It Could Happen Here Weekly 195

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hello, and welcome to It could happen here, and it could.
My name is Antre Siege. I'm also Antisom on YouTube
and I'm here once again.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
With James James Stout. People have said I'd never say
my last name and they can't work out who I am,
so I guess I'll do that more.

Speaker 5 (00:46):
Welcome James Stout, Thank you so.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
And I mean this is an unfortunately common part enough
thought for me, but I've been thinking about just how
totalizing this system feels. And it's like everywhere you're ten,
you know, walking down the street, look at the city,
a pollution, Every inch of land there's been claimed by
the system, every bit of you know, the way you

(01:11):
live and operate just feels like it's been manipulated and
controlled in some way. And so that's really what I
want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of this
system and how it's used to control, you know, both
in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure

(01:32):
of our lives. So I suppose to start off, i'd ask,
when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shaping
your choices?

Speaker 4 (01:44):
That's interesting, I mean a lot in the certain ways,
right Like, like the infrastructure of labor shaped a lot
of my choices, Like I have to work a lot
to make ends meet, right like, which means I can't
do sometimes things I want to do, Like there are
mutual aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that
I'm not able to because I have this obligation to

(02:06):
capital m I guess that's one of them.

Speaker 6 (02:09):
Or just like the.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Physical infrastructure limiting the people I get to see, right like,
there are places I love to go out there with
some really nice vegan places in Tijuana that I don't
go to as much as i'd like because someone has
built a giant wall and then another giant wall next
to it, and then stationed a bunch of people with
guns to check if I have the right piece of
paper to go back and forth to somewhere that otherwise

(02:32):
I could rude my bike to.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah, it's
really frustrating, and I think that's one of the most
obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that yeah, set of
manipulates our lives today. I think on the digital level,
there's things like just the way that social medias lead out.

(02:55):
I think it really controls like how much time you
spend on it, much energy you invest into and of
course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities with
they laid out, it tends to affect you know, just
how often we go out, where we go, what needs
a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned,

(03:17):
and how it's been used to control people. That goes
way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built
transport infrastructure in like roads and railways and ports with
the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from the
colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know,
the systems we're not designed to say over the mobility

(03:39):
needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct
line from the mines and the plantations and the resource
rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.

Speaker 6 (03:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah, And so for the British and perialists and lovers
of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports,
and we built bridges, and we built roads, and we
built really as well. It's the same pattern everywhere. You know,
in India it was used to move cotton, tea and
other resources from the interior to the ship and ports.
In Ghana it was used to move gold and cuckoo.

(04:12):
But in any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city,
you know, the actual economic self determination of the people. Yeah,
in that area, it didn't matter.

Speaker 6 (04:21):
Yeah, very much too.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in
twenty twenty, which is an interesting time to be traveling,
but I remember riding around them. The Kunar Rwanda word
for dirt road is iqitaka, right, and so that's what
mostly So we cycled on these dirt.

Speaker 6 (04:36):
Roads and it was lovely.

Speaker 5 (04:37):
You know.

Speaker 4 (04:37):
We'd go through the village and everyone would come out
and wave at you, and like the little kids would
come out and be like what the fuck is this bicycle?
And it was kind of fun, you know, And then
we we'd find someone. It's not really set up for
like restaurants, so you just find someone and pay them
an amount upon which you agreed and they would give
you some food.

Speaker 6 (04:54):
And that was a beautiful experience.

Speaker 4 (04:56):
And then there were these roads that they call Chinese
roads that just go directly from the mind to the
place where the raw material can be extracted. Because between
the China was doing a lot of what you could
generously call foreign direct investment or like neo colonialism in
lots of places in Africa, right, And it was the
contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound, Like

(05:20):
obviously you travel faster on the smooth roads, but like
you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting
and sharing that travel with people, which is why I
do these things in the first place. With just like
such a profound contrast. I remember it really striking me
at the time.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers
in general have been doing, right, They they wield their
control over labor to set things up in a way
that fulfills their interests. Yeah, and then you know, even
when people key in some sort of nominal independence and

(05:58):
they inherit these colonial infrastructure grids, or you know, they
have investments coming in and they have set up they
have these companies, it's a multinational companies setting up infrastructure.

Speaker 5 (06:11):
It still continues, you know.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
The sort of extractivist and top down nature of the
way the infrastructure is set up. You know, it doesn't
reimagine all of them, don't reimagine the logic of what
came before. You're in part for lack of funding and
in part for lack of imagination. And so in a
lot of places, the peripheral regions in these countries are

(06:34):
still lacking in connectivity. They're still lagging behind the rest
of the country. They still don't have access to some
of the basic social services and resources that the urban
core has because you know, the urban rural divide in
many ways mimics the corporate free divide on.

Speaker 5 (06:52):
The international stage.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Yeah, and then you have these neo colonial development aid
programs coming in with the IMF for the World Band,
and you have even more infrastructure projects. So just repeat
this extractive pattern under the ban of development. Of course,
real development will be connecting people encouraging people to participate
in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure that tends

(07:16):
to be set up is more so for consolidating state
power and channeling the movement of people in predictable, survailable ways,
and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others. So,

(07:42):
of course infrastructure development has the capacity to help people.
You know, it can increase accessibility, can make people's lives easier,
and it can also just manage and contain them and
varied sources. And we see a lot more examples of
this sort of infrastructure control when you look at the
class and racial dynamic within societies. Those sorts of divisions

(08:06):
and separations and stratifications they of course manifest physically. You know,
in the US you had literal segregation areas that were
designated for black people, listening for white people, water fountains
and neighborhoods and all these different things. You also had
redlining policies, and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined

(08:26):
and thus lacked investment, and thus when neglected infrastructurally due
to that racial and economic inequality, those spaces are now
right for development in the form of gentrification because the
property is so cheap, so undervalued, and so the people
who made something out of that lack are now being
pushed out. And in South Africa, I mean, up until recently,

(08:51):
these are partid era policies created townships that were deliberately
located far from white urban centers, there were lacked and
services and transit options, and physically reinforced the racial division
of that society. And even today around the world you
have human zoning laws and transit access limitations and public

(09:16):
holes and policies that recreates historical class divisions and racial divisions,
ethnic divisions. And I'm sure you and your with all
of the I mean, every time I talked to you
have like a new travel story to tell. I'm sure
you've witnessed something like this.

Speaker 4 (09:31):
Yeah, I was just thinking of how like I was
thinking of like if we think about the Syrian state
as a contiguous colony, right, like it's called the Syrian
Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained
within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly
on violence.

Speaker 6 (09:47):
Are Arab people.

Speaker 4 (09:48):
So we think of the parts of the North and
East Syria majority Kurdish areas as colonized. We can see
that reflected in the infrastructure.

Speaker 7 (09:58):
Right.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
Part of that is, as you say, this sort of
lack of investment. But then also part of it is
every government funded building, right, Schools, hospitals, the buildings you go.

Speaker 6 (10:11):
In to do the paperwork you have to do to
exist under the state.

Speaker 4 (10:15):
They're set up like strong points, Like they're designed with
a big kind of wall and then a big courtyard
and then thick exteriors like they're designed to be militarily
defensible against the people they're supposed to serve. Right, Like
the school is designed to be used as a fucking
machine gun position. And once you see it, you see

(10:36):
it everywhere, and you think about the nature of the
state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, Right,
it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like
Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona,
and you have like the unregulated working class for Raval,
like this area just next to the Rambler where the

(10:57):
streets are just fucking small, a winding and crazy and
there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over
your head, and it's a very I like to go there.

Speaker 6 (11:07):
It's a place that I enjoy.

Speaker 4 (11:08):
And then you have the ijumpler, which means extension where
the infrastructure is extremely like it's probably one of the
earlier grid cities that you would see, right. And the
idea was that like these these overcrowded kind of what
were in the nineteen twenties and thirty slums would be
like where the working class would be kept. And the

(11:28):
working class, to be clear, were like seen as there
was a colonial relationship between the boys who are the
working class in Barcelona because most of the working class
were not Catalan. They would actually put signs at the
top of these working class areas saying like Mutia begins here, right,
these are the Musians and people from Mustia, the people
from outside of Catalonia, and Catalonia stops here where the

(11:51):
working class exist. That later reflected in the working class
self identity, like it came to refer to the Ravala's Chinatown,
not specifically because of a high concentration of people from
from the Chinese diaspora, but because they've seen Chicago gangster
movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were,
and they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster, like we're

(12:12):
going to call it Chinatown that you want to come
in here, will fucking shoot you. Like I thought that
was really fascinating, like response to the way that they
have been alienated by infrastructure.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you when you
look at the sort of claims that, oh, you know,
it's just it's just roads, it's just zonating, it's just
a city grid, it's just an embassy, it's just a
government office. It's like no, these sorts of spaces, these buildings,
it's infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and when you

(12:48):
see that, you can't unsee it because you look at
the amount of decisions it would have had to have
gone into, you know, some of the examples you mentioned
or the examples I mentioned, you know, the design decisions
and say, okay, we're gonna put this rule would hear
instead of here, Yeah, we're going to use this material
instead of this material. Who you employ to build those
structures that infrastructure also as an impact in the surrounding area.

(13:11):
Are you employing people within the community, employing people outside?
What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure, who's maintaining the infrastructure? Yeah,
what level of surveillance has been implemented, Where are the
public transportation roots and why they here not there?

Speaker 4 (13:27):
You know, yeah, exactly, Like there's people whose opinions and
views matter in that process, and there are people who
are excluded from it.

Speaker 5 (13:36):
Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
One of the authors I tend to go back too
often is the Vandalists because he critics a lot of
this stuff, particularly infrastructure's control and tools. Look in Viviality.
He spoke about how modern transport and urban design have
been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.
So you call a lot the usual suspects suburbanization, car

(14:00):
centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles,
and he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all
the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could
walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're
going to get a cart, right, you can't choose to

(14:21):
walk a cycle in that sort of scenario.

Speaker 4 (14:22):
Yeah, someone's going to call the cops that you try
that in America, right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
So as a lich sor it, it's really a cultural
imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting move
in and it's frustrated. And on the global stage, you
also see how infrastructure has the capacity to control the
whole geopolitical board. You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal,

(14:48):
the Red Sea, the straight Orf home moves, all these
places have a lot of power militarily, trade wise, phlegmatically
because they control the flow of oil, or.

Speaker 5 (15:02):
Of goods, or of data.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run.
And so speaking of data, actually the realm of digital
infrastructures also very insiguous when it comes to control. We
tend to think of the Internet as that sort of
ephemeral cloud, right, but the cloud is hosted physically. You know,

(15:25):
there are sofas, there are fiber optic cables, they are
data centers, all these things. They're not as obvious as
roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but they are
just as if not in some ways even more powerful
in terms of controlling what people access, how fast they
access it, under what terms they access it, or because

(15:48):
it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down, it
can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that own
these things. There's a small group of very powerful corporations
that pretty much dictate how things are running. You know,
most people they know about China's Great Firewall and how
it's used to coordin off China from the rest of

(16:09):
the Internet in some ways. You know, it's sensors to
websites and switch results, it monitors people's activity, and it
usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the
popular global platforms like Google and Facebook. Right, But Google
and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft. It's not like they're
any better. You know, they're don't run and things republic

(16:30):
could so if you will call out what China's doing
with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I
don't think that any govement should have any control over
what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship,
data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know
a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies
deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in

(16:54):
the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah,
things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often
affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you
know that's that's a fig no no, or you have
even the manipulation of language, the words people use as

(17:17):
people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of
terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive
and all these other euphemisms which I mean, on a step,
I don't use any of them, and I despise them.

Speaker 6 (17:34):
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
The thing is a lot of people assume that these
words are censored and all platforms, but they're not. You know,
they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok
or limited in one platform. And then if people take
that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and
spread it across the rest of the internet, or will
see it bring it into real life and end up

(17:56):
saying things like unlive in real life.

Speaker 4 (18:00):
Yeah yeah, and then you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm
to determine the way you can express yourself.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Exactly, exactly, And I mean, TikTok has a lot of
heat these days because you know, rightfully so, it's very popular,
it has a lot of influence, and it's you know,
very bleatantly interventionist with its content in some damage in
ways but again, the other big cooperations are not immune either.
I mean Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah,

(18:32):
they played a major role in the sort of attitudes
that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of
targeting Hinger community and the subsequent genocide.

Speaker 6 (18:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (18:45):
So I was on a panel with some my Hinder
people the other day and they are still by physical
and technical infrastructure, being marginalized. So something myself and my
Union friends are trying to do is help the Rahinge
of Podcast initiative start podcasting right such that they can
share their own voices with the world and their their
positions and their opinions. It's very important at a time

(19:08):
when like they're facing marginalization even from revolutionary forces within
me and and we cannot sustain an Internet connection to
allow them to do that. We tried to do a
live panel and it was very hard for you know,
these guys are running around Cox is bizarre, where tens
of thousands of Hinga people live in refugee camps trying

(19:30):
to find connectivity, like just another example of how they
continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed
them to be genocided exactly.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, because the private cooperations alone and our response, well
for this is the governm months too. You know, when
the corporations still tell the gover months to do something,
the golf months comply. And then when the golf months
tell the corporations to do stuff, a lot of the time,
it's also like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially
since they government has the power in a lot of

(20:01):
cases to shut down the Internet when things are not
going their way. You know, they've they used it and
all of it. Recently, you have the suppression of the
center in protests, you know, to influence elections or to
restrict information, substructionalism and communication during crises.

Speaker 5 (20:18):
When you look at.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
All over the world Iran, India, Sudan, Yanma, Uganda, even
in Gaza. In all these cases, these governments step in
and they limit or they shut down the Internet entirely
to prevent the news from getting out. You know, they
could target either the entire Internet or they target platforms.

(20:39):
They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter. They justify by saying,
oh they're going after take news or there's a security threat.

Speaker 5 (20:46):
Yeah it's bullshit, but you know, we could see through that.

Speaker 8 (20:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
And it's tough because I mean, this is where these are,
These are the places where people have gathered. These are
the online town squares, you know, and these these this
infrastructure is very much centralized. Google controls most of the
search on the internet. Amazon dominates e commerce and cloud,

(21:12):
computer and logistics, and Meta controls a lot of people's
social interactions. You know, I could brag and say, oh, well,
I'm not on Facebook, but you know, I still use
What'sapp because everybody else uses WhatsApp. Yeah, And it's it's
so easy for them, because we're so concentrated on these platforms,
It's so easy for them to pop at us, to

(21:32):
flex their their muscles and control the direction of public discourse.
And I mean it's amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing
our engagements, exploiting our cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality.

Speaker 5 (21:52):
It's like, what the hell do we do?

Speaker 6 (21:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (21:55):
And so for the the Opium segment of the podcast,
I just want to point out that, you know, infrastructure
can be used to consolidate power and control people, but
it can also be used to resist and to reticular
a collective agency. You know, even infrastructure there was originally

(22:19):
designed to control can be taken under our control. You know,
around the world, communities have been able to challenge these
extractive logics to build their own infrastructures on their own terms.
You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form
of community built mash networks or alternative Internet local servers.

(22:46):
You know, you have projects like guifi dot net in Catalonia,
or you have the NYC Mesh in New York, and
these are efforts to engage in you know, pay to
pay and decentralized communications with all the reliance and the
telecom giants. And then you also, of course physically have

(23:06):
examples of infrastructure resisting central control, participatory urban planet movements.
You have gorilla urbanism. You have you know, of course,
the long and storied history of squatting otherwise known as
informal settlement. And these informal settlements are hubs of innovation
and a lot of cases in things like Nai Rubi or

(23:29):
in Rio Gario. You know, these these slums and favelas,
they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet,
hooking up their own water is supply. Yeah, because they
recognize that this is within their hands, this is within
their capacity. You know, we don't have to have everything,
you know, passed on to us from one hye. You know,

(23:49):
we can you know, sort of claim our own voices
and design our own spaces. If you're really interested in
how infrastructure has the capacity to control and really just

(24:10):
how states sort of see things, I have to of
course recommend the classic James C. Scott Seeing like a State.

Speaker 6 (24:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
Oh, I mean it's that's a foundational framework to understand
and how infrastructure is used for social engineering. It's really
readable as well, so definitely give that a read, and
you know, think about ways that you can contribute to
shaping the infrastructure around you. And I don't know, James,
if you have any stories along this vein you can

(24:39):
leave us off with.

Speaker 4 (24:41):
Yeah, I mean I think of a ton right, Like
even I think about like when I was a lot younger,
I lived in a I guess what you could call
a slum of Leila, like a pretty economically disadvantage to
part of Kadakus for a little while and like at
the time, and I've seen it's when I lived in
Barcelona too, I guess the English word would be info

(25:01):
shop they normally call them social centers would be the
Spanish word, or social spaces, and like it was cool
to this is a city which is established through colonialism, right,
And there was a brief time before things were terrible
in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and
largely it was people trying to make things better, and

(25:21):
like the state for a time allowed a space for
that to exist before it stopped allowing a space for
that to exist, which is where we're at right now, right,
and very clearly the state right now is very repressive
in Venezuela, to be clear, Like I didn't want to
give put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but
it was actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated, right,

(25:43):
I was like nineteen.

Speaker 6 (25:44):
My Spanish was dog shit. I was hungry all the time.

