We Are Home with Ray Suarez

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
It is nine thirty on a Thursday night, and you
were tuned into Beltwad Radio and beyond, which can mean
one and only thing. This is Chipchat. Welcome to Chipchat, everybody.
I'm chip Chazz.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I'm ted you just told him.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Or something like that. Yeah, tes is h He's coming
in hot, He'll be here, I promise. Welcome to the show.
We do have a guest this week. Ray Suarez is
going to be joining us a little bit later. He's
got a new book out which we want to talk
to him about, and we will. You know, he's an
expert on jobs. He's been writing a lot about employment

(01:33):
for years now, so we're going to ask him about that.
Uh yeah, you know. Also this week, Trump is doing
the fascism out loud. Texas reacts to Internet rumors, speaking
of which four Chan got hacked, which is hilarious. Jade
Vance and Penguins both finally have something in common, and

(01:55):
sometimes rockets do work. But before before we get to
all of that stuff, I just do want to say that,
you know, for years now, especially in the Trump era,
we've been sort of warning that we may be coming
to some sort of like crisis point, an inflection, or

(02:19):
constitutional crisis, something where our court system and our legal
frameworks don't really have a way to get around them.
We are, We're there, We're right there. Here's why we're
going to talk about a man named kil Mar Abrego Garcia.
He is a Maryland resident. He's local to us. He

(02:42):
was snatched by ice and deported that on those flights
to El Salvador, he was deported with a group of people,
many of which it seems that their status is are questionable.
The flights themselves were ordered not to take off and

(03:05):
to turn back by a federal judge. That order was
roundly ignored. It turns out that mister Brigo Garcia also
has a form of deportation protection. He was ordered not
to be deported to El Salvador because it would be
unsafe for him because of gang retaliation, because he fled

(03:29):
El Salvador trying to flee the gangs who were trying
to recruit him and press him into service, which.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
He didn't want to do.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
So he had a he had to do not deport
order legally adjudicated by the courts, and that didn't stop
the Trump people. We're now in court kind of going
over that. So we're gonna we're gonna kind of cover
those things, but we we are at it. We are
at a crisis that's going on in Leon, Leon County, UH, Florida.

(04:01):
Two big things happen. One the son of a sheriff's
deputy went on a shooting rampage and shot up everybody
at Florida State University. And two they have in ICE
attention in Leon County, Florida right now, an American citizen
who was stopped under a law that is currently being

(04:25):
suspended because it's unconstitutional. So we have local Florida or
Florida State troopers detaining people based on laws that are unlawful,
that have been found to be unconstitutional, then calling ICE
and ICE detaining an American who was born in the

(04:48):
United States while his mother is in court, showing them
his Social Security card and birth certificate, which they admit
shows that he's a Marria. However, he's still in ICED attention.
He was still in NICED attention for like five days.
So we're here. This is not the theoretical. This is

(05:11):
not Oh Chip is worrying, Oh Chip is an alarmist.
This is this is now. We're we're we're here, so
I will accept various I told you so, cakes and
apologies from everybody else later. Right now, what we have
to do is fight. There'll be time for snacks anyway.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Hey, teses, he just told them. It sounds like nothing's
going on.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Nothing's going on. Well, we took a week off, I think, right, Yeah,
as tradition dictates, when we're off, nothing happens.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Nothing happens. So yeah, it sounded like you were informing
everybody that the crisis is now.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
The crisis is now. We're going to get to that
a little bit more before we get into talking to Ray.
We're still in the intro part of the show. Before
we get into all of that. I do want to
say that last weekend I went to experience a little
bit of culture enjoy myself with the family. So we
went out to the Jazz and Blossoms Festival, which is

(06:23):
in conjunction with the DC Department of Parks and Recreation
and also the Words Beats in Life Festival kind of
all going on together, and so we were out there
to go see our friend Patrick and the poemcs. They
were sort of headlining the event or hosting the event.
I guess is the right thing to say a lot

(06:45):
of the show's friends were out there. Drew Kid was
out there. He played a set with the Black People
Don't Swim and he was amazing on the keys as
Yeah as always guys, just an absolute inspiration. Uh Stan
was out there, do me. Wright was out there, Artemis
was there. We saw a lot of a lot of friends.

(07:06):
It was a good time. Kids got face paint, you know,
we got silkscreen T shirts. It was all like the
old school Franklin Park. It was it Franklin Park, Yeah,
Franklin Square and which has been rebuilt since they removed
all of the people who were resided there.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
I watched that happen firsthand because I was working down
there during the time, and I was.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Like, oh, they did this really quick. They did. But
they installed some bathrooms, which is kind of nice.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
The bathrooms, and then they have those like it's it's
set up because it's like almost like you could almost
like eat lunch, not like standing up. But they have
like weird type of like to I guess accommodate the
people who used to work down there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Yeah, it's got all kinds of uh and it's got
like some water features, you know, like that'll that'll be
active in the summer months, a little playing around the area.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
There.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
It was like adult swings. I feel like I've seen it.
I didn't see any adults the further in the farthest
corner of that, towards on fourteenth and what would that
the ice Street. I feel like in the far corner
of that, because I've seen adults out there.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Maybe I wasn't paying attention to that, but any or
it was covered up by like some of the gear
that they do. But in any case, Yeah, so we
were out there. We had a really good time and
and got to experience some some culture and some poetry
and some some dancing, and some some music, DJ's spinning
and of course some some mcs and it was just

(08:44):
a good time and you can yeah, and I was
marveling at it. I was like, oh, look, this is
what they're trying to destroy. They just don't want families
having fun, you know. And you know, I do want
to say something to make a fine point about that,
because a lot of times I remember during the Biden
administration where the Trump people would say, oh, well, the

(09:05):
Democrats just don't want you to have X, right, or
they just are trying to make rules for the sake
of making rules, which never made any sense. But now
I'm saying something. I want to make sure that I
finish that sentence. Republicans and Trump people don't want families
to have fun, not because they just hate that, but

(09:27):
because it represents the freedom and the opposite of the
autocracy and the kleptocracy that they want to perpetrate. That
They they don't just want to stop us from having
culture for the sake of it. They want us to
stop having culture because it helps us to be human
and to organize, and they don't want us to be

(09:47):
organized because they want to steal all of the shit.
So that is the end of that sentence. Don't ever
forget that the reason that they want to oppress you
is ultimately to take all your stuff and put everybody
else in poverty and bondage for the rest of forever.
That is where they are going with this. So just

(10:08):
so that we don't sound like them and want to
sound like them anyway. Also, I wore the shirt that weekend.
It got a lot of attention. I don't know why. Yes,
it's good shirt. I was just chilly, you know, It's
like a little chili day. Neither yeah, well you know,
I don't know if you can see. Also, yeah, it's

(10:30):
got Lady Liberty given a given little little baby Trump
the boot. There you go.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
Oh he's in it. Okay, Yeah, I don't think I've
always seen just the I feel like when you've won
this shirt, it's always been when we did this virtually,
I don't I don't ever remember see I remember seeing
the shirt multiple times, I don't ever remember seeing the
Lady Liberty with.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
The Well, there it is. We're doing We're doing everything tonight. Okay.
So yeah, we went over like, what's gonna happen in
the show. It's gonna be pretty crazy. We do have jokes.
We wrote a lot of jokes. It's gonna be those
are gonna be good. I do promise that, and uh
and all of that. So do you do you have

(11:16):
a word? Tes? Do I have a word? Yeah, I
gotta work. Okay, I've got a word. So sit back,
grab some time cards. It's panic time. You're listening to
the best show, the only show, Chipchat on Beltway Radio

(11:39):
and Beyond. All right, welcome back to chip Chat here

(12:32):
on Beltwegh Radio and Beyond. I'm Heroes. Chip with Me
is tez Let's all right, So before we get into
like all of the other things we do, need to
just sort of set them background information, make sure everybody
knows what's going on. And I'm gonna just say for
the record, like going forward, even though we're gonna be
using a lot of Spanish names and words here, that

(12:54):
I'm gonna use baseball Spanish just so that like all
of the non Spanish speaking uh gringos can like follow
along and don't get caught up in the accent.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Which is funny because you're very.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Fluent and I did a wedding in Spanish tonight actually,
so yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
That's hilarious that the Cortes speaks no Spanish and the
and the Jewish kid speaks uh yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
So that being said, we're going to talk about Kilmar
Abrego Garcia, notreo Garcia. But so just like, calm down
on that.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
You've already offended people by saying it the other way.

Speaker 4 (13:40):
I've offended everybody both directions, right, exactly, everybody.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
It's that's how we like it around here, of course.
Equal So all right, let's get a little background about
mister Abrego Garcia. He fled El Salvador as a young kid.
He was sixteen years old. After the Barrio eighteen, not
MS thirteen, a different gang tried to press him into service.
They basically were out there, you know, murdering people and

(14:08):
his cousins and friends and whatever, and they came after
him and they said, hey, your choices are join or die.
So he fled and he came to America. He did
cross the border illegally. He ended up here in the
DC area, in Prince George's County, Maryland, where he, you know,
got a job. He became a sheet metal apprentice.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
You know.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
So he's he's like, not just in a regular job,
but in a trade and he's he's on a path
towards like a certification. Well he's already certified apprentice, but
then he's on a path towards a like a licensed professional.
I myself am a journeyman tradesman, so you know, and
he's doing sheet metal, which I'm air conditioning. The sheet
metal guys make our duckwork. And without them, we are

(14:55):
totally totally screwed.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
I was gonna get to that point, but anyways, continued.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
And if you are a tin bender is what we
call them, we love you because we are bad at that,
and our hands get all cut up and we don't
know what we're doing. And tin benders can like tuck
seams in Pittsburgh's without even looking and it's like watching magic.

(15:20):
So I'm just impressed with that personally. Anyway, he's working
as such. He got married to an American woman. He
has children with that American woman who are natural born
US citizens, and he was in his car with his

(15:41):
five year old son, who is nonverbal and autistic, when
he was pulled over by the cops for speeding or
something like that, some minor offense. They then later turned
him in to ICE and that's where we are now.

(16:03):
The ICE people, well, I'm sorry, that's not where we are.
That he got turned into ice. Ice was like, hey,
we're going to deport you, and he's like, well, please
don't because if you do, the gangs will kill me.
And they were like, oh okay. So he had a
hearing and the immigration court determined that it was not

(16:26):
safe to send him back to El Salvador, so he
was granted what's.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Called judge A judge has stated in the United States,
judge a federal judges.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Said, well, a federal administrative judge Immigration. Judge Immigration, yeah, uh,
stated that he can't be deported to E Salvator. They
didn't say he can't deport him to like some other Yes,
but you specifically can't send him to El Salvador. That's
not where he can go. So that is he had

(17:00):
this protective order and basically was like living his life,
going around doing whatever. Later he gets picked up by
ice at a construction or where he was standing around. No,
that was the first time. I'm sorry, he gets picked
up by ice for something that they know his name
because he's got this protective order and they go and

(17:22):
they grab him and they say he's a gang member.
We have to deport it. And we know very little
about this evidence that they had to convince anybody that
he was a gang member to get this order of deportation.
Two things about that. One, they got the order of
deportation while also acknowledging he had to do not deport order.

(17:46):
So I'm not sure what judge signed off on that
deportation order.

Speaker 5 (17:50):
And part of the reason we don't know which judge
is because the government has so far refused to give
up that information in court, despite the federal judge saying
you gotta give me the information.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
The second thing about this deportation bit is that he
was deported like on the planes that Judge Bosburg said
had to turn around.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
A second second judicial flag.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yes, and let's add a third thing. Yeah, a lot
of people are saying like, oh, well, he's been accused
of being a gang member. Well, first of all, he
hasn't been convicted of anything, so you don't know if
he's a gang member or not. Second of all, in
that third piece of information, we're second part of the
third thing, and the big thing. The allegations of his

(18:43):
gang affiliation mostly come from this one Prince George's County
police officer, who is currently himself incarcerated because he was
beating on and shaking down prostateots and then having sex
with them. And so I don't know that he's like

(19:07):
the most credible of witnesses. It sounds a little like
he was just given up names. And the accusations that
they made is that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member
of MS thirteen. Remember he was originally being pressed by
Barrio eighteen, different gang rival gang, and that he's a
member of the clique that's based in New York city

(19:30):
and further upstate, a place that he has never been,
and there's no record of him ever living there or
going there. So it it strains credulity, I think, is
the word that some of the judges have used. That's
all just the setup, right, I was to say that

(19:51):
there's a setup, So then what happened.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
There's a few things that's happened since then. I mean one,
the Trump administration has been ordered to bring him back,
right in order to facilitate his return, to facilitate him
to me, I think it judge speak for you have
improperly removed somebody from the country that was by a

(20:18):
judge told to not be necessarily removed, but you've removed
him to the one place they're not supposed to go to. Right.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Not only that admitted that it was an administrative careor yes,
that got him there in the first place. And not
only that, but the actual detention and like arrest have
no basis. There's no warrant, there's no judicial warrant. There
there is no affidavit charging documents or any probable cause

(20:51):
that would have made it legal for them to grab
him in the first place. So if this wasn't even
that he wasn't out of the country or any other thing.
The most basic of facts, as lawyers would say, you
have detained this individual with no cause.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
There's no rule of law is gone. That is what
we like. That is where we're at, because I mean,
the Trump administration not only is defied this but is
left basically in the sense of the face of the
judge with the President.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Laughed at him on Twitter or at the judge that
everybody on Twitter. So uh, here's what what then further
happened is right, they deported him to l Salvador. He's
in Seacott. The only way we actually know that is
because his wife recognized like a recognize him in the

(21:46):
video of the guys being marched through there, which is
crazy essentially, and then okay, he's there. The government admitted
that it was in a erroneous deportation, that they made
an error, but they're just saying, well, he's in a
sovereign nation, he's a citizen of that sovereign nation, and

(22:11):
we're under no obligation nor do we have any ability
to get him to come back. So Judge Paul is
Innis of Maryland District Court Federal District Court for the
State of Maryland was like, oh no, no, you need
to bring him back immediately. None of this tracks right.
You have no legal justification for this. The Trump people

(22:34):
appealed that decision. He went to the Fourth Circuit. The
Fourth Circuit was extremely swift in their response last week.
They were like, unanimous, bring him the fuck back now.
So the Trump administration then appealed that up to the Supremes,
who came back nine oh right, nine oh. That includes

(22:55):
neighbor Clarence and Sam and Alito nine oh, saying that
oh no, this is not okay. You can't suspend habeas corpus.
You can't like none of this tracks you. And the
only thing they took issue with is that the lower
court judge used the words effectuate and facilitate his return.

