It Could Happen Here Weekly 176

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Speaker 26 Cool Zone Media. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 26 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.

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Speaker 26 Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's just me, James, today, and I'm joined by Jamie, who is a librarian.

Speaker 26 And we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts on library funding and I guess years of attacks on library funding. So welcome to the show, Jamie.
Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 53 Hi, thanks for having me.

Speaker 26 Yeah, this is really great for me because I have been trying to find a librarian for a very long time to talk to us on the podcast.

Speaker 26 I understand that lots of people have been like really concerned that we cover this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which is a rough position to be in. So, thank you for coming on.

Speaker 26 I thought we'd start with, like, there was an executive order on the 14th of March. I think it was called something like

Speaker 26 further something, the federal bureaucracy, cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever. You know, I don't really care.

Speaker 26 One of the outcomes of this was, I believe, the Trump administration moving towards a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?

Speaker 53 So it depends upon how much Joj and Trump and company are going to listen to Congress, because Congress has already funded IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for this year.

Speaker 53 So that money already exists. It's already been allocated.

Speaker 53 And so in theory, they should be good for at least a year.

Speaker 53 And then next year, when the budget comes up, again, it should be up to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it.

Speaker 53 But the executive order and the commentary on it does say that they would like to dissolve it kind of as soon as possible, definitely next year.

Speaker 53 So it's really up in the air about how fast things would move, what exactly would happen, if it would be this year, if it would be next year, whether anyone's going to listen to Congress.

Speaker 26 Yeah, we will find find out I guess. So can you explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and what it does?

Speaker 53 Yeah so it's as I said the Institute of Museum and Library Services and so basically they are allocated money by Congress every year and then they hand it out to states especially them who kind of break it down into other grants.

Speaker 53 They give grants to states and libraries and institutions for things that museums and libraries do. So that includes things like on the museum side, maybe

Speaker 53 putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used to work at an institution where we had a grant that did a lot of digitization of historic documents.

Speaker 53 And on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff, especially for public libraries.

Speaker 53 end up funding things like summer reading programs, equipment, especially for internet access, you know, all the stuff related to job training and those services that libraries offer.

Speaker 53 And interlibrary loan is a big one so that people can access materials that their library doesn't hold, but it's held by other libraries.

Speaker 53 And rural libraries and tribal libraries especially really, really benefit from this. Every single state and territory in the country gets these funds.

Speaker 26 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 26 I was wondering about who funded interlibrary loan. So they're the ones who facilitate like the transporting of the books.

Speaker 53 Yeah, well, you know, depending upon your library, some libraries will fund it from their operations budget.

Speaker 53 But if, you know, especially for small, rural, or public libraries where that might be very expensive, that is one thing that these grants go to is interlibrary loans.

Speaker 26 Okay. Yeah.
So lots of very important services. And what would it mean if we didn't have that IMLS budget at all?

Speaker 26 Like what would it mean, especially for like, like you said, those kind of libraries that are financially, I guess, more marginalized and tribal libraries and rural areas and stuff?

Speaker 53 So I first want to mention that the entire budget of IMLS for 2024 was something like $266 million. We're not talking about huge sums of money in terms of the federal federal government.

Speaker 53 It comes out to about 75% per person in the country. So we're not going to be saving on our taxes if this goes away.

Speaker 53 But that money makes a really big difference. So even smaller states that maybe have a million people in it might see a couple million dollars of these grants per year.

Speaker 53 And so what that would mean is that the things that maybe not all of them, but most of the thing that these grants cover would not be there.

Speaker 53 So that means that there wouldn't be summer reading in some places. That means that they wouldn't be able to buy the hotspots that they lend out to people who don't have internet at home.

Speaker 53 That means that maybe there wouldn't be the class that teaches your grandma how to not get caught in a phishing scam. So

Speaker 53 all sorts of things, those things just wouldn't be there because there's probably not, especially in red states, other funds that are going to come to cover that.

Speaker 53 Yeah, like I think I was looking online and the budget is something like, it's something like 0.003% of the federal budget is going to it's trivial it's so small right yeah you could like take the I don't know the gold toilets away from the Navy and cover it in a debt right like it's so small yeah yeah and yet it has this enormous outsized impact you know the statistics say that every dollar spent on on IMLS returns two dollars to the economy so it's actually if you're going to measure it that way highly beneficial especially to these more marginalized areas yeah maybe we should talk about that because I think if people like maybe they just don't happen to go to the library, maybe they don't, you know, realize they have services they need, or maybe they don't live in the U.S., the library is not just a place where you can go and borrow the books, right?

Speaker 26 Like, can you explain some of the services that libraries provide? Like, you mentioned some, but they really help people. Yeah.

Speaker 53 So in

Speaker 53 for better or for worse, public libraries in the United States have become the social safety net of last resort because they already exist almost everywhere. And it's so hard to get,

Speaker 53 you know, not right now, but even in the past couple decades, other social programs started in many parts of the U.S. that things kind of just get lumped into the library.

Speaker 53 So now you get your tax worms there, maybe they have a social worker on staff. It's the place that homeless folks can sit when it's snowing.

Speaker 53 So that kind of is like a little bit aside from what we're talking about right here. But I really do want to point out that public libraries have become the social safety net in many, many places.

Speaker 53 So that aside, you know, offerings of, aside from from books and other media,

Speaker 53 including e-books, audio books, movies in lots of formats, magazines, newspapers, there are tons of classes about all sorts of things, especially technology classes.

Speaker 53 It's a place that a lot of people, it's their only reliable internet access. So, you know, in 2025, you can't do mostly anything without the internet.
You can't get a job without the internet.

Speaker 53 You can't maybe pay your bills without the internet.

Speaker 53 So that's a reliable place that people who don't have internet for various reasons, maybe they live so far out in the country that it just doesn't go there unless you have satellite, right? Even now.

Speaker 53 Or maybe you can't afford it or whatever. Or there's one computer in your house and there's six kids and someone has to do their homework.
So what's everyone else going to do?

Speaker 53 So then the computers themselves. And then also the other thing that IMLS also does is those grants will sometimes purchase research databases.

Speaker 53 So if people, kids especially are trying to do their homework. Again, like children's and teens programming is another thing between homework help, social things, clubs.

Speaker 53 So in a lot of places where there's not much going on, it's one of the places where young people can go in the afternoon or on the weekend and

Speaker 53 not be getting in trouble either because they're making trouble or the adults think they are because there's somewhere productive to be. There's somewhere that's inside supervised.

Speaker 53 There's something to do. And so.

Speaker 53 That's the kind of stuff we talk about in normal times when we're trying to fight for like weekend service or later hours.

Speaker 53 But if we're looking at it in the lens of IMLS, the building might be open, maybe, because maybe they have the foundational operational budget, but then there won't be these programs, there won't be these resources, there'll just be a bunch of books on the shelves.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's like,

Speaker 26 I don't know, I'm amazed how many of my friends and neighbors don't understand how my celebrity does. Like, I'm forever like

Speaker 26 San Diego, our housing prices are ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not be ridiculous.

Speaker 26 Well, lots of us do, but. we don't get to choose.
And so like, we have a large in-house population.

Speaker 26 I'm always like helping my in-house neighbors go go to the library, like give them a ride or whatever, so they can,

Speaker 53 yeah, like you say, access internet services just for benefits, yeah, or just like sit and read the paper and know what's going on in the world, yeah, and like not get harassed by the cops just for existing, right?

Speaker 26 Which is the rest of their existence here, sadly. Yeah, these are massively important services.

Speaker 26 I think most people like having no one because there's not really a big like fuck the libraries movement, you know. Like, I think people,

Speaker 26 I mean, these days are yeah, yeah, I guess,

Speaker 26 yeah, I guess there's the whole like uh, people people should only read stories if they conform to a certain gender storage.

Speaker 26 Yeah, well, fuck those people.

Speaker 53 Absolutely fuck those people.

Speaker 26 Talking of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads. So, you know, here are some unfortunate advertisements.

Speaker 26 All right, we're back. Talking of people I dislike, actually, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in 2020 and then re-elected, shamefully, this year, which is very disappointing.

Speaker 26 One of his first actions was to propose a budget which increased the funding to the police, surprise, and decrease the funding to the libraries. It would lead to them closing for an extra day, right?

Speaker 26 And this is our quote-unquote progressive mayor who, you know, has been anything but.

Speaker 26 But this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right? I've spoken since then to librarians around the country who for the last at least half decade have faced funding cuts.

Speaker 26 Can you explain like why doesn't the state see value in these services?

Speaker 26 I mean, I don't want you to like speak for, you know, like the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the cops more money, but can you explain like why there has been this ongoing assault on library budgets?

Speaker 53 So, you know, you're talking about the last decade to half decade. I think we can really trace it back much farther, at least 30 years to the Clinton administration, actually.

Speaker 53 I want to talk about the Democrats. But even, you know, the roots farther back than that, because we have a neoliberal problem, right?

Speaker 53 So it's basically the idea that all activity should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything should be run by a business, that everything should be subject to the market, quote unquote.

Speaker 53 And so that's where we are with libraries is that even though I can sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends generates $2 of economic activity, that somehow isn't even good enough.

Speaker 53 Because when the powers that be look at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the toilet. And that's the only way they can measure anything.

Speaker 53 So if you look at it and you're just saying, well, this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money.
This doesn't make more money happen.

Speaker 53 The idea that everything should be run by a business and everything is

Speaker 53 should be subject to market logics,

Speaker 53 that would say, well, if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries have no value because we're only measuring it in can this make the balance sheet, can this make number go up?

Speaker 53 Yeah.

Speaker 53 And even though libraries do make number go up, it's not obvious. You can't make it obvious.

Speaker 53 There's no direct line between what libraries do and number go up, even though there actually is, for example, with IMLS.

Speaker 53 So, you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal government changed and how the federal government worked changed very much under the guise of increasing service quality,

Speaker 53 what they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers and

Speaker 53 turn everything into contract work instead of regular labor.

Speaker 53 And that, I think,

Speaker 53 filtered down from the federal level into states and municipalities so that those levels of government too also started to look at how they ran

Speaker 53 their government things. And in many places, public libraries are arms of local government.

Speaker 53 That those too should also be run like a business and be subject to market logics. And therefore, number does not go up.
We don't don't value this

Speaker 53 and that that's basically it is that you know there it's hard now that we've had 30 years of overt neoliberalism in our in our government system and a couple decades more of of less obvious versions of it to make government which is now being run like a business even in the best of times value things that aren't uh that aren't valued strictly monetarily.

Speaker 53 So there's no cultural value. And even if the monetary value isn't extremely obvious, it somehow doesn't count.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. I guess it kind of, I used to lecture.
I still do lecture at university actually starting again next month.

Speaker 26 But like we pivoted towards like everything has to be STEM in education generally because

Speaker 53 that'll make money or something.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I don't know why, because like Bill Gates make the line go up. And yeah, we lost so much that has.
not just intangible value, like you say, but actual tangible value, very, very obvious value.

Speaker 26 But nonetheless, like, like you say, it's not easy to put on a graph.

Speaker 53 So it it disappears. Right.
And then, you know, even though cops also don't make money in a direct sense, somehow we can still fund that.

Speaker 53 So it really shows that like in the case of where you are, that the carceral solution is now the only solution we have.

Speaker 53 And when we sit here as abolitionists and we say, well, let's get rid of all that stuff. And people say, well, what are you going to do instead?

Speaker 53 Our answer is often it would be so different that it wouldn't be necessary. So we'd have prevention of the entire situation.

Speaker 53 And that's one of the things that libraries offer is prevention of the entire situation, making vast soise of the carceral state unnecessary.

Speaker 53 So there's a conscious choice there, especially when money is being taken out of the balance sheets of a city government from the libraries and put into the cops, of this carceral choice of saying, we'd rather everyone's life is shit so we can throw them in jail than everyone have a nice life and no one would have to go to jail.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead. And yeah, it would be nice.

Speaker 26 It reminds me of one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain in the 1930s was to create popular education centers, which included included libraries, right? And they

Speaker 26 funded these entirely, they were not funded by the state. The state was not interested in making libraries in the 1920s, 1930s in Spain.

Speaker 26 And they funded them from popular subscription and from people's union dues. And they built these Ateneos, which are now really beautiful places.
One of the places I did my PhD in Barcelona.

Speaker 26 And like, I wonder. if there is, I guess it's very hard for us to conceive of like a library without the state in the United States, right?

Speaker 26 Like, and it's like rich people putting little libraries in their middle class neighborhoods is not the same thing. Right.

Speaker 26 As much as they'd like to think it is. Like, yeah, your little phone box library is not replacing these services.
Like, is there a model

Speaker 26 for recreating this in a way that isn't reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it?

Speaker 53 I think there's a couple models and it depends upon how far down the revolution you go.

Speaker 53 So the example you gave of Spain, we have contemporary with that and slightly more recent versions of that in the U.S. So the workmen's circle and now the workers' circle,

Speaker 53 they funded really wonderful cultural programs, including libraries. Unions often had libraries, especially back when they used to have more buildings, like my union.
I'm part of my union.

Speaker 53 And aside from just like being where I work, we don't necessarily have a building per se.

Speaker 53 So those things have always existed, especially in like the workmen's circle, in ethnic communities who are trying to preserve a culture.

Speaker 53 And that's something that fit into 20th century capitalism.

Speaker 53 And so if we go farther than the revolution, I read a really great pamphlet recently from the 70s actually that was from the UK and it kind of discussed libraries, you know, if we make it through the revolution a little bit as being operated

Speaker 53 under a syndicalist model

Speaker 53 where

Speaker 53 workers and patrons, which is what we call them now, there wouldn't be quite that split then,

Speaker 53 would be able to govern and run these libraries. And there was a really great diagram.