Speaker 4 (25:48):
It didn't have any food, you know, But it facilitated
that community taking care of me because the spaces were
public and people could see if people were falling.

Speaker 6 (25:58):
Through the cracks.

Speaker 4 (25:59):
Right, I think a lot about refugee camps, so obviously
that somewhere has spent a decent amount of time, right
both within the US and outside of the US, and
something I've been thinking about a lot recently, is how
so many of the people I met on the way
to the United States and the Dadienne had horrific experiences
in the Dadianne and afterwards, but they also miss the

(26:22):
community that they had, Like they also miss the profound
solidarity of just talking to people the other day who
were telling me, like when they were hungry in the jungle,
strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give
them food.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too,
this sort of explosion and mutually.

Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, And like refugee camp is a place where you
do not have privacy for the most part, and that's
not always great, but it facilitates caring for one another.
And like, I don't know, I have this recollection from
seven or eight years ago. Now I'm walking through a
refugee camp in Mexican and just a very little girl

(27:05):
from six seven something like that, And I have long hair.
People can't see me, but she likes to like mess
with my hand braided shit. And I'm carrying this little girl,
and like I've been coming for some time, and like
the sense of community that you felt there amongst like
a really terrible situation, but like because everyone can see
you walking down his little walkway, Everyone's like, oh hi,

(27:27):
how are you? Like you know, the kind of I'm
trying to work out what they what they need and
how we can best help. Like I just remember thinking
like what the fuck is wrong with and then going
back to the United States, right, and sitting in my
little house and like, you know, you know, like that,
like I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be
close to them, but not many people are. And like

(27:48):
for most people, you know that they get out of
the house and go to their car, they drive to
their work.

Speaker 6 (27:51):
They don't say hi to anyone.

Speaker 4 (27:53):
Like it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in
those refugee camps were close to the beautiful life that
we want than we are in these million dollar homes.
In my house does not cost a million dollars. I
don't own a house. But the profound alienation that we feel,

(28:13):
in part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of
humanity to fall back into caring for one another, to like,
that's what we do when we are not like physically
and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both
both physical and digital, and even emotional that divide us

(28:34):
from one another. And I've kind of thought about that
ever since, Like, how do I build a place where
people have more stability, people have privacy, people have their
material needs.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Men, Yeah, does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah,
I don't want There's some coh hopes and sort of
plans that I've seen, for example, but don't even really
factor any much privacy, which.

Speaker 5 (28:58):
I'm not for at all.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
But the one after recreate their their dorm room experience
or in my case, they are sharing a bedroom the
entire childhood experience.

Speaker 4 (29:08):
So yeah, we need to have space for people to
have privacy, but at the same time space for people
to have community, and like, cities can exist like that,
Communities can exist like that. They're the theory of the
Mediterranean public sphere that sometimes comes up where like again
in working class Barcelona, right, people don't generally have air
conditioning and it can't get very hot, so you just

(29:29):
spend a lot of time outside balcony whatever, you know,
front port if you've got one that creates community, right,
that creates a public sphere, like a place that is
it's not quite our home, but it's not controlled by
someone else either, it's like a community space, and that
doesn't exist in like I don't live in the suburbs,

(29:52):
but like suburban America, you know, where everyone has these
like literal fences around all the shit that they own.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Yeah, that exists the very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah,
you know, some areas are very much communal and other
areas like trying desperately to be America.

Speaker 5 (30:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah, so yeah, it's kind of a mix of both
wheels there, at the very least from what I'm aware
of what I can tell people, at least say height
to the neighbors, though, Yeah, that's that's still like a
horrifying you know, like.

Speaker 6 (30:25):
Mirrors respecter of not knowing your neighbors.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Thing that I've heard of America in life that you
don't even say hi, Yeah, you know, you don't even
wave at people Like that's yeah.

Speaker 4 (30:37):
No, I'm always in my neighbor's houses and they're always
at my house. And like I'm a person who owns
a lot of tools, you know, like different spanners and stuff,
so like I'm like I will go out of my
weight to make sure that my neighbors know they can
borrow my ship and and like that does seem to
be quite a new experience for people who are like

(30:58):
new in the neighborhood or what ever.

Speaker 6 (31:00):
But yeah, we should all do that.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
It's such an easy way to fight that alienation and
the infrastructure that you know, like, yeah, there's a wall
between where I live and where the person next door lives.
But yeah I can I can knock on the door
and say, hey, it looks like you're having some trouble
with your truck. Do you need a hand or what
have you?

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, so, I mean what you're saying is it could
happen here.

Speaker 4 (31:28):
Yeah, yeah, you gotta make maybe the good things happen
here too, because enough of the fucking bad shares.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
Indeed, Laza for me, guys, all power to all the people.

Speaker 9 (31:39):
Please this is it could happen here. The show about

(31:59):
things for falling apart. One thing falling apart last year.
I guess the president's mental health seemingly so. And we're
going to talk about that today and some possible ramifications
that the current president may be trying to exploit to
help him out. Robert Evans, Hello, how are you?

Speaker 2 (32:17):
I'm fine? Is something wrong with the president?

Speaker 9 (32:20):
The current one or the old one?

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Any president ever. Has a president ever done wrong?

Speaker 9 (32:25):
I heard some nasty things about mister Clinton.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Interesting. I woke up today for the first time, so
this is all new to me.

Speaker 8 (32:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (32:33):
Just don't look on like the news or the internet
or anything, and it should be Okay.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
That's good. I'm just going to start reading Wikipedia at
the A section and see if I get to anything
bad about a president.

Speaker 9 (32:46):
So since taking office, Trump has actually sort of been
going soft on old sleepy Joe, not out of the
goodness of his own heart, right, but to possibly explore
legal options to get around some of the roadblocks Trump's
been facing in the judicial branch.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 9 (33:07):
Trump's been arguing that Biden himself was mostly absent, especially
during the later half of his presidency, and a sort
of like secret cabal of cabinet members, DNC consultants, white
House staff, and aids were running a shadow presidency.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, and one of my constant takes is there are
no secret cabals. There's a lot of cabals. They're all
very obvious, very public, very public cabals.

Speaker 9 (33:32):
But this secret cabal of like DNC interns, we're using
Biden's signature via auto pen to set policy, make judicial appointments,
and sign orders, all with little to zero awareness from
poor old six sleepy Joe. In fact, people around Biden
intentionally covered up his declining health to continue using his

(33:56):
presidential power for their own progressive agenda.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
If only they'd used it for that, and not just
to keep getting.

Speaker 9 (34:03):
Paychecks or sending bombs to Israel, or sending bombs to
Israel many of the other, many of the other things
that Yeah Biden seemed to preoccupied with. I would have
play a clip from a month and a half ago
Donald Trump, current president, explaining this conspiracy of the secret
Joe Biden cabal.

Speaker 7 (34:22):
I'm sure that he didn't know many of the things. Look,
he was never for open borders, he was never for
transgender for everybody. He was never for men playing in
women's sports. I mean he changed, I mean all of
these things that changed so radically. I don't think he
had any idea that what was Frankly, I said it
during the debate and I say it now. He didn't

(34:43):
have much of.

Speaker 8 (34:44):
An idea what was going on.

Speaker 6 (34:45):
He shouldn't be.

Speaker 7 (34:47):
I mean, essentially, whoever used the autopen was the president.
And that is wrong, It's illegal, it's so bad, and
it's so disrespectful to our country.

Speaker 9 (34:59):
Transgender for everybody, the defining legacy of the Biden era. Sure,
it's his core policy platform.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah, okay, I don't know, Like, what do you even
say at this point? Right, Like, honestly, he's sending troops
into the second major city, this one the capitol and
taking over the control of the police force. How much
is it worth just being like, oh and he said
another thing that's not true, Like, I know it's important
to cover all this, but also like, man, I'm tired.

Speaker 9 (35:28):
Oh yeah, no, it's it's it's incredibly frustrating because they
get to deploy these these absurd little lines every once
in a while and it captures media attention, and the
physical things that they're doing do not get as much
like awareness.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
And there's this constant I think misinterpretation as to like
this is all a distraction from this and this and this,
and it does sometimes function that way, but this isn't.
They're not doing this because it's a distraction. They're doing
this because they also hate this group of people. So
when I hurt this group of people, there's a lot
of people they want to hurt, and they want to
do it in different ways.

Speaker 9 (35:58):
And they're kind of playing a longer game with the
focus on this quote unquote autopen, and it remains to
be seen if it's going to be successful or you know,
pay off for them. But I do want to talk
about it now since this is on like you know,
a month, like four of them slowly seeding this into
popular discourse. It's like a new thing because every once

(36:19):
in a while, they have to decide what the new
thing is. Right a few years ago, they decided it
was trans people. They decided it was DEI, they decided
it was how the twenty twenty election was stolen. They
just decide that there's like some major problem, and then
they repeat it often enough that it becomes like something
that seemingly a share of voters actually care about. And

(36:40):
they're trying to make autopen be a thing. And there
is actual, like possible results of them focusing on this
as we as we will see. But the autopen fixation
started this past March when Trump posted a truth on
truth social claiming that Biden's preemptive partons of members of
the January sixth Investigation House Committee are quote hereby declared void, vacant,

(37:00):
and of no further force of effect because of the
fact that they were done by autopen unquote. Great, this
is not real. This is not this is not like
a real thing that he can disclaim on truth social.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
But what's real? You know?

Speaker 9 (37:17):
There is no requirement that pardons even be signed, only
that they're accepted by a subject. In nineteen twenty nine,
the Uslister General concluded in a memo that quotes, neither
the Constitution nor any statute prescribes the method by which
executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced. So he can't
just do this here. But this was kind of the
opening of the door for the rest of what we're

(37:41):
going to talk about this episode. And I guess before
we get into that, I should talk about what an
autopen is. An autopen is a tool to automate the
signing of documents by replicating a signature. And this is
a machine or a type of machine that's long been
used in the White House, like Thomas Jefferson bought and
used an early iteration of such a device shortly after
was patent in eighteen oh three, Lennon B. Johnson's auto

(38:03):
pen was photographed in the White House for a National
Inquiry or recover story titled the Robot that sits in
for the President. And it's funny that now you get
Fox News headlines that are basically written very similarly talking
about how actually a robot or the autopen itself was
acting as president and that's like a controversy, okay versus

(38:24):
it was just like a fun news story back in
the fifties.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
How many of the guys angry about this literally want
an LLM to be the president? Yes, exactly, that's my question.

Speaker 9 (38:35):
No, at least at least half, at least half the
other half don't know what an ll ish.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
No.

Speaker 5 (38:41):
Now.

Speaker 9 (38:41):
Obama was the first president to openly sign legislation with
an autopen, including the extension of the Patriot Act in
twenty eleven while at the G eight summit in France,
and the constitutionality of the autopen has never been tested
or explicitly determined in court. In two thousand and five,
President George W. Bush asked the Justice Department for its
opinion on the validity of the autopen for signing legislation

(39:03):
and other official policy documents. The Office of Thegal Council
found that quote, the President need not personally perform the
physical act of fixing his signature to a bill he
approves and decides to sign in order for the bill
to become law. Rather, the president may sign a bill
by directing a subordinate to a fix the president's signature
to such a bill, for example, by autopen unquote, though

(39:23):
there still is debate whether the president needs to be
physically present during this process or simply authorize the signing.
And you know, you have people like Steven Miller in
this administration who try to find niche little laws or
statutes to then apply in a way that it was
probably never designed or we have since these laws inceptions

(39:44):
have decided not to use the laws in that way
because that doesn't make sense of our current context. But
someone like Miller very willing to do such a thing.
And there could be, for instance, some obscure aspect or
interpretation of like proxy signature laws that they could try
to like form course through into their interpretation of like
Article one, section seven of the Constitution, which might make

(40:06):
some auto pen signatures in valid. But this is something
that's like kind of dismissed in a lot of legal
circles because as like a practical matter, it would be
disastrous to start rescinding executive actions based on this interpretation,
because like decades and decades of laws and regulations would
then fall into question and possibly become void. So lots
of people just like kind of don't think this is

(40:28):
like a real question or a real concern, And part
of me thinks that as well. But as like someone
like Miller is demonstrated, they're absolutely willing to use like
niche arguments or precedents to do some pretty like crazy stuff.
Do you know what is not very crazy?

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Robert paying money to the sponsors of this show.

Speaker 9 (40:48):
It's an extremely reasonable act.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
It's the only sane thing you can do. If you
do anything else, you are being fifty one fifty, then
you'll be on an involuntary seventy two hour hold. That's
the way the law works.

Speaker 9 (41:09):
All right, we are back. So with this Biden autopen thing,
it's not really about the autopen. The autopen actually is
not the problem here kind of at all. That's not
what they're really focusing on. In early June, the Justice
Department launched an investigation into Biden's alleged use of the autopen,
with the DOJ Pardon Attorney ed Martin writing in an

(41:30):
email that this investigation is to determine whether Joe Biden
was quote competent and whether others were taking advantage of
him through use of the autopen or other means unquote,
with a specific focus on the primpt of pardons for
members of Biden's family and clemency for thirty seven death
Row inmates who sentences were converted to life in prison.

(41:51):
So this is the real crux whether Biden was competent
and whether people were using the autopen without his knowledge.
And I think the reason why they're there start by
focusing on these pardons, whether for January sixth investigation committee
members or for those close to Biden. Like this all
relates to Trump's campaign promise of retribution.

Speaker 6 (42:10):
Right.

Speaker 9 (42:10):
You can think of Cash Betel's list of deep state
actors that he wants to investigate, like that was such
a core part of what Trump campaigned on, and he
does still seem keen on fulfilling parts of that promise.
Now Ed Martin, the DOJ pardon attorney investigating this auto

(42:30):
pen debacle himself, has said that the president's pardon power
is absolute and that using the autopen is quote not
necessarily a problem. But I think the core part here
is that it's not about the autopen itself. It's about
this secret cabal who are using the auto pen without
Biden's knowledge. So a few days after this investigation was announced,
the White House released a public memo from Trump entitled

(42:52):
reviewing Certain Presidential Actions, which ordered the Attorney General and
the White House Council to investigate quote whether certain individual
rules conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state
and unconstitutionally exercise to the authorities and responsibilities of the president.
And this document reads like something I would read on

(43:12):
like a conspiracy theory website five years ago. It's written
in a very similar style.

Speaker 5 (43:18):
Quote.

Speaker 9 (43:19):
President Biden's aides abused the power of presidential signatures through
the use of an auto pen to conceal Biden's cognitive
decline and assert article to authority. This conspiracy marks one
of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.
The American public was purposely shielded from discovering who wielded
the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across

(43:39):
thousands of documents to affect radical policy shifts. Unquote. The
memo states that Biden's advisors uote unquote tried to hide
the true extent of his mental decline to quote cover
up his inability to discharge his duties.

Speaker 5 (43:54):
Quote.

Speaker 9 (43:55):
The investigation specifically wants to look into which policy documents
were signed via auto pen and who ordered the President's
signature to be a fixed to said documents. One other
quote from the memo quote the White House issued over
twelve hundred presidential documents, appointed two hundred and thirty five
judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and

(44:18):
commutations than any administration in United States history. Although the
authority to take these executive actions, along with many others,
is constitutionally committed to the president, there are serious doubts
as to the decision making process and even the degree
of Biden's awareness of these actions being taken in his name.
Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to
exercise its presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the

(44:41):
mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity while taking radical
executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an
unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency. A circumstance
that would have implications for the legality and validity of
numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name unquote. So though

(45:03):
the two thousand and five Bush DOJ memo does support
the use of the autopen to a fix the president's signature,
obviously it still must be the president who decides to
sign a document, with the Office of Legal Counsel memo
state in quote, we do not question the substantial authority
supporting the view that the president must personally decide whether
to approve and sign bills. This is pretty obvious, and

(45:26):
that's why so much of the autopen investigations are around
Biden's deteriorating mental state and not the auto pen itself.
It's about trying to prove whether Biden was either not
mentally capable of sufficiently authorizing a signature to be a
fixed to certain documents, or was just completely unaware that
the autopen was signing certain documents with White House advisors
specifically covering up Biden's mental decline to take advantage of

(45:49):
his compromise state to personally direct policy. And that's what
the investigations are going to try to prove. The White
House is already making repeated assertions that this was the
case and this question may be finally settled in a
Trump sympathetic court, and Republicans are currently trying every angle
of attack on this. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has started

(46:12):
a Senate investigation, and a House Oversight Committee investigation is
already up and running. The past month, Kentucky Republican James
Comer has been subpoena in Biden admin officials to testify
on the use of the auto pen and Biden's mental
faculties while in office. Comer's own letters and subpoenas for

(46:32):
this investigation have been signed with a digital signature, because
this is such a common practice in Washington and like
all over the country. Now trying to think of all
the official documents you signed on your computer right now.
Metadata from a subpoena cover letter sent to former Senior
Advisor to the First Lady Anthony Bernal showed the document
was authored and signed by someone named Benzene, an Oversight

(46:55):
Committee staffer, not James Comer. Because again, this is pretty regular.
Even the investigators are doing this process themselves while doing
the investigation. Part of the reason why the Republicans are
trying to make this a continuing story and not just
about you know, the pardons is because as like Biden
appointee judges began blocking Trump's executive orders, the focus on

(47:18):
the autopen turned from just pardons towards use of the
autopen to nominate federal judges. And this is where things
get a lot more slippery. Last month, Fox News asked
House Overseec Committee Chairman James Comer if not just pardons
may be found to be null and void because of

(47:39):
the results of this investigation, but possibly also judicial appointments.

