It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. - SEIU 1000 Union Rep of the IE Reports Live from the Frontline - Everyone Hates Them: Trump, the Media and Jimmy Kimmel - Does Tylenol Give Your Baby Autism? - What Does the Antifa Executive Order Mean for Free Speech? - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #36 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources: Everyone Hates Them: Trump, the Media and Jimmy Kimmel https://www.cawshinythings.com/about-caw/ https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/fair-shakes-amv.pdf https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/article/jimmy-kimmel-returns-after-suspension-for-charlie-kirk-comments-our-government-cannot-be-allowed-to-control-what-we-do-and-do-not-say-on-television-195436293.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/24/trump-approval-rating/86306451007/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-dips-americans-worry-about-economy-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2025-09-23/ https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/kimmel-reinstatement-disney-price-increase-scoop https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/29/democrats-pounce-in-reliably-red-iowa-fueled-by-special-election-hopium-00538075 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-win-in-iowa-special-election-breaks-gop-supermajority https://www.the-downballot.com/p/iowa-democrats-win-massive-upset Does Tylenol Give Your Baby Autism? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406 What Does the Antifa Executive Order Mean for Free Speech? https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2025/09/28/the-implications-of-trumps-war-on-antifa-with-moira-meltzer-cohen/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #36 democrats-are-shutting-down-government https://www.mediamatters.org/health-care/right-wing-media-run-wild-blatantly-false-claim-democrats-are-shutting-down-governmenthttps://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4309929/at-war-department-shaving-waivers-out-clean-shaven-faces-in/ https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4309929/at-war-department-shaving-waivers-out-clean-shaven-faces-in/ ​​https://www.taxnotes.com/research/federal/other-documents/treasury-tax-correspondence/remove-irs-workers-anti-conservative-bias-group-says/7sx42 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-man-who-burned-u-s-flag-outside-white-house-in-protest-of-trumps-executive-order/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restoring-the-united-states-department-of-war/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/president-trump-deploys-federal-resources-to-crush-violent-radical-left-terrorism-in-portland/ https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/23/2025-18372/determination-pursuant-to-section-102-of-the-illegal-immigration-reform-and-immigrant-responsibility https://x.com/SecWar/status/1971342502650429458 https://www.cbp.gov/document/environmental-assessments/border-barrier-system-construction-san-diego-county-california https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/federal-drug-prosecutions-fall-lowest-level-decades-trump-shifts-focus-2025-09-29/ https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/tom-homan-cash-contracts-trump-doj-investigation-rcna232568 https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/msnbc-exclusive-former-ice-officer-led-the-fbi-to-tom-homan-248671301528 https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/judiciary-democrats-demand-doj-fbi-release-recordings-of-tom-homan-receiving-50000-cash-bribe https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/29/stephen-miller-venezuela-drug-boat-strike https://thetriibe.com/2025/09/feds-detain-dozens-of-immigrants-in-massive-south-shore-apartment-building-raid-in-chicago/ https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-federal-agents-surround-south-shore-apartment-building-dhs-requests-military-deployment-illinois/17908911/ https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/09/30/armed-agents-in-unmarked-vans-target-south-shore-apartment-building/ https://thetriibe.com/2025/10/video-shows-feds-choking-a-black-man-in-east-garfield-park/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:43Robert Evans?

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

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Recording in progress. Okay, check this out. Now, I have always been amazed by when I take a second to actually tap into like my actual network of just friends. You know you have friends in categories? You know what I'm saying?

• 2:23Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  And it's just like this.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  You just call me work homie.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, you just don't really picture those things colliding. Or when like your friends like meet each other and it turns out they know each other. It's the weirdest thing. But anyway, for me and my like podcast activist, you know, activism world, you know, a lot of times overlaps with the hip hop world. Cause you know, we believe in a lot of same stuff. But like this one like really happened.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Where I was just like in my own network, somebody I've known for a while, who I'm just now learning your name is Tristan.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  I didn't know your name was Jason.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. You know what I'm saying? That's how rap works. So, um, introduce yourself however you want to be introduced. Yeah, you know, and then let's, let's get into it.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  Hey, everybody, I'm a tangent wiggy, AKA Tristan Hacker. Uh, I got a lot of other names too, but I'll keep it to those for now. Uh, and, uh, I'm from San Bernardino. Uh, and I'm an artist in the, you know, community with, with propaganda, uh, as well as a state employee. I paid disability claims for the state of California. And in my role as a state employee, I am a, a union rep. Uh, and I'm an elected member of my union's executive board. So I represent state employees, uh, from Ontario region to San Bernardino region and in between. And I'm on the bargaining team. So I go up to Sacramento and, and help prepare for bargaining against Governor Newsom and his team as well.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Word. So you, so this is like, this is frontline energy. Okay?

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Which I love about it because it's like, like you said, like your, your day job is in some ways, it's, it's so crazy because it's like. As far away as that is from the actual like worker per se, like you have just this parasocial like intimate relationship with everybody that works for the state. Cause like you seeing, you know what I'm saying, what they going through?

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  And how great it is to think inside of such a here bureaucracy, there's somebody there that's like, no, I'm actually like fighting for y'all.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I appreciate that.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Words. So first of all, tell them what the union is. Which union we talking about?

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. S is in SAM, E is in everybody, I is in incredible, U as in union, um, Service Employees International Union, uh, but 1,000, right? So S, S E I U is one of the biggest international unions in the world. And, and, and everyone out there has probably seen the purple, purple S E I U stuff on all kinds of stuff. From nurses to state workers.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  To, uh, in, in home support services, workers and, and home care nurses. And, but there's a lot of different people that are under S E I U more broadly. State employees in California are S E I U 1,000.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Word.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  So we're, we're local 1,000 and that's the broader union that I'm a part of.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  All of Cali, okay.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  You know, all, all, all hundred thousand state employees that are represented.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Damn, okay.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  And, but, uh, I am, uh, elected to the executive board of DLC 704, which is the Inland Empire, well, the Ontario, San Bernardino, part of the Inland Empire's chapter.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Word. Ontario, San Bernardino. Okay. This is going to be very Cali specific. Like, obviously this, everybody here who listens ain't from here. So like, I've, I've cracked many LA and IE jokes and just like, you know, throughout, throughout our time. You know what I'm saying? I like to say that I have an IE passport stamped. Like I have my, um.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Aren't you a Pomona guy?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  I worked in Pomona. See, I didn't, I, I never lived there.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Okay, but you see what I'm saying? You have a strong connection to Pomona as far as I've seen. I've, I've seen you, you, absolutely.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  That's what I mean. Like I'm a naturalized citizen. I got a green card. I got a, I got a IE green card. Cause like, I worked in Pomona, you know, foundation was in Pomona. My condemned lights was in Pomona. For y'all listeners, these are like the hip hop and poetry spots that I kind of grew up in. Because since I'm, you know, born in South Central, but I'm from the 626. So, so you come, me coming from La Puente Valenda, Pomona was just so much more closer than.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Limerick Park, you know what I'm saying? So.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  So I ended up just kinda like spending a lot of time there. And then for high school, I got, I got busted in the Inland Empire. So I got busted. I was, I went to school out of district because my parents split up. It's a long story, but anyway.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  Sure, it hap- it happens a lot.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that being said, like, I have a lot of love for the Inland Empire and spent a lot of time there.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  You know what I'm saying? So that's why I was like, I got, I got a visa. I got a IE visa.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that being said, what would you say? I mean, it's kinda like, I'm kinda springing this one on you, but like, what would you say would be something that's like unique? A unique thing that someone from where you guys are at? Like a service worker where you guys are at, that might be a unique issue that's specific to them? That wouldn't be somewhere else?

• 6:57Speaker 05

  I'll do two, because I feel like I need two to kinda to answer it well.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Word.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Uh, one is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is a city, kind of a little connected city to San Bernardino. Highland has Patton State Hospital.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  Which is basically Arkham Asylum. You know, it's basically Arkham Asylum from, from the Batman comics, which is, it's a hospital for the criminally insane.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, it's like, like, in other words, like, you've committed crimes, but you have mental health issues.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  So you're not in the regular prison, but you're not in the regular mental hospital. You are in the prison for the mental patients.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  And it's a, it's a massive 24-hour facility. And I feel like, even though I work for EDD doing disability claims, because I'm in a regional chapter with the Patton State Hospital folks, um, they get a lot of, of the attention of what the union organization does, because 24-hour facilities are very, very taxing and they're very ripe for, uh, abuse and for people to go through really difficult things.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Word.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  And, and then the second thing I would say would be the fact that where we are, we have a lot of, um, we service a lot, maybe more my job, right? We service a lot of undocumented people, like a lot of the disability claims I pay.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Word.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  For the state.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  I pay to, I pay to undocumented folks, which is one reason that the ICE stuff has, has been hitting so close to home.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Word.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  And also, people may not realize that California doesn't regulate about documented status the way that the, the federal government does, right? So as long as you could prove your wages to the state of California in a legit, straight paperwork kinda way, we don't care that you're undocumented. We're gonna pay you because you're a worker and you need our services.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Facts. And like, I love that you said that, because when they talk about like, how the undocumented don't pay taxes, I'm like, yes, they do.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Yes, they do.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Yes, they do.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Yes, they do.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  They pay a lot. Yeah. If you can think of just off the head, like, obviously, over the years, the negotiations and different things that have come up.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Varied over time. We'll get to the ICE raids, because that's obviously where everything got super ratcheted up. But like, what were some of the most like, I don't like, I don't know, how would I phrase this? Where you were like, this is the most reasonable request we can ask for. Like, this is just like, I don't, this is so, I don't understand.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Why this is so hard for y'all. Like, this is incredibly, I just want to like, calibrate, because

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  A lot of times, people hear, they hear the word "union," they got all these pictures about what the things are and what this, you know what I'm saying? They got all these pictures, but I'm just like, fam, you ever heard of a five-day week?

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Work week? That's unions, my G.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  You know what I'm saying? So like, that seems very reasonable. You know what I mean? So, so if you could think of like, some of the things you've had to negotiate, what was some of the most like, this is, I don't understand why this is so hard for y'all?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  So have you ever, you probably heard the phrase, "Every crisis is an opportunity," right?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:33Speaker 05

  You've heard people say that, right? So, the union, my union, and other unions, have been pushing for telework, you know, being my entire 20 years with the state. Now, I'm 17, I'll be 17 years veteran with the state as of December, right?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Wow, okay.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  The entire time, we wanted telework. It took the quarantine crisis of 2020, 2021, to actually get the state to agree to mass implement telework. And so that was like, that's a crisis that we made an opportunity. That's like, hey, we needed, we needed telework. So many people are also caring for their kids, are also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring for a new baby, or, you know, taking, you know, just at the house so the contractors could come fix their plumbing, you know, it's like, like, telework has been something that we thought was very reasonable for a long time, that it took, it took until the COVID crisis for us to get telework. And we feel like we're pioneers in that, in a workforce way, because now there's lots of places that have telework, partly because I think the work that unions like us have done.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  That's dope, man. You know, obviously, coming out of the pandemic and recently, like, a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys can come back to the office. And people are like, absolutely not. Why, like, why would I?

• 10:38Speaker 05

  Hard to take it away, hard to take it away once you got it.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Why would we do that? I know my own, like, my wife, you know, she, pre-pandemic, at the spot she was working at, she was working at a nonprofit, you know, she was like, okay, I was touring so much, that she was just like, Dude, like, you want me in this office at a certain time. It's stress on the whole family. I had to get my daughter to school. It's, you know, just breaking her neck to figure stuff out. She's like, I'm done with the stuff that can be done at a desk within an hour. She's like, I'm just, I'm just scrolling the internet.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Like, I'm just like, like, I'm trying to tell you.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  You're paying for AC, you're paying for lights, you're paying for the desk space.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  For all this, there's no reas- like, I don't have to be here, you know?

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  And, um, so she pushed. She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights, you know, figured it out and, you know, without telling her business, she, uh, she actually helped the staff unionize there. You know what I'm saying? She was like, look, man, this is ridiculous, you know what I'm saying?

• 11:39Speaker 05

  You got a real one.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, don't, don't, don't Google it. Anyway.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so something that you had to, you know, you said you, you actually go up to the state, you, you interact with Gavin Newsom, you know, which is the whole thing.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  We have our opinions on Mr. Newsom.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  You know, and like, how allied are you as an ally? Like, you know what I'm saying? And, and, you know, people are complicated. We can't always agree on the same things, you know what I'm saying? Like, but like.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  That's correct.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  There's been, there've been times where it's been like, hey, you know what? Salute.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  He's doing something dope and then other times when he's not, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Doing something dope, the other times it's like, bruh, who are you?

• 12:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Right? Like, what is happening right now? So, so obviously, you know, when you go up there, you're, you're not interacting with him. You're interacting with his team, right?

• 12:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, the one time I actually met him, um, I went to the California Democratic Party Convention in 2012, uh, in, in San Diego. And, um, and I just went with a friend, just showed up. I was not a delegate.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  I was a union rep already, but I had no official role. I just showed up and walked around the, the San Diego Hilton, which is also where they founded San Diego Comic Con.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  And, uh, and I got to meet a lot of officials, uh, including some inland ones, including some really famous people like Nancy Pelosi's daughter. But, uh, I went up to, I went up to, uh, like at the time Lieutenant Governor Newsom. And basically thanked him because he had just voted against the tuition hike uh for the Cal States and UCs. And I was and I I went to Cal State Summer, you know, I have my masters in poetry, my MFA in poetry from Cal State Summer, you know. And so I I was still a student at the time and he had just voted against the tuition increase. So there's a picture of me meeting him from that from that time. That's the only.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Oh, that's great, yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that and then he had just done something good and he had and he said humble things about it when I thanked him for it. So my one personal interaction with him was good, but since then, when in the capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team, like my our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team in Sacramento.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Word. Okay, so give me one, something that's been like.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  The opposite.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Where what they were asking for. Yeah, it was like, this is completely unreasonable, guys. Like, what are you talking about?

• 13:45Speaker 05

  So every three years, every three years, our state employee contract goes up. Right? And so around the two-year mark, we we start gearing up negotiations, you know, and the state, Newsom has the power to summon us for negotiation and we have the power to summon his team for negotiation, right? So at that two-year mark, we start negotiating. So in twenty twenty-two, we started negotiating about the twenty twenty-three expiring. You know, so that we by the end of twenty-three, we could have a new contract. When your state employee is difficult, it's hard to strike. Right? Like, you have to have an extremely high threshold to strike. Like, if you're a a private company and you're in a union, it's a lot easier to strike. You guys don't want to strike, you strike, like that episode of The Simpsons.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  They're just like dental plan, you know, and they started striking. Right, right? Uh, with with the state, because we provide essential services to Californians in need, it is an extremely high threshold in terms of what it would take for us to legally be allowed to strike. Right? And Newsom and his team know that, so they could kind of like really slow walk negotiations and stop negotiating in good faith. But as long as there's like, uh, you know, what is it? There's signs of life on the hospital ticker. The negotiations, then they're stick, we're still obligated to not strike. Right? So in twenty twenty-three, our contract expired. Newsom was offering us one or two percent raise for the next three years. And meanwhile, he was going on TV saying, I'll debate Ron DeSantis.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Oh, who's during that time?

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Uh, uh, I want to help the the the Screen Actors Guild uh finish their contract and the and the Screen Writers Guild and I want to, so it's like, whoa, whoa, bro, where are your kids? Why are you trying to go help their? Yeah. You know, it was like, why you're not negotiating with us, but you're on TV talking about, I want to help Harrison Ford. And I want to help, you know, I want to help the actors get their contract. And it's like, so I something I had, I made a TikTok recently about how I think my, uh, my lefty friends and I'm lefty as hell. Of course, but like artist friends, anti establishment friends, you know, leftist friends, I think hate Democrats in stupid ways. Whereas there are smart ways to hate Democrats. Okay. Right? Like to me, the stupid, the, the, the stupid way to hate Democrats is to be like, oh, both parties are the same. I'm going to sit out and let Republicans win and hurt us worse. Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Right? To me, the smart way to hate on Democrats is to realize when they're doing a good thing here. They're distracting you from a bad thing here. Mm hmm. And then they're doing a bad thing here. They're distracting you. You know, it's like. A good thing. Yeah. Okay. Right? So like Newsom at times might be capitulating to Trump on something federally, but then he does something good state domestically in the state to kind of keep his rep up or the reverse. Yeah. Maybe he's fighting with Trump on something and that's good. Yeah. But he's doing some wax shit like slow walking or contract negotiations. We're not Hollywood actors, right? So when our contract goes up, you didn't get the news about it, like with the Screen Actors Guild, because that's slopping your Hulu. That's stopping your Disney plus. You know, you, you hear all about that. When our contract expires. Yeah. You don't hear about it unless you're on disability, unless you're on one of our programs and then you can't go to the office because, because we're understaffed

• 16:32Speaker 05

  or because something's going wrong with us. Right? Damn. So 2023 was a pissed off time for us because he's offering us peanuts. He was offering to help everybody else. Let me help the actors. Let me help the screenwriters. Let me fight Ron DeSantis. Let me go, go to Washington and have federal fights. Meanwhile, we're, our contract expired and when our contract expired, there's things we lose. There's stipends we lose. There's benefits we lose. Yeah. And he just, so he had us, had us in a bind. So I organized a worksite picket at my office in San Bernardino. Let's go. In 102 degree weather, we can't strike, but we can picket. Wow. Okay. See, I didn't know that. Right? You know, so that's part of being a union rep is like, what are my tools? Yeah. You know, like, what are my tools? Like know your, know your arsenal, know your weaponry, right? And so I organized a picket. We had signs, me and, and I'm just, I'm, I tear up and I think about this because I had coworkers

• 17:16Speaker 05

  that I didn't think were going to march in the heat with me. I thought it might've been me by myself. You know, I was one of only one or two union reps in my office at the time. Now, we have four because I've been recruiting, you know, and I have good people in my office, you know? Um, but at the time, I was one of the only union reps. Uh, there was people who I knew had legit skepticism about the union. I didn't expect it, but every single lunch, not just my lunch, at every lunch, we had people picketing in front of my office with signs. People were honking in support of us. Within a month or two, we got an eight percent raise on that next negotiation.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Let's go.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  You know, and so, you know, when we fight, we win. When we unite, we win, you know, like you don't hear, we're not fighting for nothing and, and, and that was a do or die moment for me as a union organizer because I hadn't had many, um, real fights yet. And I had, I couldn't really point to my coworkers and say, hey, we did this and got this. We did this and got this. So the fact that I got my coworkers to march in a hundred two degree weather with me instead of just sitting in the air conditioning, having lunch, and that we won, that a few weeks later, they said, you're going to get an eight percent raise.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  That's hard.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  You know, like, I was like, yes, like proof of concept. I have proof of concept. I'm not just wasting my coworkers' time. I could tell you that it's a tangible result to when we organize together.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  See, that's, these are the type of like wins we need to hear because we've been, we've been taking some Ls like.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Speaking of Ls, so y'all's, y'all's SEIU one thousand, you know, David Werther, right? That's his name?

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. David Werther is from one of the California SEIU branches. He's tightly connected to our union, but he's not one thousand.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  He's not one thousand. Okay, word.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  But he is SEIU, so he is part of us. Yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  So when ICE, you know, invaded our streets.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  He was outside, you know, doing what he had to do. I know S- SEIU set up the, uh, the thing at Alvera Street. Yeah, they set up a, a, a location there for like to educate. It was just such a beautiful thing, but

• 18:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  The first thing that got me out the house was the rally for when he was detained. So like,

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Man, tell me what was going on and as much as you can behind closed doors.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  So, most of the listeners here know this story because this show is like pretty tapped in, but yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Right. Mm hmm. So what I would say is this to me is an opportunity to talk about like the cultural differences with inland in LA, right?

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  The union is very progressive, right? But the inland is a much more conservative area, right? And compared to Los Angeles, compared to San Francisco, compared to, you know, it's not as big of a city. It's more impoverished.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 05

  You know, there's a lot of, you know, even just the geography of it, right? People may grew up in the city, like my, my, my mom grew up around where you're talking about, La Fuente and El Monte. I was born in El Monte, right?

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Word.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  But there was a suburban exodus in the late eighties of like people who wanted to go from that East LA 626 area to raise their kids in the inland, because that was the more conservative suburb, right? So for me, every time something like that happens with something like a David Huerta or something in one of the bigger cities happens and we're fighting with the, with the right wing about things, it's a matter of me educating my inland people about why we care and how we're all connected, you know? And then, and then there's always some people, and I got to respect this, as a union organizer, I really have to be able to talk with my more conservative members, because there are people in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me, they're just workers who want to be represented, right?

• 20:17Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, that's actually a good point to hammer down, because like, last year, one of the shows on our network covered a union strike at a, I want to say it was like a metal plant in Alabama. Like in the sticks of Alabama, these are good old boys from the South. But, but one thing we can agree on me is like, pay me what I'm worth. Like you're saying, like, it just seemed pretty simple to me. I don't understand how you've got to be a progressive to want to be paid what you're worth, you know?

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  So I think that that's a good point to say that like, even in a rather conservative place, all of us want to go home and eat, you know, and, and earn the wages that I, that I should be, pay me what I'm worth. It just, it seemed that simple.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Exactly, and so, so that's a tension that happens, right? And this is, this is probably a discussion that happens among a lot of progressive groups in general, that like, there's people who want you to focus on your, on your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're part of an interconnected society, where it's like, if the immigrants are being harmed, and the laborers are being harmed, and the artists are being harmed, and the nurses are being harmed, and the teachers, you know? So, so there's always that divide, but in the inland, which is a more conservative area, there's a Especially that divide between people who are like, I don't want my union fighting about immigration and ICE. I don't want my union fighting about the environment.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Hmm, wow.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  I don't want the union fighting about LGBT. I just want the union to fight for my raise. I want the union to fight for my telework and that's all I want them to do, right? So that's a, that's a big thing for, for, for me is to kind of explain to people how, no, David Werther fighting for immigrant rights is him fighting for you as a worker.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  You know, because if they came for them, they could come for you, you know? So, so that's kind of how I see that.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Did you feel like it landed well?

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Uh, it always does, uh, does with some and it doesn't with some, you know? Yeah. I, I'll be honest with you. There are people who just left the union after the Charlie Kirk killing.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  In my opinion, they're going to really weird logic jumps when they're like, well, the union endorsed Kamala and Kamala has supporters that are happy about Charlie Kirk dying, so I'm leaving the union.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  And I'm like, uh, so you don't want that raise?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  You really red stringing that joint.

• 22:14Speaker 05

  You know?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  That is definitely the always sunny in Philadelphia meme of just you like tying these strings together like, bro, I don't know what you talking about.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And so to be honest, there's been some of that, you know? I, I'll say this, the Charlie Kirk gave us more of that than the immigration stuff, but, but there's always those few whispers from a few people who are like, they're just not down with the broader.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Cause those of us who are in the leadership of the union, I think we have solidarity. You know, we have solidarity, not just with other state workers, but with anyone who's in any SIU.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  With Teamsters, with anyone who's in any union and with Californians, anyone who is somebody who is in a vulnerable group.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  You know, and so there's just always that difference of opinion. I would say overall, let's say it's 60% hits in a good way.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Word.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  And in my area, because it's so conservative, let's say 40% it doesn't, you know, it's something we work on.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  That's interesting.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Okay. My last two questions would be this, like.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  I'll give them both, like, so what are y'all currently kind of like pushing for? I'm assuming it has a lot to do with immigration and ICE raids and stuff. But also, in what ways can we, as just a broader community, help?

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Well, how do I put this? So I work in downtown San Bernardino.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  And my disability office is next to the Mexican consulate.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Let's go. First of all, we need to paint the picture of San Bernardino. I really feel like, for those that don't know California, the the nature of what San Bernardino is, is a part of this story that you might be missing. First of all, like, okay, all that you picture, everything that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was in the 90s, all the pictures that you think, you know what I'm saying? That you go, oh, it's really San Bernardino. Like, you know what I'm saying?

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  So, I mean, I'm trying to say this in a way that's descriptive and not derogatory, because obviously, like, it's always Cali love for me and I, you know, of course. But there is a certain, there's a certain part of San Bernardino that feels like, like, just a spirit of like, we just gave up.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  The Walking Dead.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  The Walking Dead, exactly it. It feels like a zombie land, like, just this dark. I remember the Carousel Mall, like, you walk by that mall, it's eerie. It just feels like, when people talk about the forgotten man, the forgotten America, I'm like, San Bernardino.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Like, we didn't gave up on that city, yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  It's recently gone from 230,000 people to only 200,000 people. But also, probably because a lot of people that left were the most impoverished people, our poverty rate went from, let's say, in the post-Bush II recession, like, 2010, we had a 30% poverty rate, we were the most impoverished city in the state. We've gotten down to like 17% poverty, which is still bad.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  You know, that's still almost one out of five people. Well, it's very diverse. I mean, and as someone who pays attention to politics, it has all the problems, exactly like you said, all the problems that people talk about when they say the important problems. It's post-industrial, there's gun violence, it's diverse, there's poverty. You know, there's environmental issues because it's such a warehouse empire.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Uh, because it's such a, you know, area of freight and warehouses. It's like the air quality is some of the worst in the state.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Um, you know, we have real problems, you know, we got real problems. And in downtown, downtown San Bernardino is a A lot of where the problems are. We want to get it like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and and some of the other nicer downtowns, but it's just not there yet. And there are people absolutely working on that. And um, like there are a couple alleyways in the city. It sounds so, it sounds so uh, uh, humble, but we have a couple alleyways in the city that got um, $500,000 grants recently to kind of make them a arts alleyway to kind of look like something more like the Claremont Village.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Let's go.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  You know, and so, yeah, you know, and so we are always working on it and I will always, you know, as somebody who founded, co-founded the Inland Empire Music Awards Show and other platforms that I put on, not just my art, but I help put on other artists in the inland. I will always tell you about the amazing tacos you could get in my city, the amazing small businesses you could support in my city, the amazing art community.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Put on by my, by my OGs like Judah One of Pomona, like Noah James of the inland and Lisa J and

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  and many others, you know, who helped build a really beautiful um, ecosystem. Like there's, there's, please come, come to Summer, you know, hit me up and I'll take you to save beautiful parts of it, you know? But yes, it's, it's rough.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  To your point, I know, I want you to get to the next thing, but to your point, that was the same as that picture of Compton to where it's like,

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  like in the sense that like, we know it's dangerous. We know there's poverty. We know there's that, but there's beauty here.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  There's dope stuff.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  You know, and let me come like, and again, like just the hood rules where it's like, well, you and me. Like, so you're good. You know what I'm saying? Like, you and me, you know? And some of the, yeah, like, we can, we can definitely shine lights, like I said, like, you know, I've talked about Noah James on this show, you know what I'm saying? I've talked about Judah One, you know, that I talked about Sincere, C4, like the people that like, I came, I came up with, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, the Inland Empire, a lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to LA is really IE, you know what I'm saying?

