May 12, 2025 • 62 mins
This week the guys chat about the week that was.
Join us, wont you?
Links:
- https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/magazine/seasteading-libertarian-ocean-living.html
- https://www.seasteading.org/#about
- https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-official-behind-the-end-of-daca-explains-himself
- https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/posse-comitatus-revisited-use-military-civil-law-enforcement
- https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-executive-order-police-martial-law/
- https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/319/fully-fund-the-cops-program/
- https://www.dw.com/en/texas-town-home-to-spacex-renamed-starbase/a-72431158
- https://x.com/StarbaseTX
- https://time.com/7282440/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-city-texas-location-population
- https://fpif.org/crypto-bros-are-trying-to-bankrupt-honduras-for-scuttling-their-private-cities/
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/24/seasteading-a-vanity-project-for-the-rich-or-the-future-of-humanity
- https://www.wired.com/story/section-702-reauthorization-expansion/
Ear Worm:
- https://open.spotify.com/track/7MmhQMfjXPF2AnqrmbqvVB?si=e7a51JRcRMq03OMCtHIb5w
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
This is At the Extremes. Beloved's welcome back to At the
Extremes, the podcast where we discuss the extremes in our
society and how we got here. As always, we're your host.
I'm Greg. And I'm Surge.
And today we're going to be chatting about the week that
(00:28):
was. Before we get into that though,
Sergio, silver lining. You know, I I've been struggling
to kind of think of a silver lining because I've been so
fucking pissed that the Arsenal have lost three games.
Yeah, that's fair. And I have just been, you've
really taught me a lot about rage and I've just had all this
(00:49):
rage in my heart and just bleak outlooks in life.
No, I'm just kidding. That was a bummer, but it was,
it really sucked. But you know, I the silver
lining and all of it was it's been really fun cheering for the
the Arsenal and, and being therefor the team when they win and
(01:09):
lose and getting to have those experience and getting excited.
Wasn't crazy about the places that we went, but it was fine.
It was being able to be there, hang out with you.
What? What was wrong with the places
that we went? Well, the first place that we
went, you know what? I'm going to throw their name
out. Das Beer Hall.
They allow children in there. And so we got scolded for saying
(01:31):
fuck when PSG scored and we. And who brings our kid to a bar?
Yeah, first of all, like 3:00. Yeah, when A and a 3:00 on like
a Tuesday afternoon. Get the fuck out of here, yeah?
No, that was that was unacceptable.
And then the other place just itwasn't Mcavoy's, which I big up
some Mcavoy's. Mcavoy's a good place, but it's
(01:51):
not really a soccer bar. And so people were were kind of
trashing soccer and. I was ready to kill somebody.
I mean, but you're always kind of.
On edge yeah, I'm I'm riding on tilt all the.
Time, but anyways that that was,you know, just having the
experience of even though it didn't go our way, you know,
that's that's life and you just have to deal with it and there's
(02:15):
the rest of the season and hopefully Arsenal can can come
back with the the last three or four games that they have and
got to win out. Got to win out.
We're not we're not secure in Europe yet.
So we got to win out. Yeah, well, that's that's good.
You know, it's your first like proper season going through the
whole Champions League thing and, you know, living with
(02:36):
disappointment, you get used to it.
So I. Mean we shared this over Texas
that you know, I've as a lifelong Seattle fan when the
Seattle Seahawks gave up that that interception that I don't
know if you'll ever experience something that brutal.
(02:56):
I mean in. Real time where you where you
could have won the game. I mean like personally if you
would have. Fucking ran the ball, but I
digress. I think in rugby I've had that,
but yeah, that was crushing too.Anyway, doesn't matter.
Yeah, doesn't matter. It it does, but it's all right.
I'm trying my hardest to not gettoo angry too early in the
(03:18):
podcast. So so.
Had a lot to cover. We got a lot to we got a lot of
ground and a lot of rage. That's coming.
Well, that's good, man. I'm glad.
I'm glad that you enjoyed that the Arsenal, you got the swag
for it. You've got the you've got the
all the merch for it. I think my silver lining I got
to start with the Blucifer T-shirt.
If you paying attention to our at the extremes blue sky you saw
(03:42):
Sergio got me a a lovely little T-shirt.
It's got Blucifer destroying theentire city of of Denver.
It is a fantastic shirt. So big ups to you, Sergio for an
excellent gift. It's such a good shirt and
Blucifer. All hail Blucifer.
All hail Lucifer. What a what a stalwart of the
(04:04):
community really like he's a stand up, stand up individual.
Lucifer, thank you. I guess the other one that I
want to go with like 2 parter, 2parter.
You know me. I can't I can't keep it brief.
The second Part 2 part I just finished a book by Barbara
Walter. She is a she was ACIA analyst
(04:29):
and she studied specifically howCivil war start and I read her
book and it it's incredibly enlightening her.
Her book is basically like how do Civil war start?
It's a really good read, highly recommended.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
But it was disappointing and notdisappointing, but definitely
(04:50):
like depressing material 'cause you realize, oh boy, oh boy.
Oh boy. We are perilously close.
But with that done and dusted, let's take a real quick break.
And when we come back, we're going to talk about douche
canoes and company towns. Yeah, so we're back.
(05:21):
The douche Canoe of the Week is a guy by the name of Gene
Hamilton. You've never heard his name
before, and most people haven't.Gene is a gigantic douche canoe
and a human hemorrhoid. He, along with Stephen Miller,
are responsible for the creationof a conservative legal public
interest group called America First Legal.
(05:43):
Let me, let me ask you really quick, go for it, Gene.
That's, that's not a a name that's used very often.
Like the only gene that I've known is Gene Hackman.
Yeah, the only hack, the only gene everyone knows is Hackman.
Yeah. Which?
Yeah, Gene. Yeah, Yeah, you're right.
Are there any other famous genes?
I don't know Billie Jean, but there's a Billie in front of it,
(06:04):
so yeah, that's Levi. No, no, Gene.
Yeah. So Gene.
Famous genes. And what that's a crazy story.
Gene hacked the way he died, where he his wife contracted
hantavirus and then died and he had dementia and or Alzheimer's
and didn't have anybody care forhim for seven days and then he
(06:25):
died. It's wild.
That is, that's. A sad way to go.
So yeah, along with Stephen Miller, this gene, Gene, this
Gene that we're talking about today, Gene, where we at Gene
Hamilton. Sorry.
Along with Stephen Miller, Gene is responsible for the creation
of a conservative legal public interest group called America
First Legal. According to their website.
(06:48):
America First Legal is the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.
We are committed to an unwavering defense of the truth
of true equality under the law, national borders and
sovereignty, freedom of speech and religion, classical views
and virtues, the sanctity of life and the centrality of
family, and our timeless legal and constitutional heritage.
(07:10):
Which just seems like blah blah blah blah blah.
Yeah, these are all like, you know, Make America Great Again,
like talking points, right? So currently, if you go to their
website, there's a Chiron that runs across the top of the web
page that calls out directly sanctuary cities and the
officials who are in charge of those, a policy in those States
and cities and how to get in touch with them and their office
(07:32):
locations. So it is really, really kind of
scary, especially given like what's happened in the last 48
hours with people getting lockedup.
If you were a mayor in New Jersey and you're, you know,
protesting at ICE detention center, all of a sudden, you
know, whatever. The writers for AFL outline and
(07:53):
outline an acronym you see all over their website.
It's called SHIELD or stop helping illegals enter and
linger without deportation. If you click on Maryland, for
instance, like I said, that gives you Brandon Scott's
information. It gives you his address, it
gives you his direct phone number, like to his office.
I imagine that that's still having to go to like a
(08:14):
secretary, but like they are very targeted in what they're
doing. This is very, very clinical,
very surgical. It won't surprise you to find
out that Gene thinks initiativeslike Diversity, Equity,
Inclusion are Marxist, given thegiven the the The Shield acronym
being what it is here. There's been a lot of talk in
(08:37):
the media about equity and DEI, but what does it really mean?
What are these concepts that you're hearing in the workplace
and it's school and on the news?And let me tell you, these
concepts at their root are Marxism, what we're making
decisions about as a society. It looks like if Jude Law had a
(09:03):
meth problem and had been on a Bender for five days.
Yeah, yeah, I know. He's a he looks like.
A piece of shit. Yeah, he looks like a bloated
Jew law. Yeah.
Those principles are picking winners and losers based on
things that they can't control, their color of their skin, their
(09:24):
sex. The fact of the matter is that
this country was founded on the idea that everyone gets treated
equally, that all men are created equal by their creator.
I mean, obviously there's serious issues to take there
with that statement, but yeah, what are your thoughts from that
(09:44):
clip on Jean other than he lookslike a blooded Jude Law?
That he fucking sucks. And you know, I, I was just
thinking on the way up here of just the mindset that you have
to have to be able to not recognize that there are these
huge inequality, inequalities that are going on in, in our
(10:08):
society and the type of type of person you have to be to be able
to spout the stuff out and, and actually believe it.
And I just, I've come to the hard realization the last like
month and a half how racist people really are.
Like I've lived in kind of this fantasy camp that this is just,
it's a small population of people that live in Appalachia
(10:29):
that just haven't had the exposure.
But we have the federal society,we have Harvard, Yale educated
lawyers that are against DI stuff and making this, this a
thing. And to me that's just it's mind
blowing. It's mind blowing that this is
(10:50):
this is something that we have to have to say.
Like this is, there is inequality.
It's like, what are you talking about?
And to me, it's just like, it's common sense stuff.
And then these are people that are fucking smarter than I am
that are believing, are supposedto be that believe this stuff.
And I'm just, I, I don't know, I, I guess it's just me having
(11:13):
to come to, you know, radical acceptance, accepting that
there's a lot of people that believe this stuff and it's just
not, I mean, some of it might befor show, but just that there's
a lot of people that are just. Whether for show or for real,
like you're saying it and you'regetting people to jump on board
with you and you recognize that there's something out there that
(11:35):
you can take advantage of or highlight.
And if you were a hateful person, it it comes off
authentically. And if you're not, but you're
just a grifter, unfortunately itcomes off authentically.
It's how it feels at least, right?
Oh, and just what you have to doto be able to sell yourself.
Yeah, almost like selling your soul to the devil to to get to
(11:59):
that point. If you don't believe that, yeah,
that in in, you know, this anti DEI stuff.
So I I don't know, it's just to me, it's just it, it's a reality
check every day. I'm just like, what is this
fucking real life? Yeah, And, and it is.
And there's fucking Count Dracula's Stephen Adolph Miller
(12:19):
that's the architect of all thisshit and which I still can't
decide whether if he is just in leather pinching his nipples and
and doing crazy stuff or if he'strolling.
I just. I don't know man.
What's the difference then? You know, like when you're at
that place, like there is no difference whether you're
(12:41):
trolling or you're being for real.
Like if you can't tell, then you're that's who you are.
That's the greatest hoax that's,you know, that's ever happened.
But specifically though, to yourpoint, Gene is a policy maker
and an attorney and you're probably going to know him
better for the complete tall sack of shit that he is.
He was the attorney responsible for overturning DACA.
(13:04):
Here Trump is, and what? What is DACA?
So DACA and and again, I, you know, I was watching.
Deferred action for childhood arrivals.
Yeah, And you know, there are quite a few resources I was
looking at and I still came out kind of confused.
I was like, I don't really thinkI know exactly what the process
is for DACA and. So I think basically like the
(13:26):
real, because I, I haven't read the, the technical legal jargon
of it, but it's basically unaccompanied minors that have
come across the border that didn't have, you know, didn't
come across with a parent or guardian with them that had
people on in the United States that they could go to as like
sponsors. Like a like an aunt who lived
(13:47):
in. Uncle, family friend or.
Whatever. Got it, got it.
OK, well in 2017, Donald Trump had this to say on the decision
to end DACA. Thank you.
Well, I have a great heart for the folks we're talking about, a
great love for them. Those people.
(14:09):
People think in terms of children, but they're really
young adults. I have a love for these people
and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it
properly. And I can tell you in speaking
to members of Congress, they want to be able to do something
and do it right. And really we have no choice.
We have to be able to do something.
And I think it's going to work out very well.