Speaker 10 (47:44):
Biden made two hundred and twenty eight judicial appointments, including
forty five Appeals Court and one hundred and eighty seven
District Court judges, and most importantly, Biden appointed Justice Kachanji
Brown Jackson, the Court's most long winded justice who couldn't
even define what a woman is. Mister Chairman, you mentioned
that you're looking at some of the pardons that were

(48:04):
done under President Biden and the use of the autopen,
doctor Fauci being one of them, talking about whether they
were legitimate or not. Are you also looking into Biden's
judicial appointments as well.

Speaker 11 (48:17):
Absolutely everything that was signed with the autopan, especially in
the last year of the Biden presidency. This is when
all the books that are being written, all the tell
all interviews that are being recorded from his former disgruntled
staffers and stafferds who are trying to preserve the reputation
for future employment. They're all saying that Joe Biden was

(48:40):
in a deep mental decline and that he was protected
by a very small inner circle. We brought a few
of those people in the inner circle and asked them
simple questions like were you ever told to lie about
the president's health? And they couldn't answer that question. They
had to plead the fifth to avoid self incrimination. This
raises an issue whether these pardons, whether these judicial appointments,

(49:03):
and whether these executive orders are legal. I believe that
if this investigation keeps going in the way that it's going,
that's going to a very serious concerns about whether or
not Joe Biden even you what was going on around him,
much less whether he authorized the use of his signature
on all of this stuff. I think all of these
are in jeopardy of being declared null and void in

(49:24):
a court of law, and that's a big deal for
the Trump administration, because so much of what Trump is
up against in court now with these liberal, biased Biden
appointed judges is the fact that they're using and citing
some of these executive orders as reason to throw out
President Trump's agenda and President Trump's executive orders. So they

(49:46):
tried to trump proof the the administration on the way
out the door. And the problem that got now is
the American people realize that Joe Biden wasn't the one
calling the shots, and he may very well have not
even been mentally fit to make decisions to authorize the
use of his autopin if he even authorized it. So
this is going to play out in a court of law.

(50:07):
I think our investigation is going to be a substantial
part of evidence in it, and that's why we're doing
the investigation.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Uh yeah, that's that's the rub right there. That's exactly
what they want, right is to completely peel back the
last administration or two of judges and make it just
be all their people, a whole justice system that they
completely control.

Speaker 9 (50:29):
If they could recall like two hundred and thirty federal judges, yeah,
and fill in two hundred and thirty more like Trump
appointed judges, that would clear out so much of the
legal roadblocks that they're currently fac there.

Speaker 5 (50:44):
Yep.

Speaker 9 (50:44):
And that is the real crux of their focus on
this issue. That's why they're trying to like insert this
into reality. And they're throwing this autopen story like everywhere.
Even the Epstein files, which don't exist, were concocted by
the ever suspicious autopath.

Speaker 7 (51:00):
It's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion.

Speaker 6 (51:03):
I can say this.

Speaker 7 (51:04):
Those files were run by the worst come on earth.
They were run by Comy, they were run by Garland,
they were run by Biden and all of the people
that actually ran the government, including the autopen.

Speaker 9 (51:20):
Whatever the current big news story is, they're going to
try to shove the auto pen in there because that's
how they operate, that's how they craft reality. Okay, we
are back. So needless to say, Biden and his advisors

(51:44):
have denied all of this. And it's a little tricky
because part of what makes this story slightly compelling for
Trump's team is that obviously Biden's mental health was in
decline for the past few years of his presidency. We
all saw that happen. That like a accepted part of
our country's history. Now we all saw the debate, and

(52:06):
so much of their argument for this is resting on
how much everyone understands that you have a whole bunch
of former White House staff writing books on this topic now.
So with that aspect in mind, they still have to
defend the use of the autopen and Biden's competency and
awareness of all of the decisions being made to do this.
Last month, had his first interview with The New York

(52:28):
Times since like twenty twenty one, where he discussed how
he gave oral authorization for all of the pardons, with
the autopen operation specifically being managed by the Staff Secretary
Stephene Feldman. He said, quote I made every decision. Biden
said that the White House used the autopen specifically for
the last batch of pardons. Biden said that they used

(52:49):
the autopen because of the high number of pardon warrants
issued totaling around four thousand, which affected three categories of
federal convicts, people serving home confinement, non violent drug offenders,
and people on death row. He did not choose or
prove like every single name on that list, but claims
to have determined the criteria and categories, saying, quote I

(53:12):
was deeply involved I laid out a strategy how I
want to go about these dealing with pardons and commutations.
I pulled the team in to say, this is how
I want to get it done generically and then specifically unquote.
In preparation for the final months of the Biden presidency,
his White House counsel wrote an email to staff in
like November of twenty twenty four, laying with the process

(53:33):
four reviewing pardons, the last step being quote the president
makes the final decision on the final pardon and or
the commutation slate unquote. At this point, around a dozen
people have been subpoenaed and are giving testimony, and investigation
is looking through emails from the time, specifically starting with
these pardons, because I think that's the only way they

(53:54):
have to like investigate this right now. It's easier to
investigate the pardons from the last three months the presidency
than just all of the documents as signed over the
course of like four years, or even just two years
if you look at like the past two years of
his presidency. So specifically, they're focusing on the final pardons
as like a way in to figure out the process
for how the autopen was functioning and who was using it,

(54:16):
and they may try to extend that process out to
things like judicial appointments over time. I think trying to
rescind the appointment of someone like a Supreme Court justice
very unlikely because obviously Biden had awareness that that was
going on, but they might try to pull more fucky
shit with the circuit court appointments or that kind of stuff.

(54:37):
I don't think this is like the most important story
facing the country right now. Obviously the stuff going on
in Washington, DC and many other aspects of how the
Trump administration is operating with ice and with trans people
affects people more immediately. But I've been specifically trying to
pull information on how they're crafting this narrative around the

(54:58):
autopen ever since he made that first truth back in March,
because I saw this as a ongoing reality crafting project
which might accumulate in something actually meaningful over time. And
none of these investigations have released their findings yet, and
they're not expected to for at least a few more
weeks to months. But it's something that I think is

(55:19):
worth keeping an eye on right now, especially considering you know,
Miller and others, and like the Heritage foundations focus on
trying to find niche loopholes in which executive power can
be really exercised. And if one of the ways to
remove some of the roadblocks towards this president's executive power
is to undermine the executive power of a previous administration,

(55:41):
it would be the first time we see that strategy
actually enacted. And it sounds like kind of cartoonish, but
that's so much of what they're currently doing is pushing
everything to that extreme, trying to test all of these
more niche theories that you see people talking about in
the past, Like around twenty eleven, when Obama first signed

(56:01):
legislation with the autopen, you had a whole bunch of
libertarians complaining that this is unconstitutional because he wasn't physically
present when the document was being signed, and so you
have like think pieces on that at the time that
then kind of get memory hold, and now you're going
to see some of those justifications back again and actually

(56:22):
try to test them out in court, especially if you
have a Justice Department investigation, you have an Attorney General
investigation of a cent an investigation, and a House investigation.
If one of those can stumble onto or develop or
invent some compelling argument. We will actually see versions of
this complaint be tested in a way that we never
have before, because it would be like disastrous to the

(56:42):
functional aspect of this state. If you determine that all
presidential documents signed via autopen are not ballid unless presents
in the room, that would be a massive domino tipping
over which you know, most reasonable people who work in government,
like elder statesmen, are not going to want to do
that because that sounds like a fucking nightmare, like legally speaking,

(57:04):
and it would be like disastrous, like it would destroy
some fundamental aspects of the government. But right now, destroying
aspects of government is kind of the point. That's what
we saw with Doge, That's what we saw during the
first few months of the presidency, using this kind of
tech startup thought process behind running a government. You have
to break things first so that you can rebuild it
in a way that suits you better. And if that

(57:26):
means stripping away two hundred federal judges to put in
two hundred of your own, that would have massive benefits
for them. And I think that's part of why they're
having this focus right now. Oh yeah, that's kind of
all I have on that, So once you have some
closing thoughts.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
No, I mean, of course this is the game as
laid out in not just Project twenty twenty five, but
what the right has been talking about my entire life. Like,
none of this should be surprising if you've been paying attention.
The only reason why some people are surprised is that
there's folks in the democratic hierarchy who have been saying
for years, this isn't really what conservatives want. This is

(58:04):
just a fringe, right, there is no fringe anymore. They'll
never actually do this. They can't do this. The system
doesn't work that way. There's just been this belief that
this can't happen, right, it can't happen, or that like
if it did, obviously you know the cops will stop them,
the FBI will stop them, the army will stop them.

(58:25):
And there's a reason why they've went out of their
way to gain control of all of those organizations before
doing this. So yeah, I mean, you cannot. We can
either pretend that someone's going to stop them and you
don't have to worry about it, or just accept that
we are where we are and there may be some

(58:46):
unprecedented things that need to be done. Yep, that's all
I'll say. Legally, that's all I should say.

Speaker 9 (58:53):
That's the episode. Bye bye everyone, Okay, cool.

Speaker 6 (59:12):
Hello, and welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 (59:13):
It's me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be
joined by a friend of the show, Kyle Cassada.

Speaker 6 (59:19):
How you doing, Carl, Oh, I'm doing great.

Speaker 12 (59:21):
And when I hear a friend of the show with
any of you all are you James, It's a real
honor to me. So I'm honored to be your friend
and a friend of the show. So I'm glad to
be here.

Speaker 6 (59:29):
No, thank you. We always appreciate you being here and
everything you do within range. Kyle.

Speaker 4 (59:33):
We're not here to talk about gunstaf today Italy, which
is nice in a way, because we're here to talk
about something which is also very important right in terms
of keeping people safe, and that is activism against like
corporate destruction of our environment. We're here to talk about
something called Project Blue specifically. Can you explain to listeners
who are not familiar folks who maybe you haven't heard

(59:55):
about it, what Project Blue was proposed to be.

Speaker 12 (59:58):
Yeah, it's not dead either, we'll talk about that more.
But the Project Blue was a was we'll see a
two hundred and ninety acre data center project put that
in scope, two hundred and ninety acres WHO data center
south of Tucson through a company called Biel Infrastructure that
through people's hard work, came to find out it was

(01:00:20):
for Amazon. But a two hundred and ninety acre AI
data center south of Tucson, Yeah, that is vast.

Speaker 4 (01:00:29):
I'm trying to think of a like, I can't think
of a comparison for two hundred ninety eight is, but
that that is a huge amount of like computing power, right,
I guess.

Speaker 12 (01:00:38):
It's hard to fathom that kind of space when you
think about it. Yeah, there are maps of what this
proposed data center's footprint is.

Speaker 6 (01:00:45):
And if you take the.

Speaker 12 (01:00:47):
Rough rectangle of it and place it over Tucson proper,
the city of Tucson, that's they propose it to be
just south of it pretty much envelops and it consumes
the entire downtown of Tucson in multiple neighborhoods. That's how
big this is. And it's one data center.

Speaker 6 (01:01:04):
Yeah, what was the data center is supposed to do?

Speaker 5 (01:01:07):
Like?

Speaker 4 (01:01:07):
What if people aren't familiar, right, what is the data
center to do? What do they do with the big computer?

Speaker 12 (01:01:11):
Okay, So for people that aren't really into the tech
sector of things, a data center is essentially think of
something besides of a bigger than a mall that has
nothing but giant computer data banks in it. So it's
a giant place where you would think of your old
mainframes in the old days. It's not mainframes anymore, but
like it's racks and racks and racks of computing power
and connectivity to the Internet for the purposes of whatever

(01:01:35):
Amazon would want to do with this. So if you
go to use Amazon's infrastructure or use their AI, that
buzzphrase it now is everywhere the computers that do those
things or those requests or decide what products they want
to market to you through their algorithm. That's what these
data centers do. So it's essentially an entire city.

Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
Of just machines. Yeah, but tech.

Speaker 12 (01:01:58):
Cropolis is an interesting way to put it. It's not
a netcropo, it's a tech croppler.

Speaker 6 (01:02:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:02:02):
So imagine a few people maintaining an entire city of.

Speaker 4 (01:02:06):
Machines, right and actively participating in like undermining the value
of labor for everyone else with this AI shit.

Speaker 12 (01:02:12):
Well, that's part of this project we're going to get
into a minute is one of the things they like
to propose is that it's going to bring jobs, but
only at the.

Speaker 6 (01:02:18):
Beginning, and we'll talk about that more. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
Yeah, Well, let's talk about like people in Tucson did
not want this data center, right, Like there was a
broad based and well organized opposition to it. So perhaps
we should explain like why why? I mean, I guess
people listen this podcast are inclined to think data center bad.
But can you explain the impact that this would have
had on the city and the turning area?

Speaker 6 (01:02:40):
Oh?

Speaker 12 (01:02:41):
Yeah, absolutely, So it's very interesting to me to think about.
So these data centers of this accord are if you
if you're interested in this topic and start googling, you're
going to find that this is, of course not the
first large or mega data center that's been implemented across
this country. Because anunder that are in Texas and they
are belching large amounts of pollution and to the environment.
Cities nearby get absolutely destroyed by it. Typically they're brought

(01:03:04):
in through some sort of tax incentives by the local
city council or local county, and so that's exactly what
was happening here with Tucson. So the local city council
was pretty friendly to the idea. They were talking to
this beal infrastructure to bring in Project Blue, they were
giving tax cuts, they were giving all these incentives to

(01:03:25):
bring this gigantic, megalithic thing into just south of town.
And part of the insidiousness of this is that this
was going to go forward until someone noticed it.

Speaker 6 (01:03:34):
Yeah, it was just.

Speaker 12 (01:03:35):
Going to happen all of a sudden one day, this
thing is there, right, but it was noticed, And I
don't honestly know exactly how it.

Speaker 6 (01:03:41):
Got noticed, but it got noticed.

Speaker 12 (01:03:43):
And one of the things I really find interesting, historically speaking,
is how certain places and cultures resonate over time with
historical events from the past. Tucson historically is an interesting
place in terms of its environmental activism. There's a number
of things that happened in Tucson. In the nineteen sixty
There were groups that were actively fighting the spread of

(01:04:04):
highways highway infrastructure, so they were anti freeway, and their
reasoning and rationale was it that freeways were the arterial
infrastructure that allowed for the destructive spread of tracklum developments.
So the way to help one way is to prevent
the destruction of the local environment and the spread of
a city was to diminish its freeway footprint. And I

(01:04:28):
think you can see this is true if you look
at any big city now like Phoenix is essentially a
hive city, and all of the growth comes because of freeways, right.

Speaker 4 (01:04:36):
Because people can get to work or whatever quickly, and
so you get commuter suburbs.

Speaker 12 (01:04:41):
One thing that's always was interesting when I was doing
more work in infosec, when people talk this does make sense.
By the way, this is going to sound off topic.
I was talking to the information security architect for McDonald's
and we were working with them on putting together a
This is why this is interesting me as a data
center thing I used to do a lot as work.
They were talking about putting in a very secure and
encrypted data center for the purposes of protecting their intellectual property.

(01:05:04):
And I was talking to this guy. I was like,
what is this like your recipes or what is it
you it's a McDonald's protects Yeah, And this was wild. No,
they don't care about the recipes. They were protecting their
software that determines where they should buy the next piece
of real estate to put a McDonald's. McDonald's actually a
real estate company. And I have seen this in real
time with my life because I've lived in a very

(01:05:26):
remote part of the Arizona Desert the frontier for lack
of a better term, of Arizona for a long time.
And the first thing that popped up in this one
little area in the middle of.

Speaker 6 (01:05:34):
Nowhere was a McDonald's.

Speaker 12 (01:05:35):
And now everywhere you see a McDonald's show up someplace
that seems a little weird, give it a few years
and it's suddenly the epicenter of a new tract one development.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
Oh it's like they have some unique algorithm to determine.

Speaker 12 (01:05:49):
They figure that out, and the McDonald's are the first
thing they come't usually a gas station in a McDonald's,
and it essentially just looks like, oh, this is the
place to stop, take a leak and buy a burden.
But no, they buy all the land around it, and
then they start selling or leasing that to other businesses
as the growth happens. That's a big part of how
the McDonald's corporation makes its main money. Fascinating, Yeah, and

(01:06:10):
so aligned with you put a freeway. When you see
a freeway suddenly show up in the middle of nowhere.
Someone has a goal to put a giant tract home
development out there and sprawl that city a little more so. Anyways,
going back to the original topic, these people in Tucson
in the sixties were anti freeway and they actively changed
the way Tucson grew. And I think it's one of

(01:06:31):
the major reasons Tucson, if you've ever been to Tucson
versus Phoenix, is a very different, culturally different vibe of Phoenix.

Speaker 13 (01:06:39):
One.