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And we know, like, we know, because they're not lying about it. We know that. Matter of fact, nobody has pride about, IE got pride, boy. Like, they're like, no, no, no, no, we are the inland and I love that about y'all. Anyway.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  See, check it out. Yup, yup, yup, yup.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  You know?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  Because the IE got a Heisman.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  The IE got a Heisman. So, yeah, okay. So anyway, so your office is next to the Mexican consulate.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  Mexican consulate, right? And so I've actually spent my, you know, I've been at this office in San Bernardino since 2014 and five years before that, I worked in the Riverside office. But I've been in my, my office in San Bernardino, 2014, and I have gone to so many, I've infiltrated so many right wing protests that are in front of the Mexican consulate.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  And like, and like, so I'll go hang out with them and like, oh, what are you guys, what are you guys doing? And then I'll like, take their markers, I'll take their posters and I'll just kind of be like, oh yeah, maybe you have a point there. And then I'm like, I'm in my office and then my, my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office is like, oh, where can you get these markers? Like, I got you some markers. Because it's like, you know, and so I'll infiltrate right wing protests, but, but on the flip side lately, you know, ICE knows they could come to my corner and my corner in downtown has the Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican consulate, the disability office, the old city hall building. Like it's, it's like the hub, it's one of the downtown hubs of the city and ICE has been coming and snatching people up uh, in front of my office. Uh, it happened, it's happened twice at least, uh, in the last month. And one of the days that it happened, I was in the office, I called my congressman, I called the, the mayor.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  I got all the local authorities involved. By the end of the day, the horse mounted unit of my city's police was like patrolling to make sure ICE wasn't messing with us. And I tell you, homie, what a weird place this is. I've never been so happy to see the, the regular cops.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. What is this, what is this timeline?

• 28:47Speaker 05

  What are you doing to me? What are you doing to me? We're like, I, I, I'm in, I'm in 7-Eleven at six in the morning getting my, getting my coffee and I see regular cops. I'm like, thank you, sir, for at least showing a warrant.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  When you arrest me, you know, you know, because ICE is doing none of that.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  None of it.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  None of that. They, they're not doing warrants to do it. They took, I don't want to cry. They did, they pushed a, a wife out of the way. She's like, what are you doing? They took the husband, tossed him in the van and drove off. It all happened so fast that no one was able to film it.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  No, in this era, no one was able to film it and they know that how, that they're doing it that fast, right?

• 29:19Speaker 04

  That's the trick, yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  That's the trick.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  That's what we've been telling, like, a lot of people have asked me, just friends from out of town, like, dude, has it, has it toned down? And I was like, no, it just went underground. It's like, they just, they're a lot more sneaky now. Like, it's not this big display of power. It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where, like you said, you just getting your gas, like you usually are pumping gas and then somebody just, and it's so fast, I can't film it. You know what I'm saying?

• 29:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  And the hard part for me is like, Is is is to your point to where it's like, since you're not identifying yourself like, you might not even be a ICE agent.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  And and that's a thing that happened. That's a thing that there are people who impersonate um, law enforcement officers and go harass people just on a racist basis.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  You know, and and and it is arguable that the Trump administration is empowering people like that.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  Uh huh. Man.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, so so yeah, it absolutely is happening. Uh uh the my uh to be honest, my union uh, we're gonna always support the actions that are fighting back against it, but the but the only things that we really have jurisdiction to to actually fight uh is is our is the labor related stuff, you know? And so, you know, we we actually just got telework extended uh in exchange for delaying our raise. You know, uh because uh the state's really broke right now for a lot of reasons.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  We delayed for two years a raise that we were about to get in July. The so we're already a couple of months past not having that raise. But in exchange, we got our telework agreement extended for two years.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Dope.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  So um what I would tell people who want to get involved is like, if you are in a a workplace that has a union, get involved, you know, and or if you had someone in your life like me who does union stuff outside of work, next time they invite you to a phone bank or next time they invite you to an event, go go support because we're absolutely, we were at the No Kings protest, we were at the Anti ICE protest, like like like like we're we're in the unofficial capacity, we're gonna we're gonna do uh all those kind of things to support the broader community and and even though it's my union, like for example, on Wednesdays, we have a lot of our meetings, we're doing a phone banking for Prop 50, right, which is the whole redistricting thing, which gives us the power to take some seats away from the Republicans. I know there's a lot of, there's a debate to be had there, but ultimately, it's it's us trying to to take, keep some power away from the right wing and you don't have to be in my union to go to those phone banks. If you want a phone bank

• 31:24Speaker 05

  to help Prop 50 pass so we could take some Republican seats away from the Federal House of Representatives, hit me up, hit up anybody in in, you know, in the Inland Empire chapter of SEIU and we can bring you to a phone bank in Ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever and we could phone bank against these dang Republicans, you know?

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, man. Man, tangent. I appreciate this, man.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  I appreciate you, man. I've been wanting to have uh wanting you to have me on. I I I love your show and and I love you, man. I think you're such a cool dude. I think you're wise. I think that you're engaged in the community in a cool way. You're you're an artist I respect a lot and not just me. I mean, people friends like sincere that like, explain to me why you're significant to them and why you're an influence and stuff like that. So I I appreciate even being on your radar, brother.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Man, stop it. Stop it some more. I'm just kidding. My wife says that. Uh, okay, so perfect. Well then, tell us how people need to hear your music, how they can get in touch with you, how they could follow you. Give me all the links.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, T A N J I N T. Uh, it's Tangent. You know, you could find me on everything, uh, Twitter, Instagram, you know, Facebook. Um, what was it? The, uh, the Inland Empire Music Award Show, uh, that I'm a co-director and co-founder of is at, uh, it's onlyempire.com. That's, uh, I T S onlyempire.com. And also I want to encourage Inland Empire artists, you know, you still have from now till the end of September to, to submit to the award show. And, and we've been doing it for three years. We partner with nonprofits and businesses. We throw a dope ass,

• 32:45Speaker 04

  It's pretty dope.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Gala.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  You know, aw- award show at a little art center in downtown San Bernardino, at the Garcia Center for the Arts, where we give away real trophies and real awards. And we have red carpet media and performances. It's like, it's like the Grammys for the Inland Empire. So, you know, please get involved in it'sonlyempire.com. That's Only Empire now. Uh, Fam Likely is my, my group with Diesel. We got a new album out. That's like Scam Likely on your phone, but Fam Likely, because it's likely that your fam is hitting you up. Uh, Fam Likely. West Coast Avengers is my first group, the more nerdcore Inland Empire stuff. And we got a new, uh, album that came out, uh, just under a year ago now, The Harvest. So, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm everywhere. You can catch everything.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  All over the place. Yeah. Tangent Wiggle. Thank you so much, my brother.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  Hey, thank you, man. Much love.

• 34:12Speaker 01

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• 35:18Speaker 06

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about why everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I am your host, Vielwog. And, oh, boy, things feel bad? I don't know. This is my most, this is my most Robert Eskin show in a while. With me to talk about why everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump and the way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that you interact with is Vicky Osterviel, who is a writer and editor at the collective journal CAL, doer of many things, agitator.

• 36:02Speaker 06

  Busy, I'm very busy. I think it says bricklayer. Yeah, Mason.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended Universe out April 14th of next year that is about the way that Disney sort of took over the world through the deployment, expansion and the usage of the violence of the copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours. So we'll be talking some more about that and about Disney's long history of fascist bullshit towards the end of the show.

• 36:38Speaker 07

  Exactly, yeah. Yeah, well, it's a pleasure to be here, Mia. Thanks. And yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel, you know, in this moment, I think.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Oh, God. Oh, no. Jimmy's Kimmel. Oh, no.

• 36:48Speaker 07

  Shout out to the number posted that. I love you.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  Okay, so I think that the place I wanted to start is with this like question of like, why does it feel like this?

• 37:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 06

  And I think part of the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval rating is really low. Like, people don't actually like him. It's like 41, his approval rating is 41%. It's down like a point in September, even with all the Charlie Kirk stuff. It's still down.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 37:19Speaker 06

  His most popular policy is immigration policy, which is terrifying, but his most popular policy is polling at 42%. So no one actually likes him or anything that he does, right? And like, like 41% is still like a lot of people, but it's not the majority of the country.

• 37:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 06

  Notably, like by how math works.

• 37:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  There's been a few things I think are interesting about this. There, there, there are signs that this is actually really, really, there's something substantive happening here. One of them was a special election that I think people paid attention to for about two days and then forgot about, which was a special election in Iowa, which like prevented the GOP from getting a, a two, three, three super majority in, in the state legislature. And the Democrats somehow miraculously, even though the Democrats are hideously unpopular, they won a special election in a district in western Iowa that was plus 11 for Trump this year. And this is not like a, like, this is a district that is like just Sioux

• 38:23Speaker 06

  City or something, or like, you know, this is a, this is a gerrymandered ass district that is like a little bit of Sioux City and then stretched out all the way into a bunch of rural areas to like diffuse the vote. They won this district by 11, like, last year. They lost this election by 11 points in western Iowa.

• 38:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  Unhinged. They're doing, like, all the elections, like, it's, it's getting ridiculous. Like, and again, this, this is like, this is again, like, voting for people who are, like, not popular, but it's like, literally any alternative, people are like, "Holy shit, western Iowa." Is like, "No, fuck this. This fucking sucks ass." Like, it's...

• 39:03Speaker 07

  Yeah. A thing that, you know, I've been following a bit is that farmers are freaking out.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 07

  Soybean, soybean crops and corn crops are gonna be rotting in the fields. Um, you know, I think soybean, soy, soy in particular, something like 50% of the US soy crop is traditionally exported, and by traditionally, I mean, every year exported to China. This year, China is not buying any American soybeans.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 39:26Speaker 07

  So, literally, half of the market is gonna die. And I don't know, you know, sometimes these numbers don't, don't really do justice. If half of an economy collapses, that's the whole economy collapsing. That's not, that's not like, "Oh, yeah, they just, like, took, uh, you know, a haircut." Like, that's massive.

• 39:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed-out class of people who are not, like, major corporations in the entire world, and it's not working. Like, they, they keep, they keep being like, "Oh, it's okay, we'll just, like, give you a bunch of money." And it's not enough, because China has decided not to buy any of the soybean crop. But it's like, "Okay."

• 40:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  And this is something we, we talked about, like, at the beginning of the administration, which is that, like, this administration has been going through and systematically alienating every single part of the coalition.

• 40:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  They're pissing off, like, the farmers, they're pissing off, like, the major pharmaceutical companies, they're pissing off the military, they're pissing off a whole bunch of the parts of the government bureaucracy, like, they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones over, like, Comey's stuff that they're still mad about. And then the guy they put in charge of it is just, like, completely incompetent. And it's like, "Okay, there, there's only so long you can sort of go, like, systematically alienating every part of your coalition, just like, basically attempting to drop a bomb on the economy every single week." And sometimes it drops, and sometimes it doesn't.

• 40:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here with tech stocks and with like the economy in general that has been sort of, you know, on the ground for most of us, has felt like it's been in recession since 2020.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  Right? You know, of different sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while. Now it's really bad. No one can get a job.

• 41:03Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 41:03Speaker 07

  Right? Like, things are really, like, prices are going up, up, up. Everyone feels bad. And yet, the stock market is still achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized equivalent strategy of like, make it look like things are normal and good. And like, that will actually support things materially. And like,

• 41:21Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  I mean, maybe it will forever. Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know. I don't think that's, I think that's a bad bet, but like, okay.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, but, and I think the interesting part of this too is if you look at what's going on with the economy, and it's also worth noting, right? Like, the economy nominally, in sort of econometric terms, looks fine. You're not fine, but it looks sort of okay. Right? The stock market's still growing. There's technically like economic growth. But, comma, we both saw this chart a couple of weeks ago. That is the most unhinged thing I've ever seen in my entire life, which is there is a GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst, which shows that tech in the last, like, year roughly, and like in the last, sort of like, short-term window, it's been 35 to 45% of all US GDP growth?

• 42:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  And when I say tech, by the way, like, to be clear about this, it is technically a composite of like, all the sector, right? But like, it's basically just the, like, the top, like, the five big tech companies, right?

• 42:32Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  It's like Apple, it's Microsoft, but specifically, and this is the one that's like, unhinged right now, is that like, the most valuable company in the world is Nvidia, a company that makes graphics cards.

• 42:42Speaker 07

  Yep. Yep.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  And this is all, because this is, all of this GDP growth, quote unquote, is AI boom stuff, right? It's like massive fixed capital investments. Sure, it's like, yeah, there's like incredible fixed capital investments, but the fixed capital investments are just... We're building a diesel-powered AI data center somewhere in Tennessee that is going to poison the entire population for no benefit.

• 43:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 06

  And it's like, all of these companies have gone just completely, totally all in on AI. A thing that doesn't make any money, can't make any money, and structurally will not make any money. And this is like a third of the growth of the economy.

• 43:17Speaker 07

  We are actually living through the famous old tweet, the drill, is it drill about the candles? Someone help fix my economy?

• 43:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 07

  We're living in the candles tweet. The whole economy is candles.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this is the thing that our colleague at Zitron argues that there is not enough money in the world to just continuously bail these companies out.

• 43:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  Like, there just isn't, right? The cash flow of these companies is like, they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate that like, can't be replaced by government contracts, which is just unbelievable. And I think this is one of the disconnect things, right? Because like, it's interesting, you're starting to see a little bit of stuff crop up from like, local level politicians, where every once in a while, you get to be like, oh yeah, no, it is like a recession economy, like on the ground in like, Wisconsin.

• 44:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  But I feel like in the media, and this is one of the things that I think makes everything insane, it's not being treated that way.

• 44:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, and I think, you know, you went exactly where, you know, we talked about going, but we were gonna go, which is that like, part of what is so crazy-making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between sort of the on-the-ground experience that everyone's been having for years now, but is like, especially intense. And like, the fact that like, AI is very obviously not interesting or good, and no one likes it. And like, even the people who sort of are, I think mostly in good faith, like trying to take it seriously, and who are like, yeah, it's gonna change everything, like, you know, like, normie people in work stuff, like, they don't really use it very much, or if they do use it, like, it's not effective. There wasn't a campaign to force everyone

• 44:54Speaker 07

  to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened. Everyone wanted one, because it was like, obvious what it did for you. Now, you know, they're obviously... Whatever. This is not a defense of the smartphone, but like there is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right? That like the AI economy is nonsense, that like the economy that everyone says is doing fine feels bad. And this has been going on since, you know, Biden campaigned on, you know, oh, it's just a vibe session. The, you know, the, the economy is fine. And like, the economy wasn't fine.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  No.

• 45:25Speaker 07

  One of the charts I really am obsessed with is a chart from like Bloomberg, which is like, uh, small business owner confidence from like 2010 to 2025. And like, if you look like from 2016 to 2020, which is the first Trump term, it goes up like 500%, right?

• 45:41Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ.

• 45:42Speaker 07

  It just goes up, it just, it's just huge. It's the highest it's been by huge margin and it just drops again in 2020. So it finally made me understand why so many libs were like so committed to the vibe session analysis because there was a massive vibe inflation under the first Trump administration.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 45:57Speaker 07

  So the reason people felt like the economy was good was because small business owners, and this is the classic analysis of fascists, right? It's the petty boys, well, the small business owners.

• 46:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 07

  They were like, this is the best times you've ever lived through, based on no evidence. And if you work for a business and your boss is like, things are booming, we're doing great. You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely to believe it. You know, like if everyone around you is saying that, like, there's no reason to doubt it unless, I mean, you know, you don't, you don't really believe your boss a lot of the time, but you know what I'm saying? Like, it just, it has, it has an effect of making everyone feel like things are better. That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election, November 2024.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 46:32Speaker 07

  Before liberation day, but on the announcement of the liberation day tariffs? Tanks. So that's gone.

• 46:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's gone. Yep. Yep. And I, I think that's a really vital sort of component of what's happening is like, you know, we, we talk a lot about how so there's sort of these like self-contained like reality tunnels that people are going down, but it's also really diffused by class.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Yes. Yes.

• 46:54Speaker 06

  And this ties back to the AI stuff, for example, where it's like, if you are in the tech sector, AI is kind of useful because the one thing it can sort of kind of do decently well is program.

• 47:05Speaker 07

  Right.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  And if you're, and if you are in this sort of like world, which is again enormous portions of all of the economic growth, right? That is happening is, is coming out of these places. And it's like, oh, this really does look like, like the future is here. If you've, you suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you. And it's like, well, maybe coding was just wasn't that hard to begin. With maybe, but like, you know, like I say, this is someone who learned to code it and hated it, but like, you know, but like it creates these sort of like self reinforced like reality tunnels. But everything about the reality tunnels is like every once in a while, like the actual world comes in like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it. And that's what happened to the small business people was they were like, oh shit, what do you mean? They got rid of the de minimis succession? What do you mean they're putting all these tariffs up?

• 47:50Speaker 06

  What do you mean they're like, just straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistics system that have been like, that's the basis of like most American small businesses are like our shipping businesses, right? Like, or they're either directly shipping businesses, or they rely on, on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries. And this just even goes into like the grift economy, right? Like massive portions of the grift economy are just like, yeah, like dropshipping grift bullshit.

• 48:13Speaker 07

  Supplements, stacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, you know, it's another reality tunnel, Mia.

• 48:18Speaker 06

  All these products and services, damn it. That was, that was a better one than I was gonna do. I was gonna do, you know what else is a scam? But it's

• 48:28Speaker 07

  These products and services that support this podcast.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  We are so back. We have never been more back. I want to kind of also talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as this has been going on, which is that Trump and his party has staged a pretty successful takeover of a lot of it. You know, you had, I mean, Elon Musk obviously buying X, but like they're in the process of taking over CBS, basically by using the fact that quote unquote free media is actually capitalist media and you can just buy them out and bully them by threatening them with losing money. You can in fact just completely get them to fall in line or have your own rich backers just buy it. And I, and I think this, this is refueling the disconnect, right? Where there was also this, this post 2020, all of like this, the, the senior management level

• 49:25Speaker 06

  of all of the newspapers kind of lost their minds in 2020 because their staff was like, no, we don't want to print Tom Cotton calling for the US Army to be deployed against protesters.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  And these people were like, okay, fuck it. We're like, you know, you can see us like the Washington Post. They were like, yeah, we will literally rather burn the post than have that happen again. And the post obviously is like under the control of Jeff Bezos, who was a stalwart Trump ally. And I think this has been contributing to it because like they've been able to take over social media platforms, they've been able to take over the sort of corporate bourgeois media.

• 50:01Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  And it's created this incredible unreality of this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular leader and that the things he does are popular and that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff. And it's like, well, I mean, there kind of has been a cultural shift in terms of like, you know, elite liberals are allowed to be racist again.

• 50:20Speaker 07

  Fuck.

• 50:21Speaker 06

  Which, you know, it's like, all of the people who always wanted to be eugenicists are like, you know, on that shit now.

• 50:30Speaker 07

  And they, you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed up under COVID, right? Like, this is also contiguous in a way.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 07

  But yeah, no, I think that that's exactly right. And I think part of what we saw in the last week, I mean, I know we were going to talk about this a bit, that like the last week when we're recording this, which was the week of the Charlie Kirk memorializing, when everyone pretended that ventilating a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had befallen American heroes. And I saw a lot of people who had been up until then relatively level-headed, suddenly really start to panic that week and feel like things were really, and I think part of that was because with a man as absolutely rizless and as obviously malicious and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk, getting that treatment, like he was, you know, Robert Redford or whatever who also passed. I think that happening in unison across all the media, I think people finally realized,

• 51:22Speaker 07

  like, oh, everything is totally captured. And the people who hadn't really thought that felt like that there was sort of this unanimity, the unanimity you're talking about, because they're able to project this unanimity through this one sort of media voice. And like, the fact that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel getting fired and there being like a genuine upswell of popular attention about the man show guy, like, who hasn't been funny like probably since he was 14 or whatever. I think a lot of people have focused on that as being extremely embarrassing and cringe, which like, yeah, accurate. But I think like also like, they couldn't even hold it together for a week, right? Like, they couldn't even hold this full court press together for a week. They had that Charlie Kirk documentary. They were like, we're gonna film it on, you know,

• 52:04Speaker 07

  on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing Jimmy Kimmel. They just canceled it. They put it on YouTube.

• 52:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, 26,000 views. This means that I am very, very proud of this. More people listen to me complaining about the way that everything everywhere all at once was spreading the bourgeois patriarchal ideology of the family. More people listen to me talk about that on this show than watch the stupid fucking Charlie Kirk.

• 52:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, sorry to that man, but people do not care. Like, people don't care about that guy. And, and it didn't, and also, as you said at the opening, his polls have gone down. People are like, shut up about this. Like, they don't care. It doesn't work. Like, polls aren't everything. But like, I think that this disconnect that's so hard is that if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment, which all of us do, like, that's how most of us get all of our information, that's, this is not a judgment. It feels like everyone is like, you know, is at like half mast, you know, for their, for their beautiful, their beautiful boy. Look what they did to my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and caught bullets. Like a Fox News article said that he was like particularly strong bodied and

• 53:14Speaker 07

  he's kept, he saved other people.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  Okay, I, I need to talk about this for a second because this is so fucking unhinged. What, okay, so his like surgeon or whatever was like, oh yeah, he was, he started, his surgeon wrote a thing about like this bone that doesn't exist in your neck. That he was like, oh yeah, he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet. And this got like picked up by like Fox News who's now running a story about this magical iron bone in Charlie Kirk's neck that like God put there or something to save. I, I just, it's, it's so.

• 53:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I can read the headline for you. Hang on, I've got it here.

• 53:52Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 53:53Speaker 07

  So this is Fox News on X. There's a picture of Charlie Kirk. It says, surgeon says Charlie Kirk's body stopped bullet in, quote, "absolute miracle that saved others", TPUSA says. And then, quote, "man of steel. Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet that would typically, quote, 'just go through everything', and it was, quote, 'an absolute miracle. Nobody else was killed', his surgeon told Turning Point USA." So, that's weird behavior that people don't like. That's not, yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  No.

• 54:20Speaker 07

  So I think like, basically, they have this capacity to do this like really, really intense unified message across the entire spectrum of the media. And we're seeing it again right now with like NPR publishing, basically, does Tylenol actually cause autism? So the science isn't out yet, you know, or whatever, like as their headline, you know?

• 54:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 07

  So like, obviously, like, that's scary if you're used to a reality which is shaped largely by the media. And, and Trump has gotten into office twice based on a media reality shaping effect.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 54:50Speaker 07

  And the media has been the main tool, both social and mainstream, for putting him into power. So it's understandable to take it seriously, because it does need to be taken seriously. But there's other stuff going on.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  Well, and like, the funniest version of this was just how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimmel back.

• 55:12Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 55:13Speaker 06

  Which was like, sub one week.

• 55:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, it was sub one week. And, and, you know, to me, that says that actually the boycott spread real fast and real far.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 07

  Like, there was a Disney adult on TikTok, right, who was sort of like, giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney World vacations, and was like cancelling his Disney World wedding, you know? And like, this was like, all happening really, really fast. People were really mad.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 55:36Speaker 07

  And, you know, yeah, it's, again, it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel, but it's not really about Jimmy Kimmel, right? It's because everyone hates this man. They hate this.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and people don't actually want this in dipshit to just literally, and, you know, and he's trying to do this again, right? He's apparently trying to sue Disney. Like, they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able to just straight up say what is legal to say on TV?

• 56:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  Which is the thing that he is attempting to do right now.

• 56:04Speaker 07

  And the other thing about it that I think is, is really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't go to the press and fire this man. They pull strings behind the scenes. They get him to retract, like, on his show in a way that causes no attention. And the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they probably don't really think much about it.

• 56:27Speaker 06

  Right?

• 56:27Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. That is how like, real, really smooth. Smooth repression of a free press into a bot press involves a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes. And in fact, it has been happening for 20 years in America. There has been a lot of that going on. Yeah. Part of what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain way is that Trump just needs to do less. Mm-hmm. Things have been set up for fascism for a while. He just needs to do less and he can't help himself. They can't help themselves because they're, you know, because they need it to be in this sort of public mode. And also, he's lost his, you know, his juice, but...

• 57:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And it's also just like, I mean, this is also partially, Trump is just like pathologically obsessed with late night comedy.

• 57:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 57:11Speaker 06

  Because he's a TV guy and so he's just mad on, he's red and mad and nude online, except like the previous version of it where like you were just like throwing shit at your television set in like 1955, which is a really terrified thing to have in the presidency. But, you know, speaking of, speaking of having things in the presidency, these products and services, look, if they paved it more, you'd get better transitions.

• 57:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  But they don't, so...

• 57:36Speaker 07

  Vote for them.

