is going to both let some
of the worst folks off the, hook or at least
make it harder to classify them with the groups that
should be classified, with while also making it easier to
lump in forms of what many of us would consider
more reasonable political activism under that umbrella is quite. Bad

(02:23:01):
AND i, think of course for, me due to my
my pet. Interest you, know all of these instances of
continuing to, like, pervert and misuse philosophical terms to have
meanings developed over hundreds and thousands of years for these political,
ends it is very.

Speaker 10 (02:23:16):
Upset, Well i'm excited to usher in the new wave
Of kirkergardian violent extremists who are gonna usher in.

Speaker 2 (02:23:23):
To get me on a.

Speaker 3 (02:23:24):
List stop.

Speaker 10 (02:23:25):
IT i am actually sorry that this went on nearly
double the length of WHICH i thought it had. Planned
after such a depressing, Episode i'm gonna ask kind of
an odd, question what philosophy booked do you think people
should read in this political, Moment because a lot of
people are approaching me with like like how DO i stay?

(02:23:46):
Sane how DO i stay how DO i like keep
going when things feel so? Bad and for, Me i've
always turned to. Philosophy i've been recommending different books to different,
friends And i'm kind of interested, in like what you
have to say about kind of what philosophy can offer
us in these times of like existential.

Speaker 3 (02:24:03):
Torment, YEAH i mean a really simple one THAT i
talk about way too much is cure care. Guards the present,
age which you find in this book Called Two, ages
that's easy to. Buy it's normally really, cheap or you
can just read it online. Someplace that kind of describes
a society in which people get caught up in media
and reflection and the bs they are told rather than

(02:24:24):
developing their subjectivity for. Themselves and think that one's really.
Great in terms of more contemporary, Stuff i've been Very
Frederick jamison pilled recently nice AND i THINK i Mean
i've Read jamison before on and, off but recently dove
in more. Deeply and there's One, OKAY i have it
at arms, reach SO i can say that the title
correctly That i've really been. Enjoying it's called An American.

(02:24:45):
Utopia Dual power in The Universal army By Frederick, jamison
edited by Saw, Voygiak and it's this Large jamison essay
about what he sees as an alternative for leftist power In,
america responses from a bunch of other. SCHOLARS i have
found it very. Interesting but for, me at, LEAST i
find comfort in the fact that others have accurately diagnosed

(02:25:08):
and understood what is happening right now and at least
give us the tools to understand the, thing so it
feels less nebulous and.

Speaker 10 (02:25:16):
Mysterious we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the. Time,
Yeah and that's something THAT i feel like some leftists
kind of get trapped, in or it's kind of a
two sides. Thing is what some people just get fully lost,
in like the labyrinth of, theory and the other people
get lost and trying to constantly reinvent or like make
for the first time stuff that already. Exists, Right AND

(02:25:37):
i think there's a really careful balance between like reading
some stuff so that you can like know what's going
on and not feel the need to try. To like
you cause every you, know philosophical evolution to come about
via your own.

Speaker 3 (02:25:50):
Thought, yeah you don't have to be the one to do.
It someone else are you Doing.

Speaker 10 (02:25:54):
You're not, alone like other people have done, this and
you should still like think for yourself and still. Compare
but people have thought about this type of, stuff but
for people have been in bad political situations, before and
it's useful to know what they've. Thought and like this is,
like you, know my work is mostly looking at like
current events and like trying to track but like extremism
and like what the government is, doing and you, know
more information always helps me choose how to navigate in the.

(02:26:16):
World that's why do episodes like. This AND i think
philosophy is just one other side of. That unless you
have anything else to, say do you want to talk
about where people can find you? Online and your new YouTube?

Speaker 3 (02:26:27):
Channel, YEAH i have a recently launched YouTube channel that's
just under the Name michael Oh burns AND i think
it's literally just YouTube Slash MICHAEL O burns them quickly.
Yep YouTube Slash Michael oburns Or i'm gonna be doing
more stuff quite, regularly extremes and video, essays largely doing
some of the stuff we were just talking, about using

(02:26:49):
philosophy and concepts from theory and from theory to try
to understand what's going on in both the political and
like the social and interpersonal, Levels Like i'm working on
a Thing i'm excited about on like, depression, capitalism and mental.
Health so, yeah And i'm on all most of the
social Media's i'm Just Michael burns Or MICHAEL. O, burns
relatively easy to find on most.

Speaker 10 (02:27:09):
Places, well thank you so, Much michael for joining me
in this dive through the darkest depths of The internet
and the extremism milieu that is festering In america and.

Speaker 3 (02:27:21):
Abroad thanks for having.

Speaker 2 (02:27:23):
Me welcome to it could happen.

Speaker 1 (02:27:45):
Here I'm Robert, evans and this is a podcast about
things falling, apart which they always seem to be these,
days and in, particular this is an episode about what
to expect out of the next six months to a.
Year if you're not sure what else to, do try
and spread. CALM i first learned this lesson back in

(02:28:06):
twenty sixteen hanging out with Perennial libertarian presidential Candidate Vermin
supreme during the protests around that Year's Democratic invention In.
Philadelphia if you've never had the pleasure of Seeing vermin
at a, protest he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot,
cops and his example taught me a lot about how
to communicate to a group of, angry scared people in tense.

(02:28:27):
Situations those lessons came in handy for me back in twenty.
Twenty but The George Floyd uprising is now almost five
years in the. Past trump is once again in. Power
very little seems to stand between him and the exercise
of a kind of, arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation
has seldom seen within its own, borders but as often sponsored,

(02:28:48):
elsewhere Including El, salvador Where trump has sent hundreds Of
american residents and plans to send, thousands perhaps tens of thousands.
More the purpose of this essay is to provide my
predictions for the next six months to a. Year What
i'm writing here is, speculative but it is based on
the best DATA i have available and numerous Conversations i've

(02:29:09):
had with activists current federal, employees former, soldiers and retired law.
Enforcement there are a million places WHERE i could, start
BUT i feel like the most responsible place to begin
is by answering this, question is now the time to?
Panic last, year After biden's disastrous debate, PERFORMANCE i put
out a podcast essay Titled Don't. Panic it was my

(02:29:32):
most shared episode of this podcast that, year AND i
felt pretty good about the response Until trump won, again
AND i found it briefly impossible to take my own.
Advice Since january of twenty twenty, five the fascist takeover
has only, accelerated AND i have lost count of the
number of people who've asked, me is it time to?
Panic the answer to that is still, no but not

(02:29:56):
because there's no reason to. Panic in, fact panic is
a natural reaction to our present. Moment if your fight
or flight reflexes haven't been, triggered well they might be.
Broken even, so don't, panic because in combat and, disasters
in any dangerous situation you might find yourself panic is

(02:30:16):
what will kill you as surely as anything. Else there's
a concept in military THEORY i bring up, often something
introduced to soldiers undergoing training. Today it's called the ode.
Loop it describes the process people go through while acting
and reacting under, fire and particularly while deciding how to
act and react under. Fire it stands for, observe, orient,

(02:30:40):
decide and. Act if you can interrupt any part of that,
loop you can stop your enemy from fighting back. Effectively
the basic principle of THE oda loop functions on the
grand strategy scale as well as it does in a.
Gunfight this is the point behind the flood the zone,
strategy orchestrated By Stephen miller and the other intellectual loom
and aaries Behind trump. Too the fire hose of outrage

(02:31:03):
is to distract you from observing everything that's, happening to
keep you off balance so you can't orient, yourself to
stop you from deciding and. Acting Elon musk's purchase Of
twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit. CANON ai accelerated the
spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst,
nightmares and this has helped blind and divide the people

(02:31:26):
who should have linked arms to stop this shit before
it got to the point that it's at. TODAY i
want you to think of how many prominent leftists have
fallen repeatedly for right wing propaganda like. That russia would
never Invade, ukraine or That trump might actually be somehow
better For. Gaza these and a million other things have
blinded and hobbled potential. RESISTANCE i might also bring up

(02:31:49):
the Whole maga communist, movement but the less set about those,
people the. Better, meanwhile columnists at liberal legacy publications Like
The times have fallen for every hyped up story about
transgender athletes or woke kids on college, campuses and the
danger of the illiberal left poses to free. Speech they've
denied genocide and demonized those who protest against, it and

(02:32:10):
too many Elected democrats have taken their lead as the
path of least. Resistance many have pulled right for reasons
far more. Sinister the fact That Gavin, newsom governor Of,
california is hosting fascists on his new podcasts while mailing
burner phones to tech CEOs points towards something, dark, immediate.
Deadly we live now in the culmination of a successful

(02:32:34):
decades long plot, two in the words Of Curtis, jarvin
repeal the twentieth century and turn this nation into a
dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are
the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money
or invested In facebook back in like two thousand and.
Five the early stages of the, plan of, course date

(02:32:55):
back well Before Peter tiele Or Elon musk Or Donald
trump begin and when a coalition of would be oligarchs
tried to OVERTHROW fdr in what has become known as
The Business, plot and were thwarted by A marine general
Named Smedley. Butler these men wanted revenge for The New,
deal but they found seizing power at the top harder
than they'd, hoped and so they embarked on a, slower

(02:33:18):
bottom up. Approach hence The John Birch, society the creation
of countless think, tanks and the generation's long effort to
stack The Supreme. Court the war on abortion was a
concerted step towards this, plan an artificial creation alongside the
birth of the religious right as a political. Coalition there
was initially a small group of men at the center

(02:33:39):
of the, web guys Like William Brignery won And William
Brignery doo Or Paul. Wayrich but the engine of cultural
and political change forged from the late forties to the
nineteen seventies was so successful that at some point it
became self, perpetuating and when a gaggle of tech bros
found themselves with more wealth than any humans had ever,
held the machine was there to mold them and to

(02:34:01):
be used by. Them it's all worked so damn well
that many PEOPLE i know have lost hope. Entirely we're,
fucked goes the. Script they're gonna send us to the,
camps and they can't be, stopped at least not without apocalyptic.
Bloodshed well that's not necessarily. So now people have already
died as a result of this, administration a lot of,
them and that will continue to. Happen but a collapse

(02:34:25):
into total carnage is not, inevitable nor is a future
that offers us nothing but a.