Speaker 12 (01:06:39):
It doesn't sprawl the same, yeah, and it still has
stuff that isn't strip malls. It actually has locally owned businesses,
It actually has some community resources, not all of its
tract home and strip malls. And I think a lot
of that is because of that freeway activism. Also, you
look back into Tucson's past, love them or hate them,
or somewhere in between. The somewhat infamous author Edward Abbey

(01:07:02):
lived in Tucson and wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang and
wrote a lot of environmental activism. He had a lot
of views that were kind of deplorable, but when it
came to climate and when it came to the environment,
he was pretty on point. And his work spawned an
organization called Earth First, which was one of the not
the first, but one of the most famous direct we're

(01:07:22):
talking direct action climate activist or Clyde. You know, they
were the ones that were destroying bulldozers, driving them off cliffs,
some burning down Ski Shelle's like pretty wild stuff because
they believed there was no retreat in defensive Mother Earth.
He's a quote, but anyways, he was Tucson. Earth First
birthed in Tucson, and then Earth First was a victim

(01:07:44):
of the green scare and many of them are still
in prison for their work. But they did have an effect.
Whether you agree with that sort of direct activism or not,
they had an effect. But here we are, it's been
many years after those big main activities and all that
stuff became quiet. You don't really think of like direct
action activism when it comes to the environment like you

(01:08:06):
did back in the eighties and nineties. But when this
data center popped up, groups started showing up in Tucson
that really felt very earth first e I'm not talking
direct action like firebombs, but their speech, the way they
were organizing, coming to city council meetings and not just
showing up to speak but disrupting the meetings, like causing
a scene, and their work so far and I will

(01:08:29):
mention some of them later in this topic have actually
sort of forced the hand of this city council to
deny the project. And so looking back, you're like, it's
interesting to see the residents of things like those old
freeway activists and Edward Abbey and Earth First it's still there.
Tucson still has that, and you see that coming up

(01:08:50):
now in regards to this data center project and other
things that are starting to happen.

Speaker 6 (01:08:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:08:55):
I love Tucson and spent a lot of time in
Tucson for years and ye as years, and there is
a feeling of like it's got this like DIY community
feeling that you do not experience. And people think two
sons in Phoenix, are they just smaller version of the same,
But they're incredibly different.

Speaker 12 (01:09:11):
Oh no, yeah, it's hard to describe the difference. You
have to go to both.

Speaker 4 (01:09:15):
Yeah, yeah, oh, you could not go to Phoenix. You
can go almost anywhere else in the US and experience
the same thing as Phoenix, Right, it's incredibly generic as
the city.

Speaker 6 (01:09:23):
Yeah, you know, the Phoenix is an old place too.

Speaker 12 (01:09:25):
Now as old as too soon, but the very core
the downtown of Phoenix still has something. However, Phoenix was
never good about preserving any of its historicity or historical content,
and so they never saw a building old enough or
cool enough that they didn't care about bulldozing it and
putting up a Walgreens. Yeah, and so Phoenix is as
I forgot what documentary it was, but it was like
what you just described so many American cities. You drive

(01:09:47):
to it and it's just like this, like constantly looping
revolving piece of film of Walgreen, McDonald's nail salon, super cuts, Chili's,
rinse and repeat, and it just every ten miles. It's
the same thing Dutch Brother's coffee. It just never ends.
And Tucson is not yet like that. It still has

(01:10:08):
still has a soul.

Speaker 4 (01:10:10):
Yeah, there are special places in Phoenix who say, like
Guadaloupe is cool. When my yagie friends live said this
is nice, Sarah, I like getting there. Let's take a
little break and talk about how Tucson and Posts is
data center.

Speaker 12 (01:10:31):
So there are a number of groups that came togethers
if you can't track everything all at once, because it's
not possible to human being. But the one I've been
keeping eye on and communicating with is called No Desert
Data Center. They have a presence on the web. They're
all over social media Facebook, Instagram, and for me at least,
And this is not to exclude anyone. If if you're
one of the primary people or groups that we're working

(01:10:52):
against this and you heard this, please do not feel
like I'm excluding you. This is just the group that
I landed up connecting with and following. So but they
are also doing a good job of aggregating others too.
So almost all of their posts have like a bunch
of other groups tagged in it. So if you were
to look up the No Desert Data Center folks, you're
going to find a.

Speaker 6 (01:11:08):
Lot of them.

Speaker 12 (01:11:09):
But they had some amazing artwork.

Speaker 6 (01:11:11):
You know.

Speaker 12 (01:11:12):
One of the things that I think is really important
in activism is getting the attention of the local community.

Speaker 6 (01:11:17):
Artwork will do that.

Speaker 12 (01:11:18):
So if they're this incredible poster that's like says no
drop for data and it's a water drop with a
rattlesnake and havalina and a solaro and they had a
rattlesnake wrapped around a rain drop, Like really good stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:11:32):
That catches your eye.

Speaker 12 (01:11:33):
So they were doing that, but they were also getting
people together. They were having meetings, planning sessions before city
council meetings, getting people together, doing the artwork there, rallying
the troops, for lack of a better term, building morale.
You don't have activism without morale. And then they were
showing up and showing up in numbers. There's videos on
Instagram on their feet alone, where one of these city

(01:11:56):
council meetings had over one thousand twosonians in it with
and posters. And they weren't just sitting there quietly waiting
for their thirty seconds to speak. They were disruptive, they
were loud, and they were not going to not be heard.
So that type of activism in this instance very clearly
is the reason that this happened. Because if you read
the writings of a number of the city council members,

(01:12:20):
they were very sympathetic to the data center. One of
them was talking about like, this is the wrong thing
to do. If we block the data center, they're just
going to build it anyway, and it's better for us
to be involved because then we can help tune it
to be better for the community. No no, no, no, no,
you're just whitewashing a horrible thing. And so this group
and other groups called them out on that immediately. Nice,

(01:12:42):
So like, no, that's not it. So I think I'm
answering your question. But it groups like this, Yeah, throwing
up in large numbers, being loud, not only online but
in person.

Speaker 6 (01:12:54):
That forced their hand. That's craz show. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:12:57):
Yeah, it's people actually being willing to get out of
the tweets into the streets, so to speak, to like
actually show up in this case of these meetings. But
it doesn't have to just be meetings, right, it could
be anywhere. I guess Luis should just talk about like Tucson.
It's from an audhum word. It means dark corner, but
it is not a cool place. It is cool in
the Phoenix. Actually, let's hot that, like this data center

(01:13:18):
would have consumed a massive amount of energy I presumed,
like just keeping the computers cooled, right, and a massive
amount of water.

Speaker 6 (01:13:25):
To do that.

Speaker 12 (01:13:26):
Absolutely, So when you start talking about heat, for example,
I think it's worth I know we don't have infinite
time here on this podcast, but it's worth noting for
people that are not familiar with the concept of heat islands.

Speaker 6 (01:13:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:13:36):
Heat islands are where you build so much metropolitan infrastructure,
including asphalt and concrete, with no botboards, heat or cooling.
You really don't like Phoenix was built without thinking about that.
They're thinking about it now, but it wasn't built thinking
about it when it sprawled, and it was continually was sprawl. Yeah,
Phoenix was always a little harder than TuS just because

(01:13:58):
of like you know, gigra apphical reasons. But now Phoenix
is measurably and demonstrably hotter because it never cools off.

Speaker 6 (01:14:07):
And that's a heat island.

Speaker 12 (01:14:08):
So what happens is during the day, all of that
I'll create, all that asphalt, all those things heat up,
and it'll get to at moments like just this last week,
one hundred and eighteen, one hundred and twenty degree in
the middle of the day. But because the heat island
hasn't been architected well and has no green space to
deal with this, at night, it's still one hundred and
five Jesus See, it never gets below one hundred and

(01:14:31):
So the problem with heat, like obviously one hundred and
twenty degrees can kill you. But the problem with the
heat is that as you never get a chance to
cool off. Heat over time is more dangerous to human
to all living organisms. If you get a break, that's
what keeps you alive. So it can be one hundred
and twenty during the day, but if it's seventy five

(01:14:51):
at night, that gives you a moment to heal and
recuperate for the next day's heat. Phoenix is one of
not the worst, believe it or not, but one of
the worst versions of a heat island, and they are
actively working to make that better. But it's kind of
hard to undo what's been done. Yeah, Tucson, once again,
because the sprawl is diminished by activism of the past,

(01:15:13):
did not become the heat island Phoenix does. So while
it might be one hundred and thirteen during the day,
it might get down to eighty at night. Yeah, and
that really is a big difference for not only sustainability,
but for the health and safety of everyone that lives there.
One of the things that I find is interesting is
the justification for these data centers is because Arizona is

(01:15:33):
seen as a place that doesn't have significant natural disaster risk.
But one of the things that's being left out of
the conversation I don't know why this is the case.
Is that heat and heat islands are a natural disaster.

Speaker 6 (01:15:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they kill people.

Speaker 12 (01:15:49):
If the power were to go out in Phoenix at
the wrong time of year, the death toll is hard
to fathom.

Speaker 6 (01:15:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without air conditioning, it's unsurvivable in those
temperatures fifty for older people, people medically conditioned to what
have you.

Speaker 12 (01:16:03):
Anyone at risk, the unhoused is one example, of course,
which they don't even do proper metrics and measuring of
because our society doesn't care like it should. However, outside
of that, you said people that are at risk, anyone
that has any sort of illness, the young, the elderly,
anyone like that. They have to live in their air
conditioned spaceship to survive.

Speaker 14 (01:16:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:16:22):
Yeah, and it would have taken it, like you say,
a huge amount of cooling just to keep this data center.

Speaker 12 (01:16:28):
Well, that's where this gets so fascinating when they start
proposing these because like, oh, let's be realistic, right, Arizona
is probably low risk for a dramatic earthquake or a hurricane.

Speaker 6 (01:16:37):
That's fair.

Speaker 12 (01:16:38):
Yeah, However, it is not a low risk for a
heat casualty event, which is going on every year and
getting worse, yeah, with climate change. And so these data centers,
the one in twoson that was proposed, would have consumed
and the numbers fluctuate, and the course the numbers you
get from the Amazon crew versus others will be a
little different. But as best as I can tell, the

(01:17:01):
power consumption of this one data center was essentially the
equivalent of that of metropolitan Tucson. Pieces yeah, so you
double the power load of the entire city for this
data center. And the cooling system there's two different ways
to cool there's quote unquote air cooled and water cooled.
They can tell you whatever they want. The reality is

(01:17:22):
they're probably not going to be affected with air cooled
in this environment, so it's going to be water cooled.
And the data on that also seems to be the
water consumption of this was not only equal, maybe worse
than that of Tucson itself. Looking at this site right now,
water positivity claim for the initial two years, but the
initial estimate was six hundred and twenty two million gallons. Whoa, yeah, yeah,

(01:17:46):
with a seven hundred milliwat expected demand, it's crazy. And
so what happens is not only does the city council
just see dollar signs in their eyes? Local electrical infrastructure
TEP the two soon electrical or other data center places
where data centers are located suddenly do things like stop

(01:18:07):
worrying about any form of arbon positivity, or they get
rid of all their carbon goals so that they can
build and work with people like this, Because if you
double the power consumption of a region overnight for a
data center, yeah, think of the waste that you're going
to produce to do that, right, Yeah, And suddenly how
do you produce that power. You're not going to have

(01:18:28):
a nuclear plant pop up tomorrow, so you're going to
do other things like burn more coal. Yeah, and so
your carbon and carbon positivity or attempt to move away
from carbon waste, they just throw that out the door
so they can have these lucrative, juicy contracts with these
data centers.

Speaker 4 (01:18:46):
Yeah, yeah, that is I mean, it's just on the
face of it. When I heard of it, I was
just like, why are they doing this in the one
of the hottest places you know, in the region. But
I guess yeah, they don't see heat as a threat.
Having spent a lot of time in the desert there
I can tell you it is a threat to human life.
So as of last week, right, the council has refused

(01:19:08):
it permission to be built in Tucson.

Speaker 12 (01:19:11):
Due to intense external pressure. Yeah, they did vote against it.

Speaker 4 (01:19:16):
Yes, yeah, so that's like it's a victory. I guess
it's a victory in a battle, but it's not the
end of the war.

Speaker 6 (01:19:21):
Oh No.

Speaker 12 (01:19:22):
That's the problem with all this is that these companies
and these folks will never stop.

Speaker 6 (01:19:28):
So I just saw an.

Speaker 12 (01:19:30):
Article in fact that two days ago, yes, this project
was voted down. However they're coming back with just another
proposal to do it a slightly different way. And so
each time they just reiterate and change it. It's just
a new battle, right, so they will change the words
however they want to make it sound until these people
will vote yes for it. So like Nikki Lee, which

(01:19:54):
is the ward for a councilwoman, was the one that
was arguing against essentially saying that we should approve the
projects so we can have better control of it, and
the activists said against that. But it's just they're just
going to keep changing the tune until the activists get
essentially worn out. On top of that, this is not
the only data center being proposed in Arizona. There are

(01:20:16):
currently three of them under proposal. So there's this one
in Tucson and two of them in Panall County. The
one in Panall County starts off at the small size
of three hundred acres, but it's proposed to go to
three thousand acres. Jesus, They want to build a ultimately
a three thousand acre data center that sprawls essentially from

(01:20:38):
southern Phoenix across the entire north south breath of Pennall County,
on the west side of the I ten southwest of Elois,
extending through significant what are indigenous or what were indigenous lands,
destroying whatever cultural remains are there. But imagine if this
two hundred and ninety acre data center was going to

(01:21:01):
equal the power consumption and water consumption of Tucson. What
is a three thousand acre data center going to do.

Speaker 6 (01:21:09):
Yeah? Yeah, that's insane. That's just us.

Speaker 12 (01:21:12):
And that one is currently still in its early phases.
That one is called the Laosa Project. The CEO of
this company is named cool Deep Verma. Okay, Verma Vrma,
I'm not afectioner, that's the right pronunciation. But in another
example of tech bro narcissism. He's calling this Verma Land,
and his company is called Verma Land. It's like the

(01:21:32):
most awful version of Disneyland. We're not even bringing you rides.
We're just gonna drink your water belt heat into the sky,
destroy your desert so you can have a disturbing psychological
parasocial relationship with an ai avatar. And we're gonna do
it at your expense. Verma Land, isn't that lovely?

Speaker 6 (01:21:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:21:50):
Man, I've seen that's weird. They already owned a lot
of land of the iten I think.

Speaker 6 (01:21:55):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 12 (01:21:56):
Yeah, No, they've been They've been purchasing land throughout Arizona
and sitting on it. But this is where the three
thousand acres come from. Is Verma Land.

Speaker 4 (01:22:03):
Jesus, Yeah, that is this doesn't mind boggling leave vast
data center. So I guess like this is one you know,
as you say, this will either move someone else. So

(01:22:23):
there will be other struggles right like the For instance,
the United States is waving many of the waivers, including
ones that protect indigenous human remains, to build its border
infrastructure right now. Actually a lot of the border infrastructure
is coming out of the U of a tech park
in Tucson. Rights, that's where a lot of these companies
have the headquarters, right, the people who make the border

(01:22:45):
surveillance infrastructure. What can we learn from this struggle in Tuson.
If we're not in Tucson, we might not even be
in the US. Because there are some unique things about Tuson, Right,
It has this history of activism, and it's always been
I don't want to use weird in a Rogatree way,
but it hasn't conformed to like the neo liberal capital
model of a city. But I don't think it's unique.

(01:23:06):
There were things I think that anyone can take from
this victory and the continued opposition, Right, So what can
we learn from it?

Speaker 12 (01:23:13):
Yeah, yeah, No, I think that that's a fair way
to put it in. And I think that speaking of
like the reverberance of the history of the area and
the types of movements that came out of there, as
we mentioned already earlier, make Tucson unique in regards to
it being at least culturally more ready than someplace to
have this struggle. However, if they do succeed and completely

(01:23:34):
stop Project Blue and the two hundred and ninety acre
data center near Tucson has stopped. It's not going to
stop there. We see three more data centers being proposed
in Arizona proper, the three thousand acre dream site that
I've mentioned already is they're just going to keep changing
and moving and trying to do it somewhere else. The

(01:23:55):
reality of this is that when we look back at
the workers' rights movement right there was the IWW the
Industrial Workers of the World. The thing is Tucson winning
one fight against this data center only is a microcosm
of the greater macrocosm of the consumption of these tech
bros and tech industry people who do not care about

(01:24:18):
the climate, do not care about you, do not care
about the community, do not care about the water they consume,
and they will destroy everything in their path for profit.
We know that that is what this form of data
capitalism is. And so Tucson's lesson is everyone has to
be this And I agree with you that Tucson isn't
unique in that there are other places that will have

(01:24:38):
the fight, But this is truthfully everyone's fight, because the
amount of pollution that would be belched out of this
data center or the ones being proposed in Arizona affects everyone.
The reality of climate change is, in my opinion, indisputable.
We're seeing it every year. It's worse, and it is
human induced or a large degree, unlike some people want

(01:25:02):
to deny. Yeah, and having your AI avatar on the
Internet is not in the interests of humanity as a whole.
So we have to work on this on a much
large It's a global issue.

Speaker 6 (01:25:12):
Yeah, yeah, it is not.

Speaker 12 (01:25:13):
It is not a local issue, That's what I'm trying
to say. And these data companies like Amazon, like Google,
like Apple, although this isn't Apple in this instance, but
all of them. Yeah, they have the power, if not
more of power than that of a nation state.

Speaker 4 (01:25:27):
Oh yeah, Like I think if my friend's in the
Marshall Islands, right, this small nation state, but one nonetheless, right,
they will have maybe thirty or forty years before the
islands around inhabitable due to the rise of the sea level.
And like their response has been a to double down
on community and supporting each other.