(23:18):
They said, you can't use the word effectuate, but you
can use the word facilitate. So she amends her order
to facilitate, and the Supremes send this case back to
Paul Zenus's court and say you better comply with what
she says. So she orders them to show how they
have facilitated his return, and to date their answer has

(23:41):
been this middle finger and this middle finger. They are
not divulging any information. They refuse to comply with her orders.
So she said, okay, deposition time. We're gonna let anybody
who needs to depose, anybody who they think they need
to depose, give me the names of every federal official
that could have possibly been involved in this case, from

(24:04):
the lowest level ICE agent all the way up to
the president. And the government was like, fuck you, we're appealing.
So they go to the Fourth Circuit and tonight, tonight alone,
the Fourth Circuit sent back this response that read like
like a Comedy Central roast of bad lawyering. They were like,
you need to do what the fuck the court said? Immediately,

(24:27):
this flies in the face of everything everything. There's absolutely
no justification for any appeal here and go comply with
the order. Now, of course they're going to appeal that decision,
so that that that's going to go to the Supreme Court.
So like it seems like every single piece of this
is going to be you know, up up, up, down
down down, up, up, up, down, down down, And that's

(24:49):
what they want because the question.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Because but here goes the question is that the rule
of law is broken, but the only way to fight
it is to continue to use the rule of law
right through the appeals, which is long right these and
this is moving faster than most things. Yep, it's moving
a lot, but it's still like it's so it's such

(25:14):
a long press.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
Every day this is happening. Kill mar Brego Garcia is
still yeah, concentration camp in El.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Salvador, and that's what it is. That's what it is.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
It's exactly what it is. So nobody's gotten out of there.
By the way, there's no former inmates of Seacott. There's
just dead inmates. So it's so crazy, man, you know.
And the the photos that we've seen from there, you know,
they they look fairly recognizable, especially that I think yours
and my people, So we we have seen those images

(25:50):
every day that this goes on. The Trump people are
sort of getting what they want, which is that he's
not here. He is he is there and they are
throwing up their hands now too. Things are happening with
this one. Yes, you're right, we're fighting this on a
legal front, right because we have to. Even if ultimately
we know that they aren't going to comply, we need
to at least check the box so that we are

(26:10):
on the right side of history when all the shit
completely falls apart. But the second thing that's happening is
the Trump people are building up their playbook. What they're
figuring out and depending on how Scotis rules on some
of this stuff, is they can extra judicially deport people,
including American citizens, which they're actively talking about this week,

(26:32):
to places that they are pretty sure the courts can't reach,
and then say, hey, hands tied. Sorry, can't do anything
about this. This dovetails with the situation that's happening in
Florida in Tallahassee right now in Tallahassee, or this week
in tallahasse Here in the county where Tallahassee lives, Leone County,

(26:53):
there was a young man who's twenty years old who
doesn't speak English as his native language. He speaks a
Mayan dialect as his native language, but he was born
in the United States. He has a first certificate and
Social Security card to prove that he was picked up
by the Florida State Police because Florida passed a law
saying it's illegal to be to enter Florida without papers.

(27:17):
That law has been struck down by the courts two
weeks ago and is currently not in force. But that
didn't stop DeSantis' gestapo from picking this guy up as
he crossed the Florida Georgia line and they whisked him
off to jail and charged him with being in Florida

(27:38):
without being a US citizen, or something to the equivalent there.
His mom shows up in court, shows his first certificate
and all of his ID and they go, well, that
does seem to check out. Unfortunately, we've already turned him
over to Ice, and Ice is like, we're not letting
him go. And the judge is like, I can't order
Ice to do anything because I'm a state judge. And

(27:59):
they're fed what's happening there? Right, The Trump people are
figuring out that if they can move fast enough, they
can out maneuver the courts. The courts are slow. The
courts are and they're meant to be slow. Yeah, exactly,
so they.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
The other branch of government. The way it's written down,
isn't supposed to go completely ape shit and defy the court.
This isn't even in previous administrations, right, even in the
previous Trump administration. Right, there have been times where there're

(28:36):
be in court orders, and I think that was this
frustration in the first administration people would follow through because
it's like, well, the court said, like, that's just how
it works. And now he has challenged completely how all
of this works.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
And he's working out. The thing that that we said
all of this time ago, that I said have been saying,
is that he's just gonna not comply. He's gonna say
you and what army?

Speaker 6 (29:03):
And we are now here, we are at the and
now and now this is where the government now, for
one way or another, one way or another, will.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Now have to evolve. The court now has to look
and say, all right, what do I have in my arsenal?
And again this has never been done.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Before so well, and they don't have much. They don't
have much. Let's let's uh move this story along in
terms of some actual facts. Let's go dateline, Washington, d C.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Chief US District Judge James E. Boseburg of Washington, DC,
on Wednesday, that's yesterday, said that he would launch proceedings
to determine whether any Trump administration officials defied his order
not to remove Venezuelan migrants from the country based on
the Wartime Alien Enemies Act and should face criminal contempt charges.

(29:57):
Quote the Constitution does not talk sor willful disobedience of
judicial orders, especially by officials of a coordinate branch key
word there, who have sworn an oath to uphold said Constitution.
The judge said in a written ruling, he made sure
to write it down this time, because the last time
they said that it didn't count because he didn't write

(30:19):
it down, which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
He went on to say that allowing political leaders to
defy court judgments would make quote, a solemn mockery of
the Constitution itself. Boseburg's order is the latest development in
a broader showdown between the Trump regime and the federal judiciary,
which has blocked or slowed many of the White House's

(30:40):
far reaching actions. The Supreme Court did rule this month
that plaintiffs in the Venezuela migrant case filed their lawsuit
in the wrong venue, but not that it was without merit.
So the Supreme Court said that these guys had to
file their lawsuits in the jurisdiction in which they were detained,
not in the jurisdiction where the law was broken. That's
a little iffy, but but they also said in that

(31:02):
same ruling that each and every one of them was
entitled to challenge their detention individually, not as a class,
but individually, and that the government had to respond to
those The government had so far disregarded that part of
it entirely and refused to respond to any of the
challenges that have been levied in court, which now has
to take place in Texas. Judge Boseburg sort of went

(31:24):
on to explain that quote it didn't matter, right. Boseburg
said that the ruling did not excuse Trump administration officials
from filing his orders while they were still in place.
He characterized the administration's decision to proceed with the removal
flights on March fifteenth and sixteenth despite his order not
to as quote willful disregard sufficient for the court to

(31:48):
conclude that probable cause exists to find the government in
criminal contempt.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
And the key thing here, which I think will will
be a through line right for any of these challenges,
is when the president along with members right of the cabinet,
like they swear the oath to the Constitution. So what
this is going to come down to is one grand

(32:16):
case in the Supreme Court, right, and I don't know
what cases ends up being right, where does the failure
to uphold the constitution mean anything?

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Right?

Speaker 2 (32:28):
I don't know what that case will be, right, but
there will be the case then, because again, when someone
will argue that the Trump administration, whoever, isn't they've sworn
this oath and they're not upholding it. What is it
the willful what was it? You just quote it on
their willful.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Willful disregards for the court to conclude that probable cause
exists to find the government and criminal contempt.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
So that gets appealed right eventually to the Supreme Court. Right, right?
I don't know why it shouldn't even be appealed, right,
because that that shouldn't have to go anywhere, Right, It
shouldn't be that. No, they're in contempt because they've already
did xyz.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Yeah, but there's a wrinkle to that. Contempt is a charge.
It has to be prosecuted, and the DOJ would not
prosecute the charge against themselves. So the judge said that
he would give the government an opportunity to remedy the matter,
such as by asserting custody of individuals so that they
can exercise their right to challenge their removals. A step

(33:27):
that would not necessarily require their release or return, but
you know, would at least follow the rule of law. Otherwise,
Boseburg said he would direct it to identify the officials
who knowingly defied his previous order. If it declined, the
judge said he would see sworn declarations from witnesses or
testimony under oath so that he could refer the matter

(33:47):
for prosecution, and if the Justice Department declined to act,
he would appoint a lawyer.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
To do so.

Speaker 1 (33:54):
So contempt is a little different from other crimes, right,
the judge can kind of prosecute this a little bit,
and he gets to decide on his own deal, so
he can call witnesses. He's the one who's building the
case for contempt, and then he's the one who's gonna
refer that to the prosecutors. If the DOJ doesn't want
to bring the case as federal prosecutors, which they wouldn't,

(34:18):
he can appoint a special prosecutor to bring it on
behalf of the government, even if the government is declining
to do it, because remember, the government is like, you know,
the Constitution itself, right exactly. But then there's a problem.
It's in federal court. It's not in a state court.
So let's say this special prosecutor has all the evidence.

(34:40):
The Trump people come in and admit, yeah, we sent
the fucking planes. What are you gonna do about it?
And they go, all right, we find you in content,
nail him to the wall. What's Trump gonna do? Pardon
off you go. So he's gonna be able to find
plenty of people who are gonna be carrying that pardon
already written for him in their back pockets to go
in and say whatever the fuck they want. This is

(35:02):
where it ends. They're doing the thing right in front
of all of this. There isn't I don't I don't
have like a better way to tell anybody what to do.
I don't think that there's enough convincing anybody showing them
to be liars or showing them to be flagrantly violating
the constitution that's going to change one single thing. They

(35:26):
are in charge. They're not going anywhere.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Then it means that more people get snatched up in
the street, more American people find them to be outrageous,
more American people go through the streets themselves, and then
again this ends in violence.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
It will. It will because they are gonna snatch people
like you and me. They're gonna snatch anybody they disagree with.
I was talking to some lawyers. They are worried that
they are going to start being charged with harboring illegal
immigrants simply for working to protect their rights, you know,
and asylum claims. I said, what's the point of charging them.

(36:01):
They're just gonna snatch you up and throw you out
of the country and say that you can't come back in.
And you know, they're just going to extra judicious judicially
behave there. They are outside the bounds already, They've they've
willingly said. So I don't know what to tell anybody.

(36:24):
You know, everybody do what you think you need to
do best. But I would, I would heavily recommend preparation,
for lack of a better word than I don't.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Want to say that.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yeah, hey, Brian is our guest in the green room.
Green room.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Now that we've.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
Oh, great, well, let's do this. Let's take a quick break,
and when we come back, we're going to get to
talk to somebody much smarter than us, who has much
better read on all of this, and real news, the
real newsman talking to to the fake news guys, So
we'll be right. We'll be right back with race Warz.
You're listening to Tip Chat on Beltway Radio n Beyond Sweet.

Speaker 7 (37:12):
We're in the middle of a hostile government Chay Goubers.

Speaker 8 (37:17):
I want to talk about it, but I be laid forwards.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
And if you say you wait a minute, do we
have to stop this?

Speaker 7 (37:25):
We have one, but she didn't once.

Speaker 8 (37:27):
A lady in the office, hostile, uber, hostile.

Speaker 7 (37:40):
Of that world, part of a Nigerian prince cam surprise, surprise,
and end up being a white man.

Speaker 9 (37:52):
Oh, I just want to.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Know what the hell do I do?

Speaker 10 (37:58):
Probably due get you say you in a minute?

Speaker 4 (38:02):
Who we have stop this?

Speaker 3 (38:04):
We haven't, but you didn't. More than.

Speaker 11 (38:10):
Hostile, hostile, hostile, che hostile, hostile.

Speaker 7 (38:42):
Go this eatbu left the right, give u us.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
I'm messing around this ape out left the right. He
don't worry about hing down this heat be left the right,
give it us.

Speaker 9 (38:57):
I'm messing around this heat out left it right.

Speaker 7 (39:00):
He a worry about if you see you wait a minute, two,
we have to stop this. We had one, but you
didn't want the lady Yon.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
Hostile, dom.

Speaker 9 (39:17):
Y Hoyle say hostile.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Or all right, welcome back to Chip Chad here on
Beltweit Radio and beyond. I'm your host, Chip with me
is Taz.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
What's fun?

Speaker 1 (40:01):
That's the theme song of the night Man or Yeah, ever, I.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Don't know many nights, yeah, many moons?