Speaker 53 So there's definitely been ideas for a long time about what this could look like.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess in the collectivized economy of revolutionary Barcelona, libraries still existed, Atheneos existed, and I'm sure it was along a syndicalist model because everything was.

Speaker 26 So, yeah, I think that's

Speaker 26 a good thing for people to

Speaker 26 look towards. I want to stop and take one more break, and then I want to talk about what people can do to protect libraries.

Speaker 26 All right, we are back.

Speaker 26 So, currently, like, I mean, this is like a funding cliff for the library system, right?

Speaker 26 I suppose it's hard to say, but like, how long would it take before people stop seeing these services if Doge was to start doging tomorrow?

Speaker 53 I honestly can't tell. You know, I think

Speaker 53 that people

Speaker 53 depend, it really doesn't, it's hard to say now, right? Because we do have the funding there. It's just, will it actually happen? Will the thing happen? Yeah.
That That has already been allocated.

Speaker 53 I think we have a little bit of time, but I would expect if that congressional oomph isn't expressed, that especially when summer reading rolls around, we'll really start to see it because that's something that a lot of people depend on to keep their kids occupied during the summer.

Speaker 53 And especially out, you know, in red states and rural areas, it's going to be very much like the, I never thought the leopards were going to eat my face. Yeah, yeah.
Kind of situation.

Speaker 53 Which is sad, like because it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the library very often right right right that's that sucks you know because it's just it's gonna be a lot of a lot of kids especially without those resources yeah i i think about like how

Speaker 26 like i wouldn't have survived my undergraduate without libraries like book or my grad school books are super expensive uh especially academic books and like i relied very heavily on interlibrary loan.

Speaker 53 Yeah. And this is, you know, at the university level, to be sure, where books are very expensive.
Yeah.

Speaker 53 But at the public and school library level, you know, this is exactly why this is happening is because there is this ongoing narrative from the last few decades where people, especially like queer kids, say that the library saved their lives.

Speaker 53 Yeah. Young people of color saying like, this is the only place I could see myself in culture by reading these books.

Speaker 53 So of course, of course, this is happening because that, you know, they want to take that away. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, because it's a place where people can kind of exist. Yeah.
Without that. Yeah.

Speaker 26 So let's talk about like how can people engage to protect their libraries? What can they do? What are like some action items they can take?

Speaker 53 I unfortunately don't have great news.

Speaker 53 I don't think, you know, because of the way this is working and it is so much about just like raw brute power that no one at the federal government or even state governments for the most part seems to be able to counter.

Speaker 53 It's just like not something they can conceive of. Yeah.
Because they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed, right? We've already had the congressional funding.

Speaker 53 This should have a congressional you know this is passed by congress and yet an executive order and elon musk can undo it right if things were working this wouldn't be happening right so so we are really kind of down

Speaker 53 down the line a little bit in what we can do and how effective it's going to be that said there are things we can do a lot of them are the uh

Speaker 53 the things that liberals usually do which is like yeah calling your senator over and over and over again every day and your representatives and and your state your state government too to make sure that your state government is paying attention to what they're going to lose.

Speaker 53 There are certainly

Speaker 53 things one can sign on to from major library organizations. The ALA has been writing a lot and less formal organizations than that.

Speaker 53 I think one thing that we can always be doing, not just in this situation, but if you want to be supporting libraries, one of the best thing and easiest things you can do is go get a library card if you don't already have one and use your damn library.

Speaker 53 There's probably something there that you want.

Speaker 53 And that actually really does help because libraries, whether it's with something like IMLS or whether it's grants from foundations and or local funders, you know, their local government, are better able to make their argument for why they should be given money if they have good statistics to say, we had 10% more readers this year.

Speaker 53 You know, the number of books we loan this year is higher than it's ever been. People are coming to our events in droves.
that kind of success breeds success.

Speaker 53 If they can show that to potential funders, they're more likely to get money. So, go don't even bother to read the book.

Speaker 53 Just check the book out, keep it for we can give it back if you don't have time to read it. Like, make make those numbers go up.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. And you can even, like, let's say you're not inclined to go to the library for whatever reason and you don't like going out or you're worried about uh COVID or something.

Speaker 26 Um, like you can do most of this online, right? Like, if you have Libby, you can

Speaker 53 borrow e-books. You can borrow e-books and audiobooks from Libby.
Um, some libraries have streaming movies.

Speaker 53 A lot of libraries have still either all online or hybrid events that you can watch rather than having to go to the event at the library.

Speaker 53 You know, the one thing about some of those streaming services and Libby that I will caution about is that your data is less secure, if that's something you're concerned about, than it would be borrowing paper books.

Speaker 53 Okay, that's good to know. Because most libraries, even in the kind of tech dystopian future we live in, do a decent job or at least try to be

Speaker 53 good about your borrowing data when you borrow hard copies. But because

Speaker 53 things like Libby and the streaming services are third-party integrations, those collect some amount of use data.

Speaker 53 So it's absolutely great to use those, but I would caution that if you are a person who has a very high threat model and you want to be careful about your data, go for the paper.

Speaker 26 Okay. Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of nicer, nicer experience to read a paper book as well.

Speaker 26 What about like, If people, I know lots of people who are librarians listen, because they email me, like, is there a that they can organize who's the way that people are organizing either to prevent this or like as a way of harm reduction, right?

Speaker 26 Like as a way of reducing the damage that the state can do to people's access to learning?

Speaker 53 Yeah. So there are a few more radical organizations that I think are worth paying attention to.
My favorite is Library of Freedom Project. They're really wonderful.
Okay.

Speaker 53 I'm more willing to say the thing without bullshit.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 53 The thing that, you know, I would obviously urge every worker to do this, but if your workplace is not unionized,

Speaker 53 start working on that. Yeah.

Speaker 53 That will always give you more power. So

Speaker 53 you should start trying to organize your workplace.

Speaker 26 Yeah, definitely. Hopefully, hopefully there's still time for people to do that.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 53 Who knows where that's going to go? But you can at least try.

Speaker 54 It's still legal now.

Speaker 26 Yeah, right.

Speaker 26 Why not start to? And like, regardless of what happens, like, we're... stronger in this together than we are apart.
And like unions have done a lot to prevent fascism in the past.

Speaker 53 And similarly, there are, depending upon what state you live in, there might be a state library organization that is active, and that would be just a good way to make connections with other libraries near you and their librarians.

Speaker 53 And, you know, maybe if you do lose some of your funding, you can put your heads together and

Speaker 53 use each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that.

Speaker 26 That makes sense. Are people like attempting? So I know some of the stuff IMLS have is like online archives.

Speaker 26 Are people attempting to somehow download that in order to preserve it in the event that it goes away?

Speaker 53 I don't know that that's really

Speaker 53 that's not really what we

Speaker 53 yeah. I think that there are other kind of data rescue projects with the federal government that have better data than that.
IMLS doesn't have that much data. So I wouldn't be too concerned with that.

Speaker 53 Okay.

Speaker 26 So it's more like along the workplace organizing side.

Speaker 53 Yeah, it's definitely like trying to figure out to make how to make your and the libraries around you keep going and offering the things to your communities that they've been offering.

Speaker 53 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 26 It would be pretty tragic. Like there's a library not so far from my house.
Like I can ride my bike to it and I go there all the time. And it would be really tragic to be without that.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 So yeah, please continue to organize for your libraries. Is there anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people?

Speaker 26 Like it's a pretty bleak time generally and I think a lot of us take refuge, especially in reading actually. I guess a way you can escape terrible things.

Speaker 26 Is there anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment?

Speaker 53 I think

Speaker 53 in libraries and elsewhere, it's just being able to offer a counter narrative, like not buying into the idea that the library is a money hole. you know,

Speaker 53 it can only be valued monetarily. So when you hear that, maybe start going to your library's board meetings.

Speaker 53 And when you hear those kinds of things said, get online for the comments and offer a different narrative. And you can do that all over your life in different, in different ways.

Speaker 53 When you hear that narrative that is monetary and neoliberal and harmful,

Speaker 53 offer a different one.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I think that's really cool. Like, it's so sad to think that we should have to quantify the value of everything monetarily, but especially something like a library.

Speaker 26 Like so many people have had such positive engagements with them, which have nothing to do with the... with the cash nexus or like generating revenue.

Speaker 53 And that's what makes them valuable and what makes them special sometimes so yeah hopefully people hopefully people can advocate for that how would you find your library's board meeting if you wanted to like if you uh your library if you have a public library near you they should have a website and the website should have an events page that includes board meetings uh hopefully other information about your library's board as well and if you can't find it maybe call at the library and ask they'll probably just tell you they're really good at information there yeah yeah that is the thing that they do all right well thank you so much for joining us, Jamie.

Speaker 26 That was great. It was really, really helpful.

Speaker 53 Thanks for having me.

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Speaker 73 Hey, and welcome to Kerapen here.

Speaker 73 Today we're continuing our journey through Latin American anarchism, where we last left off with a look at the anarchist history of Uruguay.

Speaker 73 We talked about Uruguay's general history, its radical influences, anarchism's period of popularity in the early 20th century, its radical experiments and its cultural influence. So today,

Speaker 73 James and I, because James is here. Hello James.

Speaker 26 Hi Andrew.

Speaker 73 Today we're going to look at what Uruguayan anarchists have been up to from the 50s onward, paying special special attention to the activity of the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya and the idea of especifismo.

Speaker 73 By the way, as James just indicated, I am Andrew, Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube as Andrewism.

Speaker 73 But all that aside, let's get into it.

Speaker 73 The Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, or FAU, was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1956.

Speaker 73 According to Paul Sharkey in the Federación Anarchista Uruguaya, the FAU had very strong working-class roots, as many of the militants came from labor-heavy districts like El Cerro, which definitely shaped their outlook.

Speaker 73 The FAU was also very much emphasized in direct action over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity in reaction to safe repression and economic exploitation.

Speaker 73 And the FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist-Leninism.

Speaker 73 Although some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them resisted the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that milieu.

Speaker 73 Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and their influence globally.

Speaker 73 and of course the coincident fall of the anarchists in Spain.

Speaker 73 According to Oliver Zuzenko's 65 years of revolution, the FAU came about in a time when Uruguay's prosperity coming out of World War II had come to an end, as its agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the Allies' massive standing armies.

Speaker 73 This economic downturn triggered major social unrest, which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon.

Speaker 73 One such instance of unrest involved 150,000 workers going on strike in solidarity with their fellow workers in a tire factory.

Speaker 73 During the strike and after, the FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers, and even a few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up a more united labor movement.

Speaker 73 So rather than having union split along political, ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right populists, and so on, there will be one big tent just focused on labor.

Speaker 73 Now, I personally think a big tent has its benefits and its drawbacks, as with any other strategy. I think the benefit is obviously that it has the ability to mobilize a large number of people.

Speaker 73 But I think the difficulty and the drawback is that having so many affiliations under that big tent can mean that there's not really much of a shared goal left behind.

Speaker 73 Like, yeah, the anarchists want anarchy. The right populists might just want to secure some benefits and protections, and the socialists may be interested in launching a party.

Speaker 73 Sure, they all proclaim to have some interest on the side of the workers, but how that manifests looks different from group to group. But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out for the FAU.

Speaker 73 So they formed the National Confederation of Workers, or CNT, as that big tent in 1964.

Speaker 73 But even before that, there was a split. Not too much of a surprise.

Speaker 73 After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU was actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro and those who critically supported the revolution.

Speaker 73 Those who were opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in 1963 as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet bloc, while those who remained in the FAU were critical of Castro and his government, but still supported the fall of Batista.

Speaker 73 Of course, with the Cuban Revolution came that very noticeable shift in American foreign policy.

Speaker 73 They saw that with all that happening right in in their backyard, they'd need to take a very different approach if they wanted to win the Cold War.

Speaker 73 So Suzenko actually describes how in 1961, JFK changed the approach of the now infamous School of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to preparing for anti-communist counter-insurgency against homegrown revolutions.

Speaker 73 So as a result, militaries across Latin America became more right-wing and seized power for themselves to protect civilians from the danger of their rights. In 1964, it was Brazil.

Speaker 73 In 1968, it was Peru. In 1973, both Chile and Uruguay fell.
And in 1976, Argentina fell.

Speaker 73 As Ozenko noted, in just over a decade, Uruguayan anarchists would become surrounded by right-wing dictatorships which collaborated to round up and exterminate left-wing dissidents of all flavors.

Speaker 73 Not to mention, the economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharkey, between 1955 and 1959, the cost of living doubled and wages did not keep pace.

Speaker 73 By 1965, inflation was running at 100%,

Speaker 73 and by 1967, at 140%.

Speaker 73 Madness. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Well, just wait and see, Andrew.

Speaker 73 Oh, yeah, yeah, we are living in some interesting times.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 you never know.

Speaker 73 So the president that preceded the military dictator imposed a wage freeze and devalued the currency. That was his bright idea, his solution to the crisis.

Speaker 73 So people's lives were obviously getting worse. And the time had come for some decisive action.

Speaker 73 So the CNT aided in strikes across sectors and even tried to call for a general strike. As Uzenko writes, the FAU decided that they were going to take on a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare.

Speaker 73 So they tapped into a coalition of leftist groups to rob in hood food from the corporations to give to the poor.

Speaker 26 Awesome. You have to say it.

Speaker 73 Yeah, but sadly, the coalition couldn't last very long.