• 57:49Speaker 06

  We are back. So, you know, I, I think it's worth noting that like, yeah, no, like, like the immediate financial pressure of, you know, just, just the collision of wait, hold on, like, the people who buy things, which is most people, admittedly, like Disney adults are a very narrow subset of people, but like, the, the, the speed and rapidity of which reality, which is people don't like this guy, hit the like, sort of, you know, just, just like, just like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of, of the Charlie Kirk stuff was just unbelievable. And like part of this, this is something that, um, Marissa Cabas from, uh, The Handbasket reported, which is that part of what was going on was Disney was about to roll out a price increase.

• 58:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 06

  And so they had to bring it back so they could do their price increase, which, well, brother, just delay the price increase. If we're trying to do authoritarian, whatever. Okay. Yo, I, I am happy these people suck at doing this. It's great. We like it. We like that they're mad at it.

• 58:48Speaker 07

  Right.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, like Disney is being pressured here, but I think it's worth... Talking about something that you have been spending a ungodly amount of time in the minds of.

• 58:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 06

  Which is Disney and fascism. Oh, boy.

• 59:05Speaker 07

  Yay. Um, yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny about this week for me personally, and that's what really matters, obviously. Is that, is that, uh, is that like, you know, when we went into this administration, we started seeing what they were doing. I was like, I can't believe I'm writing a book about free trade and lawfare, right? Like warfare by law, like, you know, like, sort of this, this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart, right? Like, like, like farm, the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow to the IP regime. Sorry, the intellectual property regime, the IP regime is what I analyze in the book I've just written and is coming out in April. And it's about how Disney really was like a sort of pioneer in understanding the value of intellectual property and manipulating it.

• 59:50Speaker 07

  And how you can see that through the entire corporate and artistic history of Disney Studios. So it's about like Disney movies and how they're all connected. They actually all sort of tell stories about IP in certain ways and how we sort of miss that angle on them very often, very frequently. And misunderstand how much IP functions in the broader society because, for example, fast fashion companies. Now, I know you said talk about Disney, I'm talking about something else. Fast fashion companies, they actually own very, very little materially. So their offices are leased mostly, their factories are contracted. You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted. They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores, right? They like have very few direct employees other than like store level, if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise. They might not even employ the store level people, but they probably do.

• 1:00:35Speaker 07

  Store level people, corporate employees, and then they own their IP. And maybe they own a headquarters building somewhere, right? Like, that's a fancy building.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 07

  And everything else is quote unquote owned by them controlling the designs, the logos, the images. And they can guarantee that they can make almost infinite money off of that. Because. The global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that would make people who would like to see any human rights thing enacted blush with shame. And it is incredibly effective. It is the one thing that international law does quite well is enforce copyright and trademark and patent. So when you have stuff like the, you know, you can no longer ship under $800 without tariffs, like those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because they don't own ships, they don't own factories, they

• 1:01:27Speaker 07

  don't even really own the, you know, they, they own the shirts only when they arrive on American shores, really.

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  This has always been the dream of reproduction of capital, which is to have a company with no assets that makes money.

• 1:01:37Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 1:01:38Speaker 06

  And they're so close. They're so close.

• 1:01:40Speaker 07

  They're extremely close and, and all this stuff is destroying it. So I was like, well, great. Now I've written this whole book about how Disney, you know, is actually really like a state actor and like they have, they have like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which you may or may not know about. People talked about Celebration, Florida a bit when that happened in the 2000s, which is like a weird creepy company town that they run. They actually own a huge section of, it's like two counties, it's larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida.

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ. What?

• 1:02:10Speaker 07

  The conflict with DeSantis over the Don't Say Gay bill, which people, you know, interpreted largely through the lens of the, you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics he was pushing, which is understandable, is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida because they don't pay taxes in the same way. They make their own laws, they have their own police force. So basically.

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ. Disney made the first networks state.

• 1:02:34Speaker 07

  They did it. They actually did it and they've been doing it for 30 years. They, or no, sixty, sixty-nine is when they get the deal for Reedy Creek.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  Holy shit.

• 1:02:42Speaker 07

  They've had it for a long, they've had it for a long time. People don't love to talk about this for some reason. I think it's really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting. But the reason that that's all really, really connected to intellectual property is because one of the things that Disney did, despite, you know, having literally their own statelet in the middle of Florida.

• 1:03:02Speaker 07

  Is maintain themselves as the Magic Kingdom. They are associated with childhood nostalgia, magic, even as they've grown and grown and grown as a behemoth, like they've managed to largely stay connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood. And there have been moments in the 90s, they overreached a bit. There've been like, you know, there've been problems and you can read all about that. But basically, they did image management on all these different levels. So they managed Mickey Mouse, they managed the law around copyright, like copyright extensions famously were largely driven by Disney lobbying in 1976 and then again in 1998. Anyway, so all of these things, I'm trying to reduce a very big argument to a very small package here, but basically Disney designed and, and, and the other IP businesses

• 1:03:46Speaker 07

  that, that work around it have figured out that if you can control the way your product appears in the market and you can control the like images and the, the feelings people have about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you can really do whatever you want materially behind the scenes, right? They're like, they're like, they're like controlling an image is so powerful. And part of why, like what's happening with Disney, why it's falling apart so fast is because if they give in to Trump at all, it requires shattering that image that has been a century in the making, right? Like, like part of what was so brutal about the thing with Jimmy Kimmel was like, it's just obvious that Disney did that, that the corporate people did that and they did it because Trump did it publicly.

• 1:04:28Speaker 07

  Trump is humiliating these, these corporations publicly, right? He's, he's, he's humiliating them. He's, he's forcing them to, to come to heel. It's not working popularly. He's not capturing anti corporate sentiment, really. People are like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel? Like, that's weird. You're a creep. But then also, he's also destroying the legitimacy of everyone. It's, it's pulling everything down around him. It's a family annihilation, right? He's so angry about 2020 and like being tried that he's just going to rip everything down around him. Wow. That was, I just said a lot of different things, but, but all of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about, like, The Trump regime in some ways and the relationship to Disney is that Disney has

• 1:05:07Speaker 07

  for so long built this image of America that has managed to persist like across and against, you know, a century of increasingly violent, ineffective and visible imperialism like in Korea and Vietnam and then Iraq and Afghanistan. It was so crucial to the image of what American capitalism was. And then Trump, a man who is just as built by images as the Disney Corporation, comes and is just like, just is ripping it all down because he's sort of, you know, one gaping narcissistic wound, right? Like running, running a country, right?

• 1:05:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 07

  So if you, if you look at the history of like Disney in general, Hollywood and intellectual property management in general, what you can see is the way that we have, that this, this media apparatus has been built. When I say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know, when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever, they just think about stuff on TV. But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate through society. And it's like, the way that you get paid for your job with, you know, like the idea of clout is like actually part of that. Like it does function as a form of payment, right? Like it's not, like people make fun of that, like, oh, good. But like, then everyone acts as though it's real, right? And then when everyone acts as though it's real, it's real, it's a social relation. So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on images

• 1:06:24Speaker 07

  that rely only on being forced through a sort of massive group thing from the top of the economy and the political class, was built by these corporations. But it was built explicitly to, you know, reap as much wealth as possible for, for their shareholders.

• 1:06:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, to make money. Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 07

  Trump is too perfect a product of that. And this regime is too perfect a product of that. And now it's all, it's all, you know, it is its own gravedigger, you know?

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. The point has a line about like, the way that the spectacle sort of like intrudes into and like becomes reality. And like, if Disney is sort of like the stage manager of this, right? Like Trump just is the thing, like come to life and powering through it. And he doesn't, because he is the image and not the thing that creates the image, he has different interests.

• 1:07:10Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

  Than the people who create the image, who are, you know, trying to make money. Trump is trying to like satisfy all of his like.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  Vindictive, sort of, narcissistic rage?

• 1:07:25Speaker 07

  Exactly. It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's doing is extremely real.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 07

  He genuinely is fighting over the election and over like Comey. Like, he is like, he really believes these things. This is a regime that believes the things that, for example, Karl Rove would teach people to say to get away with doing what they wanted to do, right? These are, as you said, they are the image itself. They are true believers in the spectacle, and as such, break the fourth wall, right? If we're gonna use a theater metaphor here. As such, they end up, they end up like, just destroying it. And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture the spectacle, right? And then there were all the people, as you describe, and the people who make the spectacle, maintain the image, make the image, they were around him. So they would just, they would just close up the puncture. They would close up the suture. They would work really, really hard, right? So what I

• 1:08:15Speaker 07

  mean by that is like, Trump would say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would be like, like, controversial statement from President Trump, right? Which like, completely normalizes it. And like, everyone would sort of pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatic shit. And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right? Like, people would just pretend that it was normal.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, that he was speaking at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, right? Like, just like, shit would happen.

• 1:08:39Speaker 07

  Exactly. And everyone would sort of try to, would normalize it. And that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle, and it made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch august institutions such as the Washington Post going over backwards to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim, right? So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him as he punctured it, right? But he, he has actually too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair. He actually thought they were his enemies. The RINOs, right? The Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media, they, they have been purged. They have all been purged and controlled. And now

• 1:09:21Speaker 07

  they all just repeat what he says. And what ends up happening is that the spectacle just remains torn, and people see through it. Like, it's just not working anymore. And I think what's scary is that It still feels like they're repairing the spectacle around his claims. Because the entire media is speaking as one, and the Democrats are speaking as one, and the Republicans are speaking as one. And they're all agreeing. You know, we imagine someone else, Jean Hugh Public, sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay, it's all pretty normal. Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, you know? We sort of project that that person is there. But actually, more and more people who would have been like that in the first regime are like, well, I don't believe any of this shit.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also we're saying like, the way that we're talking about this in terms of his unpopularity and reality. And, you know, in terms of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that it's, there's not just horrible shit happening constantly, right? And that's the other part of his ability to sort of eliminate the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like, that, it was to some extent restraining him, right? Like, that's the reason why there wasn't just like, there were a bunch of deportations under Trump, there were a bunch of deportations under Biden. The thing that's happening now is not the thing that was happening before, right?

• 1:10:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  The Secretary of the Interior wasn't showing up at like, 5:30 in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American citizens out of their house? Like, that was like, not happening?

• 1:10:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Speaker 06

  Before, and that's what is just, you know, it's unbelievably horrifying. And it's also not popular.

• 1:10:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:10:58Speaker 06

  Like, even, even those approval rating numbers, right? Like, you know, like, his immigration policy, in theory, is the most popular thing he's doing. And also, ICE can't do mass, large-scale raids because if they stay in one place for too long, so many people will show up, they can't do it. And, you know, and the, the lightning raids that they've been doing have been really brutal and really effective. But like, those are not the tactics a stormtrooper force that broadly has the popular, has popular consent.

• 1:11:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  Right? They don't move like that. And, you know, I talked about this, I guess it'll be like, two weeks ago on Executive Director, but like, People are like stopping these raids in like Wheaton.

• 1:11:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Speaker 06

  Like Wheaton used to be literally the center of the base of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit for like 40 years. This was like the center of the Christian right. And they have lost Wheaton.

• 1:11:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  It's been like electing Democrats and it's not just electing Democrats, like the speed at which it's moved from electing Democrats to like a bunch of people showed up and are stopping like lightning ice raids, which is really impressive, genuinely very, very impressive organizing. It's very hard to do. Most times it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough. And somehow, again, like the place that used to be the capital of the moral majority, it's like Jerry Falwell's fucking like home domain, right? Like the epicenter of like of the Christian right is in doing the anti-ice raid shit. Like, what? Like, and this is something that's been going on for like, you know, probably like four or five years, but like them doing like really serious, very good direct action.

• 1:12:35Speaker 06

  The entire terrain of the world is shifting beneath us while all of these people constantly try to like paint over this like little tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like, no, no, the ground's still there. There's all these holes in the middle of it, but like, you know, we're, we're gonna put on some tarp that like, looks like the sky beneath it. It's like, wait, why is the sky down?

• 1:12:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 06

  Don't ask questions, just keep walking.

• 1:12:56Speaker 07

  Exactly. And I think that's like, I think that's really important. And a thing that I think happens sometimes when I sort of make this analysis with my friends, I think they think that I'm saying that like fascism isn't here, or that like this isn't a fascist regime, or that like they don't want to like do Nazism. Like they very clearly do.

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 07

  My analysis has been like since February, I mean, part of what's happened is like in February, when the Do's stuff was going on, I was like, well, the American republic is over. Like, we'll never be able to go back. Like now, what do we do? So I think like a lot of, a lot of the disjuncture and the confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines. Cause it's really hard to accept. It's a hard and complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually like this is dying, like this is a dying regime and a dying empire.

• 1:13:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 07

  And like, that does not mean it's less dangerous. In fact, historically, it's often more dangerous and it's death throes. And it does not mean when I, when we, when you and I talk about him being ineffective, it does not mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying.

• 1:13:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 07

  We're both trans women who organize with other trans women, like we know about it. Okay, y'all, like we are dealing with the fallout all the time. But like the situations that we could be going through, the situations that they could be achieving that with the public that they were handed by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID and had created an effective red scare around Gaza that had like, you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten liberals to like, say that that was normal and good, right? Like, that was a very, very scary public.

• 1:14:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Speaker 07

  To, to hand to Nazis too, now with nukes, right? And like, I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when the only fascist regimes we think about are Nazism and we think that like, it's inevitably like going to be just like the Nazis. Or even if we just say, well, it could be more like Italy. Like there are dozens of different dictatorships.

• 1:14:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 07

  Across the history. I don't expect everyone to study all of them, but like, but like it's worth understanding.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  Learn a third one. Pick, pick one, literally pick one, fucking a, a, anyone that's not the made two. There are so many. Like you have, you are spoiled for options.

• 1:15:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, you can do, you could do, if you, you know, pick a decade, you know, you like the seventies? Go for Swart though in Indonesia. You like the eighties, Brazilian military dictatorship, no problem. Like, or you could do Korea in the eighties. You got lots of choices. Oh, the fifties, go for Greece, no problem. Don't worry about it. The reason that I bring all that up is just to say that like, things are really bad. And if we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia of the power that they have available and the time that they can wait.

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 07

  But as you're saying, and as I've been sort of seeing also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance. It is completely uncovered. It is not being seen, but because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made, they also don't see and understand their level of resistance. Like they've disorganized the FBI, right? They fired about like, was it like a fifth of FBI agents, like head of agents? And then like a bunch more are now doing like street crime and are like being put into ICE. Raids and people talk about that as being terrifying and it is terrifying. The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids and to use every resource available to them is scary.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 07

  But also, if they don't have the FBI's eyes on the ball, which they clearly don't anymore, they have redirected the FBI. They are not nearly as cognizant of what's going on in terms of resistance as they were even six months ago.

• 1:16:17Speaker 06

  No, like if you if you look at the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, right? This is like, Charlie Kirk is like their guy, right? The FBI is so stripped down right now that with a full court press, the only reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand that Discord wasn't private. And he like dropped his gun and didn't pick it up again.

• 1:16:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, and his dad recognized it, right?

• 1:16:37Speaker 06

  And if he had done those two things, they wouldn't have found him. Like, they didn't catch him, he turned himself in, right? And that's, again, someone assassinated like their guy and they couldn't find him. Like, this repressive apparatus, it is really, really scary and very good at doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now, which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at like 5:00 in the morning by blowing their fucking doors down. And like dragging them away to a prison, right? It's not good at anything else.

• 1:17:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Speaker 06

  And the thing, right, that that is a very, very good way to create an engine of, you know, like immense human misery that that whose spectacle they can sell. But it's not actually a good way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship. We have seen very, very successful sort of dictatorships in in the last like 20, 30 years, right?

• 1:17:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 06

  And, you know, like they take a bunch of forms, I think like the most classically like 1930s Nazi party one is is Modi in India.

• 1:17:39Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  And Modi in India has done the thing in the sense of like has really, really successfully transformed the consciousness of people in India to this sort of like unbelievably unhinged right wing fascist version of like Hindu supremacy.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  That hasn't happened here.

• 1:17:56Speaker 07

  Right. You know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which is his brown shirts, like, has four million people in it.

• 1:18:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 07

  Right? Like, I mean, you know, it has million, they have millions of brown shirts, right? Like, ICE is having trouble hiring 12,000 extra agents in a, in a, in a continent of 400 million people. Again, this doesn't mean that everything's fine, but yeah, like, if you look at that, if you look at Erdogan in Turkey, or you look at Putin in Russia, or even Orban, to his, to a different degree in Hungary, like, they slow-rolled it, right? They, they went through

• 1:18:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Speaker 07

  a few elections that were like, slightly sketchy, but basically normal, like, and they like, and they just slowly built power, and it took them a decade to get to the point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that Trump was trying to do.

• 1:18:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 07

  And like, again, there's no rules. It might work, what Trump is doing, but like, compare it to Millet in Argentina, right, who they all loved so much, who came into power similarly to Trump, started throwing truth bombs everywhere, you know? Just like ripped apart, and has now had to come hat in hand, begging for a bailout to the United States.

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:19:00Speaker 07

  Because his whole thing, his regime fell apart within 24 months.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:19:05Speaker 07

  There is ultimately a material limit to what you can do.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  You can't just speak reality into existence for that long.

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that's, that's the thing, right? If, if it was possible to just speak reality into existence, we would all be living under neoconservatism.

• 1:19:18Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:19:19Speaker 06

  Right? There would be like, a pure, well-functioning, oil-extracting, American client state in Iraq right now.

• 1:19:24Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

  And I don't know what the fuck they would have done with it, again, send, but like, if, if, if you could just do the thing, and I've, I talked about this on the show, I talk about this on the show all the time, right? The thing the neoconservatives thought they could do with evidence-based reality thing, right? Where like, they, they thought that what they could do was just, instead of observing reality and creating your positions from it, they thought they could just purely influence and manipulate reality to become whatever they wanted it to be. And they couldn't, right? Like, where the is George Bush right now? Right? Like, where is Dick Cheney? Like, the Trump administration somehow, staggeringly, has managed to, like, they finally found a war crime so bad that John Woo, the architect, like, the guy who wrote the torture manuals, was like, wait, hold on, you can't just blow

• 1:20:07Speaker 06

  up random, like, boats of people in Venezuela. Like, what, what? Like, I, I, I literally had not even occurred to me that it was possible for you to commit a war crime so bad that the guy who wrote the torture memos was like, hold on, hold on, hold on, whoa, I ain't set up for this shit. Like...

• 1:20:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're absolutely, like, unhinged, they're horrible, and, thank God, they are so unpopular and so bad at this.

• 1:20:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 07

  Because if they were just a little bit better at this, I think it's very clear what they want.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're fucked. We're screwed.

• 1:20:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, we go, we go under, like, four months, but that hasn't happened, because they're not good at this.

• 1:20:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 06

  And they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatus, like Disney, like, they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatuses that were designed to, like, propagate them. Like,

• 1:20:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right? Like, Trump could have just used, you know, like, like, basically, like, the way that every other thing, like, like, the way literally the Nazis did, right? Like, until, like, literally until they were forced to break it off during, like, World War II, right? Which is, like, use Disney as a propaganda apparatus for you.

• 1:21:16Speaker 07

  And Disney was gun-shy because of the fight with, the fight with DeSantis didn't go that well for them.

• 1:21:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 07

  Surprisingly, you know, like, they, they had some trouble with that. And so they were gun-shy, like, going into the administration, like, they were very quiet, like, they were not rocking the boat, they were making lots of statements about how, like, you know, we support it, like, he didn't have to goad them into taking a position. In the culture war, like, they were just very glad that they weren't fighting off DeSantis anymore, and that they weren't fighting off... You know, the Daily Wire, you know, claiming that they were, you know, whatever, the woke mind virus or whatever the hell, you know?

• 1:21:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Speaker 07

  Like, they were just, they were just putting their, keeping their heads down, trying to rebuild after the disaster of the pandemic, right? Like, trying to, like, get their cruise line back up and, like, as profitable as it could be, you know?

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:21:55Speaker 07

  They were working on, like, they were just doing their thing, and they were like, no reason Trump should stop that. There's no reason Trump should stop that, is what they thought.

• 1:22:02Speaker 06

  No, but it's like, they, they, they were implementing, like, a lot of the culture war stuff that they wanted in terms of, like, okay, we're going back to white people, we're never having another non-whiteing character again, like, eat shit.

• 1:22:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, they canceled, they're canceling TV shows with just, like, queer characters, like, they're just, they're just doing stuff like that, they're doing, they're doing everything that, that the, the regime wants. But, as you mentioned, he's just sitting there watching TV and, like, like, throwing his remote around, and, like, unfortunately, his remote, like, dictates US policy.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. I think that's an important note to close on, because, like, his remote dictates US policy to the extent that everyone pretends that it does, and one of the things that can start happening in the, in the, in the end stages of these kind of regimes is that, like, the, the levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state.

• 1:22:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  Right? So he just, like, declared that Antifa is, like, a domestic terrorist organization, right? We're gonna be talking about that later this week, possibly earlier this week, I don't know when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything in and of itself, he's just, like, waving a magic wand around, but if he doesn't have the repressive apparatus to make that matter, then, okay, then, then him throwing the remote around isn't, like, gesturally controlling the arm of, like, one of the most sophisticated, what's supposed to be one of the most sophisticated repressive apparatuses ever.

• 1:23:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 06

  Right? And they rely on both the compliance of the state bureaucracy, which they've been decently good at pulling in line, but also they rely on our compliance for this.

• 1:23:32Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  And you don't have to comply with them. That's, that's, that's, that's the fun thing about, about existence, is that they can't just, they can't just make it real unless you help them.

• 1:23:44Speaker 07

  And as we saw, as we've already talked about, the, the Charlie Kirk special doesn't go up, right? They say, like, the

• 1:23:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 07

  The COVID vaccines are, like, we're gonna restrict them, and most of the pharmacies are just, like, just check a box saying you need it. Like, you know, like, not in every state, but again, like, These massive institutions, they can't really get them in line. So why are you letting them get you in line?

• 1:24:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, and remember, you know, like, they had better control of their institutional apparatuses in 2020. And the outcome of that was there was a giant uprising and they put the president in a bunker, a thing that he's still mad about to this day. Right? Even when it looks like they have total control, they don't. And I don't know if he's gonna like, end up in a Hitler bunker. But, look, as of right now, as it stands, the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in a bunker is 100%. So, you know, if, if, if the past is to be a prediction of the future, we could see it again. When all of this shit goes to hell and the economy collapses and everyone's like, "Oh, this was all a lie the whole time. Wow, damn, A, look."

• 1:24:47Speaker 06

  You know?

• 1:24:47Speaker 07

  And

• 1:24:51Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 1:24:52Speaker 07

  You can say that, but

• 1:24:53Speaker 06

  I don't know if we can. Uh, we're just gonna, we're just gonna, we're just gonna put a really long belief over that entire sentence. And we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader.

• 1:25:02Speaker 07

  You too.

• 1:25:05Speaker 06

  Completing the sentence, just figuring out what it was saying, not doing the thing.

• 1:25:12Speaker 06

  Okay, this, this, this has been a cadaver here. Vicky, where can people preorder your book?

• 1:25:17Speaker 07

  Oh, uh, you can go to Haymarket, that's who's putting it out, and they have a list of links. You can also go to my, uh, Blue Sky account, vickiacab.bsky.social, um, and you can find a link there.

• 1:25:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, and where can people find you and your work?

• 1:25:29Speaker 07

  Uh, Cawshinythings.com, it's the Collective Anarchist Writers, um, or any other acronym you like, C A W. That's where I'm working most regularly now.

• 1:25:38Speaker 06

  Good pro theming, that's great, that's great.

• 1:25:40Speaker 07

  It's COVID-based.

• 1:25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. We love, we love a COVID-based economy.

• 1:25:44Speaker 07

  Thanks so much for having me, Mia.

• 1:25:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for coming on.

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  That's me.

• 1:28:05Speaker 08

  That's Cave. Yep. Many of you will know him, but he's a medical doctor and host of the House of Pod podcast. And I'm also joined by Tyler Black, who's a psychologist in British Columbia. Welcome, Tyler.

• 1:28:16Speaker 09

  Psychiatrist.

• 1:28:17Speaker 08

  Psychiatrist. Fucked it up.

• 1:28:19Speaker 09

  Them's fighting words, James. Them's fighting.

• 1:28:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah, this is, uh, yeah, it's like when people call me a sociologist, I understand. Or even worse, an anthropologist.

• 1:28:29Speaker 09

  It's a pleasure to be here and no worries. Tyler is Canadian, so to see him correct somebody on something makes me happy. No, I'm very sorry.

• 1:28:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, but that's why we get him on.

• 1:28:39Speaker 09

  He's very sorry. He's very sorry about that. I love Tyler very much. He comes on my show not infrequently. And one really pleasant thing that's happened, one little bright spot in the last, I don't know, five years of terror that have been happening medically is seeing Tyler gradually over time become grumpier and more willing to fight.

• 1:29:02Speaker 08

  Aren't we all?

• 1:29:03Speaker 09

  That's the only bright spot I've had. Thank you, Tyler, for that. Yeah, you bet.

• 1:29:06Speaker 08

  I imagine that's a side effect of your consumption of acetaminophen, which may also make you, yeah.

• 1:29:13Speaker 09

  Got to cut back, bro. Got to cut back.

• 1:29:15Speaker 08

  Yeah. All right. For those not familiar, why, why are we talking about Tylenol? Might be the, the name you're familiar, if you've, especially if you're American, people like to use brand names a little more. I still find that very confusing and I've lived here for about a part of two decades. But why are we talking about Tylenol?

• 1:29:30Speaker 09

  Tyler, do you want to introduce this concept?

