It Could Happen Here Weekly 180

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
every episode of the week that just happened is here
in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but

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

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to it. Could that be here? A podcast where
the ancient leftist adage there is power logistics has finally
been realized by one Donald Trump. I am your host,
Mia Wong, and with me is Gere. How are you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Gear Just another great day in America.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
It's great, it's great. There were resting judges. It's a
good time.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
It's great.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under
different circumstances.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Hey, look, have I ever publicly called for the arrest
of the judge?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I'm not sure I have.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Maybe probably not, because like a resting power itself is
a little bit problem hashtag problematic.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, I mean this is this is this is a
car sural solution to this is garrison, Like we kind
of using carcialism to solve the problems of the cultural system. Sure,
speaking of carceral systems, there is the economy that we're
all living under, which is also quite literally a cucural system,
because so much of it is based on prisident and
slave labor of various kinds across the world. Now I

(01:25):
have good news and I have bad news about this.
I don't remember what the good news was, so we're
only getting the bad news, which is that, well, the
good news and the bad news is that this the
system that we all grew up on. That the economic
system that has, you know, supported us our entire lives,
or not supported us for our entire lives. The thing,
you know, the system that encompasses everything we have ever known,
is fucking dead. It is dead as shit. The economic

(01:47):
system that existed literally at the end of last year
does not exist anymore. It is it right now in
the process of dying. And the thing that is emerging
has not emerged yet, which means we get to go
to Gramsy quote where he says, this is the time
of monsters.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
The Chinese century. My favorite whatever Gramsky, how do we
say this guy's name? Gromski, Gramm gram sheet, see you
fucked up too. Yeah, my favorite gram Sheet quote. We're
entering the Chinese century.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Look, okay, So here's the thing I I, on a
fundamental level think that Gramsy is like the harbinger of
the entire retreat of the twentieth century left. So I
hate him and therefar if you say his name properly. Also,
we're gonna get into a little bit about white. The
Chinese century is going to also be a complete shitcho
for them too.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
But you know, the Canadian century, I don't know. Finally,
the Yugoslavian century with God Emperor Mark Carney in charge,
he will usher in a new era of Canadian progress
and global supremacy. As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy

(02:58):
will suck up all of the independency and resources from
the US in the late twentieth century. And finally, we
will have a Tim Hortons in every country in the planet.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
I'm so excited for us to finally get our first
war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
That will be exciting.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
So there is a story that we have told on
the show many many, many, many, many many times, and
it is the story of the structure of the modern
world economy, the birth of theoliberalism, the ascendancy of free trade,
the decline of the US as the world's grand manufacturing power,
the collapse of the clower of the global working class,
and the generalized ascension of capitalism, and this specific form

(03:43):
of capitalism as the structuring force of the world system.
It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices,
technological changes in class wears, domestic politics, and grand international
maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure
that ruled the world for half a century of American hedgem.
And we are going to tell a very very abbreviated

(04:04):
version of that story for one final time because that
world the world.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Because you'll probably do this again in two years. But okay, the.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
World that we were all born into, that world is
fucking dead and Donald Trump has killed it.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
This is how it died.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Garrison. Yes, in the beginning, there was war, sure, in
the ashes of a continent's read by the flames of fascism.
Two army's stood triumphinch over a new world. One of them, unfortunately,
was the United States. The second one, unfortunately was the USSR.
Now it's also worth mentioning that very briefly, both the

(04:46):
French and the British assumed they would also be like
superpowers and no jokes, washed, failed, failed powers, zero out
of ten absolute dipshits destroyed.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Oddly enough, Japan walked away with more power than either
of those countries. Yes, yeah, a little bit, a little
bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here though,
and this is and this is you know, like this
actually is a lot of what this episode it's about,
is that the thing that World War One or World
War two did was was one also do this, but
was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires, right,
because the world had been ruled for several hundred years

(05:30):
by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans.
And you know, this is some extent like Spain, but
Spain was sort of gone, right, But like those old
world empires had been what had structured everything in the world,
and at the end of World War Two that suddenly
wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was
that if if you look at the places in the
world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right, you

(05:53):
know there, I mean, there was obviously some industrial production
in Latin America, particularly Argentina. There was some like Chinese
manufacturing belts that were run by Japan in China that
weren't destroyed. And then there was the entire manufacturing power
of the United States. And this meant that alone among countries, right,
the US was in the most dominant position, like one

(06:16):
of the most positions of great power has ever been.
And even though there technically was a second great power, right,
they had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power.
We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves.
We had I mean, I guess, like the second largest
army in the world, but you know, like we were
significant the more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this

(06:36):
had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was
really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial
power the US had to go but down because we
controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much
of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that
could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the

(06:57):
world would catch up and this was the thing that
was actually necessary. And this is something that was that
was spurred on by the American industrial class, right because
they suddenly had all of these like jeep factories you're
trying to make cars out of, and they needed people
to buy the cars, and the only way to do
that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in
order to sort of rebuild these places as markets and
so for like a very brief time. And this is

(07:18):
the sort of like golden age that all of these
Trump people and all of these like weird dipshits like
harkened back to. Was this like part time of like
unmatched American power, but also it was it was a
time in the world economy where you could have multiple
powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero sum.
And that just was not going to last because at

(07:41):
a certain point, and this is accelerated by things we've
talked about in other episodes, like this attempt by a
bunch of what we're called the non Aligned Movement or
sort of the G seventy seven, you know, also like
the Third World Movement, a bunch of these countries that
were non alliance to like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, which you
can immediately tell how this alliance is going to ship
because these two countries are like in the same alliance, right,

(08:04):
like you know, this is the Chido's Yugoslavia's in this
with like Saudi Arabia, these countries sort of like economic
strategy was to create something that actually is in a
lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying
to do, which is like using their control of resources,
although again the resource of the US has now is
like moneyasually took all of the fucking world's resources, right,

(08:25):
but using that to develop your own local industrial basis
so you can have your own local manufacturing economy. And
this is something that like a lot of countries pursued this,
like Venezuela pursues this, like Bolivia pursues it. This is
this is something that like everyone like kind of across
the political spectrum is trying to do in like the
sitties and seventies and through the eighties. But the thing
is it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of

(08:48):
a model for what these people are trying to do,
which is what Reagan was able to do to the
American economy. In the sort of nineteen eighties. And what
Reagan is able to do is Reagan actually does something
that sounds really bizarre now, but he was actually successfully
able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six
or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp

(09:11):
up American like like industrial production and like was able
to do the whole sort of like we're bringing the
jobs back to the US. But the thing is, the
way he did this was not the way the Trump
administration is doing it.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
What he did was, on the one hand, he blew
a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that
garrison will sound familiar to you because these people are
trying to blow a hole in the American economy, right,
like you have seen this.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes, I have seen the stonks and the trade and
the shipments, yes I am.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah. But but even like like Elon Musk would like
deliver like post about this right like very deliberately about
how he wants to destroy the economy so that there
could be like a oh yeah, brief economic hardship and
that a golden age, right.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Necessary hardship will have to endure for a short period
of time to then reach the like Utopia, which surely
around the corner.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, And it's interesting because when when when serious people
have to defend this, like Fox Okay, I say serious people,
I'm taking this and I'm saying Fox News because like
Sevi serious, Look look here's.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
A serious clouds.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, I don't have to defend this, right, Like, Okay,
you know we're not dealing with like you know, we're
not dealing with like intellectual titans here. But like when
someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has
to defend this, it is Reagan, they point you, because
Reagan and Carter was also had a hand in this.
But Reagan does this thing called the Volker shock, right,
like working working hand in hand with Paul Volker's the
head of the Federal Reserve, which, notably, Trump just spent

(10:36):
a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of
the Federal Reserve and then had to back off on
that because all of the markets were like, this is
our fucking rubicon, Like we don't give a funck about
any of the other thing. Well, I we kind of
give a fuck up the other things you be doing,
but like if you fire the head of the Federal reserve,
like we're going ape shit. But like you know, the
the FED and Reagan work together in order to do
this thing, which is the jack interest rates to just

(10:59):
like unhinged levels, causing everyone else's debt in the world
to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay. This like annihilates
boast of the world's economies. This also creates like a
double dip recession where the US has like almost twenty
percent unemployment.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
But he's able to.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Write this out specifically because like this thing actually benefits
a bunch of sections of the American capitalist class. Like
if you are someone who holds debt, right, this is
fucking great for you. And this is something very different
from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the
trade war, Like everyone is just having the very worst
time I've ever had.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
It does seem like a globe of losers.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed
him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of
American manufacturing. And there is still a lot of American manufacturing.
We'll get to that in a bit. But the thing
he was able to do was the thing that Garrison
I was threatening at the beginning of the show. By
the time I am done doing this, pot like maybe
not this podcast, but I finish doing it could happen

(12:01):
here when I like die on the battlefield in fifteen years,
everyone will be able to fucking explain the Plaza Chords
and the reverse Plaza Chords because they're they're the central
thing that got us to this alt to this fucking place,
which is that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes
to like West Germany, and the subtext of what he's
saying is like you are American military protectorates and because

(12:24):
you are American build or Japan by the way, it's
like the great industrial power of the nineteen eighties right
and through the nineties, Like they are like the defining
like they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today.
Like if you want to find every argument people make
about China from the entire political spectrum, like all the
way from like people in the one hands going like
this is they're gonna destroy American hegemony to people on
the other hand being like this is what socialism is,

(12:45):
you can find all of those same arguments people made
about Japan in like the eighties but you know, what
Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the
value of their currency relative to the dollar. Right, So
the dollar is suddenly worthless, and because the dollar is
like worthless relative to other international currencies, it makes US
manufacturer more competitive. And this like temporarily restores American techleological production,

(13:07):
but then they have to reverse them because that nukes
the entire Japanese economy, and the Japanese economy becomes an
entire thing of real estate speculation, which you know, I Gars,
I know you may be too young to remember what
happened the last time that we based the.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Entire economy of speculation.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
But that's not true.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
You're like a few days older than me. Come on,
that's unbelievably not sure. I am over half a decade
older than you.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
Is that real?

Speaker 6 (13:32):
No?

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Yeah, real, Yeah, we'll talk about this afterwards. I don't
I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my
mea wong docs file to check once, all.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Right, while Garrison checks to be a wog docs file.
The economy that is built up from all of us, though, right,
is an economy based on a few different things. One,
it's based on an entire network of global supply chains
with you know, like very very minimal tariff barriers between them.

Speaker 7 (13:59):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade,
which is you know, not really free, but obviously like
the ways that these were written structurally benefited the US,
right where like the US is allowed to do all
of this shit for like its corn production that nowhere
the country is allowed to do. Like all of the
market tampering that all these people scream about is just
what the US does with corn. But you know, the

(14:20):
entire canoxicism was based on being able to cheaply produce
different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and
then move them across the world cheaply in order to
sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It
is based on the US running a series of bubble economies,
so the tech bubble, the housing bubbles, heata, et cetera.
And it is based on the US dollar and the

(14:42):
bond as like the fundamental aspects of the like as
the world reserve currency, the fundamental thing that drives the system.
And when we come back, we will talk about this
literally all exploding and what it's going to do for
all of you, which is not good. Yay, okay, we

(15:10):
are back now. One of the things that have in
a lot of ways locked the system in place was
that because of the way that these these manufacturing like
networks are set up, right, because they're all so interlinked,
because they're all dependent on like exploiting differences between production

(15:31):
capacity and like labor costs in different countries. They are
all so interconnected that if you try to pull one
thread out of it and do a major change to
the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately. And
this meant that there has always been an enormous structural
incentive to keep things the way they were, even if
everyone can also already like realize that they're kind of

(15:53):
fucked up. And this days all the way back to
like things that most people largely have forgotten about. But like, oh, Alma,
for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA, and he never like
intended to do that, but like even if he had
the moment he got into power, you know, like Trump
renegotiates NAFTA too, right, But he renegotiates NAFTA and it's
just like the same trade deal because for a long time, right,

(16:14):
if if you were going to run the capitalist economy
in a functional way. The only thing you could possibly
do was run it the way he had already been
set up, because there were so many structural factors about
how this is snow production works, that this is only
that this is the only way you could run it
and still like have the economy not explode. But now
we have finally produced a group of men so stupid
that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy.

(16:37):
And this is where we get into the lebrond of
turf terrasom'er on right now, and we get into something
that is very important to understand about this, which is
that this shit is not about economics right in the
sense that you or I were understand them. This is
none of this stuff is about like we want the
economy to grow. It's this is not something that like

(17:01):
really any of the major sectors of capital want because
it is just nucleus whole thing. And this is why
you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has like
openly criticized the trade policy, even if he's been sort
of hedging it. What we've been seeing is this widening rifted.
And we talked about this in the last executive disorder,
where like different factions of the Trump administration were literally

(17:22):
trying to like isolate Trump from like Navarro, who's the
guy who wants to do all of the all of
the tariff bullshit they've been, you know, like literally try
to get them alone in a room so that they
can they can implement their trade policy. But the actual
underlying urge here is completely ideological, right it is. It
is this idea that like if you run a trade

(17:44):
deficit with a country, or if you're if you are
buying things from a country, they are ripping you off,
and you always need to be selling more things than
you're buying, which is just like so okay on one level,
like this is just so fucking nonsense that like attempting
to explain why is bullshit is kind of pointless, But
we're gonna do it anyways, because someone fucking has to somewhere.

(18:06):
And this actually does also reveal something about the way
that money has always worked under these systems. Okay, so
before we get to like what this is going to
do to the entire world economy, we need to talk
about Garrison. Do you know what balance of payments.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
Is that sounds like something I would ask my accountant about.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, so this is a technically an accounting thing, right,
But the balance of payments of a country, it is
like a leisure thing, right, But it's the measure of
like their accounts, right in terms of all of the
money coming out of the country and all of the
money coming into the country. That's you know, that's like
trade balance stuff, right, And the balance of payments is
actually very important for a lot of countries because specifically

(18:46):
most countries in the world need to buy things in
a currency they can't print. This has always been the
structural limit of things like modern monetary theory, which talks
about how like your country's ability to like have things
isn't constrained by just like the pure money supply of
your country as long as you're buying things in your
own currency, right. Like the purpose of money is the

(19:06):
thing that move assets around. But inflation isn't a product.
I mean, like, yeah, okay, if you just like hammer
the fucking printer button, right, Like, yeah, you can cause
hyper inflation, but substantively because money is something that is
a production of the government, because it is literally government debt, right,
It's not a commodity in the conventional sense where you
have to like figure out how much of it there is,

(19:28):
and there's like a limited supply of it, and you
have to like manage limited supply and make sure the
economy doesn't explode. You can just use the money that
you have, and you can use debt like deficit spending
effectively to continue to circulate goods around the economy. The
problem is if you have to buy something that is
not in your currency, that's where you need trade because
you need to find a way so you know, I'm

(19:48):
gonna taken example that we're gonna come back you later,
which is Bolivia.

Speaker 5 (19:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
If you are Bolivia, you need to get American dollars
so you can buy like gas, right, so people can
like fucking fuel their cars. And the problem is you
can only buy oil in American dollars, so you have
to find something to export to a place where you
can get American dollars for it. And in this sense,
balance of payments actually matters enormously, right, And balance of

(20:12):
payments is also just like a function of all of
your trade deficits and all of your trade share pluses
sort of combined. Right, But think about the US. This
is a notable thing. Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit.
There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar.
So for the United States, none of this shit matters
at all, none of the balance of payment stuff.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
It is completely.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Irrelevant, like literally completely totally and utterly irrelevant. Right now.
If you are like Bolivia and you run out of dollars,
then what you have is a spirally economic crisis where
like people looking suddenly can't buy food because no one
can buy oil, so no one can move things around,
so like the entire economy literc collapses. This is a
very very very common mode of economic collapse. But you know,

(20:53):
none of the things that the right is talking about,
like in terms of like, oh you have like the
United States has like a trade deficit with China is
like yeah, great, that means that we're buying things from them.
Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever, was like, yes,
I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, like
and that's fine.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
Mia goes full Rand Paul on the podcast today.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah I know what. But the thing is, the thing is,
it is very very funny that Rand Paul is now
complaining about this because it's like well, yeah, I don't know.
If all of you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time
like fucking polling around with like Alex Jones and the Klan,
like we probably wouldn't be here right now.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, zero falls is definitely like the Tea Party does
have a sizeable chunk of the blame here.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, like like that's the thing, like this, this is
your all of your fucking fault. Lock them up quick,
zero to ten, zero to ten, Get him out, Get
him out, gethim out.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Now.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Do you know what else we need to get out?
Gett a stock?

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Oh it's these fucks and services. Yeah, get them out
of stock.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Get them out of stock while you still can.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
Well, we still have an economy.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
We are back now again, as I was saying, like
this attempt to make the American economy function in a
way that it has trade surpluses with every other country.
And also, and this is also important, these people don't
think that like services are real and a lot of
what the US exports as services. But because they're all
these really weird like me, because they're all fascists, right,

(22:24):
they all have this all of this weird ideological shit
about masculinity and about the favoring of the concrete over
the abstract, because the concrete is like masculated. It is
like it is the nation, right like this, like steel
workers and people who fucking hammer coal out like this.
This is what masculinity is. This is what nationalism is.
This is what men are supposed to do.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Yeah, you have the materialists on the evil side, and
you have the post materialists on well.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
No, okay, so this is a long time ago. I
did a bunch of episodes called The Class and the
Culture War, and one of the points that I make
in that episode is that one of the arguments that
the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pistone makes about what
the Holocaust was was this attempt to pit the concrete

(23:11):
part of capital against the abstract part of capital. Right
where the concrete part of capital is like the nation
and the worker and the factory and like the boss,
right and all of these like concrete things were pitted
against the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital,
which is to say, like quote unquote like Jewish financiers
and all of the sort of like weird collection of

(23:32):
like modifiers that gets associated with like you know, the
rootless positive politanism, like the globalism, like all of this shit, right,
And what the Nazis did was embody all of that
stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person and
his arguments. And this is arguing about like sort of
structural anti semitism and what the Holocaust was was that
the like that was what the Nazi revolution was. That's

(23:55):
what the liquidation of like and this is how episode describes,
like liquidation of Jesus is what this is what the hall,
this is what the genocide was, which their attempt to
destroy the like abstract part of part of this thing
by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing.
And this is what these fucking people are also are
also doing in their own way, right, Like.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
Yeah, they're just doing it with like the price of
eggs or like the availability of housing.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Right, and you know, and it's also knowing like these
people are like unhe and anti Semitic, right, because this
is all part of the same ideology. They just sort
of like they're doing the shit in different ways and
they haven't like yeah, I don't know, like if these
people are in power for like a decade, we might
just get this right where they're literally doing the Holocaust again,
but like we're not at that point yet, but we're
at the point is where like this this kind of

(24:37):
like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the
nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract,
and like these figures can be like embodied in anti
these things. And this is also what like what the
like this is what the administration is doing with immigrants, right,
is like passing them in that role of like the abstract,
like the foreigner, they the national, the like the anti
the anti national.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Those things are are is causing our economic problems, our
housing problems. And then you have other instances like with
like Mexico and Canada where they tie in the trade
war with this like ventanyl thing, being like you know,
like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're
using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop ventinyls. Like
they're they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like

(25:20):
immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars
with these with these you know, massive massive countries some
of our most important trading partners.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, and this is causing an interesting split because Trump's
like political coalition right has a bunch of kind of
different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're
like Trump and Navarro and like, i mean, Trump is
instinctually pro tariff and like he can be talked out
of it because again this guy's brain, like we saw

(25:52):
this last administration, Like the last person in the room
with him can convince them, but basically anything. But you know,
those people are structurally committed to like thisacivic version of masculinity.
And there's a lot of portions of the right that
are and that are committed to like this trade policy
is like the America first American nationalist thing. But like
someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this. And

(26:12):
like even a lot of the people who are like
the inner circle sort of like Jarvin like tech fascist
right are like okay, but hold on, like we make
all of our shit in China, so like you know,
and this is why, like Elon is coming against the
terrorists because like, yeah, they're gonna fuck him, like because
he has to import stuff and export stuff from China
because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are, right,
and you know, and if once you get out of

(26:34):
the circle of of like that kind of like tech
fascist right, and the tech people are the people who
are the most closely aligned with this administration, right, like
an internships of like all the sexus of the capital,
tech is the most closely aligned one. But you know,
you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens
and Walmart, right, and these are also like like the
Waltons as a family are like traditional backers of the

(26:54):
right for ages and ages and ages right, there've been
backers of far right causes. They also don't want this
because also their entire supply chains work you fucking China
and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around,
and the further route you go when you when you
start getting into like actual finance capital. These people are
fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit,
we're about to lose all over goddebt money. And the
consequence of this is that all of this stuff is

(27:17):
shaping out in a sort of political battle in the
administration over who can get Trump in the room last
to try to figure out how how the economy is
going to work. But the problem is, and I have
been vindicated in this In the very brief amount of
time between when the episode of Friday came out and
when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China,

(27:38):
Like they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations, and yeah, he's
just lying about this, right, Chinese government says, no, we
have not started negotiations.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
It's like, no, there's no negotiations. Yeah, and there and
and again, like structurally there can't be negotiations because there's
no actual way for the US to like not have
a trade deficit with China, Like there's no way you
can do that. And that's the thing that will satisfy
these people. So all of this means that the economy
is fucking dead, right. This is the sort of like
free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions

(28:09):
off of like you know, like fucking drop shipping and
all this cheap production of a bunch of other countries
and you know, like assemblies of a bunch of different
like goods in different places, and the US is like
the economic center of the world is just fucking gone. Now.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
One of the reasons I.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Started writing this episode in the first place is that
I have read so much fucking analyzes of these goddamn
turf tariffs, and do you know how many of them,
for a single fucking second considered what this was going
to be like for anyone who doesn't live in the
United States.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
What the fuck is wrong with people?