Speaker 6 (01:25:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:25:44):
They also did things like if you go in between
the islands on an Atoll and the Marshal Islands, den
really used like a Higgins boat, a landing craft from
World War Two, Right, But they also have these solar
power canoes now to reduce their footprint. They're a tiny,
tiny fraction, I know, a single percent of the word
CO two footprint. And so what happens in Tucson will

(01:26:05):
affect them, right, and what they do cannot alone help
them survive, right, And they've appealed to the world's solidarity,
made a whole podcast about this, and the world has
not shown up for them. Right, So, like I think people,
you're right, like, this is a global struggle. It's one
that you know. It doesn't stop in Tuson, doesn't stop
in Eloy, doesn't stop in Phoenix, like it stops when

(01:26:28):
these data centers, which are antithetical to our survival of
a species, stop being built for shit that we don't need.

Speaker 12 (01:26:34):
This is touching on a point that always that frustrates
me frequently when we talk to people who are at
least on the right side minded in terms of being
concerned about our future, and they do the thing right,
they'll do their recycling, or they'll put up a solar
panel and all those things. Sure, but and this isn't
to say that the individuals shouldn't do the ethical and
moral thing that they can do when they can do it. Absolutely.

(01:26:56):
Can you recycle, sure, do it. Can you put up
a solar panel? Absolutely do that. But the real truth
and reality of climate change and the destruction of our
environment and this planet that we all inhabit, it's not
the individual, it's the corporations is at a nation state
level and a corporate level that is going to destroy
our small Biosphere one. Ironically, biosphere is we'll talk about

(01:27:20):
the experiment is near Tucson. Actually Biosphere two was a
little experiment that was a self contained nineteen eighties thing
where these scientists essentially encapsulated themselves in air tight bubbles
to see if they could live with the CO two
production that they were creating within it. The truth was
they couldn't. The ocean turned to algae and they would
have died. So they learned Biosphere two wasn't going to work.

(01:27:41):
But we have bios for one, and the individual doing
the solar panels or recycling. That's a good thing, and
that's moral, but that's great, it's something we should do
if we can. But it's us we have to act
against the truly destructive forces, and it's the corporations and
the nation states that are belching destruction into our planet,
not the individual recycling or not recycling as a soda can.

Speaker 4 (01:28:03):
Yeah, exactly, And I think it's one of the greatest
like frauds editor cannots, these corporations amants to put off,
is to have people attribute blame for climate change to
the person not recycling that can, not the corporation.

Speaker 12 (01:28:18):
Yeah. You know, the political spectrum is always challenging, and
I'm not trying to like point at any one thing,
but this is where I think we all have our failings, right,
and I think this is where like progressive space fails often.

Speaker 6 (01:28:31):
Which is you'll see tone.

Speaker 12 (01:28:32):
Policing, and you'll see recycling, and you'll see solar panels.
But the reality is that isn't really doing shit. It
just isn't in the grand scheme of the numbers. It
isn't it that data center. Stopping that data center is
an actual victory. That's something that needs to happen. Yeah,
and those things need to stop. That kind of stuff
across the board, not just in Tucson, not just in Arizona,

(01:28:52):
but everywhere needs to be a thing where everyone comes
together and realizes that these people are consuming the very
planet that we need to live on. You see Elon
Musk talking about going to Mars. We got with the
human race has to go to Mars because a meteor
might hit the Earth. No, your company is what hit

(01:29:13):
the earth, my friend, You're the one destroying the Earth,
not that meteor.

Speaker 6 (01:29:17):
Yeah. Yeah, it's not external.

Speaker 4 (01:29:19):
And they like the you know, it's it's coming from within, right,
And it is if you say, like it did the
species level threat to us?

Speaker 12 (01:29:26):
The calls literally coming from inside the house.

Speaker 4 (01:29:28):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But we should
also celebrate these victories and lemp in them. Right, So
if people are interested in learning more about the struggling
in Tucson, perhaps they're they're living in Phoenix and they're
just now learning about vermaaland right or these other AI projects,
Like why can they find out more about this? How
can they involve themselves?

Speaker 12 (01:29:49):
Yeah, so I want to first of all, I don't
I hope that I didn't come across as saying like
this is hopeless.

Speaker 6 (01:29:54):
I don't think it is.

Speaker 12 (01:29:54):
Like when you see the actions of like what made
two soon unique now and we saw the actions of
what Earth the Thirst was able to achieve through their
decades of work which they did achieve a lot. It
resonates still to this day. The planet is a better
place because those people paid a price to do what
they did. And that's just something that never stops, is
what it boils down to. Yeah, these companies, these people

(01:30:15):
will never stop trying to destroy our home for their profit.

Speaker 6 (01:30:20):
So that's the point I was trying to make.

Speaker 12 (01:30:22):
And so this was a success and we should celebrate that.
Like you said, the one I want to reference is
No Desert Datacenter dot Com. Again, I want to very
much point out they are not the only ones. Many
people came together. They're the one I have really been
paying attention to. If you go to No Desert Datacenter
dot com, they have links to all their socials Instagram,
Blue Sky, Facebook, and if you go to any of those,

(01:30:44):
their Instagram is particularly active and has some great motivational
art on it. I will tell you that they will
also link you to a number of other.

Speaker 6 (01:30:52):
Organizations at the same time.

Speaker 12 (01:30:53):
Yeah, so if you're interested in this particular issue of
these data centers in Arizona, I would reference you to that.
You can go to their link tree, which is also
linked from their Instagram and that'll connect you to a
number of other organizations that are working on this right
now and to their merit the Project Blue. They succeeded
at least delaying Project Blue, hopefully stopping it. Yeah, and

(01:31:15):
the next post they put up was about the data
center in Eloy, so they understand that this is broader
in scope than just one desert.

Speaker 6 (01:31:22):
Yeah, data center. That's great.

Speaker 12 (01:31:24):
Yeah, it's like it was in the movie There Will
be Blood if you ever saw that. There's an amazing line.
Of course, I drink your milkshake if you drink the
water south of Tucson or don't. Yeah, but then put
a data center just north of Tucson. It doesn't matter.
It's the same watershed.

Speaker 6 (01:31:39):
Yeah, yeah, right, it's the same same problem.

Speaker 12 (01:31:42):
So no desert datacenter dot com And that'll get you
to a bunch of different links and a bunch of
updates about what's going on with this.

Speaker 4 (01:31:49):
Perfect and god, if people want to follow your weg
I mean, you have a presence on the internet.

Speaker 6 (01:31:53):
Where can people find you?

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 12 (01:31:55):
Yeah, yeah, my project is not necessarily about the desert
data center, but I'm definitely obviously very sympathetic and part
of that too, just not on my project. I'm in
Range TV, So if you want to find all my work,
you can find it by just easily going to Enrange
dot tv and there's a link on there called watch
and that'll get you to all my socials. I distribute
my video content. Decentralized YouTube is the is the line

(01:32:17):
in the room must be realistic. But I have my
content in multiple different places. The easiest way to find
all of them is range dot tv and you'll find my.

Speaker 6 (01:32:25):
Socials there too, which is Facebook and Blue Sky and
all that.

Speaker 12 (01:32:28):
And of course my topic is more about firearms history
and civil rights and how they intersect. But if our
ability to breathe and drink water isn't human rights, I
don't know what it is.

Speaker 4 (01:32:37):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's how we should see these things.
Thank you so much for your time, Kyle. That was great, James,
thank you for having me.

Speaker 12 (01:32:42):
I appreciate it's always a real treat to be on
any of the shows here, and I love all the
work you all are doing, and together hopefully we can
I don't know how to put it, stop these corporate
maggots from eating our not yet corpse of an earth.

Speaker 13 (01:32:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:32:55):
Then I think it's like I guess I'll finish up
by saying like, it doesn't matter if we confronting fascism.

Speaker 6 (01:33:00):
It doesn't matter if we're confronting this destruction of our planet. Right.

Speaker 4 (01:33:04):
The only way through this is together, and the only
way that we defeat this is through building stronger communities
to show up for one another. And that's something that
you have documented extensively in the historical parts of your channel.
So I think there is a connection that I hope
people can see there.

Speaker 12 (01:33:20):
Yeah, community defense is also protecting our planets so we
can live on it. Yeah, I agree with that, and
we have to do that together. Thousands of people showing
up to city council meeting at Tucson is a glimmer
of light in this moment, and hopefully we can see
more of them.

Speaker 6 (01:33:33):
Yeah, all right, thanks Cap.

Speaker 8 (01:33:54):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things
falling apart this week featuring an entire three sentences about
putting it back together again. I am your host, Bio Wung,
and today we are gathered here to talk about tariffs.
Oh boy, it has been a massive two weeks of

(01:34:15):
tariff news, the most important aspect of which has been
finally getting a resolution to what was going on with
the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose
at the beginning of his time in office. On July
thirty first, we finally actually found out what those terrorists
are going to look like, and what those terrorists are
going to look like is PRISTI ann Effectively, what happened

(01:34:41):
is that roughly, if the US runs a trade deficit
with you, you get a fifteen percent tariff, and you
get a ten percent tariff if we run a trade
surplus with you. Now there's a bunch of other individual rates.
We'll get to some of them in a second, but
it's worth emphasizing that this this doesn't make any sense.

(01:35:03):
So okay, before we get into the structural effects of this,
I want to sort of look at what the nominal
stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're
at odds with each other. And this is the point
where we're turned to later. Part of the justification for
the tariffs is that, Okay, they're trying to use tariffs
to replace the income tax. That's nonsense, it's gibberish. You

(01:35:27):
literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the
income tax. But okay, that's the thing that they want
to do. The other nominal justification, and this is what's
being used in negotiations and is the thing that is
causing individual tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up.
Is that Trump is pissed off that the US runs

(01:35:49):
trade deficits with countries. And again, like this is basically nonsense.
The US pays for things in its own currency. We
don't actually need other places currency. It doesn't matter if
you run trade deficits. I really hate that Rand Paul
is right when he said I run a trade deficit
with my grocery store. But like, that's how the American
Empire is supposed to work. These people do not care

(01:36:12):
that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work.
They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that
has ever existed in the entirety of human history, and
they see numbers on a chart which says we pay
them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it.
But again, okay, if that's a state of justification, right,
then why are you imposing a terra fun countries? We

(01:36:33):
have a trade ser plus two that doesn't make any sense,
and the difference between them is only five percent, So
what are we doing here? It's nonsense, like our trade
policy is being run by people who don't understand how
any of this works and are operating off of, you know,
effectively just pure anger and rage. So I'm going to
talk about a few of the really really high rates.

(01:36:56):
We're not going to focus on much on the thirty
percent South Africa, for example, but oh boy, so Syria
is at forty one percent, which is absolutely fucking hideous.
Syria is a country that I don't know anyone who
listens to this show is aware of the extent to
which Syria has been devastated by the civil war, and
this is an incredible blow to their economy. Laus and

(01:37:21):
Me and Mar are also being terriffed at forty percent.
And we promised in the executive disorder to explain how
Trump recognizing the junta so Joe Biden had refused to
recognize me and Mar's like military coup government. As long
time listeners of this show are aware, there is a
military coup in in memr There is a large gale

(01:37:42):
revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government. My co host
James Stout and Robert Evans have done a lot of
very good reporting on this that you can go find.
You should find is some of the best journalism that
I've ever encountered. But the US's official position has been
that we don't recognize the coup government because it is,
and this is true, a coup government. But Trump just

(01:38:05):
sent the junta a letter of that says you're tariff
to forty percent. And the thing about this is the
junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah, Like that means
you recognize us, right, because you're sending us official fucking
notices of shit. So you're recognizing US as the legitimate
government of me and mar And so the junta is
like thrilled by this. There's some evidence of like the
US lifting sanctions on them after. It's kind of messy,

(01:38:27):
but yeah, great. Somehow, in the attempts to sort of
just like squeeze every last drop out of all of
these countries, we have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship.
Hate that back to the more direct tariff stuff. The
tariff's on Laos is also going to be devastating for
Lahosian economy, which is a lot of the economies in

(01:38:50):
Southeast Asia are pretty heavily export driven, and it's one
of the places where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place.
After the sort of increase in labor prices and increase
in resistance from the labor movement in China kind of
pushed all of that capital down the make Coung River delta.
This is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos.

(01:39:13):
And you know, this is something I want to keep
emphasizing over and over again that these turf teriffs, people
they hurt the most are workers in places like Laos,
in places like Syria. Right, Hugoid should just be absolutely
fucking devastated by it. Now, let's also talk Switzerland, which
was the other country that had a terriff at like

(01:39:34):
forty percent. This one is genuinely really funny, which is
that it seems to largely be driven by Trump being
pissed off of the trade deficit, which is like, compared
to like the scale of the US economy, the trade
deficit is like zero dollars. But the funniest part of
this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by
gold imports. Now, this is extremely funny because If you

(01:39:55):
know anything about the American right, you know that a
lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially
when they were sort of building their operations, a huge
source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold.
This was the original Alex Jones grift, right. I think
he still does it a little bit now, before he
sort of pivoted in supplements. You would partner with like
gold salesman and like silvia salesman. This and this has

(01:40:15):
always been a huge source of these people's money. Now
there's there's been a little bit of decrease in the
prominence of gold as a thing. Actually, there's a very
good Folding Ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Idris Elba
Weird Gold promotion documentary which talks about the ways in
which gold has been sort of threatened by bitcoin and

(01:40:38):
well mostly bitgcoin. But it's like cryptocurrency in general is
like the scam. You're trying to sell all of these
sort of weird prepper and like hardline quote unquote sound
money libertarian y types. But it is very funny that
this is in effect a self reinforcing cycle, because the
thing about the price of gold is that it is
largely determined by how fucked the rest of the economy

(01:40:59):
is gold. People who are trying to sell gold are
trying to sell you on the fact that the economy
is about to fucking explode. But this is a cyclical effect,
right where these teriff rates go up and the economy explodes,
and so people buy more gold from Switzerland, at which
point are trade balanced with Switzerland gets worse.

Speaker 2 (01:41:15):
It works, it worse, so any all.

Speaker 8 (01:41:18):
Other like Swiss watches are another sort of major source
of export currency, so offf which are again all worn
by all these fucking maga grifters with their like fucking
ten thousand dollars watches or whatever, So that one is
just funny. Trump has also announced and this has not
gone into effect yet, who fucking knows when if it
goes into effect, But I think it's worth talking about,

(01:41:39):
which is that Trump has been talking about putting a
one hundred percent tariff on semiconductors unless you invest in
the US. So Apple sort of in response to this,
pledged one hundred million dollars in investment in the US
to build chips. And I think it's also worth looking
at the ideological underpinnings of this, because a huge part

(01:41:59):
of this thing is something that you've been seeing increasingly
on the right, is this dream of making domestic iPhones.
And if you look at the people in the tech sector, right,
the sort of tech billionaires you run all this stuff,
they're openly fantasizing about like, oh, these like soft weak
liberals are going to be forced to like work in
the factories and put iPhones together or whatever. And it's

(01:42:20):
worth emphasizing that this is just not possible, right, And
this is true of a significant number of the things
that they want these tariffs to do. They're just not
possible results of the policy levers they're pulling. A couple
of months ago, I described a sort of similar policy
thing to this as like they are attempting to scream
at the moon in order to control the tides. It's like,

(01:42:41):
it doesn't work. It's not the right lever. It literally
can't do what you think it's going to do. And
it's worth going into why, which is that we can't
make iPhones here because we don't have the migrant labor
force to do it. And a lot of you may
be thinking, oh, well, the US has a lot of
migrant workers. No, you don't understand China, which is where

(01:43:01):
most of these things are built. Even with the tariffs,
like a lot of you know that there were some
downcycling of plants, that stuff has mostly been upcycled. Again,
China has three hundred million migrant workers. That is almost
the entire population of the United States. Right, we are
talking about individual plants with two hundred thousand workers. That

(01:43:22):
is the low end estimate. By the way of those numbers,
we don't actually have very good numbers on how big
some of these fox Con facilities are. The low end
estimate is two hundred thousand. Right, And again this is
just in time production. So okay, what does that actually mean? Right?
This means that the production cycles work on a lot
of For example, the way that UPS works, right, We're like,

(01:43:44):
you have a bunch of people who are effectively seasonal
or part time workers who only come in when demand increases.
So for UPS, right, and it's actually a relatively similar
schedule to the way it works in China. But it's
like there's these massive surges around the holidays with apples,
it's more like September November roughly, But it's in order
to like massively be able to ramp up production in

(01:44:06):
time for you know, the sort of like massive holiday
increase of orders. Right, But in order to do this,
you need to have a production apparatus where you have
two hundred thousand workers there, but you can also get
rid of most of them and they can support themselves
doing other stuff for the rest of the year, and
then you have to be able to bring them back
in during peak season. We just do not have the

(01:44:29):
populations to replicate this, right, even if you're trying to
replace it with prison labor. The thing about the American
prison system is that it's decentralized, right. This is actually
a key element of how the US economy is structured.
Prisons are one of the sort of three major sources
of jobs in rural areas. The other two are like
Walmart style service jobs, which replaced anything else that was
in the economy, and the military basis, which is part

(01:44:50):
of why you know, like like this is part of
why rural politics of console reactionary, because like, okay, so
if your options in the economy are soldier, prison guard,
service labor, you're gonna generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit.
But again, even even though the American prison system has
a really high population. These people are really spread out,