• 1:29:32Speaker 10

  Sure. Um, so yeah, Tylenol goes by paracetamol in UK and, and other, um, other places in the world. It's acetaminophen here. So it really is not talking about Tylenol, though the shorthand that the political people who've been talking about it have specifically called out the brand Tylenol, which is bizarre. But this stems from both a mission that RFK Junior, when he took over as the HHS sort of had, which was to find the cause of autism, which is, you know, his political quest to find some environmental cause. I mean, he started as an environmental lawyer. I don't think he's doing this disingenuously. I think he truly believes there is an environmental cause to autism.

• 1:30:16Speaker 10

  But of course, RFK wields science, probably driven by the brain worm. And so he has this way of having a conclusion and then finding the science to support it. And it was very clear that he was going to point towards vaccine vaccine schedule. And at some point, this is definitely coming. Yeah. I think this might be a roundabout way to do it through fevers and Tylenol. But the Tylenol link is something that has been a question mark. So a really quick aside will be that when drugs are regulated, the drug companies have very little natural interest to study it in pregnant people. It only brings them risk. There's no reason to do it. You are required to submit what studies you have on animal toxicity in utero and these types of things, but not really that much for humans.

• 1:31:02Speaker 10

  And so the drug companies usually put their hands up and go, talk to your doctor about using this. Right. And then the rest of us in medicine have to take that information that's been generated about this medication and try and interpret it on pregnant people. And it creates this system where we create the evidence over the next 20 years in what we call pharmacal vigilance or post marketing studies where we basically, has there been a problem? Did we find any birth defects, you know? And, and we kind of do it backwards. It's kind of makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCT on pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any reason for the, for the drug. So it's, it's one of those sort of loopholes. And so this natural conversation has resulted in science that points in a number of directions.

• 1:31:46Speaker 10

  Does acetaminophen cause autism? Can't be answered by the current science because it's all cohort data. It's looking backwards. It's looking at populations. It's confounded. However, the best study was published in 2024, which makes the timing of this announcement really awkward. There was 2.5 million people. It was, I believe it's a Danish study. Swedish. Swedish study. Okay. And in that study, there was a small link found, but because they had 2.5 million people, they could check that link by looking at sibling pairs within that 2.5 million. So in that group, they had 16,000 sibling pairs, both exposed to and not exposed to acetaminophen. And lo and behold, they found that there was no relationship there. So this really is one of the more definitive

• 1:32:30Speaker 10

  correlational studies that says, pretty much any effect we're seeing is probably confounded. It probably isn't due to acetaminophen, though there are some animal studies that might hint at it. It appears to be minor. And Kevay, I see you're about to say something. Yeah.

• 1:32:44Speaker 09

  First of all, that's exactly right. I think that there are a lot of things that Maha and RFK Junior talk about that are just insane and you can dismiss out of hand. This is a topic that is not complete rubbish. It is something that has a little bit of nuance and we can talk about. As Tyler was just mentioning, there is some evidence that there might be a small relationship, but the real key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative. Are they just related for some reason or another, or are they caused by each other? And that study that he talked about, that Swedish study, looked at about 180,000 infants that had parents that were exposed to acetaminophen.

• 1:33:26Speaker 09

  What's really elegant about that is that it looked at the siblings. That's why it's such an important study. And that's, would I say it closes the door on the matter? No, I agree with Tyler. I think the preponderance of evidence now is that there is no connection between Talmud and autism. But I don't know if this study totally closes the door. It is really well done, though. So they showed that if you look at siblings, if you look at a family, there's no connection. You take out some of the variables. You take out some of the confounders there that can obfuscate or confuse an issue. You take those out of the picture and you see that there's no relationship between Talmud and acetaminophen. What's interesting, in that same study, that Swedish study, if they then put those back in,

• 1:34:11Speaker 09

  if they didn't account for the siblings, then yeah, it showed that there is a little bit of evidence, a small, basically, relationship between, you know, acetaminophen and developing autism.

• 1:34:24Speaker 09

  But once you start accounting for some of these really tough to account for variables, then you start to see that that falls apart. And that implies that most of these other studies are not causal, but correlative relationships.

• 1:34:38Speaker 10

  The sort of 2025 update is, and I think this might, I think as that we learn more about it, this might have been something that was either solicited or developed in tandem with RFK and his goals. But there was a publication in 2025 by, I think, the Harvard Dean of Medicine,

• 1:34:56Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 10

  who has been a plaintiff's witness for attorneys battling Tylenol in developing autism. So there is a bit of a financial conflict of interest there.

• 1:35:06Speaker 09

  Right, yeah. Baccarelli.

• 1:35:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, Dr. Baccarelli, who published a study called a navigation review. And it's basically a sciencey version of, let me tell a story and here's the evidence that supports it. Basically, what they did is they took the number of studies. They counted the number that pointed towards Tylenol as a factor and they counted against it. And they found about 20 something in total. The majority of them found a link to Tylenol and autism. And then a minority found no link. But of course, that's not really how we do science in 2025. If we had two studies, and you can actually look at his, his studies. And some of these studies are 200 people, 300 people, 500 people.

• 1:35:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48Speaker 10

  And then you have this other study that's 2.5 million people. You know, in, in the real world, that larger study would dwarf the significance of the other ones.

• 1:35:57Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:35:57Speaker 10

  But in the way that this navigation study was set up, they're all kind of equal. In fact, he treats the non-confounded sample that Cave was mentioning as its own study. And then he treats the controlled sample with siblings as its own study. So the same study from Sweden was cited twice, one for and one against.

• 1:36:18Speaker 09

  Ah.

• 1:36:18Speaker 10

  You can see how you could shape a narrative, which is what a narrative review is. It's when you shape a narrative. It's not a very sciencey way to do things. We like to do systematic reviews. And this did provide a bit of, of cover because now everyone in HHS can point towards this study by the Harvard Dean of Medicine, published in BMC Environmental Studies, peer reviewed, showing that a navigational study shows that there could be a link. But it really, if you read the study, any scientist reading it would be like, yeah, there could be a link, but the largest study in that group suggests there is no link.

• 1:36:53Speaker 08

  Right. Yeah, it's someone's playing games with evidence when they've already decided what their conclusion would be.

• 1:36:59Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 08

  Let's talk about this fascination with autism that that exists in the Maha, right? Make America Healthy Again, for those who are not familiar. What's happening here? People are probably diagnosed with autism at a higher rate now than they were when these people were young. Right? That is not, however, well, I will let you guys explain that. Explain how that doesn't mean that we're giving children autism, if that is my understanding is correct.

• 1:37:25Speaker 10

  Sure. I mean, I'll I'll jump in first. So there's a number of ways to test whether or not the rate is truly increasing. So the first thing to say is, over the world, we've seen a gradual increase in the global population that has autism from about 0.8% of the population to about 2% of the population. That's what's happened over the past 25 years of studies across the world. Now, that's not exactly the exponential rise that you often hear about in the United States. The United States has a lot of unique features, so you have a ton of people working in this area. You have a ton of researchers, lots of people have access to healthcare. There's many reasons why global numbers might not look like American numbers. But the general idea behind this increased rate of autism,

• 1:38:09Speaker 10

  most of that increase is due to our change in diagnostics and the way that we label things. So when RFK was a kid, there were kids that were excluded from school because they were literally called retarded. They they were not allowed to come to school. They were known as spazies and goofs, and they were the ones that, you know, were made fun of. And they struggled throughout life. Now, were they called autistic? No. Did they have the same symptoms that the kids today that are being diagnosed with autism have? Probably. And the way that we can control for that, there's some really elegant studies. One is we take diagnostic criteria from children. And then we ask adults currently living today to go through a structured interview, looking for those things. And guess what? We find the same rate in adults that we see in kids.

• 1:38:52Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 1:38:53Speaker 10

  This idea that it's an exponential rate. Now, I think the rate is also increasing, but I think it's increasing gradually. And this is because the extreme of ages are having kids more. More often, especially at the older end. And we do know that older age is related to autism, especially older age of the father. And we also know that premature babies and babies with significant developmental disabilities are surviving their their their postnatal period. As soon as they're born, instead of instantly dying or dying during childbirth or not being able to be resuscitated, they're kept alive and survive. And this is good. But this does mean that there's more neurodiversity in the world, because of course, these children have encountered significant harm.

• 1:39:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, I agree with that. I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded, and that's part of why we see more. But yeah, I think the the two things we know that are related are some genetic predisposition, if there's people in the family that have it, and the older age of patients. And as we get older, I'm an older father myself, you know, you you see more with older patients, and that's more common now than it's ever been before. So these are all a part of it. And once you take a look, for example, going back to that Swedish study in 2024, that was so good, that sibling study looks at the genetics of it. And once you account for the genetics of it, you start to be able to say, OK, maybe this other stuff like Tylenol isn't important.

• 1:40:18Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 08

  Yeah. Is there a gender element to this as well?

• 1:40:22Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Speaker 08

  I may have misremembered here, but my understanding is that women, men, people tended to be diagnosed at a lower rate until relatively recently.

• 1:40:31Speaker 10

  Yeah. So not only is there a gender component, but I do think that the biological sex of the child has an impact on the genetic expression, because it seems like the transmission from to males is higher than the transmission to females. So there might be something buffering about that extra X chromosome. You know, we have this shirpy little Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates.

• 1:40:51Speaker 09

  You only have one Y chromosome?

• 1:40:54Speaker 10

  Sorry. Are you a super male?

• 1:40:56Speaker 09

  I have two Ys.

• 1:40:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's YY.

• 1:40:58Speaker 09

  You know, hairy, my ears are.

• 1:41:00Speaker 10

  So there are a number of disorders that the X, the extra X chromosome is protective for. And I do wonder if that's the case for autism. But what's also true is we have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys should be. And that leads to boys being diagnosed with autism more frequently than than girls. So the girl that's quiet and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid a lot more quickly than when you see that in a boy, that the parents think autism or the clinician thinks autism. So there could be some social reasons for that discrepancy as well. And then the last thing I really wanted to say is that the really tragic thing about all of this is profound autism, which autism is a specter, profound autism is extremely disabling

• 1:41:44Speaker 10

  for people around the person. Generally autistic people enjoy their lives, especially if the world is set up in a way so that they can live safely and without impediment. Autistic people are perfectly content to be autistic. And this whole idea of autism being this travesty, this epidemic, this

• 1:42:03Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:42:03Speaker 10

  blight on society is really doing a disservice to the wide variety of people that we're now calling autistic. Because when our criteria expanded, we created a whole space of autistic people who are very, what we would call non-profound autism. These are people that have difficulties in social communication or do the same thing over and over despite, you know, it being at an abnormal level, but it's what they need to soothe themselves. You know, that will be called autism now. Now, would a parent want a child who's in a home constantly rocking back and forth and just soothing themselves by licking their fingers or whatever, you know, some very severe autistic behavior? No, that probably wouldn't be the parent's ideal.

• 1:42:45Speaker 10

  But I've worked with so much autism in my life. I'm a child and adult psychiatrist. I've seen so many autistic kids. They can live happy, happy, happy lives autistic. So I'm not a fan of the blight sort of messaging of it either.

• 1:42:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because that's one of the worst things about, in a sense, one of the most damaging things about it, when people who are living happy, healthy and fulfilled lives are being like slandered or pathologized or rided by the government of this country, and that's fucked.

• 1:43:15Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Speaker 08

  And I'm sure will have an impact on those people because it would have an impact on anyone to see this condition that, as you said, right, like maybe difficult for people who are not familiar with it to navigate, but it doesn't mean that you can't have a fulfilling and happy and very pleasant life.

• 1:43:30Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 08

  Suddenly suggested there's some kind of massively disabling and terrible travesty. And that the person who gave birth to you is to blame for this, right?

• 1:43:40Speaker 10

  Right. That's what really bothers me is that we're always trying to find ways to blame mothers.

• 1:43:46Speaker 09

  This is, yeah, this is, this is a mantle and I apologize for that listener. Please don't at me for that.

• 1:43:51Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:43:52Speaker 09

  But part, part of what this is, is like control over women. And, you know, while that Swedish study I mentioned may not completely close the issue, I think it's pretty clear that the evidence pretty strong against there being a connection between Tylenol and to make a wholesale governmental recommendation that as a country for us to move this way, to make such strong claims, to have a president come out and just say grit your teeth and bear it.

• 1:44:20Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:44:21Speaker 09

  To women in regards to the one medicine that we've told them they can use during a pregnancy is insane to me.

• 1:44:28Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Speaker 09

  So there's the autism issue and the insult essentially to that community, but also to women in general. It's insane to me that this is happening right now. Again, there is a bit of nuance to this issue. As I mentioned, it's not like totally insane to ask about and question it. But to make a wholesale directional change in, in how we recommend managing patients with our pregnant is, is nuts. It's just nuts.

• 1:44:55Speaker 10

  Yeah. And to piggyback on that, you know, like it's really normal. It was normal advice in 2024 for us to say, yeah, you can use Tylenol, but try to use it sparingly. We're not really sure. Use it when you need it though, because we do know that pain and fever and these types of things are bad for the baby.

• 1:45:12Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:45:12Speaker 10

  You know, so this, this kind of way in which it's now been massage. So I saw a letter from Dr. Marty Makary, who's another grifter who's now in the, in the American political system there, has written a letter basically saying at the bottom, use it judiciously and, and it is the only one that's approved. So, but that's exactly where we were before. There was no need for a pass conference. Every doctor was saying, use Tylenol sparingly, but you can use it.

• 1:45:38Speaker 09

  James, can I tell you what's driving me crazy about this?

• 1:45:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, please.

• 1:45:42Speaker 09

  This administration has done something, Trump in general, has done something that has blown my mind, which is somehow time and time again, I find myself defending people and things that I would never want to defend, like.

• 1:45:59Speaker 09

  First of all, I'm watching Jimmy Kimmel. I don't know how that happened. I blame Trump for that. Second, like Tylenol is a dangerous medication. I'm a liver doctor.

• 1:46:09Speaker 10

  Yes, suicide.

• 1:46:10Speaker 09

  I deal with like Tylenol overdose is causing acute liver injury and acute liver failure is a massive real issue across the world. And it is, it's, it's a real thing. So there are reasons that we should be watchful of Tylenol, but this is not one of them.

• 1:46:27Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:46:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, personally, I'm a champion of all Tylenol should be like the UK. It should be an individually wrapped pieces. Because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of intentional overdose and even ICU overdoses that cause liver failure. So yeah, take away freedoms.

• 1:46:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, right. This is the medical freedom crowd. It's amazing.

• 1:46:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, we should take an advertising break and then come back. So we'll do that.

• 1:46:50Speaker 09

  Oh God, that would be fantastic. If I could take an advertiser, I could use an ad right now. So bad. Amazing.

• 1:46:55Speaker 08

  Yep. It's gonna be for uh, yeah, fucking lemon pepper water, which is the only pain treatment you should be taking.

• 1:47:03Speaker 09

  Bark to put between your teeth.

• 1:47:05Speaker 10

  Big speed run.

• 1:47:06Speaker 08

  Sure, sure. Yeah. Go get some leaves and fucking eat them. What can go wrong?

• 1:47:21Speaker 08

  All right, we are back. Thank you for that message from Leaf Pain Relief.

• 1:47:25Speaker 09

  Hit the spot.

• 1:47:26Speaker 08

  It's good. Uh, don't eat leaves. I saw someone posing with a, uh, they were taking their graduation pictures, very nice setting. I'm not gonna say the flower, I guess, just in case. It can cause quite remarkable hallucinations and it is not, not a good idea to be like huffing it. Yeah. It's a nice looking flower. If you didn't know, you might huff it.

• 1:47:43Speaker 09

  Now I want to know what the hell you're talking about. You're gonna tell me later, I'm assuming.

• 1:47:46Speaker 08

  You've lived in California your whole life. How do you not know this? Yeah, I'll text you after we're done.

• 1:47:51Speaker 09

  Dandelions? Is it dandelions? I've been told not to snort dandelions.

• 1:47:56Speaker 10

  It reminds me, though, there was a TikTok video of, there's been a few of, of women proudly being pregnant and ingesting Tylenol. And to be clear, that's a, that's an insane response to this problem. Like, please don't take Tylenol as a point. As Kevin was saying before the break.

• 1:48:10Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:48:10Speaker 10

  Tylenol does deplete the glutathione in your body and it is toxic to your liver. If your liver doesn't have the glutathione necessary, it directly injures the liver.

• 1:48:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:48:20Speaker 10

  And this is what happens when you take an overdose is it overwhelms the amount of, of glutathione that your liver has and it causes liver damage. So.

• 1:48:28Speaker 09

  And most pregnant women who want to keep the baby are very judicious to begin with. And not just like downing shit willy nilly, you know what I mean? Like, they're like, oh, God, this is really bad. I better take something. And Tylenol, by the way, sucks. I, you know, as a pain medicine, you know, it's not gonna, it's like the thing you take when they won't give you anything else. It's not a great one. So you, to take it from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism. If you're gonna make extraordinary claims, you have to have, if not extraordinary evidence, preponderance of it. So this is really bothering me, as you can tell, because it does not exist.

• 1:49:09Speaker 08

  Yeah. I think something you mentioned earlier, like when, like you said, you're backed into a corner where you're defending like, uh, Big Pharma and Tylenol specifically, like, is the one thing that they've tried to do is like inhabit nuance and then disingenuously use it.

• 1:49:24Speaker 10

  Absolutely. Yes. Yes. That's the entire anti-vaccines move.

• 1:49:28Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. Right. And then it leads to people responding in a way that it raises nuance entirely. I understand where we get that response, but like, it's, it's not the correct response, right?

• 1:49:38Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:49:38Speaker 08

  People want you to be like, this is a hundred percent safe, right? They want you to say, this is actually the perfect medication and it's fine and you should have it for breakfast.

• 1:49:46Speaker 10

  Yeah. And the, the HHS tweeted out a statement that Tylenol did in 2017, basically saying, we don't recommend Tylenol in pregnancy.

• 1:49:55Speaker 10

  But no drug maker recommends any medication. They all say specifically, talk to your doctor about this medication. They're not allowed to recommend the medication. Only doctors can.

• 1:50:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, right.

• 1:50:06Speaker 10

  So when they're using that language and then HHS tweets it out, HHS is tweeting it out specifically to give the illusion that we don't want pregnant people to be taking this medication. They specifically said, we don't recommend it. And that's a nuance. And that's how they use it. And it just sucks.

• 1:50:21Speaker 09

  Right. That's exactly right. And Tylenol, the makers of it. By the way, I am curious about the fact that Johnson Johnson spun off Kenview. I wonder if they knew this was coming and that's why they did it. The same way that DuPont spun off.

• 1:50:32Speaker 10

  It was only three years ago that they did that, right?

• 1:50:35Speaker 09

  You know, like DuPont spun off the company in charge of all their PFAS, their forever chemicals. Cause they knew shit was coming down the pipeline. I wonder if that was the same reason here. Tylenol did this.

• 1:50:44Speaker 10

  Well, they put Band-Aid and Neutrogena in the same group. So I think it was more just to consolidate home stuff.

• 1:50:51Speaker 09

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 08

  Got a press conference coming next week about Band-Aids.

• 1:50:56Speaker 09

  Cancer. Cause anxiety.

• 1:50:58Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 09

  Anyways, it's very interesting to me that this is happening at all, really. I mean, what I thought was interesting about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys picked up on this too, was, you know, I was wondering, why is this pivot happening? How can RFK Junior be happy about this? He can't be happy about leaving his crusade against vaccines. The Maha community behind him clearly doesn't love that aspect. And I wonder why they were pivoting to that. And I wonder what you guys think about that. I did feel that during that press conference, Trump really went out of his way to sort of give lip service. And we could, we should talk about this too, about vaccines. He talks about vaccines a lot, even though there's no new evidence about vaccines causing problems.

• 1:51:42Speaker 09

  And Trump gave this terrible advice about breaking up the vaccines, which we know is a terrible idea because that's going to lead to decreased uptake overall. The more visits you have to go back to, the less likely you're going to do it. So the more likely you're not going to get vaccinated. But, but it made me wonder why this is happening now? Why they decided to, to make this pivot? And I wonder what you both think about that.

• 1:52:05Speaker 10

  My theory is the link with fevers. If I'm being really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try and link vaccine-induced fever to autism. And they're going to say, oh, we thought it was the Tylenol, but it turns out to be the vaccines.

• 1:52:22Speaker 09

  Oh.

• 1:52:23Speaker 10

  It's the fever and the fever is caused by the vaccine.

• 1:52:25Speaker 09

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:52:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, my theory is gender, I think, that telling pregnant people to suck it up is then you've got, you know, your dudes all standing on the podium there, right? Like, the majority of pregnant people are going to be women. It's something that men have been doing to women for millennia. Like, it's a safer bet than, yeah, your kid might die, but you know, you never know.

• 1:52:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. Which actually, you know, that brings up another thing that I think we should talk about, which is what Trump kept saying. Trump kept saying, don't take it, but he was like, what's the worst that happens? Nothing bad will come of it.

• 1:52:57Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 09

  So it invokes this precautionary principle, which is like, you know, why not avoid the Tylenol? What's the worst that can happen? And that doesn't work here.

• 1:53:08Speaker 10

  No.

• 1:53:08Speaker 09

  Because we know that people are taking this for a fever. Tylenol is not good for inflammation, doesn't work on inflammation the way Advil, Ibuprofen does, but it can work on a fever. And we know that fever can have some risk, at least as much if not more than Tylenol, in harm to the baby, in harm to the pregnancy. So to me, the precautionary principle just doesn't apply here. And to hear the president, I never heard a president give medical advice before like that. It blew my mind. I felt like I was disassociating while I was watching this. I'm like, this cannot be real life.

• 1:53:44Speaker 10

  And he said it so unequivocally, don't take Tylenol, just suck it up. And, and I tweeted something that I read from Dr. Glockenflocken, who is one of my favorite medical comedians, but he said this will kill people. And, and I do agree, I think people were very incredulous when I, when I said this will kill people and they were like, what do you mean, people dying of a fever? I'm like, yeah, kind of. Like, fevers can be really bad for you. And if you're not going to hospital and the only thing you have is Tylenol, it's a really good idea to take the Tylenol. And there's some people that don't go to hospital for lots of reasons. And fevers can kill you, they just can.

• 1:54:17Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Speaker 10

  So.

• 1:54:18Speaker 09

  I disapprove of the Canadian and Englishman referring to the hospital as hospital. I need you guys to refer to it as the hospital.

• 1:54:26Speaker 08

  I'd forgotten about that, yeah, always with a definite article, yeah.

• 1:54:29Speaker 10

  Taking it to a hospital, yes.

• 1:54:30Speaker 09

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:54:32Speaker 08

  But yeah, I think you're right. Like there is no like no harm option here, right? Like that is a that damage is done when when people don't take this.

• 1:54:39Speaker 10

  Right. I just imagine this this poor mom, you know, at home, you know, doesn't have great healthcare, but does have a bottle of Tylenol and is battling a sorry, I'll Americanize this like 104 degree fever.

• 1:54:52Speaker 08

  Thank you. Don't make me do math.

• 1:54:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, you're welcome.

• 1:54:54Speaker 08

  Don't make me do math.

• 1:54:55Speaker 10

  You know, and and you know, it's it's around that 103, 104 mark where we actually get really worried about the person's brain. We get really worried about their health and what's going to happen and and what would happen to that person in hospital. They would absolutely get Tylenol right away, prescribed by a doctor right that moment. And so I worry about this. I worry about this mom presenting to hospital with her fever. She's pregnant and the doctors say, okay, we're going to give you Tylenol. And she says, no.

• 1:55:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, right.

• 1:55:21Speaker 10

  Why? Because I don't want I don't want my child to have autism.

• 1:55:23Speaker 08

  Because people are listening to this guy. First of all, again, the hospital. Second, they're going to listen to this guy. It's insane. People are really going to take this advice.

• 1:55:33Speaker 10

  And I could see, you know, especially the more Trump following people saying, you will never give me Tylenol, not in this hospital.

• 1:55:41Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:55:42Speaker 10

  And so so it does sound silly that not taking Tylenol could kill you. But if you're so scared of Tylenol because it causes autism, that you don't take it when it's recommended to you by a doctor or it's prescribed to you by doctor, you could die. And and I won't be surprised when there are more fever induced deaths in 2025 and 2026 in the United States. I already have the CDC Wonder data search ready to go because I study mortality all the time. And I am absolutely sure we're going to see a few more fever induced deaths than we would have previously.

• 1:56:13Speaker 08

  Geez, yeah.

• 1:56:25Speaker 08

  Maybe like we can finish up by explaining to people like, you know, if you're talking to someone in your family, right? Someone who maybe isn't a listener sadly to either of our podcasts. I know this isn't directly the area either of you specialize in, but from what I understand, pregnant people, like the way that drugs are categorized, as we spoke about earlier on, there's not like, yeah, go ahead and take all of these, right? There's like, probably fine if you have to, probably a bad idea unless you really need to. And I'd like maybe some straight up don't.

• 1:56:58Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Speaker 09

  Can you explain that for people?

• 1:57:00Speaker 10

  Sure. So there's a classification system and it's technical, but it's exactly like that. There are very few medications that are like totally fine. These are medications that are given during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy. But for the most part, pretty much everything else, in my world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodiazepines and whatnot. They all have the same classification, which is basically contraindicated. Don't take it unless your doctor provides it for you. Now, we still get pregnant people with depression and psychosis and who need all these medications.

• 1:57:37Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:57:37Speaker 10

  And so we do have to interpret it based off of the data that we have. And the data that we have always comes late. So if we find a problem, it's found too late and generally it's precautionary. So typically, I don't know, Cave, if there's a similar thing in GI work, but like for me, I'll get a call all the time. Oh, we have this woman, she's 32, she's really worried. She normally takes antidepressants, but she's thinking about stopping them because she's really worried about passing into her baby or whatever. And I'm like, how bad is the depression? Well, it was really bad. She was hospitalized three times and nearly died. I was like, you probably want to keep antidepressant treatment going and just let her know that there could be some harm to the fetus, but depression is way worse. And we just go with God, you know, do your best.