Speaker 1 (40:15):
All right. So race Wise has been writing about the
workforce for many years now, including some award winning podcast
work and various books and articles and just everything. We
have asked him back to talk about the current economic
chaos and how that's impacting people throughout this great country,
and we'll get to the immigration side of that as well. Ray,

(40:37):
welcome back to Chipchat.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Great to be with you.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
We are very excited to have you. Just before everybody knows,
if you look right over Ray's head, you'll see his
new book, We Are Home. Yeah, there you go. So
we're gonna we're gonna be talking about it because it's
very relevant.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
To the current situation, you betcha it is.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
So before we get to all of that, though, Ray, briefly,
could you give us kind of a snapshot of the
employment situation in the US. What's the job creation rate
and unemployment rate looking like these days and all of
that kind of stuff.

Speaker 12 (41:15):
Well, you know, later this year we may look back
at the April report as the last good report, because
it was really good.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Two hundred and twenty eight thousand new jobs, unemployment sailing along,
bumping along level at about four point two percent, good
job creation across several different sectors of the economy, a
little over seven million people out of work, a low
three point eight percent unemployment rate for men, women at

(41:50):
three point seven percent. And you know, this is the
way things have been going. It is to be fair
well above the average of the last twelve months, which
has been around one hundred and sixty thousand new.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Jobs a month.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
But you know, would be the envy of many countries
around the world that are having real trouble with job creation,
labor force participation staying about level. A lot of people
are retiring right now, and that tendency was encouraged supercharged
by the pandemic, where a lot of people my age

(42:27):
in the late sixties who were on the bubble and thinking, ah,
I really want to keep on doing this, and they
elected to retire the ones who could afford to. So
it sped up the decisions that a lot of people,
a lot of boomers, were going to be making. Anyway,
the average hour of the earnings up nine cents an
hour to thirty six dollars an hour, as you know,

(42:50):
seen from thirty five thousand feet across the economy, and
the average work week is about thirty five hours.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
So all that means that were basically in pretty or
we were in very very solid territory. Maybe not the
best we've ever been, but very solid inflations.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Also in the.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
Context of what's been going on over the last several years,
there we go month after month, Yes, a lot of
the slack in the workforce being soaked up by new
job creation. We are at a point where you might
expect things to be flagging, to expect those numbers to

(43:36):
be declining, and they haven't. As economists started to whisper
last year, oh you know, maybe it's all over. Maybe
next month we'll only see fifty thousand. It's kept in
the high six figures month after month after month. There
was a lot of confidence. We'll see now with declining
consumer confidence and the uncertainty that's been injected into the

(43:59):
economy by these new Trump policies, whether that kind of confidence,
whether employers will say, yeah, let me add that extra
guy on the second shift, let me create a new
job because everybody's hustling as art as again and they're not.
I could probably make more money if I put another
person on that shift. They may not do that now,

(44:22):
and you know, got it. We need a couple of
more months to see whether that's gonna happen, but certainly
it's front loaded. All the tendencies that would push that
kind of decision making are now front loaded.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Ray how do we tell the story? I guess to
the average American who has a lot going on in
their lives about like what the real economy is, because
I think no one takes into account the shock that
COVID was. No one takes into account that while inflation
spike drastically, we were able to bring that back down.

(45:00):
I know we've talked to the soft landing has been
something that's been talked about and talked about, but it
does feel like, for like lack of a better phrase,
we made it there and it was cruising along, and
it seems that that uncertainty has been injected into the
minds of folks. Not even so much right now, but

(45:20):
it felt like a year and a half ago, people
were like, if this doesn't feel good to me, my
economy doesn't feel good.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Well, you know, if you're a middle aged worker, let's
say you know in your early forties. Easy, easy, I'm
just picking the name number out of a hat.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Is Chip.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
I was like, you have never lived through a sustained
period of high inflation, so this seems like the worst
thing that's ever happened, the worst thing in memory. And
people who want you to think it's a terrible economy
are only too happy to say that we've never had
inflation like this before, We've never had mortgage rates like

(45:59):
this before. When I bought my first house, I felt
like I was lucky, lucky to get an eight and
a half percent mortgage. Yeah, and it was one of
those ones that was on an elevator. So it went
on to nine and a half percent the year after that,
and ten and a half percent the year after that. Woohoo.
Now people are saying, oh my god, what are we

(46:21):
gonna do. No one has ever borrowed six percent money
in the history of houses to buy their house. This
is terrible and it must be Joe Biden's fault. Well,
I think the Democrats were terrible in their messaging on
the economy, absolutely terrible. I think there was a tendency

(46:42):
to look at some of the crazy things that were
being said and say, oh, nobody's gonna believe that. That's dumb,
So nobody's gonna believe that, And smarty pants Democrats just said, well,
we don't have to say anything because obviously that doesn't
make any sense, so we don't have to defend against it,
which is ridiculous. It was like watching political malpractice roll

(47:08):
out in real time, and he's saying, why aren't you
this is a campaign, there's two sides here. Why aren't
you guys fighting back? It was really weird. As someone
who's covered a lot of presidential campaigns, I just couldn't
believe it at points because the economy. On one level,
Donald Trump is the luckiest politician in the history of

(47:32):
American politics, because if he had won in twenty twenty,
he would have been president for the inflation. The inflation
was coming when the pandemic ended and they figured out
how to get all those container ships out of Long
Beach Harbor and how to get the containers onto trucks
and trains. The pent up demand, the forces that were

(47:57):
creating the inflation would have been unleashed no matter or
who was present. Absolutely, So he loses, gets to say
he really won, goes home tomorrow. A lago inflation begins
and he says, well, look, it's because it's because of
Joe Biden and the very tough work that had to

(48:17):
be done in order to tame the pandemic had to
be done by the new Biden team instead of by
him insisting that it really won. Sitting down in Florida,
historians forty and fifty years from now, we'll just scratch
our heads in wonder about some of the things that
have happened in the last ten years in this country.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
But those historians are going to be in other countries
because historians will be banned in the United States because,
you know, the new dictatorship. I mean, one of the
things that you kind of got onto. They're just about
you know that the inflation is going to happen like
these some of these are kind of cyclical things. Some
of these are you know, are a bit man made. Obviously,

(49:03):
the crisis that we're in right now economically, you know,
the Dow is dropping or the markets in general, not
just the Dow but worldwide are just on this you know,
consistent slide that's all totally man made. You know, there
was no like underlying foundational reason this needed to take place.

(49:24):
There are I think a pretty solid number of economists
who would argue that some of the spending during the
pandemic relief period did sort of supercharge that coming inflation
anyway because of just the amount of money that's floating
around in the economy was going to do that. But
we also saw, you know, through that same period, sustained

(49:48):
job creation, sustained wage improvement, and wages were even with
that inflation outpacing inflation, and you know, while the Fed
was able to keep the interest rates sort of under control.
To your point earlier about the houses, you know, my
dad tells me that getting under twelve percent was considered
a miracle, you know, at the time that he bought

(50:10):
the first house they bought here in Arlington. It's you know,
when when they bought their the house that they live
in now, they were like, they got in at seven
percent and they thought that that was the most magical
thing that could have ever happened. So, you know, your
your point is right on that there's a lot of
people just really don't have a good concept of like

(50:31):
the economy, you know, and they don't really.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
You know.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
It reminds me that like progressive ad where that kid's like,
what's the economy and the grown ups are all like,
what isn't the economy. It's like, oh, yeah, that's right,
nobody knows what is the economy.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
So well, look, you had a choice. You had a
choice during the early period of the pandemic to let
the recession be longer and deeper or blow money out
the door into people's pockets to keep that from happening.
But in return, you were gonna have inflation. Yeah, I

(51:09):
though official, no elected official ever said to the American people, Look,
the people who are making some of these choices, this
is what they're faced with. We can have a longer,
deeper recession with millions more people out of work, or
we can have high inflation for everybody.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
That was the choice.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Biden weighed the calculation that making it a shorter recession
and a shallower one was the better call. And yes,
we had inflation.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
But it wasn't just an American decision, right. The whole
world basically was forced to make this decision, and they
made it in a coordinated manner that did pay off.
We got through that, and I would say it paid
off tremendously for for Americans because while the rest while
we were experiencing that inflation and the corresponding job growth

(52:06):
and wage growth, the rest of the world was like
slowly getting back to level, like they were not growing.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
So they were having inflation and not creating jobs exactly.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
So they were having a case of like semi stagflation.
That's still happening in other That's why you saw the
European Central Bank lower rates again today because they're still
trying to get that money like flowing and get that
economy to grow a little bit. Germany didn't see growth,
Japan didn't see growth, China saw their growth slow to
the lowest it's ever been in in you know modern times.

(52:42):
It's and here we were growing at like four percent
you know a year, and and with the inflation that
comes along with it.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
It is all just like I think, is this textbook
first year economic student stuff. But this is really at this.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Point, like we're all understanding this, right. We're all having
this conversation as a bunch of like actual reporters who
actually cover the economy and two guys who read your books. Well,
Tes reads the books, and I just pretend to read
the books. We're we're having this conversation because we're academically
approaching this. But Tes was kind of on that, like,

(53:21):
nobody felt this.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
They didn't feel it in there absolutely, and that's a
really important potent part of this whole story. People felt bad,
people felt and we're not talking about a couple of people.
We're talking about tens of millions of people who feel
like they're not hitting their marks, they're not living out

(53:42):
their dreams. They had bigger hopes for themselves at thirty
and thirty five and forty, they feel like they're strung
out on debt. Yes, there's a lot of that kind
of heartache in the economy, and somebody had to acknowledge it,
and I really I think the way Donald Trump acknowledged

(54:05):
it during the just completed campaign was kind of silly
and not founded on any fact. But I think the
way the Democrats ran away from it didn't do them
any good either.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
It's very difficult to tell people that that we're doing better,
but that you understand why they don't feel better. That's
a hard thing to say because.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
It yeah, but you got to say it if that's
the truth. You got to say it.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Well, So, speaking of truth, have we started to see
any of the impacts of the tariffs on the workforce yet?
And if we, if we have it, what are the
sort of likely outcomes here? We've heard all kinds of
wild predictions all over the place, but I want to
know what you think is coming.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Well. Part of the problem is that the tariffs are
on again, off again. They're twenty five percent, they're fifty percent,
they're zero, they start in three months, they start next week.
The pipeline of goods from China is vast and full,

(55:06):
and I think the flow of goods from China is
either going to slow or immediately get more expensive. And
to say winning a trade war with China will be easy,
you either don't know anything about China or you don't
know anything about economics. I'm not sure, but either way.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
He's in both.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Yeah, I'll choose column C. And you know China. China's
recent rise after they were able to enter the WTO
is largely thanks to the American consumer.

Speaker 13 (55:51):
When you walk into a Walmart, when you walk into
a Costco, when you walk into a Best Buy, it
is full of things made in China, if you start
charging fifty percent.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
More for those things, you know, how, how is that?
In what world? Are we not going to feel that
and feel it soon all kinds of things. Now, this
is a fault of American capitalists, it's a fault of
American industrialists, and it's a fault of American leaders. But
it took us thirty years to get here. We didn't

(56:28):
just snap our fingers and one day walmarts filled to
the gills with Chinese goods. We the Chinese one by one, targeted.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Product lines, sure whole industries, bit by bit by bit.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
And then bought you know, they they dissembled factories in
the rest of the world and just simply brought entire
factories to China and reassembled them.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, or to.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Make glood medical equipment one by one by one, becoming
either the sole or the dominant producer of everyday consumer items.
Sixty five percent of the world socks, I mean conservative estimate,
eight point one billion people. That's sixteen billion feet that

(57:21):
they're putting socks on. So you know, the idea that
we are suddenly going to make everything from China way
way more expensive, and then like magic, like crocuses like daffodils.
Factories are going to spring up around America making socks
and gloves and baseball gloves and bats and bicycles and pills.

(57:49):
Everything is ridiculous. And when American factories do start to
make those things, they're not going to be cheaper.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
That's the thing, is that the fundamental purpose of the
tariff is to make the less favored product, whether it's
you know, imported or whatever, as expensive as the favored product,
so that your choice is now not based on price.
You know, you take the price out of it and
now it can be based on something else. That is

(58:20):
the purpose of the tariff. That's that's what they are.
That's why they level playing fields, right, is that they
take away the advantages. But what they don't take away
what they you know, the problem. It's always complained that
you can move goods, you can move capital, but you
can't move labor. And like what they're not the tariff
doesn't equalize for its cost of living in relative places.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
So there's a reason that certain things are made in
some places and not in others is because the value
of the product is low. Therefore, the the what the
workers earn producing the product is relatively low, and nobody
is going to be willing to do that if their
cost of living can't you know, if they can't keep
up at their cost of living. So you have to

(59:01):
make those things in low cost places so that they
can even be made at all, not only.