Speaker 2 (02:34:30):
Boot upon our.

Speaker 1 (02:34:30):
Necks despite the money that went into building this is
a new house made with cheap, materials and there are
already cracks in the. Foundation so my first prediction for
the coming months is, This the cracks will, widen and
we'll talk about, that but, first as we're obligated to,
do here's some. Ads trump and the men who swim

(02:35:01):
in his wake signal only. Strength honesty is neither in
their interest nor a strong. Suit But Curtis, yarvin chief
profit of the Neo reactionaries And Peter teel's pet, philosopher
is in a different. Position he knows people in power
listen to some of what he has to, say and
over the last few months his profile has risen. ENORMOUSLY
i can take credit for at least tiny amount of.

(02:35:22):
That many normal liberals and Elected democrats now know who he.
Is this exposes him to a danger that was not
present for him During trump's first. Term if the current
fascist salience should be pushed back and this movement, fails
there could be and should be, Prosecutions and he rightly
fears that if this, happens he might follow in the

(02:35:43):
footsteps Of Alfred, rosenberg The nazi high theoretician who was
executed At. Nuremberg that's why On march sixth he published
a messi, sprawling seven thousand word essay Titled barbarians And
mandarins in his trademark nigh unreadable. Style it comes with the.
Subheading as soon as it stops, accelerating it stalls and.

(02:36:04):
Explodes if you want to spare yourself the headache of
reading through one tenth of a novel of yarvins at
best turgid. Prose there's a good article by the Nerd
reich that breaks all this. Down we'll link it in
the show, notes but the gist is That yarvin Thinks
musk And trump have been too, slow have embraced too
many half, measures and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards. Disaster.

(02:36:29):
Quote unless the spectacular earthquakes Of january And february are
dwarfed In march And april by new and unprecedented abuses
of The richter, scale The trump regime will start to
wither and eventually. Dissipate it cannot stay at its current
level of, power which is too high to sustain but
too low to. Succeed it has to keep doing things
that have never been done. Before as soon as it stops,

(02:36:51):
accelerating it stalls and. Explodes now the week's since have
seen massive and rising public awareness Of seacott the terrorism
TO tenh facility In El salvador being used as a
concentration camp by The trump. Regime this might rightly be
called a new and unprecedented. Abuse but there's a couple
of issues, Here at least as far As yarvin sees.

(02:37:11):
Them for one, thing the people targeted there have been,
migrants people who are in THE us either illegally or
in THE us on visas that have been, revoked people
who have been accused of being part Of, trindagua but
not the people That yarvin wants to see, liquidated, because
as he writes in this, column the thing that he
thinks The trump administration should be doing right now is

(02:37:34):
quite literally gassing media personalities and politicians who don't align
with his, viewpoint basically literally killing the. Opposition and since
he's shown to be unwilling to do, that the fact
that he's shipping people to concentration camps on its own
isn't terrifying. Enough, now the other thing that's Concerning yarvin

(02:37:55):
is that while the use of this facility In El
salvador as a foreign concentration camp by The trump regime
is terrifying and is, unprecedented it's also been met with
a significant, response one that burges on unprecedented. Itself i'm
not just talking about the protests or of the Recent
Supreme court ruling ordering a temporary halt of such. Deportations

(02:38:17):
i'm referring to something else that's happened due to the
sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our president has
a concentration camp and has been talking about SHIPPING us
citizen dissidents. There i'm talking about stuff like the fact
that formerly conservative Columnist Bill crystal is now calling for
the outright abolition Of, ice and the arch Neoliberal Mealymouth

(02:38:37):
David brooks calling for a general strike in the pages
of The New York times while quoting from The Communist.
Manifesto this is more than just a vibe. Shift it's
an open realization and acceptance by prominent people who are
neither radical nor revolutionaries that any, action even the formerly,
unimaginable might be necessary and justified in this. Region, now

(02:39:01):
make no. Mistake first, off this is because a lot
of these people are worried about their own privileges going
away under a dictatorial. Regime but that doesn't change the
fact that this is a crack in the very foundation
of the authoritarian power. Structure yarvin is scared, then because
we weren't supposed to be here. Now harvard was supposed

(02:39:22):
to have folded Like columbia and then have been slowly
and quietly. Liquidated the tame press was supposed to turn
wholly for the regime or be, disappeared not Quote Karl
marx and urge people into the streets to do a general.
Strike SO i don't find all this cheery BECAUSE i
Think David brooks is going to become Shithead Shay. GUEVARA
i am, embraced, however by the failure that this represents

(02:39:44):
for them and above us who seek unchecked. Dominance cracks
are also visible in the recent history Of Elon, musk
who has watched the value of the stock that underpins
his whole empire. Collapse he fought desperately to Convince trump
not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it.
Further the result we See trump assuring his inner circle
That elon is on the way, out While musk himself

(02:40:05):
prepares to step back from doge in the hope that
it will somehow protect the remainder of his. Ambitions these
are all good, signs and the damage will continue to. Spread,
however and this brings me to my next. Prediction The
empire's gonna strike. Back we are in for a hot,
summer my, friends and there's no way around. THAT i

(02:40:26):
mean this in the literal, sense that it will probably
be the hottest summer on, record although that fact will
be true of every subsequent summer in our. Lives BUT
i also mean this in the sense that things are
going to cook off in the streets very. Soon this
is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to.
See trump has made no secret of his desire to
use The Insurrection act not only at the, border but

(02:40:46):
to SEND us troops INTO us cities to crush riots
and punish leftist. Demonstrators this was a desire hatched in
reaction to The George floyd, uprising and it always seems
to be envisioned by the right as targeted against black
clad antifa. Types the reality is that anti fascists have
not been a consistent presence on the ground around the
country for some, time at least not organizing in the

(02:41:08):
way that they were back when antifa was a. Buzzword
there are numerous reasons for, this but the biggest is
that the fascist movement has moved beyond waving flags in
the street and getting into fist fights to try and scare.
PEOPLE a lot of them are running federal law enforcement
agencies in the. Military now Proud boys just tain't a,
priority not for those on the left who want to stop,

(02:41:29):
this or frankly for the. ADMINISTRATION i expect protests around
the country in the coming months for several, reasons but
the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption has a
rise in food, prices in the rise of everything else in,
price as well as a collapsing economy courtesy of the president's.
Tariffs there are already numerous signs of, this both in

(02:41:49):
terms of the volume of shipping coming into The United
states and early signs of collapsing crop yields in The United.
States and this is where a study of history helps one,
out because nothing but nothing brings down regimes like rising bread,
prizes and any attempt to crack down will be stymy
by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites

(02:42:09):
who Backed trump before will be suffering. Too, obviously the
people closest to him are making bank off the economic
upswings and downswings over the whole teriff. Issue but there's
a lot of other, people people who supported, him people
who thought he had their, back who weren't quite close
enough to, power and they're Watching trump shoot their own
fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free.

(02:42:31):
TRADE i won't pretend to know where things are gonna
pop off or will be the, hottest but the evidence
shows the regime at least Expects, washington D C to
play a central role in what comes. Next Republican congress
members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal DC's self, rule
And trump Appointed Ed martin to be the city, attorney
a man, who in the words OF Usa today Columnist

(02:42:54):
Chris brennan, quote lacks experience but loves. Revenge, now the
fact That Elon musk and His doze cronies left so
many in the city and the surrounding area unemployed after
their purge of the administrative state means that there's an
even higher number of, motivated angry people with free time
and experiencing organizing, large complex systems who have nothing to

(02:43:16):
do right. NOW a similar set of circumstances brought us
to the twenty twenty. Uprisings this was not just a
product of the months of isolation or of the brutality
Of George floyd's, murder but of the sheer number of
people who were out of work and who were finally
given a chance to take out their anxiety at an
authoritarian president tightening his. Grip and today that grip is

(02:43:38):
even tighter and the danger more. Real we have a
president openly discussing his desire to Put american citizens in
a foreign concentration. Camp trump and his inner circle are
hoping for protests that stay isolated TO dc and perhaps
a few major blue, Cities portland and the. Like this
would provide an opportunity to send in the, troops to
utilize The Insurrection act to s people in the, street

(02:44:01):
and to send some ring leaders off to L. Salvador
this would be the riskiest option For trump in some.
Ways Pete hegseth has not been a competent or Popular
secretary Of, defense and ASKING us troops to fire on
protesters opens up the risk that some junior officer might
bulk at that, order which could create a cascading chain of.
Disobedience such things have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout.