• 1:58:22Speaker 09

  There are certain medications where we are going to say you absolutely shouldn't take these during pregnancy.

• 1:58:27Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 09

  And you should discuss that with your obstetrician.

• 1:58:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 09

  Talk that over with your gynecologist and your primary care doctor. You should talk it over with your medical team. That's great. But every medication has some small amount of risk, some larger than others. But it's really about the risk versus the benefit. And this has been well studied by the experts. What you've heard, what those people have heard from Trump and RFK Junior is well outside of the normal recommendations

• 1:59:01Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:59:02Speaker 09

  From the experts like the ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

• 1:59:07Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Speaker 09

  The people who have been keeping our pregnant patients alive and relatively well for many, many years. This is well outside of those recommendations. And while it's an interesting topic, and I think maybe, you know, sure, I'd like to see more studies on it. I'm never going to say, don't study this more.

• 1:59:26Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:59:26Speaker 09

  I would say that the preponderance of evidence and scientific belief and medical belief in this one goes against what they're saying. And I would say at least, talk it over with your doctor. If you have a question, talk it over with your doctor. And that's, you mentioned it before, Townlaw has sort of like, you know, tried to hedge its bets by saying, talk, get over with your doctor. But the reason they do that is they know most doctors are going to be reasonable about this and follow the scientific evidence that's there. So I would say if they really have a question, they should talk about it with their doctor because Trump, whether or not they love him or not, this is well out of his range of understanding. And he is getting, it's like a game of telephone.

• 2:00:07Speaker 09

  He's getting a version of the medical information transmitted to him by RFK Junior, who is getting a weird version of it from his belief system. And it's being supported by people who are there solely just, just there to do the, the beck and call of Trump at this point. And that's super dangerous. And so if they can keep an open mind about it, talk it over with their doctor, continue to do what their parents did, I think they're going to be okay.

• 2:00:37Speaker 08

  Yeah. Real quick, because like, for reasons that are largely related to the way that we do healthcare in the United States, people sometimes are reticent to talk to their doctor, unable to talk to a doctor. Reliable sources of medical information versus the shit that you find on Google. Give us like a five minute primer.

• 2:00:53Speaker 10

  Yeah. So, you know, in almost every jurisdiction, there is an official health agency that you can go to their website and get good health data. So in B C, we have Health Link B C, and there's a number that you can call to speak to a nurse. In America, you have great, I would say, used to be great, like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they got a little hokey. I would still say, you know, you, you, there are some really good American places that you can go. Mayo Clinic has a lot of public facing information that has pretty good general descriptions.

• 2:01:24Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Speaker 10

  But just make sure it's from a place that is official, because there is a whole space now that's going to be opened up, because the second part of this presentation that R F K gave was, was about a generic medication that might help some people with a very specific form of autism.

• 2:01:42Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:01:42Speaker 10

  And I promise you, the, the amount of huckstering that's going to happen based on that, the alternatives, you know, we made a joke about lemon water before, before the ad break, but there are going to be people who are going to be selling the alternative to Tylenol that is autism free.

• 2:01:57Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:01:57Speaker 10

  And that, that's really worrisome.

• 2:02:00Speaker 09

  Yeah. Be wary of anyone that has something in their Instagram, their TikTok, their wellness post that uses the words detox. Be wary about ancient remedies. Be wary about anyone that is selling something like Dr. Oz, who, by the way, sells a version of the folic acid or the leukovorin that they're talking about here. So be wary about that. We don't sell shit. Be wary about people like Dr. Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard Epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a good doctor.

• 2:02:35Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:02:36Speaker 09

  From the friends I have in Harvard, they say he's not a bad guy, but be wary about the fact, anytime you see someone's making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars off a court trial to sue Tylenol and has a vested interest in these things. So you should, you should be wary about those things. That, that's definitely something to look for in. If you're looking for a trusted source, speaking of hucksters, you could listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, anywhere you find podcasts, where we're going to talk about medical stuff just like this, and I will bring you trusted sources.

• 2:03:07Speaker 08

  Beautiful. That's, that was all a long play to get to listen to Gav's podcast.

• 2:03:11Speaker 09

  I'm in it for the long con. I'm in it for the long con, buddy.

• 2:03:14Speaker 08

  Yeah. Thank you for helping us clear that up a bit. I think it's, it's a real rough time for healthcare in general, and especially people with autism, like, like neurodivergent people. It really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government bad mouthing people. So, yeah, we are thinking of you.

• 2:03:32Speaker 10

  Very similar to the, the issue with trans kids. Like, I'm a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the route to Florida and other things with respect to trans policies. And it's just got to suck to be a trans kid in Florida right now. It's got to suck to be a, a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing what's coming down the pipeline. And it'll be the same for people with autism and families with autistic kids. Yeah.

• 2:03:59Speaker 09

  Yep. I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours.

• 2:04:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:05Speaker 09

  We didn't even talk about hepatitis B, by the way. We didn't even talk about hepatitis B. We can talk about some of the point. There's just so much. There's so much, and it's so terrible. And you're absolutely right. It's really like for that community right now.

• 2:04:18Speaker 10

  By the way, I wanted to debunk something because it's been said multiple times.

• 2:04:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, get it.

• 2:04:23Speaker 10

  RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I didn't know anybody autistic when I was, you know, my, when I was a kid or whatever. I've never met someone autistic my age. Donald Triplet was the very first person diagnosed with autism in 1943, I believe, 1943. He just died last year. I think he was something like 80, 90 years old. Okay.

• 2:04:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 10

  Autistic people are old too. This idea that there aren't old autistic people is so ass backwards. It was just not diagnosed.

• 2:04:57Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:04:57Speaker 10

  And, and, and it's, it's such a shame because when, when he, when Donald Tripoli passed, you know, like people in psychiatry notice, that's not the type of thing that people in the world notice, but he was the very first autistic person. He lived a full life. He was an engineer. He had autism. It was diagnosed. He was the first ever case diagnosed and he also lived a life. And, and so for, for RFK to just erase him completely and say, I've never known an old person to have autism is just ridiculous.

• 2:05:26Speaker 08

  Yeah. And like, if you conduct yourself as RSK does, but it being a piece of shit to neurodivergent people, then even people who, who have been diagnosed aren't just going to be like, hey, man, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about my autism.

• 2:05:36Speaker 10

  About my autism.

• 2:05:37Speaker 08

  Because you're, you're being a turd to them and like you're being unkind. Yeah, like what do you expect?

• 2:05:43Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, Tyler Grandin is like, how old is she now? Like in her seventies? I mean, it's, it's absurd to think that this is a totally new thing. I mean, it, it also tells me that he was probably a bit sheltered and, and probably didn't meet enough people.

• 2:06:01Speaker 10

  Wow, a Kennedy sheltered? Wow.

• 2:06:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. He's, he's had a different experience of life than any of us. It's fair to say.

• 2:06:08Speaker 10

  I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler Noll pun. I'm very proud of that. I usually do pretty much every time and it pisses my wife off so much.

• 2:06:17Speaker 09

  I'm really proud of you, man. You've shown a lot of growth.

• 2:06:19Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I was, I was gonna make one, but I thought I'd leave it. Didn't want, didn't want to offend.

• 2:06:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you very much. Where can people find both of you on, on the internet if they'd like to? Or, you know, in person?

• 2:06:34Speaker 10

  Don't find me in person. Do not do that.

• 2:06:36Speaker 09

  So you can listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll hear people like James, you'll hear people like Tyler. Last time Tyler was on was actually for episode 284. We did an episode on adult ADHD with author Rex King. She's rad. So that's a good episode to listen to. And you can find me on Blue Sky at CaveMD. I still have a Twitter account and Instagram account, but I don't really use those that much. So find me on Blue Sky. Blue Sky, by the way, as a shout out, as a plug, I think it's good for sci- if you're interested in science-based stuff, it may not be that much fun for everything else, but at least in terms of like, if you want to follow doctors, scientists, that's a good place to go. That's, that's where a lot of us have gone. So I'll

• 2:07:21Speaker 09

  be there at Blue Sky.

• 2:07:23Speaker 10

  Yeah. And I'm, I am still on Twitter, TylerBlack32. I'm slugging it out. It is a lot of hate and a lot of death threats now, especially as I've, I've been on a few trans podcasts. I've been on quite a few medical anti-vax and vaccine podcasts. So, you know, I'll pop up from time to time on a podcast or something, but I'm not really have anything to plug anymore. I'm just really hoping that we can continue to fight this, this sort of, it's a really disgusting reality in this decade that misinformation has won the day and literally misinformers are the political leaders now. And misinformation has just eroded science to the point where I don't know if America's ever going to get it back.

• 2:08:06Speaker 09

  Yeah. If we do, this has set us back many years. This has set us back many, many years.

• 2:08:11Speaker 10

  Yeah. It's pretty bleak.

• 2:08:13Speaker 09

  Well, that was fun.

• 2:08:15Speaker 08

  Let's end on that hopeful note. Yeah.

• 2:08:16Speaker 10

  All right.

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• 2:10:13Speaker 08

  Hey, everyone. It's James here. We promised that we would get you something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's series of executive orders targeting certain groups. And we reached out to a lawyer, Mo, who is a fantastic lawyer. And we asked him to interview them. They said they had just done an interview with Final Stool Radio, which is an excellent show. And they suggested that I take a listen to that. I took a listen to that and I think it's a fantastic interview. And I don't think there's much that we can add to it. So we're going to re-air that interview in full. The one thing I would add to it is that there have been a number of cases recently where grand juries have not.

• 2:10:55Speaker 08

  Returned an indictment, that's relatively rare, but we are seeing that more frequently. And that just enforces everything that Mo says here, which is that at this time, we still have separation of powers and at this time, the executive cannot simply make law, one still has to be prosecuted according to a statute by a district attorney or a USA attorney, right? The president cannot just make law in this instance pertaining to the First Amendment by executive order. That doesn't mean that there will not be harassment. And as you'll hear here, those two are distinct things. And I think Mo gives an excellent outline on how we should think about and conceive this moment in American history. So without

• 2:11:38Speaker 08

  any more of me taking your time, this is an excellent interview that bursted with Mo. I hope you'll enjoy it. And if you would like to check out Final Straw Radio, you can do so using the link that I will put below this episode.

• 2:11:52Speaker 12

  Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location, or other context that would help us understand who you are?

• 2:11:59Speaker 13

  Good morning. I'm Maura Melzer Cohen. Everybody calls me Mo. My pronouns are they or Mo. I'm an abolitionist, an educator, and an attorney in New York. Primarily, I represent people who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements.

• 2:12:21Speaker 12

  So we're here to talk about the recent White House statements following the assassination, I mean, I mean, following the reelection of Trump, but more recently, the assassination of Charles Kirk. That Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. Can you talk about what legally changed with the executive order of September 22 of this year or yesterday's when we're recording this, National Presidential Security Memo Number Seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence? Again, it came out on September 25. What changed with with those?

• 2:12:57Speaker 13

  Well, before I answer that question, the first thing I want to say is nothing that I say on this program is legal advice. This is information.

• 2:13:08Speaker 13

  If you want legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged conversation with a human attorney who is admitted to practice in your jurisdiction. As to your overall question, what changed legally is essentially nothing. I think the top level takeaway here is that these executive orders are frightening. They are a frightening contribution to an already dangerous political discourse, and they may very well end up being quite disruptive to left movements, including, I think, primarily centrist liberal movements. But nothing that was legal last week is illegal this week, certainly not because of those

• 2:13:53Speaker 13

  statements. And the state cannot prosecute you for things that were legal when you did them. So, I mean, I can't see the future, but as of right now, the law and the Constitution have not changed. So if this administration wants to, in any meaningful legal way, designate anyone, any group, as domestic terrorists, they can change the law, which is not going to be quick or easy, or they can dispense with the law. But under the current legal regime, there is no mechanism that would make it illegal

• 2:14:31Speaker 13

  to be Antifa, whatever that means, or to hold anti-cachist values, or to assemble, or to petition the government. And, you know, to be clear, not that doing any of those things or being any of those things are necessarily effective at creating social change right now, but my point really is they're not illegal.

• 2:14:56Speaker 12

  Just to sort of throw this back your way, so there was, when you were responding to that, it made me think of, there's a veteran who lost a bunch of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know, about a year ago hit this region. He was recorded, like, he went pretty viral, calling out and shouting down a state politician who had a, like, a public meeting here in the area, just saying there's been, like, total, like, lack of support after the storm, and here are all the needs, and you're just a lying politician, this sort of thing. The same man, right after the executive order that Trump made about burning US flags, went out and burned one across from the White House, and then he got arrested

• 2:15:41Speaker 12

  for it. Like, I thought that there was a Supreme Court decision back in the 80s that said it's not actually illegal to burn a flag. So does that make his executive orders now law?

• 2:15:52Speaker 13

  No. There is a Supreme Court decision. It's called Texas v. Johnson, and it is still law. And in fact, after Texas v. Johnson, Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning the American flag, and it was found unconstitutional. It is astonishing and illuminating that that man was arrested for burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct. I will say, I'm not sure what he was actually charged with, right? If he was charged with, you know, creating a fire hazard,

• 2:16:37Speaker 13

  I suppose that, apart from the fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation, I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating a fire hazard in a public place or something like that. But no, flag burning remains protected regardless of what the president or Congress says about it. It would take either an amendment to the Constitution or a very serious change in Supreme Court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal.

• 2:17:11Speaker 12

  Okay. Yeah, so this is a distinction I'd love for us to get back to in a moment between legality versus what, you know, the sort of like box that that powers decide to put a thing into. Like, I know I've definitely been detained, not for being an annoyance to the cops, but within my legal rights, but they'll say, ah, but your shoe's untied on a Tuesday, whatever, and then like, waste my time.

• 2:17:40Speaker 13

  Let's talk about that. And because I do want to talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements, and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are and can be and have long been used to surveil and disrupt and target the left. But actually, before we do that, why don't we talk about sort of some of the categories that are in play here and be really clear about definitions? Or at least, understand that there are differences between these categories, right? Because there is a difference between the law and political discourse.

• 2:18:20Speaker 13

  And there is a difference, importantly, between law and power. And there is certainly at least some daylight between the legal constraints on state power and the state's power to ignore those constraints. And then, I think, what will be significant to this discussion is there is a significant difference between Antifa, which is a set of practices or beliefs that are not necessarily even all that well-defined, and what this administration refers to when it uses or deploys the word "Antifa."

• 2:19:01Speaker 13

  And there is yet more difference between the booking man that is being invoked by that word and the individuals and organizations that the administration actually intends to target. There's a difference between political targeting, surveillance, disruption, and prosecution, right? Those things are all different. And there's a difference between prosecution and conviction. And there is an important difference between someone's political beliefs and associations, which are and remain protected by the First Amendment, and politically motivated conduct that is illegal. So, you know, executive orders and these kinds of statements on national security are policy statements.

• 2:19:47Speaker 13

  They don't in and of themselves make things happen. They don't in and of themselves change the law. And an executive order that is inconsistent with the Constitution or existing law at least ought to be unenforceable.

• 2:19:59Speaker 12

  Okay. But yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know, cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate, and those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting. They can affect your job prospects, they can affect your housing stability, they can affect whether or not some unhinged person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy theory about you. But so that distinction of like, well, you might get exonerated by a court after you've been held in pretrial for a year. I guess that is an important distinction, right? Because it means you're not spending, you know, an extra 30 years or 20 years or whatever behind bars with the terrorism enhancement.

• 2:20:44Speaker 13

  Well, I mean, that is also cold comfort. I'm really not trying to be dismissive. I think it's important to recognize what these distinctions are and primarily because I want people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared for and what we need to be worried about and what tools we have and what tools are effective at resisting what's coming down the pike. And in order to do that, we need to know what's coming down the pike. We need to know who actually has power in this situation. The fact that an executive order doesn't change the law does not mean an executive order will not result in a lot more state repression or that it won't disrupt movements or even ruin lives.

• 2:21:26Speaker 13

  It doesn't mean that Trump is not going to accomplish the thing that I think he's actually trying to accomplish here in the immediate short term, which is broadcasting to his base that non-state action against people identified as or perceived to be part of the despised group, you know, is desirable by this administration, will be condoned by this administration. I think that is important to recognize. Saying that it doesn't change the law does not mean it isn't dangerous. I just want to be very precise about, I think, the ways in which it is likely to be dangerous and some of the ways that it might not. Might not be. And again, I'm not trying to be dismissive, but state repression exists

• 2:22:09Speaker 13

  all the time. State repression against leftists and anarchists in particular has been ongoing the whole time. This is not a Trump thing. And in fact, I think it's important to note that the executive who's probably most responsible for having laid this groundwork is Biden, who set forth a policy strategy that focused on funding the federal targeting of what at that point he was calling political extremists, which was a label that was being applied to groups on the left as well as neo-Nazis and alt-right groups. So this administration has already been engaged, and not just this administration, right? We have centuries

• 2:22:48Speaker 13

  at this point of targeted disruption of left movements. The way that it's currently being rationalized is a little bit different. The way that it's being broadcast, normalized, is a little bit different. But it's, I will say, I don't think this is actually anything all that new or different. And the difference in how dangerous it is, is one of scale, maybe, rather than, it's a difference in scope rather than nature.

• 2:23:21Speaker 12

  I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction. I think that like, sometimes people in the center and even sometimes people on the left will look at, in particular, things that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory. They're like confusing, and they're bombastic. And there's a part of us that, that will say like, no, but that's, that's not what's actually happening. That's not what actually was the motivation for that person. Or like, that person voted, you know, Republican in the last election, whatever. And so I think that that distinction that you're making of, you know, this, this may not, this may be like an approach to motivate the base. It may prove not to be legally like standing, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on people.

• 2:24:05Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:24:05Speaker 12

  And what we should be looking for out of this is a projection of not only like a call, call to action or red meat for the base or whatever, but also like a clear proposition of that's meant to chill us and chill civil society, that these are the intentions moving forward. This is the narrative and this is the story that they're going to be going with, right?

• 2:24:29Speaker 13

  Absolutely. And I think it is important to point out, right now, we're, we're seeing a lot of people pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality. And I, I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful. I mean, I think it's part of the point, right? Manipulating the facts, making narrative claims that are totally unsupportable and muddying the waters in this really fundamental way is part of the project.

• 2:25:08Speaker 12

  There was a, a German jurist, I guess, who became the highest jurist during the Nazi regime in Germany, but continued writing theory, like was writing it before as a member of the conservative revolution, as they called it. And then afterwards, he survived the war and continued living in Germany, writing Carl Schmidt, who talks a lot about like the limits of liberal approaches towards legality and liberal governance with a belief that like it makes sense to push it to its limits and beyond, break it and recognize that governance is about the imposition of power and the sheltering of those who are

• 2:25:50Speaker 12

  under the control or in the protected community of the state with a consideration of war through the state's power against internal enemies as well as external enemies. And this is the devil's bargain that we make. It's like Hobbes on steroids. And it feels like a lot of the stuff that the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 has been pushing. Was that they have this, I know that there are some theocrats in that movement. There's the unitary executive theory that a lot of them have been pushing. And they'll play with this, like the Trump administration will play with this identity of the king, King Trump or whatever, the dawn, as it were, like making these executive decisions and being

• 2:26:32Speaker 12

  unbesoldened to anything else. And they've actually been like, you know, saying to courts, you can't stop us from deporting these peoples to an unsafe third country, whatever, stop us. I wonder if, like, I wonder if you have any comments on this, if I'm coming out of left field or what?

• 2:26:49Speaker 13

  Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt, as opposed to the Heritage Foundation. He was at least intellectually honest. Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where they're trying to normalize what Schmidt would have called like a state of exception, where there's sort of unbridled executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints on state power, right? And it's funny, because I've been in conversations over the last months where, and talking with a bunch of my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the current legal regime, and we're talking about how dangerous it is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law, you know, and it's sort of amusing for a bunch of anarchists

• 2:27:31Speaker 13

  to be like, oh, no, the rule of law is collapsing. But when I'm talking about the rule of law in this way, I'm really talking about constraints on state power. And those are what's collapsing. And that's exactly what Schmidt envisioned and argued for, frankly. And I do think we're seeing that. I think one of the things that I've noticed in some of these EOs, especially the couple of statements from the last few days, is he keeps talking about things like love of God and anti-Christian sentiment, which is, I mean, you know, this is entirely incompatible with the First Amendment, which provides that no state shall establish your religion, right? I mean, we really are outside the contours of recognized

• 2:28:16Speaker 13

  You know, legal norms, constitutional norms. And I think a lot of this stuff is functioning and is meant to normalize this kind of discourse and to inject it not only into the exercise of government power, but to normalize it in terms of what people understand to be legitimate legal discourse.

• 2:28:50Speaker 12

  Kind of shifting a bit, like, let's get into some of the implications of this. So if it hasn't changed law, but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted. I've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and getting doxing attention. There's a website now, I think, called, like, Who Killed Charlie Kirk? Or The People Who Killed Charlie Kirk, or something like that, maybe an app. It's kind of like the post-Charlie Kirk assassination version of Canary Mission. Does this mean that police are coming after people for sharing memes? Is that happening? Is that what's happening in these cases?

• 2:29:22Speaker 13

  I mean, police have always been coming after people for sharing memes. I would say I get calls at least every month from people who have been visited by federal agents because they said something on the internet that was upsetting to somebody else, and then they reported it, and the FBI is just following up on a tip. But that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment. Let me say that in human language.

• 2:29:50Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 2:29:52Speaker 13

  This does not undermine the First Amendment. The First Amendment still exists. And all of the legal framework around having the right to say things as long as those things are not true threats, that still exists. So it is not unusual for people to be targeted or monitored or visited by law enforcement. But typically, that stuff doesn't actually really go anywhere. I am concerned about people being subject to doxing and having negative social consequences and fallout from this kind of stuff. And it certainly is, you know, can be life ruining.

• 2:30:35Speaker 13

  Again, I don't, I don't mean to trivialize the effects of this kind of retaliation, social retaliation. But it is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution or a criminal conviction. It's, it's a different set of mechanisms. Now, one thing that I do think is interesting is that these EOs and the statement that came out on the 22nd and yesterday particularly identify certain modes of that, that kind of social conduct that you're talking about, like doxing, swatting, right, which is making a false report of like an ongoing violent crime so that a SWAT team shows up and raids somebody's home.

• 2:31:13Speaker 12

  Which can be deadly.

• 2:31:14Speaker 13

  Right. This is very dangerous. And interestingly, to me, anyway, there are these specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements. And those specific behaviors are largely tools of the right. People on the left are not notably interested in sending law enforcement to someone's house. So there is a perverse way in which this may end up being sort of protective, I suppose. Because I think it would be very difficult for the government to go after the people who are exposing ICE agents, which again, is not illegal right now. Even if it were to become illegal, it isn't right now.

• 2:31:54Speaker 13

  And it would be very hard for them to go after those folks and not also go after the folks who are running that silly website about people who say something mean about Charlie Kirk.

• 2:32:06Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, and this is speculation outside of like legal advice, or any of that, that we're giving legal advice, but outside of like the legal framework.

• 2:32:14Speaker 13

  They're definitely not giving legal advice.

• 2:32:16Speaker 12

  I mean, it kind of points to a thing that already, this, this hypocrisy or this difference between what it's called when one party does it versus what it's called when another party does it, like outside of the fact that the government gets to do what it wants to until the government stops itself from doing a thing.

• 2:32:31Speaker 13

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:32:32Speaker 12

  I mean, it, it feels like it's a part of the creation of a differentiated subjectivity. Like, there's the subject of the state that falls under the values that are being attacked. Christianity, whiteness, heteronormativity, these like patriotism in these certain ways.

• 2:32:50Speaker 12

  Versus the people that are doing these same things, but are corrupt, are dirtied, are outsider internal enemies, are Soros-funded, however we want to like, name that. But, um, yeah, I guess that's not, I mean, that's, this is nothing new. It's just an amplification of that same, right?

• 2:33:10Speaker 13

  Yeah, very much. And, you know, what, what is changing a little bit, although all of these threads have been present, is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of targeting with respect to, in particular, Palestine solidarity movements, gender non-conforming people and what they're calling Antifa. So, you know, we're seeing, we've been seeing congressional investigations, the allocation of funds to federal law enforcement, purging not just individuals, but whole agencies that the administration feels are insufficiently aligned with its priority. Replacing federal law enforcement that, and I mean ranging from FBI agents on the ground

• 2:33:50Speaker 13

  to DOJ with people who will enthusiastically and blindly pursue these priorities and using a lot of resources to target the nonprofit tax status and funding of groups identified as being aligned with any of the disfavored movements. And one of the things that they're doing is kind of, it's this real spaghetti, you know, throwing everything at it. And it, it's very overwhelming. It's overwhelming for movement infrastructure. It's overwhelming for legal, for people on the ground. And it's all happening at once. And I think it's all being, it's mutually compounding. It's mutually reinforcing. It's demoralizing.

• 2:34:35Speaker 13

  And in particular, the stuff that's happening with immigration is so devastating. And because immigration is so wholly under the control of the executive, that is an area where he's able to sort of make a policy and make it so and have it be carried out by Fiat. And he has made his own private army with ICE. And I think one of the effects that I, in just in my observation that that has had is that people see that happening and assume that he has that level of control over everything else. And I do want to point out, like, again, it's absolutely devastating to see what's happening

• 2:35:20Speaker 13

  in the immigration space. But in fact, he does not have that level of control over the rest of government and over non-immigration law. And I think that's really important to remember.

• 2:35:35Speaker 12

  Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting. There's a lot of people that have talked, and not to get too far down the road with this, but like, with the, like, attempt to normalize sending National Guard or sending active military to different states, or federalizing National Guards to be present from different states in these places.

• 2:35:56Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:35:56Speaker 12

  Almost like if it's constant and, like, overlapping enough, then eventually just military being on the streets, generally rousting houseless folks, is going to be a normalized thing.