Speaker 14 (59:07):
Just You'll remember, just a few minutes ago, I told
you that in the latest report, the average hourly wage
with thirty six an hour, right, And nobody making socks
in China is making thirty six miles an hour. Nobody
making iPhones in China or earbuds in China is making
thirty six dollars.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
And they're making hours a week.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
Right, So if you open a factory to do that
work here, it will be entirely or almost entirely automated.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Yeah, job, we're gonna ask about that because I think
that's gonna that's gonna cost job. So, you know, and
and I do want to ask another, like maybe a
detail question. He said that that, you know, it's not
just about that the pipeline from China and other things.
There's a flip side to these terrafs, right that if

(01:00:01):
other countries decide they don't want to do business and
buy Americans there's certain things, just like there's things that
we have to buy from China. I think it was
maybe Lutnik or somebody was on TV explaining that you
can't get mangoes in the United States. We can't grow
mangos in the Unity. You have to import mangoes. Right,
we can't grow bananas in the United States. We can't
grow coffee in the United States, so we have to

(01:00:24):
import these things. There's things that Americans can make and
produce that the rest of the world doesn't really have
quite at that rate. A good example I think that
we hit a lot on this is soybeans. The United
States can produce soybeans at a tremendous rate, and because
of the inland waterway system, we can get them to
market at below the cost of what other countries like

(01:00:47):
Brazil can do because they are dependent on trucks and
rail and that is an intrinsic advantage that the United
States markets have. But if we get tariffed back, which
has happened, that advantage is removed the same way the
low cost of labor in China gets removed from their products.
But during this whole thing, isn't it pretty likely that

(01:01:10):
the rest of the world is just going to sort
of like cut a big circle around the US and
then continue trading with each other and just kind of
leave us out of it. Is that is that a
possible outcome?

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
This is part of the challenge of having a seventy
eight year old president who formed his ideas about the
way the economy works as a young businessman in the
seventies and eighties, and he grew up in a world
Donald Trump did where the essential nature of American industry

(01:01:42):
was such that the United States really could throw its
weight around in the way he's presuming to do. Now.
What he is not, it seems to me taking account of,
is that the world can more easily, not entirely, but
can more easily do without the things we make, and

(01:02:05):
without the things we grow, and without the things we
sell and assemble. And I just don't know where this
all goes. There is a world out there. The rise
of the rest has created a world where people can
more easily say, eh, you know, we'll buy it somewhere else.

(01:02:28):
And because we did it for me. You know, when
I was living in Chicago, I lived near a big empty.

Speaker 15 (01:02:37):
Factory that used to be the play school factory. That
made play school kids toys. Sure that factory moved to
the South to chase lower hourly rate wages in states
where there were no right to work laws. Then it
moved out of the country entirely. And toys are very,

(01:02:59):
very heavily in China.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
When I was a kid, I would look at the
labels on bath towels and stuff like that, and it
was made in the Carolinas, right, that moved to Central
America and then out to South Asia and East Asia.
We don't even make those things. So the rest of

(01:03:25):
the world can very easily do without us when it
comes to shoes, clothes, electronics, but even more high tech
production materials, lathe and machining materials, all kinds of complicated
machines that we used to assume you needed the United

(01:03:46):
States for. You don't need the United States for.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
Right, Why should we assume that we have some sort
of major technological edge on the Chinese at this point,
I don't think that's true at all, And I mean
we do, we do.

Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
But you know, so, for instance, a good example of
what you're talking about is Boeing. Okay, they could be
cutting their throats over there, because if you speed up
the rest of the world's adaptation to a world without us,
Boeing is screwed.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Oh absolutely, because air Bus will.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Say, Hey Air Ghana, Hey Nigeria Air, We'll sell your
planes and we won't do these crazy things, these unpredictable
flights of fancy policies. We'll just sell your planes and
then we'll fix them when they're broken.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
How about that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
And China, which will be developing its commercial aviation industry
over recent years, is more than happy to say to
buyers in the global South, look those people.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Look at what they're doing.

Speaker 16 (01:04:56):
Can you be sure that if you buy a Boeing
jet five years from now, we're not going to make
the parts fifty percent more expensive ten years from now,
They're not going to come back to you with all
kinds of ridiculous demands.

Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
Buy from us. We'll tell you the parts, we'll teach
you how to repair the planes, no problem. And I
think the United States has a romantic notion about its
own essential nature in the past, that it would be permanent,
that countries would definitely always want the things we make.

(01:05:32):
And if you make the things we make harder to buy,
forget it. I mean, I just don't understand what's going
on at all. His theory of the case is so
deeply flawed, But he doesn't. He's still going to be
a rich guy when it's all over, when the chickens
all locked up there in the roost, it's us that's

(01:05:56):
going to pay the freight for that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
Do we also lose? I think? Well, right, because other countries,
if they start migrating the sense towards China, China can
also say, hey, look what democracy has gotten you. They
can't even build your damn plane anymore. Look what them
and do they get to that point where you could
also see that's happening around the world anyways. But countries

(01:06:20):
that might have also looked at America as like, oh,
democracy could work for us to look towards China and
be like, do we really care about like human rights?
We if we can. If this country that is another superpower,
seems to be the more stable option, maybe the way
they're doing it makes more sense, which sounds.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
Crazy to me saying that democracy looks more stable than
democracy Right now?

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):
Uh, you know what I'll do to get a counter
narrative to test this case. Let me go turn on
Voice of America.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
Oh oh god, wait a.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Minute, Oh it is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
I mean they in Burma who just had this terrible earthquake,
and USAID could have been right there with you know,
shovels and excavators with the big American.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
Flag, all the back teams that were already in the region.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
And so it's crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:07:14):
You have to remember that the in Trump world, they
don't believe in soft power. They don't believe that soft
power is potent, that it really works. They believe you
govern and you show your strength by muscling people, by
showing them the validity of your argument, by muscling. It

(01:07:36):
is a very Roman Empire way of getting along with
other countries in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
I don't know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
Look, it is a it is a different theory of
how to operate. It is maybe you know, I think
the British used it for two hundred years and it's
why one of the most celebrated holidays in the world
is Independence Day from Britain. So you know, a lot

(01:08:10):
of them been here before.

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
So I do want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
You know, Trump talks about bringing these jobs back. We
touched on that briefly. You know, are these really is
there any kind of a thing? You know, often economists
will talk about churn, or they'll talk about how like, okay,
if automation does come, you know, then you just get
higher value people who fix the robots or whatever. And

(01:08:40):
and you know, I have this conversation all the time.
People they complain about, oh, the audit the checkout at
the grocery store. I don't want to do my own
scanning of the groceries. And I go, oh, yeah, I
guess we'll go to the bank so you can write
a check and hand it to the guy at the
counter so you can get some money out. And they go,
what the hell are you talking about? I'm going to
the ATM. And I'm like, right, because of course you do,

(01:09:02):
so like is there. I'm just I want to be
their right, I'm pretending to be a journalist.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
Here.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
Is there some opportunity here for the sort of level
of the jobs to rise even if the threat of
jobs of factories returning is entirely automated.

Speaker 3 (01:09:20):
Yeah, you know, there is some validity to this idea.
The notion that every production job in whole industries had
to be lost was never a valid point.

Speaker 1 (01:09:35):
Now it never turned out to be the case. They
just changed.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
Masters of industry, made the decision that by taking advantage
of new globe straddling supply chains, they could also look
for the cheapest labor and make their bones doing that.
So you know, I was on television for twenty five years.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
I buy.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
A lot of men's suits. Over the years, I buy
a lot of men's shirts. Brooks Brothers, my favored store.
I would look in the collar because you could always
tell something about the global economy from where a shirt
was made. And I finally threw up my hands when
my new white shirt said made in Mauritious. Yeah, Mauritious

(01:10:27):
is a teeny tiny island in the middle of the
Indian Ocean, far from everywhere. Mauritious is just as far
away from the United States as you could get without
being on your way back right. And so it made
sense to get cotton too, Mauricious, cotton and dye and

(01:10:53):
looms and all to the other side of the planet,
rather than have somebody do it in the in the
garment district in New York, in South South California, where
a lot of the needle trades still are right now,

(01:11:14):
it made more sense still somehow to do it in
Mauritius or Sri Lanka or Indonesia. These are the places
where my where I see my shirts are being made now,
famous maker, famous brand, well known brand. And yet the

(01:11:36):
shirt itself is not really from any of from any
places that the Brooks brothers would recognize. It's from Mauritius. So,
you know, and we did not have to plunge headlong

(01:11:56):
into sending jobs all around the planet. That much is true.
I interviewed Carla Hills and Mickey Cantor, George hw Bush's
trade ambassador who negotiated NAFTA, and then Mickey Cantor, who
picked up the ball from her and was Clinton's equivalent

(01:12:18):
negotiator for his administration, and they both said, look, there
are a lot of advantages that NAFTA had to a
developing North American auto industry, for instance, so that lower
value parts of the job of making a car could

(01:12:38):
be done elsewhere, and the highest valued parts could still
be kept in the United States, or else you'd lose
the entire car. Right. So Bramley in Ontario made Caprice's
Great Big Cars car, and you know, a lot of

(01:12:59):
the parts were made in the United States. A lot
of the parts that were being slapped into that car actually.

Speaker 17 (01:13:06):
Crossed the border again and again. Because there was no tariff,
you could do parts of the job in whatever part
of the country.

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):
It made sense. Same thing with the evolving relationship with
the Mexican auto industry. So parts were made in Heremocio,
put into cars in Texas, in light trucks. A lot
of Americas like trucks and made in Texas. If you
put tariffs on those parts, that stops that process dead,

(01:13:42):
of making other North Americans rich, of keeping industries that
do have some critical relevance to our economy in North America,
and in the bargain, keep Mexican workers at home because
there's profitable work for them to do instead of in
the border looking for gigs in the United States. I mean,

(01:14:03):
there were all kinds of good arguments. Yes, NAFTA was
going to involve job loss. Was it in America's interest
to if there was going to be job loss, make
sure those jobs were in northern Mexico and in Ontario
and Quebec instead of in Indonesia and Thailand and Mauritius.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
Right, Because people in northern Mexico come across the border
to buy American stuff, and you bet that's a sort
of a common thing all right, since you brought up immigration,
here's what we're gonna do. We wanna take a quick break,
and then when we come back, we want to talk
to you about the sort of immigration side of this
economic chaos coin if you're okay with that, and then

(01:14:48):
we'll be right back with more from race Wise. You're
listening to Chipchat on Beltwegh radio and beyond.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
I don't like them.

Speaker 10 (01:14:58):
Button chemicals in the water.

Speaker 18 (01:15:00):
They turned the frigging frog. K.

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
Do you understand that?

Speaker 18 (01:15:03):
Turned the freaking frog K? Crap case FB frigging frogs fat,
it's not funny. I'm gonna say real slow for you, Okay,
frogs for your life, Okay, frocks frigging socks. I don't

(01:15:32):
like a frog, okay bringing.

Speaker 10 (01:15:37):
Frogs, frogs.

Speaker 3 (01:15:43):
Frigging sob crap.

Speaker 10 (01:15:45):
Won't you break a frog?

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
It's not funny.

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):
I'm gonna say real slow for you. From Place.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
Wall back to on that Way radio and beyond. Oh man,
are we back?

Speaker 3 (01:16:12):
Yeah? What do you doing trying to make me? Miss
Alex Jones?

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
Brian Brian should get a Peabody award from that, like
that perfectly timed.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
Oh my god, does he have to share it with
Alex Jones though, come on stage and accept it with him.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
I don't know if.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
Alex Jones is allowed on a stage.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
We're trying to buy We were trying to buy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Yeah, we tried to buy Info Wars, but we lost
to the Onion and because we don't have any money.
But it's very timely, because you know, it's funny, but
also it is currently Passover. Just to let everybody know
if I sound a little grumpier than usual because I

(01:16:59):
can can't eat it anything delicious matza. That's not true.
I can eat other things with the matsa, but I
can't have any like bread or pasta.

Speaker 3 (01:17:08):
I'm definitely a coconut macaroon.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Yeah, well those parts are good. There are good parts
of Passover, like brisket and matzavol soup. All good.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
Those children of Israel wandering in the desert and eating
those coconut macaroons, it wasn't so bad.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
Yeah, man of Shevitz was doing big business dropping them
from the sky. So but anyway, I just I just
want to like throw this out there. This is not
relevant at all, but there is this wonderful funny bit
of like Jewish trivia here. If you look at the
Ten plagues and the way they're written in the tra
it lists the plague that most people know as frogs,

(01:17:48):
it's just frog. It's just the Hebrew word for frog.
Just one frog, not many frogs, just one. And it's
not clear what sort of a singer frog created a
plague big enough that the Egyptians almost let us go.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
But but it happened, so.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
Ponder that.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
I mean, hail and boils and all that. That sounds
pretty bad, but a frog.

Speaker 1 (01:18:16):
But they didn't all happen at once. Each plague would happen,
and then Pharaoh would be like, all right, get out
of here. And then while we're getting ready to leave,
he would be like, never mind, which is how we
ended up with the Matsa, because we were like, He's like,
get out of here, like fuck it, grab the bread,
let's go, and and you know Matza. But the frog,
the one frog, terrorized to the point that Pharaoh was like,

(01:18:40):
get out, and then after the frog cut it out.
Maybe because Alex Jones came, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
It might have been that frog from the famous Looney
Tunes cartoon that sings in Dances with the top Head.
That's right, that might have been, that might have been
too much to take singing, singing, Stephen Foster songs.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
Yeah, Hello, my baby, Hello.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
All right. So Ray has a new book out all
about oral histories of immigrants coming to America. It's called
We Are Home. So we thought who better to ask
about the current environment for immigrants and the impacts on
the economy as a country as a whole. So Ray
tell us a little bit about the book before we

(01:19:25):
start peppering you with more questions.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
It is a parallel set of histories. It is people
telling their own stories of coming to America in the
modern era of immigration, and a story of the evolution
of immigration law in the United States, whether it has
to do with refugees, whether it has to do with
parts of the world that you were allowed to come

(01:19:49):
in from and not allowed to come in from. Part
one chapter is devoted to the tremendous increase in black
immigration the United States after Black Americans were the most
uniformly native born people in America because they were kidnapped

(01:20:12):
brought here, and there was no further immigration after the
end of the Civil War. So if you were black
and on an American street somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:20:22):
It could be.