Speaker 73 Differences in strategy would lead to the FAU doing its thing by building defense councils similar to those organized in the Spanish Civil War.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Speaker 73 While the other groups copied a She Guevara-style guerrilla army approach forming the national liberation movement to pomeros or the mlnt

Speaker 26 the existential debate among like anarchists in arms is is this that you've just like highlighted right it's need we form authoritarian structures similar to those using for example the cuban revolution the russian revolution these kind of status revolutions which characterize the left in the 20th century in some ways.

Speaker 26 Or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defense committees like the the six person groups that the cnt organized in spain

Speaker 26 to a more egalitarian large formation like a like a truly revolutionary army and like the split that you're talking about is the split that almost every movement has yeah although the the mlnt was necessarily anarchist right they they were like following the um castro model is that right like the shiguevara kind of guerrilla warfare doctrine, pretty much the Guevara sort of model, yeah.

Speaker 73 Although, I'm glad that you bring up this point because it's actually something that I was writing about earlier today in preparation for a video.

Speaker 26 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 73 I think there's a conflation that anarchists need to be careful with between leadership in the sense of authority, as in the right to command and control and that kind of thing,

Speaker 73 versus leadership in the sense of guidance, advice, coordination, expertise.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 I think that just as you might have even, you might have an anarchist construction collective, right? And they're building a house,

Speaker 73 you might have something like a foreman who is coordinating all the actions that all the different builders and all the different tradesmen are engaging in

Speaker 73 to ensure that.

Speaker 73 the different parts of the house come together cohesively and seamlessly, that nobody's like stepping on anybody's toes that everything is being done in a proper timing that is an instance where there would be coordination without necessarily having authority it's just really a division of labor to ensure that the task that everybody is there to accomplish can be accomplished and the person who is given that particular task within that division of labor

Speaker 73 is doing so by taking on that responsibility. But just as they have the responsibility, others will also have the responsibilities.

Speaker 73 And that that does not elevate them above the other people in that association.

Speaker 26 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 73 And so kind of in the same way that you have that in a construction site,

Speaker 73 I think that that is the kind of approach we need to take in a military formation where the person who is, you know, respected for their knowledge of military strategy or has the information or the expertise to be able to handle the planning of that approach because we're all here to win, right?

Speaker 73 We're all here to defend our freedom freedom and to defend the freedom of the people we love

Speaker 73 so there's no sense in splitting off into a bunch of different groups and failing at our task when we can come together where necessary to engage in the coordination of our strategy to improve the chances of our success you know and of course there is a vulnerability in times of warfare that we do have to acknowledge because

Speaker 73 warfare historically is one of the times that is the most ripe for authoritarian seizure and control.

Speaker 73 But because that vulnerability exists in those times, is when I think we have to be extra vigilant of how that could potentially manifest.

Speaker 73 You know, we don't sacrifice our cause in defense of the cause. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 26 Yeah, definitely. Like, because it's easy to do that.

Speaker 26 It's easy to be persuaded that this situation is unique and different, and therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of the very essence of what we're doing.

Speaker 26 The method that, like, the people I have spoken to, both those within formations today and in Rojava, and in other, mostly in Rojava, but also in Myanmar, and those, for instance, in the Iron Column, which was a Phi column in the Spanish Civil War.

Speaker 26 They're probably most famous for leaving the front line to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and the cops had too many.

Speaker 26 And what they did was that they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline. Discipline being something that one has for oneself, not the hunting that comes from above.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 26 they had leaders who would lead in times of combat, right, when we needed to make swift and decisive action. There wasn't time to obtain consensus.

Speaker 26 They used consensus to arrive at those leaders. Those leaders were able in times of urgency to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power or status outside of that moment.

Speaker 73 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 73 Just like in an emergency scenario, you know, if somebody is, you know, leading a surgery, for example, or leading a rescue operation, that doesn't mean that they're elevated above everybody else.

Speaker 73 It just means that they have the knowledge and the skills to accomplish that particular task.

Speaker 73 And the others of their own free will respect that knowledge enough to go along with what the person is recommending.

Speaker 26 Exactly. Yeah.
And that, yeah, that doesn't mean that that person is inherently. capable of bossing you around.

Speaker 73 Exactly. And I like the mention of discipline in particular because that really is the distinction because people talk about, oh, you need to have military discipline.

Speaker 73 How are you supposed to have military discipline without blind obedience to authority?

Speaker 73 And sure, we're not going to have, we're never going to have discipline to the extent that soldiers are dehumanized and treated like cannon fodder, as you would find in a traditional authoritarian military.

Speaker 73 But the discipline is derived from solidarity.

Speaker 73 It's derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the care people have for each other within their formation, and the responsibility they have for their own actions as being part of that formation and for how their actions will affect those around them.

Speaker 26 Yeah, exactly. And I think that's something like you see it again and again when you read the column, the Daruti column newspaper, right?

Speaker 26 They talk about discipline and how we have to have our discipline comes from our commitment to our cause and to each other, not from any fear of repercussions or like quote-unquote disciplinary action,

Speaker 26 but from like the fact that we don't want to let our comrades down, nor do we want to let our cause down. and like uh

Speaker 26 when people do do that right there there are it doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary actions but it means that those are like

Speaker 26 like you said before you don't break away from the core of what you're doing so they agree by consensus to include with the person who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong what a suitable punishment would be um or a suitable set of repercussions would be um so that it reinforces the idea of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment yeah i think there is of course the potential for

Speaker 73 processes to potentially become

Speaker 73 how do i want to put this well what i will say is i think it's necessary that even in engaging with

Speaker 73 those who have you know broken trust or who have

Speaker 73 seemingly split from the association or have jeopardized the safety or security of the association that you find ways to deal with those situations on a case-by-case basis.

Speaker 73 You know, that you're responsive to the particular circumstances that cause that action,

Speaker 73 or that particular outcome, rather than, as you would find in modern militaries, where you have like a very clear, this action has this consequence, this action has this consequence, this action.

Speaker 73 Like a lot more flexibility is required because we understand that

Speaker 73 we don't have this matrix of crime that authorities do. You know, we're we're dealing with harm, they're dealing with crime, right?

Speaker 73 And so in dealing with harm, we have to approach each of those situations in the context of their situations rather than in some sort of cold, like distant calculation.

Speaker 73 You know, and I think in approaching it in that way, people are more willing, I think, to fess up or to...

Speaker 73 take accountability for their harm because they know that there's that relationship there that are going to try to work through it That while there may be many potential consequences to their actions, there's an openness to dialogue there rather than a rigidity of this is what you did, so this is the outcome, automatically.

Speaker 26 Yeah. I mean, that is the latter is like a system that looks not at people, but at quote-unquote crimes, right? And like,

Speaker 26 this is the opposite of a restorative justice system, which looks at people and the situations they are in and not just the worst thing that they happen to have done.

Speaker 26 We should return to South America and we've once again diverted it.

Speaker 73 Yes, yes. Although I feel like these digressions always get to something essential and brings out a little something extra to what I would have

Speaker 73 prepared in advance.

Speaker 73 So we had this split, right?

Speaker 73 We had the FAU and then you had the MLNT.

Speaker 73 And they did collaborate where there was common cause, cause, but it wasn't a permanent collaboration. You know.

Speaker 73 And while this was taking place in the urban guerrilla warfare sphere, you had different things taking place in the labor movement.

Speaker 73 The FAU was dealing with the consequences of big tent organizing, as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party, or PCU, had pretty successfully claimed significant influence in the CNT.

Speaker 73 So in response, according to Susenko, the FAU created a rank and file alliance called the Combative Tendency, which pushed for more militancy and less bureaucracy in the Union movement.

Speaker 73 Through that alliance, the FAU was able to accomplish a lot more outreach and action. But in return, the president of Uruguay introduced emergency laws executed by the military to counter the unrest.

Speaker 73 The revolutionary left continued to fight against the military's involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily paper called Ipoka.

Speaker 73 Then the government was like, stop, don't do that, that's illegal.

Speaker 73 And when the government says, stop, don't do that, that's illegal, that means they put boots on the ground and you know, raided their offices.

Speaker 73 And so the paper fell apart, and the groups involved went underground.

Speaker 73 And, like I said, the military raided their bases.

Speaker 73 But then when the FAU was like, let's get the band back together, unfortunately, the other groups were too scared to resurface, understandably.

Speaker 73 And so

Speaker 73 because of that fear,

Speaker 73 the PCU kind of had a fall from Greece. You know, for a while, they were the big boys on campus in the CNT.

Speaker 73 But after the FAU kind of

Speaker 73 came to the forefront again with all its bravery and stuff, they kind of ended up falling back.

Speaker 73 And you see, the PCU had chosen to appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction within the ranks of the army might support their bid for power, kind of like what happened in the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 And so, you know, they really thought they were cooking something. But as the saying goes,

Speaker 73 the stove was not even on.

Speaker 26 I haven't heard that one. That's good.

Speaker 73 Yeah, the military saw them as pretty much insignificant. So much so that while other leftist groups were facing severe oppression, the PCU was actually pretty much left alone.

Speaker 73 And so when the union rank and file saw that and turned their backs on the PCU, they ended up turning their focus toward the combative tendency because at least they were doing radical and serious stuff.

Speaker 73 And so the unions were under attack from all sides, the police, the military, and even neo-fascist gangs.

Speaker 73 And the FAU-led combative tendency was focused on defending these workers' movements from those threats.

Speaker 73 According to Suzenko, the FAU held a secret congress and formed their own armed wing, the OPR33,

Speaker 73 which, unlike other guerrilla groups in the region, wasn't a top-down organization. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to decide how they carried out missions and which actions it took part in.

Speaker 73 The FAU still set the overall strategy, but it wasn't about becoming some kind of vanguard.

Speaker 73 And some of their actions, by the way, according to Sharkey, included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings.

Speaker 26 It's like old school Spanish anarchism.

Speaker 73 Yeah. Well, there were some old school Spanish anarchists within their ranks.
Yeah. So you really can't be surprised.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, Drew. There's this wonderful line in Abel Paz's book about Daruti that

Speaker 26 Daruti was very fond of children. So he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education.

Speaker 73 Oh, that's beautiful.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's such a wonderful like.

Speaker 73 It is beautiful. Yeah.

Speaker 26 I don't know. I just enjoy it very much.
The whole like,

Speaker 26 you never know what direction that sentence is going to go in.

Speaker 73 that is a coincidental example of that yeah i think

Speaker 73 yeah so you know you do what you have to do pretty much yeah yeah and like i think it's really like he wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism he was maximalist for the sake of like educating children yeah yeah it wasn't it he didn't see the violence as an end in itself exactly exactly it had a cause and a reasoning behind it yeah and the the fae was the same way you know their reasoning was just that if the capitalist class is going to use force to protect their interests, then the workers should be able to use force to defend theirs.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. France fan on stuff.

Speaker 73 And so they did what they had to do.

Speaker 73 Meanwhile, the PCU was stuck to their policy of a peace month, which actually had a detrimental effect in the broader movement as the military kept growing in strength.

Speaker 73 And so the very anti-communist military's involvement in breaking up all the worker activities emboldened their role in politics.

Speaker 73 And then once they defeated the MLNT, with the FAU struggling to resist, isolated by the PCU's inaction, the military took on the opportunity to coup the government, leading to the rise of Juan Maria Porberry, the first president of the civic military dictatorship in 1973.

Speaker 73 In the aftermath, the FAU made the tough call to move their operations to Argentina, which hadn't yet fallen to military dictatorship.

Speaker 73 From there, they worked within the CNT to organize a massive 15-day general strike. It shut the country down for a time, but it wasn't enough.

Speaker 73 And the efforts to keep up the fight were constantly undermined by the PCU, which still insisted on negotiating instead of taking real action.

Speaker 73 Meanwhile, the people were suffering. According to Sharkey, between 1971 and 1976, there was a 35% fall in real wages, and by 1979, inflation was running at 88%, with wages limping behind at 45%.

Speaker 73 So until 1976, the FAU continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay. But after Argentina's coup, that was it.

Speaker 73 To quote Jezenko directly, during the US's Operation Condor, dictatorships across Latin America continued coordinated to kidnap, torture, and murder leftists.

Speaker 73 Across the continent, between 60,000 and 80,000 leftists were killed, and more than 400,000 were placed in in political prisons. End quote.

Speaker 26 Jesus.

Speaker 73 And I think we need to sit with those numbers because it's very easy to hear numbers like that and just think, you know, that's just a statistic, pretty much.

Speaker 73 We hear big numbers, our mind kind of goes statistic. Yeah.

Speaker 73 But to like think about the impact that would have for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to be just taken out, whether killed or imprisoned, leaving like a gaping hole of knowledge, of experience, of education, of radicalism.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 A country may take decades to recover from something like that.

Speaker 73 It's a cultural death in a sense.

Speaker 73 You know, obviously this is the political movement, but it's kind of similar to how during colonialism, elders would be wiped out.

Speaker 73 And with them, all of their knowledge, all of their oral histories, all of their languages, just wiped out in an instant.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 This is different. Of course, this is a political ideology as opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity.

Speaker 73 But it's still just a massive loss of all that history, all that experience, all that radicalism and information just gone.

Speaker 26 Right. Yeah.
It's hard for a movement to recover from that. Yeah.
It's not like a genocide or like this colonial kind of,

Speaker 26 you could call it like a decapitation. Well, it's like a decapitation of a movement, I suppose.

Speaker 73 Well, I would say it's more than a decapitation because it's not just like notable figures that were taken out or particularly influential thought leaders or anything. It's almost everybody.
Yeah.