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Why does nobody fucking care about a single goddamn person
who lives outside the United States. I have read so
many fucking analyzes of this fucking shit. I have read
these things from I have read these things from the
business papers. I have read these things from fascists. I
have read these things from the center left. I have
read these things from leftists. Do you know how many

(29:08):
of these things have said anything about actual fucking people
who do not live in the goddamn United States. Fucking
none of them. Every once in a while you'll get like,
this will be bad for the economy of China, and
this is this is a catastrophe because the people who
are going to be most affected by this when when

(29:29):
the fucking turf terrorists some liberation they come back into
effect over the summer are the working classes Sri Lanka.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
This is going to be the.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Fucking apocalypse for a bunch of people who have been
going through hell for years and years and years and years.
It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia, who which
is already facing a dollar crisis and is struggling to
import fuel.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
It is going to be places like Bangladesh. It is
going to be places.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Like Vietnam, which is, you know, structurally in a better
position than a lot of the rest of these countries,
but like fucking won't be in a structurally better like
balance for a structurally better position when it has like
ninety percent goddamn tariffs on it. And yes, the US
is going to be real fucking bad, right. Everything is
going to cost a lot more money. All of us
are going to have a lotless jobs. The people who
are in jobs are going to make a lot less money.

(30:10):
There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless.
There is going to be a lot of people who
can't get fucking food. It is going to be a catastrophe.
And also at the same time, the US is going
to look like fucking fully automated, luxury gase based communism
compared to fucking Shri Lanka. This kind of sort of
wrote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically

(30:30):
this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans
don't even fucking think about it, Like, is the reason
why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the
first place. And this is why, like in like four
fucking months, literally no one in the entire country social
security is actually going to show up because nineteen year
ol grow up doesn't understand sequel, because nobody in this

(30:51):
fucking country gives a single shit about anyone who lives
outside of the country enough to try to do a
single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going
to affect everyone. Because the death of the global economy
will be felt here, it is going to be felt
so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn Earth. And
I am, like, I am losing my fucking mind at

(31:11):
the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to
engage with this completely. This is gonna be being unbelievably
fucking angry because, like I don't know, a bunch of
my family doesn't live in this country, which means I
have to deal with the fact that, like everyone else
who lives in another country is a human being who's
exactly the same as fucking we are, and this is
the thing that nobody else appears to want to fuck

(31:33):
deal with. I am losing my shit. Please God, stop
talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the
United States and aren't mostly going to be born by
everyone else. I didn't write a transition for this, but
you know, I will transition out of this by again
going back to the fact that all of the reason

(31:55):
this is going to be so bad is that the
global economy is based on, you know, a combination of
resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that
all rely on there not being one hundred percent tariffs
on goods and importers to the US. And when this
shit goes through, and when the rest of the tariffs
go through and make it you know, the thing that's
happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff

(32:17):
is everyone you know, and this is something like Nintendo
has been talking about right where they were, like, okay,
our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to
move a bunch of our production into Vietnam. And that
was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of
rising labor costs in China, and you know, a whole
bunch of sort of factors like that, but none of
that shit, none of that stuff that's like to sort

(32:39):
of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline,
is going is going to be able to function once
the tariffs on basically of the country on Earth go
into effect. And there's a second problem here, which is that, Okay,
so what is the new economy going to look like?
These people, like the people running like the administration, right,
like people like Navarro and people like Trump, and a

(33:00):
lot of the sort of like, right, who is driving
the policy thing here think that that the production that's
happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced
by the US. And there was a trap that people
fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this too
sometimes because it's, you know, it's a fast and easy
way to think about the Chinese economy, and it's not accurates. Well,

(33:21):
it's not like, isn't capital the whole picture of what's
going on. But the way that people think about the
Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things
are made in China is because labor is cheap there,
because either the culmination of exploitation and poverty, and that's
true to an extent, right, But the actual sort of
genius from capitalist perpective of capitalis returned to China was that,

(33:45):
you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and
this continues to be true thirty or forty years into
the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled. And the
education was paid for not by capitalism, right, it was
paid for by the sort of socialist system like this,
This combination of things of a highly educated and an
increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, working these jobs,

(34:06):
means that there is an extremely high skilled migrant labor
population that knows how to do a bunch of shit
like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right,
that is vital to making electronics. And the US does
not have a couple of one hundred thousand migrant workers
that you can just have and like exploit and not

(34:27):
pay healthcare costs to to know how all of the
chip manufacturing shit works. Right, There are people in the
US who know how to do some of these kinds
of things. But we're talking, you know, even though the
US does have a manufacturing economy and it is very
high tech, it is not on the scale of these things, right.

(34:48):
And the second, the second big reason why things are
producing in China, and this is the reason why production
didn't just shift all shift out of China after twenty
eleven when there were huge protests there and huge riots
there over sort of labor conditions, is that there was
an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like this physical
factory infrastructure that is in China that you can't easily
just move out to another country. And this is this

(35:11):
is the basic things like the power grid functions right,
and you can't really easily replicate that, and you can't
just have this thing that there's all these people want
to do where like the US will just suddenly, you know,
have all of these factories, right and well suddenly like
all these things will just like come back and miraculously
like there will be all of these jobs because like

(35:32):
who the fuck is going like we don't we literally
we don't have the technology for this. We'll not technlogy.
It was like, who is going to build all of
the factories? Right, Like the factories don't exist here, the
like the inter technical systems for them don't exist here.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
You don't want to switch to costing fifty thousand dollars
available in ten years pre order now Sorry, no available
in twenty years. I forgot about the environmental impact surveys.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, iPhone, iPhone twenty years.

Speaker 7 (35:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
But like you know, and like and like a lot
of this is because like you know, you're hearing a
lot of reports now with like small business owners. We're
talking about like, yeah, it's so much easier to work
with Chinese manufacturers, is like impossible to work with American manufacturers,
And part of that is just exploitation, right, Like, yeah,
there's a lot of things that like there there were
like labor conditions that are very common in China that
do happen in the US, but are much easier to

(36:19):
do there. But also, like I don't know, like China
has like an entire network of like the ability to
basically do this sort of like pop up light and
media manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly, and
the US doesn't fucking have that, right, Like, we do
have a bunch of manufacturing in the US, right, Like
that is the thing that we have, but it was
largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid of

(36:41):
sort of like the masses of workers that are rose
and cities like Detroit to like atomize them, right, And
this is actually like also happening in China right now, weirdly,
Like China has been pivoting to a service economy for
a long time, but think this thing as those service economies,
A lot of that shit is like also like drop
shipping production, right but like, you know, there's no actual
way for you know, befure like capital atl like costs

(37:02):
and things like that. There's no actual way to replicate
the conditions in China that make it like an effective
like source of global production in the US or even
in like a country like India, Like there's just not
the infrastructure there to do it, and there's not the
sort of like migrant labor population. It's not the sort
of things that you need. And what this means right now,
right is that like there is not a future lined

(37:24):
up to replace the one that we're in right now.
We literally don't know what this is going to do
because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out.
Because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything,
like they are trying to extract the copper wires from
the house and in order to do this, they like,
you know, A, because they think they think that's how
the economy works, is they attract the copper wires, and
b their plan to extract the copper wires is to

(37:45):
blow the house up with dynamite. And now, no one's
ever done in environmental impact statements on what if you
blow the house up with dynamite?

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Because why the fuck would you do that? Right, Sometimes
the police do that.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
It's true, it's true, but I guess, I guess they
is the world's police force. But go, you know, like,
no one has planned for this. But the second thing
is there isn't another model of capital waiting in the
wings in the way that there was when the sort
of Reaganites did this the economy, because the Reaganites had
an entire ideological apprightus, they had a like a functional

(38:17):
way for the economy to work and be worse and
be more exploitive. But there's nothing behind this, right, there's
just a vision that literally cannot work. And so the
place that I want to end as we head into
the end of the economy, and as you know, I
like I've been trying to grapple with what is it
going to look like after this is that we just

(38:39):
don't know. Things in the supply chain are going to
break that we have never thought about before, Like medical
systems are going to start breaking down, Right, The supply
chains for like like really really basic goods that we
don't even think about the production process of is going
to start breaking down because it relies on being able
to cheaply import one very very specific kind of like

(39:02):
I don't know, like ball bearing that's made in one
factory and suddenly cost like four hundred times as much
as it did before, And we don't know what that's
going to do. And this is on the one hand,
absolutely horrifying, right, like this is going to mean an
unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world. But

(39:26):
on the other hand, there is no plan, right, They
don't have a fucking strategy, And that means that the
future of the global economy is up in the air,
and it's up to us to make it a fucking
better one. Right, It's we either drive these people from
power and we and we destroy the basis of their
power on such a fundamental level they can never return
to power, right, Like, we just we just fucking kneecap them.

(39:49):
We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all
of the things, of the productive capacity that they have
that has been allowing you to do this. We make
sure they can never get it again, and we make
sure that we fucking control it. And we either do
that or we all get crushed for a generation and
we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering the

(40:09):
likes of which only a few people in the most
hideously wardone parts of the world have experienced today.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, I for one am very excited to see the
the anarchist liberal reglobalization Alliance finally fighting in the streets
of Seattle to regain globalization full circle.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
You know, I will point out the reason they all
called it alter globalization and not anti globalization was that
like one of the one of the original line of
them did say anti globalization of them did, right, but like,
like like a lot of their argument was like the
West Coast teams, certainly this is true, but like like
it's also it's also true that like like what like
one of the arguments they were making was that like
neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places, but

(40:57):
capital could and The thing that they want was a
world where people can move between things and like, fuck capital, what.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
The fuck like eat shit?

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Right, And that's a world that we can build, right,
We can build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested
by the immigration gestapo, where like there isn't a fucking
line on the ground that dictates whether people can disappear
you to a concentration camp.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
And that is also globalization.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Right.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
We just have to fucking do it and ar co
Clintonism one day we can look at a beautiful world.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Look, if Bill Crystal can admit the radicals were right,
all of these other motherfuckers could come around.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
We've been right all but we've been right the whole
fucking time. Fuck you assholes.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
All of you broke this world and it is now
our job to put it back together. And you fuckers
are going to back us or we are all going
to be killed by fascism. And those are the terms.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Deal with it. It's a strange world. Do we live in.

Speaker 8 (41:53):
Boo, Hello and welcome to it could happen here. I'm

(42:17):
here to ask you if you can imagine a world
where national borders don't define our identities. This internationalist idea
has historically been known as cosmopolitanism, and it has some
deep roots, including interestingly some connection to anarchism, and of
course that's what we're seeking to explore here today. I'm

(42:40):
joined once again by the one and only.

Speaker 9 (42:43):
It's James James Stout. Thanks for having me, Andrew, I'm
excited about this one.

Speaker 8 (42:47):
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to have
this conversation. Are you familiar with cosmopolitanism.

Speaker 9 (42:53):
Yeah, and like, look if there gets the more broad
sphere of like anarchist internationalism, something I'm very interested in, right, Like,
we had an interview on the show maybe two weeks ago,
for a few weeks ago, and people hear this with
people explicitly calling themselves internationalists fighting in Mianmar. Of course,
I've spent time in re Java and with internationalists there, So,

(43:16):
like internationalism is something I'm really interested in for sure.

Speaker 8 (43:19):
For sure, I think it's a very compelling and inspiring idea,
especially in a world that lacks many of those ideas.
At its core, cosmopolitanism is just the belief that all
human beings belong to the same shared moral and political
community that transcends national, cultural, and political boundaries. In the book, Cosmopoulitanism, ethics,

(43:41):
and the Wilders Strangers. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appia describes cosson
Politanism as quote two strands that intertwine in the notion
of Cossopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations
to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we
are related, with the ties of kith and kin, or
even the more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other

(44:02):
is that we take seriously the value not just of
human life, but of particular human lives, which means taking
an interest in the practices and believes that land them significance.
People are different, the Cossopolitan knows, and there is much
to learn from our differences, because there are so many
human possibilities with exploring. We neither expect nor desire that
every person or every society should converge on a single

(44:24):
mode of life. Whatever obligations are to others or theirs
to us, they often have the rights to go their
own way. So basically, we have obligations to others beyond
just our immediate infiliations, and that human diversity is something
to be valued, not just tolerated. So it's not the
idea of assimilating all of humanity into one singular culture

(44:48):
or society or government. Is the idea of recognizing and
embracing the diversity of humans, but recognizing our shared affinity
all the same. A couple different versions of cosmopolitanism. There's
some moral cosmopolitanism, or the idea that all humans have
equal moral worth. There's political cosmopolitanism, the idea that global

(45:10):
governance or international institutions should supersede national borders. And then
there's cultural costopolitanism, which is the blending in exchange of
cultures through migration, trade, and shared histories. But costopolitanism fully
embraced has I would say an inherent tens with power,
especially nationalism, the states, and capitalism. And while it's true

(45:31):
that liberal cosmopolitanism relies on global institutions like the United
Nations and reinforces hierarchies, anarchist cosmopolitanism envisions of world where solidarity, cooperation,
and mutual aid emerge from below through free association, rather
than being imposed from above. So today will be unpacking

(45:52):
the history of cosmopolitanism, how anarchists have engaged with the topic,
and why it remains somewhat of a battleground today. Yes,
the term itself comes from the Greek cosmopolitis, which means
citizen of the world. The earliest articulation of this idea
is often attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, who is a

(46:14):
Synic philosopher who, when asked where he came from, simply replied,
I'm a citizen of the world. According to Martha Nusbaum,
Greek stoics like Xeno of Citium, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius
expanded on this idea, arguing that humanity shares a universal
reason and should live in accordance with nature, not artificial

(46:35):
divisions of state or tribe. Of course, many of these
philosophers didn't have any issue with patriarchy or slavery in Greece,
so there is some inconsistency in their concept of a
shared humanity.

Speaker 9 (46:47):
Yeah, the two counts as human I guess, isn't it like?
Which is pretty bleak.

Speaker 8 (46:52):
Indeed, But let's pass forward a bit. During the Enlightenment
we see a more structured political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. Emrgin
Emanuel Kant was one of its most famous proponents. In
the book Perpetual Peace, kan't imagine a cosmopolitan condition, where individuals,
not just states, had universal rights, and where a global

(47:13):
federation of free republics would ensure peace and cooperation. However,
his version of cosmopolitanism still relied on legal structures and
state based governance. Another Nightman thinker associated with cosmopolitanism was
Dni Dederu, who criticized colonialism and argued for a cultural
exchange free from that kind of domination. He also argued

(47:34):
against monarchy, the church, and aristocratic privileges, as they were
obstacles to a truly free and universal human community, which
then brings us to the French Revolution, which brought these
ideas into the real world. Revolutionaries declared the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, which proclaims universal rights beyond
national or social status, but the revolution soon became entangled

(47:58):
with nationalism, early under the Acabins, who suppressed descent and
waged wars in the name of France. Meanwhile, the Haitian
Revolution provided a different example of liberation. In practice. Enslaved Africans,
inspired by the French Revolution's rhetoric of liberty inequality, revolted
against French colonial rule and established the first free Black republic.

(48:21):
The revolutionaries, led by tous Saint Levitire argued that liberty
was a universal human right, not one limited to European citizens,
and declared Haiti a refuge to all enslaved persons. But
despite its radical implications, the Haitian Revolution was largely ignored
or outright opposed by European powers. Their so called enlightenment

(48:44):
only extended Europe, ignoring our racial and colonial realities. Seeing
this time the emergence of nationalism, which on the one
hand promoted self determination for homo pressed nations, but on

(49:08):
the other hand, saw the nation state as a superior
form of political organization. So anarchists were among the earliest
critics of nationalism. Patrons of Pradawn, for instance, rejected both
the nation state and centralized cosmopolitan governance, instead advocating for federation,
a frequently misunderstood concept that refers in anarchist literature to

(49:29):
a decentralized network of freely associated individuals and groups working
in solidarity. Similarly, Mikhil Vicunen attacked nationalism as a tool
of ruling elites, arguing that states use national identities of press,
class struggle, and international solidarity. Bi Cunin did back national
liberation movements, but he understood the danger of nationalism as

(49:53):
a force that often replaces foreign rulers with homegrown oppressors. Instead,
Bcunen promoted an gist internationalism where workers and oppressed peoples
across borders would unite against both capitalists and state powers.
By contrast, the Bolsheviks would eventually developed the idea of
socialism in one country, and the ever paranoid Stalin would

(50:15):
famously deride Jewish intellectuals as quote rootless cosmopolitans. This, of
course aligned him with the rest of Europe's nationalists in
their anti semitism inaccurate cricketerization of cosmopolitanism as opposed to
cultural identity or sovereignty and ramid defense of national borders. Honestly,

(50:35):
I would not be surprised if Trump or Putin used
some equivalent to rule less cosmopolitanism today.

Speaker 9 (50:42):
Yeah, yeah, I did see. It was like a pro
Trump account. I guess constantly or unconstantly paraphrasing Stalin this week.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
So that was great.

Speaker 9 (50:51):
Really, will they say it's like, how many divisions does
the judge command? Which is a I think there might
be a quote from Startin if it's not quotes a paraphrase, right,
But in this case, it's a reference to the attempts
by a district court judge in GC to block the
rendition of people to El Salvador who are accused of
being members of various gangs, and Mirosalva culture being the

(51:16):
two main ones.

Speaker 8 (51:18):
Yes, so just being expelled. What's the connection to Stalin?

Speaker 10 (51:21):
Though?

Speaker 9 (51:22):
The quote how many divisions does the judge command? Let me,
I'm pretty sure how many divisions does the pope command?
Was the staling?

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Quite?

Speaker 1 (51:30):
That's right?

Speaker 9 (51:31):
So, like it's referencing this idea that like might makes
right and like that, you know, if you have the
bar of the state, then you're not accountable to morally
or even even within the confines of the state, like
separation of powers that we're supposed to happen in the US, right,
like if you have the monopoly on coercive violence and
you're no longer constrained by those things.

Speaker 8 (51:54):
Right, Yeah, I see, I see. So of course anarchists
suppose all those things. They opposed what is happening now,
and they oppose what was happening then. From its inception,
anarchism has been an internationalist movement rejecting the artificial borders
imposed by state and champion in global solidarity. Unlike Marxist internationalism,

(52:17):
which has often relied on the centralized structures of the First, Second,
or Third internationals, anarchists emphasized decentralized horizontal networks of struggle
the connected workers, revolutionaries, and stateless peoples across continents. The
anarchist Saint Emir Internationale, which ran from eighteen seventy two
to eighteen seventy seven, was one such network. As discussed

(52:40):
by Lucian van der Waldt and Schmidt in Black Flame,
that group explicitly rejected nationalism and state power, and throughout
history anarchists worked a bridge linguistic, cultural, and national divides
from multilingual anarchist newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
such as La Protester Argentina, their Camp in Germany and

(53:03):
The Libertaire in France, through transnational cynicalist movements like the
Industrial Workers of the World, which organized workers across race, nationality,
and language in the early twentieth century, and including contemporary
mutual aid networks where anarchists coordinates across borders to support refugees,
disaster relief, and addigenous land struggles. Anarchist networks, contrary to

(53:25):
popular belief often extended beyond Europe into North Africa, Asia
and Latin America, where anti colonial and labor struggles intertwined
with anarchist thought. If you're curious, by the way, about
the anarchist histories of Egypt or the rest of Latin America,
they could check out my series on it right here
on the canappen Air podcast. And if you've listened to
that series, you'll know that because anarchists were constantly persecuted,

(53:49):
exile became a defining experience which further reinforced the internationalism.
Folks like Michail Bi Cunan, Pieter Kropotkin, and Erikomana Testa
moved across continents, spreading anarchist ideas and connecting struggles. Mal
test in particular was basically a common San Diego. He
touched multiple continents over the course of his life. So

(54:13):
bout the late nineteenth century, anarchists like Groulph Rocker developed
an alternative to both statist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism, which
sorts of balance cultural diversity with global solidarity from below.
Rocker argued that people should be free to maintain their
cultural traditions without being bound to the state or nationalist identity.
So liberal Costopolitanism was pushing a global order through state

(54:36):
led interventions, international institutions, and legal frameworks. And while this
form of Costopolitanism has led to some games on people
in human rights, international refugee protections, and anti genocide treaties, well,
for one, we see the failures of these institutions in
practice daily, and for two, they ultimately reinforced the state
power that creates so much harm rather than dismantling it.

(55:00):
The UN and the WTO often uphold the interest of
powerful states above and before the international laws and obligations.
Whilst sideline and grassroots movements, while liberal Costopolitanism sits on
its hands waiting for elit driven reforms to the system,
anarchists engage in direct action to support migrants and other
marginalized folks without waiting for such reform. I have to

(55:22):
give a shout out here, of course, to the No
Borders network, and also a shout out to the work
that you do, James on the side.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I've see a lot more people
than me doing.

Speaker 8 (55:32):
It of course. So the sad part is, even if
it started with some noble ideal the concept of liberal
cost of politanism today doesn't so much manifest in the
freedom of people, but more so in the freedom of
markets and money, the globalization of markets and money. So

(55:55):
we will bring McDonald's and Netflix to your country, but
you can't come to our country, or will kill you.

Speaker 11 (56:02):
Yeah, that's about it.