Speaker 3 (01:20:22):
It was like a lead pipe cinch that you were
born somewhere in the United States. Now twenty percent of
black people in America are either immigrants or the child
of immigrants. It is remarkable, just remarkable.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
Taz is British, yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
On my mom's side to Jamaicans, and on my dad's
side Cuban and Italian born in England. Yes, but there
you go. I fall right into that. And I think
that part is huge because I remember a lot of
times being in like whatever, I could get a cab
and when the cab drivers a lot of the times

(01:21:03):
would figure out that I wasn't from here, there would
be a lot of vitriol towards black Americans born here.
And you know, I always found that to be so
crazy because I was like, well, you obviously don't understand
your history, because the reason you're probably here, the reason
I'm here is a lot of the laws throughout the

(01:21:23):
Civil Rights era, right, is what kind of that's when
these immigration laws start to change and you see black
people from around the globe as well as other people
coming into the United.

Speaker 3 (01:21:34):
States, right, and that kind of inside the family stuff.
I didn't feel entirely, you know, Puerto Rican guys from Brooklyn.
I didn't feel entirely comfortable going into that at length,
but obviously it's there. And I use a cab driver,

(01:21:57):
a DC cab driver, interestingly enough, because one day I
got into his cab. He recognized me, because cab drivers
are interesting news for people.

Speaker 1 (01:22:10):
Who don't know cab drivers, especially in DC universally listened
to public radio, that is all.

Speaker 3 (01:22:19):
So he said, are you races and I said, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
Connecting with your cab driver, just say the word Kojo
nandi and you will be best friends immediately.

Speaker 3 (01:22:30):
So he was Somali, and he was all bent out
of shape about his son filling out DC Public School's
paperwork in high school and when it asked you to
list your nationality, race and ethnicity and all that, he
put African Americans. So the guy was all wound up

(01:22:51):
about it. And I said, you know, sitting in the
back of the seat, just waiting to get to my destination,
I said, well, you know, both his parents were born
in Africa and he was born in America. I mean,
if anybody can claim to be African American, I guess
he could.

Speaker 2 (01:23:07):
And he looked at me and he said.

Speaker 14 (01:23:09):
You'll know that's not what they mean, right, And I
had to admit, you have to admit that, Yes, I
didn't know that that's not what.

Speaker 2 (01:23:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
Excellent story, all right. So Trump has been waging a
war on immigration, not just on the economy but economically speaking.
Why you know, why does the United States depend so
heavily on immigrant labor and immigration in general to keep
our economy going.

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
The United States has tried to have it both ways,
to be both hostile and mean to immigrants and mount
a giant, blinking neon help wanted side that faces the
rest of the world in every direction. At the same time,

(01:24:02):
we've never really come to terms with what that means.
We don't have a lot of babies. We are below
replacement level in our fertility. So the military and colleges
and factories and farms are going to need young, strong,

(01:24:25):
smart people to do work, and we're not going to
have enough of them. We have a more mild form
of the Chinese problem of too many old people and
not enough young people. We're lucky it's not as bad
as it is in China, but it's still a problem,

(01:24:46):
and we are not encouraging the very people who could
help us out.

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
Of it.

Speaker 3 (01:24:55):
Yes, we still do have pretty high levels of legal immigration.
But in general, if you go to a dairy farm,
as I did in Wisconsin and Minnesota in Arizona, everybody
sticking a valve on a cow's utter is a Spanish

(01:25:17):
speaking person from Mexico or Central America. Everybody who is
working in a grain elevator.

Speaker 19 (01:25:25):
In Sioux County, Iowa, in the northwest count corner of
Iowa is from Mexico, Central America. It is you know,
if you get your muffler fixed on Coney Island Avenue
in Brooklyn, it is likely a.

Speaker 3 (01:25:39):
Pakistani doing that work. It is just an economy very
heavily devoted to services and a workforce that is very
heavily immigrant doing those services. I mean, if Americans really
yearned to be bakers or people so together t shirts

(01:26:03):
making sneakers so that we take back those jobs were Vietnam,
you know, I'm not seeing it. I don't know if
that's the case, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
Not doing it. It was it was like back during
I want to say, even maybe the Obama years, that
the United farm Workers like put out this thing of
like come do our job, come take our jobs, right,
and they said all of these people who are saying
that immigrants are taking American jobs. Here's our jobs, come

(01:26:37):
and take ours. We'll let you do it. And three
people showed up, and one of them was Stephen Colbert,
who then like went to Congress and testified about how
picking strawberries was hard. He didn't realize he'd have to
bend down to do it, and like it was a
whole thing. There's huge sectors of the economy that depend

(01:26:58):
on immigrant workers, like meat packing, agriculture, as you mentioned,
DA area, as you mentioned, I guess that's part of agriculture.
I think a lot of the energy sector is very
heavily dependent on immigrant workers, you know, working in the
extractive industries. Trucking. Trucking is massively I don't know if
it's dominated yet, but it is very heavily immigrant driven.

(01:27:23):
Like and these are critical people think of these as
like quintessentially American kind of kind of jobs, but without them,
like our identity as a nation full of you know,
the truckers are like the cowboys, right, and the farmers
are like, you know, a white guy named Ted with
a hay seed in his mouth. Like that's not even
close to true. Hasn't been true in a really long time.

(01:27:46):
Is the hostility towards immigration, legal or otherwise likely to
damage those sectors of the economy in a way that
we may not really be ready to manage.

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
If we put our enforcement where our mouth is and
go after those industries where there's high levels of immigrant labor.
Immigrants are heavily concentrated in three big industries, food service, agriculture,
and hospitality. Right. And if you stay at hotels, or

(01:28:19):
you eat in restaurants, or you like food, if you
want to go to your supermarket and find food there,
know that those are industries that are very heavily dependent
on immigrant labor. And if you want to pay five
bucks for a strawberry, if you want to pay you know,

(01:28:39):
seven fifty for an egg plant, Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:28:45):
Mass produced crops can be done all by American labor
or automated. Immigrants are heavily heavily represented in those parts
of the industry that are hard to automate. I'm glad
you brought up strawberries. Strawberries a perfect example. They haven't
yet figured out how to get a machine that will

(01:29:07):
pick strawberries without damaging so many of them that you
lose the profit on a field of row crops like
that and in soft fruits in the Great Lakes region,
southwestern Michigan and northeastern Indiana. It's all done by Spanish

(01:29:28):
speaking people. And ironically, these were men who did this
work in Saint Joseph's County, Michigan. Places like that. They
would come up from Mexico, do the work and go home.
And over time, the United States, as a matter of policy,

(01:29:49):
made the border harder, harder every year, harder to get across,
more expensive to pay somebody to sneak you across. Finally,
in concert with the farmers who were building small cabins
for them to live in and all that, so they
wouldn't just blow through town just to pick that crop

(01:30:11):
or service that crop. Well, they said, I can't risk
going home. I won't be able to come back when
you need me. So they're going to stay. And what
you know, let's talk a little bit about biology here.
What's a young guy want if he's going to decide
to stay in northern Michigan instead of going back to

(01:30:32):
his hometown. He wants his wife or his girlfriend. Sure,
so they would smuggle them across, and before you know it,
there are kids who need ESL and the elementary schools.
There are Tienda's little stores and a sort of growing
little Mexican town in places where immigrants had not really

(01:30:56):
been settling for a hundred years. We did that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
We did that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
We created those places in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
And Indiana and Illinois.

Speaker 3 (01:31:10):
We created that by creating no alternative system for people
to easily get back and forth. The farmers said, all
the bureaucratic answers that they got from Washington in the
form of new methods for filling that workforce were overly bureaucratic,
overly security minded, and just too unwieldy. You want to

(01:31:33):
meet people who employ illegal immigrant labor, go to the
RNC in two consecutive Republican National Conventions. I was at
buffet tables talking to guys, and one guy was building
subdivisions in the Atlanta suburbs, and I said, well, do

(01:31:55):
you hire undocumented people? He said, well, yeah, I get
anybody else to hammer uh roof shingles in July.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
Right, right, Okay, I'm sorry to your point there when
you were saying that, right, they can't even though necessarily
afford to leave, because if they leave they're not going
to come back or they wouldn't be able to come back,
and then their families go there. I think the stat
from like a lot of the folks who ended up

(01:32:25):
showing up on January sixth, they said most of those
people came from areas where they said that they felt
there was an influx of these like again, what you
just said there, and it's almost like, well, you're frustrated
with that, and that's caused you to go ry and
try to tear down democracy, but it's also what you
benefit from it at the same time, and it's like

(01:32:48):
it's just really a mind fuck. For lack of a better.

Speaker 1 (01:32:51):
That's the word.

Speaker 3 (01:32:52):
That's a technical term.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
Yes, I just I'm baffled by it.

Speaker 3 (01:32:58):
Because, yeah, but you knows, along with places where they
do see that kind of increase, you know, in farm
towns in Iowa and places like that. I do work
for the American Communities Project from Michigan State University, and
they are constantly doing surveys of public opinion, and we've

(01:33:20):
started asking a question, yes or no, true or false
to the statement. I'm feeling more and more like a
stranger in my own country. Okay, it's a way of
getting people to talk about their feelings about those kinds
of things. And some of the places where the numbers
are very high actually have very few immigrants. They have

(01:33:45):
this feeling that immigrants are overrunning the country, even though
they don't see them themselves. I was in a county
in southern Missouri there's ninety eight percent citizen, ninety seven
percent white, and people were saying, yeah, I do feel
more like a a stranger in my own country. And

(01:34:06):
I'm thinking, why, why we could stand here all day
and never hear anybody speaking another language. We won't have
any problems with people who are not supposed to be
here here here in the Ozarks, there just aren't that
many of them. But they know in the next state

(01:34:26):
or in the next county. They have anecdotes. When I
was in southern Missouri, they talked about the chicken plants
which are in northern Arkansas. They're over the state line
in another state. But people have this feeling. Look, people
gonna feel what they're gonna feel. You can't change that.
But that growing idea that immigrants are overrunning the country

(01:34:51):
has driven part.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
Of the moment that we're in now.

Speaker 3 (01:34:55):
In nineteen ten, fourteen, percent of people living in the
country were born in another country, and that was at
the end of an era of huge numbers coming in.
We are now at that fourteen percent level again in
the twenty twenty senses. One hundred and ten years later,
we're back up to that roughly one out of seven

(01:35:17):
people in the country was born somewhere else in the world.
And we're losing our minds. I mean, people are marching
around statues of Roberty Lee chanting you will not replace us.
There is a portion of our population that thinks it's
totally cool and likes getting tie takeout and all of that.

(01:35:38):
And then there's a portion of our population that's telling
my surveyors from the American communities, I feel like a
stranger in my own country.

Speaker 1 (01:35:47):
It doesn't stop them from meeting tacos, I would point out,
And also, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
But it stops them from meeting good tacos.

Speaker 1 (01:35:55):
It does because they don't know how to order them.
So it is it is sort of like a thing.
I think Mitt Romney called them magnets. He said, if
you turn off the magnets, then the people will stop coming, right.
And the idea here is we do have industries not
to be too particular about it, but construction. Since you
mentioned that meat packing, agriculture, these things depend not just

(01:36:19):
on immigrants but on illegal immigrants because the people who
are making the money simply could not make a profit
at the prices that Americans are willing to pay for
these products if they have to pay a fair wage.
So they are dependent on being able to abuse these workers,
underpay these workers as a business model. That is their method, right,

(01:36:40):
Like the minimum wage doesn't apply to farm workers, so
they can pay them on piece work and not have
to pay a minimum wage. If Americans are doing that job,
there's not a chance they'll they'll do it for even
the seven to twenty five, let alone for a piece
work wage, because their cost of livings are so high.

(01:37:00):
As you mentioned, the farmers are doing everything they can
to keep these people here. All I'm saying is that, like,
if there's this huge thing like where the country is
hostile to the workers, to the immigrant workers, at what
point do the people who depend on them, and I
am talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:37:21):
Like the guys you met at the buffet, have to
stand up and like whether they want to or not
defend the status quo or defend the access to this labor.

Speaker 3 (01:37:34):
I'll give it two times. They did. They did. In
nineteen eighty six, the Immigration Reform and Control Act Amnesty,
brought in by Ronald Reagan, required employers to come forward
and vouch for people who had been working for them,
sometimes at some reputational risk and actuarial risk to themselves.

(01:37:58):
And they did it, and they helped people that they
depended on to make their businesses profitable get legal. When
DACA came in, a similar demand was made of employers,
and a lot of them were hesitant and then came
forward and said, yes, this person has been working for
me for years. Here's their timesheets, here's their work records.

(01:38:25):
And they were willing to do it, and it took
a lot from them. Some of the people who framed
both those laws were weary. They weren't sure that people
who might face a little bit of jeopardy by admitting
that they were employing undocumented workers would actually write their

(01:38:48):
names and give all their information on the forms. But
they did it. Hundreds of thousands of people got documents
that helped them work in the straight economy through DACA.
Millions through the Immigration Reform and Control Act, part of
the problem has always been with enforcement because after the

(01:39:11):
Immigration Reform and Control Act, the main lever that they
were going to use to slow down illegal immigration was
to put the burden of enforcement on employers.