Speaker 73 Anybody who had that fight in them or had that radical knowledge or consciousness.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned or the mistakes they'd made and learned from like are gone.
The movement has to begin almost from like a blank slate.

Speaker 73 Yeah, the history is basically race in a sense. So all that's left is really what they might have written down.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 Which is obviously only a small portion of what they might have had to share with the rest of the world.

Speaker 26 Yeah, especially in a movement that's been criminalized and pursued by the state, right?

Speaker 26 Like what they write down is what they risk the state discovering, so that they're only going to risk writing things down.

Speaker 73 Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, when you look at this, this, this, this didn't just happen in Uruguay, this happened all over the world.

Speaker 73 In some cases, this massive wipeout of the anarchist movement took place even earlier, you know, in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s. But in all these cases,

Speaker 73 that loss is something that we are still, in a sense, recovering from.

Speaker 73 We kind of had to slowly build back, but we still haven't ever reached, in many places, the height that anarchism was at at certain points in its history, in certain parts of the world.

Speaker 26 Yeah. I mean, look at even like Spain still has a very strong anarcho-syndicalist movement, right? But like the best of the anarchists died in, in Aragon, in Madrid, and

Speaker 26 in concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War. And like it took decades for that movement to recover.
And it's still not as strong as it was.

Speaker 26 But this was one of the high points.

Speaker 73 Especially when the legacy is so much erased. You know, when you look at how histories are taught everywhere in the world.

Speaker 73 You're barely going to get a mention of anarchism, despite the massive role it played in shaping the 20th century, 19th and 20th centuries.

Speaker 26 Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as a historian is that like when people write histories today, they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of the state.

Speaker 26 And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis. David Graeber does it.
Jim Scott did it too. The idea is that people who exist outside of the state are behind and that they...

Speaker 26 they have failed or chosen not to advance to the more advanced human existence that is the state.

Speaker 26 And Jim Scott does this in the art of not being governed, right?

Speaker 26 Like, if we look instead as people who have chosen to refuse the state, then we understand anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the options available to them rather than a step backwards or failure to advance to the state.

Speaker 26 And we can look at the whole of history from that perspective and see it very differently, but most historians don't.

Speaker 73 Exactly.

Speaker 73 I'm sure you've encountered this where people just kind of assume, oh, well, the anarchists lost, so that means they're destined to lose.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 73 They lost that particular fight. That doesn't mean the war is necessarily lost.
And additionally,

Speaker 73 states have lost too.

Speaker 26 Yeah, states continue to lose.

Speaker 73 States, state projects have lost, continue to lose. You know, the capitalist project, capitalist businesses, they lose, they fail.

Speaker 73 That doesn't mean that the project is destined to lose or destined to fail. It just means that particular iteration or that particular attempt was not

Speaker 73 able to succeed in all its ambitions.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and like as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right?

Speaker 26 We should be attempting to learn from and document the past rather than to sort of categorize it into like failed and successful.

Speaker 73 Yeah, that too. Because the standards, the standards of failure and success are often dictated by the standpoint of the status quo.

Speaker 26 Yes, very much so, yeah.

Speaker 73 It's kind of like how the Haitian Revolution is spoken of as the only successful slave revolt, or one of the only successful slave revolts.

Speaker 73 And the standard for success in that case is that they were able to establish an independent state.

Speaker 73 Whereas other slave revolts in other parts of the world, including within the Caribbean, would have taken different paths.

Speaker 73 The Maroons, for example, their former revolt was a withdrawal from the system that surrounded them, creating a pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil.
We had the

Speaker 73 Kilombos,

Speaker 73 these settlements that extracted themselves from the surrounding oppressive structure. and tried to survive to the extent that they could.

Speaker 73 Not all of them lasted.

Speaker 73 But nothing lasts forever, you know.

Speaker 73 Countries rise and fall.

Speaker 73 And so I think if we limit ourselves to just the example of Haiti, particularly in the context of success in a slave revolution, I think we miss out on a lot of those other examples and opportunities for inspiration and guidance.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I think you're right. I think like

Speaker 26 this applies to lots of places.

Speaker 26 I think about it like, you know, I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but also to be with people in their moments of revolution and to like spend time with revolutionaries in Myanmar.

Speaker 26 And one of the

Speaker 26 analyses that you'll always see is that

Speaker 26 this creation of liberated spaces is A, not enough, or B, like there are also places within the non-government zone where there is still very strong control from a pseudo-state, right? But

Speaker 26 I think that overlooks the fact that, yeah, there are not like

Speaker 26 libertarian states.

Speaker 26 But people are living their lives without gods and masters, that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment, and they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory in other people.

Speaker 26 That might be what success looks like. Yeah.
Like that they are able to be self-realized.

Speaker 73 Yeah, just the psychological experience in itself. It cannot be under understated or underrated.

Speaker 73 Even if it's on that small scale of the individual, that's still valuable.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and like if we if we acknowledge that that,

Speaker 26 it's much harder to go back. Like, those people can't go back because they've existed in liberation, right? Like, they've lived in a free way.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 And, like, they will always know that that freedom is possible, that they can live without authority, live with it, without state power, that liberation is a thing that can exist not just in our minds, but in physical space.

Speaker 26 And like, exactly. They will always know that like that's that's available.
And if we can tell those stories, so will other people.

Speaker 73 Exactly. Exactly.
Because that is something I speak about so often. It's the need in the process of social revolution to develop people's powers, drives, and consciousness.

Speaker 73 You do that by giving people both, of course, theoretical education and shared knowledge in that sense, but also through experience.

Speaker 73 Because I've used this phrase before, you can't put the gene back in the bottle.

Speaker 73 You can't go from experience in freedom to a situation of unfreedom and then shrug your shoulders and think, oh, that's all there could ever be.

Speaker 73 After you've experienced an alternative to the status quo, you're not going to go back to thinking the status quo is all there is and all that could ever exist.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 26 We have to remember that when we're looking at these things, like it's easy to look from where something ended and project that back, but we have to understand how it felt when people were doing it too.

Speaker 73 Exactly.

Speaker 73 So we're kind kind of we're kind of left on a somber chapter in Uruguay's anarchist history.

Speaker 73 Because unfortunately, it was only after the fall of Uruguay's dictatorship in 1985 that anarchist militants were able to return to Uruguay and re-establish the FAU in a fractured political and social landscape with greatly reduced numbers.

Speaker 73 Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created the People's Victory Party or PVP in exile, which had attempted to reorganize resistance efforts, but also fell into some Leninist tendencies.

Speaker 73 But the mainline FAU continued to focus on grassroots organizing, worker struggles, and political education.

Speaker 73 It continues to be engaged in Latin American anarchist networks, particularly with Brazilian and Argentine groups, like the Ferração Anarquista Caucha, the Ferração Anarquista Cabocola, the Ferraciao Anarquista do Rio de la Janeiro, and the Argentine organization AUCA.

Speaker 73 Despite its past radicalism, the FAU has shifted towards a broader approach, integrating mass movements while retaining its commitment to anti-authoritarian socialism.

Speaker 73 Since then and up to today, their approach has aligned with the practice of Especifismo, which they developed to rebuild their strength in Uruguayan political movements.

Speaker 73 That approach has since been influential across Latin America and beyond, including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

Speaker 73 I've actually spoken about Especifismo on this podcast before and on my channel, but to give a quick summary, Especifismo is an organizational approach guided by three key concepts.

Speaker 73 The first is the need for a specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis.

Speaker 73 The second is the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic, political, and organizing work.

Speaker 73 And the third is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insertion.

Speaker 73 Especifists reject the left unity idea of a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of anarchists loosely united, because they feel it boils down to a lowest common denominator politics.

Speaker 73 They feel that when this unity is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for united action or develops political discussion.

Speaker 73 It can be described in a sense as an affinity group with the shared interest in the advancement of a very specific politic, but they aren't just internally focused.

Speaker 73 You know, Especifismo is focused on building popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation, rejecting both electoral and vanguardist Marxist approaches.

Speaker 73 So the Espresso Fismo distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organizations or affinity groups and broader mass movements.

Speaker 73 And they advocate for anarchists creating the former and inserting themselves in the latter, building up anarchist presence and the presence of anarchist ideas in unions, in student groups, and in community struggles.

Speaker 73 So if you want a more in-depth exploration of Especifismo, I suggest reading the discussion between Felipe Corrella and Juan Carlos Mekoso called The Strategy of Especifismo on the anarchist library.

Speaker 73 And they talk about how the fragmentation of the working class under neoliberalism has created some very distinct challenges that require fresh organizational strategies and less dogmatic rigidity to simplistic class analysis.

Speaker 73 But they also speak for the need to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within social movements, retaining their independence but engaging in their struggle.

Speaker 73 And they also end up in that interview discussing the FAU's long-term strategy as a process of resistance, rupture and reconstruction.

Speaker 73 Resistance meaning that they're strengthening grassroots organizations, direct action and ideological development.

Speaker 73 Rupture meaning that they're breaking away from catalyst institutions through revolutionary action.

Speaker 73 And reconstruction means they're establishing new social relations based on self-management and mutual aid.

Speaker 73 It's kind of similar to the way that I break down social revolution conceptually as an approach that incorporates both opposition and the proposal of alternatives.

Speaker 73 So I have been thinking about Especifismo

Speaker 73 lately. I made that video many years ago and my anarchist

Speaker 73 understanding has shifted a lot, especially recently.

Speaker 73 In going back and looking at how I would have analyzed things previously, I think there's some different directions that I might take certain things in.

Speaker 73 I think, for example, that the idea of affinity groups engaging in social and solution is extremely valuable in shifting the conversation within these mass movements.

Speaker 73 But I also think that there's a risk in the ways in which a specificismo, if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening ground for cooperation towards some rather un-anarchist outcomes.

Speaker 73 You know, what I mean by that is I think it's important when discussing a specificismo to be very careful against the interpretation of it as some kind of a vanguard strategy or way to dictate a vision of anarchy.

Speaker 73 I think that even if somebody's taken the especifist approach in creating an affinity group organized around a very specific form of anarchism,

Speaker 73 that group should still be in conversation with different tendencies and engaging in an ongoing process of critique and convergence of ideas.

Speaker 73 I believe this is the sort of motivation between Malatesta's idea of synthesis and the synthesis federation in anarchist history. I'll still read in a bit about that.

Speaker 73 But anyway, I'd love to hear about, you know, what the FAU and other anarchists in Uruguay are up to here now. You know, they can feel free to reach reach out to me.

Speaker 73 I have a website now, andrewsage.org,

Speaker 73 and I wish them all power to all the people. That's it for me today.
You can find me on YouTube and Patreon, and this has been It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 73 Peace.

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Speaker 16 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 17 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 18 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 19 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 20 We got clear facts.

Speaker 21 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 23 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 24 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 25 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 55 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 56 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 60 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber.

Speaker 57 They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 64 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff stuff they can trust.

Speaker 58 And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 64 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there?

Speaker 11 And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

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Speaker 69 If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 14 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too. It all comes down to this.

Speaker 13 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about.

Speaker 65 and that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 72 So grab your little ones Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 28 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it.

Speaker 32 Things like PrEP.

Speaker 37 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 42 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed.

Speaker 45 It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 26 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 26 Welcome to Kidappin' Here, a podcast where I last left RFK Jr. on the proclamation that if he was to take office, millions will die.
And all evidence suggests that I am going to be right about this.

Speaker 26 I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is Gare.
Hello.

Speaker 54 He's making the meme come true. He's making the millions, millions must die.

Speaker 26 I we're really really

Speaker 26 Really truly only the white man could make real unlimited genocide in the first world. It's great.
It's great stuff. So this is gonna be a recap episode of not even all like some

Speaker 26 of the stuff RFK Jr.

Speaker 26 has done since since he's gotten confirmed as the fucking United States' Secretary of Health and Human Services, an organization which can includes so many things, but like, for example, the NIH, the CDC,

Speaker 26 FDA, I believe. Yeah, many, many things.

Speaker 26 So, okay, there are lots and lots and lots of different rounds of budget cuts that are happening and grant cuts from a whole bunch of different departments and agencies.

Speaker 26 We're going to start with National Institutes of Health

Speaker 26 cutting a whole bunch of studies for vaccines for new diseases.

Speaker 26 So RFK Jr.'s thing was, well, we're not going to fund any COVID research because COVID is over.

Speaker 26 So no more research into COVID vaccine treatments. We're not going to fund that.
Now, obviously, COVID is like not over

Speaker 26 trivially, obviously. You catch it and it makes you sick and sometimes you die and sometimes you get debilitating long-term negative health outcomes.

Speaker 26 But this is the logic that they're using to just be like, no, fuck it, fuck it. We'll cut all of the funding that we can find that does this stuff.
Now, the problem again, and so these

Speaker 26 cuts look a lot like the very beginning of the Trump administration where they were just going through, and like you'd get a giant list of grants that got cut in the sense that they're like control effing programs, right?

Speaker 26 And they're like searching for keywords and then just killing all the block grants that do that. We'll get more into this at the end of the episode with like a different set of cuts.

Speaker 26 But one of the one of the big issues with this is that it's killing coronavirus research in general. Like all of it

Speaker 26 is getting like massive cuts.

Speaker 26 And so this includes, I think it was CNBCs you're putting on this, killing a bunch of fairly like late stage research on things like, you know, like actually having vaccines that could work across like the broad category of coronaviruses because like obviously there are there are a whole bunch of different kinds of coronaviruses and there are certain sort of vaccine techniques that can work to suppress like the families of them.

Speaker 26 And fucking, I don't know, maybe the Europeans or the Chinese will figure out how to do that because it sure as fuck isn't going to be us after we cut all this fucking funding. It's great.