Speaker 2 (02:44:25):
History there's also the.

Speaker 1 (02:44:27):
Chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might
succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the. Cradle
so we might call this the high risk high reward,
option AND i should note That Donald trump has more
than a few times in the past chosen the high,
risk high reward, option SO i don't consider this. Unlikely

(02:44:47):
but it won't be lost On trump or his cronies
that the violence which met the first protest in twenty
twenty provoke the largest domestic uprising and living. Memory people
have not forgotten, this and some blue State democrats have
even made let's, say confusing noises to that. Effect case in,
Point Governor Bob ferguson Of washington just signed a bill
barring other State National guard units from Entering washington without

(02:45:10):
his approval unless they were mobilized by The. President, now
as that last part might key you when, on this
bill doesn't have a lot of legal force or any
really at, all but it's a sign that even fairly
milk toast Elected democrats are starting to consider the real
possibility of a federal invasion of their. States The president
has discussed sending out of state troops into blue cities,

(02:45:31):
before largely in the context of cracking down on immigration
and sanctuary. Cities this is all dangerous, language but going
further than just language carries risk for the regime. TOO
i would not be shocked if we were to see
The Texas National guard or, whoever whichever state occupying let's Say,
chicago after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats

(02:45:52):
that have been made by members of The trump administration
to arrest governors who aid in a bet undocumented migrants LIKE. Jb,
Pritzker and an act like that would surely spark mass
protests In chicago and very likely. Elsewhere the fact that
a move like that would have such a risk of
sparking mass, resistance as well as further legal, challenges might

(02:46:14):
keep The trump administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous,
outrages at least for the time. Being and if that's
the route they, CHOOSE i think something different might be.
Likely AND i call this potential path forward the pressure,
cooker and we'll talk about, that but, first here's more.
Ads when public unrest exploded in twenty, twenty it did

(02:46:46):
so after four solid years of build. Up if you'll,
remember the earliest fascist anti fascist street clashes of that,
period started before the twenty sixteen, elections were largely focused
around speeches at campuses by right wing bocketeurs and dueling
demonstrations in a handful of. Cities the first wave of
such activity crested In charlottesville twenty seventeen with tragic, results

(02:47:09):
but the vibe it set and the people it trained
continued to take part in street, actions and many of
them formed the infrastructural core of the movement that exploded
onto the scene After George floyd's. Murder the last year
of serious protests have focused more on the genocide And
gaza than, anything and it's not coincidental that the first
wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took

(02:47:30):
part in those. Demonstrations Since trump took office AND doze
started doing its, thing there have been more large scale
demos that focused directly on the. Regime, now these have
been quite manageable from the regime's point of, view and
they have not yet attracted the same kind of, crackdown
but that won't remain the case as people grow more.
Desperate any fool can see that the apparatus of repression

(02:47:51):
constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on, democrats
former federal, employees and people who are just hungry and
pissed about rising food. Prizes, however this represents another tight
rope scenario for the. Regime these demonstrations are, large and
unlike student protests Against, israel the media has proved less
eager to marginalize the participants as. Extremists as time goes

(02:48:15):
on and things get, worse folks who last year scoffed
at college students occupying campus buildings may themselves consider if
perhaps it might be time to fox some shit. Up
this will be an uneven, process with sudden leaps forward
and pulls, back and it will provoke an equally uneven state.
Response there will be attempts to send so called instigators

(02:48:36):
and organizers. Overseas du Will salvador unless the public reaction to,
this which is building AS i, type continues to escalate
to the extent that it becomes. Unfeasible if, so there
are ample domestic locations to detain or even disappear those
the regime considers. Dangerous first on the chopping block will
be the people whose heads are currently closest to the,

(02:48:57):
blade organizers and demonstrators against, genocide whose citizenship is not
at all in. QUESTION i expect if, large disruptive demonstrations
do threaten the administration's, hold they will also start to
our Target antifa, again which will start with the targeting
of longtime, activists many of whom would have been people
arrested or at least heavily surveiled in twenty.

Speaker 2 (02:49:18):
Twenty, however it won't.

Speaker 1 (02:49:20):
End, there and it will quickly expand to Elected, democrats
new people organizing, protests folks who have never had anything
to do with any of the kind of anti fascist
actions that so Captivated Fox news back in twenty. TWENTY
i will be shocked if we make it more than
another year without a serious attempt to Brand antifa a
domestic terror, organization and if that succeeds in a way

(02:49:42):
that has legal, force then the fact that there is
no such organization won't. Matter Trump's feds will do what
we've Watched ice do With. Trendagua they'll break down the
door of whoever they, wish argue tattoos or possessions of
certain literature or whatever is proof of, membership and then
those who survive the raids will find themselves in the
most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them. In

(02:50:04):
if things follow WHAT i suspect is the likeliest, path
we will watch this PROCESS ebb and flow over the
next several. Months each spring and, summer protests will grow
and peak in the hottest, months with new cities and
tactics being attempted regularly by groups constantly reeling from raids
that are devastating and, terrifying but due to the incompetence
of AN fbi whose investigative capacity has been, neutered failed

(02:50:28):
to really disrupt. Things as the weather cools, off exhausted
activists will lick their wounds and make new. Plans scattered
acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual
cells will occur year, round BUT i expect large scale
demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement to follow
a pattern not so different from What afghanistan veterans knew

(02:50:49):
was fighting, season hot summers of mass, activity winters of,
raids and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's.
Offensive and as time goes, on the energy will, build
the tension will, build and of course we might find
ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not too distant,
future perhaps a year or two down the. Line, now of,

(02:51:12):
course none of this will occur in a vacuum or
independent of the news churn that we've been drowning in for.
Years and this brings me to my next, prediction which
is the coming of politics as. UNUSUAL i apologize for
coming back to The David brooks of it, all but
seeing a man who in twenty seventeen wrote The trump
had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over,

(02:51:33):
him and then wrote a column attacking millennials for their
tribalism call for a general strike is a, sign and
it's not a sign That brooks has gotten. Smarter it's
a sign that we've entered radical, times and that radicalization
spares not even the. Centrist if the worst case scenario
occurs in a few weeks from, NOW us soldiers are
gunning down demonstrators while ice officers krt Elected democrats off To,

(02:51:56):
seacott feel free to disregard this. Passage but if the
somewhat slower path, PREVAILS i expect to see more politicians
and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left or
at least away from the dissolving. Center we've watched this
process occur on the right during The biden, years and
to a, degree it is still occurring out of a
fear of reprisals under The trump. Regime i'm finalizing the

(02:52:18):
script on the day Sixty minutes Producer Bill owens stepped
down over interference from paramount executives into his coverage Of Donald.
Trump but the polls have started moving against the. Right
trump's public approval on immigration policy is under water for
the first time in, years and his approval on everything else,
is while not always at record, lows diving with significant.

(02:52:38):
Speed the next several months of shipping, data as well
as concerning early reporting on farm, yields suggests a near
future in which a lot less will be available for.
Everyone we saw what a rising price of eggs did To,
biden and we've also Seen Senator chris Van holland go
almost overnight from a marginal figure IN us politics to
one of the most Famous democrats in the nation because

(02:53:00):
he had the modest courage to fly to L salvador
and call the president's use of a foreign black site
what it. Was there will be more people Like Van
holland who display courage previously unseen in a moment of.
Trial but much more than, that there will be, opportunists
those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval
of crowds more willing to countenance radical action in the

(02:53:20):
streets than they were a year. Ago most politicians and
most thought leaders in the old media are, reactive And
i'm not saying that this will, change merely that what
they react to will change because of who is in
charge now and because of the desperation of the times
brought on By republican, policies which is going to paint
a target on the backs of conservative leaders as large

(02:53:42):
as the targets they've been painting on the backs of.
Dissidence and all of this means one, thing which is
we're approaching the age of weird. Terror so much has
happened in this, shitty stupid year THAT i think we've all.
Forgotten twenty twenty five opened with a military veteran blowing
himself up in a cyber truck in front of The
Trump hotel And casino In Las. Vegas his reasoning was

(02:54:04):
based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered
in his service as it was on his exposure to
right wing, propaganda which convinced him that The democrats needed
to be dealt. With but he saw things clearly enough
to know that yet another mass shooting or self, immolation
or even a run of the mill bomb wouldn't have
garnered him or his manifesto any. Attention so instead he

(02:54:24):
picked a cyber truck and A trump, building symbols of
the two most viral men of our very stupid, era
and he blew one of those up in front of the,
other and by, gummet we all did pay attention for
a few, days at least late last, year an anonymous
gunman the government believes to Be Luigi mangione was even
more successful at holding our attention with an even stranger,