Speaker 9 (56:13):
It was really interesting to like the moment I sort
of became aware of libertarian left politics was in the
early two thousands in the context of the movement against
like the G eight as it was then and at
the time it would be referred to in the legacy
media as like anti globalization right, which I don't think
it ever was right by definition, it was very global,

(56:36):
like you had people from all around the world tending
these protests and rallies and speeches as such, Like it
was a very global movement. The problem was not with
globalization costopolitanism internationalism. It was with the nature of neoliberal
capitalist globalization, which let capital move and stop people from moving.

Speaker 8 (56:53):
Exactly. It's some old opposition sugg as the free reign
of exploitas across the.

Speaker 9 (57:00):
Low Yeah, exactly, we let people take their money and
employ people at lower wages, but God forbid those people
ever want better for themselves or attempt to come somewhere
where they can materially benefit themselves doing the same labor
in a different nation, for instance.

Speaker 8 (57:14):
Yeah, And to be honest with you, I've never really
been a respect of borders. I think they're just I
think they are really really blatantly foolish imposition. I don't
even think you need to be a radical to see
the issue with this idea that your sor one point
has to determine your entire future.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Yeah, that some.

Speaker 8 (57:38):
People in the past could cut up the earth and
then decide where you can roam freely.

Speaker 9 (57:45):
Yeah, I think anyone. I see a lot more from
people who are not by any means radical or even
on the left, like this, like within Europe, right within
the Shanngen area, which the UK has decided to remove
itself from for reasons that are largely racism, Like we
could move freely. When I grew up, my identity and
experience was much more European than necessarily British. Right, I

(58:08):
could go for the weekend to Spain if I wanted to,
or France, and flights were cheap then.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
So it did.

Speaker 9 (58:13):
Like I used to get on Friday night, take a
train to Belgium and raise my bike in Belgium and
come back on Sunday night, very very often, and like
you see it here too in San Diego, where like
the border is just a line and a delay. But
for most people, like we were a very binational community. Unfortunately,
the one way that that manifests itself is that the

(58:35):
cost of living in San Diego compares to the average
wage is vastly disparate because we have this over pressure
valve where like people can't afford it here, they can
live across the border where the cost of living is cheaper,
and that allows people to exploit working class people in
both contexts sadly.

Speaker 8 (58:52):
Right, Yeah, as you mentioned the UK, by the way,
I'm not sure if you've heard the news, but trend
Ad has recently been imposed visa requirements by the UK.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Fuck sake.

Speaker 8 (59:05):
Yeah really, thankfully we still have Shangani area access. Yeah,
but just recently the UK was like, due to yeah,
the usual excuse people abusing the asylum seeking system that
they're not removed of visa exemption. So our colonizers have
now decided that you know, we don't want you to

(59:27):
move free in our country. We want you to pay.
And visas are not cheap Theyan ever cheap, especially when
there's no guarantee other than being accepted. Yep, it makes
it all the more frustrating.

Speaker 9 (59:38):
Yeah, and like this just comes after the British government
attempting to deport Afro Caribbean migrant kmes, part of what
we call the wind Rush generation, which is just one
of the most disgusting and like, yeah, it just it
just wanted one of the most venopathetic things I've ever
seen a government do, Like these people who the UK
asked to come so that it could rebuild this economy

(59:59):
after Second World War, and then taking advantage of the
fact that at that time there was no process for
regularitation and then trying to deport these people who have
lived their whole lives in the UK.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
It's just horrific.

Speaker 8 (01:00:10):
Yeah, it is. It's horrific, it's frustrating, it's infury, it's
in really yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
Yeah, it makes me really angry.

Speaker 9 (01:00:17):
Like if we didn't have a wind Rest generation, not
that like you need like popular music to justify their
existence as part of our community and they should be
able to stay. But we wouldn't have punk music if
we wouldn't have scar music. We like so much of
what is like integral to even like quote unquoite British culture.
It actually came from these people because they are British

(01:00:38):
and they belong there.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
Just as much as anyone else.

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

Speaker 9 (01:00:42):
I used to teach a class about music and colonial
culture and colonialism, which is why that comes to mind.

Speaker 8 (01:00:47):
I actually missed an opportunity to go to the UK
earlier this year. I didn't want to pay the cost
to fly to go at that point in time. I
deeply regrets it because I'm like I could have gone. Honestly,
I think if you're the UK and your your country
has stolen so much like I think the UK has

(01:01:11):
the least right or justification out of any country if
you had to concede that a country should be lost.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
And I don't.

Speaker 8 (01:01:19):
I don't give any country that concession. But if you
had to give that concession, you could be last to
receive that concession as far as I'm concerned. You don't
get to go on roam across the entire planet and
then shut yourself off. Yeah, you don't get to go
on steel and pill fall from across the world, shuffle
it all into your national museum and then block people
from access in it.

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

Speaker 9 (01:01:41):
It is just like it's just the most clear and
pathetic like two level standard or whatever, and it like
it's I mean, the UK has a very I'm sorry
you didn't get to visit in one sense, and I'm
sure we have lots of listeners who are in the UK.
Every time I'm home, I feel this like profound sense
of like post colonial melancholy that the UK it's just

(01:02:01):
sort of it's getting worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
And the way.

Speaker 9 (01:02:05):
Britain is responding is with our government blaming everyone else
and like trying to strip posterity. Yeah, stealing everything they
can just mass Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:02:18):
Yeah, I think that frustration for me as well as
that it's not to watch the country itself, although I
would have loved to have visited like Scotland and you know,
we Ls and that kind of thing, but and all
the stuff there is to see in London. But the
biggest frustration for me is that it's a it's a
connection point. You know, when you impose a visa like that,

(01:02:39):
you block people's connections other areas. One of the few
direct flights outside of this hemisphere you know, to the
European and African hemisphere is through a flight to the UK,
and so by adding that in position, it's like it's
like the world feels like it's being closed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
Yeah, yeah, you can see that.

Speaker 8 (01:02:59):
One more where there was almost a time in the
recent past where it felt like or the world was
opening up to people, you know, with the internet, the
rise of the Internet, and then you had, you know,
the introduction of things like the Shangan Agreement. Our access
the Shangan area was fairly recent. I think it was
twenty fifteen we got that access. Yeah, okay, But to

(01:03:19):
go from that point to like just so quickly, you know,
the tide shifts. So now there's extremely hostile global order
towards something as fundamental as the movement of people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
Yeah, it's it, definitely.

Speaker 9 (01:03:33):
We definitely are entering it in like an era where
things are becoming more closed off again. Then many of
us grew up with right, many of us. You know,
I saw what most of my experience that I can
remember was being able to move freely through Europe and
that's not the case anymore for British as citizens. Yeah,
Like it's getting visas and everything else is getting harder.

(01:03:54):
And harder to move around the world, and despite the
Internet somewhat connecting us like, our physical mobility is certainly
much more limited.

Speaker 8 (01:04:04):
Indeed, I think the idea of cosmopolitanism, getting back to it,
I think it's valuable. I think, you know, the idea
that we have obligations to others beyond just our mediate
affiliations is important. You know that human diversity is going
to be valued, not just tolerated. That that's fantastic. Carl Levy,
an anarchist scholar who wrote two pieces on cosmopolitanism that

(01:04:27):
a link in the show notes, has argued that anarchism's
history offers a third way between the hierarchical globalism of
liberal cosmopolitanism, which relies on state driven global governance, and
exclusionary nationalism, which weaponizes identity and borders, often in service
to the far right. And that third way that anarchism presents,

(01:04:49):
not third way in the sense of fascism, third way
in the sense of anarchist possibilities, is a kind of
federated pluralism, the web of self organized groups that interact
freely without a central authority. This version isn't just theoretical.
We've seen it in recent history through antiglobalization protests, the
occupying movement, the Square movements in Egypt, Spain and beyond,

(01:05:12):
and so flawed. They show the potential, not yet fully realized,
for diverse place based struggles that remain connected through mutuality
and transnational solidarity. We have to avoid this sort of
abstract universalism that can be found in cosmopolitan thought. We
must incorporate decolonial struggles and crown cosmopolitan practice in the

(01:05:34):
voluntary cooperation of people acted in solidarity across differences. Ultimately,
the question isn't whether anarchists should engage a cosmopolitanism, because
they always have. The real question is how anarchists can
cultivate a cosmopolitanism that is truly liberatory when the connect
struggles without eraise in difference, foster solidarity without enforcing uniformity,

(01:05:58):
and builds a world where cooperation and not domination, defines
our relationships. That's what happened today. All power to all
the people.

Speaker 3 (01:06:09):
Peace, dark woke is back. Ten more years of liberal supremacy,

(01:06:36):
bankers in control in the great Nation of Canada. This
is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, I'm joined
by James Stout. We are discussing the twenty twenty five
Canadian election, which I maybe slightly exaggerated in the opening there.
But the election did happen yesterday or two days ago.

(01:06:56):
Whenever you're listening to this, I was up all day
on on CBC and on Elections Dot c A checking
in on all the charts and all the stats to
see how this how this kind of upset election went,
and oh boy, did it did it go? James? How
much do you do you know about Canada and elections?

Speaker 9 (01:07:19):
But both of these things are things that I have
some knowledge about. I've been to Canada twice. That's a
fellow Commonwealth member.

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):
I guess, yeah, we are both citizens of the Commonwealth.
So there we go.

Speaker 5 (01:07:31):
Just kind of have the Queen on the money. Queen
is dead, dead.

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
Queen Queen is dead, but yes, we do have Queen
on money money.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
So that's another thing I understand.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
We have a parliamentary system like like yeah, liket do
I say England or like Britain or UK.

Speaker 5 (01:07:47):
It's a yeah, it's a United Kingdom I think would
be the institute that Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
Well we have one of those two, but it's less
confusing because it's just one country. We don't try to
be three countries like like you in the UK, Britain
in England did.

Speaker 5 (01:08:03):
Where a continent, let a mini continent. That's what we're
going for. We've left Europe where we run away to
the Caribbean slowly.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Oops. Yeah, luckily Canada is doing just fine. Debatable, but
certainly this election has has gone probably slightly better for
global stability in stopping the advance of far at populism
than certainly what it looked a few months ago. Yeah,
for people wh don't know, Yes, Canada has a parliamentary system.

(01:08:32):
People do not elect the prime minister directly. They elect
the MP in their district, which is called a writing.
It's a first past the post system, so whoever gets
the most votes in each writing they get their representatives.
Since to Parliament, the party with the most representatives they
take control of the government and that is who the

(01:08:52):
Prime Minister is. And the next Prime Minister of Canada
will be Mark Karney, who assumed the prime minister rule
like last month, winning the Liberal election after Justin Trudeau
resigned in January. And before we get into some of
the results, at first a little bit of an election.
Kind of background. So Liberals have been in power for

(01:09:15):
nearly a decade, slowly getting less and less popular as
the cost of living has risen. Less election in twenty
twenty one, the Liberals kept their minority government, but the
leader of their party, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, continued
to decline in popularity. By the end of twenty twenty
four's approval rating was just twenty two percent or net
negative fifty two. Conservatives were up twenty five points in

(01:09:39):
the polls. It was a near certainty that they would
sweep the next election. Trudeau announced his resignation on January sixth,
kind of the January sixth of Canada, if you think
about it. Former banker Mark Karney won the party election
in March of twenty twenty five. Carney quickly called for
an election to write off the peak of anti Trump
sentiment sweeping across Canada. This was following Trump's talk of

(01:10:02):
annexing Canada and the global trade war and tariffs directed
at the American neighbor upstairs, next door, I don't know, yeah,
downstairs south, No from America. It's a oh I see yeah, okay,
yeah from yeah, got it. Understand, which is maybe a
northern standpoint, but who cares.

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
This election or an election, would have happened by October
twenty twenty five regardless, but calling it early was a
smart move by Liberals as this was the first time
in three years that they had led in the polls.
Support for other third parties like the Keebuquad Bloc and
the National Democratic Party the NDP had slowly been shifting

(01:10:42):
towards the Liberals and we saw this in the results
Monday night. At this point, the Liberals are projected to
win one hundred and sixty eight seats, falling barely short
of the one hundred and seventy two majority. There's still,
as a time of recording, still a possible path for
them gaining a majority government, but it's fairly unlikely. It'll

(01:11:04):
probably be a minority government. The Conservatives have one one
hundred and forty four seats, the Blackabiquah twenty three, and
the NDP a measly seven, with the Green Party snagging one.
Liberals also secured the largest vote share, forty three point
six percent of the vote compared to the Conservatives forty
one point four percent, though because of a vote efficiency

(01:11:27):
basically how spread apart certain votes are. This has still
led to much more seats for the Liberals than the Conservatives. Right,
if you have more Conservatives voting in a district that's
going to go conservative anyway, those extra votes don't necessarily
mean there's going to be more representation in Parliament. That's
the vote efficiency idea.

Speaker 5 (01:11:45):
Yeah, plus plus supposed to is a very bad system
as electoral systems go. It leads to an awful lot
of votes not counting for any representation. Like, for instance,
to Garrison Davis, party could have fifty one percent of votes.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
In all writing and.

Speaker 5 (01:12:02):
I could be there at forty nine and I would
get zero MPs base.

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
Hey sounds fine.

Speaker 5 (01:12:08):
Sounds fine by me, Garrison Davis in control.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Well, this is kind of what happens in Canada. The
election system in Canada is pretty swayed towards the Liberals
because of how much more dispersed they are versus you know,
most Conservative supporters in the Western provinces Saskatchewan, Alberta in
BC and a growing presence in Ontario. But yeah, the
Liberals kind of always get a bit of a boost
in the election. Now, we did have record high early

(01:12:34):
turnout in Canada, seven point three million people cast their
vote early during Easter week. The full turnout is higher
than it was the past few elections, but it matches
pretty much to the twenty fifteen election. So to get
a majority government you need one hundred and seventy two seats.
This allows you to not have to worry about like
no confidence votes which trigger new elections, and you don't

(01:12:57):
need to work with other parties to pass legislation. Now,
this will probably be a minority government, with the Libs
having to work with a small number of remaining in
DP and block seats to run the government, which one
could consider a good thing in terms of being pushed
maybe towards some better policies rather than just like liberal supremacy.

(01:13:19):
But it also in its government will be more unstable
and it kind of gives the Conservatives more room to wiggle,
So it's definitely a mixed bag. As reporting first came
in for Atlantic Canada, it showed that this would be
a tighter race than what the Liberals were hoping for.
During election night, it seemed Conservatives were on track to
pick up two seats in Newfoundland, though in the end

(01:13:42):
the Liberal incumbent barely kept their seat, beating the Conservative
challenger by twelve votes. In Terra Nova the Peninsulas. The
Libs did fare much better in Quebec, though they flipped
eleven seats. This was the best performance by Liberals in
Quebec in years now. Conservatives gained some seats from the
Liberals in Ontario under Doug Ford, with Conservatives flipping seats

(01:14:06):
around the Toronto suburbs. One of the biggest stories of
this election was just the complete NDP collapse the progressive
kind of democratic socialist New Democratic Party. They're currently projected
to lose seventeen of their twenty four previously held seats.
The NDP basically gave Carny this election. Jack Met Singh

(01:14:29):
lost his seat. That's the leader of the NDP. He
lost his seat to Wade Chung, a Liberal, and stepped
down as leader on Monday night. Part of what makes
this such a big setback for the NDP is that
because they failed to win at least twelve seats, they
actually lose official party status in Parliament. Parties have to

(01:14:50):
win at least twelve seats to be recognized as an
official party in the House of Commons. Official parties get
to have offices in Parliament, extra staff, They get to
ask questions legislative sessions and can sit on committees. Now,
the NDP did previously lose party status in nineteen ninety three,
winning only nine seats in that election, but this performance
was slightly worse, hitting only seven. So this is going

(01:15:13):
to be a big shake up. The NDP is going
to have to be forced to rebuild, which is maybe
necessary based on kind of a degree of NDP stagnation
the past decade. They're kind of caught in like twenty
seventeen politics in my opinion, though saying did lead them
to pass some significant legislation and progressive policies do have

(01:15:35):
a degree of popularity in Canada. The NDP was polling
about the same as the Liberals just three months ago.
The movement that we're seeing is from NDP voters scared
of Polyev and Trump, so they moved to Carney to
avoid splitting the left vote, as Carney was seen as
more capable of beating Polyiev than the NDP leader Sing
and certainly justin Trudeau. Now, Funnily enough, some of this

(01:15:59):
quote unquote STRICTGIC voting actually did end up splitting the
vote in a place like b seen specifically Vancouver, which
recently has gone strongly NDP. But this year the Conservatives
were able to snag three seats because enough previous NDP
voters ended up going liberal in an attempt to gain
a Liberal majority, but that resulted in neither the NDP

(01:16:23):
nor the Liberal candidate actually individually getting enough votes to
win the riding. Let's talk about vote share compared to
the last twenty twenty one election, so Liberals did fairly
well this election, especially compared to previous ones. They gained
over ten points compared to the last election in twenty
twenty one. Conservatives also didn't do badly actually like they

(01:16:47):
actually did. Okay, this certainly wasn't the result they were wanting,
but they did not do bad. They gained over seven
and a half points this race. Reliable Conservative voters still
voted conservative and they were able to siphon off some
support from other parties, with Conservatives doing slightly better than
what polling predicted, but a lot of very close races

(01:17:09):
across key districts. Now where all those extra votes or
vote movement is coming from is all of the third parties,
the Green Party and the Black EPIQUA both dropped over
a point. The far right People's Party dropped four points
and the NDP dropped eleven point six huge huge losses

(01:17:29):
for the NDP. Most of those voters probably going liberal,
although some may just not have voted. One of the
more interesting parts about this election is that the Conservative
Party leader Pierre Polliev lost his parliamentary seat. He lost
to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy by about four thousand votes four

(01:17:52):
point six percent of the vote. So this is going
to probably cause a bit of an upset in the
Conservative Party. There might be some maternal in over whether
Polyiev should continue as party leader, though he did not
step down from that position during his concession speech Monday night. James,
do you have do you have any thoughts here before
we pivot to ads.

Speaker 5 (01:18:12):
It wouldn't be such a like scene, as such a
humiliation for the Conservatives if it wasn't for all the
polling until maybe like a couple of months ago. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
Yes, The reason why it's such an upset is because
they were like destined to win, as almost like divinely
written into fate like three months ago, and the fact
that they fumbled this is gonna be like a massive,
like historical footnote, not even a footnote. This is like
a historical topic. Is how the Conservatives fumbled this election?

Speaker 9 (01:18:43):
Yeah, like people, the thing is that the Liberals want
despite people having been pissed off with them for a
long time and wanting something different. Yeah yeah, because people
would just like mad at Trump.

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):
And we will talk more about the background of the
lead up to this race and in those dynamics that
James mentioned in the next segment after these ads. Okay,

(01:19:15):
to talk more about the lead up to this race
and Trump's influence on this election, I talk with Lance
from the Serfs, of fellow Canadian who talks about politics
just as much as I do. So here is that
interview that I recorded just a few hours before the
polls closed in Canada.

Speaker 10 (01:19:36):
Hey, my name is Lance. I run a number of
different channels, usually under the banner of the Serfs. There's YouTube,
dot Com, Slash, the Surf Times, and at the serf TV.
On most other social media, I cover news, politics, internet slop,
usually from a dumpster fire like perspective.

Speaker 3 (01:19:52):
And you're Canadian importantly, Yes, I am Canadian, but I
have been resigned to living in this States for quite
a while. I actually just had some Canadian family visit me,
and they kept making fun of me for living in
the States, specifically because the States are trying to, you know,
take Canadian territories seemingly. So now I'm getting a lot

(01:20:13):
of hate for my Canadian family members for living in America,
which is interesting.

Speaker 10 (01:20:18):
I was gonna say, it's got to be a scary
time to be living in the United States as a
Canadian citizen.

Speaker 3 (01:20:23):
A little bit, I am. I am dual, but we'll
see how long that matters. So I want to talk
talk a little bit about kind of the background of
this election, because I think this is maybe the most
interesting Canadian election in the past ten years, specifically because
of how much the results have always felt it inevitable,
but the actual results have like flip flop. Three months ago,

(01:20:47):
four months ago, I'm sure that me and you may
may have predicted probably something resembling a conservative sweep. Not
to put words in your mouth.

Speaker 10 (01:20:58):
Well, Minorti or Jordi government led by the Conservatives, know
no question that that was where all the major polling
was trending. And then the exact opposite on this roller
coaster election in both directions. I think it's pretty easily explainable,
especially to your American listeners who might have been wondering
what was happening. Essentially, the country had a combination of

(01:21:19):
burnout on Justin Trudeau and the person who replaced Justin Trudeau,
Mark Carney, effectively took the number one campaign it was
the actual campaign slogan of the Conservatives away from him
immediately after being crowned the new leader of the Liberal Party,
which was ax the tax, which is what you know,
fascist Millhouse, who we call Pierre Polievro over here. That

(01:21:41):
was his big campaign promise, the Conservatives were going to
ax the carbon tax, and that had a lot of
people excited, a lot of people didn't like Justin Trudeau.
And then along comes Mark Carney and he takes both
of those things away from the Conservatives. He's not Justin
Trudeau and he acts the tax and so they had
to kind of completely reset. And this was before the
wild card of Trump shows up. Yeah, which of course

(01:22:02):
now is airing not only Canada but the world. I
would say like most countries now are kind of having
to completely reset how they think and want to do
geopolitics into the future because of his policies.

Speaker 3 (01:22:12):
Well, and I know, like a decent chunk of the
Alberta economy is now in great jeopardy because they can't
self fuck Trudeau merchandise.

Speaker 10 (01:22:21):
Which was propping up their entire economy outside of the oil.