Speaker 26 So, all right, we're starting sort of, I guess, on the vaccine beat here because there's so many different kinds of bullshit. One of the other really big things that happened is Dr.

Speaker 26 Mark Peters, who was the guy who like did Operation Warp Speed, which was Trump's like big push to get a COVID vaccine now? And this is something I think is worth highlighting.

Speaker 26 And again, this guy like worked under Trump, right? A lot. And some of these programs we're going to be talking about later were Trump programs.
But Trump won.

Speaker 26 I mean, like, Trump did do some anti-vax shit and say some anti-vax shit, but he wasn't like a hardline anti-vaxxer.

Speaker 54 Definitely not. No.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 54 At many points, he tried to take credit himself for the fast response of the code vaccine, which, hey, as long as we get the vaccine, do whatever you want, buddy.

Speaker 54 And the amount that that's been like memory hold and like they're trying to like just alter, alter history regarding the COVID vaccine is

Speaker 54 a little

Speaker 54 head scratching. It gives me that like just slow growing headache that I'm experiencing every day, nearly all the time, just not due to COVID, because I've actually, to my knowledge, never gotten it.

Speaker 54 but it is a headache of political origin.

Speaker 26 Yeah. And I think one of one of the one of the interesting elements of this is something I talked about more like

Speaker 26 in the wake of like the immediate wake of 2020, like 2021, 2022, is there used to be a big split in the Republican Party between like the lab leakers and the anti-vaxxers.

Speaker 26 Because the thing about being a lab leak person is that like you can't be a China released a bioweapon person who also thinks that the vaccine is evil or at least you shouldn't be able to, that those are like mutually, it took years.

Speaker 26 It legitimately, this is enough cognitive dissonance that even like the Alex Jones types, it took years for them to sort of like develop a level of cognitive dissonance that allowed them to do this.

Speaker 26 They did do it eventually.

Speaker 26 And what we're seeing right now, right, is like Trump, as a way of sort of shuring up his anti-vaccine flank, has just like handed control over all public health policy to these just like hideous anti-vaccine like cranks.

Speaker 26 And so Peter Marx, who was like... one of the big guys from Trump won and who stayed on through Biden, who was like, yeah, okay, I'm going to fucking get this vaccine to work.

Speaker 26 He has been forced to resign. And Marx also was the guy who was in charge of vaccine safety in the U.S., right?

Speaker 26 And he's forced out. And he said in a statement for CNN, I mean, you can read the whole thing somewhere, but quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary.

Speaker 26 This is RFK Jr., but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies. So that's good.

Speaker 26 That's the guy who used to be in charge of our country's vaccine safety going like, yeah, this guy wanted me to just fucking lie about vaccines constantly. So that's great.
That's fun.

Speaker 26 So before we get into the people who he's also he's bringing in to do his like unbelievably fake hack bullshit vaccine study stuff, we should talk a bit about the measles outbreak in Texas.

Speaker 26 Now, the reason that this isn't getting more coverage is that this is going to get a really significant amount of coverage on this show in the near future.

Speaker 26 When those episodes are done, this is going to get significant coverage.

Speaker 26 For now, what I think is sort of important about this is that, so there's been an outbreak of measles, which like there should not be outbreaks of measles. We have defeated measles.

Speaker 26 We have the vaccine. You can take it.
It's part of the MMR vaccine. You take it and then you don't get measles.
But there are massive, you know, like communities who are fucking not vaccinating.

Speaker 26 And as like in large part because of the fucking anti-vaccine shit that's being spread by people like RFK Jr.

Speaker 26 And faced with this, RFK Jr. has done a bunch of unbelievably mealy mouth bullshit about personal choice to do vaccines, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 26 And then also did a whole thing about how he was going to have the government send vitamin A to like combat measles,

Speaker 26 which is just nonsense, right? Like,

Speaker 26 so this is, this is obviously just a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to cover this more as it goes on.
Yeah, so stay stay tuned for more measles horrors.

Speaker 26 Yeah,

Speaker 26 the other thing we're not going to cover, because it's going to be covered by these products and services, are these advertisements.

Speaker 54 I would love to talk more about them. We're still trying to get that hims and eventually that themes sponsorship, but.

Speaker 26 We're getting closer. We're getting closer.

Speaker 54 Getting closer.

Speaker 54 We are back.

Speaker 26 Now, what we are not coming closer to is finding a connection between between vaccines and autism because there isn't one. It's all fake.
However, comma, people who don't believe this include RFK Jr.

Speaker 26 So RFK Jr. has been

Speaker 26 doing something. Okay, it's genuinely a little bit unclear who exactly is running this, whether this is like the Department of Health and Human Services is like a broader organization or just the CDC.

Speaker 26 But he's trying to set up a bunch of people to like basically cook the books and try to publish some shit that shows a link between vaccines and autism.

Speaker 26 It's genuinely deeply murky and unclear as to who's doing what right now. But one of the people who's been brought in to do this is David Gere, who is, oh God, oh boy.

Speaker 26 I mean, even by the standards of guy whose job it is to like cook evidence to make it look like there's a connection between vaccines and autism, even by their standards, Gere is like an absolute fucking hack.

Speaker 26 So we talked about Andrew Wakefield on this show, and there is weirdly a Wakefield connection here too. So Wakefield's the doctor who originally cooked up like a connection between the MMR vaccine and

Speaker 26 autism. Gere is from like a slightly different faction of these cranks.
And this is the faction that's more, that's like the most closely aligned with RFK Jr.

Speaker 26 And this is the faction that thinks that like weird methylmercury or whatever the fuck in some older vaccines was causing autism, which like, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 26 But he, you know, he and his dad, Mark Gere, like did a whole bunch of work to try to sort of establish this evidence. I'm going to read this from NBC just describing their work.

Speaker 26 Quote, the gears conducted research from a makeshift laboratory

Speaker 26 in their carpeted, wood-paneled suburban Maryland basement. So get there doing this shit from their basement.

Speaker 26 Published several studies, many of which were retracted, and promoted an unproven treatment for autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and included injections of luparon, a drug used for prostate cancer in early puberty.

Speaker 26 In children, it's only approved for precocious puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues, and seizures.

Speaker 26 They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper testing and misled parents into thinking they were signing up for an approved autism therapy.

Speaker 26 A 2011 Maryland Board of Physicians investigation found the Greeris had violated standards of care.

Speaker 26 So to back up for a second, right? A, they claimed that mercury and vaccines is causing autism. B, they claimed to be able to treat it with puberty blockers.

Speaker 26 But, they could cure autism with a puberty blocker? Yes.

Speaker 26 Which is also extremely funny given, like, you know, all of the these people are like, you know what, trying to ban puberty blockers now?

Speaker 54 We'll give it to them. That's that's fine.
We're going to cure autism by giving all these autistic kids puberty blockers and making them trans.

Speaker 26 Sure. Sure.
Let's go for it.

Speaker 54 Let's give that a shot.

Speaker 54 I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 54 Yeah,

Speaker 54 that bone damage thing isn't real, but that's fine. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Unfortunately, this is one of the other problems with this.

Speaker 26 You get a lot of sources that are just fucking making shit up about these fucking diseases.

Speaker 54 To be fair, I also am probably unfamiliar with this exact puberty suppressus.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I don't think neutrons.

Speaker 54 But in general,

Speaker 26 in general,

Speaker 54 the bone density loss of puberty blockers

Speaker 54 is

Speaker 54 mostly negligible.

Speaker 26 Yeah. So again, again, this guy is like, I found the cure for autism and it's puberty blocking.
Very funny.

Speaker 26 You know,

Speaker 54 I do know a lot of autistic people that have gotten, how do I say this?

Speaker 54 They've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned. I guess I'll say it like that.

Speaker 26 Look,

Speaker 26 being on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic kid than going through puberty if you are trans. Oh, but yes.

Speaker 54 but this also shows how like the attack on puberty blockers for you know quote-unquote trans minors is completely nonsense because these drugs have been used for cis children to cease early onset puberty these are fully reversible yeah these are used for cis children it's used by these like hacks and weirdos to quote unquote cure autism yeah by these same people as an autism cure for the vaccines oh my even though these are the same like drugs these quote quote unquote like chemical castration drugs, as Matt Walsh would put it, are

Speaker 54 now trying to be banned

Speaker 54 for trans children. So,

Speaker 54 you know, hypocrisy always, always, always matters. It's always, it's always important to point out their hypocrisy because that's how we win.
So here, this is one, one more step towards victory.

Speaker 26 Garrison, Garrison, listen, David. Pointing out hypocrisy is important because morale is a terrain of struggle.
It makes you feel good, and that's a little bit important.

Speaker 54 Average Jon Stewart post, but okay.

Speaker 26 Let's continue.

Speaker 26 So his father, Mark Gere, who he's doing a bunch of this research with, was stripped of his medical license. Now, David Gere, actually, amazingly, amazingly was not stripped of his medical license.

Speaker 26 And Gere said, do you want to guess why he wasn't stripped of his medical license?

Speaker 54 He didn't have one.

Speaker 26 He didn't fucking have one.

Speaker 26 So instead, instead, he was prosecuted for doing this shit without a medical license. He also doesn't have a medical degree.
He has has like a, he has like a liberal art student. Okay, okay.

Speaker 26 That, that rules.

Speaker 54 These, these liberal art students are giving our kids transgender hormones

Speaker 54 many such cases.

Speaker 26 He's like the only person I've ever seen who actually genuinely did do like dangerous and unauthorized, like fucking like medical, like unauthorized medical experiments on children with puberty blockers.

Speaker 26 Like, he's the only one.

Speaker 54 Yeah, this is the first instance I've, like, heard of, like, mass unethical use of puberty-suppressing drugs.

Speaker 26 It's a fucking anti-vax. This is the guy they're bringing in to, like, to cook up a connection between vaccines and autism using, like, fucking Ver's data or whatever.

Speaker 26 So, investigative journalist Brian Deere, who is, I think, probably most famous to people who've watched like an H-Bomber guy video as the guy who brought down disgraced ex-doctor to Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 26 Deere, like, also wrote about this guy, like in his like unbelievably dog shit study about,

Speaker 26 so he publishes like an unbelievably dog shit study about like the mercury and vaccines causes autism, whatever the fuck.

Speaker 26 And it gets basically like immediately obliterated the moment autism like activists discover it and they're like, holy fucking shit. Like these people are evil.

Speaker 26 I'm going to read a quote from Brian Deere's article about it.

Speaker 26 One of Miss Sidel's, that's the person who, like the autism like advocate activist who like discovered this stuff. One of her complaints concerning the Gere's apparent institutional review.

Speaker 26 The seven-member IRB institutional review board consists of Mark and Dave Gere, Dr.

Speaker 26 Gere's wife, two of his business associates, and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is the patient slash subject of Dr.

Speaker 26 Gere, and the other whom is a plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims.

Speaker 26 So the the IRB, right? This is like an ethical sort of review board thing that you're supposed to go through to get your studies approved.

Speaker 26 So the IRB for the study, again, is these two guys, his dad's fucking wife, two of the business associates, and the mothers of two Wachitic children who think that vaccines cause autism and are like, one of whom is in a lawsuit about it, and the other one is taking the fucking puberty blockers to try to cure the autism.

Speaker 26 So this is the guy who is being brought in to do the book cooking, is a guy with no medical license, no medical degree, who had to retract his papers because they were bullshit.

Speaker 26 Yeah, also, and this is something that's common between him and RFK Jr. is all these people, they think that like,

Speaker 26 and this is going to be relevant when we get to the sort of HIV/AIDS part of this is that these people think that diseases are caused by malnutrition and not by, you know, like diseases.

Speaker 26 And they think that you can treat them with just being healthy instead of like vaccines. And, you know, this is, this is their worldview, right? These people are sort of eugenicists.

Speaker 26 This is also why they, like, like, one of the reasons why they fucking hate autism so much is that they're just, you know, just on a sort of political level.

Speaker 26 Like, that's just, that's just sort of, that's just what their ideology is.

Speaker 54 Imagine how many skilled drone pilots they're going to lose. It's really going to backfire on them.

Speaker 26 Womp, womp. Or, or, we will see.

Speaker 54 Speaking of womp, womp, here's some ads.

Speaker 26 All right, we're back.

Speaker 54 Let's hear more about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

Speaker 54 the second Kennedy to have a hole in his head. But this one's from a worm.
Wow!

Speaker 26 Okay, so let's talk about the last

Speaker 26 group of things here,

Speaker 26 which is another series of massive budget cuts that they're doing this is another thing where they have a giant list of grants that they're fucking cutting this is another like anti-DEI and so you know there's a lot of the things that I guess you would expect from one of these like you can only study white people ones so like there are a whole bunch of programs in this list of like grants that they're cutting that are like studying you know racism and medicine and like the the the differing medical outcomes between like people of different races because they're getting different levels of medical care and because of the the environments that they're in.

Speaker 26 And this is all stuff that like,

Speaker 26 you know, these people do not want there to be research demonstrating that like racism exists in the medical system because it's just extremely bad for there just to be objective evidence that there is racism and that it's bad and that it kills people.

Speaker 26 So another very bleak thing that I haven't seen much coverage of is that a lot of these grants were funding research into trans healthcare and also the effects of like violence against trans people on things like mental health.

Speaker 26 There's, you know, this is also something that's devastating because like

Speaker 26 the state of trans medicine, it's like we know things that are safe and we know things that work, which is just letting people transition, but also there's so much more stuff that we need in terms of like hormone regimes that like work better, right?

Speaker 26 And things like that. And also like, you know, I mean, just sort of like basic health outcome stuff.