(02:54:45):
attack a brazen and i perfectly executed assassination carried out
by a man with a dazzling smile and the wisdom
to pick the most universally hated target that exists, today
a healthcare. Ceo we have all watched so many mass
shootings at, schools at grocery, stores, nightclubs everywhere imaginable that
they've lost the ability to shock. Us but targeted assassinations

(02:55:08):
of people at the top of the food chain are
so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs and
sheer rollicking, strangeness like we saw In vegas has a
captivating power all its. Own we will see more of
both kinds of attacks in the months to. Come the
arson attempt On Governor shapiro's home, bazar at least for
the extensive damage, done might be seen as another data

(02:55:28):
point on this. List but as new figures rise to
prominence within new protest, movements we will see attempts to kill.
Them furious and Derange trump supporters armed with cars and
guns And trump branded pocket dives will do as they've been,
doing and this part won't be. New WHAT i do
expect will be new is the increased threat felt by
the oligarchs at the top of the, system as intelligent

(02:55:49):
and patient young people continue to plot ways to go
after them and the places and times where they feel.
Invulnerable AND i also expect that editors and journalists will
continue to learn that these actions draw eyeballs more than
almost anything. Else and while all that's going, on the
truly unbalanced among us we'll find ways to hitchhike off

(02:56:09):
the well publicized turmoil coming our way and make their
own confounding. Statements there will be public suicides and attacks
utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet, imagine at least
not openly on a podcast without receiving a visit from
some friendly alphabet boy or. ANOTHER i don't know what
exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very very.

(02:56:30):
Silly and of, course as we talk about weird, TERRORISM
i don't mean to discount The nazi accelerationist types. Here
they'll keep, trying but if they want to raise above
the chatter and an even more crowded media, ecosystem even
they're going to find ways to get weird with. It after,
all an attack no one notices isn't likely to accelerate
much of. Anything AND i guess that's What i've got right.

(02:56:52):
Now i've got ten pages or so on WHAT i see.
COMING i didn't come up with a, smooth sexy ending
for this like a writer, should Because i'm tired and
thinking about this isn't. Fun BUT i did a, lot
and there you. ARE i suppose the thing you're asking
now is what the fuck DO i do about? It
and you know that's what we talk about a lot

(02:57:14):
on this. Show organize with your, friends get, involved find
ways to help. People take a stop the bleed, glass
and the love Of, god keep your eyes.

Speaker 10 (02:57:25):
Open this is it could Happen Here Executive, disorder our

(02:57:52):
weekly newscast covering what's happening in The White, house the crumbling,
world and what it means for. You I'm Garrison davis.
Today i'm joined By, Miao James, stout And Robert. Evans
this episode recovering the week Of april seventeen To april twenty.
Three Jd vance has killed The. POPE a Second pete
hegsath on authorized signal chat has hit The department Of.
Defense The White house announces that The Education department will

(02:58:15):
start collecting on defaulted student. Loans Beanie Clad Tim poole
joins The White house press, pool and Hippie facebook moms
rejoice with artificial food dies being banned Across? America how
are we?

Speaker 1 (02:58:27):
Doing, everybody which was so after hearing, that, FINE i GUESS.

Speaker 4 (02:58:32):
I outlived The.

Speaker 2 (02:58:33):
POPE i outlived The.

Speaker 1 (02:58:34):
Pope you have to live several more decades to like
outlive the. Pope, OFFICIALLY i think he was eighty, eight.

Speaker 9 (02:58:43):
So he id it and did.

Speaker 10 (02:58:45):
It thank goodness he did not die On hitler's, birthday
because that would have been a whole, other whole.

Speaker 1 (02:58:50):
Other, Yeah i'm still one day. Off i'm thinking back
to My catechism classes and trying to, remember Like pope
dead On, easter good sign are.

Speaker 5 (02:58:57):
Bad that's definitely a S i'll get some kind of.

Speaker 1 (02:59:01):
Shie how do we take?

Speaker 4 (02:59:03):
That shout out to The pistons for holding off winning
a playoff game just long enough for The pope to,
die such That francistory's entire tournament office never saw A
pistons playoff. Win congratulations to The, Pistons gradulations to The
city Of. Detroit congratulations for withholding that from The.

Speaker 9 (02:59:18):
Pope didn't that mean love to see?

Speaker 1 (02:59:20):
It Did Pope francis have a strong opinion on The
pistons that he expressed at some point BECAUSE i may
have missed.

Speaker 5 (02:59:26):
That, no he knew they were in a mackelmore, song
so therefore he hated.

Speaker 1 (02:59:29):
Them he was a huge mcle. Fan, yeah a lot
of people don't know, this but the entire time The
pope is lying in, state they're just going to be
looping thrift. Shop so, yeah As Pope francis, Wanted.

Speaker 9 (02:59:44):
Yeah that was his dying. Wish do you know who?

Speaker 10 (02:59:49):
Else probably used to listen To, mackailmore not anymore because
he got too. Woke But Pete heggseth seems like. Us
he's like a twenty Twelve mackelmore.

Speaker 2 (02:59:55):
Guy yeah it might have.

Speaker 9 (02:59:56):
Been might have. Been he was.

Speaker 10 (02:59:57):
Sharing plans for you many air, strikes his, wife his,
brother and a personal. Lawyer in another, signal.

Speaker 1 (03:00:02):
CHAT i do the same.

Speaker 9 (03:00:04):
Thing, yeah, well, yeah you've yet to act on your.
Plans it's a. Difference they are not interested.

Speaker 10 (03:00:10):
Looping at the lawyers the real Like god to your move.

Speaker 7 (03:00:13):
There that's funny BECAUSE i mean it says so much
both about like what's going on In pete Heads seth's,
brain but of the quality of, lawyer because any lawyer
worth assault would be like please.

Speaker 1 (03:00:25):
Chat, yeah you need to get me out of this.
Chat what is wrong with? You are? You are you
texting me missile package?

Speaker 10 (03:00:34):
Information that's the.

Speaker 4 (03:00:37):
Thing, though we've gotten great every like this guy From,
julianni from all of the, lawyers these like random cartoon.
Dipshits the right keeps finding that like they will just
hand you a law, Degree like if you hand the
state enough, money they will just hand you a law
degree and you can just like bullshit your way to
the bar and you'll be. Fine like they give that
shout out to anyone.

Speaker 1 (03:00:56):
You can tell a really good lawyer in a room
where legal things are being, Discussed And i've had this
happen several times because they just, leave they, bounce they
get the fuck out of the. Room and that's a smart. Lawyer.

Speaker 5 (03:01:09):
YEAH i don't know if you saw, it but The
state Of california was USING ai to say it's bar exam. Questions, so,
oh you don't even have to be SO.

Speaker 1 (03:01:17):
I bet THE ai would be able to tell, you
don't text you your wife lawyer in sun classified information
about missile. Strikes but.

Speaker 10 (03:01:26):
Whatever, now hopefully if they start USING ai more to
get through, school they won't have they won't have as
many student loans to be collected. On, yeah of practice
that has been paused Since march of twenty, twenty set
to be resumed On may. Fifth and then uh uh.
Man The timpool thing was was really. Wild Press Secretary
Carolyn levitt gave a give a glowing introduction To Tim

(03:01:50):
poole's addition to the press, room And tim's first question
to the administration was was asking why news media just
lies so much About trump and journalism here from Comrade,
tim really probing. Question let's pivot TOWARDS rfk and the
concerning registry that has been, discussed which is a word

(03:02:13):
you never like to. Hear whenever someone brings up the
concept of a, registry it's usually, bad always.

Speaker 1 (03:02:18):
Bad So i'm going to talk in general about WHAT,
rfk the things that he has, said not just about Autistic,
americans but about people who are receiving psychiatric, medication people
who are addicted to, opiates people who are utilizing like,
stimulants by WHICH i MEAN adhd, medicine which if you HAVE,
adhd that's not exactly the way it, functions but that's

(03:02:41):
the way he frames.

Speaker 2 (03:02:42):
It because these are all tied, together.

Speaker 1 (03:02:44):
RIGHT i have some frustrations with kind of how it's
been taken on social media THAT i think are not
causing people to worry when they don't need to, worry
but look at maybe sort of the wrong area to
be to see the immediate threat coming. From so First
i'm going to start with like what his been, said
and before we get to the, registry we have to
go back to what he was talking about on the

(03:03:04):
campaign trail because prior and this is prior to him
Endorsing Donald, trump when OUR Fk junior was like an
individual like running for president on his own under his independent,
campaign he started talking about wellness, farms, right and these
were specifically in the language that he, use places that
people who were addicted to psychiatric. Medication antidepressants he named

(03:03:27):
specifically antidepressants and, stimulants as well as people with opiate, addictions,
right and he has since talked about other drug addictions as.
Well could go to spend three or four years working
on a. Farm he always frames it as also like learning.
Skills so it's this mix OF i want people to
be able to work in this you, know lovely, bucolic you,

(03:03:49):
know agrarian setting where they'll gain working. Skills and then
there's also pepperdin these very frightening phrases like they need
to be reparented right. Now in addition to, this he's
not just that this is all focused On americans who
are taking medications that he thinks are over prescribed or purely. Unnecessary,

(03:04:11):
right that's always the, Way like psychiatric. Medication he almost
has a scientologist attitude towards it that like this is
all essentially. Unnecessary and, obviously you, know all of this
stuff comes out of their elements of this that were
true at one. Point for, example back in the, nineties
Like riddlin was wildly overprescribed to. Kids but the way
in which he's translated this now is that basically everyone

(03:04:32):
on a, stimulant everyone on an, antidepressant is on it.
Unnecessarily and in a podcast in twenty twenty, four he
went further by kind of tying a lot of this to,
race specifically stating, quote every black kid is now just
standard put on adderall on SSRIs, benzos which are known
to induce, violence and those kids are going to have
a chance to go somewhere and get. Reparented so that's

(03:04:55):
all deeply.