Speaker 1 (01:39:23):
Yeah, with the iines and that everifyed.

Speaker 3 (01:39:25):
They didn't do it.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
They did not do it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
What is Where's Tyson? Where's con Agra? Where are all
of these big conglomerates that are dependent on this labor?

Speaker 3 (01:39:39):
Say?

Speaker 1 (01:39:39):
Why are they not out here saying wait a minute.
And they don't have to admit that they're like employing
illegal workers or undocumented workers. They could just say, hey, look,
we're a nation of immigrants. We want to sell checking
everybody like they could come up with some plausible like
bullshit to make this case. But they need these workers too.
Why and they're billionaires, right, don't they have access to Trump?

(01:40:02):
Can't they buy, like, you know, a million dollar dinner
at mar Alago and sit next to him for five
minutes and be like, hey, you know, by the way,
like where that is?

Speaker 20 (01:40:11):
Already in the last seventy two hours, Trump was reported
to be vacillating on the workers working in essential industries
like agriculture. Oh, he's already softening the same way he
did with the tariffs.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
You know, if you get to him, if you get
to be the last person who spoke to him, you're
in better shape, you know, in the.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
So he's just a spineless sack of shit, really, is
what that says to me. You don't have to co
sign on that. I know you still need to be
able to get interviews, but.

Speaker 3 (01:40:48):
I do.

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
I do have another question that's related to immigration and
related to the other kind of thing that we're talking about.
You know, like as government workers are laid off, right,
they're going to start to represent a larger chunk of
the unemployed. That's gonna have an impact on the numbers.
If immigrants are driven out of the country and leave,
so does their purchasing power, So does that piece of

(01:41:12):
you know, people always people have our time kind of
remembering that the economy is two sided, right, that there
have to be enough customers as there are producers. If
you run a bunch of migrant workers out of this
country who still need to buy food, who still need
to buy gas, who still need basic services, they're not
there to buy those things. That's going to impact the

(01:41:33):
people who provide that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:41:34):
So like there will be empty houses in neighborhoods all
over America. There will be employers who can't fill shifts.
There will be businesses that cater to immigrants that won't
be able to sell their product. I think we really
haven't fully taken on board what it would mean to

(01:41:59):
do as many of the president's supporters would like us
to do, which is to run millions of people out
of the country. Right now, they're just nibbling at the edges,
coming up to people on the street, surprising them when
they're coming out of school, and things like that. We
aren't doing it at scale yet they're testing us. I

(01:42:21):
think they're testing the tolerance of the United States for
this kind of enforcement. And if they're just going to
be picking up one student visa holder here and another
one there, you're never going to get ten million people
out of the country. There's a point at which you
either scale up, or you admit that you're going to

(01:42:44):
find some other solution to the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:42:46):
Or they lie about it. They keep picking off ones
and twos and then tell everybody that they succeeded in
mass deportation. And because part of the Trump cult is
that you must accept the thing they say as true
regardless of what you can see with your own two
lion eyes. I'll just accept it and say, yay, you
deported millions of people and like it was four. So

(01:43:06):
all of this is to say, it feels weird before
we let you go, because it is a school night
and we know that you have important things to do
and not just yammer with us about nonsense. Well, I
want to tell people.

Speaker 2 (01:43:18):
To buy my book. I was going to say, can
I weave in for a book question on there?

Speaker 3 (01:43:22):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):
Yes please?

Speaker 2 (01:43:23):
I wanted to ask Ray, like, through the individuals that
you spoke to when you were writing this book, right
the like Becoming American? Right, was there a through line?
I guess whether no matter where people came from, I
guess around the globe, what are some of the through
lines that everyone had, like in the idea of like

(01:43:44):
becoming American?

Speaker 1 (01:43:46):
Great question?

Speaker 3 (01:43:47):
Uh? One through line is that many of the people
I spoke to would have all of the things being equal,
preferred to have a secure, fure, comfortable, and well resourced
life in the place that they were born and came

(01:44:07):
here because they simply found that to be impossible either
because remaining where they were born was dangerous to them
dangerous to life and limb or they were simply going
to be too poor to get over. But it wasn't.
They are fond of this country. They have come to

(01:44:28):
love this country. They are grateful to this country in
ways that I don't think Americans really fully understand. Grateful
that this country was here and took them in and
had a system that allowed them to do as well
as they've done. So there is a tremendous debt of

(01:44:49):
gratitude that they feel. But many of them said, you know,
but it would have been okay. I would have been
fine if I could have just lived in my hometown,
but I couldn and I'm glad America took me in.
Several of the people that I interviewed joined the military
as young men and saw it as a road to

(01:45:11):
really becoming American and really understanding the country. And all
of them look back on their time in the military
with some affection and take a lot of value from it.
One guy I interviewed who said that he was always
a little ambivalent, but never felt more American than when

(01:45:33):
he went to his first protest and he took his
kids and he said, you know, the secret police watched
me when I protested in my home country and here
when Donald Trump put in the Muslim band, I grabbed
my kids and I ran to Dulles Airport and we
made signs and I really felt like an American. And

(01:45:53):
that guy got in touch with me about a year
later and told me about his son joining the Marriora
and National Guard and how proud he was of him.
I think they are our secret sauce as a country,
our underappreciated resource. It's like finding a tremendous gold mine

(01:46:17):
under your feet. And I hope that people read the
book and realize just how grateful so many of these
people are to this country, because I think it would
change some of the discourse. Our immigration discourse. It's been
pretty bad. We have all kinds of distorted ideas about
immigrants and crazy ideas about them. And you know, a

(01:46:41):
lot of the people I interviewed came in undocumented and
got legal over the years, one way or another. And
you know, they did what they felt they had to do,
and they're not they're not particularly proud of having broken
the law. But you know, ration creates circumstances where you feel, look,

(01:47:04):
this is what I gotta do, and they did it.

Speaker 2 (01:47:06):
Somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:47:06):
The stories when you hear about people sneaking over here
from Europe around the turn of the century and doing
whatever they had to do to make it, those are
those are like heroes. Those guys, Yeah, those are heroes.

Speaker 3 (01:47:21):
Those guys.

Speaker 2 (01:47:22):
We love those guys.

Speaker 1 (01:47:23):
We we had a we had a guy on His
name is Jack and he's from Togo, I think, uh,
And he explained to us about like how easily somebody
can lose status. Essentially that they can they can have status.

(01:47:44):
They could be here with status and something could change,
the circumstance could change, even something outside of their control
that could make them no longer have status.

Speaker 3 (01:47:53):
Like we're seeing that in real time now.

Speaker 1 (01:47:58):
But in those cases it was usually like accidental or
something like that. And now it's like directly intentional where
people are having their status revoked, you know, for reasons
that don't seem to be following due process or anything
like that. So you know that I always think about
that edge, right, that there's so many people, you know,
but for the grace of God go I that a

(01:48:20):
lot of people I know, even people I know who
are militantly Trump supporting anti immigrant, are themselves people who
overstayed and got legal, or people who crossed the border
and got legal or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:48:35):
If you're a legal partment a resident right now, you
ought to look into taking your citizenship.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
Want to go take his test and the ice guys
grabbed him there at his naturalization.

Speaker 3 (01:48:49):
Interview a German. A German, I wanted you to.

Speaker 2 (01:48:54):
Know how crazy that is for me, who became an
American citizen a week after January six And it was
crazy then, right because I was like, people really believe
in this. But to even be going through that process
right now, we'll be she frightening.

Speaker 3 (01:49:08):
Like.

Speaker 2 (01:49:09):
I'm also a person who traveled for the longest time
with my permanent resident card as my baby picture, never
thinking about it, got in and out of the country
multiple times. And I can't even imagine showing up customs
now with that and being with with the way. Uh
it's insane.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
So all right, speaking of Whistaway, we're gonna go. We
we have like the third half of the show to
get to. But we want to say thank you so
much for being just the best get We've been have
this like streak of great interviews the last several shows,
so Ray, we want to add you to that streak.
Thank you for being part of this and and for

(01:49:51):
always being so gracious to give us.

Speaker 2 (01:49:53):
All all this book.

Speaker 1 (01:49:54):
Everybody, please go buy his book. It's called he has
like several dozen books. You should buy all of the books.
If you have any any like speaking engagements or anything
coming up that people can catch you on on the
like you're kind of doing a bit of a book
tour thing or.

Speaker 3 (01:50:09):
Well, yeah, i'll be uh, I'll be out in Lafayette,
California next week speaking at the Liberty Library and talking
about freedom of the press and what it would take
to have a working class news media in this country again.
And so come out to see me in Lafayette, California,

(01:50:31):
and then the next night in Oakland at Cleo's Books
and come say hello and buy a book and I
will sign it.

Speaker 1 (01:50:40):
Fantastic. Look at that. See, we're making connections, we're helping people.
We hope they're still freedom of the press, so we
don't get thrown into goolog I can speak Spanish, I
can get I can get in and out Seacott, I
could do that. Saan on my head. Tesz is in trouble,
which is.

Speaker 3 (01:50:57):
I don't know. I don't want to I don't want
to see you the shaved head being bent over and
having to walk bent over across the prison floor.

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):
There.

Speaker 3 (01:51:07):
I don't want that. Even if you don't speak Spanish.

Speaker 1 (01:51:09):
I don't want to. I don't want anything to do
with that either personally. But just in case, you know,
I'm prepared. Okay, we're gonna take a break. Thank you
Ray for hanging out with us. Really get it on
Beltwegh radio and beyond. Thanks Ray, good bye.

Speaker 3 (01:51:36):
Blonde much body? What a sad.

Speaker 21 (01:51:45):
Shine?

Speaker 3 (01:51:46):
You just thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:51:52):
Talk talk let's kay.

Speaker 10 (01:52:00):
In the world of motown.

Speaker 21 (01:52:02):
Girl, you're called.

Speaker 10 (01:52:07):
You fright lad, but it's just a show on a
more town.

Speaker 22 (01:52:14):
You'll never blow.

Speaker 21 (01:52:21):
Fine, what a sight you just.

Speaker 15 (01:52:37):
Speed.

Speaker 21 (01:52:38):
Let's just ass I porn on the cop my fanny,
I ain't get your ass. Let's just ass I thorn
on the copy.

Speaker 2 (01:52:49):
Man.

Speaker 10 (01:52:50):
I will eat you.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
I win, get your ass.

Speaker 10 (01:52:53):
My children aren't going hungry.

Speaker 3 (01:52:54):
I'll do it.

Speaker 18 (01:52:55):
I'll drink your blood and I'm starting to think about
having it eat my neighbor.

Speaker 23 (01:53:00):
You think I like the size of us, Lenna Holly
us by shame chop his ass up?

Speaker 7 (01:53:06):
Size of us?

Speaker 3 (01:53:06):
Then a hall of us by shame top top chop. Top.

Speaker 10 (01:53:09):
I will eat your leftist ass.

Speaker 3 (01:53:12):
I floorn upon the.

Speaker 10 (01:53:13):
Cob ready, I will. I will keep your ass nor
leftist ass. I torn upon the cob ready, I will
eat you. I will get your ass a barbecue your
ass flat.

Speaker 23 (01:53:30):
I will go your ass up so fast. I'm telling
them before I killed the girl out fact. Baby, you
think Christ would eat somebody, he would never do nothing.
I will am ready to hang them up, cut them
and skin.

Speaker 10 (01:53:40):
Him and chop them up. You know what I'm really
I will eat your leftist ass. I corn on the
cob main.

Speaker 2 (01:53:48):
I will.

Speaker 10 (01:53:48):
I will keep your ass. I will eat your leftist ass.
I lorn on the cob main, I will eat you.
I will keep your ass left, I will, I will left,

(01:54:12):
I will eat you. That's why I want the globals
to know I will eat your ass first. I swear
to God. It's the last thing I do.

Speaker 2 (01:54:21):
I'm gonna give any Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:54:33):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (01:54:33):
That's his idea of like killing the cowards. I think
that means sense of rotisseriy I think so.

Speaker 3 (01:54:40):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:54:40):
I don't know what how he thinks you cook a
cow but flat flat? Yeah, apparently flat barbecue is flat.
I don't I don't know what that mean. Oh my god,
my goodness. All right, Well, after that fantastic interview us
a great interview, time comes off. Yeah, Race raised just

(01:55:02):
everything right and and he's he's brilliant, and he's and
he's gracious, and he also has just such a way
of telling a story, is very compelling storytelling.

Speaker 2 (01:55:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:55:13):
Absolutely, So go buy his book. You're gonna love it
and read it and tell me all about it because
I think and that that I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:55:24):
I don't know if at a conference, but the talkie's
going to around working class journalists. I think it's just
a that's huge, and like what does the I think
the I think we were talking about this with Celeste
a little bit right and in the sense of like
nonprofit journalism, but what does it look like? Is there

(01:55:45):
any type of business model outside of what used to
be there because it's gone. The advertisement method is no longer,
there's not a classified section, right, that is not that
is that the whole business model has changed. But the
only way you can have this democracy. And one might
say the reason we're in this situation now is because

(01:56:08):
the press really right in the sense I mean it
was privatized in the sense and the weird, and I
can I don't even want to say privatize because like
there were private businesses before, right, but it's almost.

Speaker 1 (01:56:21):
Like, I think it's the word. And that's that's kind
of part of the problem, is that it got spread
too thin.

Speaker 2 (01:56:29):
For everybody could do it right, almost like, yeah, along
with the people who we really look to to to
actually give us the whether it's the post orther, it's
the times, whether they became they were all bought up, right,
Like again, they're not families that own it any longer.