(14:30):
And long term, it's going to be the right solution.
So we'll put them in cages, separate them from their
families, and that will be cool.Yeah, yeah.
Especially given where we are today, That clip is laughable.
It's offensive. It is it it's it flies in
(14:55):
clearly in the face of what he actually believes.
And here he is in a 2024 interview here recently in
December, talking about DACA. What about Dreamers, Sir?
Dreamers who were brought to this country illegally as
children, you said once back in 2017, they quote, shouldn't be
very worried about being deported.
Should they be worried now? The Dreamers are going to come
(15:18):
later and we have to do something about the dreamers
because these are people. That are coming.
From here at a very young age, and many of these are
middle-aged people now. They don't even speak the
language of their country. And yes, we're going to do
something about the dream. What?
Are you? Going to do I, I will work with
the Democrats on a plan and if we can come up with a plan, but
the Democrats have made it very,very difficult to do anything.
(15:40):
Republicans are very open to theDreamers.
The Dreamers, we're talking manyyears ago.
They were brought into this country many years ago.
Some of them are no longer youngpeople, and in many cases they
become successful. They have great.
There's a couple of things here That's that's that's that just
reaches out to me and this goes kind of on a on a on a personal
(16:03):
note. But so my mom told me that one
of her really good friends and Co workers didn't even realize
that she was was not an Americancitizen because she was brought
here when she was really, reallyyoung and she got her
citizenship eventually. But so yeah, you have kids that
come over here when they're 1-2 years old that have grown up in
(16:25):
the United. States.
And so, so they're, they're American.
So what, what are you going to do?
Send them back to places that they have no connection to,
sometimes don't speak the language, don't know the
culture. And I guess the other thing that
I think about too is that we hadTPS, which is temporary
protective status, which is alsothat was used for different
(16:50):
issues have happened throughout.So in a lot of Salvadorians came
in the 1980s during the Salvadorian civil war.
A lot of Venezuelans came up, you know, during the repression
that's been going down in their country, a lot of patients have
come up. And so with the program itself,
it's called temporary protected status.
So they can come to the United States, but then there's no path
(17:13):
forward to what they're supposedto do.
So they get stuck in the cycle, this bureaucratic cycle of am I
an American citizen? Like, what's going to happen?
Do I have to apply for this? Am I going to be able, am I
going to be sent back to, you know, my country of origin?
Even though I've been here, I have had children or family
members that are are here now. And and that's also a problem
(17:36):
because you have a lot of peoplehere that are on these temporary
statuses that are not temporary.They're 20-30 years that have
been here 40 years. How?
Long is temporary when you're here for 20.
Years, yeah. And so that's not a Democratic
or Republican thing, but it's coming up with kind of a policy
to be able to address stuff likethat.
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
It's that's that's so scary too,right?
(17:58):
Like, oh, this is this is my status.
I didn't even think about this like.
And I can I can use even a personal account is that we
have, we had a nanny for our daughter.
She is from El Salvador and she's been in the United States
(18:18):
for a really, really long time. She had a son that is here and
he has autism. And so he is an American
citizen. And so she doesn't, you know,
every year that whether she's going to get renewed or not, but
she would not be able, I mean, she would be able to go back to
El Salvador, but her son wouldn't get the same kind of
(18:40):
services that he qualifies for here in the United States and
level of care that he needs. Right, right.
Yeah. And so that's.
Send him back. You got to get rid of these
people. But that's that that goes into
these big complicated nuances that happen when you when you
have policies like this and thenyou have an administration
that's just basically trying to fucking fill a quota and you
(19:03):
scare task tactics to to get people to either self deport or.
You get $1000 if you get a. 1000fucking dollars that is.
That's like. Talk about a waste of taxpayers
money. Or the other thing that we're
talking about is maybe, possiblysending people to Libya.
(19:23):
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
Yeah, that too. That too.
Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. Maybe not in this episode, but
we'll get to that. That that might be a thing or to
Libya or to some of to they're. Talking about sending Mexican
migrants to Libya, even though Mexico is taking back migrants
(19:45):
that America's willing to ship like send back and America's
like we just might send them to Libya.
To to a country that Americans are discouraged from traveling
to due to political uncertainty.So what are we fucking doing
here, folks? A lot.
(20:06):
A lot of really bad things. Jean, our douche canoe also
wrote the policy on family separation.
Again, you brought this up, the infamous kids and cages
situation. Not to forget that Obama did
this too. But yeah, this was.
Something Obama. Obama, baby Obama He also
(20:29):
responsible for revoking temporary protections for people
who are fleeing the South Sudan during the Sudanese civil war.
Should it surprise you then to find out that that civil war was
due to, you know, colonialism and colonizers influence
religion, education, food distribution to the government,
the power, along with the Brits,we helped create those
(20:51):
conditions for that civil war and then.
You know, sectarian violence, Yeah.
Muslims against Christians, Yeah.
When you tell one power group that the other power group isn't
nearly as good as the other power group and they shouldn't
exist like we did in Rwanda or like we did, oh, anywhere that
we've been involved in the Philippines, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, you know, instead of looking for, you know, homes
(21:14):
within a place where they're going to get shot to death or
starved to death, they decided they want to come here.
And Gene is responsible for revoking that temporary
protection status for them. Period.
Didn't end until 1958, by the way, which was two years before
my parents were born. So this isn't, you know, like
the situation in the Sudan is relatively new, is what I mean
(21:34):
to say. He's an incredibly horrible
human being. In the past week or so, he's
added another notch to his belt.Jean is the author of the
section in in in Project 2025 targeting the Department of
Justice. And I've sneaking suspicion he's
also the author of the executiveorder that we're going to be
chatting about here in a second.Again, we talked about this with
JD Vance, but Trump is only as dangerous as the fucking people
(21:58):
behind him. And the EO that we're talking
about now is strengthening and unleashing America's law
enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.
This is one of the only E OS I think Trump actually knows
something about because even back in 2017 he was talking
about ending DACA and DACA protections.
(22:19):
So he actually know, I think he actually knows something about
this one. I.
Don't really think he knows anything about anything.
I know, and that's why I think he's only as dangerous as the
people around him. But the executive order is going
to make it easier for police officers to get legal support
and claims against them from Newsweek.
According to an the executive order, the new legal defense
(22:39):
structure will provide support for law enforcement officers
nationwide who unjustly incur unjustly incur expenses and
liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their
official duties to enforce the law.
That's basically like the, the, that's the, the long and short
of it, right? That's the too long.
Did not read version of this. It directs attorney Pam Bondi to
(23:02):
take all appropriate action. Can you say it right though?
It's Pamela Joe Bondi. She's she's got a Joe in her
name is her. Middle name Joe.
I I think it's Pamela Joe. Like like Josephine, like Joe.
I don't know, but yeah, really. Oh.
Oh, it's a it's a Florida thing.Oh.
Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
OK, Pamela Joe. Jody Bondi.
(23:23):
Pamela Joe. Pamela Joe Bondi, good Lord,
that is southern, isn't it? But it directs her to take all
appropriate actions to ensure that these officers are defended
through government backed indemnity and access to private
sector attorneys offering services at no cost.
So we were talking about this last week, I think about
(23:44):
attorneys who are getting lockedout of federal buildings if
they're not willing to bend the knee to do what?
So you were talking about this like you were saying, I think it
was something like to the effectof like, you know, they're
they're just cow tailing to to the administration, like you're
either going to defend these police officers for us for free
pro bono, or you're not going tobe working in the federal
(24:05):
government. Yeah, because we're going to, we
are going to bar you from being able to have these contracts and
be able to work with, you know, federal government agencies.
Yeah. Other components of the
executive order include directives to increase officer
compensation, expand legal protections, review federal
consent decrees with local police departments, which means
basically like, hey, if the fedswant to come in, you say, hey, I
(24:29):
guess you've got jurisdiction now we no longer have
jurisdiction. So if the federal government
comes in and says we're we're taking over, you kind of mend
the knee. And to increase the use of
national security resources, including military and crime
prevention. So, you know, martial law.
Fuck, I'm. I'm.
(24:50):
Just thinking, what if this guy came to a dinner party?
How I mean, he's hated right now.
So how, how do you construct that?
How does the human mind think ofthis stuff?
And how I, I just, I, I don't, Iguess I'm total liberal pussy or
(25:15):
whatever. But but I also think about it,
just even the economic sense, you have people that are coming
here doing jobs that other people don't want to do.
Like what are you doing? Or even the empathy fact that
there's a lot of people here that are coming to try to get
away from stuff that is going tokill their family or kill
(25:38):
themselves or to be able to evensurvive.
And just the level of no compassion or the thought of
another human being just ties back to this whole racism
thought. Is this like these brown and
black people that are coming or Asian people that are coming?
Yeah. Are, are fucking leeches of the
society. Like we, we, we don't want them
(26:00):
here. If, if, and, and you know, I, I
don't want to make it too, too religious here, as is my want.
But if Jesus showed up to a dinner party at, you know, if if
Jesus signed up to go to the RNC, they'd kick him out
immediately. Immediately.
Because you'd be talking about like, oh, yeah, you should give
(26:21):
to the poor. We shouldn't like billionaires
shouldn't be a thing like. Why wearing those army fatigues
instead of a three piece suit? Right, turn, turn the other
cheek. When someone offends you, you
should just turn the other cheekand you know, find common ground
with people like the things thatChrist preached.
Yeah, they, they fucking turn him away too.
(26:42):
From the conversation. Sorry, not from the
conversation. I read a lot from there.
This is from the Nation. The executive order purports to
unleash high impact local policeforces, protect and defend law
enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or
local officials, and surge resources to officers in need.
Think George Floyd and that whole situation.
(27:04):
You know, the officer Chauvin who was involved in that.
This is specifically this language is to protect officers
who kill people, and that's all it's about.
The aggressive language in the order could be cribbed from any
military police state in the annals of history, and that's
clearly the kind of polity that Trump would like to create and
(27:26):
lead. The order instructs the
Secretary of Defense to put downthe bottle long enough to
determine how military and national security assets,
training, non lethal capabilities and personnel can
be most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.
It also instructs the Departmentof Homeland Security to advance
the objectives of the Order Posse comitatus, which is
(27:47):
something that. Trying out all these fucking big
words. So Posse Comitatus got we're
going to. I'll give the.
Research this shit. Yeah, he's ready to flex right
now. So it's it's ripping.
His shirt off right now. I actually like Hulk Hogan.
Yeah, I am a real American posseComitatus isn't a thing anymore.
(28:10):
So like most Americans, I imagine, like myself included,
if I wasn't like obsessed with like these weird little things
in our system and also listeningto Alex Jones and the likes of
other conspiracy minded, like right wingers, I'd have no gay
frogs. It's a gay bomb.
It's a gay bomb. But so it's it basically.
(28:31):
I'll break it down for you. The act was signed in 1878,
immediately after the Civil War,and it removed military from
regular civil law enforcement. It was enacted in a response to
the abuses that came out of the extensive military use after the
Civil War, keeping black folks safe.
(28:53):
So Posse Comitatus was basicallylike, hey, you know, this is,
this is, this could be a dangerous thing.
We shouldn't have the military in the street acting as the
police and. We should have independent
jurisdictions being able to do that and service.
Right. Yeah, the federal law
enforcement, like we shouldn't have a federal law enforcement.
This should be people who are part of the community policing
the people in the community, notpeople who don't belong to the
(29:16):
community. Kind of like, you know, we have
in Baltimore City with people from Cecil County, Harford
County, Baltimore County, you know, Frederick County all
coming into the city who don't know the city, who are just
there to beat the shit out of people anyway.
So Posse Comitatus is, is that'swhat that is, right?
So the idea that like, hey, you know, you shouldn't be using the
(29:38):
military as the police, but whatthe executive order is asking
for is for us to be able to do that.
Hello. It's a breaking of the fucking
Kosi Comitatus Act. The last thing from the nation,
the more immediate thrust of this order is to make it nearly
impossible to hold cops accountable for their crimes.
Toward that end, it calls for officers to be indemnified by
(29:59):
the federal government when they, quote, unjustly incur
expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the
performance of their official duties to enforce the law.
This officially, this essentially extends the concept
of qualified immunity to the criminal sphere.