Speaker 10 (03:04:56):
Concerning it's like kidnapping children, unforcibly like de. MEDICATING i will,
say that's not how he has framed. It so one
of the things is People i've heard it phrases LIKE
rfk has admitted he wants to imprison millions Of americans in,
camps and, like that's not what he. Said the direct
quotes about this are not framed as a mandatory. Thing
it's framed as a replacement for other treatments that people

(03:05:19):
can choose to go into and choose to. Leave that's
what he's, said, Right, okay, now perfectly reasonable when a
guy in an administration like this is talking about putting
up camps to be, like, WELL i don't know IF
i believe, him but it's not accurate that he said
he wants to arrest millions of people and force them onto.
Camps he just has not said, that, Right, yeah, Yeah
AND i think it behooves us.

Speaker 1 (03:05:39):
To be honest about what he. SAID i think it
also behooves us to talk about like where this idea comes, from,
right and what he's looking back. To and, again a
lot of the issue here is not necessarily WHAT rfk might,
do but the fact that he might not be there.
Forever and if he starts establishing this this kind of
kind of program that starts in an attempt to be

(03:06:00):
something that is, more you can choose to be on
these camps or. Not there's certainly willingness within The Republican
party to force people into different kinds of quote unquote
treatment like. This and one THING i think that particularly
is the way in which the right has liked to
shift blame for gun violence and mass shootings off of
the availability of firearms and onto people who are on psychiatric.

Speaker 2 (03:06:22):
Medication.

Speaker 1 (03:06:23):
Right and this is an area in WHICH i could
see someone taking over FROM rfk or pushing past the
things he specifically has stated he wants to, do BECAUSE
i think he does come out of a more quack
medicine goal here putting people forcibly in camps and colonies like,
THIS i.

Speaker 10 (03:06:39):
Mean like the idea of like, REPARENTING i guess is
more is deeply Problem, yes incredibly scary, phrase but it
is worth noting as there's a there's a very good.

Speaker 1 (03:06:48):
Teen vogue article on the matter CALLED rfk wants to
send people to wellness. Farms THE us already tried that
that talks about the actual background that he is hearkening back,
to because he is. Not but his vision of wellness
farms is not like The nazi concentration. Camp which doesn't
mean that it's not possible that things could wind up
in a much darker. Direction but this gives you an

(03:07:09):
idea of the history that he is specifically calling back.

Speaker 5 (03:07:12):
To.

Speaker 1 (03:07:12):
Quote beginning of the eighteen nineties and continuing through the
first decades of the twentieth, century epileptic and feeble minded
colonies sprung up around THE. Us the initial purpose of
these colonies was to remove patients from, overcrowded badly run
asylums in poorhouses in favor of farm, life where they
would have access to the. Outdoors under the colony, model
patients generally lived in cottages designed to be more homelike

(03:07:32):
than Institutional patients were also given, jobs and many were
expected to work on colony, farms where they grew their own.
Food Doctor William, sprattling the medical superintendent of The Craig
colony For epileptics In New, york declared that the farm
model meant, nature the great, restorer will have an opportunity
to do her. Best it didn't. Work supporters of the
colony of model argued that with, time clean, air, sunshine

(03:07:53):
and a restricted, diet physical labor could heal, patients but
that didn't. Happen data from The Craig, colony one of
The america's first electic, colonies illustrates this. Point during the nineteen,
forties thanks to funding and staff limitations because Of World War,
two conditions In North american institutions were particularly grim the.
Institutions nineteen forty three to nineteen forty four annual report
to The State commissioner Of Medtal hygiene shows that less

(03:08:14):
than one percent of patients were discharged is cured that.
Year during that same, period over two hundred patients attempted
to leave the colony without, permission and five percent of
the total patient population. Died and SO i mean that's
reason enough to be deeply, worried, right the fact that
without saying LIKE rfk wants to do what The nazis,
DID rfk wants to do what The america already did

(03:08:35):
and it killed a huge number of the people who
were interned in those. Camps AND i guess the THING
i keep bringing up is that WHEN i think about
what the threat model is more than Fucking auschwitz for
people who on OUR, nssris it's A Judge Rotenberg center
on every. Corner it's camps like these where costs are

(03:08:56):
going to be cut and there's not going to be
good access for any kind of independent monitors to make
sure health and safety are being. Followed it's not that
people are going to be shoveled into. Ovens it's that
as a result of this system being incompetently applied to
the most. Vulnerable And i'm not even talking about my
worry at the moment being that everyone on AN ssr

(03:09:17):
will be forced.

Speaker 2 (03:09:18):
In it's going to be poor.

Speaker 1 (03:09:19):
Kids AND rfk has already talked about, that, Right, like
that's why he's focusing on the black, kids, right that's
who they're going. For we've had some people post up
in the subreddit being, LIKE i Know i'm going to
go to a camp BECAUSE i have, autism OR i
Know i'm going to do go to a camp because
i HAVE. Adhd And i'm telling, You i'm not saying
don't be scared of. Fascism i'm saying this is where

(03:09:42):
to fight right. Now it's NOT rfk wants to send
every adult on AN ssri into a death. Camp it's
that they're going to try and be putting these kids
instead of you, know the different juvenile programs that, exist
instead of any kind of functional medical, Program they're going
to force them into hisities like, this and it's going
to become easier for facilities like The Judge Rotenberg, center

(03:10:04):
which horribly abuses and tortures autistic, kids to spread and
to get state and federal. Funding and that's that's the, threat.
Right it's an extension of what we're doing and what we've.
Done it's not a carbon copy of what The nazis
are doing or did speaking of The, nazis.

Speaker 2 (03:10:35):
And we're.

Speaker 1 (03:10:35):
Back so a couple of things happen in quick succession
that is responsible in part for like why people are
so freaked, out and rightfully. So one of them is
THAT rfk gave a speech on the back of new
data that showed yet another rise in the rate of autism,
diagnoses and AS i said on a previous, episode it's
because we're looking for it. More but he made a

(03:10:56):
statement about people with profound autism not being able to
pay taxes or write, poems you, know or that sort of.
Thing and while he was specifically talking about people with
quote unquote profound, autism it's reasonable for people to, assume, like,
yeah but that's just kind of what he sees is basically, everyone,
right AND i don't think that that's an unfair. Assumption
and then coming right up on the heels of, that

(03:11:18):
there was an announcement from THE, nih The National institutes
Of health ABOUT Rfk junior's new effort to quote unquote study.
Autism and basically what they're going to be doing is
collecting comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of THE us
population and kind of organizing it within THE. Nih this
is the first time this has been. Done but they

(03:11:39):
are going to be grabbing basically everything they can get
their hands. On and we're talking about a mix of
med medication records from, pharmacies lab testing, records genomic data
from people who like go to the you, know department
of the basically data taken by THE, va data taken
by The Indian Health, service as well as data by
from private. Insurance and they're also going to be buying

(03:12:01):
data from smartwatchs from stuff like. Fitbits, right who does
sell their data to anybody with like twenty dollars hanging
out the back of their. Pocket and as a heads,
up if you are looking for a fitness, tracker you
should look more into. This there are a few that
have reasonably good data protection. Histories garman is one of.
Them this does not mean it's. Perfect all of them

(03:12:23):
will hand over your data if given a court order
to do. So none of them are going to break
the law to hold on to your. Data But garman
doesn't just like sell willy nilly to anybody who wants
to like advertise based on. It right that, said most
of them do the last Thing i'd write was something
like twelve out of fifteen different free fitness tracking apps
they checked sold data pretty, Widely so.

Speaker 4 (03:12:44):
Yeah about eighty.

Speaker 1 (03:12:45):
Percent, yeah it's the vast. Majority, Right, so THE nih
is basically looking at taking the data that. Exists they're
not talking about really gathering new, data but they are
Taking they are talking about collecting everything that exists and
putting it under one roof the first. Time and this
is for a couple of. Purposes. Right they want to
be able to track the spread of different illnesses and

(03:13:07):
different health problems within the. Population these are their, claims
but also they want to create a disease registry specifically
to Track americans with. Autism, Right and this is Because
kennedy describes autism as a preventable, disease which is not.
Accurate and the fact that this database and these other
databases are being made should be very. Worrisome, Right it's

(03:13:29):
both important to talk about the fact that he is
specifically signaling out autism while also stating like that's not
the only thing they're looking.