Speaker 1 (01:56:46):
They and yeah, but the press in the old days
was was that too. I think I think two things
about the degradation of that. One is that the democratization
of it meant that because anybody could do it, it
just sort of like degraded the level of veritas and.

Speaker 2 (01:57:07):
Truth involved in it.

Speaker 1 (01:57:09):
And that you know, because anybody is saying anything, You've
got this guy who goes on RT one hundred and
fifty times and now is going to be the attorney
for the District of Columbia. And then the other thing
is that like it, by having so many sources, it
eroded consensus. If you have everybody getting their news from

(01:57:33):
a small number of sources. Even if you think that
that's a little dangerous in terms of like being able
to control a narrative, you do at least have a
cohesive narrative that everybody is working off of to then
form their opinions. And for a democracy to work where

(01:57:53):
it only holds together because people believe in the idea
of it. There's no you know, ethnic bond, there's no
you know, existential outside threat, there's no nationalistic thing that
ties us together. It only works because people believe in
the idea of it. That does require a fair amount

(01:58:14):
of consensus around what is real and what is not real,
what is happening, what is not happening. And I think
that the spreading of the news or of the information
ecosystem definitely eroded that. And yeah, it does get us
to where we are now for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:58:32):
Blame the CNN I Report.

Speaker 1 (01:58:36):
Among others. All right, so now we've come to a
segment that's called chip chat in space, space, space, space,
and some other headlines. So I think we can just
take turns reading these individual headlines weekend update style, if
you want to go ahead and hit the first one there.

Speaker 2 (01:58:56):
Yes, of course, this week Jeff Bezos Rocket Company Blue
Pill origin shot of a rocket not at all shaved
like a penis into space. Well, not all the way
into space. He just put the tip of the rocket
into space. That is correct.

Speaker 1 (01:59:14):
On this ride where Katie Perry, Gail King, and several
other women who nobody can remember, including Bezos. No, that's
not true. One of them was his fiance. We think
maybe one of the science ones.

Speaker 3 (01:59:24):
We don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:59:27):
Yeah, look at this. If you're not watching, we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (01:59:30):
They brought stuffed animals with them.

Speaker 2 (01:59:32):
For some reason.

Speaker 1 (01:59:33):
People are saying this was fake, by the way, which
is very stupid. They're like, why does their hair not
look like astronauts. He was like, well, because they have
hair spray. Astronauts aren't allowed to have hair spray. They
were up for eleven minutes. Astronauts are up on the
space station for months at a time. Very different sort
of scenario. I mean, it's a bit of a publicity stunt,

(01:59:55):
let's be honest.

Speaker 10 (01:59:57):
But Mike, it looks fun. Yeah, it looked fun.

Speaker 24 (02:00:02):
My comment, or let's say, a lot of other people comment,
especially for women, they had an issue with this, which
was so weird. I felt like I get the fact
that you know, you weren't a fan of it or
anything of that nature. I understand that, but at the
same time, it's it's like, okay, you know for some

(02:00:25):
of these women, especially like gil King, she.

Speaker 10 (02:00:28):
Was completely never flies at all. She admitted that.

Speaker 24 (02:00:33):
And for her to go up on a rocket that
could you know, could anything can happen and you were
able to handle that, it was again a changing experience.
Katie Perry, you know, everyone you know was you know,
joking about her, and mind you, she's always been an
you know, a person who dealt with the stars and

(02:00:54):
astronatnomical stuff and I, you know, against it was something
that you know, it was warn't for her to go
up there.

Speaker 1 (02:01:02):
And I get it.

Speaker 10 (02:01:04):
I just don't understand the hate of it.

Speaker 24 (02:01:06):
The only thing, the only thing I like, to put
this a way, the only thing I really disliked about
this whole thing was the reporting of it and having
there was like one of the reporters or I wouldn't
say reporter whatever she was calling them after they landed,
calling all these women astronauts.

Speaker 10 (02:01:27):
That was the only thing I hated.

Speaker 24 (02:01:28):
And it's like, and Gail King smartly said, it's like
I am not accepting that term. But you know, but honestly, yeah,
you don't accept that term because you only went up
for like again, less than five minutes, and came right
back down and then that was it. And I just
feel like it's like you're you're not Aaron Hart, You're
not Armstrong, You're not none of these people who've been

(02:01:51):
in space, orbit the Earth, gone to the Moon, been
on the you know, the space station, you've done none
of that. You just went up and came down.

Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
So but then there's where the hate comes from. I
think in a sense is that one this coupled with
women in NASA losing their jobs. Yeah, right, it's just
doesn't like, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (02:02:13):
Feel we have like real scientists that are under threat,
you know, actual actual stuff is getting disrupted. And then
here is a billionaire shooting his fiance and her friends
up into space for a joy ride, saying that it
was the first flight crewed entirely by women and crew.

Speaker 24 (02:02:34):
There was pretty much one person who's captain of it.
But I but the thing was, but to add on
to that, two of the women that were going up
there are you know actual Yeah, so especially the one
woman who I thought, my god, I hope she comes
down safely because she is fine as hell. But but

(02:02:56):
I felt like it's like, again, why are you hated?
I understand you better. I probably have an issue with Bezos.
You probably have an issue with this whole thing.

Speaker 2 (02:03:04):
Is just it's funded rocket that does no scientific research,
right that you complained.

Speaker 24 (02:03:11):
About that, and but then again you add to the fact,
like you know, Elon's blow up doll gig and literally
blow ups because it doesn't do any either, even though that.

Speaker 2 (02:03:21):
They brought people back from a space. I hate that.

Speaker 3 (02:03:24):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (02:03:25):
But the crew Dragon works, the the Dragon Resupply Vehicle works,
the Falcon nine works, the Falcon Heavy works, like these things.

Speaker 3 (02:03:35):
All.

Speaker 1 (02:03:36):
Yeah, just because Bezos is behind Elon doesn't mean that
it's not going to eventually pay off and be of
some sort of scientific value. We give it some time, but.

Speaker 2 (02:03:47):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:03:48):
Get back to the jokes that they don't cover that,
I promise I wrote some of them. Go ahead, and
I think Tesz, you're on next scree.

Speaker 2 (02:03:58):
Oh you know you didn't. You didn't on this ride with.

Speaker 1 (02:04:03):
Oh on this ride work?

Speaker 2 (02:04:05):
Yeah? I did? Oh my god, Sorry, Brian, we're blaming
you on this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the
first time the space castle populated by only women went
into space since the Russians did it in the sixties
when this shot Stynd's ex wife into space, never to
be heard from again.

Speaker 1 (02:04:22):
That's not fun. This time, the capsule made a perfect flight,
thanks in large part to the trip being automated so
the women didn't have to drive it. Kenny and Kitty kidding.
Trump refused to grant them pilot's licenses, so of course
they couldn't drive.

Speaker 2 (02:04:37):
NBS shot this thing up. Even they can drive now,
all right? Uh. At one point, Jeff Bezels ran up
the where the capsule had landed and fell in the hole,
proving that space flight can affect me dangerous for ball billionaires,
just not in the way you were hope.

Speaker 1 (02:04:59):
God, that's right. Also this week, the National Weather Service
fired more of their staff, leaving weather stations in the
Midwest and South unstaffed as storm season heats up and
puts lives in danger. When reached for comment, Commerce Secretary
Howard Lutnik denied ever having heard of a Weather Service.

Speaker 3 (02:05:18):
Christ.

Speaker 2 (02:05:20):
The firings at the NWS coincidal with a large donation
made to the Trump third term campaign made by checks notes.
This can't be right, Hurricane Caaren, that's why.

Speaker 3 (02:05:34):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (02:05:35):
Marco Rubio shut down the State Department office in charge
of countering foreign disinformation, saying quote, we prefer our disinformation
to be made in America.

Speaker 2 (02:05:47):
Rubio claimed this efforts about ending censorship, or at least
that's what I think he said. Actually deleted my social
media post and wrote his in instead. Oh god, that's right.

Speaker 1 (02:06:01):
In other space news, a distant planet's atmosphere shows signs
of molecules that on Earth are associated only with biological activity,
a possible signal of life on what is suspected to
be a watery world. According to a report published Wednesday
that analyzed observation from NASA's James Webb telescope, several ex
NASA rocket scientists who were recently fired and announced that

(02:06:24):
they had plans to send Jade Vance there to investigate.
No return trip was planned.

Speaker 2 (02:06:29):
You better have a suit on. The FDA announced that
it fired all the tobacco and forcers who had for
decades been successfully busting stores selling cigarettes to miners. Quote
this is fantastic, end quotes to Tommy Hendrix of O

(02:06:50):
Few elementary school. Quote I was stressed smoking over that
math test to pass third grade. End quote. Incidentally, the
Secretary of Health and Human Service is RFK Junior. Smokes
three packs a day and started when he was seven.

Speaker 1 (02:07:04):
That's true. That is true, all right, and that's.

Speaker 25 (02:07:09):
The news news news, all right, let's keep him going. Yes,
test talk. Here there goes to test birds. There they
are what these humans? Uh no, no, no, we're not
not not this not today.

Speaker 1 (02:07:27):
Really access birds.

Speaker 2 (02:07:29):
In fact, that's what it was. It was. I'm not
talking about the tax as birds today. On April fifteen,
Reuters reported that notorious internet messaging board and formed some
might probably say four chan, had been hacked. I saw
this post. A lot of people at worked telling me
about this and the little tech chats, according to the
post circulating online, some of which said that the hacker

(02:07:50):
involved had revealed identifying details of the site's moderators to
the public. That's called docsing. The ledge hack first came
in the light when it defuncts action. The site sprang
back to life with the words you got hacked. I
love the hackers, just like find some random part of
a website that no one's looking to, and then that's
how they let you know that it's they've gained access alone.

(02:08:13):
Gal who I believe is this co founder of Israeli
cybercrime monitoring company, it's Hudson Rock. He basically was claiming
that it looks legit. Basically he cited the public publicly
circulating screenshots that important to show four chan's back end infrastructure.
So what is used to kind of crop up the
site and allow people to actually use it?

Speaker 3 (02:08:35):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (02:08:37):
Tech Crunch actually here cited an unnamed four Chan moderator,
and they were basically saying that they had no reason
to dispute the authenticity of the screenshots, and the site
was only intimately available on Tuesday. Kind of sounds like
what happens when I hack. I really should have thrown
zoom in here with these guys, because that also happened
on Wednesday. Zoom going Dick, but Zoom you'll get away

(02:08:58):
this week. We'll talk about you next week. Messages sent
the four Chance Press press email went unreturned, probably because
they couldn't get in to read it, or they didn't.

Speaker 3 (02:09:07):
Want to men to it.

Speaker 2 (02:09:08):
More than likely they got better right, and one of
the two dozen or so moderates purportedly exposed in the
hack wrote back, using the four chance email addressed to
say that the site had released a quote video statement.
The user then pointed runners to an unrelated explicit four
minute video. Request for further information was followed by a

(02:09:32):
link to a different video with some of the content.
So the hackers are just having a bloody they're having
a great time.

Speaker 3 (02:09:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:09:39):
That could have been actual four Chan.

Speaker 2 (02:09:41):
Oh yeah, they could be.

Speaker 1 (02:09:42):
I guess they could be a writters just like, do
you have any comment on this? And they sent him, yeah,
here's our video statement. They clicked the link and it's
two girls, one top or whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:09:49):
Right, Oh my god? Right? And I think it A
couple of things also around this end, Gadget had a
few funny headlines. I guess it's bo said more like
four or four chan, Am I right? Which I thought
was really good as I was looking for this the

(02:10:10):
I mean, it's it's interesting, right, I mean a few
things like they mentioned and Gadget article. I was reading
about this a couple of days ago that if four
chan ends up being done for right, this would kind
of be the most significant deplatforming of like an extreme
right wing internet users like since Kiwi Farms, which I

(02:10:31):
kind of completely forgot about, like that one that went
down in twenty twenty two when they said I was like, oh,
that's really God. I forgot. Yeah, but yeah, I mean
four Chan it's one of those things. It's like, all right,
the Internet gets really tricky, but it was used for
I mean a lot of bad stuff. I mean there's

(02:10:53):
a lot of bad stuff that kind of sprung up
on four Chan. Yeah, a lot of early meme culture
I think also comes out of that as well too,
so like this, but you.

Speaker 1 (02:11:03):
Know, like well, it kind of gets credit for the
rise of the in cells and the sort of proto
trumpet uh universe that that becomes this and it's really toxic,
hazardous stuff. I've never actually gone on fortune ever looked
at articles referencing it. But it is also where the

(02:11:25):
anonymous collective sort of their voice and got together, and
you know, they occasionally do things for good.

Speaker 2 (02:11:32):
So I don't know, you think about these like I
don't want to call it. I mean, yeah, I can't
call that unregulated forms or like I wouldn't say, but
I guess the moderators in the sense were a lot
looser than others lightly moderated and lightly moderated. It's the
phrasing they used on there. But I mean, like yeah,
like I have questions like when you start doxing these people,

(02:11:57):
right and things of that nature. I mean, I mean yes,
but yeah, I mean the other way you do this
is and how they end up getting into this is
they got access to the shell, which basically, once you
get access to the shell, you kind of you have
the keys to the castle at that point, which I
assume like a lot of times these hacking things end

(02:12:20):
up happening really either through fishing.