Speaker 3 (01:22:24):
Yeah. Well, you know, if you ignore the oil, which
will probably be fine. Yeah, yeah, I guess you could
talk a little bit about kind of what led to
this universal hatred of Justin Trudeau in like the past
like like five years, just like ever so briefly.

Speaker 10 (01:22:39):
Yeah, for conservatives, a lot of it really became increasingly
more intense with COVID, and I think internationally there was
an association with very basic safety protocols and tyranny. So
I guess some people the United States and Canada both
saw the idea of wearing a mask gra having to
wash their hands as some sort of dictatorship akin to

(01:23:00):
some of the worst war crimes ever committed on any population.
That made a schism happen, where a de sentiment kind
of really started accelerating towards less of you know, blaming
Trudeau for everything, kind of like Obama that used to
be a joke, like a Trudeau to actual fuck Trudeau merchandise,
and the idea of you know, Trudeau being an enemy
of the state and a communist dictator that was on

(01:23:21):
the right side of things. On the left side of things,
everyone got burnt out from Trudeau because the performative progressive
politics of his entire character. He was very vocal about
standing up for a lot of issues that on one
end he would you know, pretend to care about, such
as indigenous rights, land backs, stuff like that, and then
he would be suing the survivors of residential schools in
federal court to try and prevent them from getting too

(01:23:43):
much money from the federal government. So there was a
lot of Trudeau seems to performatively enjoy being perceived as
someone who's enlightened and progressive and trying to steer you know,
the society and a good direction where his policies are
effectively exacerbating wealth and equality very rapidly, because that's effectively
what you get with neoliberal centrists, right.

Speaker 3 (01:24:02):
Yeah, I mean, like to go back to that COVID thing.
Like I was in Calgary in like spring of twenty
twenty two, and I was getting like made fun of
in like bars and clubs for like wearing a mask
at that point in time, like and that is that
is Alberta. But yeah, no, that was definitely like strong.
We certainly saw degrees of that here in the States

(01:24:22):
as well, but yeah, you know, it's a little bit
of that. Like general anti incumbent sentiment was growing so
much last year, which which we saw levied against the
Democrats in the States and certainly against the Liberals. And
the way that the Liberals in Canada have kind of
been able to maneuver away from that in the way
that like the Democrats haven't is super interesting. It's not
necessarily like replicable, especially for US politics, but it's still

(01:24:46):
as interesting, I guess. Like on the Conservative side, their
leadership changed in twenty twenty two.

Speaker 10 (01:24:52):
Right, yeah, I think so it was it was twenty
two or twenty three, but I believe it was around them.

Speaker 3 (01:24:58):
That's when Holly they became leader of the Conservative Party,
which is like you know, closed ranks and like coalesced
the past ten to five years or so, and they've
been they've been gaining a large it had been gaining
you know, a large degree of popularity the past two
three years, not necessarily because of who their party leader is,

(01:25:21):
but because they are simply not the Liberal Party at
least That's kind of what it seemed like to me,
because like, approval ratings for Paul of Aara's never been
like great, but the Conservative Party has still been gaining popularity,
at least previous to the past few months.

Speaker 10 (01:25:35):
Yeah, I don't want to play, you know, give the
far right any kind of kudos or points, but I
think from an analytical standpoint, something that people should realize
is that within the last i'd say year and a
half or so, Pierre was really really effective at doing
faux populism in a way that a lot of people
were starting to get very worried about. Yeah, and that
he was starting to see a lot about the working class,
you know, the housing crisis in the country and the

(01:25:57):
fact that the Liberals are out of touch elites who
only care about enriching themselves, and you know a lot obviously,
you'd have a lot of the right wing kind of
nebulous terms like woke ideology being tied into that kind
of stuff. But he was for a long time kind
of starting to gain a lot of ground and traction
as more of a moderate style conservative who was concerned

(01:26:18):
with helping the working class, which is astonishing considering the
man is a lifelong politician like that, that is who
he is. He was making fun of people like the
leader of the Social Democrats here, drug bet Singh. He
was making fun of him for just working for a
pension and not even caring about the people or the
working class. The man is never marched with the union.
I'm talking about Pierre. He's never marched with the union.

(01:26:39):
He is a you know, his voting track record is
decidedly anti worker. It's decidedly exacerbating wealth in the quality.
Has worked his entire life to make houses more expensive.
But marketing and branding really work, especially like you know,
there's compilation clips of him saying things that are JK
rallying tier in terms of both their nonsensicalness, like talking

(01:26:59):
about how electricity is crafted by harnessing the power of
the lightning bolts into the wire that the electrician holds up.

Speaker 3 (01:27:08):
Very cool, Yeah, very cool for like powers.

Speaker 10 (01:27:11):
I'm on board, but like, unfortunately that's just not how
we usually generate power in this but like it works
on some people. They like to see a man who
fakes owlean like different kinds of wood and tools, you know,
like at Tucker Carlson esque.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Yeah, I've got a wood shop.

Speaker 10 (01:27:26):
In my back and it's like that, Well, no, I
think this is the first time you've ever seen that lumber, sir.
But as you know, again, some voters, they really started
his rebranding in that respect actually worked pretty successful for yeah,
the last year and a half against Trudeau.

Speaker 3 (01:27:40):
Yeah, he had a pretty substantial makeover the past the
past few years to make himself like presentable in this way. Yeah,
very like Carlson esque, very like Ben Shapiro goes to
home depot and gets some wood. It's definitely pulling from
that vein, although maybe a bit more successfully and like,
at least from my perspective, it feels like the degree
to which Pierre kind of hitched himself to like the

(01:28:03):
Trump populist wagon the past few years, especially like with
like sentiments like growing in like the Western provinces, that
kind of mirrors some of the Trumpian rhetoric, that type
of stuff was getting popularity. And now because he put
if not all his eggs, but some of his eggs
in the Trump basket, this is like backfired in like
popular opinion when it comes to his ability to succeed

(01:28:23):
as like a politician and like gaining support because We've
seen so much anti Trump polarization based on like the
fifty first state stuff based on the tariffs, and like
Carnie has been able to weaponize that pretty effectively against
against Pierre absolutely like it. Initially, like the way like
popularity points shifted was like by like twenty points, which

(01:28:44):
was like huge. Those have gotten closer, But.

Speaker 10 (01:28:47):
I think it's one of the biggest reversals or if
not the biggest reversal Incadian political history. Was the dominating
lead they had from having it almost an a shirt
majority to now perhaps losing to a liberal majority, which
again is unheard of.

Speaker 11 (01:29:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:29:01):
One thing that people are also kind of missing is
that he also really closely started associating himself with Elon
Musk prior to leader of you know, the US or
whatever you want to call him, the real president of
the United States. But he had a number of rallies
and on the record praising Elon Musk prior to Elon Musk.

(01:29:21):
This was pre Elon Musk overt Nazi era kind of
more just like Nazi light era version Nazi.

Speaker 1 (01:29:27):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 10 (01:29:29):
But around that time, Pierre was asked, like what do
you think about being endorsed and praised by Elon Musk,
and you know, he started making jokes about how his
kids want to go to Mars, so that's pretty cute,
and started talking about how he wants Elon Musk to
build more factories and plants in Canada. Well that's all
really coming back to hurt him now, because the very
idea of there being a stronger Tesla presence in the

(01:29:50):
country is decidedly rejected by the populace. Like, you know,
the protests that are going on in the United States
against Tesla's are going on here as well. Maybe not
as large scale or perhaps as fire based, but a
lot of them are occurring here, and so like that
I think is also really hurting him. So there's been
this really funny, strange political dance that's kind of happened
in the last couple of months where everyone is trying

(01:30:12):
to say Trump loves you more. It's like a circular
fine squad. Like at one point the Conservatives were trying
to market themselves to saying Trump was making fun of
Pierre in this clip, so look he hates Pierre more. Yeah,
And then another it was like oh no, no, no, look
he's talking a lot of smack about Mark Karney. He
hates Mark Carney Moore, so that that has actually become

(01:30:32):
a very strong dynamic of the Canadian election is who
exactly does Trump like Moore? And that's not going to
be good for you if it turns out you're the one.

Speaker 3 (01:30:40):
I guess I'd like to talk a little bit now
at the end here about Mark Karney himself and kind
of what this means for the Liberal Party. He was
the Governor of the Bank of Canada starting in to
US in eight then he became governor of the Bank
of England and managed them through the Brexit fiasco. Brexit
was not his idea. He was not pro Brexit, but
he just had and to be holding the reins of

(01:31:01):
of the Bank of England during that time period. Returned
to Canada, has served as like an informal advisor to
Trudeau and now is the is the leader of the
Liberal Party. He's a very I don't know, he tries
to like project this sense of like he's like a
like like a reasonable man, which which which he you know,
in some ways is like he's like he's like kind

(01:31:23):
of boring. He works in banking, right, like he's he's
not like overtly charismatic, but he doesn't have like the
the like youthful, like bumbling presence of like Trudeau. Like
he just he seems he seems kind of basic. I
don't know.

Speaker 10 (01:31:42):
Uh yeah, I mean that's a good way putting it. Yeah,
you're you're totally right. I mean we're talking about a
lifelong banker. I mean, he's even worked for gold Mill Sacks.
He has a yes, a very long and sordid Uh well,
I mean, in some view, it depends on your worldview, right,
if you were as a person who thinks that the
solution going forward, especially in the face of actual manifesting fascism,

(01:32:03):
is more neoliberal policies, austerity and measures, then you might
be very, very excited to perhaps get your own, like
honestly Joe Biden style election here, where we are once
again going to be choosing centre to center right economic
policies that are going to undoubtedly exacerbate wealth and equality more.
They are not going to solve the housing crisis. The

(01:32:24):
housing crisis of Canada, while it is portrayed constantly as complex,
really goes down to fundamentally, there are a lot of houses,
but there are also a lot of houses being built
in luxury markets that most people can't afford. Speculation is
not addressed, and so speculation usually gets blamed on foreign investors,
which in turn kind of brings up the whole immigration fears,
which are very successful. But with Carney, I mean, I

(01:32:47):
don't see anything dramatic. Not only did he acts the
carbon tax when he was in power initially, and that
was again, I think, strategically to remove the power the
Conservatives had on that policy. He also is getting rid
of the capital gains tax again is just going to
be funneling more money towards the ultra wealthy in Canada.
So the problem for me is that, if anything, I'm
happy that Pierre it looks like he might not win.

(01:33:09):
I don't know what by the time people are listening
to this, what the results are. But I also recognize
that this does not solve these crises for simply putting
band aids on a pause before you know, finally a
Trump of our own gets elected and then yes, people
after the facts start realizing, oh my god, he's doing
a lot of the horrifying things that he promised he
would do. He's actually trying to enact Project twenty twenty five,

(01:33:31):
all these terrible things are happening. Well, I mean, if
this was an election where it looked like Pierre was
going to win, I would say he is going to
follow through on all the aggressive measures and more that
he's promising right now, which include, you know, suspending the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to people that he
deems should be worthy of receiving freedoms, specifically because, like
Donald Trump, he wants to begin silencing people for their

(01:33:52):
speech in relation to protesting against Israel and their genocide
of Palacidians, especially if you are an immigrant toward someone
on a student visa, and these policies, you can see
they're a disaster after the fact, and people I think
wake up to them like Americans are right now when
they realize Trump's actually doing it. But you know, make
no mistake, it doesn't require, you know, too long of

(01:34:13):
the increase and we ought wealth and equality for people
to look for an answer because they're not being listened
to by the libs.

Speaker 2 (01:34:19):
Are the liberals here? No?

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
It is interesting that how much this election has almost
mirrored the American two party system with the block QEBUQUA
as well as the MDP, like probably most likely right
this is before the results, but probably going to be
losing seats to both the Liberals and the Conservatives. Yes,
and like I think like a big part of this
election I think is similarly looking back in the past

(01:34:40):
ten years, is how much I think the NDP is
frankly fumbled and probably needs to do a major overhaul
to really regain trust in the voters. And yeah, it's
going to be tough because I think, like for the
progressives in Canada, it's kind of been convenient for the
Liberals to have a minority government because then they need
to work with ENDPT.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):
And they've gotten the law accomplished.

Speaker 10 (01:34:58):
To be fair to Chuck Means, and you know, they're
for American listeners, the Social Democratic Party of Canada, they
accomplished some great things working in a minority government setting,
including a pharmacare program, including a federal feeding program for children,
a school lunch program, you know, working on paid families
sickly even extending it. So they've done a lot of
good and sort of enacting progressive policies. But it's the

(01:35:20):
Liberals who are also equally as good at taking credit
for all the things that people have come to really
like such as having dental care for the first time
and having cheaper farmercare and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:30):
Thanks to Lance again for talking with me about the
Canadian election. It's time for one more ad break and
we'll come back to discuss the future of the Canadian government. Okay,

(01:35:51):
we are back. Let's talk a little bit more about
Trump's undue influence in the twenty twenty five Canadian election,
because it is a little bit for a foreign leader
to be exerting this much influence in the votes of
you know, a separate country. Now, this was an election
that was previously about liberal stagnation and wanting change in

(01:36:15):
economic policy. This was kind of leading the Conservative popular
support the past two three years. And very suddenly this
whole election changed and it became about who Canada trusted
to oppose Trump and who Canadians wanted to be like
the face of Canada in this new like global trade

(01:36:36):
war and this fight against a hostile neighbor. And Trump
did not help this. On election morning, Trump released his
statement basically endorsing himself as the leader of Canada.

Speaker 5 (01:36:51):
Oh great, saying quote.

Speaker 3 (01:36:54):
Good luck to the great people of Canada. Elect the
man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your
taxes in half in increase their military power for free
to the highest level in the world. Have your car, steel, aluminum, lumber, energy,
and all our businesses quadruple in size with the zero
tariffs or taxes. If Canada becomes the cherished fifty first
state of the United States of America, oh no more.

(01:37:18):
Artificially drawn the line from a many years ago. Look
how beautiful this land mass would be, free access with
no border, all positives, with no negatives. It was meant
to be. America can no longer subsidize Canada with hundreds
of billions of dollars a year that we've been spending
in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is
a state man.

Speaker 1 (01:37:38):
Trump the border abolitionist.

Speaker 3 (01:37:42):
This is the rhetoric that really produced a liberal victory.
And Trump did kind of back off this stuff in
the past few weeks. And it's very funny to see
him go like full throttle the morning of the election
in case anyone was like on the fence about whether
they really was worrying about like Trump. This just this
says like such a crazy hell Mary. And we can

(01:38:03):
see this in some polling stats on Trump's Inauguration day,
the Conservatives in Canada were leading forty four point eight
percent in the polls, compared to the Liberals twenty one
point nine percent and the NDP's seventeen point six But
as Liberals searched for a new leader and as Trump
took office, the Conservative lead slowly started to slip. The

(01:38:25):
President began referring to Canada as the fifty first state,
called the prime minister quote unquote governor, and threatened to
impose huge tariffs to stop a non existent fentanyl smuggling
crisis through the Canadian US border. By April, the Conservative
lead had fully flipped over to the Liberals, who rose
to forty four percent in the polls, Conservatives falling to

(01:38:47):
thirty seven percent and the NDP around eight point five.
And these are pretty close to the final results. This
number is very accurate for liberal support. Conservatives got a
little bit more than thirty six percent of the vote
and NDP got a little bit less than this eight
point five. This is according to data from CBC and ABAGUS.

(01:39:08):
This was very much a leader's election, meaning that one
of the biggest factors driving votes was who people wanted
the prime minister to be and Mark Carney is much
more popular despite being kind of an unknown figure, which
kind of actually helps in popularity. Carney's was so much
more popular than Poliev. The past three months, Carney has

(01:39:29):
steadily gained in popularity, getting forty six percent approval, whereas
Polyiev has slowly declined in popularity. I talked about this
a little bit with Lance, but the degree to which
he's aligned himself with this like anti woke, like far
right populism rhetoric really bit him in the ass these
past few months. He would have done fine against Trudeau, certainly,

(01:39:51):
he was really writing auth that like anti incumbent wave,
but he is not like a loved figure across Canadian politics,
even among some conservatives. The two most important factors driving
Canadians vote, according to Abacus, was reducing cost of living
and dealing with Donald Trump. Younger voters seem to be
more focused on cost of living and changing policy around

(01:40:14):
fifty seven percent of voters eighteen to twenty nine, while
older voters around fifty six percent of boomers were more
concerned about stopping Trump. The very first topic in the
Canadian Prime minister debate was tariffs and US threats to
Canadian sovereignty. This is seen as like a very real
issue up there, and like hatred against the US is

(01:40:36):
genuinely growing, Like people are very upset. Canadians are very
upset about what Trump and the US has been doing.
It's being seen as like a genuine like intense betrayal.
The by Canada movement's been gaining a lot of support
with people trying to only purchase Canadian products and this
has resulted in a real cultural moment in Canada united

(01:40:58):
against the United States.

Speaker 5 (01:41:00):
It's genuinely remarkable, Like the Canada of the US have
always had pretty good relations for it. Well not a
waste they have.

Speaker 3 (01:41:09):
Well ever since that one, that one, yeah, yeah, no
one time, yeah, but the things they have improved it
in and like it's what's also remarkable is it seems
to be having an effect in Australia as well.

Speaker 5 (01:41:19):
And if you've seen that, but like I think I
saw an ad the other day that just said, doesn't
wants to make Australia like America, like straight up, you
know this is our Trump and he wile to align
with Trump. Like yeah, it's incredible.

Speaker 3 (01:41:32):
The degree which Trump doing this global trade war has
catalyzed negative sentiments around this, like far right populism, global
global wave that we've been seeing has really been a
boon to neoliberalch enemy the past few mins.

Speaker 9 (01:41:46):
You'll see like any I mean obviously, like I take
voter interviews in like legacy media with a huge pinch
of salt right, it's pretty easy to find someone who
wants to say what you want them to say. And often,
you know, certainly some of the US interviews are just
been ridiculous, but like people saying, Oh, I just want
to go back to how it was, Like I want
to go back to you know, the things that we're

(01:42:08):
used to. And obviously Trump is trending that for a
lot of people, and like in a very negative way.
And so you and as Garrison said, like the politics
of personality is becoming more important, like voting specifically for
individuals who they think will have like the negotiating ability
or just bravery or like whatever it is to stand

(01:42:29):
up to Trump.

Speaker 3 (01:42:29):
Right, Yeah, And like in Canada, I think it's less
personality driven, like actually Canadians are very against personality politics. Yeah,
I guess it's more like competency driven. And this is
where Carney was really able to succeed. It's because he's
not a compelling personality, but he is like a professional,
and that is why he was elected. Carneie helped Canada

(01:42:50):
whether the two US and eight financial collapse better than
almost any other Western nation. He is genuinely good at
his job of being like a neoliberal, like bank economy guy,
and specifically with these tariffs. This is the guy that
you want to handle this global trade crisis because this
is like what he has done his entire life. He's
never been elected to office before. He is just an

(01:43:12):
economy guy. And we saw this in like head to
heead matchups with Carnie versus Polier, rating certain things like
finding common ground to solve a dispute, where carne was
twelve points ahead, standing up to a bully, Carney's eight
points ahead, managing household expenses Carney six points ahead. Sitting
beside you on a long airplane flight, Carneie six points ahead.

(01:43:37):
Captaining a ship through a rough storm Carnee five points ahead.

Speaker 5 (01:43:40):
That's what you need, You need a seafarer five ahead
on seafaring.

Speaker 3 (01:43:45):
Hosting the best party Carney one point ahead. And you
will see.

Speaker 9 (01:43:50):
It's this reminiscent of that like was it like Tim
the plumber shit from like the bush Pailian election, like
the people I would want to have a beer with.

Speaker 3 (01:43:59):
Well, this is the The funny thing is is the
Conservatis are still better in like those types of like
physical things like putting out a kitchen fire, polyev is
up to and putting up a shelf. Polyev's up six.
This's the only two ones specured where the conservative candidate
edged out the liberals is putting out a kitchen fire

(01:44:20):
and putting up a shelf. But all other things like
solving disputes, standing up to bowlies, managing like expenses like
household expenses. Carnee Carne came out. I'm gonna read a
few lines from Carney's celebration acceptance speech here, and I'm
just gonna read them and not play clips because he
blends English and French and that's gonna be annoying. No

(01:44:40):
offense to our French speakers out there. Yeah, Garrison, it's
gonna be annoying to play for a podcast. It's not
gonna do for quote. America wants our land, our resources,
our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President
Trump is trying to break us. So America can own
us that will never happen. We are once again at

(01:45:02):
one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship
with the United States, relationship based on steadily increasing integration,
is over. The system of open global trade anchored by
the United States, a system that Canada has relied on
since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect,
has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.