Speaker 2 (03:13:35):
Into.

Speaker 1 (03:13:35):
Right they want data on people who are ON, SSRIs
who are ON adhd. Medication they probably want data on drug.

Speaker 9 (03:13:42):
Use.

Speaker 1 (03:13:42):
Right there are a lot of things they are looking
to be, gathering and none of it is shit that
they should have access.

Speaker 2 (03:13:48):
For, yeah you.

Speaker 10 (03:13:49):
Can certainly see them expanding this out to like hormone replacement,
therapy transfer, healthcare, yes.

Speaker 5 (03:13:54):
Yeah and also like the apps attract like menstrual. Cycles, right,
yes people access and reproductive.

Speaker 2 (03:13:59):
Healthcare and again the immediate.

Speaker 1 (03:14:01):
Plan i'm, SORRY i SIMPLY i don't think THAT Rfk
junior's master plan is the mass arrest of everybody who
with autism in The United states and forcing them into a.
CAMP i don't think that's what he, wants in part
because number, one his base of support is a lot
of the parents of these. Kids And i'm not saying

(03:14:22):
those parents don't want to do things that they aren't
already doing things to their kids that are, Harmful but
those parents want control over what they see as their kids'.
Healthcare they want the freedom to experiment with medications on
their kids to quote unquote fix. Them and this data
is going to be used both to provide basically to

(03:14:43):
be massaged to provide evidence that different treatments that don't
do shit do in fact. Work AND i THINK i
have suspicions of financial interests. THERE i keep getting questioned, like,
well what do you think is going to happen when
the autism cures don't, Work, well then they're going to
put people in. Camps, no the autism cures already don't.
Work this is an. Industry they make money off of.
This they make money off of drugging and medically torturing these.

(03:15:05):
Children and as far that, is the threat is that
it is going to get easier to do at a larger,
scale and it is going to be harder to, fight
even illegal to provide good information on what does and
does not. Work and that is what's happening right now
as opposed to something we might be worried, about you,
know years down the. Line and, yes we should fight

(03:15:27):
anytime the government is trying to put populations of people
into a motherfucking database like, This we should fight all
of this tooth and. NAIL i just think this is
WHAT i see as the. Danger you, Know, yeah the
risk is this to centralized. Stuff it's a centralized acceleration
for things that have already been, happening less so than
just like large scale direct sator.

Speaker 5 (03:15:47):
Intervention, YEAH i think a lot about, like in the
context of this like quote unquote wilderness therapy, programs, Yes roberts,
companies but which have been abusing children for.

Speaker 1 (03:15:58):
Years and that is WHAT i see when we talk
about these these. Farms, again my worry is NOT rfk
wants to forcibly put everybody into Fucking Auschwitz part. Two
IT'S rfk wants a hundred times as many teen treatment
facilities where kids who disobey are get in trouble with
the large caught it fucking, protests can be forced to,

(03:16:19):
labor and an amount of them will, die and all
of them will suffer permanent mental and physical damage as
a result of being put in these.

Speaker 10 (03:16:26):
Places, yeah like the behavioral improvement centers that are you
could even be part, of you, know like like community.

Speaker 1 (03:16:32):
Service, yes, yeah it's extensions of what we. Do it's Extremely,
american you. KNOW i just that's that's where my head.

Speaker 5 (03:16:42):
Is, yeah it's no Great so talking of WHERE i
guess where my head is is, Immigration, Right that's WHAT
i tend to update us. On SO i Guess i've
seen it characterize as like legal ping pong between the
courts and THE. Doj it would be like if one
side was playing ping pong with a regular tennis, racket
and everyone was just pretending that they weren't, Right like

(03:17:04):
the doj is just continuing to kind of flout these court.
Orders if we start from the top and go, down
The Supreme court temporarily banned the government from Renditioning venezuelan
men in the district Of North texas To El. SALVADOR
i think people maybe sometimes this got a little misinterpreted
on social, media like you have to look at who
the class, was and the class was a group Of
venezuelan men who were in immigration detention In North texas

(03:17:26):
who were going to be sent To Wel, salvador and
that was who got the. Relief the case at the
time was pending before THE Us court Of appeals for
The Fifth, circuit and The Supreme court said that once
that court, acted the government could appeal to The Supreme. Court,
however they, added the government should, not And i'm quoting,
here remove any member of the putative class of detainees

(03:17:47):
from The United states until further order of This.

Speaker 9 (03:17:50):
COURT i.

Speaker 5 (03:17:51):
E The Supreme court to update on the, case which
we've covered a lot.

Speaker 9 (03:17:55):
Here The Abrego garcia.

Speaker 5 (03:17:56):
Case Judge genies ordered expedite disco discovery is when both
parties in a, lawsuit like a mass information, right they're
able to find out. Information and in this, case the
government more or less ignored, this and it did so
by sticking to its line that they can't bring him
home to The United, states saying that the requests were

(03:18:19):
And i'm quoting again, here based on the false premise
that The United states can or has been ordered to
Facilitate Bregor garcia's released from custody In El. Salvulo their
claiming they were ordered to return, him and somehow in their,
minds returning him does not include ensuring his, release like
they're saying that they're only obliged to transport him should

(03:18:41):
he be released. Anyway genies in a court order called
this quote a wilful and bad faith refusal to comply
with the discovery. Obligations geni's also called the government's assertions
of executive privilege quote equally. Specious The city Of hyattsville
in this case also clarified through a press release that,
quote at no time did any member OF hpd identify

(03:19:05):
or file any report Classifying Abrego garcia as a member
of any. Gang despite, this the executive branch is still
going with that he's a violent gang. Member they also
doxed his wife this week by releasing a protective order
that she had once filed and, withdrawn and when that was,
released it contained her a, dress so she's now hiding

(03:19:27):
in a safe.

Speaker 10 (03:19:28):
House they photoshopped A ms thirteen tattoo onto his knuckles
above a weed leaf, tattoo a smiley face across and a.

Speaker 5 (03:19:40):
Skull, yeah, yeah that's what they're going.

Speaker 9 (03:19:44):
WITH i guess specious is a specious is a good? Word?

Speaker 2 (03:19:47):
Yeah just hideous?

Speaker 9 (03:19:48):
Nonsense, yeah, no absolutely obscenely.

Speaker 5 (03:19:50):
Ridiculu and then the other angler, Says i'm just saying
that you don't have a right to do process right like,
openly just Like miller has been saying. This Jd vance
has been saying this on x dot com that, like
these people don't have a right to do process for.
That they've come up with various arguments for. That it
also seems like two people sent Twelve salbador no longer

(03:20:12):
appear on any official list of, detainees which is concerning
one of, Them Ricardo. Pradovasquez he's not among the two
hundred and thirty eight people we know on the manifest
for those sent Twelve. Salvador he doesn't appear to be
In Venice, whaler which is where his passport is, from
and the fact that the government claims that they sent.

(03:20:34):
Him the government has said they sent him on The
march fifteenth. Flights he's not listed. There he's not visible in.
Photos has led to concerns that we might have sent
more people To El salvador than we currently know. About
he entered the country with A cbp one appointment, right
which of all the ways to, enter is the one
that THE us government was trying to force people to

(03:20:55):
use at that.

Speaker 10 (03:20:55):
Time, right he very like legally entered the.

Speaker 5 (03:20:58):
Country, yes to be, clear he entered at a port
of entry with an appointment to claim. Asylum he appears
made a mistake when delivering food and ended up driving
Into canada and was arrested when he attempted to return
to The United. States he doesn't show up on THE
ice detainee, locator and essentially no one knows where he is.

(03:21:20):
Right this concern has been compounded by the fact that
it also emerged this week that THE us has sent
at least one, Detainee Omar abdul Sata amen To, rwanda
and the combination of these two, things raises are concerned
that they are sending third country nationals to detention in
other countries that we are not yet aware. Of, right of,

(03:21:41):
course The Rwanda plan was something that THE uk government
hatched a long time, ago and The kagami government In
rwanda seems to see this offer right as a way
of gaining legitimacy with governments in the Global, north especially
given the widespread criticism for his actions in The Democratic
republic Of. Congo, recently from The, handbasket which is like

(03:22:05):
a kind of substacky, outlet they've reviewed memos between THE
us government and the embassy In, rwanda And i'm quoting
from one of them. Here THE us provided a one
time payment of one hundred thousand dollars to support social,
services residency, documents and work. Permits rwanda has, also according
to the Hand, basket agreed to accept ten more third country.

(03:22:28):
Nationals so THE us is Paying rwanda a little bit
more than it's Paying El salvador rate it was Paying
El salbora twenty thousand per person per, year but it's
a one time. Payment, NONETHELESS i struggled to believe that
you could concoct a way in which it would Cost
rwanda one hundred grand to produce a residency document and

(03:22:50):
a work permit for An iraqi. National but, yeah this
has obviously led to the concern that people are being
sent to other places that we don't don't yet know
about talking to people being.

Speaker 9 (03:23:01):
Sent to other.