Now, even a cop who's held criminally liable can have their
(30:20):
expenses paid for the The authorof the piece finishes with this
flurry. Like all of Trump's executive
orders, this one can be rescinded by the next president
if we're allowed to have one. But unlike some of the others, I
don't necessarily trust that thefuture Democratic president will
go back and resend this particular order.
Democrats, at least in my lifetime, have been almost as
(30:43):
deeply committed to brutal police practices as Republicans.
It would take a Democrat uniquely committed to criminal
justice reform to go back in andtake away the indemnification
Trump has provided. And one can only imagine that
that the sorry can only imagine the stink the police with unions
(31:04):
would make if such a Democrat takes that away.
And for me personally, that makes this order especially
concerning. Democrats have been moving
further and further to the rightfor decades.
Think back to Bill Clinton's three strikes rule, right?
The militarization force only increased for police under the
(31:24):
Obama administration and Biden. The surveillance programs of the
FISA court went through the roof.
Democrats, Republicans alike, they're all abusing the system,
and Trump is only setting a scarier and scarier precedent
for all of the following presidents who, if they if it
happens, they're only he's only set a scarier and scarier
(31:47):
precedent for the incoming administrations after him.
Well, and I, I totally agree because I think that's one of
the biggest selling points for any kind of administration
that's coming in, right? They're they're trying to reduce
crime, they're trying to make things safer, even though
overall I think the trend has gone down a lot when it comes
(32:09):
to. Yeah.
But if you're, but if you're an executive who goes well, hey,
it's because we're taking these actions, but.
You know what? So let me.
Let me. Just I think we're on the same
page by the. Way I I.
Devil's. Advocate I absolutely think we
are as well. If we had stronger gun safety
rules and laws that might, you know, also do a thing if we were
(32:34):
a. Universal basic income, so
people wouldn't have to feel theneed to take things from stores
and like thefts would go down and that kind of thing.
Or if we had ways to be able to treat drug and alcohol
treatment. If you legalized drugs and
criminalizing people. For, for the, and then also too,
I think, you know, again, I workwith a lot of great police
(32:55):
officers and I, I work with a lot of awesome people that
really are respectful and awesome.
But we also need to start, I'm off, I'm pro union all the way,
but we also have to be able to weed out the bad apples because
there's a lot of bad apples and there's a lot of bad systems
that are in place that allow badapples to continue to do their
(33:18):
job. And I think that's, that's
another really, really big issueis that unions are great and
protecting workers and workers rights.
But also at the same time, you have to be able when, when there
is a lot of, and let me put it this way, I'm not a police
officer. That's a very, very hard job.
(33:40):
And I couldn't imagine a lot of the stuff that that police
officers have to deal with on a daily basis.
It is, it is got has to be a really, really hard job, but we
have to also provide a lot of mental health support.
We have to not militarize the police and come up with a lot
less lethal ways of being able to to work with, you know,
(34:02):
people that are in crisis or people that are committing
crimes. Can I ask you a question?
Ask me a. Question, Poppy.
You see, you brought up something, you said bad apples.
We have to weed out the bad apples.
And this is a question that I'vebeen thinking about for a little
bit myself, is if there are so many bad apples, then you have
(34:26):
to dig the fucking tree out. And we have a lot of bad apples.
Do you want a poison tree or do you want a tree that produces
good fruit? And if we have so many bad
apples, then maybe we just need to get rid of the tree, plant a
new one. I'm not saying that we don't
need law enforcement, because I think that any society without
law enforcement eventually fallsapart.
(34:47):
Eventually, maybe, maybe it starts off as this utopian
thing, but eventually power becomes power and people are
people. So you have to have somebody
who's a hall monitor, right? But if you've got bad apples
everywhere, maybe the tree is fucking rotten or.
Or maybe what you do is you really kind of reshape the
formation instead of ripping outthe tree is that you get rid of
(35:12):
the other tree that's blocking that, you know, that's blocking
it with the shade or provide it with a little bit more
fertilizer or you provide it with organic hippie juice or
whatever that makes it good. But I, I, I think there's
different ways of approaching kind of policing styles.
You know, I think we've kind of talked about it previously, but
(35:33):
you know, getting more communityinvolvement, people that live
within the neighborhood, gettinga lot more community input,
where people know the the policing that's going on around
them, where they know the officers, where they know what's
going on, where they can have a relationship where it's not, you
know, and this is just me just saying like, oh, it's a white
(35:53):
cop saying, oh, it's just that black person right there.
Instead of saying like, oh, thisis, you know, whatever this
person's name is, you know, I know them, they've gone through
this or whatever and they have that kind of relationship
instead of treating it. Last week I saw, I know his mom
had a hard time last week because I was at I was walking
by the house and she told me about this thing.
And so he's probably like going through a hard time because of
(36:15):
this. And, you know, they're going
through a hard time as a family.So he's like acting out like,
yeah, yo, Jim, man, like, calm down, dude.
Like, it's going to be all right.
Like, what can I do to help you and your family out this week?
Like, you guys have everything you need.
It's not that. It's not, it's not a, a gentle
way of handling policing, which is, you know, preferred.
Absolutely. Maybe.
(36:35):
And it. Depends on I guess it it.
That also depends on the case though, right?
Like you don't want to fucking walk up to a like a, you know,
psycho killer. Be like, hey, what happened to
you when you were a kid? Hey, buddy.
Let's process your feelings. Right, right.
But but I think that there's different ways of being able to
manage it. And I think that again, you want
to keep people safe. You want people to be able to do
this kind of job but not be ableto to do the natural human thing
(36:59):
of just have power struggles, Yeah.
And escalate situations when they could be de escalated.
And there's a lot of escalating versus de escalating.
Sergio Oh my God, dude. I feel like we could we could
the. Fucking longest douche canoe of
the week. Yeah.
And then? This might be our episode.
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna come back and we're
talking about company towns. We're gonna keep it short
because, you know, we did go on a little, little bit there.
(37:21):
But yeah, Gene, you're a fuckingdouche.
Douche. We'll take a real quick break.
When we come back, we're going to talk about company towns.
(37:42):
And so we're back. So we're talking about, you
know, douche came before and nowwe're going to talk about a
little bit a bit a bit about company towns.
So company towns are an interesting phenomena that came
out of the industrial revolution.
Essentially, companies would build towns to entice workers to
move in. So they would have a pool of
(38:03):
captive labor, right? I.
I have some friends that are possibly moving to a company
town, so continue really. Yes, Oh my.
If you were unlucky enough, for instance, to live in a company
town designed by a coal company coal mining company, you were
likely to just be a slave. Unfortunately, you were in a
(38:23):
slave camp more than you were ina town.
If you lived nearby Hershey, PA,though, which is a company town,
that still is a company town, which is pretty cool.
You were likely to have hot cocoa breaks and rotten teeth,
but at least you were not being treated like a slave.
Hershey, to this day, like I said, is a company town.
They even have a high school named after the guy.
(38:44):
So it's like a company town through and through.
One of the key differentiators between a company town versus
other places was that you didn'tpay in money as you normally
would elsewhere. You would use something called
script. Script.
So basically it's like credit, but you could only you spend it
at the company store. The store would sell items for
(39:05):
an incredibly marked up price. You couldn't leave the company
town, you had no other money, soyou had to spend your money
there. And some companies would
actually make more money based off from their employees buying
goods from their stores than theitems that they were actually
manufacturing. And some of these company towns
also served as an Ave. to keep newly freed slaves in bondage,
(39:25):
forcing black men to build railways and roads that
crisscross our country all for free.
So company towns as a idea are is a terrible thing.
And come Elon Musk. No, he this past week, the Texas
(39:48):
town and near the Rio Grande River, the Texas town has now
become called Starbase Texas. Elon Musk has built himself a
private town where he's one of his developmental centers, I
think manufacturing center. They've decided that they are
going to break away and have their own little little fiefdom
(40:12):
tech billionaires. Are buying up parcels of land
all over the place to have to live up there a libertarian
techno future for dreams. They're buying up these little
bits of land, having their digital industrial revolution
buying and selling goods under the under their eye.
So they have complete control ofwhatever happened to that town,
(40:33):
right. I'm thinking especially like
with the lack of regulations. I think we talked about this on
the episode where we talked specifically about Musk where he
was sludge is was pouring into out from underground tunnels in
in Las Vegas. Don't believe me though?
Read from the DWA Germany newspaper.
The move to incorporate Starbaseas its own city separates it
(40:56):
from Cameron County, which previously rejected plans to
build more housing for SpaceX employees.
Starbase will not be able to approve construction plans
itself. They don't have to go through
the through the local county government.
They can just do whatever the fuck they want to now.
Developments aren't going well with some.
Pakaya Hanjansa, Co, founder of the South Texas Environmental
(41:18):
Justice Network, voiced concern over the environmental impact
and warned of more destruction, which is usual for Elon Musk.
Go ahead. Well, and and the thing that's
so interesting about this is that the, and I don't know if
star bases the is this like in in Texas, close to like the Gulf
of of I guess fucking America now or whatever.
(41:41):
You. You.
You better call it what it's called the Gulf of America.
They call it the Gulf of America.
I say Gulf of Mexico, though I think it's still Golf of Mexico.
They don't play much golf of Mexico.
They'll play, they don't play 18O's.
They say 18 O's. They only play the black, the
back black 9, black 9, not even back 9 but.
(42:03):
It because I, what I have read about one of his, the towns that
he incorporated with the SpaceX was that it was a retirement
community. It was one of the affordable
places for people to retire to, OK, that was along the Gulf or
whatever. And then he came in to launch
(42:23):
SpaceX and stuff like that and. That sounds right though it.
Had a lot of adverse effects to the people and their access and
basically trying to sell people out and get them out of there.
Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more about that in
another, in another case that that I've got lined up for you.
But yeah, that sounds about right.
If if all the other things I've read about, yeah, that that
(42:44):
makes sense. More from Becca and Josa.
They would quote, they would attempt more illegal dumping.
They would build up their dangerous rocket operations and
cause more seismic activity 'cause our homes to shake and
that would destroy more of the wildlife habitat in the region.
(43:04):
The Change City status allows Starbase to control building and
permitting processes and avoid other regulatory red tape while
collecting taxes and writing local laws.
This isn't the only modern day example though.
Sergio, Bitcoin Bros and other libertarian technocrat
broligarch types are all having a renaissance of sorts.
(43:26):
If you would buying up land to create unregulated Bitcoin
blockchain driven versions of Hershey, PA.
On an island in Honduras, localsplay football fish for tropical
gar among the coral reef, all under the eye of a town called
Prospera. Honduras, in an effort to bring
(43:49):
economic investment to the country, had established some
interesting rules. In essence, if you're untethered
from local walls, you you would come in and bake a bunch of
investment into into the local like economic zones they would
set up. And then you were kind of
untethered from like, you know, Honduran law and so a bunch of
(44:12):
Bitcoin Bros, so. Kind of like this lawless areas
that that you could basically dowhatever, which kind of reminds
me that there's a lot of places in, I've seen some documentaries
in like Guyana and areas where there's a lot of gold mining and
it's basically like they have brothels, They have all this
(44:35):
stuff for mine. It's these like shanty towns
that are created for this industry where where people set
up and it destroys the environment.
And you know, there's a lot of not, it's very good things that
go on, but people. Still need this Honduras, you
know, they have those economic zones so that these people who
(44:55):
run this town called Prosperic do the exact same thing.
Essentially, you pay for everything in Bitcoin, kind of
like script, right? Everything's paid in Bitcoin.
They control the Bitcoin investment like they have a
Bitcoin ATM. You have to pay with their
version of like a a cryptocurrency, whatever it is.
(45:16):
I think you do it in Bitcoin andthen you do it in Prospero Coin.
So like in Prospero, Coin has less transaction fees, so you're
incentivized to use it, you knowwhat I mean?
Is it almost like sharecropping?Yeah, a lot like sharecropping.
Sharecropping, right? A lot like sharecropping
basically, like when the AfricanAmericans were freed that, you
know, they got to work the land,but then they had to, they were
(45:39):
basically indentured servants tothat land because they had to
pay everything to be able to work that land because they
didn't have the tools to be ableto do it.