Speaker 26 And yeah, these people do not want anyone to know exactly how bad their fucking transphobia is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on. And so, yeah, they're like, fuck it.

Speaker 26 We'll just get rid of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch of stuff that has to do with COVID.

Speaker 26 I'm just going to read the description of one of the fucking grants they cut to give you a sense of like the shit that they're cutting.

Speaker 26 Development of a handheld rapid air sensing system to monitor and quantify SARS-CoV-2 and aerosols in real time. Which is actually would be an unbelievably useful thing, right?

Speaker 26 Like a system that could detect fucking COVID, like aerosols, like in real time and tell you that there's fucking COVID in the air. Staggeringly useful.
They don't fucking want it.

Speaker 26 One of the big things that they cut is like, you know, we were talking about this with sort of like cutting like programs that study structural racism in medicine.

Speaker 26 They basically went on a like a county by county basis and found every single grant, like state by state, county by county, city by city, every single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID on non-white people.

Speaker 26 You know, and they're doing this.

Speaker 26 I think people have forgotten about this, but one of of the things that RFK Jr.

Speaker 26 said, like, I think it says during the campaign, was he had this giant rant about how COVID was like specifically targeted to leave Chinese people and Jews alive, which is great.

Speaker 26 That is how he put it.

Speaker 54 Someone should probably report that to Trump's anti-Semitism task force.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 54 You know,

Speaker 26 hall monitor, whatever.

Speaker 54 No one cares anymore.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, they're just, you know, so they're just trying to destroy all this stuff.

Speaker 26 They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid of every single fucking thing that was funding like any program that was like mental health care as a block thing. They're just cutting all of it.

Speaker 26 So that's going to make everyone even more normal than we already fucking are.

Speaker 54 See, actually, I agree with this because this is the one thing where I think the lifestyle choice thing does matter because I just read Yaoi when I'm sad and it fixes me.

Speaker 54 And if everyone does that, I think we don't need any of these other mental health services.

Speaker 26 What are you doing in your manic, though?

Speaker 26 Read more yaoi.

Speaker 26 One-size

Speaker 54 because famously, uh, the yaoi, the yaoi reading demographic, the most mentally stable

Speaker 54 and normal population.

Speaker 26 Uh,

Speaker 26 God.

Speaker 26 One of the other ones that's unbelievably concerning is, again, like county by county going through and cutting funding for like things, things that promote child vaccination.

Speaker 26 They are systemically trying to cut off kids from getting vaccines, and they're trying to get rid of anything that opposes like their efforts to try to convince everyone, like all parents, to fucking not have their kids get vaccines.

Speaker 26 They also cut a whole bunch of grants for rapid disease response, which is great.

Speaker 26 We'll get to the exact reason why that's like so fucking terrifying in a second, in the like very, very immediate term. They also have killed an unlike 145 grants for HIV.

Speaker 26 And this is a whole bunch of different HIV programs.

Speaker 26 They are killing funding for distributing and getting people to use PrEP, which is a pill that like massively helps prevent HIV infections, especially if you are a trans woman and you are having sex, like you should get on PrEP.

Speaker 26 Or a Twink, I will say. Thank you.

Speaker 26 Yeah, the uptake rates for trans women are specifically lower, which is the thing that we know because we have these fucking funding and we're not going to have that shit anymore because they're cutting all the fucking funding for these for these fucking research programs.

Speaker 54 I sometimes do forget that there are trans women with different lived sexual backgrounds than me because

Speaker 54 coming out of Twink culture is ingrained.

Speaker 26 Like your co-host

Speaker 26 who permanently has only ever come out of lesbian culture.

Speaker 54 Yes, no, because

Speaker 54 in Twink culture, getting on prep is

Speaker 54 ingrained pretty hard at this point.

Speaker 26 Yeah, well, it's ingrained in a lot of places, but there's places where it isn't.

Speaker 26 And those places are where things go very, very bad very quickly, which is why obviously they're eliminating the fucking research for this because they want to fucking kill queer people.

Speaker 26 Like they think, they think that HIV is a fucking lifestyle choice.

Speaker 26 RFK Jr. particularly thinks it's because of paupers.

Speaker 54 Which is now leading to the paupers raids. Yeah.
Red alert, everybody. Red alert.
Yeah.

Speaker 54 It's it's getting pretty scary out there.

Speaker 26 So it's it's really fucking bleak.

Speaker 26 I mean, they've cut, you know, I mean, they're trying to just fucking get rid of this because these people are just fucking unhinged, virulent homophobes and transphobes.

Speaker 26 And yeah, they want to fucking cut these programs because they think it'll hurt us. They've also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV AIDS policy staff.

Speaker 54 Is that bad?

Speaker 26 Oh, it's bad. Here's the first CBS.
Yeah, so they do child, they're one of the other groups that does childhood vaccination efforts.

Speaker 26 They also run the fucking national vaccine program, which nobody knows what's going to happen to it now because, again, the thing that was supposed to run it, it's just fucking gone.

Speaker 26 So who the fuck knows what's happening with that now they are probably going to just completely destroy trump's like giant trump actually in his first term had a giant program to like end hiv that like kind of did stuff because it was someone else's program that trump just kind of implemented we're getting so close to the hiv vaccine yeah

Speaker 26 yeah

Speaker 26 and you know and so who fucking knows it's probably just completely fucked yeah this is going to have just unbelievably hideous consequences on millions and millions of people.

Speaker 26 And they, that it's not even that they don't give a shit. It's that they think it's cool and funny and based when people like us fucking die.
Now, on the other hand, the rest of the U.S.

Speaker 26 population is about to run into the same fucking thing that all of these stupid ass bankers thought, which is that, oh, Trump will just fuck with the queers and leave us alone.

Speaker 26 No, we're going to close in the same place that I closed the last time I talked about fucking RFK Jr., which is the fucking bird flu, which is that he wants the solution to the bird flu is he wants to fucking let it rip.

Speaker 26 And he just wants to just like be like, oh, we can just like take the birds that survive the bird flu and we'll just let the we'll just let it spread and just use those ones and those ones will be healthy now so the thing about this bird flu right is that it kills within three to four days immunologist matt coasey in scientific america describes how this thing again within three to four days has an a 90 to 100 percent kill rate

Speaker 26 so you know you can't just do this right because it'll just it just fucking kills all the birds he doesn't want to fucking vaccinate the birds which is the thing that like if you want to stop this but this this fucking pandemic from spreading then you need to do do it right

Speaker 26 and once again i i need i need to emphasize enough that when it when i when i talked to virologists about this they said that like letting the bird flu rip through all the bird populations right just letting it fucking spread letting it kill everything until you only have the ones that like didn't die is if you were like trying to cook up conditions

Speaker 26 like field conditions specifically to try to get it to develop a mutation to spread to humans this is what you would do

Speaker 26 is you would just let it fucking spread uncontrolled and kill everything so this is what we're doing at the same time as, again, anti-vaxxers are fucking

Speaker 26 running our fucking vaccine services as we are cutting the staff of or cutting, cutting grant funding for people who do response to like rapid response to emerging diseases, as we are cutting the fucking entire policy staff for the Office of Infectious Diseases.

Speaker 26 They are building a fucking pandemic. And all of these fucking people think that COVID was fucking cooked up in a lab.

Speaker 54 And what they are doing is like they are now doing the thing they are accusing everyone else of doing, which is they are fucking attempting to blamp policy to cook up a fucking play in a lab except it's not going to be in a lab is going to be in america's fucking factory farms and we are all going to suffer the consequences of it well i assume you saw the uh the the statement from uh cantor analysts uh on monday the wall street investment firm this founder uh was like a really was a really big uh trump donor was on the inauguration committee uh but uh two of two of their analysts uh put out a statement today calling to reevaluate rfk jr as uh Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling out his quote-unquote apparent anti-science and libertarian agenda, saying it will put people's lives in jeopardy to advance a discredited theory on vaccines.

Speaker 26 Look, I will say this, like, there are a lot of risks in the Trump coalition. RFK Jr.
and his people cannot fucking be allowed to run these institutions. They need to be fucking run out now.

Speaker 26 If we do not do this now, millions of people are going to die. I have been saying this.

Speaker 26 I am going to continue to say this because you can see in real time all all of the things that are going to lead to all of these people fucking dying.

Speaker 26 And, you know, his position is not incredibly secure in this coalition, right?

Speaker 26 Like, there are lots of sectors of capital who don't want the entire fucking population of the United States to die in a plague.

Speaker 54 Yeah. After Carl's grandson's resignation, tourist analysts also put out a statement advocating for vaccine use and specifically against RFK Jr.
and his vaccine rhetoric.

Speaker 54 Biotech investors also spread similar anti-RFK anti-RFK Jr. rhetoric over the weekend following Mark's resignation.

Speaker 26 So, yeah, go fucking, I don't know.

Speaker 26 I don't know exactly which public official you pressure or who you go scream at to try to get rid of this guy before he fucking gets us all killed, but go do that. I don't know.

Speaker 26 Go harass your like legislator or whatever or like find,

Speaker 26 find the nearest person who can be yelled at who will convey this.

Speaker 54 Stand outside your local CDC office and sign and protest the CDC.

Speaker 54 The hospitals are empty.

Speaker 26 It's fake. Oh, God.

Speaker 26 And on that note, getting us yet another fucking one of those...

Speaker 26 Actually, do they even do the misinformation labels anymore? On, like, Spotify and shit and like YouTube?

Speaker 54 Oh, of course not.

Speaker 26 Oh, God.

Speaker 54 We lost the election. It's not happening.

Speaker 26 Wow.

Speaker 54 Truth and reasonableness lost the election. Sorry.
Not we.

Speaker 26 So, alright. Yeah, this is the spitty kid happen here.
Get this guy out of office before we all fucking die in a plague. Again.

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Speaker 16 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 17 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 18 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 19 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 20 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 23 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 24 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 25 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 55 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 26 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it.

Speaker 32 Things like PrEP.

Speaker 37 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 42 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed.

Speaker 45 It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 26 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 54 This is It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Today I'm joined by James Stout.

Speaker 54 This episode is going to be about ICE actions against students, scholars, and professors around the country and this wave of deportations, targeting people engaged in pro-Palestine speech protest, as well as some individuals who have been roped up in this new wave of deportations, who have not publicly engaged in Palestine activism.

Speaker 54 Let's start on the evening of Saturday, March 8th.

Speaker 54 Mahmoud Khalil and his wife were returning home from dinner when plainclothes ICE agents followed the couple into their campus apartment building at Columbia University.

Speaker 54 A man wearing a Marvel graphic tee arrested Khalil for then unknown reasons and threatened to arrest Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant and an American citizen.

Speaker 54 When Khalil's wife brought his green card from their apartment, she says one of the ICE agents placed a phone call, informing someone Khalil was a permanent resident, to which the person on the phone replied, Let's bring him in anyway.

Speaker 26 I understand.

Speaker 26 He's not resisting.

Speaker 26 Don't worry about it.

Speaker 26 You're going to have to come with us. Don't worry.
I'm coming with you. Don't worry.

Speaker 68 You guys really don't need to be doing all of that.

Speaker 26 Have a big deal.

Speaker 54 During the arrest, Khalil's lawyer, Amy Greer, spoke on the phone with one of the ICE agents who said that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa.

Speaker 54 Greer reiterated to the agents that Khalil was in fact a permanent resident with a green card. But the ICE agent just responded by saying they were revoking the green card instead.

Speaker 54 Khalil's a graduate student who has been studying at Columbia for over two years.

Speaker 54 Last year, Khalil emerged as a visible figure in the college encampment protests, becoming a public spokesperson and a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University apartheid Divest.

Speaker 54 Though never being arrested, Khalil faced harassment from right-wing Zionist doxing campaigns calling for his deportation.

Speaker 54 And when ICE did come for Khalil, disappearing him to a detention facility in Louisiana and cutting him off from communication with his wife and lawyer, throughout all of this, he was not charged with any crime.

Speaker 54 Instead, ICE and the State Department are using a rarely used Cold War-era immigration statute that gives the Secretary of State the power to exclude or deport any non-citizen of the United States if there are, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that an individual's entry, proposed activities, presence, or activities in the United States would have, quote, potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that was the one that, like, I remember at the time you and I were discussing this like in our group chat and we were trying to work out like how the Secretary of State could be revoking a green card.

Speaker 26 Like, yeah. And I think you found this or you found it somewhere in the

Speaker 26 Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants, right?

Speaker 26 Like no one in 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here.

Speaker 26 I I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began. But like, this is entirely unprecedented as far as I'm aware.

Speaker 54 And right after this happened, like, we discussed how this case was probably going to be used as a testing ground for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating legal precedent.

Speaker 54 And sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier.

Speaker 54 This was just the first public instance of the Trump administration's directed targeting of students they believed to be associated with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza.

Speaker 54 And this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun before Khalil's arrest.

Speaker 54 The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Srinivasan, who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her student visa had been revoked.

Speaker 54 When ICE agents knocked, she did not answer the door. The next day, ICE showed up again to her Columbia University apartment.

Speaker 54 Srinivasan was not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings and flee to Canada.

Speaker 54 Five days later, when Ice returned to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Trina Vasan was already gone.

Speaker 54 Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam praised this as quote-unquote self-deportation.

Speaker 26 Yeah, they talk about this a lot. Like self-deportation is definitely one of their goals.
They talked about it before Trump even came into power. Like

Speaker 26 that's what we're seeing a lot of these these spectacle raids and like spectacle deportations. Scare tactics.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The desires that people leave.
Is she a Canadian citizen?

Speaker 54 I don't believe so, no. Okay.