(01:45:23):
But it is also our new reality. We are over
the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never
forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves
and above all, we have to take care of each other.
When I sit down with President Trump, it will be
to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two
sovereign nations, and it will be with our full knowledge
that we have many, many other options than the United

(01:45:45):
States to build prosperity for all Canadians. We will strengthen
our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
And if the United States no longer wants to be
in the forefront of the global economy, Canada will quote
and yeah, this is the type of rhetoric that's going
to be I think successful in Canada right now and
probably in the next few decades, is Canada's going to

(01:46:08):
try to take the spot that America used to used
to hold as like the center of like global power,
especially with climate change, with you know, crop crops slowly
slowly needed to be moved north. I think as as
as global warm progresses, Canada is in a spot to
be a like a new emerging like world power. And
with the degree to which America is just kind of

(01:46:30):
giving up that role under Trumpable, someone like Carney is
very interested in in gaining that that degree of superiority.
Now I'm gonna I'm gonna read a few comments from
from our listeners who I asked to send over their
thoughts on the Canadian election. And yes, this is a
limited sample, sask It's based on the politics of people

(01:46:52):
who listen to this show. But I still think there's
there's some interesting points here outlining what's happened in this election.
Quote Mark Karney might not be far enough left for
my tastes, but he immediately made gas cheaper a tangible
improvement for my brokeass. And with the way he's been pulling,
I'm settling on voting for him to keep the Conservatives
out with their stated anti woke agenda, pritesis, bigoted, not

(01:47:17):
like I have much choice. I would have loved to
be picking here about my vote, but I don't feel
confident in the NDP or the Greens to come out
on top of the cons Another person said, quote, I
can't believe the country seems to be rallying around a
neoliberal central banker in the face of American fascism. But
our resentment to the US seems to kind of override
all other political considerations. So much of the way this

(01:47:40):
election is panning out is a display of our culture's
profound inability to take necessary risks. We're running scared to
the serious administrator, man in the blind hope things will
be safe and normal again. When he fails, will take
a late and stupid risk again unquote. And this is
something I've seen other people express, is like with this
kind of Obama esque, you know, serious man in charge,

(01:48:03):
this like return of neoliberalism. Will this just set the
stage for, like the material conditions for someone like Trump
to emerge in the next ten years. This is a
fear that I've seen people express. I don't think it
is an inevitability, because this is not America in twenty
twelve or twenty sixteen. This is Canada in twenty twenty five.
The world is different, but I can understand this fear. Lastly,

(01:48:25):
i'll read from one other comment or from Blue Sky quote.
I understand the drive to keep the Conservative Party out
of office, but I'm also terrified of what the Liberal
Party will do to this country if they can keep
campaigning on that very basis in perpetuity. It's good that
we will probably avoid the worst. It's terrible that progress
is on hold until the Conservative Party is no longer

(01:48:47):
a contender, which could take decades. I also do not
expect the Liberal Party to meaningfully change the conditions that
are pushing voters towards reactionary politics. To be again with
unquote so kind of a similar sentiment there. I think
that the role for progressives in Canada right now is
either to rebuild the NDP or infiltrate the Liberals, probably
rebuilding NDP in most cases, because they are going to

(01:49:11):
have to have new leadership and seriously reevaluate their strategies
going forward. James any notes here. I guess, yeah, I.

Speaker 5 (01:49:20):
Think like I guess kind of to echo what a
lot of those people said, Like in the US, we
had Biden for four years, right, essentially because he was
elected on not being Trump, and he was able to
get away well, he thought he could get away with
more than he actually was able to get away with
as it turns out electorally, but like we were admonished
to vote for the person who wasn't Trump, right, and

(01:49:40):
what we got is open air detention for migrants, what
we got is inflation, what we got as a genocide
in Gaza, right. And this fear that a lot of
other nations in the global north right, like these neoliberal
economies are feeling, is going to lead to lots of
that like, yeah, we need a serious man, we needed,

(01:50:00):
we need a statesman's stand up to Trump, and that's
going to reinforce a one of that neoliberal orthodoxy and
that's going to make it very hard to make any
meaningful progress to electoral politics in those countries for the
next few years, which sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:50:14):
I think this is why some people are excited about
the minority government, although it is less stable. They could
be swayed by some more of the progressive agendas from
the NDP because they'll need NDP or block cooperation to
run the government.

Speaker 5 (01:50:27):
Yeah, they can't do a by the date, which like
I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:50:30):
Also like Carney isn't Biden like and the Canadian Liberal
Party is not necessarily the like American Democratic Party, like.

Speaker 5 (01:50:38):
They're they're different.

Speaker 3 (01:50:41):
Stuff on Gaza is different, like that the Canadian Liberals
have have restricted arms, arms trades and arms deals to
Israel the past year. Carney has not thrown trans people
under the bus the same way some Democrats have the
past year. Like these are these are different people. I think,
you know, Canada is a different country than the United
States for now. Garrison and I think what we can

(01:51:03):
see here is that this Canadian election, although it was close,
it still was a rejection of Trump's style politics. Most
Canadians do not want Canada to go the way of America.
There's there's been a subset of Canadians, especially in Alberta
and and and Saskatchewan, who have been trying to push
for this like mega style like Canada first rhetoric and

(01:51:24):
and this was denied. I think you were seeing more
support for Conservatives under Doug Ford with this more like
moderate conservatism. I think that's something to like watch out
for more. But like this, this Trump style of politics
was was rejected across the country. Yeah, and and and
Carney was able to figure out a way to make
people trust him to be a genuine like combatant against

(01:51:47):
against Trump and and usher and a new a new
golden age of neoliberal trade in the face of Trump's
Trump's chaotic and and anti market sentiments.

Speaker 9 (01:51:58):
Hopefully it does put an end too, like this, this
tendency among liberals, especially in the US but also in
the UK, to like feel that they need to engage
on right wing culture war talking points and like, I
guess quote unquote give some ground, Like we've seen that
in the UK right with with like really transfer a
big ship coming out the Labor Party, And like I

(01:52:20):
would hope that like people can see where this leads
to and that they're not going to vote for liberal
politicians who are going to throw trans people under the bus,
and like that that will be like a deciding factor
in their support.

Speaker 1 (01:52:32):
But I guess that's just my hope right now. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:52:36):
Well, and and frankly, you know, a better liberal party
or a liberal NDP coalition would would be would be
willing to engage with the idea of like taking trans
refugees from these extremely hostile countries sighly, which is just
something they've they've not like you know, publicly talked about.
But as things get worse than the States, we will
we will see. So yeah, but that is what I

(01:52:58):
have to say as a as a Canadian who lives
in the United States, my thoughts on the Canadian election.
You know, it could have been worse.

Speaker 9 (01:53:05):
It is.

Speaker 3 (01:53:06):
It is odd to see Canada almost accidentally replicate America's
two party system. So even if this was a rejection
of trump'style politics, this this this climate of fear did
result in replicating America's two party system, which is kind
of interesting the amount of which, like the third parties
lost support, with support going just towards conservatives and liberals.

(01:53:28):
That is, you know, one of the big stories of
this election, the the NDP blowout one of the big stories,
and poliv losing his seat. I think is is is
at least, at the very least a nice cherry on
top for this for this election.

Speaker 1 (01:54:03):
Whoa welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
about you know it happening here, which is what we
all what we all you know, we know what's happening.

Speaker 3 (01:54:17):
Yeah, well, and the it being rebellion in the here
being a galaxy far far away, and then now being
long long ago for this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:54:27):
Yeah we are. These are our may Day episodes and
nothing could make more sense on May Day than talking
about and or the new season of the show and
or if you're not familiar with and Or it is
a Star Wars show, and if you don't like Star Wars,
or you just don't like the Disney Star Wars, if
you've not enjoyed a Star Wars since you were six,

(01:54:47):
This is not that kind of thing. This is a
treatise on how revolutions do, can and should work, written
by people who have a deep bed of knowledge, including
a degree of on the ground knowledge of what some
of this looks like. And it is an immensely important
piece of media to be getting out right now. And

(01:55:08):
we'll start by saying Disney evil, bad corporation. I'm not
saying pay them for Disney plus Torrents exist.

Speaker 3 (01:55:18):
Yeah, raise the black flag, Raise, raise the black flag.

Speaker 2 (01:55:21):
Once again.

Speaker 1 (01:55:22):
I don't care how you get this. And you know
what I'll say this, I suspect the people making and
Or don't really care how you get this. This has
been the most financially successful show and generations. Fuck it.
Get it, like, don't don't pay Disney money if you
don't want to. I have no issue with that. I
don't know whose login I'm using it. I haven't for years.
Garrison can vouch for that. Just just watch it.

Speaker 3 (01:55:45):
Be like Cassie and Or and Liberate and Or season
two from from Disney, and watch it however however you
feel comfortable doing so.

Speaker 1 (01:55:55):
Yeah, yeah, use your f.

Speaker 2 (01:55:57):
Movie is use your here's your whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:56:00):
This is a podcast about the current season of and Or,
which is coming out in three episode blocks every Tuesday.
The second three episodes, we're now up to six episodes,
came out yesterday as we record this Tuesday of this week,
and there's two more weeks of and Or coming. So
this episode we're going to be talking about episodes one

(01:56:20):
through three. We should probably start with a little If
you haven't watched it, go watch it. Just watch season one,
and then you know, you can watch season two and
listen along with us. If you're not, if you're a
crazy person who's not going to do that will summarize
season one for you, which is that there's this guy
who grew up on a planet that was destroyed by

(01:56:42):
the Empire. He essentially like lived as a hunter gatherer
until you know, the war came to him and he
was forced out of his home and grows up very angry,
is taken in by some people who are kind of
like petty criminals and petty almost petty rebels, you know,
but not in the rebel alliance sense, just and that well,

(01:57:02):
we're going to commit some crimes around the edges and
try to get by. And the show is about this
guy getting inducted into a revolutionary organization run by a
man named Luthen that that is simultaneously very centralized around
him and also very decentralized, and that it's primarily him
arming and getting information and attempting to direct cells that

(01:57:25):
are themselves autonomous and often in conflict with each other,
which is very realistic to how things like this start.
On a historical level, everything that's happening in and Or
is based in real history. Tony Gilroy, who is the showrunner,
has stated that the kind of bank robbing years of
Joseph Stalin were one influence behind this, But there are
a lot you can see, and in fact there's a

(01:57:47):
little bit of Portland at the end of season one.
There's a number of things that have influenced this show,
a lot of moments in history the IRA.

Speaker 3 (01:57:55):
Some of the IRA like post al Qaeda, like prison
resistance rebellion. Yes, for how terrorist cells like form underneath and.

Speaker 2 (01:58:04):
Also very explicitly he talks about this in an interview
like the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. Is an influence
on how on how this one is?

Speaker 1 (01:58:11):
Yes, was an influence on this Yes. So that's all
to set this up. We're now going to talk about
what happens in episodes one, two, and three of season two.
You want to summarize them, gear.

Speaker 3 (01:58:24):
Yeah, let's start with the first episode. So, undercover rebel
agent Cassian Andor steals in experimental tie Avenger, crashes it
on a jungle planet, and then finds himself in a
sectarian split between this other rebel cell who just had
like a DISASTERUS operation.

Speaker 1 (01:58:42):
Their leader got killed, so no one's really sure who
should be running things.

Speaker 3 (01:58:45):
They capture Cassian because they think he's an Imperial pilot,
and he tries to negotiate with them as their infighting continues. Meanwhile,
Imperial intelligence agents converge to develop a plan on how
to squash potential resistance on the planet Gorman as they
plan to extract calkite minerals from the planet's core, potentially

(01:59:08):
endangering the stability of the planet to build a dust
star by the way, Yes, to build a dust star.

Speaker 1 (01:59:13):
Yeah. So what's happening is these minerals are necessary to
collect the system that makes the death stars big planet
destroying gun work. But at this point, basically no one
knows that, and the imperial like intelligence yeah, and they're
being told that it's part of an energy independence project.

Speaker 3 (01:59:32):
Mon Mathma, the senator from Tandrella who eventually becomes a
rebel leader in the Star Wars movies, is helping to
plan the Traadcath wedding for her daughter against Mathema's own wishes,
and she runs into some difficulties with someone who helped
her clean up some of her financial blemishes to help

(01:59:53):
finance the rebellion. So this is most of what happens
in this first episode. We have some of and Or's
previous comrades and planet Ferriks are on this like farming
planet and they're nervous about potential inspection. So I guess specifically,
do you have anything we want to talk about on
this first episode.

Speaker 1 (02:00:11):
Yes, I want to talk about the scene where they
talk about clearing out Gorman, because when they talk about
mining it for this mineral that's necessary to make the
Death Star, they're talking about basically doing deep fracking at
the core of the planet that is going to make
it uninhabitable, right Like, they're basically tearing out the core
of this world that produces high quality textiles, right Like,

(02:00:35):
it's famous kind of a luxury goods exporter. That's really
all they make. There's these spiders there that make a
nice kind of silk. That's what the planet does. And
it's got this population of people who are used to
being given a lot of autonomy because they make very
this nice, this like luxury product that all they're rich
people like, right, So that the folks running there are

(02:00:55):
public and in the early years when there was still
more the public, the Empire was still more on their
republican side. Still people didn't want to talk with them
too much because they make a luxury good.

Speaker 7 (02:01:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
There was a massacre there kind of early on in
the Empire when Tark and the target Yeah, landed a
cruiser on a bunch of protesters killing them. But other
than that, it's been pretty quiet for a while. There
is like a small and not super competent or armed
rebel cell starting up on the planet, and they have
this big meeting the Empire does, where everybody gathers at

(02:01:28):
a castle with the guy who's in charge of building
the Death Star to talk about how to clear off
this planet. The meeting itself in this part of the
episode is based off of the Vonse Conference, which was
a conference held in nineteen forty two by Reinhart Heidrich
and kind of managed by Adolf Eichman to plan the holocaust.
This is where they actually sat down and talked about

(02:01:49):
how are we going to build death camps, how are
the death camps going to operate, how will we evacuate
people to the death camps? All of that right, there
was a meeting. A bunch of guys showed up. There
are minutes of the meeting. Tony has stated, if you've
watched there's a great TV movie it's like twenty years
old at this point, called Conspiracy. It stars Kenneth Brannaw
as Reinhardt Heidrich, who is the architect who was like

(02:02:10):
the guy running the Holocaust. Initially it's stars Stanley Tucci
as Adolph Eichmann, an incredible iikman by the way, and
this scene is deeply influenced by that movie. Right, There
was another German movie also that, like the movie with
Brannaw was based off of. But but Tony Gilroy has
said that that movie was an influence and that this
is based on the Bonse conference, and there's a couple
of lines that are almost word for word. One of

(02:02:32):
the big differences is there's a point at which they
bring in a couple of PR agents who are outside
of the empire. That's like an outside PR corporation and arm. Yeah. Well,
I think they're an outside contractor who does marketing normally
and is doing propaganda if I'm remembering right.

Speaker 3 (02:02:46):
I think they're part of the Ministry of Enlightenment is
what they call it. Yeah, yeah, credimful name. They have
some of the best bits, yes, from this meeting.

Speaker 1 (02:02:56):
Their job is to put out propaganda that makes the
Gormans look arrogant and unloyal and bad to everyone else,
so that when they're massacred no one will care. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:03:05):
Quote, hasn't there always been something a little arrogant about
the gour.

Speaker 1 (02:03:09):
Yeah, very good. It's it's very good.

Speaker 3 (02:03:12):
Yeah, they're talking about how they like create false news
stories and like influence public opinion to be weaponized in
favor of the imperial project the Ministry of Enlightenment. Stuff
is very good. The other line I really like is
from Dedra, one of the main characters from like the
previous season, who has this like female isb agent and.

Speaker 1 (02:03:31):
She's sort of being made the aikman of the the
Gorman Project.

Speaker 3 (02:03:35):
And like she talks with a chronic Ben Mendelssohn's character
like about how propaganda really only gets you so far,
and instead what they will need to need to work
on is actually like controlling the Gorman resistance from the inside,
Like you need to count on rebels to do like
the wrong thing at the right time. So about like

(02:03:56):
like like astroturfing some kind of insurgency that can actually
in the end service the Empire's interests, and like this
is what she's talking about for her project being is
actually like helping to influence the way that the resistance
operates on the planet instead of just just focusing on
like public opinion and propaganda and like military might.

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
Yeah, What I really appreciate about this scene is the
degree to which it shows, Number One, how information is
siloed in a situation like this, how people are on
a need, Like this room is informed at the start. Whoever,
your bosses, if they're not in the room, they don't
know about this. Yeah, and you don't tell them, Like

(02:04:39):
we do not want the tightest of closed services. We
are doing a genocide and we're not talking about it
to other people.

Speaker 3 (02:04:46):
They report directly to the Emperor. No other people beneath
the emperor knows what's happening. Yeah, and even the Emperor
doesn't really know all of the details at this point,
Like yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:04:55):
And this is like like the people are cutting out,
like like they're cutting out, like the director of Imperial
of the ISP, Like they're cutting out, the director of
Material intelligeny're cutting off, like grabbing off Tarkin, like they're
cutting out, Like the most important people in Star Wars
have no idea. Like it's not even going to be
the Vader. I mean, Vader probably knows, but there's no
fucking mention of him at all either.

Speaker 1 (02:05:11):
Yeah, he can read mine, so I assume he's been
able to like glean some things, But Yes, he's.

Speaker 2 (02:05:17):
Not not involved in any of this shit because he's
not a Dutch star guy.

Speaker 1 (02:05:21):
Yeah, and again, this isn't like a massive population, so
they're viewing this primarily as like a pr problem. So
both you need to get out messaging that these people
are arrogant and bad so that nobody supports them when
we start killing them. And we need a terror cell
that can be trusted to carry out attacks against the
empire that will justify what we need to do, right,

(02:05:43):
So that that's the point of this meeting. It's very
well shot, it's very well done. There's a lot of
understanding of like just history in it that I appreciated
as a Holocaust nerd. That's a bad way to frame it.

Speaker 3 (02:05:56):
But yeah, that is a bad way to frame it.

Speaker 2 (02:05:59):
Yeah, nope, nope, nope.

Speaker 1 (02:06:01):
Anyway, No, if you've watched these episodes and you loved
them and you found that scene chilling, go watch Conspiracy
with Kenneth Brannaw and Stanley Tucci. Oh, the Tuc, the Tuc,
the Twoch playing Iikman Garrison.

Speaker 12 (02:06:15):
Dad.

Speaker 3 (02:06:16):
Alright, let's go on a break and then come back
to talk about episode two.

Speaker 7 (02:06:20):
Yeah, we're back.

Speaker 1 (02:06:31):
Did you guys know Stanley Tucci super pro Palestine.

Speaker 3 (02:06:36):
That's cool.

Speaker 1 (02:06:36):
Oh nice with an actor like that that I've really enjoyed.
I always am like white knuckling it if I when
I decided to google that, and I was pleasantly surprised
with the tuc All right, that's what I got here.

Speaker 3 (02:06:48):
Let's do Episode two. The Empire arrives on this farming
planet to complete inspections on Coruscant. Our little slimy weasel
Carril Karn keeps rising through the the Imperial ladder at
the Bureau of Standards. Man Mathma's financial schemes to help
secretly fund the rebellion start coming undone as one of

(02:07:10):
her like backers or like the.

Speaker 2 (02:07:12):
Guy who's moving the money around for.

Speaker 1 (02:07:13):
Her, yet he's helping her wash her money.

Speaker 3 (02:07:16):
One of her collaborators, take Kola, starts to kind of
back out or ask for ask for some assistance, and
is getting a erratic in his behavior as he's going
through a divorce.

Speaker 1 (02:07:30):
And is making kind of vague threats about well, maybe
I'll talk to someone about what I know.

Speaker 3 (02:07:36):
Right, Yeah, if I if I don't get something out
of this relationship, I might be forced to do something
else to ensure like my safety and financial security. Meanwhile,
Cassian is still on this jungle planet, held captive by
these by these sectarian leftists start firing at each other
and totally totally break down.

Speaker 1 (02:07:56):
Literal circular firing squad and it's beautiful.

Speaker 3 (02:08:01):
They go full, they go full Red.

Speaker 1 (02:08:03):
Army, Japanese Red Army, thank you very.

Speaker 3 (02:08:06):
Much, Japanese Red Army, and Cassie and barely barely escapes.
Over the course of this like multi day like conflict
with the UH, with the remnants of this rebellion cell,
let's talk a little bit about this UH leftist infighting
plot point.

Speaker 2 (02:08:19):
Yeah, this is something something I've never actually really seemed
to pick it in you kind of like mainstream media thing,
which is something that that happens in real movements, which
is that when when movements suffer serious setbacks or when
you know, and we see this more commonly in real life,
when sort of like you know, the tide of a
movement falls and everything starts falling apart. And these are
people who just got absolutely obliterated in a battle of

(02:08:41):
their leaders dead, a bunch of their comrades died. One
of the things that happens is in this is that
this is when the this is when social movements evolve
into infighting, you know, and this this is what was
happening inside of like the American Left roughly from twenty
twenty one to twenty twenty four was you got you
got this giant, really vicious cycle of infighting, because this
is this is what happens when there's no longer grow
threat to hold. They'veyone together, and people have this tendency

(02:09:03):
to because they've just lost. Right, everyone's trying to process
the emotions of their defeat, of like the really serious
psychological damage that they've suffered. Like in these battles, people
lash out at each other because it's easier than trying
to fight an enemy that has just defeated you. And
you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that,

(02:09:23):
like you know, these are also the periods when like
rapists tend to get ran out right and when like
abusers in the scene tend to get ran out. But
on the other hand, yeah, it turns into these really
really nasty sort of sometimes just sectarians. Sometimes they're just
sort of like, you.

Speaker 1 (02:09:37):
Know, I never liked this guy. People are getting in
trouble for being bad I'm going to just accuse this
guy of some.

Speaker 3 (02:09:44):
Shit personality conflicts stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:09:45):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And this is something
that happens like every time there's a cycle. I mean
I remember this God like, I mean you see the
shit and scenes are like from like like two thousand,
like thirteen twenty fourteen, there was like a huge cycle
of this. We're kind of cycles of this in like
twenty nineteen. What they we're kind of falling a part
as occupy isis this is just like something that's a
reality of social movements that you don't ever really is.

Speaker 1 (02:10:08):
He depicted it.

Speaker 2 (02:10:08):
And the everything I think is fascinating about it is
because and Or is the person who's watching it right,
Andor has no idea what the fuck is going on
with the chulton ams of this group.