(01:45:13):
and iPhone production requires sort of like mass centralization, right,
that's the only way to get these things to work. Plus,
the workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled
enough to be able to do this shit. And this
is a capacity that's built up in China over the
course of like decades, right, And we don't really have
this now that people have tried moving this production to

(01:45:35):
other places like Vietnam, for example, the teriff rates there
are also making this extremely difficult, but it's been really
really hard to replace. And the other issue, and this
is a technological issue, not just a sort of issue
of the systemic elements of the population of China. The
infrastructure to build microchips in the US doesn't exist. And

(01:45:58):
it's not just that the infrastructure to build the chips
doesn't exist. It's actually way worse than that. And this
is why all of the attempts and the Biden administration
has put an enormous amount of money into this. The
Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of money
specifically into the microchip angle, and none of them may
have been able to do it. And part of it's
technological problem. But part of it is that the machines
that you need to make the chips don't exist, right,

(01:46:20):
But the machines you need to make the machines that
make the chips also don't exist. And the machines you
need to make the machines that make the machines that
make the chips also don't exist. We are so far
up the supply chain, right, And this is one of
the you know, one of the things, the thing that
they're trying to do through sort of like pure politics,
right through like just like the pure exertion of state power,

(01:46:42):
is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply
chain has worked. And the way the supply chain has
worked is by intense specialization in very very very small areas. Right,
So Taiwan, for example, becomes the only place basically that
can manufacture these chips, and that intense specification means that
like the machines, that the machines that they that are
used to build this thing are only made by like

(01:47:02):
one company in social land, and like machines to make
those machines, like who the fuck knows where they're built.
And this is the thing where the technology involves has
become so complicated and the laborers become so specialized that
you're dealing with machines that like just straight up not
many people in the world know how to use, and
not on the people in the world know how to create,
and so we're so far up the supply chain, right,

(01:47:24):
And this is also if you want to look at
like what the impact of these terrorists are going to be, right,
because these supply chains are so specialized, you know, can
you can think of these supply chains as like incredibly
complicated machines, right, and any sort of like little rock
that you throw into the machine, or do you know,
you throw sand into the machine and suddenly the ball
bearing doesn't work at quite the right efficiency, and so

(01:47:44):
things just start breaking down across the entire supply chain.
And they think that they can just replicate all of
this with just like pure tariffs and like throwing money
at it, and no, you can't. These are these are
actual structural things of how the economy works. Now, do
you know what else is a structural element of how
the economy works? Idiots? These products and services and the

(01:48:04):
fact that they fund this podcast. Woo, we are so
back now one of the other kind of terriffts I
think I've been calling I guess like defiance tariffs. One

(01:48:26):
of the things that Tromp administration has been doing is
threatening to impose a fifty percent teriff on anyone who
buys oil from Russia. India has been threatened with this.
India's current terrif rate is twenty five percent. They're right
now threatening with another twenty five percent against in the
fifty percent. It's sort of unclear exactly who's going to
back down here. More interestingly, and we've talked a little
bit about this, Brazil, there is a fifty percent turf

(01:48:49):
teriff on Brazil again for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which
is very funny because this has managed to piss off
the entire sort of political sphere in Brazil to the
extent that like Bolsonaro has had to come out and
announce this because Bolsonaro was getting fucking torn to shreds
by the Brazilian right for being basically a trader, sort

(01:49:11):
of lapdog of the US as they're sort of, you know,
imposing this direct attack on Brazil through this fifty percent tariff. Right,
it's backfire so spectacularly that like Lula, who was floundering,
is now writing this incredible wave of sort of anti
American Brazilian nationalism from both the left and the right.
So Lula, who is who is again in a pretty
strong political position because of this, has refused to do

(01:49:33):
direct talk to the US because he was like, absolutely
not fuck this. Here's a quote from Reuters. We had
already pardoned the US intervention in the nineteen sixty four coup,
said Lula, who got his political start as a union
leader protesting against the military government that followed a US
backed ouster of a democratically elected president. Quote. But this
is now not a small intervention. It's the president of
the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a

(01:49:56):
sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable. Now. Again, as I
said in the ed, there's a lot of things now
that are worth looking at here. Right, we have, on
the one hand, this direct connection from Lula from you know,
the sort of subtle CIA backing of military coup stuff
which happens under the table. To you know this just

(01:50:16):
like the president of the United States is telling you
how to run your country. And that is a substantive shift,
even if like the CIA overthrowing your government like has
more of a direct political impact on it. Right. The
thing about the thing about the way American power worked
was that it was mostly supposed to be under the table,
and it's not now. It's just it's just out there
in the open. Right. The premise that the US governments,

(01:50:37):
like the president of the United States, should just be
able to tell another country what to do is the
fucking premise of American imperialism. And now they're just saying
it out loud. And it's also worth noting that it's
not like Lula is some kind of like anti American
radical right like Lula worked really well in his first
term in office, which works w Bush, but again because
of the way that the political wins have shifted here,

(01:50:58):
right to the extent that like Bulsonaro has had to
condemn an attempt to get him released from prison, which
is so funny because he's doing this. He is, he is,
he is pushing very hard. Now there hasn't really been
a response yet for Lula's like call for organized terror
resistance from China and India and Bricks. I don't know

(01:51:20):
if there's going to be. It's worth talking a little
bit about what Bricks actually is here, So bricks stands
for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It was originally
like an asset class designed by some guys at Goldman
Sachs who were you know, trying to like classify the
assets of this kind of like developing economy thing. It

(01:51:40):
was like, you know, you can buy bonds and these
things and maybe you can classify their asset rates together,
and has kind of become a political alliance. But you know,
there's a lot of people who will attempt to sell
you on bricks being the sort of like leftist anti
imperial alliance, you know, and as a sort of socialist thing.
And like I will simply ask, right, who is doing

(01:52:01):
the socialism here? Right? Is it a butcher of Gujarat?
Is it she quote we must oppose welfarerism jimping? Is
it Vladimir? We will show Ukraine true decommunization putin? Is
it the African National Congress of selling your country to
Bank of America? Is it the butcher of Haiti?

Speaker 7 (01:52:18):
Like?

Speaker 8 (01:52:18):
What are we doing here? Right? Like this is not
actually a substantively anti American political alliance. India is a
close American ally. South Africa is a close American ally,
none of this really makes any sense. It's not a
substantive political alliance. Really, people periodically make noise about it
trying to be a substantive political alliance. But like I mean,

(01:52:40):
like India and China are periodically like at war or
like almost at war with each other over the border. Right,
these are a bunch of countries that absolutely fucking hate
each other. It's never been a coherent political project. Lula
is trying to turn it into one, but like I
fucking I don't think that's gonna work. So, you know,
that's sort of what's been going on on the front

(01:53:01):
to sort of national resistance. But Lula does have, you know,
a kind of very very large and powerful political force
behind him domestically to resist this. We'll see what happens
going forward. It's also worth noting that China has been
negotiating with the US, and their tariff increases we're supposed
to go into effect have been delayed for another ninety days.
So we're stuck in this holding pattern again. But let's

(01:53:23):
talk about what this means for the economy, right, And
I think the very short term answer is that I
don't think anyone really knows right, Like, the actual macro
effects of this are things that we've only just started
to see. No one's ever really tried to model this
out because there's no reason why it whatever happened, you know,

(01:53:44):
And you're starting to see things behind the scenes, like
medical supplies being incredibly difficult to acquire. You're starting to
see a bunch of very very weird items and supply
chains become increasingly difficult to find. But again, the supply
chains are going to break down in ways that we
just don't really understand. What is going to happen, and

(01:54:05):
what has started to happen is inflation is increasing. I
want to sort of again review our kind of inflation theory, right,
which is largely derived from our friends's strange matter sort
of supply chain theory of inflation. Their uses of inflation
is that, like, it's not set by just supply and demand.
It's set by cost plus markup. Because you know, price

(01:54:28):
is not set by like an autonomous thing called the market.
Price is set by like a guy with like a
price gun. Right, It's directly set by people. And the
way that those people set the price is you know
the cost of acquiring the item, plus and markup for
their profit. Now, one of the sort of fundamental like
insights here is that price is sort of sticky until

(01:54:50):
it isn't, right, which is that like, okay, So the
actual thing that controls price is sort of like how
pissed off consumers get at price increases, but also comma
that is also very very much tied to brand, right,
And if you raise your prices and consumers get pissed,
you even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily

(01:55:10):
mean those people will come back, right. So you know
a lot of times when they're when when there's price increases,
companies try to eat it. And that's and that's been
what's happening with a lot of these things right where
at each point in the supply chain, people are you know,
people are having to sort of pay for the tariff parts, right,
And when someone has to pay for the tariff, they
increase their prices that they sell it to the next

(01:55:31):
person in the supply chain. The next person's supply chain
increases their prices right now, So the way that these
terriffs play out, right is that each person in the
supply chain is doing costless markup, but their costs are
going up. So your options are either you sell it
at the same price and you reduce the amount of
markup you're getting, which is just reducing the raw profit
you're taking in, or you raise your prices. And these

(01:55:52):
things are trying to not raise their prices, and part
of this is from direct political pressure right like Trump
has been threatening companies to not raise their prices from
the tariffs. But prices are starting to increase. And as
this goes on, and as more and more teriffs come
into effect, that it becomes more and more difficult to
evade the tariffs. The prices are going to keep increasing

(01:56:14):
because they're driven by these supply chain price increases. So
you know, cost is going to go up. It is
going to have absolutely devastating impacts on workers across the world,
primarily not in the US, but the workers who are
in these export oriented economies are going to have to
deal with just the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse.

(01:56:36):
You know what, who else hopefully doesn't have to deal
with the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse. It
is the products and services to support this podcast. We
are back now. The thing I want to close this
episode on is not actually a look at the economy

(01:56:59):
because I think, you know, we kind of don't know
exactly what's going to happen with the economy other than bad.
But there is something that I think we can look
at that's been broadly ignored or miscovered, which is what
these tariffs say about the nature of the state. And
I think what's happening is that we're seeing a fundamental

(01:57:19):
change in the way that the state functions from the
previous sort of neoliberal regime to this like just really
openly fascist one. And I think the most clear example
of this isn't necessarily the terriffs, so they are a
pretty clear example. It's this extremely weird like extortion agreement

(01:57:41):
reached between Trump, AMD, and Nvidia. I'm going to read
this from CBS quote. US chip makers in Nvidia and
AMD will pay the US government fifteen percent of revenue
generated by sales of their AI chips in China. A
White House official confirmed to CBS News this is just
a shakedown, right, you know. This is part of a

(01:58:03):
negotiating process by which originally AMD and Video were going
to be banned for selling the reiships to China, and
in order to be allowed to sell these ships to China,
Trump was like, okay, if you want to do that,
give us like thirty percent of your revenue, when they
were like, okay, what if we did fifteen percent? Right,
this is just a shakedown, and you know it's been

(01:58:24):
described as such all over the press, but they're missing
something fundamental here, which is that the state fundamentally is
just a shakedown.

Speaker 13 (01:58:32):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:58:34):
The analysis of Trump isn't from the sort of critical
press has been to view it as corruption. And it
is absolutely corrupt, right, like, no question about this. It
is unbelievably corrupt. Like we have people just giving the
president blocks of fucking gold with an iPhone embedded into them. Right,
it's it's hideous open corruption. But analysis that looks at
the Trump administration as corruption of an ideal type, right,

(01:58:58):
that looks at it as the transformation of the state
into something that it fundamentally isn't. That kind of analysis
is just wrong. The state has always and has always
only been the localized monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Right,
That's all it is. That's always ever been. Everything we
know about the state today, right from the legal system

(01:59:20):
to education, to roads, to environmental regulation to the welfare state,
are all just functions that were tacked on to the
core monopoly on violence, either as part of a carrot
and state gambit to maintain control of population or simply
as a concession to popular force. You can just have
a state that is a bunch of guys with guns

(01:59:40):
who rule purely by fiat and have control over an area.
That is a state. Everything else that we think of
as being part of a state is tacked on, and
trump Ism as a political force has simply reverted the
state back to a pure mode of extraction. Right, the
state is men with guns who take shit from you
to pay for those guns. And it becomes it was
breasthtakingly clear that this is, you know, how the state

(02:00:04):
is functioning Tree and Trump administration, because the Trump administration
has been slashing benefits while handing tax breaks and giant
government contracts worth billions of dollars to the tech elite.
And they've been spending tens of billions of dollars, you know,
to hand to the men's with guns and to recruit
new men with guns for the mass deportation regime. Right,
this is just a pure version of the state as

(02:00:25):
an extraction regime, as a regime that fucking takes money
for you at gunpoint to buy more men with guns,
so it can take more money from you. Trump Ism
imagines that you can collect this money to pay for
the apparatus of violence and terror from just pure extortion
of foreigners in the working class, you know, And we
talked about this a bit at the beginning, right, this
is part of why they want to do tariffs, is

(02:00:46):
they think to replace the income tax. You know, the
income tax is just like absolutely despised by the extra
state elements of the ruling class because rich people hate
paying taxes. But there just isn't enough capital to run
a state life that with unemploying some kind of like
MMTS money printing, which has alienated a huge part of
from sosterity coalition because his quote unquote deficit reduction stuff

(02:01:08):
hasn't actually produced the deficit. So the people who like
really really care about that shit ideologically are pissed. But
also on a fundamental level, this is already how most
city governments operate, right. They are enormous police budgets extracted
at gunpoint, either from the city council directly or directly
from the working class from fees and fines and tickets

(02:01:28):
like just leveled at working class people directly. And this
is something that is a little different from how previous
regimes of neoliberalism has functions, because those previous regimes of
neoliberalism did a lot of these same things, but they
were run through regimes of debt extraction. Right. It was
you know, it was the imf right coming into your

(02:01:49):
country and being like, okay, if you want to pay
back this these loans that this dictator took out, right,
you're going to have to like sell your entire fucking
working class into pe andage so that your entire economy
is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back.
But again, that was debt extraction, base and finance based.
Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight

(02:02:10):
up set give me all your money if you want
to live. But this is not a particularly smart strategy.
There's a reason that the state takes on other guises
than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet. Right,
A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime
where the violence is just out in the open, invites
more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime or

(02:02:32):
a regime that operates through more principles. All regimes of accumulation,
of dispossession of resources taken by violence to produce more
violence come to an end. Brick by brick and stone
by stone. Trumpism too will be torn to the ground
by the hands of the people who it thought it
could exploit.

Speaker 14 (02:02:49):
Forever this has been, it could happen here.

Speaker 2 (02:03:12):
Welcome back everyone to electile dysfunction.

Speaker 9 (02:03:15):
Electile. That's a new one.

Speaker 2 (02:03:16):
Yes, yes, Yes. The podcast about Why President Bad, also
Why World Bad, also Why America Bad. I'm Robert Evans
introducer extraordinaire with me today. Garrison, Davis, Mio, Wong, James.

Speaker 9 (02:03:35):
Stout Eventually special segment from James Stout later in the episode.

Speaker 2 (02:03:39):
Yes, later, he is being held in custody by the FTC.

Speaker 8 (02:03:44):
That's not true.

Speaker 9 (02:03:45):
You cannot say that because that is something that actually
could happen over time.

Speaker 8 (02:03:48):
So unfortunately he is not.

Speaker 2 (02:03:50):
That's why I made it be the FTC. Garrison.

Speaker 8 (02:03:53):
People will believe us, I don't. People will believe I
can get arrested by the FTC any day now.

Speaker 2 (02:03:57):
We could get arrested for the FTC any day now.
Thanks to the ads that I've been reading for British petroleum,
even though I exclusively use American petroleum.

Speaker 9 (02:04:07):
This episode recovering the week of August seven to August.

Speaker 6 (02:04:11):
Thirteen, yep.

Speaker 4 (02:04:12):
For note.

Speaker 9 (02:04:13):
Yes, it's just so we were. I think it's important
to keep up because, Yeah, if people refer back to
these episodes, it's good to know what week we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (02:04:20):
Yeah. I don't usually remember what day it is, so yeah,
good to do that, good to remember what day it
is Meyah, you want to start us off?

Speaker 8 (02:04:28):
Yeah, need I need to issue a correction about Sesame Street.
I was wrong about Sesame C's structure. Where got a
very street message from someone who works on the show
about the way I talked about it being stripped for parts.
Sesame Street was never actually like ran by PBS. It
was ran by its own independent nonprofit entity, Sesame Workshop,
I believe, Yeah, yes, not yeah, I'll called sesme Workshop.

(02:04:51):
And so the episodes that were being streamed on HBO
Max and I think they're now they've now moved to
like Netflix. Those episodes all did still air on PBS, however,
Comma the only aired nine months later. But yeah, I
want to be clear about that. And then Garrison, do
you want to talk about PBS kind of not existing anymore.

Speaker 9 (02:05:09):
Well, PBS may still find a way to exist, but
specifically the Corporation for her Public Broadcasting, which helps facilitate
the you know, the funding and the structure and the
operation of things like PBS and your local MPR, after
being defunded by the Trump administration, is now going to
shut down completely.

Speaker 8 (02:05:30):
So yeah, and that's and that's a lot of the
how a lot of the funding for rural networks particularly
was able to function. If your PBS network is like
mostly not funded by that, or they can find other
funding sources, it can survive, but real bad.