• 2:36:08Speaker 13

  Man, I'm in New York. There's military people in all the subways. Like, that [BLEEP] got very normalized post 9/11 in certain places. And so, you know, again, this is not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new.

• 2:36:23Speaker 12

  So, take it back to Antifa.

• 2:36:26Speaker 13

  Sure.

• 2:36:27Speaker 12

  Antifa. Antifa. How is the administration identifying Antifa and the left? And what are they actually dismantling and attacking? I'm thinking, like, I've heard a lot of talk about bail funds, or like LGBTQIA youth advocacy organizations, secularist groups, like, yeah, what's going on?

• 2:36:47Speaker 13

  Yeah, well, this is, this is where things get really fun. Most of the groups that are actually being targeted are not remotely related to Antifa. George Soros is not Antifa. The various legal defense funds are not Antifa. Antifa is the rationale, but not the reality. So, one of the interesting issues here is that a significant group of the people who really need to be very worried are people who work in the nonprofit sector, in extremely normal and liberal community advocacy organizations and NGOs. And these are people who have nothing whatsoever To do with Antifa by any stretch of the imagination, who are being attacked, whose funding is being attacked,

• 2:37:31Speaker 13

  who are primarily, I would say, at risk, not because they have engaged in anything approaching unlawful conduct. And frankly, I think the biggest risk for many of those people is the anticipatory compliance of their funders. We have seen a really similar thing happen with universities, where universities have been targeted by the state, by the federal government, and have been accused in particular of antisemitism. And frankly, I think it would be the work of an afternoon for general counsel at any of these universities to point out that, in fact, there is a legally established difference

• 2:38:13Speaker 13

  between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, that criticism of the nation-state of Israel is, in fact, entirely legally distinct from criticism of or threats against Jewish people. And if any of these universities actually bothered to challenge these allegations, I think that they would win in court on the law. And what we're seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge these allegations, settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to the allegedly aggrieved parties,

• 2:38:57Speaker 13

  and capitulating in ways that are unnecessary, unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and cede more ground, not just more ground than is legally called for, but more ground than is even being asked for in these cases. And so, you know, this is, to me, one of the great dangers of normalizing these discourses, is that these large institutions Are engaged in acts of self-preservation that actually undermine civil society when even a small amount of courage would go a very long way to preserving it.

• 2:39:39Speaker 12

  I think we also sort of saw this in the early days of the administration with legal firms that had brought challenges to the administration in the past backing down or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration. And we're seeing it now also with some of these large media corporations silencing some of their pundits or whatever. Or in some cases, I mean, it's clearly quid pro quo because they've got, you know, a merger that's being discussed by the FCC at the moment.

• 2:40:11Speaker 13

  Well, what we've seen, though, we have seen a lot of that sort of craven capitulation. But what we've also seen is when we fight, we win. Now, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this. What I'm trying to say is the demands that are being made by this particular administration are actually so far beyond the pale that based on our legal regime as it currently is, when we fight, we win. And so I think it is very worth reminding people that however imperfect the law is, the current state of the law forbids much of what this administration is doing. And it is actually worth standing up to it.

• 2:40:53Speaker 13

  There are other groups of people similarly who are not related to Antifa. And one of those groups is [BLEEP] posters, like including boomers who are on Facebook and Twitter making jokes about how the right is so hypocritical. And those people are getting targeted. And I would just gently remind everyone that the First Amendment does still exist and that the solution to repression is not self-censorship, but courage. And also, as I have said many times, including to you on this program, discretion is the better part of valor and not everything needs to be said on the internet. So maybe think about it before you post something that you would not like to hear read back to you by a humorless prosecutor. Then we have these other

• 2:41:36Speaker 13

  Groups that are engaged in exposing law enforcement, which I referred to a minute ago. And I think the groups that are, you know, exposing ICE are definitely going to be targeted, have already been targeted for that activity. But it sort of remains to be seen how that can happen while also protecting Canary Mission. Right? Then we have groups that are being perceived as or identified as Antifa, who are the people who are like doing food nut bombs and community gardening and cooperative bookstores and prisoner letter writing, all of which are extremely First Amendment protected activities and all of which are not only likely to be highly surveilled, are already highly surveilled.

• 2:42:19Speaker 13

  And this is the group of people who I think are actually probably most used to this and best prepared for it and also might be really hard to prosecute effectively because they're not doing crimes. And, you know, like the NGOs that we were talking about, the biggest point of exposure for all of these groups is likely to be financial. We can certainly anticipate that the state is highly interested in looking at all of our bank records, to the extent that our bank records exist with all the money we have, right? Like, we're all handing around the same stack of 20 singles to each other. But hey, you know, wire fraud. What I can say is that, you know, something like a bail fund

• 2:43:03Speaker 13

  and, you know, community support funds do need to be very cautious. That has already always been the case. And this is a really good time to hire a CPA to go over your books and to make sure that you have kept really meticulous records, to make sure that if you have raised money for something, you have only used it for the thing that you said it was going to be used for. And this is, once again, something that largely is a feature of far-right organizing. Right? I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon was actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money to do something. Build the wall. Build the wall.

• 2:43:45Speaker 13

  He was raising money to build the wall, but not using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud, right? So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already know that you have to be very careful about how you raise that money and how you monitor and track and use that money. So most of the people, I would say the overwhelming majority of people who are sort of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring, A, have already been subject to it, and B, haven't actually done anything unlawful. And, you know, that doesn't mean this won't be disruptive. It just means, look, I'm not naive enough to say that your innocence will protect you, but it's a good start. And then we have folks who maybe actually do engage in unlawful conduct or revolutionary action, or people about whom that claim could somewhat credibly be made.

• 2:44:30Speaker 13

  And that's actually just a different, a different group, right? And those things were illegal last week, and they're illegal now. And they're not more illegal because they're politically motivated, right? Although, you know, there are terrorism enhancements and sentencing enhancements and things like that. The fact is, like, you know, it can't be more illegal to spray paint free Gaza on the side of a building than it is to spray paint I love Trump on the side of a building, right?

• 2:44:56Speaker 12

  I mean, what, whether or not this like pans out in the courts, right, is one thing. But I know that like, say for the library case that happened here, where people were arrested because some people were filming in this like Palestine-related workshop in a public library. And they were asked to stop filming, and then a scuffle broke out and a phone got knocked to the ground and people got apparently dragged outside. Again, I was not there for this. But like, now the people are facing, like, people who were in the crowd, who are not the people who were filming, are facing charges of ethnic intimidation. And that's a very specific case in a different jurisdiction from where you Are practicing law, but it's not just about like what's being charged against them

• 2:45:39Speaker 12

  isn't about assault per se. It's it's this enhanced, politically driven statement based on the rhetoric that's, you know, based on the politics, right?

• 2:45:50Speaker 13

  Absolutely. And I'm glad you pointed that out because I certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions don't happen. They absolutely happen. These reset statements don't change the way in which they happen. Right? And there are ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics. And those have, those are, again, not new. I think the point that I'm trying to make is that I don't think this has changed substantively. Yeah, like, the fact that the president said Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization just doesn't really change the legal landscape.

• 2:46:34Speaker 13

  This has been the targeted surveillance of the left, whether you call it Antifa, whether it's the Green Scare, whether it's the Black Liberation Army. This has been a priority for decades of administrations. More and more legislation has been developed to criminalize garden variety protest conduct. We saw that a lot around Standing Rock and BLM. More and more resources are allocated to testing creative strategies for monitoring and criminalizing political activities. You know, again, state repression and the tools that are used in the service of state repression are just not new. And the fact that you put out these statements is maybe a good reminder that we should be circumspect and aware of repression and prepared to bear up under it.

• 2:47:29Speaker 12

  So is the RICO 61 Atlanta case a model for what we see moving forward at a federal level in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering, the focus on bail funds and other abolitionist infrastructure civil liberties organizations? Like section H of that September 25th statement refers to the Attorney General pursuing, quote, "politically motivated terrorist acts such as organizing doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder." Like, I know those are all things that, you know, they've already got charges attached to them. It's just, these are now being framed within the framework

• 2:48:11Speaker 12

  of being terrorist acts. But, you know, you said like, these practices of attacking adjacent, like, supportive movement and civil society organs is not, it's not in and of itself new. But it seems like the framing, especially with the Atlanta case where the prosecutors brought up at the beginning, like, they gave a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of anarchism, and then said, "All these people fall under this umbrella because they all have this ideology, therefore they are a conspiracy." Is that what the administration is trying to do? And is that different from what they've already done at a federal level?

• 2:48:47Speaker 13

  So, first of all, I do think that that's very likely that they will try. I think this is signaling a real interest in that. I don't think that's particularly new, but I think that it's clearly being prioritized. So, let's talk about RICO. RICO, uh, let's talk about RICO briefly. RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and it was enacted in, I think, 1970 to go after the mob, right? It was to go after crime families. But it's been used against so-called gangs and in other politically motivated prosecutions for a long time. And so, RICO is really used to kind of criminalize

• 2:49:28Speaker 13

  whole communities, but it requires that an actual crime has happened, right? Association or ideology in itself is not sufficient. So, it requires an actual crime has happened. And it also requires an, quote, "an enterprise," like a coordinated enterprise. And because the First Amendment protects association and a large, diffuse group of people sharing values is not an enterprise, you know, I'm not sure, it's not a straightforward path to say we want to use RICO in a politically motivated way and to actually be able to capture this group under a net, right?

• 2:50:09Speaker 13

  That's like, you know, saying we want to go after Antifa is like saying we want to go after people who like cats, right? There are people who like cats, but they certainly aren't coordinating together. I suppose that there are actually people who would say like, yes, I identify strongly with this set of values, but it's not a membership organization. And it would, I think, be very difficult to, to mount a prosecution or to mount a successful prosecution on the basis of what are clearly First Amendment-protected beliefs and associations. And there's pretty good law on this point, actually.

• 2:50:49Speaker 13

  And it comes from an effort to prosecute a bunch of anti-abortion protesters under RICO. And the court said, "You can't do that. The fact that there's a large group of people who happen to believe the same things does not mean that they are an enterprise." So, look, don't get me wrong. Again, this would be hugely disruptive, but it would be very difficult to sustain an effective prosecution or obtain a conviction if there was one competent investigator, prosecutor, judge, or jury member anywhere along the way. But, yes, hugely disruptive if, if they manage to do it. I would like to note something about the Stop Cop City RICO that's important.

• 2:51:31Speaker 13

  So, first of all, yay, all those, all those charges, those Ricos were dismissed for legal reasons of being utter bull And I know that, you know, there's some concern that that will be appealed, but I, I think it is worth noting and celebrating that when we fight, we win. But sort of more to the point, in this context, I do want to note that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute, and it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute, and it still couldn't be effectively used in this way. And also, federal RICO has often failed, right? Efforts to use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed. So if you look up like the Ohio Seven, which was a fairly early effort to bring a politically

• 2:52:16Speaker 13

  motivated RICO, that did not go great for the government. So, yeah, I think that's important to note about RICO.

• 2:52:23Speaker 12

  So you, you mentioned this like FBI designation earlier. It, it had been for a while, I think, under, I thought it, this came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under, under Biden for the prosecution of January 6th, but anti-government extremists, which included militia movements and also anarchists. It's been shifted to far-left extremists in the verbiage of, of the DOJ and who they're pursuing. Anti-law enforcement and anti-conservative attacks have been framed as, you know, a concerted effort by far-left extremists in the media and also like by these institutions as they're, you know, moving forward before they actually make any arrests or whatever, and through

• 2:53:06Speaker 12

  their prosecution, sometimes using terms like, you know, Antifa or Trantifa or whatever sort of motivations they're giving. I also wonder if you could say a thing specifically about this sort of framing that is being given, again, that is like, like, I was thinking about this before more recent mass shooting events that have happened, or before the hullabaloo around Charlie Kirk's assassination and, and the shooter, the alleged shooter's relationships to other people, that there seems to be this concerted effort around clinically framing and politically framing, framing transness as a mental health issue, but also as a political extension of woke gender ideology that's

• 2:53:51Speaker 12

  coming for your children. And it's like, it's, it's interesting because like, in order for people in a lot of cases in the US to be able to gain access to medical care that they desire or need around maybe gender dysphoria or some other, some other experience, they often have to use these like clinical terms for what they are experiencing and why they need medication for it. And not faulting people for making that approach because you need the medicine that you need. But now this is being turned around and reframed as therefore, if people need this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have some sort of mental deficiency

• 2:54:31Speaker 12

  or some sort of issue, which is being used in order to challenge people's right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, or saying that people are like, because of their transness, being motivated towards this attacks. Like, I don't know if you have anything to, again, not exactly like, not exactly a legal issue, but I don't know if you have any observations.

• 2:54:51Speaker 13

  Well, I mean, I guess what it comes down to, just to be very clear, the DSM makes very clear that, or that being trans is not a mental illness, that gender dysphoria is distress caused by discrepancy between the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist if any cis person were being treated as a gender that they didn't identify with, right? That would be a distress that would arise for any person. I think that there are real problems with the sort of clinicization or medicalization of gender-affirming

• 2:55:32Speaker 13

  care, but I do want to be very clear that that does not have to and does not formally or officially include pathologizing trans identity. That's something that's being imputed and being imposed, but it has no basis in clinical. Practice, not that that necessarily matters to the government, but I do think it's important to point that out. I think, given that previous efforts to restrict gun ownership on the basis of previously diagnosed mental illness have not been super successful, I don't know that this one will be either.

• 2:56:11Speaker 13

  But again, this is an issue of power and less an issue of law or logical coherent legal philosophy.

• 2:56:19Speaker 12

  So this term has been coming up a lot of, you know, with Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists. There's been a lot of pushback from the legal community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are you talking about? Can you talk about like what it means to be called a domestic terrorist? What changes that makes in like how the law approaches you or how you can be convicted?

• 2:56:43Speaker 13

  Yeah, gladly. So at this point, what it means to be called a domestic terrorist is actually nothing. There is no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or for designating a domestic group a terrorist organization. And given the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court, I think it would be very, very difficult to change the law in the way it would have to be changed in order to make that designation. There are ways to freeze the assets of a domestic group. There are ways to posit or show a connection between a domestic group and a designated

• 2:57:26Speaker 13

  foreign terrorist organization, which is a real thing that has legal effect. There is a way to financially designate a group or an individual as, you know, having this kind of relationship to a foreign terrorist organization or an FTO. So, but there's no legal mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group. That's not a thing. So this is a place where the government could simply dispense with the law, but I do not think this is a place where the government can use the law. To create a category of domestic terrorist organizations. And just to like, explain FTOs a little bit.

• 2:58:10Speaker 13

  There is a category of organization that are designated by the State Department as quote, "foreign terrorist organizations." FTOs are designated by the State Department and they are listed on the State Department website. Right? It's not a secret who they are. You're not going to suddenly find out that, you know, you gave money that to, I don't know, the Greek equivalent of the ACLU and now it's, you know, it turns out it's an FTO. There are certainly cases where the government has successfully claimed that a connection between a domestic group and an FTO exists, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

• 2:58:53Speaker 13

  And if you have a connection to an FTO, you can be prosecuted for what's called "material support for terrorism." And it's a very serious charge. It's a very frightening charge. And it does criminalize a lot of things that most people understand to be protected by the First Amendment. Right? It criminalizes providing things like medical care to certain groups. It criminalizes providing education or legal support to certain groups that are designated "foreign terrorist organizations." And frankly, this is the idea that underpins material support for terrorism charges is offensive to many people because it does feel very much incompatible with constitutional norms

• 2:59:38Speaker 13

  under the First Amendment. It's an important thing to be aware of. But it would be very surprising to me if the government were able to successfully make broad claims connecting quote, "antifa" to foreign terrorist organizations.

• 2:59:54Speaker 12

  I was, when you were saying that, that had me thinking a little bit about the Holy Land Five case. I was trying to remember that example. I guess, like, to belabor this, can we talk about the distinction between domestic terrorist organization, which is a classification that doesn't exist, versus the charge of committing terrorism? Because people get terrorism enhancements, at least, like Marius Mason, the one example that comes to my mind, right, who was a member of cells that was associated with the Earth Liberation Front. Like, so that, that person got over two decades in prison, based on, like, being convicted of crimes that existed and then getting enhancements-

• 3:00:37Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 3:00:37Speaker 12

  -based on the definition that those were terrorists, amplifying the amount of time, right?

• 3:00:42Speaker 13

  The difference is, the difference between criminalizing conduct, or defining conduct as being terroristic, and criminalizing a group. The First Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression. And that means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations, and expression, we cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides our conduct, our actions. And so, there can be terrorist offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct that you are convicted of. If you

• 3:01:27Speaker 13

  engage in certain illegal acts, and a judge determines that those acts were motivated by desire to do terrorism, then the penalty for engaging in those acts can be enhanced. But you cannot designate a group, a belief, or an expression as being a crime in itself, unless there is conduct associated with it. Because we don't criminalize people's identities. I mean, we do criminalize people's identities, but it's-

• 3:02:03Speaker 12

  But we don't say it out loud.

• 3:02:04Speaker 13

  -supposed to be impermissible to prosecute people for having those identities.

• 3:02:09Speaker 12

  I guess I have note, as I understand, the terrorism enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Louis G. Mangione case have been dropped, is a thing that I heard.

• 3:02:19Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 3:02:20Speaker 12

  Which, I mean, at the same time, this is referenced in one of those documents that came out from the White House as being a terroristic act.

• 3:02:28Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 3:02:29Speaker 12

  So what do the courts know? Okay, thank you for making that distinction more clear. All right, so how might those of us on the left, or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive of the state's view of us? How do we rally support for our identities and positions? What are some good practices, understanding, like, having had this conversation, the terrain on which we're operating?

• 3:02:54Speaker 13

  Absolutely. So I guess what I would say about best practices is understand whether you are at risk. Even if you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing that the system works and that this particular administration is like an aberration, I would say, look, this administration is preoccupied with the funding streams for very mainstream liberal causes. And the fact that it's sort of lumping everything under the banner of Antifa, you know, is probably a big surprise for some of these groups like, you know, Suburban White Moms Against Guns or whatever. But they are very focused on things like wire fraud and money laundering, and stripping

• 3:03:38Speaker 13

  nonprofits of their tax status, if there's even a whisper of the possibility that those nonprofits are pursuing goals that are in any way antagonistic to state interests. So if you are in a group that has a bank account or raises money, the best practices here haven't changed. Keep very precise track of your funds. If you raise money, use it for the thing you said you were going to use it for. Have an accountant, you know, be very, very careful about your money. And again, the best practices for the rest of us also haven't changed. This is political discourse that reaffirms what we already know about targeted surveillance.

• 3:04:19Speaker 13

  And we have for a long time known how to deal with this. If you are approached by law enforcement, remember that the Fifth Amendment protects your right not to speak to them. You have no obligation to speak to law enforcement. It is a crime to lie to federal agents, and that means that it is safest not to say anything besides, I'm represented by counsel, please leave your name and number, and my lawyer will call you. There is truly never a compelling reason to speak to federal agents before consulting with an attorney. The NLG Anti-Repression Hotline can be reached at 212-679-2811.

• 3:05:00Speaker 13

  You can call to have a free, privileged conversation about your rights, risks, and responsibilities, and to be connected with appropriate legal resources in your area. And at the end of the day, we keep ourselves safe by refusing to submit to this fear, refusing to comply in advance, refusing to second guess whether we actually have rights. And more importantly, we persist by being confident in the fact that no matter what, our communities are going to rally around and care for each other.

• 3:05:30Speaker 12

  I think that would be a great place to tie up. Thank you so much for having this conversation and for the insights that you've shared and for the work that you do, Mo.

• 3:05:38Speaker 13

  You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure.

• 3:05:54Speaker 14

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• 3:07:34Speaker 15

  Happy Groctober, everybody.

• 3:07:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, shut the fuck up. We can't.

• 3:07:38Speaker 15

  This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today we're joined by Mia Wong, James Stoudt and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of September 21st to October 1st.

• 3:07:55Robert Evans?

  And what a week it was.

• 3:07:56Speaker 15

  Yeah, it does not feel like it should be October, but who cares? I guess the government's shut down right now. So all of the dozens of anarchists around the country are rejoicing.

• 3:08:07Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 3:08:07Speaker 15

  As the Senate has failed to pass a short term funding bill.

• 3:08:11Robert Evans?

  That's right, everyone. We did it. We defeated the state using the power of the state.

• 3:08:16Speaker 15

  The state.

• 3:08:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:18Speaker 15

  Many such cases. As the government shut down, Trump is threatening mass layoffs and Republicans are framing this whole shutdown as being caused by Democrats who are trying to defend. Health care for quote unquote illegals, which isn't real. Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care. That's not even what the Democrats are fighting for. Would be cool if they were. Would be cool if you're in this country, you could just get health care. That sounds nice. Wouldn't that be a cool, almost utopian place to live? But that's not what's happening. And the right's confronted with this, but they just do not care. Here's Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, on CNN, having a little debate about this.

• 3:08:57Speaker 16

  If that counterproposal was enacted, is illegal aliens would be paid for. American taxpayers, hard earned dollars, would be paying for benefits for illegal aliens again. We're not doing that.

• 3:09:07Speaker 00

  But it's against federal law for people who are here illegally to get health care.

• 3:09:10Speaker 16

  Yes, and that's why our reforms are so important to enforce all that. What the important thing to remember is what's happening tonight.

• 3:09:15Speaker 00

  I didn't see that the Democratic proposal, that people who are here illegally should get health care.

• 3:09:18Speaker 16

  No, because they don't have the level of specification that we had in our bill. It will unwind that, and all those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed. We can't afford to do that.

• 3:09:26Speaker 00

  But you see my point, that there's nuance in the argument that you're making, right?

• 3:09:28Speaker 16

  No, that is a red herring in this debate.

• 3:09:31Speaker 15

  So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is they're trying to extend the current, currently enacted, federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people able to access health care. And Democrats are also trying to reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid, which happened under the one big, beautiful bill earlier this year. That is what they are actually fighting for. The White House is retruthing and retweeting proposals from the Democrats that include health care for aliens, but that's legal aliens. That's like legal documented residents. And they're framing this as health care for quote unquote illegals.

• 3:10:13Speaker 08

  It's a bad faith representation, as it always is. Like, people can go all the way back to the episode that I made with Rob and Sophie last year about what Trump might do to learn more about the public charge rule and how that pertains to people who are not US citizens. I don't think we really have the time, nor is there the place, to go over that here. But there is not, and there has never been a massive federal free health care plan for undocumented people. In fact, people who are undocumented... Are not going to see the doctor right now because of the persistent and untrue rumor that ICE are taking people from hospitals. That is not something I'm aware of ever happening. ICE do take people who are already in their custody to hospitals and they will wait for those people

• 3:10:58Speaker 08

  while those people are treated. That is not the same as entering the hospital and grabbing people based on their immigration status. And I'm aware of several cases where people whose life was genuinely in danger were afraid to go and seek medical attention because they were afraid that they would be targeted for their immigration status.

• 3:11:16Speaker 15

  So we'll see how long this government shutdown lasts. The last one started in 2018, lasted 35 days. If this shutdown's still happening next week, I'm sure we will include some details about government services being affected, but this could resolve in a few days, a few hours, or even a few weeks. We do not know. But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country. There still is a ray of hope, and that ray of hope is named Jimmy Kimmel, who is thankfully back on the air. I know we've all been watching. We've all been watching this, certainly. And next star and Sinclair have ceased preempting his show. That's back on air across the country. Free speech is hashtag so back in America. Prover, do you want to talk about the Disney Plus boycott?

• 3:11:59Robert Evans?

  Yes. So we've gotten some data finally on the damage done to Disney as a result of the boycott after they fired Monsieur Kimmel.

• 3:12:07Speaker 15

  Suspended, suspended Monsieur Kimmel.

• 3:12:10Robert Evans?

  Suspended, suspended. They were definitely going to fire.

• 3:12:13Speaker 15

  They wanted to fire his ass.

• 3:12:14Robert Evans?

  They definitely wanted to fire him. And, you know, there was a lot of posting online about.

• 3:12:19Speaker 15

  There's a lot of posting online.

• 3:12:21Robert Evans?

  A lot of posting about people cancelling their accounts and people being like, wow. And it's, I always, it's always very frustrating to me because like people get very excited and it's impossible to tell at the moment, is this actually anything, right? Yes, 16,000 people shared this thing about how the website for Disney was down. But that doesn't mean anything other than like someone saw the website down and a bunch of people shared and posted it. So it was very difficult to tell, like, is there actually any follow through on this? Disney's bottom line being hurt. And thankfully, I'm very happy to say that it does look like Disney suffered a substantial financial setback as a result of the boycott campaign.

• 3:13:01Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 3:13:01Robert Evans?

  Something like 1.7 million paid subscribers canceled. And this was immediately before Disney was looking to announce a price increase. So like this is, this is like a a serious, I'm not surprised they reversed course. This is like damaging to them. We're not talking about the amount of money that a company like Disney would just ignore.

• 3:13:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think the most important thing here for all of us, and this is something I talked about, we did an episode about this. This is actually before Kimball being reinstated by Sinclair, but one of the really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government.

• 3:13:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:36Speaker 06

  They are hideously unpopular. All of the, all of their sort of legitimization stuff. All of the, the sort of media complicity they've bought has bought them about a 4% approval rating bump from where they were this time of the administration, the first time. So he's had about a 41% approval rating. Everything that he's doing is hideously underwater. Like his most popular thing is his immigration policy, which is horrible, but it's the end like 42%. Everyone hates these people.

• 3:14:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:02Speaker 06

  You know, and it's, it's very easy because of their control of the media sphere to believe that they have this sort of total hegemonic power over everyone in the US until the exact moment where it gets challenged. And then everyone's like, wait, hold on. No, it turns out most of the country hates this, does not want Jimmy Kimmel axed from Disney.