Speaker 1 (02:10:17):
No, No, my pay is famous.

Speaker 3 (02:10:20):
Yeah, he knows who like the leader is because Lutherin's
team has been like supplying them with weapons, but they
don't know about like the internal structures of those groups
for like op sec reason No.

Speaker 1 (02:10:30):
And the leaders dead, like the leader got killed in
this ambush. Right, there's you hear about her. She's named
in the first season My Pay. She's one of when
when Forrest Whitaker in season one gives that very famous
rant where he's talking about all because he's the anarchist
militant leader and he's talking about all the different groups.

Speaker 3 (02:10:47):
Separati galaxy, they're lost, all.

Speaker 1 (02:10:51):
Of them, clarity of purpose. He talks, he names my
pay along with the other different So she's clearly a
fairly well known I think she's a republic restorationist kind
of person, So basically a social democrat militant leader, and
her group's just gotten fucked and she is dead. So
he knows of them, but he doesn't know them.

Speaker 2 (02:11:13):
Yeah, and because of that, you get, you get, you get,
You get two things at the same time that I
think are both really important. One is that you get
to see what this kind of like infighting looks like,
right like like actually depicting television. You get to see
what happens when when movements fail and when people start
to invite. In two, you get to see what it
looks like from the outside, from Andrew's perspective where he's
looking at these people, He's like, what the fuck is

(02:11:34):
wrong with you people? All of you guys are clowns.

Speaker 3 (02:11:36):
These are fucking children, Like I'm doing a serious job.

Speaker 2 (02:11:39):
Yeah, and this is also a thing that you get this.
This is a real movement dynamic where it's like, you know,
you're watching people who after twenty twenty or something, you
know you've been through your first movement and you're in
your first movement cycle collapse, right if you've been doing
this and I'm like, you know, if you're doing this
for like a fucking decade and you're watching all of
these people do this shit again, and it's just like,
oh god, fucking damn it. Like the kids are like,
you know, they haven't been to this before. It's really traumatic,

(02:12:01):
and they're doing all this like completely incomprehensible bullshit, which
is also like on the outside, if you look into
this as someone who's not part of one of these
scenes and you're seeing all this drama, it's just like
what the fuck is wrong with you? People? Like why
are you doing this? And the fact that you're getting
all of this like you know, fucking Disney show is fascinating.

Speaker 1 (02:12:20):
It's why, I mean, And it shows the depth of
knowledge and the the sheer amount of understanding that the
people writing this have of how movements go. Again, it's
granular and it's to a degree like based in some
real experiences that some people on this team have had,
Like you don't understand stuff like this otherwise.

Speaker 3 (02:12:42):
And as this group is like interrogating Cassie and try
to trying to figure out who he is, Like they
keep trying to dig into like what rebel group Cassiine
is like a part of, and like who he's working with,
and he's like refusing to give them this information because
that's good security culture. And they're like, but you know
who we work with, and he's like, yeah, you shouldn't
have told me.

Speaker 1 (02:12:59):
Yeah, she didn't have said that.

Speaker 3 (02:13:01):
That was bad, very very good stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:13:05):
And it's got it starts, you know, we didn't say
this with with episode one. Episode one starts with another
beautiful Cassian speech when he's because he's he's infiltrating as
a tie fighter pilot this base where he's stealing an
experimental craft and there's a young woman there who's like
a technician, who is his in right and who's clearly
just made her break with the Empire, and she like

(02:13:25):
meets him briefly. She's like, sorry, I know I'm not
supposed to look at you. I'm not supposed to talk
to you, and he like grabs me. He's like, no,
this is what it's all about, is the moment of
connection between us where we both after all of like
this being frightened and alone in the dark, were together
and we know that we're doing something. This is what
every this is, This is everything.

Speaker 3 (02:13:45):
And this is the moment you find yourself.

Speaker 2 (02:13:47):
Yeah yeah, from yourself and this is an everything that
that That was the moment in this season where I
was like, oh, okay, so the people are it's still
the same people. It's like these are people who are
just of the left in a way that you don't
really ever see even with like old communists who are
writing stuff. It's like I have given this speech to people, yeah,
like dozens and dozens of times, like this is the

(02:14:07):
thing that if you do this work, Like you have
literally given this speech to a new person about like yeah, yeah,
like this is the reason where and like it's just
fucking I'm just like that mind is blown that this
shit is just like appearing in mass media where people
who aren't from these movements are just like encountering this.

Speaker 1 (02:14:24):
And the reason why again when I say and or
is like historically profitable after the first season. Every year afterwards,
for a couple of years, the number of people watching
it increased, which by which I mean each year after
it came out, more people watched it than had watched
it in the year it came out. And that doesn't
happen to TV. Yeah, it simply is not how television works,

(02:14:47):
which is why Disney was like, here is a quarter
of a billion dollars make and or season two.

Speaker 3 (02:14:53):
Man, this is the first time Star Wars has like
visually looked good in like a decade.

Speaker 1 (02:14:58):
Yeah, oh my god, and it looks incredible.

Speaker 2 (02:15:01):
It looks gorgeous, gorgeous.

Speaker 3 (02:15:04):
There's so many super long like tracking shots this season
where they're going through like massive sets yea, with all
like like singular like one takes and like you know,
all the previous Star Wars shows are filmed on these
like digital sound stages with like you know, led screen backgrounds,
but like you cannot achieve this level of like in
real life like fidelity on like a digital background screen.

(02:15:26):
Like these are huge sets, Like specifically the Chandrilla set
is like massive. As you walk around like modern mathma's
like Senate estate or whatever for this for this Tradcath
wedding that we'll talk more about in the next episode. Yeah,
just like, really really like excellent craftsmanship going into this.

Speaker 1 (02:15:41):
Yeah, just beautiful. Okay, speaking of beautiful set design. All right,
we're back.

Speaker 3 (02:15:58):
Let's talk about the nally of this little three episode arc.
Cassian's trying to contact Lutheran and learns that his friends
on the farming planet are actually being subject to some
kind of imperial inspection. He's advised to not go there,
but of course he does anyway to check on his
friends as his Star Wars tradition a lah Luke skywalker.

(02:16:20):
In episode five, people on this planet are trying to
evade this inspection by forging emergency work orders, but their
scheme falls apart. They might have been rated out by
one of the top guys running the silo, and imperial
officers arrest and interrogate people for not having proper work visas.

Speaker 1 (02:16:40):
Yeah, and the people on this planet are Cassian's friends
from season one who he lived with, like the guy
who was effectively his big brother, Brasso.

Speaker 3 (02:16:48):
Yeah, Brasso, the guy who hits the cop with the
brick in the finale season one.

Speaker 1 (02:16:52):
Your goddamn righty, Brick's a cop And then Bicks, who
is his girlfriend partner type person kind of off and on,
and the because of her connections to him, gets horribly
tortured in season one.

Speaker 3 (02:17:03):
Yeah, and as well as young terrorist Willem, who throws
a pipe bomb into a crowd of stormtroopers in the
finale of season one. So these three are in hiding
on this farm planet and are now in trouble because
these Imperial Inspections and immigration officers are are on their tail.
On Triandrilla, Man Mathma talks to Luthen, who's there for

(02:17:26):
for work because he's like he's like an he's like
an artifact, like a dealer. But she tells Luthen that
the guy that that they were working with to to
help Man Mathma secretly fund the rebellion is showing some
erratic behavior and and and may and may need to
be like, you know, bribed to keep quiet. Luthen, being
smart and serious, knows that no, no, no, no no,

(02:17:49):
you cannot simply bribe this man into silence. This man
needs to get taken out right now. You need to
close this.

Speaker 1 (02:17:56):
He brought in the cops like he brought in the
fucking cops like he brought He has to die. That's
the way these.

Speaker 3 (02:18:05):
Threatening to snitched. This guy needs to get dealt with immediately.
The other plot point that I don't think we'll have
much talk about but is very excellent. Our slimy weasel
Cyril Carn and his new abusive girlfriend Dedra have have
Cyril's wonderful mother over for dinner in just a fantastic,

(02:18:28):
fantastically uncomfortable seed In less happy occurrences, as the Imperial
officers investigate and search this farming planet, one of them
tries to sexually assault Bix inside their little r V home.
Bix kills him, and eventually and Or arrives with a tie.
Avenger takes out this this Imperial battalion and Bix and

(02:18:51):
and Or and the kid are able to escape, and
Brasso unfortunately dies in a in a high speed speeder chase.

Speaker 1 (02:19:00):
He dies. It's it's it's an under It's like a
believable move. Someone would make it under fire. But like, man,
there's tall fucking grass. Just drop go to the ground,
don't get on a motorbike. Well you're above the fucking crops. Like,
get on the ground, high stressful environment.

Speaker 3 (02:19:18):
Right, It's it sucks, but it's but it's really people.

Speaker 1 (02:19:20):
Do stuff like that all the time in gunfights. Yes,
so it's it's one of those where I was like no,
but also like, yep, that's what happens. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:19:29):
One of the things that isn't really being talked about
with the show, but I think it is actually is
very important, is that it is absolutely unflinching in its
depiction of patriarchy. Like I mean there's you know, there's
this sort of obvious, horrifying scene of like this ice guy.
I mean, increasingly over over the course of this thing,
like just going from like hey, if you like date me,

(02:19:52):
you can not get deported because we have to maintain.

Speaker 3 (02:19:56):
The I know you're illegal, and that's fine.

Speaker 1 (02:19:58):
We know we need a bun. We're not here to
arrest everyone, right because we need the crops from this planet.
But I am going to arrest some people, and I
can make sure it's not you if you go on
a quote unquote date with.

Speaker 2 (02:20:11):
Me, yeah, and then you know, and it's just and
escalates from there and is just straight up like sexual assault, right,
And this is really really I mean obviously it's jarring
because it's you know, like it's an non sconscript depiction
of a tempt of sexual assault and then she like
does a fight and she kills them. Right, But this
was also very very jarring to a lot of people
because people are very and this is a Star Wars
thing too, they are very used to seeing fascism depicted

(02:20:32):
through its own self perception.

Speaker 4 (02:20:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:20:34):
People are very very used to seeing fascism as something
that is strong, that is ordered, as discipline that is dangerous.
And the problem is the reality of fascism is that,
like a lot of it is just a bunch of
tipshit rapists who are like pretending to be those guys. Yeah,
and you know, and this is one of the things
Andrew has always been very very good at. Is you
saw this last season right with with Dedra. Who is

(02:20:57):
her thing is that she is, you know, of the
very common amerror an archetype of the cop who breaks
all the rules to get the job done. And then
you know, and then like that that's how she first
is first introduced, and then you see what that actually
looks like in public, which is, you know, she is
just straight up torturing bis with like the screams of
an entire the death room of an entire species.

Speaker 3 (02:21:16):
And that's in season one.

Speaker 2 (02:21:18):
Yeah, yeah, that's the season one And and what's powerful
about this is something and Or also does into the
prison Break episodes is like this this fascist self perception,
right of this sort of strong ordered, discipline, unified thing
that is just propaganda. They are not actually like that
behind the scenes, right, It's just these fucking incredibly violent,
like petty losers doing this fucking shit. And then you know,

(02:21:41):
I mean the other thing about about the sort of
patriarchy side is that you see this on the other
side with with mon Mathma's like, you know, her sort
of like money cleaner, who's who's what her old friend
take Coleman like like literally is is demanding that like
Ma Mathma have sex with him in order for him
to keep keep doing this money washing shit. And this
is also something you see in bits all the time,
which is like guys with resources using their access to

(02:22:04):
resources to force themselves on women, like in the movements
and this, and you know, and there's there's like a
third dynamic here with with take Homa, which is like
another thing you see all the time in movements is
guy going through a divorce who goes completely off the
fucking rails and starts doing shit that dangers everyone and
you know, starts doing sort of like weird predatory shit,
and I think, I don't know, there just hasn't been

(02:22:26):
much analysis of like, yeah, this is these are all
ways things like if you have been in movements, you
have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways, you have
experienced cops doing shit to you, you have experienced stuff
from inside the movement.

Speaker 1 (02:22:40):
Fuck. A big part of how the major Greens organizations
that were dismantling the Green Scare were taken down was
through members of these different groups who had been doing
direct action who were misogynists. Right. That is always an easy,
easy way to break into and shatter a movement is
find the guy who's got that going on about him
and turns.

Speaker 2 (02:23:00):
Yeah, and you know, and you have that on one hand.
On the other hand, with like the cops, this is
like a very very common like cops just like sexually
assaulting people for fun. It's like a thing that they
do all the fucking time. And same thing with ice
because I mean this is obviously like I don't think
it say like this, this is just literally one to one.
They're doing ice raids and star wars. Yeah, and the
heroes are the people who like and or coming back

(02:23:21):
with a tie fighter blowing them up right, like you know, yeah,
Also I do want to someone landa know, I do
want to point out that like this show also quietly
has had like the most realistic lesbian relationship in all
of Star.

Speaker 13 (02:23:32):
Wars, and this season is like, oh, someone on this
crew is a lesbian because they have depicted my culture perfectly,
which is uh the you know okay, so like the
rich girl lesbian and the like broke.

Speaker 2 (02:23:46):
Non white like gorilla lesbian who came from nothing, his
family was killed by the Empire, get together as an
intense item dread in operation and then the moment the
operation is over there broke girl was like, fuck, this
was a bad idea. And now they're keep running into
each other in movement things that are like they're sort
of avoiding each other, and one of them is still

(02:24:07):
the perfect in fiction to lesbian culture. Incredible, No notes
loved the lesbian rebels. I'm happy for them.

Speaker 1 (02:24:14):
Oh incredible, Yeah, it's it's it's beautiful stuff. The quality
of the writing, like everyone was worried who loved or
season one, like well fuck how could it? How could
they possibly how could they possibly compare with season one?
And uh, it's just getting better. It's just they did

(02:24:34):
it again somehow, you crazy bastards, You did it again.

Speaker 2 (02:24:39):
The thing I want to close on was with this wedding,
which is there's a bunch of really fascinating things about it.
One is that, okay, so on the very nonsubtle level,
like they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing
to this like sort of tech upbeat techno thing, like
they're cutting back and forth between like mon Mothma dancing
at this wedding, and like the ice raid that's happening,
which is like, you know, this is the level of

(02:25:01):
political subtlety that you need to be working on with
the American people. You have to just be like I'm
hammering you over the head with the point which is
like all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch and like, yeah,
the ice rays are happening.

Speaker 3 (02:25:11):
Well, that is an aspect. I think it also proves
there you can operate in that zone because men Mouthma
is still a very important figure.

Speaker 1 (02:25:19):
Yes, starting is not just a useless lib right, She's critical.

Speaker 3 (02:25:23):
And you have someone like like Lucian who can put
on nice clothes, can can do this persona and extract
intel at this party. In one in one of the
previous episodes, he's like talking with this guy who introduces
his son who is in the Imperial Navy, and he
was talking about like like like a like a recent
operation on a planet, and Luten was like, oh, really
tell me more, and like it's like you can, you can.

(02:25:44):
You can still extract information at these like places where
power is like flaunted and exchanged. Yes, they are still bad.
But if you are like an aspiring rebel, yeah you
can use these places to your advantage. But no, there
absolutely still is. This is this juxtaposition of yeah, this
like you know, riotous party with with like this horrific

(02:26:04):
ice raid and yeah, like the material conditions in these
people's lives is very different. Even even if man Mathma's
doing good stuff still as like an Imperial senator, her
everyday life is very different to complete someone who's having
to hide from like ice agents.

Speaker 2 (02:26:19):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:26:19):
The other thing though, that is going on in this scene.
It's not purely these are the wealthy partying as these
nightmare raids go down. The other thing that's going on
is mon Mathma is emotionally accepting this guy who was
my lover for a long time and who is a
dear friend of mine is going to be killed. And
I have accepted the necessity. And the only thing for

(02:26:40):
me to do right now is to get so drunk
that I can't feel it.

Speaker 3 (02:26:44):
Yeah, is to do drugs, wreck drink. And that's how
you exist under like the horrific conditions that the Empire
forces you to live under.

Speaker 12 (02:26:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:26:53):
Yeah, And there's this fascinating thing. And I know this
especially watching back season one. If you look, if you
go back and watch those scenes and you look at
the way it's lit. You look at the way that
there's just the stark like white light coming through the windows.
This is not how it's lit in season one, right,
This is a very deliberate choice. Almost everyone else who
does this scene would do this sort of like warm, rich,

(02:27:14):
like golden lighting, because that's like that's how you do
these sort of like fancy wedding things. And this the
way that it is lit is the same way that
they're lighting all of the like like the stark white
imperial corridors, and there's this very you know, and so
like like it's working on like all of these sort
of like levels of like like visual metaphor of of
all of this, just like oh yeah, this is also

(02:27:35):
imperial space, right, and everyone here is operating either like
regardless of what side they're on, they're operating like in
imperial terrain in this sort of like thing. As Asma
Motha also was just dealing with like her kid becoming
a tradcath and like trying to talk her kid out
of being a tradcath or a kid FU share at
her for being like, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this

(02:27:56):
like weird marriage thing when you're like.

Speaker 3 (02:27:58):
A chire like twelve year old marriage.

Speaker 2 (02:28:00):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think the place I want
to end on is there was a really interesting thing
where like the Disney account like just posted a video
like I think it was on Twitter that was just
one the like one hour of Mathmaed dancing. Yeah, And
there was like a fascinating reaction to this of like
like cause on the one hand, there's always people like
who I know, Victoria Zeller, who's a trans writer, who

(02:28:22):
I follow, who up probably we're talking to on the
show at some point soon I had this thing, but
like oh yeah, like there are also there's just gonna
be weddings that are like based on this Chandulaine wedding thing,
and like in like two or three years, we're gonna
be seeing this And there's just interesting dynamic where like
on the one hand you have the people who were
just completely focused on the aesthetic, and then the other hand
you have the people who were like, oh yeah, I
like this is this is fucking me getting just absolutely

(02:28:45):
fucked up as like all of the fucking horrors play
out around us and having to like deal with and
fight all the fucking horrors, while like all of the
people around me are just like kind of just completely
checked out.

Speaker 1 (02:28:57):
And I thought it was just like fascinating.

Speaker 2 (02:28:59):
Watching that's to play out on social media and on
in real life like this. You know, they're being very
very literal about how it works, and it's working.

Speaker 3 (02:29:09):
I'm seeing people do it.

Speaker 7 (02:29:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:29:12):
The last thing I do want to mention is just
a big shout out to Cyril, to Cyril Karn's Italian
Jewish mother.

Speaker 1 (02:29:18):
Yeah, oh yeah, the best, the best villain in Star Wars,
Darth Vader ain't got shit.

Speaker 3 (02:29:27):
Not nearly as scary as Cerrel Krn's other No.

Speaker 1 (02:29:29):
I would take him in a fight over her any day.

Speaker 3 (02:29:32):
How However, one of the interesting parts about this little
like like dinner party is how Cyril Krn's like FBI
agent abusive girlfriend. The moment Cyril is out of the room,
she like takes control of this mother, using like all
of her like imperial interrogation and like intimidation tactics, and
it's like, no, no, no, you don't understand how this

(02:29:54):
relationship is going to go. I am in charge here.
I will dictate when Cyril can see you, how I
will dictate how your relationship with your son is going
to go, because like Cyril is like my like pet,
like I run everything and things will go according to
my wishes.

Speaker 1 (02:30:10):
See. I had a very different interpretation of that really,
because number one, she is not on board she's going
to be doing part of the Gorman genocide. She doesn't
like the plan. She doesn't like that she's involved. This
is not what she wants to be doing. She wants
to be hunting Luther. Yes, I agreed, And I think
part of it is that she doesn't like and I
think this will become increasingly clear. She's not thrilled that

(02:30:31):
Cyril's going to get involved in this shit because it's
dangerous what I thought they were kind of showing we've
been seeing her like abuse him. I don't think we've
seen her be mean to him other than like initially
when that before they were dating, she didn't take him
seriously until she saved her life.

Speaker 3 (02:30:47):
Well, I know, he's like a weird stalker beforehand.

Speaker 1 (02:30:50):
He is a little bit of a stock and.

Speaker 3 (02:30:52):
She is, like I think you can absolutely interpret some
of some of her behaviors as like a degree of
like emotionally.

Speaker 1 (02:30:58):
Abu says, it's not just a couple before their dating.

Speaker 3 (02:31:01):
Yeah, maybe I don't know fascist for fascist couple. I
think there's elements and including like the earlier scene of
them in the apartment, where like both of them are
like very uncomfortable around each other.

Speaker 1 (02:31:12):
They're awkward people, but like they're I one of the
things I appreciated about this is that, like she is
a monster. We see her doing exclusively evil things. And
then Cyril, because his mom is so cruel to him,
does the most relatable thing anyone does in this show
and goes and lies down on his bed and has
a panic attack in the middle of their dinner. And

(02:31:34):
that's when she and that's when she says look, bitch,
this is how shit's and she's being a good girlfriend
in that moment, she's getting his mom off his back.

Speaker 3 (02:31:42):
I definitely interpret this scene differently. She did also threaten
to arrest his uncle, like she does threaten to send
his uncle to forever jail. Yeah, no, I can see
how you would read it that way. I think I
definitely do interpret this scene a little bit differently, And
I I think the beauty of good writing is this
ability to look at this relationship in multiple ways.