Speaker 1 (02:12:23):
Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (02:12:26):
Yeah, it's rarely ever, like folks not sometime the time,
folks really getting down and dirty and like actually hacking
in and stuff. A lot of times it's a lot
easier for folks to get in than you think. But yeah,
I mean maybe goodbye to four chan maybe maybe maybe
so yeah, but there we go.

Speaker 1 (02:12:50):
All right, So speaking of like no fucking way, uh,
this is a series of stories that all fall into
that category.

Speaker 2 (02:13:00):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (02:13:01):
The first one is here's this like the headline. Right next,
they'll pass the law banning Alex Jones from having sex.
Since they're banning things that aren't happening, I just want
to be explicitly clear before we get into this story,
there is no credible evidence of anybody in any state,

(02:13:29):
certainly not in Texas, who is a student in a
public school who is saying that they feel like a
cat and demanding to be able to shit in a
box in the back of the classroom. That has ever
happened at all anywhere. But somehow Fox News convinced themselves

(02:13:54):
that this was happening and started like overreacting to it.
Case in Point Dateline, Austin, Texas. A new Texas bill
known as the Furries Act would ban non human behaviors
in public schools, including the use of litterboxes and wearing
animal accessories. The bill prohibits students from presenting themselves as

(02:14:15):
anything other than human, with exemptions for events like Halloween.
Students who violate the law could face suspension, expulsion, or
placement in a juvenile justice education program Salvador.

Speaker 2 (02:14:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:14:31):
Educators who failed to enforce the law could face fines,
with penalties starting at ten thousand dollars or seacott. Here's
my favorite part. This is one where they came up
with the acronym and then figured out what it stood for.
The forbidden unlawful representation of role playing in education. That's

(02:14:53):
how they got to furries. Crazy incredible, right, According to
the bill, examples of prohibited behavior again, these are things
that are not happening anywhere at all. Using a litterbox
to relieve oneself not happening. You don't need to make
it illegal because nobody's gonna do that.

Speaker 2 (02:15:16):
I mean, I guess a few people are playing golf
of pissed in the sandtrap.

Speaker 1 (02:15:20):
Sure people have pissed in sandtraps, but no kids in
schools are showing up pretending that they're cats and needing
a box. It's not happening, and be on TikTok. We
would have heard about it happening in real life. It's
one hundred percent. It would have been like a thing,
and everybody would have reported on it, because like, this

(02:15:42):
is too juicy a story not to report on all.

Speaker 2 (02:15:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:15:46):
Other things that are ban wearing non human accessories such
as tails, leashes, collars, accessories designed for pets, for other
than natural human hair or wigs or animal like ears,
or items not historically designed for.

Speaker 2 (02:15:59):
Human and not so good design.

Speaker 1 (02:16:02):
I don't know what that means.

Speaker 2 (02:16:04):
I'm trying to think of something that's not historically designed
for humans.

Speaker 1 (02:16:08):
Like if you showed up with a plate strapped to
your head, would you be in violation of that? I mean,
it's not a thing that people usually wear, but it's
not a cat.

Speaker 2 (02:16:19):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:16:21):
It also includes banning making animal noises such as barking, yowling,
or hissing.

Speaker 2 (02:16:31):
What if who lets the dogs out come exactly?

Speaker 1 (02:16:35):
Also bands licking oneself for grooming, but not for any
other purposes, So don't worry, all of the Texas pedophiles,
You're fine. It also like says there's exemptions for Halloween.
You can dress up on Halloween school mascots, but the
Halloween exemption it says you can only do it five

(02:16:56):
days out of the entire school year or out of
the entire calendar year. So like, you know, I don't
know how many Halloweens you need. Maybe there's like Halloween,
maybe dress up like an Easter bunny. I don't know
one of our holidays you might be dressing up as
an animal for.

Speaker 3 (02:17:10):
But cool.

Speaker 1 (02:17:14):
Speaking of licking oneself, this is my favorite story of
the week. I yes, could not get enough of this,
So IM go ahead and flip the hat around for
this one. You know, there's that that school school very
loosely used Ohio that thinks that they won a national

(02:17:35):
championship in football this year, which is funny because I
remember them losing twice, one of which was to Michigan,
and we have a national championship. It doesn't have any
losses next to it. I assume most national championships have
zero losses or maybe just one. But you know, a
two loss Natty, I guess it can happen. I don't
know if it's legitimate, but sure. Anyway, as the true

(02:18:00):
edition dictates, if you win the national championship in college
football and Donald trumps president, you have to go eat McDonald's.

Speaker 3 (02:18:07):
At his house.

Speaker 2 (02:18:10):
So that's true.

Speaker 1 (02:18:12):
It's true. So he kidnapped all of the Ohio players
and brought them to the White House where he fed
the McDonald's. And then one of the most remarkable things
in the world happened. If you're watching on the video here,
it comes JD. Vance Trophy and threw it on the ground.
Now you may know that JD. Vance went to Ohio

(02:18:34):
for his undergrad where he studied philosophy of all things,
you know, like a real alpha, and then he went
off to Yale Law School. Jade Vance broke the trophy.
He then played it off by saying some dumb shit
about how he wanted to make sure nobody else could
get it after Ohio. He was clearly like super excited
to hold this thing, having never played a sport in

(02:18:54):
his entire life. But he was just really you know,
ah uh uh, he's so fucking good at sports.

Speaker 3 (02:19:05):
So he.

Speaker 2 (02:19:09):
Couch that conversation.

Speaker 1 (02:19:13):
We'll have to put that to the side, have a
seat talk about.

Speaker 2 (02:19:17):
I mean, at the end of his turn, they're gonna
have to give him the chair.

Speaker 1 (02:19:23):
He'll just go home and retire to his lazy boy
oh boy.

Speaker 3 (02:19:29):
Like that.

Speaker 1 (02:19:30):
So anyway, I thought this was hilarious. Of course, everybody
had a really good time making fun of jad Vance.
Jad Vance, of course handled it as he always does
by whining and crying stop making fun of me. I
would point out that the trophy in ann Arbor is
perfectly well intact, has not been assaulted by jd Vance,
unlike most of the couches in Ohio. All Right, and

(02:19:53):
this one here, I don't know what to call this
except tariff for crazy. Read this and I said, what
what do you want to read it.

Speaker 2 (02:20:05):
Yes, all right, okay, there's a reason they can't watch
ye watch yes and quote unsecured and quote penguining in
the cardboard box as blamed for a bizarre helicopter crash
in South Africa.

Speaker 1 (02:20:21):
What an image.

Speaker 2 (02:20:23):
Let's just again, hold on. I was reading. Oh my god,
I just got ah. I just I was reading and
I didn't look at the image. That is crazy. I
just saw the bird sitting in the box. It's sitting
there like how people bring home puppies. Well, it was
that in the holes in the box and everything. It
is clearly that uh, the flightless bird apparently caused the

(02:20:46):
pilot to lose control shortly after take off from Bird Island.
I'm sure. Yeah, dah near the eastern came back in January.

Speaker 26 (02:20:56):
South African No, no recently found the feather raising side
unfolded when the bird which have been placed in a
box and onto the lap of a passenger.

Speaker 2 (02:21:10):
It's a penguin. Yeah, they're not. It's a penguin. Even
the small ones probably way a decent amount. I probably
say thirty pounds maybe I.

Speaker 1 (02:21:21):
Don't know, thirty pounds, but they're big, they're not stout right.

Speaker 2 (02:21:27):
It's a bunch of fat on most of them, right, yes,
on a decent amount. So this they placed them in
the box box and suddenly it slid forward and rammed
into the pilot's control. The pilot Robinson R forty four
raven Yeah, Raven two.

Speaker 1 (02:21:48):
I guess is that doesn't it has a new engine,
but it's an R forty four, pretty common helicopter.

Speaker 2 (02:21:55):
Right, wasn't able to regain control, causing the chopper uh
to roll to the right and plumbing nearly fifty feet
to the ground. According to report release last week, the
four seed helicopter it's not even a seat for the penguin. Right.
It suffered substantial damage when the main road of blades
made an impact with the ground. Investigators said none of

(02:22:17):
the occupants were injured and the penguin was also unharmed.
The report stated, I mean this, I read this.

Speaker 1 (02:22:24):
And I was just like, what, like what we can
only like guess what was happening. But here's my idea. Right,
rich people, yep, charter a helicopter to take them to
Bird Island with the intention to capture a penguin. See
a penguin. Go oh, it's so cute. I'm gonna take

(02:22:46):
it home. They put it in their backs to take
it home, and then they're like, hey, look, honey, at
the penguin and they're in they're in the helicopter and
the penguin's like, oh fuck this noise, and it starts
trying to get out of the box and they like
freak out, throw it at the pilot and he crashes.

Speaker 2 (02:23:03):
They're stuck on this island, right. It's insane, all right.
The little the Glopoulos penguin is about about six pounds.
Emperor penguin is fifty one.

Speaker 1 (02:23:13):
Yea, the little blue fairy penguins they dig burrows and
go on the ground. They're very very small. But yeah,
emperor penguins are fifty pounds and they stand like five
feet tall.

Speaker 2 (02:23:22):
They're not exactly not And this penguin wasn't I mean again,
it wasn't it, but it was.

Speaker 3 (02:23:28):
It was big.

Speaker 1 (02:23:28):
Go back to the photo. I can tell you what
kind of penguin it is, Brian put it. There's only
elevenpe it. Well maybe I can't no, no it is.
I can't see his face. He might be in a
dilly penguin.

Speaker 2 (02:23:40):
What's the happy feet one? It looks like that.

Speaker 1 (02:23:43):
He's not a chin strap and he's he's not a
macaroni or rock hopper. So I mean it's it's it's
pretty small number. There's only like seven species.

Speaker 2 (02:23:55):
Mister Popper didn't go about it this way. He didn't
even he didn't even put him on a plane. He
just had in their house. They didn't get on a plane.

Speaker 1 (02:24:05):
I think the thing that really is the big stories
the penguin is both black and white, so nobody knows
who to blame for this one.

Speaker 2 (02:24:12):
Black and white and from itself is from South Africa
and it's.

Speaker 1 (02:24:15):
From South Africa. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know.
Maybe can we switch the penguin out for Elon? It
seems to know how to take down rich people better
a little bit. Yeah, yeah, what a story.

Speaker 2 (02:24:27):
I mean, this is revenge for again, like you said,
the terror, it's.

Speaker 1 (02:24:30):
Terror for revenge, right, So the penguins are mad about
getting this terror slapped on them. They were very upset.
They've been trying to sell us those little pebbles that
they pick up to try to impress a mate for
years and now the pebble is going to cost like
four pebbles to bring into the United States. It's very
disheartening to the pebble industry there on Herd Island or

(02:24:53):
heard and McDonald Island. Sorry, and you know, they caught
up their buddies over on Bird Island and they're hey,
you know the humans they're fucking with the pebbles again,
and they're like, oh no, this is not gonna stand.
I'm gonna wait for one. Go get get Ted out here.
He's the cutest, right, So they marched Ted out and
Ted's like out there looking cute, tricks the humans into

(02:25:15):
scooping him up, puts them in the box and they're like,
you know what to do, right, and he goes, yeah,
I got this shit and then he pickingy band crashes
their helicopter.

Speaker 2 (02:25:24):
That's what happened. I know.

Speaker 1 (02:25:28):
Okay, great, we've come to the end of the show,
which you can tell because there's music or not. Nobody knows.
Oh there it is, okay. Thank you to Rayuirez for
being so cool and coming on the show to make
a smarter Go get his book. It's called We Are Home.
It is excellent stories and a cool format too, so

(02:25:51):
go check that out. Thank you to our radio partners,
Ripped Radio. Trump was in town this week and I
got to have lunch with him and and UH and
hang out. That was really cool and Uh I miss
him and UH should come back. This ship is hard,
So yeah. Thanks to our radio partners, Ripped Radio, Organically

(02:26:13):
Friendly Radio, and of course w b e Z Chicago.
Thanks to n OTN for keeping us on for another
week we assume although don't even know. Thanks to our
home on the interwebs, Coplaymedia dot Com, and thanks as
always to our family here at Beltwigh Radio from making
a sound as smooth as the time Bill Belichick is
having down in Chapel Hill. All right, where can everybody

(02:26:36):
get you on the socials? There, tez from mar Largo
to Mars.

Speaker 2 (02:26:40):
President Trump's Great American comeback. No, no, you can find
meat titles on there. You can five me at DC
Cortes all right.

Speaker 1 (02:26:51):
You can find me and the show on the Twitter
at chipchat, r R can find us on Facebook or
Instagram at rip chipchat, and you can of course find
me on Blue Skuy a chef chip doing all kinds
of hilarious stuff. Trump met with the Prime Minister of
Italy today to discuss EU Terris. What did he do?

(02:27:14):
He grabbed her by the Naples all right, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (02:27:19):
Tip.

Speaker 1 (02:27:20):
That's test Brian Somewhere in the background, you've been listening
to Tip chat on Beltwegh Radio and beyond street Balls.

Speaker 3 (02:27:33):
To get a sound on some is what he'd be trying.

Speaker 22 (02:27:35):
The show is like a custo feathered Eddy and then
knows words, how can we stay late when our guest
is Zilly Bird? And conclusion, the messages to go bile
with serve folks, whether that's art music or if you
just tell jokes, seek medic Hope you will dedicate your

Speaker 1 (02:27:49):
Fierst thanks to sticking with us through all these years

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