And so they were basically. Kind of just got to stay there.
Slavery. Kind of got to stay there and
work off your debt that. Continues to grow as you work
and you never. And they devalue the amount of
(46:01):
money that each crop was worth the year after year.
So you'd have to just keep on working longer and longer in
order to pay it off. Yeah, no, that sounds about
right. Yeah, it's something like that,
something like that. Sorry.
Something slight. Something slight, but the most
incentivizing piece of all of this is there are virtually no
taxes. And the libertarian tech Bros of
(46:24):
the world love that premise, right?
So it's a libertarian wet dream,as I was saying, libertarian.
They want to shoot just all the fucking ketamine that they can
do. Free of regulation.
Rooms. No laws, yeah, no taxes.
And of course, this is LED and resulted in the local
populations being removed from their land because these folks
(46:47):
who come in and say, hey, we're buying this shit and the local
population. If you're buying it or we're
going to kill you. Essentially or we'll.
Do both. Or we'll incentivize the
Honduran government when we whenthey set up these laws that the
Honduran president at the time ended up going to jail due to
(47:07):
fraud and corruption because of these economic zones that he set
up. And he was.
It's a witch hunt. It's fake news.
He was using the these economic zones as investment.
It's fake, folks, I can tell youthat.
I know what that means. It's.
(47:28):
You don't need to be bilingual to know what that means, folks.
But no. So, yeah, as I was saying, the
former president went to jail based on off of some fraud
charges where he was basically funneling money through these
economic zones and allowing these folks to just do whatever
they wanted. So they were this town, Prospera
(47:49):
went to war essentially with thelocal population, bought up all
of their land, forced them off of the land and then tried to
hire them on. So essentially it operates kind
of like a resort. So now they were, you know, you
know, doing some everything thatthey were.
(48:09):
All the food they needed to eat was coming from their own little
farms that they had subsistence farming.
They were like, they were able to survive.
They were able to make enough money.
They were still relatively poor in that way.
But they didn't live a life where they were being like
harassed and harangued by these colonizers who were coming into
(48:30):
their land and going, we want this property.
And they're like, well, no, likeit's they're financially
enslaved. Private property isn't a thing
here. We like we're we're communally
living. What are you talking about?
But that didn't matter to these libertarian psychopaths.
So the ultra rich tech colonizers move in, bring tons
of money to the area, displace the local population.
(48:52):
The Honduran government's like, Oh no, we want this.
We want economic incentive for people to come here.
So let's just keep allowing it to happen.
Now, in the last Honduras election, there was a
progressive socialist who got elected and is trying to change
these laws. But these tech Bros have sued
(49:13):
for over $40 billion against theHonduran government to slow this
thing down in the court system. Because the way that the laws
were written in Honduras at the time, they had to honor this,
this contract that this prosperity town is for the next
50 years. So it's like this insane
(49:34):
agreement between libertarians and a foreign government.
It's just, I don't know, it's, it's just a story that repeats
over and over and over again, right?
It's just this just insane need for wealth and it's
Machiavellian, right? Like the end justifies the means
(49:58):
and you can do whatever you wantto do if you get rich.
And if you're pulling yourself up quote UN quote by the
bootstraps, then then you're good.
Yeah. And it just, it drives me crazy.
What What are your thoughts about taxes?
I no one wants to pay them but. But.
(50:20):
But you do because it builds a better society if they're used
where they're supposed to be used, not to enforce and like
engage, you know, government contracts for the likes of Peter
Thiel and fucking Elon Musk. If they're used for like, I
don't know, helping the I don't have children, but I want a
smart, I want a smart populace. I want my my money to go towards
(50:42):
public schools. I want people to have books for
free. I want to be able to have roads,
right? I want these things.
Pick up my trash, my recycling yes be able to drink water.
Yes, clean water is a great. Thing.
And these are all things. Waste treatment plants.
That I I think people don't understand how incredible,
incredible it is to be able to take a shit and flush it down
(51:05):
the toilet. With toilet paper.
With toilet paper or a bidet toilet paper that's.
Oh, no, no, as bidet boys, Yeah,we.
Don't. No, no, we don't.
It's a bad. Kind of situation.
What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, we're so euro now.
But those, those are huge thingsthat we take for granted on a,
on a daily basis. When I drove here after a big
(51:27):
ice storm and I went over a hugepothole, it was repaired within
a week. That's, you know, that's taxes
and that's we need to pay. And, and I don't like paying
taxes, but I also don't really like the fact that people that
make billions and billions of dollars don't pay any taxes.
So I'm fine doing my share, but if they're doing their share.
(51:51):
If they were doing their share then you and I would have.
To there would be no fucking deficit.
And that's what it is, is is they want to be really, really
rich. And not have to worry about
paying anything on it. Anything.
Yeah, they want to do it all forfree.
Yeah, but it's your fault as a middle class individual.
(52:12):
Trying to do the right thing, you know, working in society,
doing a public sector job, yeah.That's it's your fault, it's
your fault, man, it's your faultthat this country is so bad
right now. All the.
All the kids think that they canD.
EI. They go to class and they come
out. They come in a girl, they come
out a boy. They say these things, they do
(52:32):
it. They that's where your tax
dollars are going, folks. In reality, though, that's just
the tip of the iceberg. Peter Thiel's underground
libertarian base in New Zealand,for instance, is another one of
these examples. The tech Bros building out water
rolled type colonies out at sea.And I highly encourage you to
look into something called seasteading.
(52:52):
We're not going to cover it here.
I've added a lot of links. It's absolutely insane.
But here I'll I'll give you a little bit of a little bit of a
taste here from the New York Times.
There are those who have criticized the movements
libertarian bent and called it avanity project for the rich.
Peter Newman and Australian professor of sustainability went
(53:15):
as far as to say, describe one proposed project as apartheid of
the worst kind, a dream in whichthe wealthy can remove
themselves to futuristic ocean villages and sneer at the rest
of the world. There's a lot more that we could
cover. Again, I've added links.
There's going to be a video linkin there too.
I highly encourage you to look at it.
(53:36):
But really what we're talking about here with, with these, you
know, fiefdoms that they're trying to set up is that they
think they're better than the rest of us.
They, they feel that they know that.
And they're getting reinforced by people fucking, you know,
glad handing and, you know, retweeting their shit.
And you know, right now the House is about to give one of
(54:01):
the largest tax cuts to the top 1% of all time.
Well, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, which is going to
plunge this country into medicaldebt and poverty, which have
(54:22):
been one of the most successful and best Social Security systems
and programs that we have set upin this country to prevent that.
And we are going to do that so the top 1% can get richer.
And when Donald Trump says that you don't need $30, you can just
need one or two, right? So this is where we're at right
(54:46):
now. We are allowing rich people to
get richer under the guise of saying that it's DI.
We need to cut all this shit because this is a reason why
we're too woke. And this is after the Democrats
caved on staple coin regulationsthat are going to allow for
(55:07):
Donald Trump, who's already madebillions of dollars off of his
own stable coin, to make even more money to enrich himself so
that the Saudis can pay him under the table.
Because it's deregulated. We live in it.
We live in, you know, God, the book that I just got done with
it's. Going to be a feudalistic
society. We're we're going to be in
different kingdoms. We're it.
(55:29):
It's going to be very we're. Crinkling the the tinfoil and
we're putting it on our heads right now.
We're hoping for the alien invasion.
I don't know. That's tinfoil thinking anymore.
I think we're, we are. We're close, man.
We're close the. Greg Greg is so deadpan and
(55:51):
serious right now. He he's looking into my soul
while he says. Yeah, like I'm, I, I mean it
when I, you know, the, the executive order that got signed,
what, 10-11 days ago, essentially opening up the gates
for martial law. We went to a protest.
We talked about this last week. If, if in, in summers are always
(56:16):
the hardest time of the year fornot the hardest time, but it is
always the hottest time in termsof protests.
That's when things get violent. That's when things typically get
smashed to shit. It's going to happen.
And they're already locking up mayors.
They're already locking up localgovernment officials.
They're locking up attorneys. But yeah, I know, Sergio.
(56:38):
I feel like we could, as we always do.
I feel like we could go on forever.
We do. But what are your final thoughts
on this man? I'm, I'm, I'm going to leave.
I'm going to let you wrap us up.You know, that's so unfair
because I always come so unprepared and you have these
elegant words which I believe like half of them, you don't
even understand. What they mean?
(57:01):
As you're throwing out these Latin.
I'm not Donald Trump. I'm not Donald Trump, they say.
I know the biggest. Words.
I know all the words they say. Dog, person, man.
Cat and I can repeat them forwards and backwards.
Dog, person, many words, many words.
I, I just think, you know, overall this is just, this is
(57:22):
stuff that we need to get peoplefired up about.
We need to get people to understand that.
And, you know, I'm culpable, notculpable, but I need to, in my
own profession, not spout my ownpolitical views, but I need to
talk to the students I work withabout politics and voting and
(57:46):
being able to do the things thatwe have the absolute right to do
and that we should be doing. And that a lot of the countries
have voting days where nobody works and does stuff.
And we need to be able to go back to stuff like this where
everything is closed down for one or two days where people can
vote so that they can go and have access to stuff like this.
(58:08):
Because it's super, super scary that we are really, really
flirting with. It's kind of the end of our
civilization. And I guess all great
civilizations collapse at some point.
But, you know, I hope it doesn'thappen within my, my, my, my
(58:29):
lifetime, but it's going to happen because nothing lasts
forever. And that might just be the
radical acceptance that, you know, we've tried.
We, we're, we're doing our thing.
We're doing everything we can to, you know, be able to be out
there and be activists or, But at some point, things are just
going to happen when they happenand you won't have that locus of
(58:52):
control. Yeah, yeah.
Well listeners, thank you for enjoying another episode at the
Extremes, but no, for real if you're in.
Mental health crisis. Please call whatever local.
This is May is mental health awareness month, right?
Too right. Like so please, if you are
struggling, was it 999? That's the number for mental
(59:13):
health services or whatever. I'll put it in the show.
Note. I, I, I'm not a therapist, so I
don't know off the top of my head, but there is a line that
you can get, you can get in touch with if you are having a
crisis of any sort or even if you're not having a crisis and
you just need to talk about yourtalk.
To somebody get yeah, get connected to therapist, talk to
a friend, talk to a family member that you trust and
process these things. Don't hold them inside and do
(59:35):
something about. It yes yes my God I remember my
grandfather told me something I was relaying this story to a
friend of mine the other night it is about understanding what
your circumstances and then trying to figure out what you're
going to do about it and if you know that you're not doing well
my God it there is no shame in asking for help and it's
somebody who didn't it's. Not going to get better by
itself. It I'm going to put my hand up
(59:57):
real quick and just say it. This is a full disclaimer.
I know we said we're going to leave with Sergio's final
thoughts, but I'm going to give you the last one here.
As somebody who fought it for like 10 years, it finally called
up to me. And when it called up to me, it
was not good. So take the time to take care of
yourself because God Almighty, if you don't have yourself, you
don't have anything. You got nothing.
(01:00:18):
You got, you got nothing. Not like me, I've got gold
toilets. I got gold toilets.
I got the. Taj Mahal.
Oh wait, no I don't. I got rid of that.
It's. Bankrupt.
I use that as collateral for Barons.
Mini Mercedes. They say many.
(01:00:39):
You can have 30 Mercedes toys. No, but American children only
need to have one, maybe 2. You get one or two dolls.
You get one or two dolls. Listeners, thank you for
enjoying another episode At the Extremes.
Do you subscribe? Please share it.
We're getting a lot of momentum here recently.
So all your efforts in sharing the show are really we're we're
(01:01:00):
connecting with a lot of people.Connect with this on Blue Sky.
Oh my God, at the Extremes, pod folks, we're getting a lot of
people connecting with us there too.
Well, and I would say also too, if you are interested in being a
guest or wanting to share a point of view.
Yeah, reach out to us. Reach out to us, we love having
guests and being able to banter with fans.
(01:01:24):
And how many? Fans, fans, fans indicates that
like they're fanatical about theshow.
We can barely get people to like, vote on a poll.
So we can barely get people to vote in a United States
election. So yeah.