Speaker 1 (02:32:04):
What I like about the way The Empire is written
is that they're not caricatures, but not in a way
where they're being like, well, the Empire's got a point,
but in the way that like, yeah, these are people,
and I understand how folks, why folks would want to
be a part of this system outside of just like
the cruelty that it does. Like Partigaz, who is like

(02:32:24):
the leader of the ISB section that we're watching, is
a really good boss. He listens to his subordinates, he
tells them when their ideas suck. He does not spare
their feelings, but he's he rewards initiative and he's willing
to like be proven wrong or argued with like when
people are forceful against him and make a good point,

(02:32:45):
He's like, all right, well let's try it. And I
love showcasing that in the same way that like, if
you talk to people who worked for like work for
companies like Raytheon, they'll be like, yeah, it was a
nightmare evil that we were making, and like a very
healthy working environment. And that is often the case with
some of the most evil organizations on the planet, Like
people who are very good at managing people often wind

(02:33:08):
up like That's what makes fascist systems so dangerous. It's
not that everyone in this is incompetent. It's that there
are sometimes people who are very good organizers and very
competent leaders who wind up in these systems, and that's
part of what allows the evil to happen.

Speaker 2 (02:33:24):
The point of Android, the point of Star Wars is
that also you could out organize them and beat them.
So message of hope.

Speaker 1 (02:33:31):
Yes, yes, I mean fundamentally the show is very hopeful
because the empire number one, we know the empire falls,
but number two we're seeing we're seeing like why right,
which is this attempt to control everything that inevitably creates
more fires than you can put out. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:33:49):
The tighter they hold their grip, the more systems will
slip through their fingers. Yeah, yep, which is the line
from the theory twink in season one.

Speaker 7 (02:33:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:33:57):
And I think what makes Androws some specials is this
does fill in this gap of like when we jump
into like a new hope, you have this fully like
complete like rebel alliance, right it is. It is an
alliance of different rebel cells that have come together to
do like like a large scale military action. It takes
a lot of build up to get an alliance of
rebel cells, a whole bunch of like individual like rebel

(02:34:17):
terrast cells have usually have a very hard time working
with each other. Yes, and it's very hard forget them
to coordinate. And and Or is the story of watching
these like many different cells slowly start to figure out
that maybe it would make more sense if we work
together instead of just doing random small crimes and like
hits on individual planets or imperial processing plants. The ability

(02:34:40):
to see these cells come together is what makes I
think and Or so special. And And for the rest
of the season, We're going to move forward a year
at a time all the way up to the beginning
of rogue where then we do have the like the
completed rebel alliance. So I am I'm excited to watch
that development.

Speaker 1 (02:34:57):
Yep, all right, well see you next week. This is it, sorry,

(02:35:26):
Garrison in you.

Speaker 3 (02:35:29):
It's we have a whole thing that we've been doing.

Speaker 1 (02:35:31):
Happen we have been.

Speaker 3 (02:35:33):
This is the first episode that started differently in like twelve.

Speaker 1 (02:35:37):
You're right, you're right. Why don't you why don't you
introduce erectile dysfunction or whatever we call this?

Speaker 3 (02:35:41):
That's not what it's called. This is it could happen here.
Executive Disorder, the weekly newscast where we cover, you know,
everything happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and
what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined
by Federal No No New Mexico, State.

Speaker 1 (02:35:59):
Magis Mexico, Municipal Judge.

Speaker 3 (02:36:01):
Municipal Judge, Robert Evans. That's right, Neil Long and James Stout.
We're recovering the week of April twenty fourth to April thirtieth.

Speaker 1 (02:36:11):
Yes, and we're sponsored by Hymns. Not yet, but hopefully.

Speaker 9 (02:36:15):
When they release THEMS, we will we will accept that
contract money one day.

Speaker 3 (02:36:20):
Robert, what's going on? With your fellow judges.

Speaker 1 (02:36:23):
I want to get to that garrison. Some very important
news just dropped from the real raw news Twitter account.
Oh boys, sharing what you don't want shared one hundred
and seven thousand followers. Special forces that accompanied President Trump
to the Pope's funeral arrested Biden for treason afterward, but
it turned out to be a body double.

Speaker 14 (02:36:39):
So breaking news turns out breaking us. Joe still has
a trigger two up his sleep. Patriots not in control.

Speaker 3 (02:36:50):
What a beautiful world people must live.

Speaker 1 (02:36:53):
I desperately want to lift in the world where like
Joe Biden is a Saga Rara type rebel figure, like
tricking special forces with body doubles, hiding in the mountains.

Speaker 5 (02:37:04):
They called him Joe the Jackal for a reason.

Speaker 3 (02:37:06):
Yeah, he locked up in a Vatican vaults where he's
scheming his return.

Speaker 1 (02:37:10):
He just stolen nuke from Fort Leonard Wood.

Speaker 9 (02:37:14):
Oh boy, he's in a tiny submarine making its way
to keep it right.

Speaker 3 (02:37:18):
Now, I guess you know, speaking of the Pope, But
Trump himself has announced his running for the pope ship paper.

Speaker 1 (02:37:25):
Why not let him have it. Let him have it.

Speaker 3 (02:37:28):
We will keep a close eye on that.

Speaker 1 (02:37:30):
Let him have it. But make Stanley Tucci do whatever
job Stanley Tucci had in conclave.

Speaker 3 (02:37:35):
Make him the lib A cuck cardinal why not?

Speaker 1 (02:37:37):
That's right, that's right, speaking of lib No, speaking of
judges who actually exercised a great deal of personal courage.
There have been two cases in the last week or
so of judges being arrested and charged by the Trump
administration with crimes that are all related to aiding and
abetting undocumented immigrants. Right, yeah, I'm going to start with
the case of Hannah Dugan. Hannah Dugan is is a

(02:38:00):
Wisconsin She's a Milwaukee County Circuit judge. She was sworn
in in twenty sixteen. So she's I wanted to say,
I wanted to say she hasn't been doing this very long,
but no, that's literally like nine years, eight or nine years,
so she's been doing this a spell. She's sixty five
years old. And on March twelfth, there was a fellow
Flora's Ruiz is his last name, He's thirty years old,

(02:38:21):
who was arrested after basically there was a confrontation between
him and his roommates for him playing loud music. He
was confronted for this on March twelfth, and he allegedly
fought with a male roommate in the kitchen. A woman
I'm not sure if she was a roommate or just there,
tried to break them up. Two women eventually did. One
of them got elbowed in the arm, allegedly by Flores Ruiz.

(02:38:45):
One of them was struck while trying to break them up.
It is unclear to the degree to which I'm hearing
a lot of people like I went to the centrist
subreddit to season they're like, well, a serial abuser of women.
That's not really what he's being accused of. There's like
a fight between him and another guy, and it got chaotic.
One person elbowed in the arm. I'm sorry, I don't
consider that serious domestic abuse unless it's part of a pattern.

(02:39:07):
If it's literally he was fighting a guy and other
people swarmed in and some of them one of them
got elbowed. I don't know about this woman that he's
alleged of striking. To what degree did he haul off
and punch he or was it again, there was this
chaotic struggle and several people got struck in the middle
of it. Right, this isn't like great, but this is
certainly not. The evidence that has been provided by the

(02:39:28):
state here in this case is not that this is
a serial domestic abuser of women. It's a guy who
was involved in a chaotic fight with a roommate and
a couple of other people. Right, So he's being charged
with misdemeanor domestic battery as a result of this. He
faces up to nine months in prison and a ten
thousand dollars fine on each count if convicted, and he
has not been convicted and is innocent until proven guilty.

(02:39:51):
So he went up in front of Judge Dugan literally
a few days ago when we record this, and while
she was in the midst of like having this like
court meeting. Basically, I think this was kind of like
a pre trial deal right where they're where they're kind
of like setting the ground rules of things. She finds
out that Ice is in the courthouse and that they
are looking for Flores Ruiz, and so she gets really

(02:40:14):
angry because based on what Wisconsin has stated, like the
actual like law in the state, they are not supposed
to be interfering in actual court proceedings. And part of
the reason why is that the courts don't want people
to be dissuaded from dealing with their state level court
issues by the fact that Ice might pick them up. Right,
It will stop people, It will make people go on

(02:40:36):
the run. It makes it very difficult to enforce law
and order.

Speaker 9 (02:40:39):
And it also think victims, right, Like I've said, at
least to have some makes it difficult.

Speaker 1 (02:40:43):
For victims to get any sort of justice. Yes, yeah.
The FBI FI David describes her as getting visibly angry
when Immigration shows up and she leaves the bench, right,
and she retreats to her chambers and I think confers
with another judge, and she and that judge then approached
the arrest team inside the court courthouse. The affidavit describes
her as having a confrontational, angry demeanor. She basically keeps saying,

(02:41:06):
show me a fucking warrant, right, And they don't have
a quote unquote real warrant, right, They do not have
a criminal arrest warrant. They have an administrative warrant, which,
based on the actual law, they do not. She does
not have to let them in, right, That is not
the way these things fucking work right into the courtroom
to like interrupt the proceedings. On the strength of this warrant.

(02:41:26):
She tells them to speak with the chief judge, and
she leads them away from the courtroom. Right. Once she
sends them to the chief Judge's office, this is where
the thing that may in fact be criminal behavior comes in.
Dugan goes back into the courtroom and says something along
the lines of weight, come with me, and then takes
Flora's Ruiz and his lawyer through the jury door into
a non public area of the courthouse. Right, this is

(02:41:49):
not normal behavior. And Ice is alleging that this is
interfering with the duties of federal agents. Right, that she's
basically hiding an undocumented immigrant who is being actively tracked
by Ice, right, and that that is a federal crime.
And so that is the situation. Right when it was
found out that this was happening, the FBI and ICE
arrested her. She has since bailed out. She is facing

(02:42:12):
several federal charges, and it's, you know, kind of unclear
where this case is going to go. In terms of
her initial behavior, she was absolutely legally in the right
that administrative warrant did not give Ice the right to
interrupt the court proceedings. She led them to the chief
judge that was all entirely within the law. We're going

(02:42:33):
to learn how the law adjudicates what she did afterwards, right,
taking these people through, because it's not illegal to lead
people through a backdoor. It's not a crime to tell
people to leave this way. But what may be adjudicated
as a crime is that by doing this, she was
helping to aid in a bet the escape of a fugitive. Right,
And that is the argument that the federal government is

(02:42:55):
making here.

Speaker 9 (02:42:56):
Yeah, they didn't leave the building at that point, right,
because in the charging documents, then an ice agent gets
in the elevator with them, yeah, and decides not to
detain them at that point for some reason.

Speaker 1 (02:43:06):
Yeah. Yeah, I believe that's what happened. And that part
of is why I think they picked this case, because
they thought it was close enough on the edge enough
that they could charge a judge. And I think that
is the purpose of this more than going after this,
And that's why they've been going to these courtses. They
have been looking, they've been shopping for a situation like this, right,
And part because one of the first things that happened

(02:43:27):
is the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Judge Dugan right because
She's been charged with two federal counts, and this is
a normal thing. If a judge gets accused of federal crimes,
you would, in normal terms, want them to be suspended
because those crimes are probably something like they were selling
children to a child prison, which is a thing that
happened to Trump. Pardon the judges responsible, right, you would
want those people not trying cases while this was going on.

(02:43:50):
But what's going to be done here, and what's already
being done here, is that judges that are friendly to
and sympathetic to undocumented people and who are not gigantic
pieces of shit. And Judge Dugan comes out of a
public defense background. This is somebody who defended people like
the defendant in this case in her previous life as
a lawyer, and I think acted with tremendous courage in

(02:44:11):
this situation to try to protect somebody. They are going
after her because number one, they want to chill other
judges from doing this, and number two, they can keep
her off the bench right and assume she will be
replaced with somebody worse, or that they will just clog
up the system, either way of which works in their favor.
So it will be unclear how things are going to

(02:44:32):
work out in this case. I can't tell you legally
what's going to happen. That could go either way. I
can tell you, and I think this is a very
important point. It's a point Jared Yate Sexton, who's a
scholar on fascism, made online about this particular case, is
we shouldn't give a shit if she broke the law.
She did the right thing. These people are doing the

(02:44:53):
wrong thing and they need to be stopped right And
that is my overall stance. What she did was heroic
and we should support her and fuck these people. I
don't know, yeah, yep, yep. I don't have a complicated
take on this.

Speaker 3 (02:45:08):
Solidarity with the Wisconsin judiciary or at least one of them.
At least one of them.

Speaker 1 (02:45:13):
Yeah. I have a friend who knows her and says
she's a very nice person, and her actions in this
case certainly would seem to suggest that she's a very nice,
good courageous person.

Speaker 9 (02:45:22):
Yeah, and like just to there's conceivably like a person
listening who thinks that I know, these deportation things are okay.

Speaker 1 (02:45:29):
I know if you are, fuck you, why this isn't
for you? Go away?

Speaker 2 (02:45:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:45:35):
Well, yeah, we don't make it. You know what, you
put rocks in your pockets and yeah, there's bodies of it.
Whatever the.

Speaker 9 (02:45:46):
Even if you fucking like the deportation for whatever reason,
you should be able to understand that doing this in
court houses is bad. Like if a let's just take
an example, right, Like, if a woman who is undocumented
is subc to domestic violence, right, going to testifying court
could lead to her being deported, Like, this is fucking bad.

Speaker 3 (02:46:06):
It could subject her to even more violence from the
state from yet wherever she's trying to flee from, yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:46:13):
To being detained with people, yeah, yes, if you believe
in the judicial system, right like, this stops it functioning.

Speaker 1 (02:46:19):
Also, I want to say this too, if you're purely
coming at this from a perspective of like, well, I'm
still a law and order guy, this also vastly endangers
Wisconsin police because if every undocumented person who gets accused
of a crime knows that, well, the instant I'm accused,
I'm going to be sent to a fucking concentration camp,
might as well start shooting, right.

Speaker 3 (02:46:40):
Yeah, It's why you don't see very many of these
things happening in states where people regularly carry firearms.

Speaker 1 (02:46:46):
Yes, so again you know that's all I'm saying. No,
that's not my primary concern, but I'm going to make
that point.

Speaker 12 (02:46:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:46:53):
What about the other like weirder case of the New
Mexico case, the judge in New Mexico.

Speaker 1 (02:46:58):
Yes, so now back to my fellow New Mexico municipal judge.
Actually I think he was in a missige yeah, county magistrate. Yeah,
so he and I basically the same. So there's this
guy Nancy Cano who's a former police officer, his wife
was a cop. And Joel Cano, who is the Donna
Anna County magistrate judge. These two are really you wouldn't

(02:47:19):
have expected what happened from this group. These two are
a cop and a judge.

Speaker 3 (02:47:23):
Couple radical lefty lunatics.

Speaker 1 (02:47:25):
There are wealthy landlords who own at least eight properties
and they hire three men to do like you know,
contracting work. And those men included a guy, Christian Ortega
Lopez twenty three years old, right, who is a Venezuelan migrant.
And first off, because these are cops or a cop

(02:47:45):
and a judge, they like check his papers which saved,
do not deport right like he is in the the
system not subject. This person is not subject to removal. Right,
those are on his papers. They check his papers. They
work for these three guys, work for them for a
while and develop a close relationship with the Canos to
the point that they refer to them as the boys.

(02:48:06):
And when they get kicked out of their apartment, they
let them live with them, I think for free or
at least for a nominal fee. And as they describe it,
they came to consider them part of the family. And
there's like photo evidence of that, including photo evidence of
them like going to the gun range together as like
a family day at the gun range and shooting, and

(02:48:28):
like this guy Artago Lopez like posts pictures of these
people and these like family outings on his Facebook, Like
they really do seem to have all been very close. Yeah,
earlier this year, Ice comes for these guys, the boys,
these three dudes who are living on their property, in
a small guest house on the Canos property, and they
allege or Tega Ortiz to have been a member of

(02:48:49):
trind Agua. And it's based on and I hate most
of the reporting on this because it's all just like
the alleged alleged gang member alleged trind to Agua member.
And you look at it, well, well, he has tattoos,
and there's pictures of him with guns, pictures him with
guns that are legally owned by Americans at a gun range.

Speaker 9 (02:49:07):
Yeah, he's a twenty three year old guy coming to America.
Like there's a high correlation with those people and people.

Speaker 1 (02:49:13):
Going to a gun range. Yeah, nothing illegal with that,
but they're like a gang member. Photos of guns on
his Facebook. Oh my god. So these guys get arrested, right,
and it's initially and this is like a month or
so ago. It's a big scandal. Canos resigns from his
position as a magistrate, right and gets permanently barret serving
as a judge in New Mexico because these guys had

(02:49:36):
been on his property, even though again there's not any
evidence that I have seen anywhere that he actually did
anything illegal. At this point. Now, yeah, here's where things
get problematic. At this point, the boys are being you know,
the government is treating them as people who are here
I legally, and they are trying to kick them out
and they are accusing them, these three guys of being
evolved in Trindagua. At this point, Nancy Kno provides them

(02:50:00):
with legal assistance in complying with the procedures of their
pending immigration cases, right, which shouldn't be illegal. She's literally
helping them abide by the law.

Speaker 2 (02:50:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:50:11):
But there's some other things, So Joel Cano, this is
where this guy turns from like fucking married a cop,
he's a landlord. He smashes or take a Lopez's phone.
He admits, he's admitted that he's done this. This is
not an allegation with a hammer to stop Ice from
getting it. So, first off, based illegal, super illegal, super illegal,

(02:50:34):
but not a like a good person act, I would argue. Secondly,
Nancy tries to help, and this is I think a
grayer area. Tries to help Ortago Lopez delete his Facebook account,
and I don't actually think there's any evidence of him
doing anything illegal on there. I think it's just they
knew the photos he'd posted of him not breaking any

(02:50:54):
laws would be used as an argument that he had
I think that that's defensible in court, although they will
allege that it's destruction of the evidence, they may win
on that breaking the phone is. You know, that's going
to be a tough one for them. That's just going
to be a tough one for them. Now the knos
are currently being charged and they have been released. They
can't leave the county. There was the prosecutors were attempting

(02:51:15):
to have them separated so that they couldn't talk about
the case. But thank god the judge ruling was like,
they're married, they have a constitutional right to be together.
You don't get to do that. But obviously they have
to like hand in their passports any guns they'd had,
which they seem to have already done. The good news
is that these are rich people, right, Like the judge
even makes a comment that, like, these are the wealthiest

(02:51:36):
people I've ever had in my courtroom, So they have
the resources to fight this. And again fucking politics making
strange bedfellows.

Speaker 2 (02:51:46):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (02:51:47):
Yeah, critical support to the landlord, judge, cop couple who
tried to protect these EMM grits. I don't know, like whatever,
they did the right thing, you know, in my opinion,
again not the legal thing, and I'm not urging you
to follow them and breaking the law, making very clear
it is illegal to break the phone of somebody that

(02:52:07):
you know the police are looking for because they've been
charged with crimes. That is a crime. I'm just saying
I think what they did was out of love and brave. Anyway,
That's what I gotta say.

Speaker 3 (02:52:17):
Speaking of love, I love these ads. All Right, we
are back. I am now going to discuss a I
believe the word is a flurry of executive orders that

(02:52:40):
half in the past week, because there was a ton
This was a huge week for actions through through through
executive order. We've tried to summarize a few of these
that have like or a few orders that have come
in the past few months, but but yeah, definitely the
ones that happened last week are much more notable, and
I will go through them one by one. Starting off

(02:53:01):
with an attempt to possibly repeal large sections of the
Civil Rights Act, Trump side in order to quote eliminate
the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to
the maximum degree possible. Disparate impact is a legal theory
that seeks to address discriminatory policies that, on their face
may appear neutral but actually continue decades old discrimination and segregation.

(02:53:26):
This order from Trump provokes presidential approval for Title six
antidiscrimination regulations from the sixties and seventies, and orders all
agencies to quote deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations
to the extent that they include disparate impact liability. The
order calls for the Attorney General to quote initiate appropriate
action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title

(02:53:48):
six the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. Cabinet
members were also instructed to review all pending investigations, civil suits,
consent judgments, permanent injunctions, and government positions rely on spared
impact theory. That includes Titles seven and eight of the
Civil Rights Act, which protects equal employment and fair housing.

(02:54:10):
This is kind of part of a larger attack on
civil rights in general, like obviously the past few months,
who've seen this with like DEI stuff. But last week
the DOJ essentially closed its existing civil Rights office, resigned
a dozen senior career attorneys, curbed investigations into police misconduct
and violations of voting and disability rights. Plus, the Education

(02:54:31):
at Discrimination Division is now being directed to protect women's sports,
and the Immigrant and Employee Rights Division was told to
investigate companies that quote unlawfully discriminate against US workers in
favor of foreign visa workers unquote. So that's how they
think they're going to be defending civil rights is by
keeping trans girls out of sports and going after foreign

(02:54:54):
visa workers. Basically, they're trying to turn federal civil rights
infrastructure against those whom they were meant to to protect
in the first place. The next order kind of outlies
something I'm calling cop Nation. It's called quote strengthening and
unleashing America's law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent civilians.
This is kind of like a proto martial law order.

(02:55:17):
It's what you would do beforehand to strengthen police, but
not actually like declare martial law. It's setting kind of
the path towards that, or at the very least like
strengthening law enforcement to the degree to which it like
butts up against what martial law would be.

Speaker 2 (02:55:33):
The order calls to.