Speaker 26 It was just the fastest flight from LaGuardia. Out of the country.

Speaker 54 Out of like, yeah, the closest, the closest she could be.

Speaker 26 Yeah. I wonder what her immigration status is in Canada now.

Speaker 54 She is currently figuring this whole situation out still. Okay.
Navigating her legal options both in Canada and the States.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that would be interesting too to see what Canada can offer her.

Speaker 26 And like, I don't think the Trump administration would go after having her extradited back because, as you say, she's not accused of a crime and they've kind of got what they wanted.

Speaker 26 But it'll be interesting to follow that.

Speaker 54 There is no need for extradition because none of the people that we're talking about today were accused of any crime. Yeah.

Speaker 26 With the other cases of quote-unquote, like, self-deportation, one of the issues is people have had their passports seized and held, like, lots of Venezuelan migrants.

Speaker 26 So, like, they actually can't, or it would be very difficult for them to

Speaker 26 just get on a flight and leave.

Speaker 54 Which I i think is in part why she made the decision to get out when she could right dhs claimed in a statement that trinivasin advocated violence and was quote involved in activities supporting hamas a terrorist organization unquote iCES targeting her seemingly stems from being mass arrested while trying to return to her apartment from a picnic with friends on the same day as the Hamilton Hill occupation.

Speaker 54 She couldn't get home and was caught up in the crowd and was arrested among a hundred other people.

Speaker 54 She received two summons for obstructing traffic and failure to disperse, but her case was quickly dismissed.

Speaker 54 Homeland Security claims that failing to declare these two summons is what caused her visa to be revoked.

Speaker 26 Okay.

Speaker 26 Interesting.

Speaker 54 That same week, ICE went after another green card holder at Columbia, a 21-year-old student named Yong Sao Chung, a permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from South Korea with her family when she was seven.

Speaker 54 On March 9th, 9th, ICE agents visited her parents' home looking for Chung, and that day she received an odd text message reading, Hi, Yoon Sao, this is Audrey from the police.

Speaker 54 My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward. When are you available for a phone call? Unquote.

Speaker 54 This recent arrest was allegedly in reference to being detained, among others, at a sit-in protest at Bernard College on March 5th. Chung was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction.

Speaker 54 After receiving that sketchy text message, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading: quote: The U.S.

Speaker 54 Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest.

Speaker 54 Consistent with university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you.

Speaker 54 If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS, unquote.

Speaker 54 Chung's lawyer decided to to call, quote-unquote, Audrey from the police, who revealed that she was actually an HSI agent and that the State Department was revoking Ms. Chung's residency status.

Speaker 54 Now, rather than opting for self-deportation or turning herself into immigration authorities, Chung decided to go into hiding and fight the deportation in the courts while trying to evade ICE detention.

Speaker 54 When ICE failed to locate her, they enlisted the help of federal prosecutors.

Speaker 54 To quote from the New York Times, quote, on March 10th, Perry Kaboni, Kaboni, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office, told Ms. Ahmad, Ms.

Speaker 54 Chung's attorney, that the Secretary of State, Mr. Rubio, had revoked Ms.
Chung's visa. Ms.
Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident.

Speaker 54 According to the lawsuit, Mr. Kaboni responded that Mr.
Rubio had, quote, revoked that as well, unquote. Yeah.
So this is the exact same language we saw with Khalil.

Speaker 54 And it displays a general uncaring towards who they are actually targeting and what their actual legal status is in the United States.

Speaker 54 They think they're going after people with student visas, but when it turns out they have green cards, that doesn't stop them. They still continue to do it anyway.

Speaker 54 On March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants citing a statute for harboring non-citizens, but Chung was nowhere to be found.

Speaker 54 Like Khalil, the Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda.

Speaker 54 But her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means a quote-unquote movement leader. She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza.

Speaker 54 Her lawyers write, quote, Ms. Chung has not made public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high-profile role in these protests.

Speaker 54 She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns, unquote.

Speaker 54 Chung had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found she was not in violation of any university policy related to protests last year.

Speaker 54 Chung's lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE's actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.

Speaker 54 This lawsuit reads, quote, officials at the highest echelon's government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung's speech.

Speaker 54 ICE's shocking actions against Ms. Chung form a part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S.
government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech. ⁇

Speaker 54 On March 25th, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung.

Speaker 54 The judge said that the government produced, quote, nothing in the record to indicate Chung is a danger to the community or a quote-unquote foreign policy risk.

Speaker 54 or that she was in any communication with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there would be, quote, no trip to Louisiana here, unquote.

Speaker 54 This is in reference to the big ICE detention facility in Louisiana. We'll be right back after this ad break.

Speaker 26 Okay, we're back.

Speaker 54 Now, although Chung has at least temporarily halted ICE's efforts to detain or deport her, not all legal recourses have proven successful. This week, a U.S.

Speaker 54 District judge declined a request to block the deportation of Cornell's student, Mamadou Tahl, after the State Department revoked his visa. On March 31st, Tahl released a statement:

Speaker 54 Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.

Speaker 54 I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing these options, I took the decision to leave on my own terms.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

Speaker 54 So, Tall has elected for the quote-unquote self-deportation option, at least for now. I believe his case is going to continue, but he's not going to remain in the United States.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I think he returned to the UK, right?

Speaker 54 I believe so, yeah. He's a British citizen.

Speaker 54 Now, interestingly, last September, Cornell University itself tried to revoke Tall's student visa for involvement in student protests, but he successfully appealed and was able to continue his African studies PhD remotely.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I spoke to him a little bit back then, just via direct message.

Speaker 26 But I think at that time, whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a component of it that at least he didn't want to talk about it in public, which is fine.

Speaker 26 Everyone has the right to do that. And he should do what's best for himself.
But

Speaker 26 maybe I'll try and follow up with him again now. See if he wants to speak.
Because he seems to have like,

Speaker 26 he's been, of all of these people, like the one who's been able to make the most statements and like control his narrative to some degree.

Speaker 54 Yeah, no, he entered this period of like radio silence after he won his appeal last fall and then only started speaking publicly again once he began getting targeted by the Trump administration

Speaker 54 like the past month and a half.

Speaker 26 I think he proactively filed that suit, right? Like before.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 54 Now, the scale that Mark Rubio and ICE are seeking for in regards to deportations is seemingly going to be increasingly large.

Speaker 54 On March 27th, Secretary of State Mark Rubio claimed that he has revoked over 300 student visas so far, saying at a press conference, quote, we do it every day.

Speaker 54 Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas, unquote. Now, there are a few ways the government is currently trying to find these quote-unquote lunatics.

Speaker 54 ICE seems to be targeting non-citizens who have been arrested or detained at Palestine protests, even if their charges were subsequently dropped.

Speaker 54 This is the case for Chung and Srini Vasan, as well as former student Leka Kordia, a Palestinian who was arrested at Columbia campus protests in April of 2024.

Speaker 54 She is currently being held in an ICE detention facility in Texas.

Speaker 54 Now, beyond arrest records, the government is utilizing the World Wide Web and social media to identify new and returning visa applicants and possibly current visa holders that, quote, support terrorist organizations, unquote.

Speaker 54 Social media screening of immigrants and visa holders has been slowly ramping up since 2014 and accelerated during Trump's first term.

Speaker 54 But a new directive from Secretary of State Mark Rubio titled Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants was sent out on March 25th and leaked by journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Speaker 54 The directive cites two executive orders from Trump.

Speaker 54 measures to combat anti-Semitism and quote, protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats, unquote.

Speaker 54 The State Department is now requiring consular officers to conduct a quote-unquote mandatory social media review with screenshotting for students and student exchange visitors with the intent of looking for evidence of quote advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 54 Now, this applies to FM and J visas, so student exchange visas, academic visas, and vocational visas.

Speaker 54 The directive also instructs officers to search social media for quote conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards U.S. citizens or U.S.

Speaker 54 culture, including government, institutions, or founding principles, unquote.

Speaker 54 Which is kind of the most incredibly broad thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the complete discretion of the officer, right?

Speaker 54 There's already been an instance of U.S. customs agents denying entry to someone who had quote-unquote anti-Trump sentiments found on their phone.

Speaker 54 Now, though this new directive is focused on denying or revoking student visas, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its social media data collection to U.S.

Speaker 54 citizenship, green card, and asylum applicants. Basically, anyone and everyone in the U.S.

Speaker 54 immigration system, no matter their current status or what previous vetting they may have already gone through. Yeah.

Speaker 54 On March 5th, DHS issued a 60-day notice for public comment on a proposal for quote, uniform vetting standards and national security screening, unquote, that includes the collection of social media information for all non-citizens applying for immigration benefits like citizenship or permanent residency.

Speaker 54 A statement from the U.S.

Speaker 54 Citizenship and Immigration Service reads, quote, these efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies.

Speaker 54 Unquote.

Speaker 26 Yeah, like the anti-American ideologies, again, is just vastly broad, right?

Speaker 54 It's like crazy red scare level stuff.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 And I'm guessing this will be either like a literal control F of whatever they can find of your public social media or

Speaker 26 some kind of AI assisted. Well, that's what it seems to be, right?

Speaker 54 Like former immigration agents have suggested that they're probably going to use some AI system for this as they've already kind of used more primitive versions.

Speaker 54 But ramping up to this scale and with like this increased focus and like attention on quote-unquote AI is going to affect the way that they do this vetting process. Absolutely.

Speaker 26 Yeah, great.

Speaker 54 So though the government is trying to increase their social media screening, so far they actually haven't had to do that much of their own research to identify targets for removal.

Speaker 54 On March 17th, a Georgetown scholar named Bdar Khan Souri was arrested by Homeland Security outside his home in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, who's a U.S. citizen, and their three kids.

Speaker 54 According to Suri's lawyer, masked agents, quote, refused to tell him the basis for the arrest, handcuffed him, and forced him into an unmarked black SUV, unquote.

Speaker 54 Later, his wife was informed that her husband's visa was revoked based on social media posts. and that Suri was sent to ICE detention in Louisiana.

Speaker 54 Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Suri was, quote, actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting anti-Semitism on social media.

Speaker 54 The Secretary of State issued a determination that Suri's activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable, unquote. Jesus.

Speaker 54 Of course, any single post in support of Palestine is going to be seen as quote-unquote promoting anti-Semitism, according to Mark Rubio. Surrey's lawyer wrote in a court filing, quote, Dr.

Speaker 54 Suri is an academic, not not an activist, but he spoke out on social media about his views on the Israel-Gaza war.

Speaker 54 Even more so, his wife is an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and the violence it has perpetuated against Palestinians, unquote.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it seems like he was identified through his wife, right?

Speaker 54 Correct. And we'll get to that.

Speaker 54 Suri has no criminal record, and according to a colleague, he did not attend campus protests.

Speaker 54 However, Suri's lawyer writes that his family have been victims of a doxing campaign, with his wife stating that a website had, quote, claimed falsely that my husband and I have, quote, ties to Hamas, unquote.

Speaker 54 The Homeland Security Assistant Secretary referenced that claim in a public statement on Twitter, and this harassment stems in part from Suri's father-in-law, being Ahmad Youssef, a former advisor to Hamas.

Speaker 54 A federal judge blocked Suri's deportation as immigration court proceedings continue, but he still remains in ICE detention.

Speaker 26 What kind of visa was he on?

Speaker 54 He's not a green card holder. He received his his visa to continue doctoral research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's some kind of like academic or exchange visa.

Speaker 54 I don't think we know the exact type that he has.

Speaker 26 Okay. Yeah.
That would be like, it would be interesting to know if like, are they searching just through F1 visa databases?

Speaker 26 Or are they, I mean, obviously not if they're finding these green card people, but like.

Speaker 54 Well, I think specifically in this case, they're searching social media. They're not searching through their own databases.
They don't care what kind of visa he has.

Speaker 54 They're looking at this doxing campaign that's been targeted at him and his family for like over a year and using that as the basis to deport him.

Speaker 26 Right. And then being like, can we deport? He's not a citizen.
So yes, basically.

Speaker 54 Even though his wife is a citizen.

Speaker 26 Yeah. His children, presumably, therefore are also citizens.

Speaker 54 His wife, whose father is Ahmad Youssef, they can't deport her because she's a citizen, or at least they can't deport her right now. Who knows if they'll try to denaturalize in the future.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 54 But this is the easiest person to target.

Speaker 26 Yeah. And I think that's kind of what they're going for.
Like a lot of this is

Speaker 26 like the politics of owning the libs, right? It's like the politics of being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and wanting to humiliate them. Like it's not a particularly

Speaker 26 coherent policy other than like the Palestine protest made a lot of people on the right mad and they don't like migrants and that now they're using this obscure legal provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.

Speaker 54 Yeah, and using social media to identify people who have never been arrested, never been charged with anything.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 54 We're going to finish our discussion on these doxying campaigns and ICE actions targeting students after this ad break.

Speaker 26 All right, we're back.

Speaker 54 So, right now, the two main vectors for ICE detention, whether you have a green card or a visa, seems to be previous arrests or these mass doxing campaigns.

Speaker 54 Now, someone like Mahmoud Khalil was never arrested or charged with the crime, but instead has been the target of harassment from both a local campus doxing account run by Columbia professors and fellow students, as well as larger right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission.

Speaker 54 A few days before being arrested by ICE, Canary Canary Mission posted a video naming Khalil as a quote-unquote siren emoji, suspected foreign national, alert.

Speaker 54 So, what is Canary Mission, if you're lucky enough to be unaware?

Speaker 54 Since 2015, Canary Mission has been collecting and publishing personal information of people they accuse of promoting, quote, hatred of the United States, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond, unquote.