I mean that that kind of fits. Well, these people are all
losers. Not, not our listeners.
(01:01:44):
They're great. They're the best.
They're the best. They're big league.
Doesn't give them too much credit.
Sir, no, we're giving them lots of credit.
OK. But yes, at us, we will.
We, we love to talk to you. Yeah.
And have you on the show. So.
And if you know Barbara Walter the the author, please put me in
contact. Barbara Walter.
God almighty, she's she's. Barbara Walter.
(01:02:06):
She's an excellent writer, but check the show notes and until
next week. Educate yourself Bros.
This is At the Extremes. Beloved's welcome back to At the
Extremes, the podcast where we discuss the extremes in our
society and how we got here. As always, we're your host.
I'm Greg. And I'm Surge.
And today we're going to be chatting about the week that
(00:28):
was. Before we get into that though,
Sergio, silver lining. You know, I I've been struggling
to kind of think of a silver lining because I've been so
fucking pissed that the Arsenal have lost three games.
Yeah, that's fair. And I have just been, you've
really taught me a lot about rage and I've just had all this
(00:49):
rage in my heart and just bleak outlooks in life.
No, I'm just kidding. That was a bummer, but it was,
it really sucked. But you know, I the silver
lining and all of it was it's been really fun cheering for the
the Arsenal and, and being therefor the team when they win and
(01:09):
lose and getting to have those experience and getting excited.
Wasn't crazy about the places that we went, but it was fine.
It was being able to be there, hang out with you.
What? What was wrong with the places
that we went? Well, the first place that we
went, you know what? I'm going to throw their name
out. Das Beer Hall.
They allow children in there. And so we got scolded for saying
(01:31):
fuck when PSG scored and we. And who brings our kid to a bar?
Yeah, first of all, like 3:00. Yeah, when A and a 3:00 on like
a Tuesday afternoon. Get the fuck out of here, yeah?
No, that was that was unacceptable.
And then the other place just itwasn't Mcavoy's, which I big up
some Mcavoy's. Mcavoy's a good place, but it's
(01:51):
not really a soccer bar. And so people were were kind of
trashing soccer and. I was ready to kill somebody.
I mean, but you're always kind of.
On edge yeah, I'm I'm riding on tilt all the.
Time, but anyways that that was,you know, just having the
experience of even though it didn't go our way, you know,
that's that's life and you just have to deal with it and there's
(02:15):
the rest of the season and hopefully Arsenal can can come
back with the the last three or four games that they have and
got to win out. Got to win out.
We're not we're not secure in Europe yet.
So we got to win out. Yeah, well, that's that's good.
You know, it's your first like proper season going through the
whole Champions League thing and, you know, living with
(02:36):
disappointment, you get used to it.
So I. Mean we shared this over Texas
that you know, I've as a lifelong Seattle fan when the
Seattle Seahawks gave up that that interception that I don't
know if you'll ever experience something that brutal.
(02:56):
I mean in. Real time where you where you
could have won the game. I mean like personally if you
would have. Fucking ran the ball, but I
digress. I think in rugby I've had that,
but yeah, that was crushing too.Anyway, doesn't matter.
Yeah, doesn't matter. It it does, but it's all right.
I'm trying my hardest to not gettoo angry too early in the
(03:18):
podcast. So so.
Had a lot to cover. We got a lot to we got a lot of
ground and a lot of rage. That's coming.
Well, that's good, man. I'm glad.
I'm glad that you enjoyed that the Arsenal, you got the swag
for it. You've got the you've got the
all the merch for it. I think my silver lining I got
to start with the Blucifer T-shirt.
If you paying attention to our at the extremes blue sky you saw
(03:42):
Sergio got me a a lovely little T-shirt.
It's got Blucifer destroying theentire city of of Denver.
It is a fantastic shirt. So big ups to you, Sergio for an
excellent gift. It's such a good shirt and
Blucifer. All hail Blucifer.
All hail Lucifer. What a what a stalwart of the
(04:04):
community really like he's a stand up, stand up individual.
Lucifer, thank you. I guess the other one that I
want to go with like 2 parter, 2parter.
You know me. I can't I can't keep it brief.
The second Part 2 part I just finished a book by Barbara
Walter. She is a she was ACIA analyst
(04:29):
and she studied specifically howCivil war start and I read her
book and it it's incredibly enlightening her.
Her book is basically like how do Civil war start?
It's a really good read, highly recommended.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
But it was disappointing and notdisappointing, but definitely
(04:50):
like depressing material 'cause you realize, oh boy, oh boy.
Oh boy. We are perilously close.
But with that done and dusted, let's take a real quick break.
And when we come back, we're going to talk about douche
canoes and company towns. Yeah, so we're back.
(05:21):
The douche Canoe of the Week is a guy by the name of Gene
Hamilton. You've never heard his name
before, and most people haven't.Gene is a gigantic douche canoe
and a human hemorrhoid. He, along with Stephen Miller,
are responsible for the creationof a conservative legal public
interest group called America First Legal.
(05:43):
Let me, let me ask you really quick, go for it, Gene.
That's, that's not a a name that's used very often.
Like the only gene that I've known is Gene Hackman.
Yeah, the only hack, the only gene everyone knows is Hackman.
Yeah. Which?
Yeah, Gene. Yeah, Yeah, you're right.
Are there any other famous genes?
I don't know Billie Jean, but there's a Billie in front of it,
(06:04):
so yeah, that's Levi. No, no, Gene.
Yeah. So Gene.
Famous genes. And what that's a crazy story.
Gene hacked the way he died, where he his wife contracted
hantavirus and then died and he had dementia and or Alzheimer's
and didn't have anybody care forhim for seven days and then he
(06:25):
died. It's wild.
That is, that's. A sad way to go.
So yeah, along with Stephen Miller, this gene, Gene, this
Gene that we're talking about today, Gene, where we at Gene
Hamilton. Sorry.
Along with Stephen Miller, Gene is responsible for the creation
of a conservative legal public interest group called America
First Legal. According to their website.
(06:48):
America First Legal is the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.
We are committed to an unwavering defense of the truth
of true equality under the law, national borders and
sovereignty, freedom of speech and religion, classical views
and virtues, the sanctity of life and the centrality of
family, and our timeless legal and constitutional heritage.
(07:10):
Which just seems like blah blah blah blah blah.
Yeah, these are all like, you know, Make America Great Again,
like talking points, right? So currently, if you go to their
website, there's a Chiron that runs across the top of the web
page that calls out directly sanctuary cities and the
officials who are in charge of those, a policy in those States
and cities and how to get in touch with them and their office
(07:32):
locations. So it is really, really kind of
scary, especially given like what's happened in the last 48
hours with people getting lockedup.
If you were a mayor in New Jersey and you're, you know,
protesting at ICE detention center, all of a sudden, you
know, whatever. The writers for AFL outline and
(07:53):
outline an acronym you see all over their website.
It's called SHIELD or stop helping illegals enter and
linger without deportation. If you click on Maryland, for
instance, like I said, that gives you Brandon Scott's
information. It gives you his address, it
gives you his direct phone number, like to his office.
I imagine that that's still having to go to like a
(08:14):
secretary, but like they are very targeted in what they're
doing. This is very, very clinical,
very surgical. It won't surprise you to find
out that Gene thinks initiativeslike Diversity, Equity,
Inclusion are Marxist, given thegiven the the The Shield acronym
being what it is here. There's been a lot of talk in
(08:37):
the media about equity and DEI, but what does it really mean?
What are these concepts that you're hearing in the workplace
and it's school and on the news?And let me tell you, these
concepts at their root are Marxism, what we're making
decisions about as a society. It looks like if Jude Law had a
(09:03):
meth problem and had been on a Bender for five days.
Yeah, yeah, I know. He's a he looks like.
A piece of shit. Yeah, he looks like a bloated
Jew law. Yeah.
Those principles are picking winners and losers based on
things that they can't control, their color of their skin, their
(09:24):
sex. The fact of the matter is that
this country was founded on the idea that everyone gets treated
equally, that all men are created equal by their creator.
I mean, obviously there's serious issues to take there
with that statement, but yeah, what are your thoughts from that
(09:44):
clip on Jean other than he lookslike a blooded Jude Law?
That he fucking sucks. And you know, I, I was just
thinking on the way up here of just the mindset that you have
to have to be able to not recognize that there are these
huge inequality, inequalities that are going on in, in our
(10:08):
society and the type of type of person you have to be to be able
to spout the stuff out and, and actually believe it.
And I just, I've come to the hard realization the last like
month and a half how racist people really are.
Like I've lived in kind of this fantasy camp that this is just,
it's a small population of people that live in Appalachia
(10:29):
that just haven't had the exposure.
But we have the federal society,we have Harvard, Yale educated
lawyers that are against DI stuff and making this, this a
thing. And to me that's just it's mind
blowing. It's mind blowing that this is
(10:50):
this is something that we have to have to say.
Like this is, there is inequality.
It's like, what are you talking about?
And to me, it's just like, it's common sense stuff.
And then these are people that are fucking smarter than I am
that are believing, are supposedto be that believe this stuff.
And I'm just, I, I don't know, I, I guess it's just me having
(11:13):
to come to, you know, radical acceptance, accepting that
there's a lot of people that believe this stuff and it's just
not, I mean, some of it might befor show, but just that there's
a lot of people that are just. Whether for show or for real,
like you're saying it and you'regetting people to jump on board
with you and you recognize that there's something out there that
(11:35):
you can take advantage of or highlight.
And if you were a hateful person, it it comes off
authentically. And if you're not, but you're
just a grifter, unfortunately itcomes off authentically.
It's how it feels at least, right?
Oh, and just what you have to doto be able to sell yourself.
Yeah, almost like selling your soul to the devil to to get to
(11:59):
that point. If you don't believe that, yeah,
that in in, you know, this anti DEI stuff.
So I I don't know, it's just to me, it's just it, it's a reality
check every day. I'm just like, what is this
fucking real life? Yeah, And, and it is.
And there's fucking Count Dracula's Stephen Adolph Miller
(12:19):
that's the architect of all thisshit and which I still can't
decide whether if he is just in leather pinching his nipples and
and doing crazy stuff or if he'strolling.
I just. I don't know man.
What's the difference then? You know, like when you're at
that place, like there is no difference whether you're
(12:41):
trolling or you're being for real.
Like if you can't tell, then you're that's who you are.
That's the greatest hoax that's,you know, that's ever happened.
But specifically though, to yourpoint, Gene is a policy maker
and an attorney and you're probably going to know him
better for the complete tall sack of shit that he is.
He was the attorney responsible for overturning DACA.
(13:04):
Here Trump is, and what? What is DACA?
So DACA and and again, I, you know, I was watching.
Deferred action for childhood arrivals.
Yeah, And you know, there are quite a few resources I was
looking at and I still came out kind of confused.
I was like, I don't really thinkI know exactly what the process
is for DACA and. So I think basically like the
(13:26):
real, because I, I haven't read the, the technical legal jargon
of it, but it's basically unaccompanied minors that have
come across the border that didn't have, you know, didn't
come across with a parent or guardian with them that had
people on in the United States that they could go to as like
sponsors. Like a like an aunt who lived
(13:47):
in. Uncle, family friend or.
Whatever. Got it, got it.
OK, well in 2017, Donald Trump had this to say on the decision
to end DACA. Thank you.
Well, I have a great heart for the folks we're talking about, a
great love for them. Those people.
(14:09):
People think in terms of children, but they're really
young adults. I have a love for these people
and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it
properly. And I can tell you in speaking
to members of Congress, they want to be able to do something
and do it right. And really we have no choice.
We have to be able to do something.
And I think it's going to work out very well.
(14:30):
And long term, it's going to be the right solution.
So we'll put them in cages, separate them from their
families, and that will be cool.Yeah, yeah.
Especially given where we are today, That clip is laughable.
It's offensive. It is it it's it flies in
(14:55):
clearly in the face of what he actually believes.
And here he is in a 2024 interview here recently in
December, talking about DACA. What about Dreamers, Sir?
Dreamers who were brought to this country illegally as
children, you said once back in 2017, they quote, shouldn't be
very worried about being deported.