Speaker 9 (02:05:46):
It's pretty disastrous for public media yep. And like NPR
specifically and all of its local affiliates are some of
the best like local news journalism across the country, and
this is going to be a big hurdle to get
over with the loss of a of like a giant
in the not just like the like national media space,
but like for journalism and as well as children's educational content.

Speaker 8 (02:06:08):
And it's you know, and it's worth messing to you
like this is one of the lasts as sort of
local media and local radio and local newspapers have been
carved out and got out of business and destroyed a
venture capital firms. NPR was like one of the last
local journalism outlets left in a lot of places, especially
in rural areas, and that's just getting worse. So we

(02:06:32):
hate that. Yeah, this has been the Sesame Street correction.
I deeply apologize to the cast and crew and production
staff of Sesame Street.

Speaker 2 (02:06:40):
Yes, sorry, particularly to Grover. Not sorry to Elmo. No
apologies down, we saw what Almo was tweeting. I'm on
Larry David's side of that beat.

Speaker 9 (02:06:51):
For our first main story this week, Let's talk DC.
On Monday, Trump declared it was a liberation day for
the District of Columbia to quote unquote take our capital
back and officially in voked section seven four zero of
the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to place the

(02:07:12):
DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and order
the Secretary of Defense to mobilize the DC National Guard
to quote address the epidemic of crime in our nation's capital.
Along with this announcement, Trump police a presidential memorandum reading,
in part quote, the local government of the District of
Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in

(02:07:36):
the city. The mobilization and duration of duty shall remain
in effect until I determine that conditions of law and
order have been restored in the district of Columbia. Robert
who in the past have you heard talk about federalizing
the police?

Speaker 2 (02:07:53):
Oh gosh, I mean just a Coppola. Guys. There's this
dude Hitler who you know, worked with a guy named
Hermann Gering and Heinrich Himmler to do that back in
the past. But that was in Germany, you know, a
country totally different from the United States, almost three four
countries away from US, so not really not really relevant

(02:08:15):
at all to anything happening here.

Speaker 8 (02:08:17):
And we can all resassured it can't happen here.

Speaker 2 (02:08:19):
Yeah, we're not Germans. We have a lot of Germans,
but we're not Germans.

Speaker 9 (02:08:24):
This is part of Jarvin's writing on how to take
over the government, centralizing the police as one of the
key steps nationalizing local law enforcement, putting um under federal control.
And here is another version of an acting such a policy,
mainly citing this crime epidemic in DC, though according to

(02:08:47):
DC Metropolitan Police and their own crime figures, violent offenses
which peaked in twenty twenty three fell to their lowest
in twenty twenty four, lowest time in over thirty years,
and now in twenty twenty five, I've continued to fall
even lower than that, though. Trump claims that these stats,
just like the just like the Bureau of Labor stats,
are all made up. We're all fake.

Speaker 8 (02:09:08):
We'll get to that.

Speaker 9 (02:09:08):
These aren't. These aren't real stats, and they're they're they're
assuming that there's there's been fake fake statisticians who have
been covering up the real, the real crime wave happening
across DC and even across the country. Trump cited three
incidents leading to the federalization of DC police won the
assassination of two Israeli MC staffers in May, a fatal

(02:09:32):
shooting of a Congressional intern in June, and most recently,
an alleged violent car jacking of the DOGE staffer known
as Big Balls and a possible future recipient of the
Presidential Medal of Honor.

Speaker 8 (02:09:47):
Or or Freedom.

Speaker 2 (02:09:48):
One of the medal. Yeah, well, you know, big Balls.

Speaker 9 (02:09:52):
Frankly, it might have some military credentials based on how
he survived this latest uh, this this latest violent encounter.
Who's to say this is.

Speaker 2 (02:10:00):
Salt from a platoon of Romanians.

Speaker 8 (02:10:03):
Yeah, quite quite. Frankly, I feel like we're only about
six to eight months out from him getting like commissioned
as a lieutenant and then them giving him the actual
medal of honor.

Speaker 2 (02:10:13):
I'm saying, where I go for his courageous service getting
beaten up by two fifteen year olds.

Speaker 9 (02:10:19):
So this latest incident with mister Balls I think is
his official title at DOT. We're now the Social Security Administration.

Speaker 8 (02:10:29):
Not related to Ed Bolls.

Speaker 2 (02:10:31):
Different balls, but very different guys.

Speaker 9 (02:10:35):
This latest incident with mister Balls seemed to tip Trump
over though this is something that he has lofted for
months and months he's been wanting to do this. On
Tuesday night, forty three arrests were made in DC in
relation to the federal seizure of police, and fifty officers
were part of this operation, half from DC Metro Police,

(02:10:55):
which are now federalized. So far, only thirty National Guard
troops have been deployed, but around eight hundred are on
the way. On Wednesday, Trump discussed extending his control of
DC police past the thirty day limit.

Speaker 8 (02:11:12):
Thank you, mister President.

Speaker 10 (02:11:13):
Your federalization of the police has a thirty day limit.

Speaker 13 (02:11:17):
Unless Congress acts to extend it.

Speaker 10 (02:11:18):
Are you talking to Congress about extending it or do
you believe thirty days is sufficient.

Speaker 7 (02:11:22):
Well, if it's a national emergency, we can do it
without Congress. But we expect to be to Congress before
Congress very quickly. And again we think the Democrats will
not do anything to stop crime, but we think the
Republicans will do it almost unanimously. So we're going to
need a crime bill that we're going to be putting
in and it's going to pertain initially to DC. It's

(02:11:44):
almost we're going to use it as a very positive example,
and we're going to be asking for extensions on that,
long term extensions, because you can't have thirty days. Thirty
days is that's by the time you do it. We're
going to have this in good shape. And don't forget
in the border. Everyone said it would take years and
you'd have to go back to Congress.

Speaker 6 (02:12:05):
I never went to Congress for anything.

Speaker 7 (02:12:06):
I just said close the border, and he closed the
border and that was the end of it. I didn't
go back to Congress. And we're going to do this
very quickly, but we're going to want extensions. I don't
want to call a national emergency if I have to,
I will, but I think the Republicans in Congress will
approve this pretty much unanimously.

Speaker 8 (02:12:27):
Don't like that.

Speaker 9 (02:12:29):
No, it's pretty dictatorial on like a space level quote.
If it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress.

Speaker 8 (02:12:37):
It's very Palpatine emergency powers coded.

Speaker 9 (02:12:40):
And I'm not sure if Lucas was pulling on any
real world examples for Star Wars the prequels, or if
he was just pulling all that shit out of his ass.
Who knows. It seems pretty fanciful. Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath
told his former co workers on Fox News that it's
unnoe how long DC will be under this militarized occupation.

Speaker 13 (02:13:02):
He's got the guts to say, I'm going to federalize
the police that are that don't work. I'm going to
bring in the National Guard, I'm going to bring in
federal marshals. I'm going to bring in the park police.

Speaker 12 (02:13:14):
What is the cost money?

Speaker 7 (02:13:16):
Right?

Speaker 6 (02:13:17):
It cost money?

Speaker 12 (02:13:18):
And the question is are you there for a year?
Are you there for six months?

Speaker 6 (02:13:22):
And when the troops pull out?

Speaker 12 (02:13:25):
What happened?

Speaker 6 (02:13:25):
I would call this conditions based.

Speaker 13 (02:13:27):
I would say it's a situation where we're here to
support law enforcement. Uh and the more we can free
them up to do their job, the more effective they
can be, the more we can work it. I mean,
this isn't my realm, but the justice system to make
sure people who are arrested are actually locked up. That's
why the president's talking about cash list, bear bail, and
sanctuary cities. If you're illegal here in DC, that's going
to be a problem. So all of these things that

(02:13:48):
apply to law and order are are front and center
for us. And I don't know, weeks, months, what will
it take. That's the President's call, but we're going to
be there for him to execute as swiftly as possible.

Speaker 9 (02:13:58):
The conditions based.

Speaker 8 (02:14:00):
It's real, like Warren Rock vibes.

Speaker 2 (02:14:02):
Yeah, a lot of those these days. Yeah, a lot
of mission accomplished coming out of the Trump administration too,
because they've learned that, like there's no consequence in just
saying like, yeah, we close the border and we won
the borders won You know, it's done. No one's going
to get to their base with a counter opinion that matters.

Speaker 9 (02:14:23):
As bad as things are in DC right now, this
is just the start of what they want to do.
Trump seeks to make a quote a quod example of DC,
but soon wants to go further and attempt this in
other cities, first naming places like Chicago and Los Angeles,
and then later New York, Baltimore and Oakland.

Speaker 7 (02:14:43):
We have other cities that are very bad. New York
has a problem, and then you have, of course Baltimore
and Oakland. We don't even mentioned that anymore. There's so
they're so far gone. We're not gonna let it happen.
We're not gonna lose our cities over this, and this
will go further. We're starting very strongly with DC and

(02:15:03):
we're going to clean it up real quick, pretty quickly.
As they say.

Speaker 9 (02:15:07):
We're not going to lose our cities over this, that
gets into like the core part of their framing. This,
this idea that homeless people and criminals cough cough, black
people are making us lose, like lose our cities. They're
so far gone and this is necessary for such reasons.
And like you can look at that pretty clearly. And
he's naming like Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, New York like it's

(02:15:31):
it's it's not it's not very masked here. Yeah, I
talked with DC resident bridget Todd this morning. We should
have an episode with her perspective coming out early next week,
I think Sunday night.

Speaker 2 (02:15:45):
I wrote an episode early this year laying out, you know,
some of my predictions for the year, and this along
with weird terrorism, we're two of like my big ones. Right,
that that DC, in particular, he would be attempting to
fill with soldiers and probably invoke the Insurrection Act.

Speaker 9 (02:16:03):
No.

Speaker 2 (02:16:03):
One thing that I have been surprised on is that
they really do seem kind of hesitant to go full
in on the Insurrection Act. And obviously I didn't expect
LA to get troops deployed in it before DC, but
just based on what they were saying, like after the election,
kind of as he was preparing to take office, it

(02:16:23):
was very clear that they were looking at DC as
a focus, in part because they had, you know, during
his last term as well. Right, this is not entirely unprecedented,
but his desire to specifically not just take away any
sort of autonomy that the city has and put it
under direct federal control, but to see troops in the
streets and federal agents in the streets is not surprising.

(02:16:45):
It's something that like, it's not even should be I
honestly shouldn't even call it a prediction. It's just something
he's been repeatedly saying he's going to do. So the
fact that it's happening now, you know, the only thing
that's surprising to me is that it happened in la
first right, and that they really do seem to have
and who knows, you know, this could change by the
time the episode airs, but they do seem to have
something of a I don't know if a block is

(02:17:06):
the right way to phrase it, but they don't seem
yet willing to go for the Insurrection Act. That still
seems to be a bridge too far for some reason.
I'm not one hundred percent sure why.

Speaker 8 (02:17:15):
I think I think they're worried about like massive backlash
to it, like they're really unpopular.

Speaker 2 (02:17:21):
And right, I mean, they also just don't need to Yeah,
that's that's a fair point.

Speaker 9 (02:17:25):
Gar they have this like Section seven forty to call on,
and if Trump's going to try to get Congress to
pass a new crime bill that can allow them to
do this kind of stuff without having to use the
Insurrection Act. So I think it's more of like a
matter of necessity, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:17:38):
Just maybe just a risk they don't think they need
to take.

Speaker 9 (02:17:41):
Yeah, and like who knows what type of weird shit
they would try to push into a crime bill, including
like exceptions for almost any city to have their police
force be fetualized.

Speaker 8 (02:17:50):
I think the interesting part of this to me is
also so that like it feels like a lot of
what their politics is is like the spectacle of making
it look like there's power there versus like actually doing
the thing, because like you can't actually hold DC with
eight hundred National guardsmen, and like you know, if you
look at what happened in LA, they kind of like

(02:18:10):
declared victory, but then the actual thing they came there
to do, which was like do this like unpresented mass
deportation with they did some of it, and then they
got right out of the city. And so I think,
I don't know, I think I think there's a kind
of apocalyptic framing of this where it's like, Okay, well
it's over, they can just do this. But also it
has not been going well for them, and like was

(02:18:34):
it from DC the video of the guy of the
guy just like throwing a sandwich at the National Guard
throwing a subway sandwich. Yes, yeah, right, like actual regular
people really don't like them. And I think I think
we're just going to see escalating resistance as more than
like fucking eighty guys get deployed there. And I don't know,
it's unclear to me whether they can actually just like
maintain this or if they're just gonna say, like we

(02:18:56):
did it Joe in like thirty days and pull out right.

Speaker 9 (02:19:01):
That's kind of what some of the rhetoric looks like,
is that they're going to try to arrest as many
homeless people as they can, put them in jails, lock
them up into hospitals, like the executive order that we
mentioned a few weeks ago, Yeah, and like scare teenagers,
and that's most of what they want out of this,
and they're going to make a big show of it,
and then they'll yeah, declare that the city is now safe,

(02:19:23):
and then they'll use the legitimate crime stats showing crime
falling and be like, look, we proved it. So that
I think that is probably what it will what it
will turn out to be. But if they try to
push forward to a new crime bill like Trump is mentioning,
or call it a national emergency to help strengthen his
own powers. I think that's indications that this could have
some longer lasting results. Let's go on and ad break

(02:19:48):
and return to talk terrif I suppose.

Speaker 15 (02:19:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that and we're back.

Speaker 2 (02:20:08):
And obviously the big tariff news this week, as we'll
get to, well, one of the pieces of big tariff
news is that Trump has ordered another extension of the
kind of delay before enacting tariffs against China. You might
say Trump looked at his tariffs against China and decided
tariff he no like it.

Speaker 16 (02:20:29):
Sorry live jazz right, jazz Bob, Sorry lot jazzy jazz bo.

Speaker 2 (02:20:46):
Okay, that was min true talk tariffs, honestly.

Speaker 8 (02:20:49):
Okay, So this is kind of a light tariff news week.
There isn't that much also because if you want to
hear me talking about tarriffs for like forty five fucking minutes,
go listen to the episode on when.

Speaker 2 (02:21:00):
You just did a tariff episode. I just really wanted
to lead into the tariff thing that way.

Speaker 8 (02:21:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:21:05):
No, there is actually a very important piece of tariff
news today. Arizona iced Tea is considering raising prices for
the first time in over thirty years due to Trump's
fifty percent aluminum tariffs.

Speaker 2 (02:21:18):
All right, everyone, get off the call right now. It
is time to riot, find it building, burn it down. No,
this is this is not a drill.

Speaker 9 (02:21:28):
Not acceptable. Arizona iced tea has been the shining beacon
resisting inflation for decades. The proof proof that inflation is
fake is on every Arizona iced tea can. And if
Trump's gonna take it away from us, burn the whole

(02:21:48):
system down.

Speaker 2 (02:21:49):
Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 9 (02:21:50):
I want CEO handing out cans to throw at your
at your local government of choice to defend the ninety
nine cent can. It's one of the most important aspects
of American culture.

Speaker 2 (02:22:07):
It's the only thing left of the American dream. Yes,
it's the one last piece of the American dream. Is
a ninety nine cent can of Arizona iced tea. That's
all we have left.

Speaker 9 (02:22:17):
Fifty percent aluminium tariffs will not take this away from
US aluminium.

Speaker 2 (02:22:22):
Yeah no, just just move past it. May forget it.
It's it's Canadian.

Speaker 8 (02:22:27):
Where are you going on? Okay? This is actually a
good way to pivot into the just complete mess at
the buer of labor statistics. So one of the things
that Trump has been really harping on is so the
buer of labor Satistics published a jobs report and it
was bad. And Trump has been absolutely furious about this
ever since. And we will actually come back to I

(02:22:49):
think we will literally come back to the Arizona Cans
after this, thank God. But coma however, good lord, the
people they are trying to put an office right now.
I so long ago, in the galaxy far far away,
I made an argument that the Trump regime is built
on peer stupidity, that there is no plan at all.
There is only you know, a raviting mall of the

(02:23:11):
oblivion of reason that obliterates all attempts to comprehend it
and leaves only the words, yes, they really are that stupid.
And this argument was about a guy named Stephan Miron,
who was Trump's share of the Council of Economic Advisors,
and his plan to like make other countries pay taxes
on holding US bonds, a thing that is just unequivocally
good for the United States. And you know this is

(02:23:34):
a plan. You can go back and listen to that
episode from a few months ago. This is a plan
so monumentally stupid that the only way I can think
of describing it was like yelling at the moon to
stop the tides. Anyways, Trump is trying to get that
guy appointed to be one of the board members of
the of the Federal Reserve. And the staggering thing about
that isn't just that he's doing this. It's not like

(02:23:56):
this is not the guy who's in the news right
now for being unbelievably stupid and getting appointed to an
extremely important structural agency of the American economy. Because they
are trying to appoint senior economists at the Heritage Foundation
E J and Tony as the head of the Bureau
of Labor Statistics after they fired the last head for

(02:24:17):
like releasing the job support Right, this guy, Okay, I
make fun of economists for being dumb as shit all
the time. He might legitimately be the stupidest economist I
have ever seen. Just on blue Sky, like the day
this was announced, right, I saw someone dunking on him
for drawing a chart where he doesn't seem to understand

(02:24:38):
that people retire and that when they retire they're not
in the labor force anymore. Where he was doing this
trend line that was based on the assumption that like
people wouldn't retire. There are so many just incredibly basic
economics since he doesn't understand. There's a post that I saw.
This is the first one. That was the second one
that I saw, the first one that I saw, And
it's really funny because this is like in the New

(02:24:59):
York Times now, but I just like saw this on
Blue Sky. Was this post by this economist's name Joey Paulitano,
who said, quote an economist's so dumb. I had to
explain to him how the price index works. Will now
lead the BLS.