Speaker 5 (03:23:02):
PLACES A us, Citizen Jose, hermosille was detained BY ice
after approaching a border patrol agent to ask for. Directions
he was detained for ten. DAYS dhs is claiming that
he was arrested near The nogales border and that he
approached the border patrol agent and upon doing, so identified

(03:23:24):
himself as a non citizen who was not in the country,
legally which is what they. Claim, yes So hermaiceo disputes
this along with his. Lawyers he says he approached the
agent looking for, directions having had a seizure and been
in the hospital and when he.

Speaker 9 (03:23:40):
Got out of hospital was trying to work out where to.

Speaker 5 (03:23:42):
Go he is From New, mexico but he was visiting
his girlfriend's family In. Tucson he told the agent he
was From New, mexico and the agent accused him of.
Lying in his, ACCOUNT dhs has to produce a transcript
With i'm not going to call it a signature because
it just has.

Speaker 9 (03:23:58):
The Word jose written underneath.

Speaker 5 (03:23:59):
It, Right Mister, hermercio according to his, girlfriend has some learning,
difficulties and by her, account he wouldn't have been able
to read The english language transcript that he's alleged to have.
Signed so like, totally whether or not he signed this
is rather a material. Right he, clearly judging by her,
account was not aware that he was in. It judging by,

(03:24:21):
this this is not even a signature with a last.
Name it's laughable to suggest that he like consentingly signed. This,
Yeah but nonetheless he was detained for ten days till
his family produced his documents in.

Speaker 10 (03:24:32):
Court, yeah he was arrested quote unquote without proper immigration,
documents which you don't carry around when you're A us. Citizen,
yeah you're not obliged to, papers, please you don't need.
That his family brought His Social security card certificate to,
court and eventually the case against him was dismissed after
being held By ice for ten. Days this reminds me
of a similar case from this past, week where A

(03:24:55):
us citizen was detained On wednesday the. Sixteenth this is
a twenty year old born In, Georgia Juan Carlo's Lopez.
Gomez he was pulled over while driving to work near
The florida. Border he doesn't speak Much english Or. Spanish
he speaks an indigenous mind, language but he gave his
REAL id card And Social security card over to a state.

(03:25:17):
Trooper he was detained and charged with illegally entering the
state as a quote unquote unauthorized. Alien, similarly the trooper
claims That Lopez gomez said that he was in the country.
Illegally this is like some kind of communication error or
these law enforcement officers are just like lying or trying
to construct like language traps to make someone agree to

(03:25:39):
a statement that admits that they're in the country, illegally
which allows them to be. Detained he was put into
a twenty four hour ice. Hoold the next, day a
federal judge verified his birth, certificate which was brought by his,
mother but claims to lack the authority to release, him
though he was released Later thursday, night and he was
arrested under a New florida law signed by The santas last,

(03:26:00):
month which a judge blocked. Earlier this month On april.
Fourth this basically allows the state troopers to act as
their state's own like border, patrol and it penalizes immigrans
who quote unquote knowingly enter or attempt to enter the
state after entering The United states by eluding or avoiding
examination or inspection by immigration officers.

Speaker 4 (03:26:20):
Unquote, yeah and like and like the common thing, here
right is that they're just we've seen. This there are
a bunch of other cases that are like this, too
where it's just like they see someone who's not white
and they're just, like, yeah fuck, it we can grab
this person and then just lie about what they. Said
it's like it's not even very based on racial. Profiling,
yeah but it's like the things it's like it's not
even it's not even like racial profiling. Anymore like it's
it's they're just attempting to black bag like random non

(03:26:43):
white people that they're just running. Across, yes and so
of course they're like GRABBING us, citizens right cause they're
just grabbing random. People but it's like they're just fucking
doing this to. Everyone this has happened in other states as.
Well there's been instance like, this like the past few
months which have which have increased in frequency Since.

Speaker 10 (03:26:59):
Trump has taken. Office, yeah let's go on a break
and return to talk. Tariff, okay we are. Back how's

(03:27:20):
the how's the economy? Going locking jazz b rock jazz
Bot Sary.

Speaker 1 (03:27:30):
Lockingcky Jazz bocky Jazz.

Speaker 10 (03:27:36):
Bob do not? Like, Okay, mia what can you tell
us about tariffs this? Week so we got a look
inside The White house this week at how the, tariff
the turf tariff suspension. Happened, now remember so there was
there was a deliberation day tariffs a few weeks ago
and then they got suspended for ninety. Days so we're

(03:27:57):
all still on the ninety day count jone clock on those.
Unsuspended but we got a view of how that happened
from The Wall Street, journal and The Wall Street journal
reports That Secretary Treasurer Scott bessett And Commerce Secretary Howard
lutnik basically waited Until trump Advisor Peter navarro was out
of the, room and then it was in a, meeting

(03:28:18):
and then they Cornered trump and we're, like you gotta
roll these terror you gotta do this pause on the.

Speaker 1 (03:28:22):
Tariffs honestly, iconic you, KNOW i hate to say, it but.

Speaker 4 (03:28:27):
Iconic this was also all the FIRST trup administration, ran
and everyone appears to have forgotten that this is how
all of the shit works, well.

Speaker 1 (03:28:34):
Because there was a there were all those stories for
the first couple of weeks about how smooth and well
run it was and everything.

Speaker 4 (03:28:40):
Slow, yeah and the many people assume that there was
like a plan behind, this and, like, no, NO i
am fucking. Vindicated they really are just this fucking, Stupid, like,
no there is not a grand strategy behind this sort
of like tariff.

Speaker 2 (03:28:55):
Rollout.

Speaker 4 (03:28:55):
Right there is a senile old man and his stupid warring,
advisors and they're both fighting each other basically for like
they're they're they're they're they're trying like they're they're trying
to wait until the other persons out of the room
so they can grab control of the fucking puppet. Rains
but this this does actually lay bare something that's sort
of important about, this which is that like there is
a huge fight inside of The trump administration between kind

(03:29:16):
of lutnik who's like the representative of a bunch of
different sort of sectors Of american, capital, Right like he
he's a representative of like you're fucking Like walgreens, dipshits,
right and like he's also representative of the with the finance,
people and those people are losing their fucking minds over
the tariffs because it's again going to destroy the. Economy
But navarro is you, know it's just like a hardline

(03:29:38):
sort of like Anti china. Ideologue And navarro is the
person who's been driving the most intense versions of these,
tariffs and it's a real issue for everyone else in
the administration who doesn't want this to, happen Because navarro
is like the one guy in the administration and The
trump actually likes and so they can't directly move against
him because they. Lose Like Elon musk tried this and
like it got. Nowhere and so you know what we've

(03:30:00):
been seeing is is just like, again the tariff policy
here is just being set by who's the last person
in the room with. Him, yeah so we're probably still
like about sixty days ish out from these terroists coming
back into a. FACT i, mean this basically means like
they'll be hitting in the, summer which is also just
like absolutely the worst conceivable time for these terrors to

(03:30:22):
take effect in terms of like if you were just
like deliberately trying to cause a massive popular mobilization against.

Speaker 2 (03:30:27):
You this is what you would.

Speaker 4 (03:30:28):
Do they're not, that they're just, dumb but, like you,
know so, okay let's most move on to the sort
of big news of this week is the press has
been carrying stories About trump backing off of the one
hundred and forty five Percent china tariffs and the fact
that there's gonna be negotiations and it's all going to

(03:30:48):
get wound, down and, Like i'm pretty sure this is
just kind of pure lutnik shit to try to calm
the markets. Down the issue with this story is that
there are no, negotiations. Right everyone keeps talking about how
THE us is going to do negotiated settlement With. China
there have not been any. Negotiations there are not. Negotiations

(03:31:08):
there has not even been a process to start negotiations
because you, know the last stories we had about this
is that like neither side wants to be the person
to like start going to the table because like asking
the other side for negotiations makes them look. Weak Like
trump has been Asking china to ask him to cert of.
Negotiations The chinese are refusing And the second issue, here

(03:31:30):
and this is the more substantive problem with with a
sort of negotiated back, out is that The Trump navarro
position hinges on the line that the trade deficit inherently
like With, china is proof Of chinese market. Manipulation and
the thing, is there's no actual way to systematically address
that right like, That there's nothing that like Either china

(03:31:50):
or THE us could do that would that would reverse
the trade. Deficit so there's no sort of like you,
know like, yeah like like the obvious way out here
will be for Like trump to take some kind of
weird symbolic victory and Like china to be like we're
doing a fenntional crackdown or some. Shit but the thing, is,
like ideologically for someone Like, navarro And navarro is the

(03:32:10):
important figure, here Like navarro just Wants china destroy, it,
Right there's no actual negotiating process that he can do
that will actually sort of like make this like negotiation
shit happen and have it actually like eliminited. Tariffs the
only thing that can happen basically is a political battle
inside of The trump administration Where davarro gets pushed out.
Somehow but, Again navarro is Like trump's. Guy SO i

(03:32:34):
just don't buy all of, this all of the fucking
stories that are coming.

Speaker 9 (03:32:36):
Out and this happens.