• 3:14:21Speaker 15

  Comrade Kimmel has joined the fight.

• 3:14:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are more of us than there are of them, and there always have been.

• 3:14:27Speaker 15

  And by more of us, Mia is referring to herself and Jimmy Kimmel as a coherent political class, just for the record there.

• 3:14:32Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 3:14:33Robert Evans?

  The only two members of a coherent political class.

• 3:14:36Speaker 08

  Me, me, and Kinnon is in.

• 3:14:38Robert Evans?

  But that's good news, just overall.

• 3:14:40Speaker 15

  Fourth estate, which holds me up.

• 3:14:42Speaker 08

  The third way.

• 3:14:43Speaker 15

  And Jimmy Kimmel.

• 3:14:45Robert Evans?

  And that's it.

• 3:14:45Speaker 15

  This is the worst day of my life.

• 3:14:46Robert Evans?

  The entirety of the fourth estate. But I don't know, there's a little bit of good news for you. A bunch of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti-first amendment, anti-democratic.

• 3:14:55Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 3:14:56Robert Evans?

  Massive overreach of the state, thought crime nonsense.

• 3:15:00Robert Evans?

  And the company suffered such dramatic, within like, literally in the space of a week, that's 330 million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost. That, even Disney can't ignore that kind of money.

• 3:15:12Speaker 15

  Oh, but like, regular people. Yeah, yeah, like, it's people who subscribe to Disney Plus. An army of ordinary liberals, the actual, like, silent majority in this country, said, "No, Disney."

• 3:15:23Robert Evans?

  We're like, "Well, that's gross and scary. I'm not paying Disney anymore."

• 3:15:26Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 3:15:26Robert Evans?

  And it's good that they did that.

• 3:15:28Speaker 15

  Currently, the right's trying to manufacture a counter boycott against Netflix for having children's shows with non-binary characters, mostly using clips from children's shows that are like, two or three years old. Clips that Libs of Talk Talk has already posted years ago, now, Trya Rycheck and others are recirculating these clips to be like, "Look at, look at how Netflix has gone too far, is pushing woke nonsense down the throats of your children by using, like, ancient clips from, like, the Jurassic Park TV show." Like, "Okay, guys, good luck with that. Have fun."

• 3:15:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:00Speaker 15

  In other news, the Department of War. So, this actually happened last month. On September 5th, Trump signed an executive order approving the name "The Department of War" as a secondary title for the Department of Defense to use in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch, while the administration also works on changing the name officially through Congress. Peg Seth nearly immediately switched all of his accounts and his office nameplate to read "Secretary of War." Yeah, you know he pushed hard for this one.

• 3:16:38Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:16:39Speaker 15

  Defense.gov now redirects to War.gov, and they're just referring to this in all public appearances as "The War Department," something that we've talked about on the show before, of them wanting to do, and they're going to continue to, to push this and using this kind of war framing for domestic operations. Yeah. Not just international deployments.

• 3:17:01Speaker 08

  This was its historical name, right? Like way, way before it was a DOD.

• 3:17:05Speaker 15

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:06Speaker 08

  It was just to be clear for people. That doesn't mean that it's like a good reason to change it back.

• 3:17:12Speaker 15

  Trump truthed last week. Quote, "At the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war ravaged Portland and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists. I'm also authorizing full force if necessary. Thank you for your attention in this matter." War ravaged Portland. How's it, how's it hanging out there for our Portland correspondents?

• 3:17:43Robert Evans?

  It's fine. It's kind of rainy. I had a nice tapas dinner on Sunday. It was pretty good. The crows are really nice.

• 3:17:50Speaker 15

  Does someone want to mention like the nature of the anti ICE protests happening in like one square block in like the South Waterfront of downtown Portland?

• 3:17:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's in the South Waterfront. McAdam is what people here call it, the neighborhood where the ICE auxiliary facility is. And there have been protests off and on pretty much since Trump took office. Usually on like a good night, you get maybe 150, 200 people. There were some nights kind of around where things blew up in LA that there were more like 500 or 600 people out for a couple of days. There really hasn't been any of the like what we were seeing in 2020 in terms of like the mass, mass gatherings. And, and you know, there has not really been much in the way of like people getting arrested or generally getting arrested for crossing a line that separates federal property from like state property, so to speak, and like step over it and then a bunch of guys run out and grab them. Right?

• 3:18:42Robert Evans?

  That's, that's mostly what the arrests are for. A lot of people have had charges dropped. I mean, people get fucked up charges when they get charged, but a lot of them are not really sticking because they're not very strong. Like, because there's just not much going on, right?

• 3:18:56Speaker 15

  Yeah, we'll talk more about why Trump thinks there's this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland. But, but yeah, so far the protests have been relatively mild.

• 3:19:06Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 3:19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, the vibe is very much like the classic Portland thing of people with like holding donuts on fishing lines out in front of the cops.

• 3:19:13Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 3:19:13Speaker 06

  It's like that, not like Molotovs.

• 3:19:16Robert Evans?

  The response has been crazy. Like, there's a video going around that's a bunch of federal agents, I think they're FPS, rolling in up from a van from outside of the ICE facility and arresting somebody who, again, probably crossed a line or threw something. Generally is why people have been getting arrested. So that the response has been nonsense. That video is from recently, and I'm seeing it attributed to Trump's declaration of war. But like, I saw stuff like that three months ago, four months ago.

• 3:19:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:19:42Robert Evans?

  Like, it's been happening every day. Like, they do roll up in their vans when they because they periodically throughout the day will have feds come in to go grab a couple of people. And that this is a thing they've been doing. So they've been, so far at least, I have not seen either an escalation on the ground, really, in terms of like what protests, what the protests are doing and the numbers of protesters since Trump's declaration. And I also really haven't seen an escalation in what's being deployed on the ground.

• 3:20:09Speaker 06

  We have not seen the Oregon National Guard presence that is being promised.

• 3:20:13Robert Evans?

  No.

• 3:20:13Speaker 06

  This has just been DHS officers.

• 3:20:17Robert Evans?

  I can confirm, just based on some, some information that's come my way, that there do seem to be an increased number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their transponders off.

• 3:20:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:27Robert Evans?

  There's a couple of reasons, reasons they can do that. Some of them is for if they are transporting, like, high-value quote-unquote deportees, right? People who are being deported for some sort of serious crime.

• 3:20:40Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 3:20:40Robert Evans?

  Uh, some of it is if they are, feel like they are under threat and are doing, like, emergency personnel transfers.

• 3:20:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:46Robert Evans?

  They're not generally supposed to fly without their transponders, although, again, you can't really trust anything to work the way it's supposed to work. But there is some evidence that they have been ramping up, and they have been flying more MQ-9s over the city, Reaper drones, um, for surveillance purposes. So, that, I can say, there does seem to have been a degree of escalation. But in terms of, we're not seeing troops marching through the city yet, and I honestly can't, it doesn't seem to me, as of the moment that we're recording this, that there has been an escalation in the level of force used on the ground. Right?

• 3:21:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:21:16Robert Evans?

  Now, that said, the level of force used on the ground before Trump declared his war on Portland or whatever was still pretty extreme. That has continued. I just, it doesn't seem like what's happening right now is a massive increase over where we were two weeks ago.

• 3:21:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:21:30Robert Evans?

  You know, that's all I'm saying.

• 3:21:31Speaker 06

  And I think the place where that has happened is Chicago, and we will get to that later.

• 3:21:35Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 3:21:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:21:36Speaker 15

  But Trump has continued to talk about deploying quote unquote troops to US cities, including at a meeting of top brass on Tuesday, September 30th, where Pete Hegseth basically ranted to top generals and admirals about no more wokeness in the military. But Trump also spoke, telling top military officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal-run cities, calling it a, quote, "war from within." Let's play the clip.

• 3:22:08Speaker 17

  But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out. It'll be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war, too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in.

• 3:22:34Speaker 08

  The two separate issues that he conflated, right, protests in cities and people crossing this, the border.

• 3:22:42Speaker 15

  Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been

• 3:22:44Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 3:22:44Speaker 15

  talking about this for a while. I mean, same thing with like DC, right? Combining this like crime issue with undocumented immigration and also with protests against ICE operations targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind of bundled together into this, into this "war from within."

• 3:23:01Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, the immigration issue, right, is one that gives him a much broader leeway in the powers constitutionally available to him as the executive than policing with the military, which is on the face of a thing that shouldn't happen in the United States. It makes sense from a tactical perspective for them to conflate those two things together, I will say, even if it's not particularly real.

• 3:23:24Speaker 15

  During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders, quote, "Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room." Talking to generals. Because it's the enemy from within and we will have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved, unquote. So they're directly addressing admirals and generals about them having to help form a quick reaction force to quell civil disturbance, which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling it, again, the enemy from within, a line that Trump used a lot during the tail

• 3:24:08Speaker 15

  end of his presidential campaign in 2024.

• 3:24:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Which is just, it's, every single element of it is just fascist.

• 3:24:15Speaker 15

  I mean, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty blanket authoritarian stuff. Like, there's no, like, sugarcoating it here.

• 3:24:18Speaker 06

  No, yeah. Yeah.

• 3:24:19Speaker 15

  They don't need to, like, use coded phrases, right? They, they just say this stuff.

• 3:24:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, they're just, yeah, they're just, this is, this is just fascism. Like, they're just trying to do it. Yeah, they're just saying the thing.

• 3:24:28Speaker 15

  In the meeting, he explicitly labeled these kind of dangerous cities as a training ground for our military National Guard.

• 3:24:36Speaker 17

  But I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission. It's really a very important mission. And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we're going into Chicago very soon. That's a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor, stupid.

• 3:24:58Speaker 06

  And I, I think it's worth noting, both the mayor of Chicago and the governor Pritzker have been very unhappy about this. Like, as much as Pritzker has kind of not been doing anything about, like, CPD aiding ICE in raids, he is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National Guard troops in. So if they're very serious about following this through, we're going to see some kind of large-scale confrontation.

• 3:25:24Speaker 15

  Yep.

• 3:25:25Speaker 06

  And Pritzker is not the kind of, like, knock-kneed Gavin Newsom-type governor. Yeah, he's not Gavin Newsom. He's not simply just going to let Trump do this. And, yeah, and that's going to be a major source of confrontation, assuming this, assuming this specific, like, we're going to send the National Guard in to Chicago stuff, like, happens soon.

• 3:25:48Speaker 15

  Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotek, governor of Oregon, about deploying Oregon National Guard and her pushing back against that, but ostensibly acquiescing in some way because there's been an announcement from the Oregon National Guard that they will be deploying and people in Oregon probably aren't going to be happy about it. They won't quote, "understand the mission." But during this meeting, Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor.

• 3:26:13Speaker 17

  Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor. "Sir, please don't come in. We don't need you." I said, "Well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looks like World War II. Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding." "Sir, we have it under control." I said, "You don't have it under control, governor, but I'll check it and I'll call you back." I called her back. I said, "You, you, this place is a nightmare. Probably, it's certainly not the biggest, but it's one of the worst. It's brutal. They go after our ICE people, who are great patriots and tough job too, but they love it. They love it because they're cleaning up our country."

• 3:26:58Speaker 08

  They love it because there's a $50,000 signup bonus.

• 3:27:01Speaker 15

  Well, unless they're playing false tapes. So the tapes aren't necessarily false, but if you're watching Fox News 24/7, what Fox News is doing is they're playing a lot of clips, not from the year of our Lord 2025, but in fact, from 2020, when Trump's last federal invasion of Portland happened, where he deployed BORTAC, which looked much more like a war scene. Do you know why? Because of the massive amounts of chemical munitions that BORTAC, like, caked downtown Portland in, which made it look very similar to a war scene. So yeah, that, those are the clips that are playing nonstop on TV. I've been watching Fox News clips. They're just playing clips of Portland 2020

• 3:27:45Speaker 15

  to make this look like a different situation than what the current on-the-ground situation is, which may have some intense moments, but not nearly the intensity of five years ago, which again, was stoked by Trump's own military police force, which was deployed to the city. So yeah.

• 3:28:02Robert Evans?

  There's some information that Trump got corrected internally. I don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything. But yeah, six-year-old footage, five-year-old footage being used to justify military deployments. It's about what you'd expect, really.

• 3:28:16Speaker 15

  Literally yesterday, I saw footage circulating on X, the everything app, of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into a street.

• 3:28:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I remember that Molotov.

• 3:28:25Speaker 15

  And I'm like, I remember that Molotov.

• 3:28:28Robert Evans?

  I know that Molotov getting thrown half a decade ago.

• 3:28:32Speaker 15

  It only hit another protester whose feet got very badly burned.

• 3:28:35Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 3:28:36Speaker 15

  And that's the, that's the type of footage circulating that makes it look like, you know, once again, Portland's burning down. Portland's always burning down. Using like one or two select clips from, yeah, half a decade ago.

• 3:28:46Robert Evans?

  And again, no buildings actually burnt down.

• 3:28:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, they've created a reality around what happened in Portland in 2020 that, that you will never change with facts or evidence, right? Like to people who watch Fox News, Portland was burned to the ground in, in 2020.

• 3:29:02Robert Evans?

  And again, even on the worst nights in Portland, we could go three blocks and get food from a food cart.

• 3:29:07Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:29:07Speaker 15

  We got a lot of great Chinese food that summer.

• 3:29:09Robert Evans?

  We got great Chinese food, shawarma, you know?

• 3:29:12Speaker 08

  Yep. In LA, when the city was, uh, whatever, under siege, I went to Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty, pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings at 2 AM on a Wednesday scene.

• 3:29:21Robert Evans?

  That's a war zone. That's a war zone.

• 3:29:23Speaker 08

  I had my plane carrier on. I was, I was ready to go.

• 3:29:27Speaker 15

  Here's some ads. Well, we'll be back to talk about Chicago.

• 3:29:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:29:30Speaker 15

  But, uh, enjoy these, uh, possibly Buffalo Wild Wings sponsored ads.

• 3:29:35Speaker 08

  I doubt it. No vegan food.

• 3:29:48Robert Evans?

  All right, we are back.

• 3:29:51Speaker 08

  Sweet, and it's good to be back. I want to talk very briefly about, uh, Pete Hegseth, Sec War, as he is calling himself now, right? And the little speech he gave.

• 3:30:00Robert Evans?

  Pete Hegseth.

• 3:30:02Speaker 08

  He's, uh, he's, he's working on his, uh, his physical fitness for sure. His bod there. He, uh, put a big emphasis on, uh, on physical fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit.

• 3:30:13Robert Evans?

  Male standards.

• 3:30:15Speaker 08

  Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the various role of their, uh, combat roles that they, if they want to do that, right? So that would mean, you know, the army physical fitness test, right? Whatever the, the male standard quote unquote was, would be everyone's standard. I don't want to go deep into Hegseth's career. That would be, that would be another episode, possibly of, of another show. But I do want to talk about the stuff. Did you notice he said no more? He listed a number of generals, but one of them was Milley, right? He said no more Millies, uh, Chiarrelli, and I forget who the other one was. But I thought that was interesting, given what we saw Trump say about QRF, right? Milley had a long career in the military, right? He, he saw plenty of combat and all that stuff. But, uh, I think he's most well known to most people for

• 3:30:57Speaker 08

  his cooling effect on the use of the US military against protesters in 2020, I'll say. I think that is what that was referring to, right? That Hegseth was talking about removing that kind of person from command.

• 3:31:12Robert Evans?

  And, and Milley also said no to Trump when he wanted to deploy for, and he was also working behind the scenes. He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to have a plan if he tries to use the nukes after the election.

• 3:31:25Speaker 08

  Yeah. Milley was doing everything he could to mitigate what he saw as a massive

• 3:31:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:31Speaker 08

  danger of, uh, of Trump responding in a completely disproportionate way.

• 3:31:35Robert Evans?

  A legitimate national security danger. Yeah.

• 3:31:37Speaker 08

  Yes. Yeah. Like, like, yeah, someone who's, whose job is protecting the United States, like that's a reasonable concern, was a reasonable concern at that time. Obviously, the Trump administration does not want people like that in command anymore. And that was something that Hegseth spoke about at length. The rest of his speech focused on shit like fitness standards, shit like grooming, visible tattoos, a bunch of stuff that you would expect from a mid-career infantry officer who hasn't had a particularly distinguished career, right? Like that's the shit that mid-career infantry officers do.

• 3:32:12Robert Evans?

  I think you mean warfighters, James, which is Hegseth's preferred term for soldiers.

• 3:32:17Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 3:32:18Robert Evans?

  Fuck me.

• 3:32:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, because it's gender neutral.

• 3:32:22Robert Evans?

  Start that. They've been doing that for a while, but.

• 3:32:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's on the M R Es. It's been on the M R Es for a while. But yes, Hegseth does like the phrase warfighters. Yeah, his, his stuff was, like I said, not something you would expect from someone who I think he was at oh, four in the National Guard, right? I don't think any of that is particularly new. He issued a number of directives. One thing I did want to talk about was this change in grooming standards. So the War Department has issued a new directive on shaving profiles. What this does in practice, as we can see from their announcement, which features prominently a black soldier shaving, is it takes away long-term shaving

• 3:33:06Speaker 08

  profiles for soldiers with medical conditions such as pseudophilitis or eczema, or other soldiers who who experience skin irritation by shaving, right? Previously, those soldiers may have had a, like a waiver, which they could show to their officers, if their officer said, hey, soldier, why haven't you shaved? Soldier, sailor, airman, Space Force Guardian, whatever, right? Why haven't you shaved? They could say, well, I'm on the shaving profile because of this condition that I have. Now you will only have a year, and then you will have to somehow rectify that condition. They talk about treatments a little bit in this announcement, which you can read if you want. I'm not going to read them out for you, but

• 3:33:48Speaker 08

  this will very clearly target black service people the most, and I don't think that's a coincidence. And as we see from the from the picture of the black soldier shaving in the, in the release that they sent out there. This is happening at the same time as the rest of the stuff, right? And at the same time as we've seen trans folks removed from the military, as Hegseth seems to be going pretty hard on removing women from combat roles. He's previously been more outright in that this time he's in his speech, he was talking about how women, if they could meet the same standards as men, would be welcome in combat roles, but they they wouldn't quote unquote lower the standards.

• 3:34:28Speaker 08

  The whole thing was pretty remarkable to see Hegseth lecturing, you know, people who have spent collectively maybe hundreds of years in combat.

• 3:34:36Speaker 15

  Really, people who've spent decades losing wars.

• 3:34:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:34:41Speaker 15

  Decades of cumulative time.

• 3:34:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, centuries between them, right? But explaining how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience in it than him.

• 3:34:52Speaker 15

  Yes.

• 3:34:52Speaker 08

  And basically telling them, it's not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before, right? The soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the politicians and the generals.

• 3:35:02Speaker 15

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:35:03Speaker 08

  This is nothing new.

• 3:35:04Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 3:35:04Speaker 08

  But it was still kind of remarkable to see Hegseth delivering it to the generals.

• 3:35:09Speaker 15

  And specifically, both Hegseth and Trump made statements about if the generals and admirals did not like what Trump and Hegseth were saying, they should just resign. They should just leave.

• 3:35:19Speaker 17

  I've never walked into a room so silent before. This is very, don't laugh, don't laugh, you're not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.

• 3:35:40Speaker 17

  But you just feel nice and loose, okay? Because we're all on the same team.

• 3:35:46Speaker 15

  Part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists in the upper brass of the military. Like, that's part of this process. That's why he doesn't want Millies, he doesn't want people that will deny him. He wants just a complete loyalist government, and that includes the military.

• 3:35:59Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:36:00Speaker 15

  And if that means that we're going to have a whole bunch of generals and admirals resign because of Hegseth and Trump's anti-woke ranting, then that's a desirable outcome for the administration at this point.

• 3:36:12Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:36:13Speaker 15

  Speaking of war, Chicago.

• 3:36:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the scenes that I have seen the most frequently described as war or looking like a war this week have come out of Chicago, where on Tuesday, the 30th, there was one of the most brutal raids that we've seen from the feds.

• 3:36:37Speaker 06

  Yet in any city, this took place in South Shore, which is a 90% black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where a whole bunch of immigrants who, I don't know if people remember, when Texas and a bunch of other states in the South started busing immigrants up to cities in the North, Chicago is one of the ones where that happened a lot. A lot of these people ended up in South Shore, and there was a massive raid on an apartment complex in the South Shore. Agents showed up in a combination of moving vans, sort of unmarked vans and armored vehicles. It's still unclear exactly how many people were taken. We so don't know. Estimates at the time suggested about 40. It's very unclear.

• 3:37:21Speaker 06

  What we do know about the raid was that it was absolutely brutal. A bunch of, a bunch of the initial reports thought they had been shooting, but there hadn't been shooting. What there had been was that they blew into this apartment complex with flashbang grenades.

• 3:37:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Pretty common for people to mistake those, too.

• 3:37:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and these are just, you know, these are just regular people who suddenly at 1:00 in the morning, a bunch of explosions start going off. There's a whole bunch of pictures that you can see in various articles about this, of doors torn off their hinges. The agents did a, I know this is a classic Chicago police tactic, but, you know, they just went through and just started grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it onto the ground. There were Black Hawk helicopters, like constantly circling this just random apartment complex. There was a massive FBI presence alongside Border Patrol and ICE.

• 3:38:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:14Speaker 06

  It's also worth mentioning that Independent Atlet Book Club Chicago, which is one of the very sort of prominent independent local media outlets there, obtained a picture from a neighbor who was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police Department on the scene, which they are, they are expressly forbidden, like by state law, from assisting in immigration enforcement. It is worth reading this article in order to see this quote, quote, "We did not participate in or assist with any immigration enforcement," spokesperson Maggie Heon said in a statement, followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CPD car on the scene of this raid. Yeah, this raid is a really significant escalation of force

• 3:38:56Speaker 06

  in a city that has, I mean, I was already seen ICE literally shoot someone and kill them. But. Yeah, I'm gonna quote this from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet in collaboration with Unravel Press. Veronica Castro of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at a press conference said, quote, "This looked like hundreds of masked agents knocking down doors and dragging families out in the middle of the night, holding babies that were unclothed," Castro added. So, they are dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night, holding naked babies because people haven't had time, like they're not giving people time to like even put clothes on, something you see a lot in the accounts of this. I'm gonna read some more from an account from ABC.

• 3:39:38Speaker 06

  "As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer. And I said, 'What's going on? What's going on?'" He never actually told me. "He said I was being detained," said Alicia Brooks. "Neighbors like Ebony Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flashbangs. They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there when I seen the little girl coming around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too. Had them zip-tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where is the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right there. He said, 'Fucking kids.'" So, that is what these raids are looking like now.

• 3:40:22Speaker 06

  It is again also worth noting that like, this is, this is a very significant escalation of force. They are zip-tying children to each other as they drag them from their homes at 1:00 in the morning and saying, "Fucking kids." Yeah, and this also marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away from the areas they've been targeting before, which tend to be the suburbs and the outlying areas, and into very, very majority, the majority black parts of Chicago. And we're gonna talk more about this next week with journalists who's been on the ground. Yeah, I mean, for example, a couple of hours before we recorded this episode, so there are sparse details, but there is a video that shows the feds just two hands on neck

• 3:41:06Speaker 06

  choking a black man in East Garfield Park. It's deeply unclear why this is happening, but they are just doing this now?

• 3:41:17Speaker 06

  And what we have so far, we don't know why they were doing this, but this is also one thing I think is very alarming. This is also reported by Tribe. There's a video from the scene where an agent is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is not an immigration enforcement action. The agent goes on to say they were responding to a robbery in progress. All we know about is there was a car crash, then they just started choking this guy. It's unclear exactly what's going on with this. There probably will be more details by the time this episode is going out, but the feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago. I mean, just randomly choking black people on the street and this massive hideous raid in South Shore are pretty significant escalations in places they haven't

• 3:42:02Speaker 06

  been targeting before. And it's hard to see this ending anytime soon, or there, you know, things getting any better from here, especially with the sort of, you know, as you were mentioning earlier, there hasn't been really any sign of like an intensification in federal violence in Portland, but in Chicago, there absolutely has been. And it's horrible.

• 3:42:25Speaker 08

  Yeah. So talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess, according to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS is going to use the Cultural, Environmental and Historical Protection Waiver that we reported about that came out this spring to force through wall construction in the San Diego sector. I am guessing that in part we will see this used to waive the, one of the, one of the acts that is waived is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And I'm guessing in part that this will be used to waive that, right? Because Kumeya ancestors are in these areas. And in the

• 3:43:09Speaker 08

  end, tail end of the previous Trump administration, I reported on this for Sierra, which is a magazine of the Sierra Club, Kumeya people were using ceremony. So they were participating in ceremony every day at construction sites in order to slow down the clock.

• 3:43:26Speaker 08

  And they also filed a lawsuit, right? But they they were trying to basically run out the clock on the Trump administration in 2020. They successfully, in some areas, prevented some construction, but with the waiver of Nagpre, it's hard to see how they will be able to do that. They also waive a bunch of other acts, the Eagle Protection Act, Environmental Amendment, Bird Treaties, and a bunch of other acts, right? This comes on the same week Secretary of War Pete Hegseth restored medals of honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee. If people are not familiar, this is not the episode where I do a history of things that have happened at Wounded Knee Creek. But this was the largest mass shooting in US history. This was just a slaughter.

• 3:44:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lakotas civilians were murdered by the United States military. It wasn't a battle, this was just a massacre. There were significant casualties for the US military. Most of them were caused by the US military, i.e. friendly fire and a completely disorganized slaughter of civilians. There was a standoff at Wounded Knee later in the 1970s, in which two indigenous people died, one went missing. You can read Mary Bravebird's book about that, if you want a firsthand account of that, it's a very good book. But yeah, Hegseth is doing this, I think, because Lloyd Austin had previously ordered a review of those medals. Because they weren't fighting, they were just killing people.