Speaker 3 (02:55:33):
Quote unleash high impact local police forces, protect and defend
law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or
local officials, and surge resources to officers in need unquote.
It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to
have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense
to police officers who quote unjustly incur expenses and liabilities

(02:55:57):
for actions taken during the performance of their official duties
to enforce the law. So this tries to make it
harder for police to be held accountable for a civil
and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm.
According to Business Insider, quote, following previous executive orders targeting

(02:56:17):
a number of elite firms, nine law firms have agreed
to deals with the President and collectively agreed to provide
nine hundred and forty million in pro bono legal services
to support the President's policies. This order also calls to
use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen
legal protections for police officers, as well as to quote

(02:56:39):
seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote
investment in the security capacity of prisons, and increase the
investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of crime data
across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to review and
remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on to local or
state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance

(02:57:02):
of law enforcement functions. And then, finally, quote, Attorney General
and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary
of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate,
shall increase the provision of excess military and national security
assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.
And shall determine how military and national security assets, training,

(02:57:24):
non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized
to prevent crime unquote, so moving more national security resources
over to state and local law enforcement, and directs the
ag to go after state and local officials that struckt
criminal law by quote, prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying
out duties necessary for public safety or unlawfully engage in

(02:57:46):
discrimination or civil rights violations under the guise of DEI
do you want to discuss anything with this you know,
anti ACAB executive order here and what it might actually
like do in reality besides you know, expanding like legal
protections for cops.

Speaker 2 (02:58:02):
I mean, I think the worrying one to me is
that they're very explicitly talking about using military national security
assets like in the US against Americans, and the thing
right now we are doing is like to prevent crime.
But like I think, very obviously everyone is look at
this is immediately gone. Like part of this obviously is
about like trying to defeat any attempt to even moderately
reform the police, but a lot of it is also like, yeah,

(02:58:22):
they're expecting giant they're expecting giant protests this summer. Yeah,
and they want to be able to use military assets here.
And what they're doing with this, the Secretary of Defense
is developing a plan to use military assets like presumably
against protesters either that or you know what I mean,
Like cercific thing here is like used to prevent crime,
which is just like the deployment of the US military

(02:58:42):
against like US Right, that's I think a pretty cut
in dry. They are developing the apparatus through which they
are going to attempt to deploy the army against the
US citizens in the US.

Speaker 3 (02:58:54):
Well, and it's also specifically like empowers like individual police
officers against any like received restrictions that like local or
state officials might be putting on them. Yeah, And I
think that's what makes it more super worrying for me.
It's like it's like enabling like the police state aspect
of like of the of the executive branch saying, hey,
like individual cops, we support you more so than whatever

(02:59:15):
like local jurisdiction you are like under. And if if
the local jurisdictions start to like restrict your ability to
like to to to do violence, restrict your ability to
do your job, we are going to help you to
make sure that you have the legal and like physical
capacity to continue your job as you see fit.

Speaker 1 (02:59:32):
We will throw the high dollar lawyers that we have
threatened into working for us at these states and municipalities.

Speaker 3 (02:59:40):
Yeah, both to like defend your individual actions and then
also go after the people in charge of you, like
like like both of them.

Speaker 8 (02:59:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:59:48):
Yeah, So it's more like CPD black site shit, like yeah,
Nazi gang shit, like you know them just like shooting people. Yeah,
Like that's the kind of shit.

Speaker 9 (02:59:57):
The torture the data sharing, I think is something people
should be aware of. The Like that seem to be
what I would imagine we'll be funding for more federal
fusion centers and then equipping them with like home land
security assets, intelligence assets that are already used outside the US.
Like that is concerning especially in a climate of like
migration crackdown, right, Like this data sharing will help them

(03:00:21):
further target migrants well.

Speaker 3 (03:00:23):
And this relates to another executive order for protecting American
communities from criminal aliens. Basically, it targets sanctuary cities. The
Attorney General and the DHS Secretary will publish a list
of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration
law and federal funds. Those districts will be suspended or terminated,
and if those districts remain sanctuary districts after officials have

(03:00:45):
been notified of their status, then necessary legal remedies and
enforcement measures shall be pursued to quote end these violations.
Section one of this order lists several federal criminal laws
that they say are being violated by these sanctuary districts,
including quote obstruction of justice on lawfully harboring or hiring
illegal aliens, conspiracy against the United States, and conspiracy to

(03:01:08):
impede federal law enforcement. Assisting aliens in violating federal immigration
law could also violate the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act unquote, So they're even rapid and rico here for
state and local officials who are trying to protect immigrants
in their communities. There's a few other executive orders I
want to mention, including one that requires professional truck drivers

(03:01:29):
speak English. I think this is actually just to mask
the consequences of like the tariffs, with the.

Speaker 1 (03:01:36):
Fact that a lot of truck drivers are losing their jobs.

Speaker 3 (03:01:39):
Yes, yeah, so this is to like hide those layoffs
or trying to force people to get laid off if
they don't speak good enough English, or to like to
create pretext to have these layoffs be justified as we see,
you know, the shipping industry slowly collapse because of the tariffs.
Another order that's just more frustrating, I guess to me
and like worrying long term about the future is quote
advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American youth. And I'm actually

(03:02:02):
going to play a video here of Trump's signing this order.

Speaker 4 (03:02:07):
This next executive order relates to artificial intelligence educations. There,
you've obviously done a lot in the artificial intelligence space already.
The basic idea of this executive order is to ensure
that we properly train the workforce of the future by
ensuring that school children, young Americans are adequately trained in

(03:02:27):
AI tools so that they can be.

Speaker 1 (03:02:29):
Competitive in the economy.

Speaker 4 (03:02:31):
Years from now into the future as AI becomes a
bigger and bigger deal.

Speaker 6 (03:02:35):
That's a big deal. US AI is where it seems
to be at. We have literally trillions of dollars being
invested in AI, and there are some money today. Very
smart person said that AI is the way to the future.
I don't know if that's right or not, but certainly
very smart people are investing in it heavily.

Speaker 3 (03:02:58):
This clip is super interesting to be he said, demonstrates
just how little Trump knows what's really going on. Like
this is the first time he's seen this order. He
has to get explained to what it is before he
signs his name on it. They're just handing him these
things and he's just signing papers. He is not like
dictating which things he actually wants to happen. He just
gets handed stuff and there's cameras on. He's like, hey,
this is to help AI with kids, and you're so

(03:03:20):
smart about AI, mister President. He's like, yes, I am.
As he signs his name. The actual text disorder is
really freaky. Quote. By fostering AI competency, we will equip
our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to
adapt and thrive in an increasing digital society. Early learning
and exposure to AI concepts not only demestifies this powerful
technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to

(03:03:42):
become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future.
To achieve this vision, we must also invest in our
educators and equip them with the tools and knowledge to
not only train students about AI, but also to utilize
AI in their classrooms to improve educational outcomes. Unquote James,
how do you feel about that at a as a
as an educator yourself.

Speaker 9 (03:04:03):
Probably fifty percent of my time in the classroom right
now is trying to explain to people where they shouldn't
copy paste the assignment into chat GPD And like every
year for the past three or four years, we have
dealt with like bots, like students in my class who
are not real people. I've dealt with more and more

(03:04:24):
and more use of AI. It's from people who I think,
like the folks who are coming through my classroom now,
like many of their like high school years when they
should have been getting good solid like writing tuition work
during COVID lockdowns, right and so like. I'm not entirely
blaming like the folks coming through my class here, but

(03:04:44):
it is it's a fuck situation. That's only getting worse.

Speaker 1 (03:04:47):
It's fucked.

Speaker 9 (03:04:48):
It's the like I've been educating people for nearly two
decades and like I've never come across anything this bad.
It is fundamentally damaging people's engagement with education and their
ability to learn.

Speaker 1 (03:05:02):
It's giving them permanent brain damage. It is life altering
their ability to think and in a way that may
never be recoverable for a lot of people. Yeah, I
don't want to be a boomer. There's data on this.
The AI companies have. Microsoft has data on this. It
damages people. It needs to.

Speaker 9 (03:05:20):
Be finding good solutions for that. Writing assignments AI can't
write like it's not that hard. But before people come
into my mentions right saying like, oh you can use
this to detect AI. I can detect it because the
assignments it submits a shit. The problem is that people
keep using it, like because it's Roberts said that, they're
running out of other options, right.

Speaker 3 (03:05:42):
And they're like really committing to this. The end of
the order directs the Secretary of Education to provide grant
funding to quote improve educational outcomes using AI, including but
not limited to AI based high quality instructional resources, high
impact tutoring and college and career pathway exploration advises and navigation.

Speaker 9 (03:06:02):
Yeah, I mean sadly like these federal and to extend
state level too, Like dictats, I guess do impact what
you're supposed to put on your syllabus, right, Like, especially
for like high school students, these can genuinely impact what
high school teachers are supposed to teach. It changes a
little bit like once you get to the university level.

(03:06:23):
And I guess we'll we'll see how this goes. But
like this, this genuinely could have a very damaging impact
on and it already has had a damaging impact on
the US education system.

Speaker 3 (03:06:33):
Yeah, I have one more thing I want to read here.
This is actually a presidential memorandum, not an executive order,
but this cause to investigate Democrat and grassroots funding platform
Act Blue, a legend quote schemes to launder excessive and
prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees quote. Actlue has
been the target of conspiracy theories for years, starting with

(03:06:54):
James o'keef and Elon Musk has recently targeted Act Blue
with with bizarre theories on how Act Blue functions and
is used to funnel money to like Antifa, and and
you know, George Soros money get getting moved over to
all of these you know, Tesla Vandal's crazy stuff. But specifically,
Trump is calling the Attorney General and Treasury Secretary to

(03:07:16):
quote investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising
platforms to make straw or dummy contributions or foreign contributions
to political candidates and committees, and to take appropriate action
to enforce the law unquote. I think this whole thing
beyond trying to you know, harm the Democrats' ability to
like win elections in the future as a form of
collection meddling is also just like a spig smoke screen

(03:07:39):
away from a CNN investigation last year into deceptive practices
used by political fundraising platforms Win Red and Act Blue,
which found that the Republican platform had more than seven
times the fraud complaints sent to the FCC than Act
Blue during the period of twenty twenty two to twenty
twenty four, with the fundraising platform targeting aging seniors who
thought they were personal friends of the Trump family with

(03:08:02):
propaganda and emails that trick them into signing up for
recurring donations. And what they thought was a personal correspondence
to President Trump. It's a really worrying investigation. It'll be
linked below. And like, you know, meanwhile, you have Elon
Musk literally offering people millions of dollars to like get
people to sign up to vote and sign petitions. And
and yet they're gonna try to try to investigate, you know,

(03:08:24):
fraud in Democrat and grassroots fundraising, which I'm sure there
is a little bit of, but according to this investigation
by CNN, so much more fraud on the on the
on the Republican fundraising platform. You know, there is actually
one Democrat who we can verifiably claim did a bunch
of weird fundraising ship and did straw donations from foreign donors.
And it is Eric Adams, who is Trump's favorite Democrat.

(03:08:52):
Trump is personally keeping out of prison. Oh gotastic. Anyway,
that is the that's the flurry. We're gonna go one
more break and then come back to close out on
some immigration and tariff updates.

Speaker 12 (03:09:04):
Hell yeah, we're back.

Speaker 1 (03:09:18):
And wait, what's that? Do you hear? The dulcet tones
of an angel?

Speaker 5 (03:09:23):
Sorry locking jazz rocky jazz Bart Sorry lock.

Speaker 12 (03:09:34):
Locking jazz rocking jazz.

Speaker 5 (03:09:37):
Bo We're gonna get to the rest of the class catalog.

Speaker 1 (03:09:41):
We got four years. Yes, yes, I'm really looking for
secrating the temp. We're working on a cover of Lost
in the supermarket where there's just nothing in the supermarket
because of the terriffs. It's actually very easy to find
my way around in the supermarket now because there's nothing
on sone.

Speaker 2 (03:10:01):
So, all right, what's actually happening with with the Turff tariffs.
I'm gonna I'm just gonna start by reading Trump's incredible
cope about why everything's going to shit. This is Trump,
This is a truth from true social This is Biden's
stock market, not Trumps. They didn't take over until January twentieth.
Terrorifts will start kicking in. We soon start kicking in,

(03:10:23):
and companies are starting to move to the US and
record numbers. Our country will boom, but we have to
get rid of the Biden quote overhang. This will take
a while, has nothing to do with the tariffs all caps,
only that he left us with bad numbers. But when
the boom begins, it will be like no other.

Speaker 1 (03:10:38):
Be patient.

Speaker 3 (03:10:39):
This is Biden's stock market.

Speaker 5 (03:10:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:10:43):
So the reason he's saying this is that So today
we got a report that the US for the first
quarter suffered the first like actual economic contraction of the
economy since like twenty twenty two, and that basically there
was like one quarter in twenty twenty two. We're contracted,
and and it like basically since like the lockdowns, it's

(03:11:03):
been expanding. We are probably already in the recession. And
the other thing there's think that's very important to note here,
right is you're seeing a lot of reporting about this
being a contraction, and a lot of the reporting we'll
talk about how like, yeah, this is because people are
like rushing to do their all their imports right now
before the tariff's hit. The thing is, right, this economic
contraction is like before the actual substantive impact of the

(03:11:26):
tariff's hit. So this is just the beginning of like
the rolling economic collapse, and all of these turf tariffs
are going to generate. There's been a little bit of
movement in the sense that like, Okay, so when I
last talked about sort of the declines in like shipping
from China or just shipping in general, it was mostly

(03:11:48):
like sort of I don't know what you'd call them,
chipping industry, trade press this has hit like the mainstream
press now that you know, and some of these indicators
are doing sixty percent import drops from China, and it
looks like China is maybe kind of starting the preliminary
things to figure out how to figure out negotiations, and

(03:12:09):
that they've been the Chinese government has been going behind
the scenes and talking to a bunch of like high
profile American companies and has been like quietly repealing some
of their one hundred and twenty five percent retaliatory tariffs
in the US on like very specific goods. We'll see
what happens there. There hasn't been more movement than that.
What is also very interesting is that so okay, so
like obviously like a bunch of prices are just increasing

(03:12:32):
already in places like like Temu and like Sian And
Amazon was going to have like a counter that showed
how much additional money you were spending because of the tariffs,
and they announced they were going to do this, and
then President Trump like got on the phone with Jeff
Bezos and yelled at him, and then Jeff Bezos said
he wasn't gonna do it. But this is also an
interesting thing because we're actually starting to see cracks between

(03:12:54):
Trump and like people like bezis, like the tech people
can really have been his like closest basis support right
for this whole the entire project in terms of like
sect like large scale sectors of capital, it's been these
people who've been backing him. And I think as as
the stuff continues, we're going to continue to see rifts
between them and the Trump administration over shit like this,

(03:13:17):
because you know, like people get really really is something
we've talked about a lot in episodes we've done on
pricing and inflation, is that people get really pissed off
and prices go up, and that's a way to like,
you know, this is a problem for these companies because
this is the way you lose sort of brand loyalty,
and that's like how everything goes to shit. And Trump
has to is doing all these deflections to be like
it's not actually the terrorifts that are doing this because

(03:13:39):
people are gonna be really pissed about this and yeah,
I don't know, welcome, Welcome to quarter one of the recession.
This is going to be the best quarter of the
economy for a long time.

Speaker 9 (03:13:49):
Yeah, tariff talk, Okay, so it's cuds out with immigration update.
I'm just gonna run a few speed run a few
of these, and we'll get a bill deep in some
of them. The New York Times is reporting that once again,
the Trump administration is separating, has separated a child from
their parents.

Speaker 2 (03:14:08):
Jesus fucking Christ YEP.

Speaker 9 (03:14:10):
A federal court denied the government's motion to dismiss a
First Amendment challenge to its policy of deporting pro Palestine
anti genocide activists. So that allows the case to go ahead, right,
So it allows a First Amendment challenge to be mounted,
which is a good thing, right, given that this is
like their policy right now, is a frontal assault on
the First Amendment for people who are not citizens. In

(03:14:33):
the Brego Garcia case, both sides agreed to a seven
day pause in the discovery process after the passing of
sealed motions. Then on Tuesday, Tuesday this week, the DOJ
filed another sealed motion. We can speculate, and you will
see people speculating if you go into the blue skuy
or Twitter or whatever. I don't think it's beneficial to

(03:14:56):
do that in this case. Right, what we should be
focusing is that a man is in a prison camp
who did nothing wrong. It doesn't matter that justice system
is continuing to fail him, because he is still there
and so are hundreds of other people. The experimental quote
National Defense area in New Mexico. So we spoke last

(03:15:16):
week about the Roosevelt Reservation, right, and they are starting
this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation with an area in
New Mexico. And we've seen the first charges that are
filed against migrants. According to Washington Post, at least twenty
eight people have been charged or added to their charges
a penalty for violation of security regulations in addition to

(03:15:37):
the mad charges entry without inspection.

Speaker 5 (03:15:39):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:15:40):
Hegxeth visited the area this week and he talked about
how they were going to post signage in English and
Spanish to indicating that crossing the area would be trespassing
on US military property. Increasing numbers of migrants over the
last few years have not spoken either of those languages.
It doesn't seem to be something they've accounted for here.

(03:16:00):
The US Attorney for New Mexico allegedly, according to the
Post quote can't wait to begin charging people who cross.
So that's great, and so it does seem that they
are using this. As we talked about a week or
so ago as a way to quickly charge and then
deport people who are entering the United States between ports
of entry.

Speaker 1 (03:16:21):
And other court news.

Speaker 9 (03:16:22):
A judging Colorado places attentative restraining order on the use
of the Alien Enemies Act there without twenty one days
of notice in a language of person understands advising them
of their right to bring a Habeast challenge. So that
means if someone is going to be removed under the
AEA right, they have to get three weeks of notice,
and that notice has to advise them that they have

(03:16:44):
the right to bring a challenge and then as opposed
to what they're doing right now, which is deporting people
extremely quickly. Right And this was upheld by the Tenth Circuit,
so that's in place there. It'll be interesting to see
how many of them are able to bring. Still, bringing
a habeas challenge is complicated. It could be expensive and
require a lot of legal time, and I know most
lawyers who work in immigration are overwhelmed.

Speaker 1 (03:17:03):
Currently.

Speaker 9 (03:17:04):
Yes, in California, a judge has ruled that CBP can't
carry out warrantless stops and arrests after the ACLU filed
a suit in response to the CBP sector's operation returned
to sender, which happened in late twenty twenty four. So people,
this is one of the things that people may have
already forgotten about. But in December of twenty twenty four,
CBP started detaining residents, migrants, laborers outside a home depot,

(03:17:30):
a grocery store, and at road checkpoints up in California
Central Valley. Right, people are thinking, oh, the Central Valley
is a very long way from El Centro, what are
they doing up there. I've included a map of border
Patrol sectors in the sources today so people can see.
But although the l Center sector only spans seventy one
miles of linear border, it goes a lot further north.

(03:17:52):
So that's what they were doing out there. The judge
in this case, who is US District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston, quote,
you just can't walk up to people with brown skin
and say give me your papers. There's a very good
reporting on this in cow Matters, which I have also
linked in the sources today. Notably, I looked through the

(03:18:15):
order today, the core order, and one of the things
we get is kind of a vision into how border
patrol is expediting these deportations. Right, So I'm going to
quote from the order here, quote, once Border Patrol agents
transported the people they're rested to the El Centro station,
they would quote extract voluntary departure agreements from as many

(03:18:35):
people as possible without explaining the consequences.

Speaker 2 (03:18:37):
And this is all that.

Speaker 1 (03:18:40):
This is the Plaincliff's contention, which is aclu.

Speaker 5 (03:18:42):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:18:43):
So we've seen this a lot, right, like we saw
it in the case when they detained a citizen in
Tucson not so long ago. That they're trying to get
people to sign these documents. Sometimes you're not actually, in
most cases, I believe you're not actually signing a physical document.
You're signing one of those little pad screens, and you
might be given an iPad to read the document on,

(03:19:04):
but you don't get a chance to look and flick
through the document and then sign it left, sign a
physical copy of the document.

Speaker 3 (03:19:11):
Right.

Speaker 9 (03:19:11):
The injunction that happened here only applies in the Eastern
District of California. The judge also ordered Border Patrol to
record all arrests and stops and report them within forty days.
The government argued this would be too burdensome, which is
odd because they're already required to do paperwork when they're
arrest or stop someone, right, but that was a rule

(03:19:32):
by the judge. Despite this, so the old Central Sector
has still been carrying out operations way north of land border,
including recently outside a home depot in Pomona. So this
is CBP not ICE, right for people are familiar with
that distinction. But at least in the Eastern district, they
can't be stopping people now without warrants, So that's a
good thing from the courts. I guess those are I know,

(03:19:55):
we've got a long episode today. Those are the most
important immigration things that I've come up with this. I'm
sure something will happen between us recording this coming out,
but yeah, that's what I've got for you.

Speaker 3 (03:20:06):
The last thing that we'll mention is that Mosen Motowi,
the US screen card holder who was arrested by ICE
at his citizenship interview, has been released from ICE custody
as of April thirtieth, by order of a Vermont judge.
This is really the first piece of good news we've
had in relation to Trump's crackdown on Palestinian protesters and

(03:20:29):
student protests. So yeah, Motowi's case will still continue, but
you will not be in ice custody for the duration
of this case.

Speaker 5 (03:20:38):
And I think we saw in the Mapood Khalil case
the judge has ordered that New Jersey is a correct
jurisdiction for that case to proceed. So that offers a
possibility of the same that it's essentially the same charge
that both of them have right or the same reasoning
for trying to remove them, So hopefully we will see
a similar result there.

Speaker 3 (03:20:57):
We'll be following up on both these stories as the progress.
But that does it for us today. Here at It
Could Happen Here, We reported the news.

Speaker 1 (03:21:06):
We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
more episodes every week from now until the heat death
of the Universe.

Speaker 15 (03:21:19):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com for check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly
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