Should they be worried now? The Dreamers are going to come
(15:18):
later and we have to do something about the dreamers
because these are people. That are coming.
From here at a very young age, and many of these are
middle-aged people now. They don't even speak the
language of their country. And yes, we're going to do
something about the dream. What?
Are you? Going to do I, I will work with
the Democrats on a plan and if we can come up with a plan, but
the Democrats have made it very,very difficult to do anything.
(15:40):
Republicans are very open to theDreamers.
The Dreamers, we're talking manyyears ago.
They were brought into this country many years ago.
Some of them are no longer youngpeople, and in many cases they
become successful. They have great.
There's a couple of things here That's that's that's that just
reaches out to me and this goes kind of on a on a on a personal
(16:03):
note. But so my mom told me that one
of her really good friends and Co workers didn't even realize
that she was was not an Americancitizen because she was brought
here when she was really, reallyyoung and she got her
citizenship eventually. But so yeah, you have kids that
come over here when they're 1-2 years old that have grown up in
(16:25):
the United. States.
And so, so they're, they're American.
So what, what are you going to do?
Send them back to places that they have no connection to,
sometimes don't speak the language, don't know the
culture. And I guess the other thing that
I think about too is that we hadTPS, which is temporary
protective status, which is alsothat was used for different
(16:50):
issues have happened throughout.So in a lot of Salvadorians came
in the 1980s during the Salvadorian civil war.
A lot of Venezuelans came up, you know, during the repression
that's been going down in their country, a lot of patients have
come up. And so with the program itself,
it's called temporary protected status.
So they can come to the United States, but then there's no path
(17:13):
forward to what they're supposedto do.
So they get stuck in the cycle, this bureaucratic cycle of am I
an American citizen? Like, what's going to happen?
Do I have to apply for this? Am I going to be able, am I
going to be sent back to, you know, my country of origin?
Even though I've been here, I have had children or family
members that are are here now. And and that's also a problem
(17:36):
because you have a lot of peoplehere that are on these temporary
statuses that are not temporary.They're 20-30 years that have
been here 40 years. How?
Long is temporary when you're here for 20.
Years, yeah. And so that's not a Democratic
or Republican thing, but it's coming up with kind of a policy
to be able to address stuff likethat.
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
It's that's that's so scary too,right?
(17:58):
Like, oh, this is this is my status.
I didn't even think about this like.
And I can I can use even a personal account is that we
have, we had a nanny for our daughter.
She is from El Salvador and she's been in the United States
(18:18):
for a really, really long time. She had a son that is here and
he has autism. And so he is an American
citizen. And so she doesn't, you know,
every year that whether she's going to get renewed or not, but
she would not be able, I mean, she would be able to go back to
El Salvador, but her son wouldn't get the same kind of
(18:40):
services that he qualifies for here in the United States and
level of care that he needs. Right, right.
Yeah. And so that's.
Send him back. You got to get rid of these
people. But that's that that goes into
these big complicated nuances that happen when you when you
have policies like this and thenyou have an administration
that's just basically trying to fucking fill a quota and you
(19:03):
scare task tactics to to get people to either self deport or.
You get $1000 if you get a. 1000fucking dollars that is.
That's like. Talk about a waste of taxpayers
money. Or the other thing that we're
talking about is maybe, possiblysending people to Libya.
(19:23):
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
Yeah, that too. That too.
Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. Maybe not in this episode, but
we'll get to that. That that might be a thing or to
Libya or to some of to they're. Talking about sending Mexican
migrants to Libya, even though Mexico is taking back migrants
(19:45):
that America's willing to ship like send back and America's
like we just might send them to Libya.
To to a country that Americans are discouraged from traveling
to due to political uncertainty.So what are we fucking doing
here, folks? A lot.
(20:06):
A lot of really bad things. Jean, our douche canoe also
wrote the policy on family separation.
Again, you brought this up, the infamous kids and cages
situation. Not to forget that Obama did
this too. But yeah, this was.
Something Obama. Obama, baby Obama He also
(20:29):
responsible for revoking temporary protections for people
who are fleeing the South Sudan during the Sudanese civil war.
Should it surprise you then to find out that that civil war was
due to, you know, colonialism and colonizers influence
religion, education, food distribution to the government,
the power, along with the Brits,we helped create those
(20:51):
conditions for that civil war and then.
You know, sectarian violence, Yeah.
Muslims against Christians, Yeah.
When you tell one power group that the other power group isn't
nearly as good as the other power group and they shouldn't
exist like we did in Rwanda or like we did, oh, anywhere that
we've been involved in the Philippines, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, you know, instead of looking for, you know, homes
(21:14):
within a place where they're going to get shot to death or
starved to death, they decided they want to come here.
And Gene is responsible for revoking that temporary
protection status for them. Period.
Didn't end until 1958, by the way, which was two years before
my parents were born. So this isn't, you know, like
the situation in the Sudan is relatively new, is what I mean
(21:34):
to say. He's an incredibly horrible
human being. In the past week or so, he's
added another notch to his belt.Jean is the author of the
section in in in Project 2025 targeting the Department of
Justice. And I've sneaking suspicion he's
also the author of the executiveorder that we're going to be
chatting about here in a second.Again, we talked about this with
JD Vance, but Trump is only as dangerous as the fucking people
(21:58):
behind him. And the EO that we're talking
about now is strengthening and unleashing America's law
enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.
This is one of the only E OS I think Trump actually knows
something about because even back in 2017 he was talking
about ending DACA and DACA protections.
(22:19):
So he actually know, I think he actually knows something about
this one. I.
Don't really think he knows anything about anything.
I know, and that's why I think he's only as dangerous as the
people around him. But the executive order is going
to make it easier for police officers to get legal support
and claims against them from Newsweek.
According to an the executive order, the new legal defense
(22:39):
structure will provide support for law enforcement officers
nationwide who unjustly incur unjustly incur expenses and
liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their
official duties to enforce the law.
That's basically like the, the, that's the, the long and short
of it, right? That's the too long.
Did not read version of this. It directs attorney Pam Bondi to
(23:02):
take all appropriate action. Can you say it right though?
It's Pamela Joe Bondi. She's she's got a Joe in her
name is her. Middle name Joe.
I I think it's Pamela Joe. Like like Josephine, like Joe.
I don't know, but yeah, really. Oh.
Oh, it's a it's a Florida thing.Oh.
Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
OK, Pamela Joe. Jody Bondi.
(23:23):
Pamela Joe. Pamela Joe Bondi, good Lord,
that is southern, isn't it? But it directs her to take all
appropriate actions to ensure that these officers are defended
through government backed indemnity and access to private
sector attorneys offering services at no cost.
So we were talking about this last week, I think about
(23:44):
attorneys who are getting lockedout of federal buildings if
they're not willing to bend the knee to do what?
So you were talking about this like you were saying, I think it
was something like to the effectof like, you know, they're
they're just cow tailing to to the administration, like you're
either going to defend these police officers for us for free
pro bono, or you're not going tobe working in the federal
(24:05):
government. Yeah, because we're going to, we
are going to bar you from being able to have these contracts and
be able to work with, you know, federal government agencies.
Yeah. Other components of the
executive order include directives to increase officer
compensation, expand legal protections, review federal
consent decrees with local police departments, which means
basically like, hey, if the fedswant to come in, you say, hey, I
(24:29):
guess you've got jurisdiction now we no longer have
jurisdiction. So if the federal government
comes in and says we're we're taking over, you kind of mend
the knee. And to increase the use of
national security resources, including military and crime
prevention. So, you know, martial law.
Fuck, I'm. I'm.
(24:50):
Just thinking, what if this guy came to a dinner party?
How I mean, he's hated right now.
So how, how do you construct that?
How does the human mind think ofthis stuff?
And how I, I just, I, I don't, Iguess I'm total liberal pussy or
(25:15):
whatever. But but I also think about it,
just even the economic sense, you have people that are coming
here doing jobs that other people don't want to do.
Like what are you doing? Or even the empathy fact that
there's a lot of people here that are coming to try to get
away from stuff that is going tokill their family or kill
(25:38):
themselves or to be able to evensurvive.
And just the level of no compassion or the thought of
another human being just ties back to this whole racism
thought. Is this like these brown and
black people that are coming or Asian people that are coming?
Yeah. Are, are fucking leeches of the
society. Like we, we, we don't want them
(26:00):
here. If, if, and, and you know, I, I
don't want to make it too, too religious here, as is my want.
But if Jesus showed up to a dinner party at, you know, if if
Jesus signed up to go to the RNC, they'd kick him out
immediately. Immediately.
Because you'd be talking about like, oh, yeah, you should give
(26:21):
to the poor. We shouldn't like billionaires
shouldn't be a thing like. Why wearing those army fatigues
instead of a three piece suit? Right, turn, turn the other
cheek. When someone offends you, you
should just turn the other cheekand you know, find common ground
with people like the things thatChrist preached.
Yeah, they, they fucking turn him away too.
(26:42):
From the conversation. Sorry, not from the
conversation. I read a lot from there.
This is from the Nation. The executive order purports to
unleash high impact local policeforces, protect and defend law
enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or
local officials, and surge resources to officers in need.
Think George Floyd and that whole situation.
(27:04):
You know, the officer Chauvin who was involved in that.
This is specifically this language is to protect officers
who kill people, and that's all it's about.
The aggressive language in the order could be cribbed from any
military police state in the annals of history, and that's
clearly the kind of polity that Trump would like to create and
(27:26):
lead. The order instructs the
Secretary of Defense to put downthe bottle long enough to
determine how military and national security assets,
training, non lethal capabilities and personnel can
be most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.
It also instructs the Departmentof Homeland Security to advance
the objectives of the Order Posse comitatus, which is
(27:47):
something that. Trying out all these fucking big
words. So Posse Comitatus got we're
going to. I'll give the.
Research this shit. Yeah, he's ready to flex right
now. So it's it's ripping.
His shirt off right now. I actually like Hulk Hogan.
Yeah, I am a real American posseComitatus isn't a thing anymore.
(28:10):
So like most Americans, I imagine, like myself included,
if I wasn't like obsessed with like these weird little things
in our system and also listeningto Alex Jones and the likes of
other conspiracy minded, like right wingers, I'd have no gay
frogs. It's a gay bomb.
It's a gay bomb. But so it's it basically.
(28:31):
I'll break it down for you. The act was signed in 1878,
immediately after the Civil War,and it removed military from
regular civil law enforcement. It was enacted in a response to
the abuses that came out of the extensive military use after the
Civil War, keeping black folks safe.
(28:53):
So Posse Comitatus was basicallylike, hey, you know, this is,
this is, this could be a dangerous thing.
We shouldn't have the military in the street acting as the
police and. We should have independent
jurisdictions being able to do that and service.
Right. Yeah, the federal law
enforcement, like we shouldn't have a federal law enforcement.
This should be people who are part of the community policing
the people in the community, notpeople who don't belong to the
(29:16):
community. Kind of like, you know, we have
in Baltimore City with people from Cecil County, Harford
County, Baltimore County, you know, Frederick County all
coming into the city who don't know the city, who are just
there to beat the shit out of people anyway.
So Posse Comitatus is, is that'swhat that is, right?
So the idea that like, hey, you know, you shouldn't be using the
(29:38):
military as the police, but whatthe executive order is asking
for is for us to be able to do that.
Hello. It's a breaking of the fucking
Kosi Comitatus Act. The last thing from the nation,
the more immediate thrust of this order is to make it nearly
impossible to hold cops accountable for their crimes.
Toward that end, it calls for officers to be indemnified by
(29:59):
the federal government when they, quote, unjustly incur
expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the
performance of their official duties to enforce the law.
This officially, this essentially extends the concept
of qualified immunity to the criminal sphere.
Now, even a cop who's held criminally liable can have their
(30:20):
expenses paid for the The authorof the piece finishes with this
flurry. Like all of Trump's executive
orders, this one can be rescinded by the next president
if we're allowed to have one. But unlike some of the others, I
don't necessarily trust that thefuture Democratic president will
go back and resend this particular order.
Democrats, at least in my lifetime, have been almost as
(30:43):
deeply committed to brutal police practices as Republicans.