• 3:44:51Speaker 08

  Therefore, it makes sense, you know, to to strip these these medals of honor, and that there was very little honor in what they did. Hegseth has restored those. Very amusingly, he said this is final, like another SecDef couldn't just order a review like in four years and change it again. CBP has also issued a request for comments here in San Diego about its plans to build 7.6 miles of wall west of Tecate, as well as 1.3 miles of wall east of Tecate, more secondary barrier east of Otime Mesa, and install or maintain 51 miles of, quote, barrier system attributes, which may include fiber optic cables, lighting poles, artificial lights, power cables, surveillance cameras, access and patrol roads, and utility shelters.

• 3:45:37Speaker 08

  What this would do, I think most people who haven't spent time at a border are not aware that there are vast gaps in the border wall, right? And this would close some of those. There are still gaps east of this area that when a lot of people were entering in 2023, they were coming east of here in a more mountainous area, but this will close existing gaps in the wall around Takata, around Marin Valley. I imagine that after that, they will continue to move east. The areas where there are gaps, some of the areas where there are gaps for the reason that hard to access, some of them are would be very hard to access with construction machinery. And therefore, they'd have to spend a long time building a road before they could

• 3:46:18Speaker 08

  even begin building the wall. Reuters has conducted a review of more than 2 million court records and concluded that federal prosecution of drug cases, especially those of high profile traffickers, have dropped to the lowest level in decades.

• 3:46:35Speaker 15

  Fell for it again, a word.

• 3:46:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, normally you would see things like racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy charges, right? But these are down 24% compared to last year. Even ongoing investigations have stalled as a federal law enforcement apparatus is focusing the vast majority of its people on deporting people who have not been accused of any crime.

• 3:46:56Speaker 15

  Really, and even just like the regular FBI investigative capacity, it's been shifted

• 3:47:00Speaker 08

  Massive.

• 3:47:00Speaker 15

  To large extents towards just immigration enforcement. So they're not, they're actually just not going after as much like actual crime.

• 3:47:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think some agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive, for example, I think have the majority of their agents tasked to immigration raids right now, the FBI. One agent described what he had been tasked with as, quote, photo op bullshit, which was taking photos of their teams on and before raids for use by the ATF and the White House in in social media posts. So they do appear to have lost the support of even some federal law enforcement. Talking of federal law enforcement, we have also learned this week about an FBI operation. In the Biden administration during which Tom Homan allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash. What?

• 3:47:54Speaker 08

  You didn't hear about the Tom Homan bag of cash? No.

• 3:47:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:47:57Speaker 08

  Ah, ah, what a joy to be able to share this with you, Gareth. No, this is gonna get better. Just, just keep it, keep simmer, simmer down. It was in a bag. Simmer down. Simmer down, simmer down. So, uh, Tom Homan, for those who are not familiar, is Trump's border czar and a longtime border security official dating back to the Biden administration. Let's find out about how they got on to Tom Homan. Well, it was, you just said that there was $50,000 in cash, but for, for what? Just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Another Obama-era staffer, Julian Calderas, who agents, undercover agents had contacted as part of a separate investigation,

• 3:48:37Speaker 08

  repeatedly suggested to the agents that they may wish to bribe Homan in order to obtain government contracts. Calderas repeatedly suggested this to the undercover agents, so much so that they diverted their investigation and set up this investigation. They gave Homan the money, but waited to see what he would do in office in order to see, I guess they felt they would have a stronger case if he came back to them and said, you know, I have these five federal contracts. Which one would you like? The Trump DOJ took no further steps to investigate and has closed the investigation, according to NBC.

• 3:49:14Speaker 08

  The Trump administration is claiming this was a setup by the FBI, but of course, the investigation occurred in, in September of 24, so before the election. Again, it was not an investigation that they started on. It branched off because Calderas repeatedly suggested that they should continue to bribe, they should try and bribe Homan. The agents who, who did this operation were posing as businessmen trying to get government contracts, right? Okay. This might explain, so Homan was a big time Trump affiliate, right? Big time Trump supporter. Yeah. People were suggesting that he might be made Secretary of Homeland Security. This might be why. Uh, we will never know for sure, right?

• 3:49:55Speaker 08

  This might explain why he's been given this slightly less formal, uh, role, which I don't believe he has to pass through Congress, which is quote unquote border czar.

• 3:50:03Speaker 15

  This is like the level of normalized corruption. It's so good. Which exists in every level of this administration. Is like, remember when they just could not stop talking about Hunter Biden? It's like every, all the time. And meanwhile, you have like, like, you know, like all of like Jared Kushner's dealings with like Qatar and the Saudis, and Tom Homan getting $50,000 in cash. Yeah. From like undercover agents posing as businessmen to help obtain like government contracts. It's like an absurd, comical cartoon world.

• 3:50:36Speaker 08

  So it's Keystone Cop shit. Uh, we don't know if he's given the cash back.

• 3:50:39Speaker 15

  Oh, he, no. That cash is long gone. So much cocaine, like, I, I could either confirm or deny it was spent on cocaine. Um.

• 3:50:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, a wild instance of corruption.

• 3:50:51Speaker 15

  Oh, God.

• 3:50:53Speaker 08

  Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela. In Venezuela, it seems that Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on strikes on alleged drug smugglers. Uh, according to a Guardian piece, the strikes had been authorized by the Homeland Security Council.

• 3:51:06Speaker 15

  Sure.

• 3:51:06Speaker 08

  Uh, that's a body that Miller leaves, which has massively grown in influence since the Trump administration. It seems like most people in the administration were pretty much kept in the dark about this until very shortly before the strikes took place. They were justified under the Article II powers, which give the president authority to use force in limited self-defense engagements. Uh, but it seems like Miller is, is, uh, pardon the pun, driving the ship on this increased violence that we're seeing against Venezuela.

• 3:51:48Speaker 15

  All right, we are back for our final story this episode. We're going to talk about. The National Security Presidential Memorandum Number Seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September 25. This relates in many ways to the Antifa Domestic Terrorism Executive Order from last week, but this memo is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes that will affect law enforcement investigations. So let's go over the four sections of this very, very long memo. I've tried to condense it down as much as possible,

• 3:52:33Speaker 15

  but there is some good information in here to know. Section one asserts that there's been an increase in political violence in recent years with assassinations and, quote unquote, riots in Los Angeles and Portland, which have resulted in a more than 1,000% increase in attacks against ICE officers since Trump's inauguration 2.0. The memo states that riots and violence aren't organic events or isolated incidents, but in fact, quote, "a culmination of a sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society," unquote.

• 3:53:13Speaker 08

  We've spoken about the statistic about attacks on ICE officers before and how that's very misleading.

• 3:53:18Speaker 15

  Yeah, I mean, an ICE officer is attacked when an ICE officer's fist encounters the face of a child. That's, that's-

• 3:53:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, a Latino grandmother.

• 3:53:29Speaker 15

  Yes.

• 3:53:30Speaker 08

  Latina grandmother in that case.

• 3:53:32Speaker 15

  Well, and a lot of this talking about, you know, riots as not organized events or isolated incidents. What they describe here is this like culmination of this sophisticated campaign. This is just describing like the process of like what protesting is, right? Trying to direct or change policy outcomes, which comes up a lot in these like domestic terrorism laws, which when over applied to just nonviolent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard First Amendment activity.

• 3:53:58Speaker 08

  It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment, right? Like the right to assemble, the right, well, several of them actually. The right to assemble, the right to speak, the right to petition the government, like- These are fundamental.

• 3:54:08Speaker 15

  The right to Twitch stream at a riot as a free member of the press. Yeah, definitely.

• 3:54:13Speaker 08

  That's not a right that I choose to exercise, but I guess it is one that exists. But you and I have, you were in Portland, I was in Los Angeles, like the idea that these cities were fundamentally like damaged by these protests is just not true.

• 3:54:25Speaker 15

  Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots. They're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens. This memo describes how these, you know, organized campaigns start by, quote, "isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action," unquote, claiming that this process happens across, quote, "anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized doxing with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault targets," unquote.

• 3:55:00Speaker 08

  I mean, this is what the right has done to like especially migrants and trans people, right, for a very long time. Anonymous chat forums, and do they mean Reddit?

• 3:55:14Speaker 15

  Reddit, Telegram, maybe.

• 3:55:16Speaker 08

  Yeah. I know, I know that some subreddits have been closed since the issuing of this memorandum, which I'm wondering if it is related.

• 3:55:28Speaker 15

  Not explicitly, but like, I think this memo would be in this section, like referring to things akin to Ice Watch.

• 3:55:34Speaker 08

  Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 3:55:36Speaker 15

  As well as, you know, standard, like, you know, anti fascist action against, like, legitimate neo Nazis, which

• 3:55:42Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm. Yep.

• 3:55:43Speaker 15

  The right is not against doxing as a practice, as we have seen the past few weeks with the state-sponsored, organized doxing harassment campaigns against people for their comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.

• 3:55:55Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 3:55:56Speaker 15

  The memo goes on to list a collection of, quote, "common recurrent motivations and indica," or indicators,

• 3:56:02Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:56:02Speaker 15

  "that unite this pattern of violence and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism. These movements portray foundational American principles, support for law enforcement and border control, as fascist to justify and encourage acts of a violent revolution. Common threats animating this violent conduct include..." Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality. So insofar as this memo has been reported, it's mostly been on this specific section here.

• 3:56:45Speaker 15

  Listing the indicators that could be driving terroristic acts under the umbrella of anti-fascism, including all of these beliefs that people are allowed to hold in the United States due to the rights granted to us in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

• 3:57:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, the hypocrisy is the point, and it's sometimes not worth, or it's not the point, but it's not particularly, you know, it doesn't change anything by pointing it out. But I will just point out that like the idea that border control is a foundational American principle is not true. It was not until the Chinese Exclusion Act that the United States began to exclude anyone from coming here, and that was in the 19th century. History understanders will have noticed that the United States began at some point before the 19th century.

• 3:57:30Speaker 15

  One thing I will say regarding like this section, some reporting around this memo is framing things like, you know, anti-capitalism or anti-Christianity is now that is going to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist. That is not the explicit way is written about in this memo. These are indicators, which if some investigator sees on a Twitter account or a Blue Sky account, could then cause them to investigate further into this person or group. But it's not like just expressing these things will itself deem you a terrorist and be putting you in jail. And this does rely on action. Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying to prevent crime before it happens. I think this would be more in the way of how the FBI

• 3:58:15Speaker 15

  tries to set up like sting operations or catch people who are planning a violent act before they actually do it. As we've even seen the past few weeks, with people being arrested for planning retaliation attacks following the death of Charlie Kirk. This has happened.

• 3:58:32Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:58:32Speaker 15

  Now, the memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to, quote, "investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts," unquote. So that is the the pre-crime aspect of this order, which they could use some of these beliefs, like extremism on migration, or race, or gender, anti-Americanism, as justification to start investigating groups, which then arrests could follow prior to imminent violent act as deemed by central law enforcement.

• 3:59:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, in theory, the role of the federal law enforcement has always been to investigate people who were planning violent or terroristic acts. The difference here is that this is being specifically framed around a certain group, and this probably will lead to more attempts by them, or surveillance on people within those groups, right?

• 3:59:37Speaker 15

  No, this is very worrying in terms of like surveillance, suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity, first amendment protest activity, non-government organizations that support progressive causes or values. Like, that's the real, like, concern here.

• 3:59:56Speaker 08

  It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example, a number of grand juries did not return indictments of people who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them for, right? This is unusual. Most federal prosecutions do result ultimately in a guilty plea, right? Because they bring very strong cases when they bring them. But it's worth noting that the, specifically like the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles has not stuck the landing on all of its attempts to indict people for things that they did during that time of protest in June.

• 4:00:32Speaker 15

  In terms of like implementation, the memo says, quote, "Law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society," unquote. Networks, entities, organizations, these refer to like established organizations, like actual like formed groups that have political activity.

• 4:01:01Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 4:01:02Speaker 15

  Now, section two outlines how the National Joint Terrorism Task Force will, quote unquote, "coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national strategy," and orders the local Joint Terrorism Task Force around the country to, quote, "investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation of any citizen's rights," unquote. The GDTS, Joint Terrorism Task Force, will also investigate institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations, which are, quote, "responsible for, sponsor,

• 4:01:44Speaker 15

  or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct as previously described."

• 4:01:50Speaker 08

  That's a broad net, right?

• 4:01:53Speaker 15

  There's a lot of this stuff, like the NT for Order also alluded to this, Trump's statements made in the Oval Office have alluded to this, going after funders, foreign funders, whether that's the groups like ACLU or like bail funds. They've mentioned George Soros very often.

• 4:02:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:02:09Speaker 15

  The Open Society Foundation, right?

• 4:02:10Speaker 08

  Yeah. I think the right has had a fascination with Soros for a long time, right? They've been looking for a reason to either exclude Soros from participation in US politics. And just to be like, obviously, I think most people realize this, but that that fascination is rooted deeply in antisemitism. George Soros is a Holocaust survivor, and there has been like an attempt to find reasons to exclude Soros from US political activity for some time. I think it's reasonable to see this in that trend.

• 4:02:37Speaker 15

  This sort of like big organizations, foreign organizations, is also mentioned in this memo.

• 4:02:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:02:43Speaker 15

  And saying the investigation will include NGOs and American citizens with foreign ties that could be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or, quote, "money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage in activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism," unquote. The memo states that the Attorney General shall issue guidance which ensures that domestic terrorism priorities include "politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, damage of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder." The guide shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indica common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts

• 4:03:28Speaker 15

  in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity. Unquote. This is a worrying list of things that are not domestic terrorism, that they're going to try to claim are domestic terrorism. Trespass?

• 4:03:39Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:03:40Speaker 15

  Like trespassing is now domestic terrorism? That's not a great thing for the Attorney General to be issuing guidance on.

• 4:03:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, civil disorder is a very broad and somewhat nebulous term, right?

• 4:03:53Speaker 15

  Are they gonna call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing right now domestic terrorism? No, of course not, right? These things are just taking form for explicit, like, political prosecution for the political ends of the Trump administration.

• 4:04:07Speaker 08

  I think the goal here, like, some of these, there isn't even a statute, right? Like, I'm not aware of a broad federal doxing statute, aside from, you know, certain specific instances where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address.

• 4:04:19Speaker 15

  Violent intimidation of probably, like, federal law enforcement would be one thing that they go after.

• 4:04:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, federal law enforcement, people with protective orders, that kind of thing, right? And yeah, there are probably ways of doing that, but I think a lot of this is intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing.

• 4:04:37Speaker 15

  Absolutely. The Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to "identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political activity," and shall deploy investigative tools, examine financial flows, and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams. Unquote. Again, very obsessed with this idea that there's tons of money that is funding Antifa, which if you know anyone under the Antifa umbrella, you know that they are extremely broke.

• 4:05:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, this is a...

• 4:05:04Speaker 15

  Left-wing protesters are not the most financially stable bunch. There's not... This illicit funding streams, this is a huge, a huge idea that the right has like latched on.

• 4:05:14Speaker 08

  Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the authoritarian left, actually. The idea that people can't act independently unless there is a large, well-funded actor motivating them to act. It is something that, because the authoritarian right and the authoritarian left agree on some things. And one of them is that like, people can't take the initiative to act, right? That there has to be some kind of vanguard, in the case of the authoritarian left.

• 4:05:39Speaker 15

  Sure.

• 4:05:39Speaker 08

  Nefarious funder, in the case of the authoritarian right. And so this, this lines up with the way that they understand the world.

• 4:05:46Speaker 15

  I mean, yeah, and this, I was talking specifically here in terms of like, regular people on the ground attending protests. There's like big, big groups, like, you know, often like, you know, communist aligned groups that may be receiving funding, possibly from foreign sources.

• 4:06:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for, for real.

• 4:06:02Speaker 15

  But I do not believe that is what this order is. At least this section is actually wanting to go after. That might be what they, in the end, actually end up targeting.

• 4:06:11Speaker 08

  End up sweeping up.

• 4:06:13Speaker 15

  Because it's the only thing that actually has like, you know, foreign funding. But like, you know, capital A Antifa, teenagers with like umbrellas showing up in front of an ICE building, are not receiving money from like Iran, China, or Russia, like.

• 4:06:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, as you say, it might be large, Southern Policy Law Center, the ACLU, the Open Society Foundation, Bill Gates.

• 4:06:32Speaker 15

  Network for Strong Communities.

• 4:06:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, like some of these organizations might be what they're trying to drag a net over here.

• 4:06:39Speaker 15

  Or nonprofits. The next section instructs the IRS to quote, "take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism," unquote. And calls for the IRS to refer suspect organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

• 4:07:01Speaker 08

  It, it's probably worth noting the context here that there was, this is after a 2010 congressional investigation that found out that the IRS had gone after some Tea Party groups, right? Do you remember the Tea Party, Garrett, in your old seven at that time?

• 4:07:14Speaker 15

  I, I remember, I remember the Tea Party, yeah.

• 4:07:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the, the. Feeling here Biden, if you remember Garrison also also hired a number of new IRS agents. There was a conspiracy theory that these were to to provide some kind of armed, massive armed element to the IRS that was going around in the Biden administration. I'm sure the IRS had an armed element, right? There is not a federal investigative agency that doesn't like the postal service has cops and probably a SWAT team. But there was a feeling on the right that Biden mobilized the IRS against right wing individuals. And I can see this being the the old painting. I'm swinging back in the other direction a little bit.

• 4:07:54Speaker 15

  One of the more interesting sections that I've highlighted of the memo instructs investigators to quote, question and interrogate individuals engaged in political violence or lawlessness regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship. Prior to

• 4:08:15Speaker 08

  Perfect.

• 4:08:16Speaker 15

  adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement unquote. That's directing like the interrogations of people arrested at protests like specifically go after who's funding them to be at protests. I'm sure some very fruitful information will come out of.

• 4:08:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:08:31Speaker 15

  Referring back to our discussion of like, you know, the the common motivators or indica, including things, you know, like anti capitalism, anti Americanism. And how those beliefs in and of themselves, I do not think will be sufficient for declaring someone a terrorist. And like locking them up is because later in this memo, the memo directs investigations to quote, prioritize crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson, violations of the RICO Act and major fraud against the United States unquote. So.

• 4:09:15Speaker 15

  Could the government use these indicators to then find groups to target, to stick some of these crimes onto groups or organizations? Absolutely. That's probably what they're gonna do.

• 4:09:26Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 4:09:27Speaker 15

  But these are the things to be aware of. And they're gonna try to slap these on. People who are just arrested at protests, people who work for NGOs, people who work for legal support networks, maybe migrant assistance networks.

• 4:09:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:09:43Speaker 15

  That's gonna be the target for a lot of these things. And we've seen some of these conspiracy charges in San Diego with their Antifa prosecution case. We've seen similar stuff in Atlanta with Stop Cop City, right? There is precedent for this. We've seen the state try to, to a degree of success and failure, actually push these charges forward.

• 4:10:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, the panic that those two cases created, I think, and we're still pre-trial in the Atlanta case, right?

• 4:10:14Speaker 15

  Trial's in progress.

• 4:10:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, sorry, pre, I guess, the conclusion of that trial.

• 4:10:19Speaker 15

  But the current indication is that most of these Rico charges are not going to stick.

• 4:10:23Speaker 08

  Yes, and most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego did not, right? And most of those people ended up not being convicted of all the things they were accused of. I do see the major fraud against the United States, and I think that's probably gonna use against NGOs. I do also wonder, they have spoken before about the payroll protection plan and looking at PPP fraud.

• 4:10:46Speaker 15

  Yeah, I mean, financial crimes are always really scary, right?

• 4:10:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, like a lot of nonprofits, you know, like people undoubtedly, given the scale of the PPP, people abused it. I think nonprofits would be a lot more buttoned up than almost anyone else in that regard, especially these big liberal nonprofits. But that is an area which I'm sure that the Trump IRS will be looking at.

• 4:11:13Speaker 15

  Yeah, and they might even try to slap these on people making jokes or quote unquote threats online, right? Solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

• 4:11:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. People shouldn't be saying stupid chill on social media right now.

• 4:11:24Speaker 15

  Which is absolutely like a chilling speech, right? That is bad. That is a bad thing. But you don't want to give these people extra ammunition to use against yourself right now.

• 4:11:35Speaker 08

  Fighting words are not always like First Amendment speech, right? Now, like, I'm no expert in where that starts and where that ends, but yeah, like, in terms of not doing stupid things, like, this is not a time to do stupid things on your posting website of choice.

• 4:11:53Speaker 15

  Section 2 closes by calling for investigators and federal police to, quote, "adopt strategies similar to those used to address violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle entire networks of criminal activity," unquote. So, yeah, especially with all this financial stuff, money laundering, RICO, conspiracy charges, they're basically using, or they want to use, like, tactics to take down, like, organized crime rings, just targeting their political enemies, targeting political organizations and people who attend protests. Like, that is, that is the real gist of this memo.

• 4:12:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:12:30Speaker 15

  Section 3 instructs the Attorney General to designate qualifying groups or entities under investigation as domestic terrorist organizations, per the definition of domestic terrorism in 18 U.S.C. 23315, and to submit a list of such groups to the President of the United States. And Section 4 instructs the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to designate domestic terrorism a national priority area and provide extra funding for law enforcement to, quote, "detect, prevent, and protect against threats arising from this area." That is the bulk of the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7, promising to chill speech and go after political opponents and organizations, entities and individuals

• 4:13:15Speaker 15

  and employees of organizations.

• 4:13:16Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:13:17Speaker 15

  Very, very undemocratic, very, very on its face authoritarian.

• 4:13:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:13:22Speaker 15

  You don't even need, like, allegations of political targeting, like, they're writing down how they want to do political targeting. They're bragging about it.

• 4:13:31Speaker 08

  I briefly want to raise the example of the flag burning, right? So Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier this year. I can't quite remember when. Subsequently, someone called Jan Carey of North Carolina was arrested after they burned a flag, an American flag, just to be clear, outside the White House. I guess the flag burning executive order doesn't apply to like your, you know, like anime flag or whatever, specifically about the flag of the United States. Something which I think Johnson versus Texas is a Supreme Court case, right? But there is a considerable amount of legal precedent that that is First Amendment speech.

• 4:14:14Speaker 08

  Carey was arrested. What is being missed in the discussion is that Carey was charged with two misdemeanor crimes. One was for lighting a fire not in a designated area and receptacle. The other was for lighting a fire in a manner that threatened to cause damage to and resulted in the burning of property, real property and park resources. These are both offenses that you can be incarcerated or fined for. I want people to know that, right? Like, he was not arrested because of the executive order, although the executive order may very much influenced the climate which led to his arrest and charge with these other things, but he wasn't charged with violating the executive order because that is not how it works.

• 4:14:55Speaker 15

  They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums. What they can do is direct how the law will be enforced or policy guidelines, right? And that's what this is affecting right now. All of these branches, like the DHS, Justice Department, federal police, are going to be following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo to then try to enforce the laws that we have, some of which they will probably find ways to do it. And sometimes they won't.

• 4:15:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing a very large range of things and someone will find some way in there to criminalize someone for something that might seem on the face of it to be not nefarious. But that doesn't mean that we have executive legislative fusion. We don't write ourselves too branch to the government and that is important to remember too.

• 4:15:46Speaker 15

  No, no laws have been changed criminalizing anti-Americanism, right?

• 4:15:51Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:15:52Speaker 15

  That is, that is an important thing to keep in mind. That does not mean that this order is not going to chill speech, suppress free speech, or be used to criminally target people.

• 4:16:01Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:16:02Speaker 15

  Criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for years and years regardless of the actual like outcome, right? Even if they get off on the charges.

• 4:16:09Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 4:16:10Speaker 15

  And we want to be clear that we're not like minimizing the effects of this, but we do want to actually break down what like the threat model is specifically for like NGOs, legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, right? These are probably going to be the first targets of a lot of like the conspiracy fraud sections of this order besides, you know, protesters that get rounded up and get put into, into this like political war game that they're playing.

• 4:16:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:16:39Speaker 15

  Similar to how regular protesters in Atlanta then found themselves suddenly amidst like a three-year-long Rico domestic terrorism case.

• 4:16:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 4:16:47Speaker 15

  Despite not participating in any kind of large organized aspect of Stop Cop City. They were just regular attendees. So there'll be stuff similar to that, that, that happens throughout the next few months to years. And I think that is where we should keep our attention focused on mitigating the harms of government overreach.

• 4:17:05Speaker 08

  Yeah. So for the fundraiser this week, something slightly different. I wanted to read off this GoFundMe for the emergency circus. They are traveling south of the US border. I believe they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to hold circus acts, circus performances for kids. I have obviously, not obviously, but I've spent a decent amount of my life in refugee camps and migrant shelters and they can be pretty hard places for kids. And it's something that I think about almost every day. And so people bring Enjoy to those children is something that I think is wonderful and very important. Like people get the impression that like legal funds are important and then kids having a laugh is not important. But like children have a right to be children and that's taken away from them by the immigration system.

• 4:17:49Speaker 08

  And so I would like, if you supported this, the website is www.gofundb.com/f/ec-o f f-i c e. It will also be in the show notes. If you would like to email us, you can do so at our encrypted email address, which is [email protected]. Your email will only be end to end encrypted if you send it from an encrypted email address. Proton Mail is an example of an encrypted email address.

• 4:18:24Speaker 15

  Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode for next week. There was a shooting at a Mormon church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity. And then once information about the shooter became more clear, they quickly dropped the subject. So on Wednesday, I'll be doing an episode talking about this shooting and a few others and how various outlets on the right and left are only reporting on these big shootings insofar as they can turn them into political weapons against the opposition party. We reported the news.

• 4:19:01Speaker 01

  We reported the news.

• 4:19:08Robert Evans?

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

• 4:19:13Speaker 18

  It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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