Speaker 4 (03:32:37):
Constantly every single time there's one of these, things there's
all these stories being, like well they're gonna get rolled.
Back it doesn't actually mean, this and that just. Happens,
right we have one hundred and forty five percent rais On. China,
now the last THING i want to talk about is
what the actual effects of this has. Been and the
effect is that it has. Been there's been a massive
slow down and a massive like shutdown in in exports
From china to THE, us like internship container ship. Traffic,

(03:32:59):
right we're talking talking About i'm just gonna quote FROM cnbc.
Here so they're talking About, optimizer which is like a
tracking system for, ships and they, said, quote year on,
year the data shows a forty four percent drop in
vessels schedule to arrive the week Of may fourth To may.
Tenth now that that's not actually necessarily a forty percent
drop in, traffic because there'll be more shit when like

(03:33:22):
other boats get. Full but you, know to put this into, perspective,
right during the worst for, trade the worst parts of
THE covid lockdowns the year and a year drop was
only twenty, Percent so and twenty percent is the number
that's been that's been being spread around the media for
like what roughly the drop looks like for some companies
is larger than. Others and, again the, tariff we still
haven't even seen the actual shocks of the tariffs, yet

(03:33:45):
and we're already seeing a decline in experts From china
that is like again around the level of the. Lockdowns
and and you, KNOW i think like people remember like
the kind of unhinged shit that that, caused, right and
that's something that always only going to. Intensify and the
other part of, this right is that the strategies right
now for how this is being dealt with is moving Through,

(03:34:05):
vietnam moving Through. Cambodia but if you remember the rates
from the original sort of like turf tariffs From Liberation, day,
right like the terif On vietnam was like one hundred
percent or some, shit it was like eighty. PERCENT i don't,
remember zap my. Head but like there's no actual viable
strategy of just of ways you can route these goods
through and it's been especially hitting the sort of drop shipping, companies,

(03:34:29):
right like people Like temu and anything that relies on
airfhrase just getting. Fucked and so this this is all
just you, know just sort of rolling in the, background
is just this logistics, crisis and it's it's it's also
an echoing. Crisis and this THING i actually want to
close this section on is, That, like so the big
issue with with these sort of empty, boats, right and

(03:34:49):
these cancelations at boat, waters is that in order for
it to be, profitable because all of these these shipping
companies run on such low, margins, right they only barely
survived the pandemic by taking out a series of just
like unhinged sort of like weird collateral based. Loans and
in order for these companies to be, profitable they have
to continuously keep on completely filling up.

Speaker 9 (03:35:09):
Ships.

Speaker 4 (03:35:09):
Right if a ship is not, full it is not
profitable for them to run, it, so you, know and
if that's if that's not, happening the entire system literally
grinds to a halt until there's enough orders to move things.
Through so even the ship that there is demand, for,
right can't be shipped because these shipping companies cannot afford
to unless the entire thing is. Full so the supply
chain disruptions that we are going to see from, this

(03:35:31):
as this sort of escalus and as this, continues and
especially in a few months if the liberation dataies go
back into, effect are, Catastrophic and we really, like it's
just what it's this. Way you can hear the, thunder
you can see the, lightning but the storm hasn't hit,
yet and it is going to and when it, DOES
i don't. KNOW i was trying to do a poetic
thing about how we're all going to get fucking, drenched
but we're. Fucked it's going to be unbelievably. Bad and

(03:35:54):
the only process right now inside of the administration that
doesn't involve like some kind of mobilization is, like, again
Is leutnik winning this fucking intra intra administration political battle With?
Navarro so, woo, well pre order Your nintendo switch too right.

Speaker 10 (03:36:12):
Now. Yes in other, news The Minnesota Attorney general is
assuming The trump headmin over the executive order about trans
women participating in school, sports saying he will quote not
to participate in a shameful bullying and also says that
this order violates The Minnesota Human Rights. Act so we'll

(03:36:34):
see some more court cases over this in the weeks to.
Come i'd like to talk a little bit about the
student crackdowns For palestine, protests kind of in a different
way like we've, discussed LIKE ice going after and detaining
and deporting and taking away visas and green, cards so
unrelated to that side of. It on the morning Of,

(03:36:56):
Wednesday april twenty, third THE fbi served multiple search war
in Southeast, michigan presumably related To palestine protests and encampments
from the past. Year there's also some reporting of law
enforcement activity in other states Like, pennsylvania But i'm still
waiting to confirm. That the press secretary for The Michigan
Attorney general confirms investigators executed search warrants for three. Homes

(03:37:20):
he said that people were briefly detained during the execution
of these, warrants but they were all eventually, released and he,
noted quote there is no immigration enforcement angle to the
execution of these search warrants, unquote so these people aren't
being investigated BY ice to get deported. Necessarily this is
seemingly for other protest. ACTIVITY a Pro palestine student group

(03:37:42):
says that these rates happened at around eight. Am. Quote
early this, morning police AN fbi agents rated for residences
of The university Of michigan Pro palestine, protesters refusing to show.
Warrants they seized all electronics and a number of personal. Belongings.
Quote let's close this episode by returning to my Most

(03:38:03):
Stephen Colbert Skibbity biden, Segment Stinky, musk which is still
the worst Name i've come up. With Last, Tuesday Elon
musk said that quote working for the government to get
the financial house in order is mostly done, Unquote So
musk is moving closer to stepping back FROM doge this,
may around the time that his special Government employee designation

(03:38:24):
is set to. Expire reporting From Washington post claims That
musk is growing tired of the vicious and unethical attacks
from the left and that is kind of dragging on,
him with other reports suggesting That musk is annoying Other
cabinet members and administration officials more Than trump. Himself in,
fact just This, wednesday a few hours before, Recording musk And,

(03:38:46):
bessett we're having a pretty intense shouting match in The White.
House going, Forward musk says that he plans to work
for the government about one to two days a week
for the remainder of The trump presidency so that he
can quote make sure that the waste and fraud that
we've stopped does not come roaring.

Speaker 6 (03:39:04):
Back.

Speaker 10 (03:39:04):
Quote he keeps referring to his work At dogs like
being already, completed, essentially like we already found all of the,
fraud and now we just have to make sure more
fraud doesn't. Happen we've previously reported on the alleged fraud
that he claims to have found and the false numbers
up on The doge. Site but it seems like this
work really is like winding down the Musk doge like

(03:39:25):
reply to this email with five things you've done this
week or else be. Fired directive has essentially sputted out
senior officials do not comply with the core aspects of the.
Directive it was never really, enforced and The Trump office
Of Personal management later said that this was voluntary and
THAT opium officials may have never actually ever read those
response emails at. All though a small number of agencies

(03:39:48):
are still requiring compliance with this, mandate and in some fun,
News tesla stock just continues to, decline dropping to half
its peak from Last december and Anti testla vandalism potentially
spiking the cost Of tesla. Insurance tesla had a just
disastrous earnings call This, Tuesday april twenty, second showing That

(03:40:08):
tesla profits have fell seventy one percent over the first
three months of the. Year the total revenue was decreased
nine percent compared to twenty twenty, four with car sales
revenue dropping twenty percent compared to a year. Earlier The
TESLA cfo stated that quote the negative impact of vandalism
and unwarranted hostility towards our brand and our people had

(03:40:31):
an impact in certain markets. Unquote in a company statement
before this earnings, Call tesla claimed that quote, unquote a
changing political sentiment could impact demand for their. Product musk
announced that he would be shifting his attention back To
tesla and that His doge time allocation will quote unquote drop.
Significantly musk talked tariffs on this earnings call and tried

(03:40:57):
to carefully like not Bash, trump whilst stating concerns over
the high, tariffs saying, Quote i've been on the record
many times as SAYING i believe lower tariffs are generally
a good, idea but this decision is fundamentally up to
the elected representative of the, people being The president of
The United. States so you, Know i'll continue to advocate
for lower, tariffs but that's ALL i can.

Speaker 11 (03:41:18):
Do.

Speaker 10 (03:41:19):
Unquote any thoughts On musk And tesla here before we.

Speaker 4 (03:41:24):
Close, yeah one THING i want to remind everyone that
is genuinely good news is that the thing About tesla
sales dropping is that it actually fucks them in two different,
ways right because because again most of the most of
their money is from these carbon credits that they're. Selling
but the thing, is in order to be able to
get the carbon, credits they do need to be able
to sell cars. Totally and so each like subsequent cycle

(03:41:46):
of people not buying cars is also destroying their carbon credit,
subsidies which is like this sort of like spiraling like
cash crisis. Thing so you, know, look Zero tesla sales as,
possible we can keep driving.

Speaker 10 (03:41:57):
Of better world as, possible can destroy these.

Speaker 2 (03:42:00):
Bastards we can ruin.

Speaker 4 (03:42:04):
This one guy specifically's, life and it's not even that.
Difficult so, yeah, well we reported the.

Speaker 2 (03:42:12):
News we reported the.

Speaker 1 (03:42:15):
News, Hey we'll be Back monday with more episodes every
week from now until the Heat death of the.

Speaker 11 (03:42:25):
Universe it Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone.
Media for more podcasts from Cool Zone, media visit our
website coolzonmedia dot com or check us out on The iHeartRadio,
App Apple, podcasts or wherever you listen to. Podcasts you
can now find sources for it Could Happen. Here listened
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