It would take a Democrat uniquely committed to criminal
justice reform to go back in andtake away the indemnification
Trump has provided. And one can only imagine that
that the sorry can only imagine the stink the police with unions
(31:04):
would make if such a Democrat takes that away.
And for me personally, that makes this order especially
concerning. Democrats have been moving
further and further to the rightfor decades.
Think back to Bill Clinton's three strikes rule, right?
The militarization force only increased for police under the
(31:24):
Obama administration and Biden. The surveillance programs of the
FISA court went through the roof.
Democrats, Republicans alike, they're all abusing the system,
and Trump is only setting a scarier and scarier precedent
for all of the following presidents who, if they if it
happens, they're only he's only set a scarier and scarier
(31:47):
precedent for the incoming administrations after him.
Well, and I, I totally agree because I think that's one of
the biggest selling points for any kind of administration
that's coming in, right? They're they're trying to reduce
crime, they're trying to make things safer, even though
overall I think the trend has gone down a lot when it comes
(32:09):
to. Yeah.
But if you're, but if you're an executive who goes well, hey,
it's because we're taking these actions, but.
You know what? So let me.
Let me. Just I think we're on the same
page by the. Way I I.
Devil's. Advocate I absolutely think we
are as well. If we had stronger gun safety
rules and laws that might, you know, also do a thing if we were
(32:34):
a. Universal basic income, so
people wouldn't have to feel theneed to take things from stores
and like thefts would go down and that kind of thing.
Or if we had ways to be able to treat drug and alcohol
treatment. If you legalized drugs and
criminalizing people. For, for the, and then also too,
I think, you know, again, I workwith a lot of great police
(32:55):
officers and I, I work with a lot of awesome people that
really are respectful and awesome.
But we also need to start, I'm off, I'm pro union all the way,
but we also have to be able to weed out the bad apples because
there's a lot of bad apples and there's a lot of bad systems
that are in place that allow badapples to continue to do their
(33:18):
job. And I think that's, that's
another really, really big issueis that unions are great and
protecting workers and workers rights.
But also at the same time, you have to be able when, when there
is a lot of, and let me put it this way, I'm not a police
officer. That's a very, very hard job.
(33:40):
And I couldn't imagine a lot of the stuff that that police
officers have to deal with on a daily basis.
It is, it is got has to be a really, really hard job, but we
have to also provide a lot of mental health support.
We have to not militarize the police and come up with a lot
less lethal ways of being able to to work with, you know,
(34:02):
people that are in crisis or people that are committing
crimes. Can I ask you a question?
Ask me a. Question, Poppy.
You see, you brought up something, you said bad apples.
We have to weed out the bad apples.
And this is a question that I'vebeen thinking about for a little
bit myself, is if there are so many bad apples, then you have
(34:26):
to dig the fucking tree out. And we have a lot of bad apples.
Do you want a poison tree or do you want a tree that produces
good fruit? And if we have so many bad
apples, then maybe we just need to get rid of the tree, plant a
new one. I'm not saying that we don't
need law enforcement, because I think that any society without
law enforcement eventually fallsapart.
(34:47):
Eventually, maybe, maybe it starts off as this utopian
thing, but eventually power becomes power and people are
people. So you have to have somebody
who's a hall monitor, right? But if you've got bad apples
everywhere, maybe the tree is fucking rotten or.
Or maybe what you do is you really kind of reshape the
formation instead of ripping outthe tree is that you get rid of
(35:12):
the other tree that's blocking that, you know, that's blocking
it with the shade or provide it with a little bit more
fertilizer or you provide it with organic hippie juice or
whatever that makes it good. But I, I, I think there's
different ways of approaching kind of policing styles.
You know, I think we've kind of talked about it previously, but
(35:33):
you know, getting more communityinvolvement, people that live
within the neighborhood, gettinga lot more community input,
where people know the the policing that's going on around
them, where they know the officers, where they know what's
going on, where they can have a relationship where it's not, you
know, and this is just me just saying like, oh, it's a white
(35:53):
cop saying, oh, it's just that black person right there.
Instead of saying like, oh, thisis, you know, whatever this
person's name is, you know, I know them, they've gone through
this or whatever and they have that kind of relationship
instead of treating it. Last week I saw, I know his mom
had a hard time last week because I was at I was walking
by the house and she told me about this thing.
And so he's probably like going through a hard time because of
(36:15):
this. And, you know, they're going
through a hard time as a family.So he's like acting out like,
yeah, yo, Jim, man, like, calm down, dude.
Like, it's going to be all right.
Like, what can I do to help you and your family out this week?
Like, you guys have everything you need.
It's not that. It's not, it's not a, a gentle
way of handling policing, which is, you know, preferred.
Absolutely. Maybe.
(36:35):
And it. Depends on I guess it it.
That also depends on the case though, right?
Like you don't want to fucking walk up to a like a, you know,
psycho killer. Be like, hey, what happened to
you when you were a kid? Hey, buddy.
Let's process your feelings. Right, right.
But but I think that there's different ways of being able to
manage it. And I think that again, you want
to keep people safe. You want people to be able to do
this kind of job but not be ableto to do the natural human thing
(36:59):
of just have power struggles, Yeah.
And escalate situations when they could be de escalated.
And there's a lot of escalating versus de escalating.
Sergio Oh my God, dude. I feel like we could we could
the. Fucking longest douche canoe of
the week. Yeah.
And then? This might be our episode.
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna come back and we're
talking about company towns. We're gonna keep it short
because, you know, we did go on a little, little bit there.
(37:21):
But yeah, Gene, you're a fuckingdouche.
Douche. We'll take a real quick break.
When we come back, we're going to talk about company towns.
(37:42):
And so we're back. So we're talking about, you
know, douche came before and nowwe're going to talk about a
little bit a bit a bit about company towns.
So company towns are an interesting phenomena that came
out of the industrial revolution.
Essentially, companies would build towns to entice workers to
move in. So they would have a pool of
(38:03):
captive labor, right? I.
I have some friends that are possibly moving to a company
town, so continue really. Yes, Oh my.
If you were unlucky enough, for instance, to live in a company
town designed by a coal company coal mining company, you were
likely to just be a slave. Unfortunately, you were in a
(38:23):
slave camp more than you were ina town.
If you lived nearby Hershey, PA,though, which is a company town,
that still is a company town, which is pretty cool.
You were likely to have hot cocoa breaks and rotten teeth,
but at least you were not being treated like a slave.
Hershey, to this day, like I said, is a company town.
They even have a high school named after the guy.
(38:44):
So it's like a company town through and through.
One of the key differentiators between a company town versus
other places was that you didn'tpay in money as you normally
would elsewhere. You would use something called
script. Script.
So basically it's like credit, but you could only you spend it
at the company store. The store would sell items for
(39:05):
an incredibly marked up price. You couldn't leave the company
town, you had no other money, soyou had to spend your money
there. And some companies would
actually make more money based off from their employees buying
goods from their stores than theitems that they were actually
manufacturing. And some of these company towns
also served as an Ave. to keep newly freed slaves in bondage,
(39:25):
forcing black men to build railways and roads that
crisscross our country all for free.
So company towns as a idea are is a terrible thing.
And come Elon Musk. No, he this past week, the Texas
(39:48):
town and near the Rio Grande River, the Texas town has now
become called Starbase Texas. Elon Musk has built himself a
private town where he's one of his developmental centers, I
think manufacturing center. They've decided that they are
going to break away and have their own little little fiefdom
(40:12):
tech billionaires. Are buying up parcels of land
all over the place to have to live up there a libertarian
techno future for dreams. They're buying up these little
bits of land, having their digital industrial revolution
buying and selling goods under the under their eye.
So they have complete control ofwhatever happened to that town,
(40:33):
right. I'm thinking especially like
with the lack of regulations. I think we talked about this on
the episode where we talked specifically about Musk where he
was sludge is was pouring into out from underground tunnels in
in Las Vegas. Don't believe me though?
Read from the DWA Germany newspaper.
The move to incorporate Starbaseas its own city separates it
(40:56):
from Cameron County, which previously rejected plans to
build more housing for SpaceX employees.
Starbase will not be able to approve construction plans
itself. They don't have to go through
the through the local county government.
They can just do whatever the fuck they want to now.
Developments aren't going well with some.
Pakaya Hanjansa, Co, founder of the South Texas Environmental
(41:18):
Justice Network, voiced concern over the environmental impact
and warned of more destruction, which is usual for Elon Musk.
Go ahead. Well, and and the thing that's
so interesting about this is that the, and I don't know if
star bases the is this like in in Texas, close to like the Gulf
of of I guess fucking America now or whatever.
(41:41):
You. You.
You better call it what it's called the Gulf of America.
They call it the Gulf of America.
I say Gulf of Mexico, though I think it's still Golf of Mexico.
They don't play much golf of Mexico.
They'll play, they don't play 18O's.
They say 18 O's. They only play the black, the
back black 9, black 9, not even back 9 but.
(42:03):
It because I, what I have read about one of his, the towns that
he incorporated with the SpaceX was that it was a retirement
community. It was one of the affordable
places for people to retire to, OK, that was along the Gulf or
whatever. And then he came in to launch
(42:23):
SpaceX and stuff like that and. That sounds right though it.
Had a lot of adverse effects to the people and their access and
basically trying to sell people out and get them out of there.
Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more about that in
another, in another case that that I've got lined up for you.
But yeah, that sounds about right.
If if all the other things I've read about, yeah, that that
(42:44):
makes sense. More from Becca and Josa.
They would quote, they would attempt more illegal dumping.
They would build up their dangerous rocket operations and
cause more seismic activity 'cause our homes to shake and
that would destroy more of the wildlife habitat in the region.
(43:04):
The Change City status allows Starbase to control building and
permitting processes and avoid other regulatory red tape while
collecting taxes and writing local laws.
This isn't the only modern day example though.
Sergio, Bitcoin Bros and other libertarian technocrat
broligarch types are all having a renaissance of sorts.
(43:26):
If you would buying up land to create unregulated Bitcoin
blockchain driven versions of Hershey, PA.
On an island in Honduras, localsplay football fish for tropical
gar among the coral reef, all under the eye of a town called
Prospera. Honduras, in an effort to bring
(43:49):
economic investment to the country, had established some
interesting rules. In essence, if you're untethered
from local walls, you you would come in and bake a bunch of
investment into into the local like economic zones they would
set up. And then you were kind of
untethered from like, you know, Honduran law and so a bunch of
(44:12):
Bitcoin Bros, so. Kind of like this lawless areas
that that you could basically dowhatever, which kind of reminds
me that there's a lot of places in, I've seen some documentaries
in like Guyana and areas where there's a lot of gold mining and
it's basically like they have brothels, They have all this
(44:35):
stuff for mine. It's these like shanty towns
that are created for this industry where where people set
up and it destroys the environment.
And you know, there's a lot of not, it's very good things that
go on, but people. Still need this Honduras, you
know, they have those economic zones so that these people who
(44:55):
run this town called Prosperic do the exact same thing.
Essentially, you pay for everything in Bitcoin, kind of
like script, right? Everything's paid in Bitcoin.
They control the Bitcoin investment like they have a
Bitcoin ATM. You have to pay with their
version of like a a cryptocurrency, whatever it is.
(45:16):
I think you do it in Bitcoin andthen you do it in Prospero Coin.
So like in Prospero, Coin has less transaction fees, so you're
incentivized to use it, you knowwhat I mean?
Is it almost like sharecropping?Yeah, a lot like sharecropping.
Sharecropping, right? A lot like sharecropping
basically, like when the AfricanAmericans were freed that, you
know, they got to work the land,but then they had to, they were
(45:39):
basically indentured servants tothat land because they had to
pay everything to be able to work that land because they
didn't have the tools to be ableto do it.
And so they were basically. Kind of just got to stay there.
Slavery. Kind of got to stay there and
work off your debt that. Continues to grow as you work
and you never. And they devalue the amount of
(46:01):
money that each crop was worth the year after year.
So you'd have to just keep on working longer and longer in
order to pay it off. Yeah, no, that sounds about
right. Yeah, it's something like that,
something like that. Sorry.
Something slight. Something slight, but the most
incentivizing piece of all of this is there are virtually no
taxes. And the libertarian tech Bros of
(46:24):
the world love that premise, right?