Speaker 6 (02:25:12):
Kill me good.

Speaker 8 (02:25:14):
So he was doing his thing where he was like
posting the price indexs and being like, prices aren't going up.
But the thing about the import price index is that
it calculates price is pre tariffs. Okay, so of course
they wouldn't go up because they're not calculating the tariffs.
And he was posting this as like, no, see, the
terrorists don't do inflation. H he is he's being chosen

(02:25:35):
for this position because he is just like a rigid
ideologue of the Trump administration, right, but he's also he's
so fucking stupid that things are happening. I have never
seen with right wing economisy before where other right wing
economists are going like, this guy can't be allowed to
take office. He's going to fuck everything up because he's
too dumb. Like I am watching economists at the Manhattan Institute,

(02:25:57):
which is an organization that was literally found in by
Reagan's director of the CIA, William Casey, right like that.
The Mahattan Institute is a right wing institute, right like again,
this is this is this is an organization founded by
Ronald fucking Reagan's CIA director. And I am watching those
people go, this guy is too stupid to be put

(02:26:19):
in office. Please don't put him there. This is unprecedented.
I've never seen right wing economists break rank on the
sort of like affirmative action program they all have for
like really really underachieving right wing shithead economists. It's astonishing
and so and the reason he's being brought in, and
this is also the reason he was like the chief

(02:26:39):
economist of the Herrer's Foundation, is that he has been
calling for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
and also thinks that again like like Trump does it,
they've been like cooking the books to make democrats look
good and Republicans look bad. And so if he gets
appointed and this is also like goes to the Senate,
but him being appointed here effectively signals the end of

(02:27:01):
independent economic data from the federal governments, hooray, which is
a just catastrophic, Like every single part of the governments,
every policy organization, every like every every single element, every corporation,
every element of the entire US economic system relies on
this data being nonpartisan and accurate. And it's obviously like, yeah,

(02:27:23):
all like all data is political, but like it being
like reasonably accurate is like the defining thing about the
US economy is that this data is there and functions
and this is what everyone based their decisions off of.
And he very much looks like he wants to just
end that. And I want to close by noting that're
like one of you know, at the very end of
the Soviet Union, right, one of the things that was

(02:27:45):
taken as like the giant signal that things were going
to shit there was that like their leadership by like
the like the mid late eighties was deploying satellites specifically
so they could use satellite imagery to check the output
of their own factories because there their control of the
economic statistics had become so like just annihilated right by
just like mass falsification, their loss of control over the

(02:28:08):
standards that their measuring regime was seen as like, this
is the regime falling apart. And we are like eight
months out from Google doing that shit, right, Like, we
are not very far out from companies doing a thing
you have to do with like remote provinces in China
where the fault were, Like there's data falsification of Like okay,
we're like using satellite data to like measure freight loads
and like measure electrical consumption and like figuring out what

(02:28:32):
factories are open at night to figure out how much
that's You know that that is something that is very
much in our future. I'm only kind of joking about
the satellite shit. I think we probably will live to
see that, assuming this thing goes through, assuming they remember
how to launch satellites. Well it won't. It won't be them,
It'll be it'll be like corporations doing this. Oh sure, sure, yeah,

(02:28:54):
like you using the row satellite grads and.

Speaker 9 (02:28:55):
I mean I can, I can, I can see the
uh yeah, the Blue Origin satellites launching. To keep track
on to keep track of Amazon's efficiency.

Speaker 8 (02:29:04):
Yea yeah, oh good lord. Yeah. I want to close
on like one final brief note, which I've said this before,
but I want to say it again. This is the
exact thing that but like one is. One of the
big things that brought down the military keatorship in Brazil
was that they were lying about inflation data. You know,
the thing about inflation is that you can just see
the price of the Arizona can go up.

Speaker 2 (02:29:26):
Just like you can see Huey Dewey and who we
expand and our favorite inflation fetish pornography. They don't give
me Hazard pay for this. They really should Hazard. I
feel like this is a bonus.

Speaker 8 (02:29:41):
Oh I guess this is also mentioned. Part of the
reason they're trying to put this like absolute clown on
the board of the Federal Reserve is that they want
to replace the chairman of the Federal Reserve so that
Trump can just directly set interest rates. That's a looming
crisis that is coming.

Speaker 9 (02:29:57):
Trump is threatening to sue the head of the Federal
Reserve right now. Oh yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, he
is yep.

Speaker 2 (02:30:03):
He sharees, which is a fast It's gonna be amazing precedent.
I am excited.

Speaker 8 (02:30:08):
Oh, it's it's astonishing. I don't know. It's been very
funny because a lot of the kind of internal publications
from like the banks about this have been like, ah,
if you're a Boostero and Powell, it's not that big
of a deal. Like the banks can like autonomously said
interest race technically without the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
And it's like, Okay, I don't think you understand how

(02:30:31):
bad this is going to get. So we're still we're
still in cope. I don't know what we'll report to
you back on the show when all of that enormous
clusterfug blows up.

Speaker 9 (02:30:42):
Yay, before we go and break again, I'd like to
have an update for one of the stories we talked
about last week, the Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois and
then later to California to brick orm to stop or
delay a redistricting vote in Texas. And now Texas Democrats
are to come back home, possibly as soon as this weekend. Yes,

(02:31:03):
after Governor Greg Abbott ended the special session to redraw
the congressional map, which would add five new Republican House
seats with some Democrats expected to return very soon. Nothing
stops Abbot from just calling another special session once the
Democrats return. In fact, he has said that that's exactly
what he's gonna do.

Speaker 2 (02:31:23):
He's definitely going to do that, Yes, and add in.

Speaker 9 (02:31:27):
New legislation to convince some of them to stay. So
we will see that they can just leave the state
again if they want to. H unclear, if unclear if
they will. I mean, other states are threatening retaliatory redistricting,
specifically the governors of New York and California. This is
going to be a really annoying mess with different with

(02:31:48):
different states all redrawing their maps just to create some
kind of congressional balance. Of Florida also threatening to do
the same. So we will we will see how this
develops over time. But yeah, Texas Dems may be home
sooner than expected.

Speaker 8 (02:32:03):
It's so cool that on the one hand you have
the Republicans creating the image of tyranny and then expanding
their actual power, and then you have the Democrats doing
the image of resistance and then giving in.

Speaker 9 (02:32:13):
I mean, they're not really giving in yet. Yeah, we'll see,
we'll see, but they are going home because this session
is ended. Yeah, What still remains to be seen is
if they will flee the state a second time, like
a week later.

Speaker 8 (02:32:26):
Yeah, which who knows. I have little faith in that,
but we'll see.

Speaker 9 (02:32:30):
Yeah, I'm not sure at this point. Yeah, but I
thought we should include that small update there, and now
we should include a secondary ad break. Okay, we are back.

(02:32:52):
In other news. Last week, on Friday, a mass shooting
was targeted against the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The
thirty year old shooter broke into his father's safe to retree.
Five firearms were then used in the attack. The shooting
started at a CBS across from the CDC main entrance.

(02:33:13):
Shooter then fired upon six buildings on the CDC campus,
with the total of five hundred rounds being fired during
the incident, with two hundred shots hitting CDC buildings. One
Decab County Police officer was killed. The shooter later shot
and killed himself. Police were contacted several weeks before the
shooting by unknown individuals due to quote recently verbalized thoughts

(02:33:39):
of suicide. According to the GBI director Chris Hosey, this
was about the soon to become shooter. Police found written
documents from the shooter expressing distrust in the COVID nineteen vaccine.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Josey said the shooter quote
wanted to make the PUBLICBLIC aware of his discontent with

(02:34:02):
and distrust of the vaccine unquote, with sources who knew
him telling ABC News he blamed the vaccine for making
him sick and depressed. The CDC director sent a letter
to its ten thousand employees earlier this week saying, quote
the dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led
to deadly consequences unquote. The Monday after the shooting, RFK

(02:34:26):
Junior oh No, who recently defunded mRNA Vaccines, visited the
CDC campus to express condolences for the family of the
officer killed, as well as to quote offers support to
all of the CDC employees who are a part of
a shining star health agency around the world to quote
from an interview he gave with SCRIPTS News. When Kennedy

(02:34:48):
was asked what would be done to stop the spread
of vaccine misinformation to prevent future incidents like this shooting,
Kennedy said, quote people can ask questions without being penalized
and quote we don't know enough about what the motive
was of this individual unquote hate that. That's all pretty
pretty disgusting seeing narratives that RFK Junior has promoted for

(02:35:12):
his own profit for years yep being used to justify
as shooting targeting the CDC headquarters.

Speaker 2 (02:35:18):
Yeah, and it's you know, it's kind of unclear exactly
what because it seems like he was shooting at the buildings.
He fired at least two hundred rounds, roughly two hundred
rounds into the buildings, about five hundred rounds fighter total.
But I've seen people say that means he was like
shot five hundred He did not a lot of those
rounds are the police. No, that's the toast of them

(02:35:39):
or the police. You know, two or three hundred rounds
would not at all be odd for how many police
would fire in response to a guy like this who
is just bag dumping, you know, into a building. It's
unclear to me did he see people through the windows
and was he trying to hit them or was he
just shooting at the buildings to make a statement. The
fact that he did shoot and kill a police PAE officer,

(02:36:00):
presumably with intent, makes it more likely that maybe he
was trying to hit people inside the building. I don't
know how much it's worth splitting hairs here, but I
am like it is kind of unclear to me. Was
his goal more to make a statement or was he
hoping to like rack up a body count of CDC
employees and this was just as close as he could get.
I don't think we really know. Maybe we probably never will.

Speaker 9 (02:36:23):
It seems he had trouble accessing or getting close to
some buildings on the CDC campus. This was mostly done
from the CVS, which he at a certain point, according
to police reports, he could not get out of. He
was locked inside the CVS what and tried to exit
by shooting like the windows and doors, and was unable

(02:36:44):
to and then killed himself inside.

Speaker 8 (02:36:46):
Huh jeez.

Speaker 9 (02:36:48):
So it is a kind of odd situation. We don't
have a clear idea yet because this just happened a
few days ago. We don't have a clear idea yet
of like the exact on the ground situation, just these
kind of general general facts about which buildings were hit
and how many shots were fired. And then the anti
VAXX opinions and writing found allegedly in his home.

Speaker 2 (02:37:11):
Yeah, so We'll say more will come out about this
in time, but I mean the basics are pretty clear,
which is that this is the natural extension of decades
of anti vaccine rhetoric and specifically the last several years
of OURFK relentlessly attacking the CDC.

Speaker 9 (02:37:29):
Now the piece of news this week that I should mention,
though frankly, we don't have much to stay on this
because it's unclear this will actually turn into anything real
or not. But later this fall, the Supreme Court will
consider whether to take a case that could overturn the
national ruling on gay marriage. This specific case that they
would be considering has not done very well in all

(02:37:50):
lower federal courts, which is why it's been appealed to
this level. The legal justifications used for the First Amendment
have not made much progress in federal appeals courts so far.
If the case does get chosen, it would be primarily
for like ideological reasons based on specific new Supreme Court justices.
But it is still unclear if this will get accepted,

(02:38:13):
and I'm thinking not super likely. I don't think this
is something that we need to have tons of panic
about at the moment.

Speaker 8 (02:38:22):
So something that I mean, I don't know if panic's
the right word, but did actually happen and is very bad?

Speaker 13 (02:38:28):
Is that?

Speaker 8 (02:38:29):
So Trump issued in the Executive Order a while back
about like getting rid of collective bargaining rights for a
bunch of different kinds of government employees, like nominally under
the auspices of national security. There'd been a whole bunch
of court cases kind of winding the way through the courts,
but last week, the VA became the first government agency
to actually do it. They just straight up got rid
of the union contracts for three hundred and seventy seven

(02:38:52):
thousand workers. Like three hundred and seventy seven thousand workers
is an astonishing number of workers to just straight up
the union doesn't exist the next day, Yeah right, they
just their contract sharp being recognized. This in and of
itself is really stunning, and also the lack of response
by the union movement, especially considering the number of people involved.
It's just been like strongly worded statements and encouragements for

(02:39:15):
the Democrats to pass a bill through Congress to recognize
collective bargaining rights, which speaks really really ill of the
broader labor movement that like, again, they just took away
the unions of almost four hundred thousand people, and Organized
Labor's collective response was just to kind of shrug. So
that's really fucking bleak. It's probably going to be spreading

(02:39:37):
to more agencies as this plays out. Yeah, it's really
I don't know. And even the language unions of using
it talk about it. They're like, oh, this is union
busting for speaking out against anti worker policies, and it's like, no,
it's union busting because they literally got rid of the
unions of three hundred and seventy seven thousand people. What
are we doing here? I don't know. I'm gonna have

(02:39:57):
more on this as I guess more word from union sources.
There's a staggering lack of information about this and people
are being slow to respond, but I want to mention
it here because it's devastating and hideous and yeah, it's
real fucking bad.

Speaker 9 (02:40:15):
Before we close this episode, James Stout has a special
report on immigration and information about a fundraiser.

Speaker 4 (02:40:23):
James, all right, So immigration report. With the change of
the month, children across the country are returning to schools.
This means that ICE agents are also returning to enforcement
at schools, not just ICE agents as we know, other
federal agents' board patrol ATFDA, etc. Are all taking part
in immigration enforcement now they're no longer restrained by the

(02:40:45):
sensitive Places doctrine, which previously stopped them from doing enforcement
at schools and churches and other places where it's generally
considered not worth it because doing so obviously provides a
massive disincentive for family to take their children to school.
In this instance, in Chula Vista, second largest city in
the County of San Diego, ice detained a parent a

(02:41:07):
block away from a school, leaving two young children in
the car. Like most schools in the area, Tula Vista
Elementary School District will not allow ice on campus without
a warrant unless there's an active emergency. Just to explain
that active emergency thing a bit I guess, for instance,
in Uvalde, because all the local cops were cowards and
stood outside, it was actually a border patrol team or

(02:41:28):
attacked specifically who killed the shooter there, So that would
be an example of when immigration agents might enter a
campus during an active emergency. In Los Angeles, a fifteen
year old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed,
and detained by federal agents at gunpoint. He was accompanying
a relative who was reaistering at the school, and he
was in the car with his grandmother. The agents, who

(02:41:49):
appeared to be bored patrol from videos i've seen, release
the boy after intervention by school staff and left live
ammunition on the sidewalk. For some reason, these look like
five five six rounds from the pictures I've seen, I'm
guessing it's just terrible weapons handling procedures here. It appears
that this boy was not the person they were looking for,
but nonetheless they've obviously horrifically traumatized this young man for

(02:42:14):
no good reason. In response, LA Unified School District is
ramping up safety patrols. These include volunteers, teachers, and school cops. Apparently, obviously,
school cops cannot directly prevent immigration enforcement officers from doing
immigration enforcement, but they can notify people of their presence,
and they're trying to have safe zones around schools so

(02:42:37):
that people can either safety walk to school or safety
drop their kids off. They're also changing their bus programs.
Buses are part of school district's property right, so just
as ice could not enter a school without a warrant,
nor could they enter that bus without a warrant, and
it would be within the training of the bus driver
to deny them access if they did not have a warrant.

(02:42:58):
So the bus would potentially be a much safer way
for people to get to school that are having their
parents drive them. And so what la USD is doing
is expanding their bus programs in LA. I've seen a
lot of information on this in the resource guide that
was published by the LA Office of Immigration Affairs.

Speaker 6 (02:43:14):
So now is a good time to remind everyone that
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria defunded the San Diego.

Speaker 4 (02:43:21):
Office of Immigrant Affairs because he refuses to stop giving
the Cobs a fire hose of our money.

Speaker 6 (02:43:28):
This has left migrants in one of America's largest border
cities even more vulnerable.

Speaker 4 (02:43:35):
We're also doing a fundraiser this week. We're going to
fund raised for Bouquet again. I'm going to go see
her later this week. I know she has hearings coming up. Bouquette,
for those who do not remember, is an Alevy Kurdish woman.
Because of her ethnicity and religion, she wasn't safe in
Turkey and she came to the USA to ask for refuge.

(02:43:56):
She's been in San Diego for six months right now,
and she is trying trying to raise money for her
asylum case. And she can't work because she doesn't have
a work permit, and she has cancer, which is obviously
something which is very difficult for her to manage alongside
the massive stress of immigration enforcement. Right now, she needs
to raise seven thousand dollars to pay her lawyer. I'm

(02:44:19):
looking at the GoFundMe as I record this and it
is at one thousand, nine hundred and forty one dollars.
If you would like to help, you can go to
www dot GoFundMe dot com, slash f slash urgent, hyphen help,
hyphen four, hyphen bouquette, b uk e t s hyphen asylum,

(02:44:43):
hyphen case, or you can just go down as a
show notes and click the link. We really appreciate all
the support you guys have given.

Speaker 9 (02:44:51):
Thank you to James for that.

Speaker 2 (02:44:53):
Well, I guess that's our week. We reported the news.

Speaker 5 (02:44:57):
We reported the news.

Speaker 2 (02:45:04):
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It could happen.

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James Stout

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