So it's a libertarian wet dream,as I was saying, libertarian.
They want to shoot just all the fucking ketamine that they can
do. Free of regulation.
Rooms. No laws, yeah, no taxes.
And of course, this is LED and resulted in the local
populations being removed from their land because these folks
(46:47):
who come in and say, hey, we're buying this shit and the local
population. If you're buying it or we're
going to kill you. Essentially or we'll.
Do both. Or we'll incentivize the
Honduran government when we whenthey set up these laws that the
Honduran president at the time ended up going to jail due to
(47:07):
fraud and corruption because of these economic zones that he set
up. And he was.
It's a witch hunt. It's fake news.
He was using the these economic zones as investment.
It's fake, folks, I can tell youthat.
I know what that means. It's.
(47:28):
You don't need to be bilingual to know what that means, folks.
But no. So, yeah, as I was saying, the
former president went to jail based on off of some fraud
charges where he was basically funneling money through these
economic zones and allowing these folks to just do whatever
they wanted. So they were this town, Prospera
(47:49):
went to war essentially with thelocal population, bought up all
of their land, forced them off of the land and then tried to
hire them on. So essentially it operates kind
of like a resort. So now they were, you know, you
know, doing some everything thatthey were.
(48:09):
All the food they needed to eat was coming from their own little
farms that they had subsistence farming.
They were like, they were able to survive.
They were able to make enough money.
They were still relatively poor in that way.
But they didn't live a life where they were being like
harassed and harangued by these colonizers who were coming into
(48:30):
their land and going, we want this property.
And they're like, well, no, likeit's they're financially
enslaved. Private property isn't a thing
here. We like we're we're communally
living. What are you talking about?
But that didn't matter to these libertarian psychopaths.
So the ultra rich tech colonizers move in, bring tons
of money to the area, displace the local population.
(48:52):
The Honduran government's like, Oh no, we want this.
We want economic incentive for people to come here.
So let's just keep allowing it to happen.
Now, in the last Honduras election, there was a
progressive socialist who got elected and is trying to change
these laws. But these tech Bros have sued
(49:13):
for over $40 billion against theHonduran government to slow this
thing down in the court system. Because the way that the laws
were written in Honduras at the time, they had to honor this,
this contract that this prosperity town is for the next
50 years. So it's like this insane
(49:34):
agreement between libertarians and a foreign government.
It's just, I don't know, it's, it's just a story that repeats
over and over and over again, right?
It's just this just insane need for wealth and it's
Machiavellian, right? Like the end justifies the means
(49:58):
and you can do whatever you wantto do if you get rich.
And if you're pulling yourself up quote UN quote by the
bootstraps, then then you're good.
Yeah. And it just, it drives me crazy.
What What are your thoughts about taxes?
I no one wants to pay them but. But.
(50:20):
But you do because it builds a better society if they're used
where they're supposed to be used, not to enforce and like
engage, you know, government contracts for the likes of Peter
Thiel and fucking Elon Musk. If they're used for like, I
don't know, helping the I don't have children, but I want a
smart, I want a smart populace. I want my my money to go towards
(50:42):
public schools. I want people to have books for
free. I want to be able to have roads,
right? I want these things.
Pick up my trash, my recycling yes be able to drink water.
Yes, clean water is a great. Thing.
And these are all things. Waste treatment plants.
That I I think people don't understand how incredible,
incredible it is to be able to take a shit and flush it down
(51:05):
the toilet. With toilet paper.
With toilet paper or a bidet toilet paper that's.
Oh, no, no, as bidet boys, Yeah,we.
Don't. No, no, we don't.
It's a bad. Kind of situation.
What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, we're so euro now.
But those, those are huge thingsthat we take for granted on a,
on a daily basis. When I drove here after a big
(51:27):
ice storm and I went over a hugepothole, it was repaired within
a week. That's, you know, that's taxes
and that's we need to pay. And, and I don't like paying
taxes, but I also don't really like the fact that people that
make billions and billions of dollars don't pay any taxes.
So I'm fine doing my share, but if they're doing their share.
(51:51):
If they were doing their share then you and I would have.
To there would be no fucking deficit.
And that's what it is, is is they want to be really, really
rich. And not have to worry about
paying anything on it. Anything.
Yeah, they want to do it all forfree.
Yeah, but it's your fault as a middle class individual.
(52:12):
Trying to do the right thing, you know, working in society,
doing a public sector job, yeah.That's it's your fault, it's
your fault, man, it's your faultthat this country is so bad
right now. All the.
All the kids think that they canD.
EI. They go to class and they come
out. They come in a girl, they come
out a boy. They say these things, they do
(52:32):
it. They that's where your tax
dollars are going, folks. In reality, though, that's just
the tip of the iceberg. Peter Thiel's underground
libertarian base in New Zealand,for instance, is another one of
these examples. The tech Bros building out water
rolled type colonies out at sea.And I highly encourage you to
look into something called seasteading.
(52:52):
We're not going to cover it here.
I've added a lot of links. It's absolutely insane.
But here I'll I'll give you a little bit of a little bit of a
taste here from the New York Times.
There are those who have criticized the movements
libertarian bent and called it avanity project for the rich.
Peter Newman and Australian professor of sustainability went
(53:15):
as far as to say, describe one proposed project as apartheid of
the worst kind, a dream in whichthe wealthy can remove
themselves to futuristic ocean villages and sneer at the rest
of the world. There's a lot more that we could
cover. Again, I've added links.
There's going to be a video linkin there too.
I highly encourage you to look at it.
(53:36):
But really what we're talking about here with, with these, you
know, fiefdoms that they're trying to set up is that they
think they're better than the rest of us.
They, they feel that they know that.
And they're getting reinforced by people fucking, you know,
glad handing and, you know, retweeting their shit.
And you know, right now the House is about to give one of
(54:01):
the largest tax cuts to the top 1% of all time.
Well, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, which is going to
plunge this country into medicaldebt and poverty, which have
(54:22):
been one of the most successful and best Social Security systems
and programs that we have set upin this country to prevent that.
And we are going to do that so the top 1% can get richer.
And when Donald Trump says that you don't need $30, you can just
need one or two, right? So this is where we're at right
(54:46):
now. We are allowing rich people to
get richer under the guise of saying that it's DI.
We need to cut all this shit because this is a reason why
we're too woke. And this is after the Democrats
caved on staple coin regulationsthat are going to allow for
(55:07):
Donald Trump, who's already madebillions of dollars off of his
own stable coin, to make even more money to enrich himself so
that the Saudis can pay him under the table.
Because it's deregulated. We live in it.
We live in, you know, God, the book that I just got done with
it's. Going to be a feudalistic
society. We're we're going to be in
different kingdoms. We're it.
(55:29):
It's going to be very we're. Crinkling the the tinfoil and
we're putting it on our heads right now.
We're hoping for the alien invasion.
I don't know. That's tinfoil thinking anymore.
I think we're, we are. We're close, man.
We're close the. Greg Greg is so deadpan and
(55:51):
serious right now. He he's looking into my soul
while he says. Yeah, like I'm, I, I mean it
when I, you know, the, the executive order that got signed,
what, 10-11 days ago, essentially opening up the gates
for martial law. We went to a protest.
We talked about this last week. If, if in, in summers are always
(56:16):
the hardest time of the year fornot the hardest time, but it is
always the hottest time in termsof protests.
That's when things get violent. That's when things typically get
smashed to shit. It's going to happen.
And they're already locking up mayors.
They're already locking up localgovernment officials.
They're locking up attorneys. But yeah, I know, Sergio.
(56:38):
I feel like we could, as we always do.
I feel like we could go on forever.
We do. But what are your final thoughts
on this man? I'm, I'm, I'm going to leave.
I'm going to let you wrap us up.You know, that's so unfair
because I always come so unprepared and you have these
elegant words which I believe like half of them, you don't
even understand. What they mean?
(57:01):
As you're throwing out these Latin.
I'm not Donald Trump. I'm not Donald Trump, they say.
I know the biggest. Words.
I know all the words they say. Dog, person, man.
Cat and I can repeat them forwards and backwards.
Dog, person, many words, many words.
I, I just think, you know, overall this is just, this is
(57:22):
stuff that we need to get peoplefired up about.
We need to get people to understand that.
And, you know, I'm culpable, notculpable, but I need to, in my
own profession, not spout my ownpolitical views, but I need to
talk to the students I work withabout politics and voting and
(57:46):
being able to do the things thatwe have the absolute right to do
and that we should be doing. And that a lot of the countries
have voting days where nobody works and does stuff.
And we need to be able to go back to stuff like this where
everything is closed down for one or two days where people can
vote so that they can go and have access to stuff like this.
(58:08):
Because it's super, super scary that we are really, really
flirting with. It's kind of the end of our
civilization. And I guess all great
civilizations collapse at some point.
But, you know, I hope it doesn'thappen within my, my, my, my
(58:29):
lifetime, but it's going to happen because nothing lasts
forever. And that might just be the
radical acceptance that, you know, we've tried.
We, we're, we're doing our thing.
We're doing everything we can to, you know, be able to be out
there and be activists or, But at some point, things are just
going to happen when they happenand you won't have that locus of
(58:52):
control. Yeah, yeah.
Well listeners, thank you for enjoying another episode at the
Extremes, but no, for real if you're in.
Mental health crisis. Please call whatever local.
This is May is mental health awareness month, right?
Too right. Like so please, if you are
struggling, was it 999? That's the number for mental
(59:13):
health services or whatever. I'll put it in the show.
Note. I, I, I'm not a therapist, so I
don't know off the top of my head, but there is a line that
you can get, you can get in touch with if you are having a
crisis of any sort or even if you're not having a crisis and
you just need to talk about yourtalk.
To somebody get yeah, get connected to therapist, talk to
a friend, talk to a family member that you trust and
process these things. Don't hold them inside and do
(59:35):
something about. It yes yes my God I remember my
grandfather told me something I was relaying this story to a
friend of mine the other night it is about understanding what
your circumstances and then trying to figure out what you're
going to do about it and if you know that you're not doing well
my God it there is no shame in asking for help and it's
somebody who didn't it's. Not going to get better by
itself. It I'm going to put my hand up
(59:57):
real quick and just say it. This is a full disclaimer.
I know we said we're going to leave with Sergio's final
thoughts, but I'm going to give you the last one here.
As somebody who fought it for like 10 years, it finally called
up to me. And when it called up to me, it
was not good. So take the time to take care of
yourself because God Almighty, if you don't have yourself, you
don't have anything. You got nothing.
(01:00:18):
You got, you got nothing. Not like me, I've got gold
toilets. I got gold toilets.
I got the. Taj Mahal.
Oh wait, no I don't. I got rid of that.
It's. Bankrupt.
I use that as collateral for Barons.
Mini Mercedes. They say many.
(01:00:39):
You can have 30 Mercedes toys. No, but American children only
need to have one, maybe 2. You get one or two dolls.
You get one or two dolls. Listeners, thank you for
enjoying another episode At the Extremes.
Do you subscribe? Please share it.
We're getting a lot of momentum here recently.
So all your efforts in sharing the show are really we're we're
(01:01:00):
connecting with a lot of people.Connect with this on Blue Sky.
Oh my God, at the Extremes, pod folks, we're getting a lot of
people connecting with us there too.
Well, and I would say also too, if you are interested in being a
guest or wanting to share a point of view.
Yeah, reach out to us. Reach out to us, we love having
guests and being able to banter with fans.
(01:01:24):
And how many? Fans, fans, fans indicates that
like they're fanatical about theshow.
We can barely get people to like, vote on a poll.
So we can barely get people to vote in a United States
election. So yeah.
I mean that that kind of fits. Well, these people are all
losers. Not, not our listeners.
(01:01:44):
They're great. They're the best.
They're the best. They're big league.
Doesn't give them too much credit.
Sir, no, we're giving them lots of credit.
OK. But yes, at us, we will.
We, we love to talk to you. Yeah.
And have you on the show. So.
And if you know Barbara Walter the the author, please put me in
contact. Barbara Walter.
God almighty, she's she's. Barbara Walter.
(01:02:06):
She's an excellent writer, but check the show notes and until
next week. Educate yourself Bros.
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