Speaker 54 Now, they have profiles for a few legitimate, like American neo-Nazis, but many profiles only cite criticism of the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza as proof of alleged anti-Semitism.

Speaker 54 And now, there is increasing evidence that the government is using websites like Canary Mission to target students, professors, and scholars for ICE deportation, essentially outsourcing intel gathering from these pro-Israel non-government organizations.

Speaker 54 A few weeks ago, Canary Mission uploaded a profile for Rumeza Oz Turk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University.

Speaker 54 They included a picture, her resume, and linked to an op-ed she co-wrote last year for her student paper, criticizing the university for its ties to Israel amidst the war in Gaza.

Speaker 54 For this, the Canary Mission claimed Azturk, quote, engaged in anti-Israel activism, unquote.

Speaker 54 Two weeks later, While walking alone to Iftar dinner for Ramadan, a plainclothes ICE agent approached Oz Turk on the sidewalk.

Speaker 54 As he grabbed her arms and wrestled away her phone, five more agents surrounded her and pulled up their gator masks as neighbors began filming the arrest.

Speaker 54 Within 24 hours, she was moved to ICE detention in Louisiana.

Speaker 54 A statement from Homeland Security claimed that HSI, Homeland Security Investigation, had determined that Oz Turk, quote, engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans, unquote.

Speaker 54 And Secretary of State Mark Rubio said, quote, we gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses, unquote.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, again, like writing an op-ed is like as central to the First Amendment as things can be, right?

Speaker 54 Yeah, there's no evidence she was even attending campus protests, let alone tearing up

Speaker 54 the university. She co-wrote an op-ed, and you should not be deported for engaging in protest on a university campus at all, right? This is blatantly unconstitutional, extremely worrying.

Speaker 54 The fact that this person just got a profile in the Canary Mission website for writing an op-ed, and then this is used as justification for her deportation is still like an even greater escalation.

Speaker 26 Yeah, like if we're talking about like this, this sort of like liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas, right?

Speaker 26 Like the way that ideas enter the marketplace, like you will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an op-ed in in your campus newspaper, right?

Speaker 26 Like that is the most like well-behaved, straight-down the middle, constitutionally protected thing, way to engage in anti-genocide activism, pro-Palestine activism.

Speaker 26 So like in a sense, this one is particularly disturbing. Like it's a frontal assault on First Amendment rights for non-citizens is what it is.
Yes.

Speaker 54 On March 24th, Canary Mission published a new section of their website titled Uncovering Foreign Nationals, which which lists the profiles of non-citizens who they believe qualify for deportation.

Speaker 26 Jesus.

Speaker 54 Another far-right pro-Israel doxing group called Batar, which even the ADL lists as an extremist group,

Speaker 54 which is wild. Batar says that they have given the Trump administration a deportation list of thousands of names, including citizens that they expect to be denaturalized.

Speaker 54 People like Mahmoudou Tal and Mahmoud Khalil have been targeted by both of these organizations.

Speaker 26 People will be familiar with, I don't know if it's Bitar or Bitar, but like you probably have seen videos of them on campus trying to hand pages to people.

Speaker 54 Pagers.

Speaker 26 Yeah, like

Speaker 54 making light of the pager attack Israel did.

Speaker 26 I mean,

Speaker 26 making a threat.

Speaker 54 Sure.

Speaker 26 Like if you're going to come onto a campus and make a fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism,

Speaker 26 I mean, the hypocrisy is kind of the point.

Speaker 54 Or even just like, you know, quote-unquote, celebrating the deaths of people, right?

Speaker 26 Yeah, right. Like, like mocking this attack, which killed children, which, you know,

Speaker 26 crippled people. It's just disgusting.
It's like just abhorrent.

Speaker 26 They seem to get a lot of attention online because they do the thing where they go up to people and say deliberately provocative things and then film their reactions, right?

Speaker 26 They're kind of IRL trolling.

Speaker 54 The past week, ICE actions against students have seemingly accelerated.

Speaker 54 Ali Riza Daruti, a doctoral student from Iran studying at the University of Alabama, was arrested by ICE on March 25th in the middle of the night at his off-campus apartment.

Speaker 54 Daruti's entry visa expired, but he was allowed to stay in the States as he still maintained his student status. Yeah.
It's unknown why exactly he was targeted.

Speaker 54 He has no ties to protests or any notable online footprint.

Speaker 26 It could be his ethnic origin, right, Leg.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it could be his name, right yeah but that we should explain the status thing a bit more for people who aren't familiar so like sure your status is when you're in good standing with the university so normally that means you need to be enrolled in 12 credits per you might be on semesters you might be on quarters i don't think it usually matters but you have to there's a minimum course load it may be different for different systems i don't know You'd also need to be in good standing in terms of like not late on your fees, right?

Speaker 26 Your tuition fees, that kind of stuff, right? Not in any

Speaker 26 you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university for any actions that you've taken, that kind of thing.

Speaker 26 It means you are currently a student at the university, basically.

Speaker 26 The only time this normally affects international students that I'm aware of, like as a person who now teaches students, is like they can't drop below a certain course load when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain course load to either focus on

Speaker 26 they might have like a research position they might be doing other stuff on campus like taing right sometimes that taing counts towards their course load sometimes it doesn't but it can affect things like that.

Speaker 26 But generally, it would be the university that would update that status, right? That would notify US customs and immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that.

Speaker 26 If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what happened here, right? No.

Speaker 54 Simply his entry visa expired. So if he left the country, he then would have to get another visa to get back.

Speaker 54 But he can stay as long as he still has his valid student status.

Speaker 54 so not only is ice trying to revoke these like visas but they're trying to essentially say that by revoking these visas they are also attempting to strip them of their student status which is like a separate like step uh these things can get kind of very very blurry though yeah like i don't quite know how that works in terms of like are ice supposed to be able to i don't think it hugely matters at this point technically the state department does have that ability but it's under the same like foreign policy risk designation Okay.

Speaker 54 And they'll justify it by saying, well, his visa already expired, so we're just removing him because his visa expired, even though that's not really how this works.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and they don't have to remove him for that reason. But yeah, in this case, I guess they're going for something else.

Speaker 54 No, because the University of Alabama did not elect to rescind his student status. He was a student in good standing.
Yeah. And thus legally allowed in the United States.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, like everyone else here. He hadn't done anything that would, under normal circumstances, lead to him having any interactions with USCIS.

Speaker 54 Just this last week, ICE detained a University of Minnesota grad student at their off-campus housing.

Speaker 54 The university released a statement saying that they had no prior knowledge of this incident and had not shared any information with federal authorities. This person's name is still not released.

Speaker 54 Last week, a student at the Southern Illinois University had their visa revoked. The school administration told their college paper that the university has no role in the visa revocation process.

Speaker 54 The Illinois governor's office is working with schools across the state to, quote, ensure they are being vigilant about what's happening on their respective campuses.

Speaker 54 The governor's team has asked universities to communicate with international students about the general resources available to them through the institution.

Speaker 54 In addition, we have suggested that they connect impacted students with legal resources that have been in place for several years, unquote, according to a statement sent to the university paper, the Daily Egyptian.

Speaker 54 Tina Sickinger, which is

Speaker 54 a very cool name, the school's director of international student and scholar services, sent an email to the international student body of Southern Illinois University, advising them to carry photocopies of immigration documents with them at all times, as well as proof of enrollment and records of U.S.

Speaker 54 residences. The email recommended that students, quote, use caution on social media and exercise discretion when participating in political demonstrations or protests, unquote.

Speaker 54 Warning that though protests should be protected speech, quote, such activities can sometimes be misinterpreted and may carry risks to your immigration status, unquote.

Speaker 54 Unfortunately, I think this is the university trying to look out for these students.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that's the best you could expect from them, really.

Speaker 54 And they are providing like legal resources to these students, but they're essentially saying, like, you shouldn't post anything or do any protests because then ICE might come kidnap you. Yeah.

Speaker 54 Which is just a fucked up situation to be in. And, like,

Speaker 54 they don't have like any other ability to like stop this right now. I am, I am curious what Pritzker is going to continue to do here, though.

Speaker 26 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 26 none of what they've said is like wrong. It's kind of what you can expect from the university.
The best you can expect from the university, really, is like, hey, we've noticed it's happening.

Speaker 54 So that is the situation as it currently stands. I do have one final tidbit here just that highlights the absurdity of this whole situation.

Speaker 54 On March 24th, a lawsuit on behalf of Israeli Columbia students and relatives of Israeli October 7th victims was filed against Colombia Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and individual Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 54 The lawsuit alleges that these Colombia groups and students are the domestic propaganda arm of Hamas, and even even claims that these groups had advanced notice that the October 7th attack was going to take place.

Speaker 26 Oh, come on.

Speaker 54 So the plan was kept secret among Hamas's own political allies in the region. Yeah.

Speaker 54 But they gave an Ivy League university in New York City

Speaker 26 tip off. They just let him know what was coming.

Speaker 54 Completely absurd.

Speaker 26 Yeah, absolutely. Like the IDF completely failed to see this coming, right? But not the folks at the Ivy League universities who were ready and waiting.

Speaker 54 Hamas didn't tell the Houthis. They didn't tell Iran.
They didn't tell Hezbollah.

Speaker 26 Didn't tell Hezbollah.

Speaker 54 But they told student activist groups in New York City at the Columbia University campus.

Speaker 26 Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. Like

Speaker 26 I eagerly await this court case, I guess, to see what evidence they have of this.

Speaker 26 The evidence is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.

Speaker 54 Some of the quote-unquote evidence that they allege is that some of these activist accounts had renewed activity in October of 2023, like before the attack happened.

Speaker 54 But this is just a simple coincidence. Obviously, these people did not have a heads up that the October 7th attack was going to take place.

Speaker 54 The lawsuit also argues that protest activity is not First Amendment protected speech, but in fact, quote, substantial assistance in the form of propaganda and recruiting services and in coordination with a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 54 Again, alleging there is some kind of communication between Hamas and student activists in New York City.

Speaker 26 Yeah, this is ludicrous. Like one of the reasons that maybe we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is that Hamas is a listed foreign terrorist organization.

Speaker 26 Many other groups are, and lots of groups in that part of the world are, but like, it's just a bigger stick to waive, I guess, material aid, No one has been actually accused of material aid to a foreign terrorist organization, as far as I'm aware.

Speaker 26 But, like, that is kind of the sort of stick that they're waiving, right? That is the thing that they're alleging.

Speaker 54 I will end us with just this kind of final note.

Speaker 54 Now, while there are little signs that this would happen at a scale this large and this focused under a democratic president, a degree of consent for this type of targeting was manufactured the past year as it relates to Palestine protests, with some liberals and democratic politicians associating activists as pro-Hamas terrorists.

Speaker 54 And this is the consequence of that public perception building and the consent being manufactured for that framing.

Speaker 54 And now that the even more evil side is in charge, they can take that justification and run with it way further than what a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris would have done.

Speaker 54 So it is far worse, but it's not in a political bubble.

Speaker 54 This has been like a growing project for the past few years.

Speaker 26 There was no point at which the Biden administration really like effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech. Yeah.
We may not like it, but it is central to the Bill of Rights.

Speaker 26 It's central to what America is supposed to be about.

Speaker 54 They never defended the constitutionality of this speech. Yeah.
Nor would they have intervened to stop the deportation of someone like Tall if Cornell decided to revoke his status, right?

Speaker 26 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 54 I don't think.

Speaker 54 the Biden administration or a Kamala-Harris administration would be directing these universities to take that action themselves, nor would they be, I think, revoking student visas at scale like this.

Speaker 54 No. But they would have let ICE do the stuff that ICE does if universities themselves elect to remove student visas or unenroll these students.

Speaker 54 And like a degree of the complacency here is placed on the actual university administrations, the university staff who have been vilifying these protesters for the past two years.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and I mean, in some cases, right? Like I'm thinking of one of Columbia, like professors have got away with things which are absolutely unacceptable and like 100%

Speaker 26 in some violation of your agreement with the university as a member of the faculty, like doxing your students, photographing students without their consent, following students around, like absolutely unacceptable.

Speaker 26 Like in any other context, that you would be immediately shit canned for that.

Speaker 26 Like really, really, the only reason you can lose 10 years seemingly is being a fucking creep to students or stealing a lot of money.

Speaker 26 And like universities did allow that for more than a year under the Biden administration. And like we're seeing the consequences of that now.

Speaker 54 It's also worth noting that since I've had to quote from so many government statements this episode, the Trump admin is continuing to correlate any expression of sympathy or solidarity with Palestine as explicit support for Hamas.

Speaker 54 Basically, anything you say that's critical of the Israeli government, its actions in Gaza, are being interpreted by the Trump administration as anti-Semitism and support for the October 7th massacre.

Speaker 54 This is a false equivalency. What the government alleges should not be automatically taken as the truth.

Speaker 54 These tactics have been used for years to broadly smear pro-Palestine activists while also hurting anti-Zionist Jews.

Speaker 54 And I guess, like, finally, We are not necessarily endorsing every single thing that every single one of these students has said.

Speaker 54 We do not necessarily agree with the framing of every single sentence that they have said.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, we don't know everything that they've said.

Speaker 54 We can, yeah, exactly. This is like completely separate to that.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it doesn't matter. Like, we are defending their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.
Correct.

Speaker 54 No matter what they're saying, no matter if they have opinions on Hamas that differ from ours, no matter what they are saying at a campus protest, it should not result in ICE targeting them and hunting them down and forcing students to attend sit-in protests into hiding hiding to defend their own rights and to keep their green cards.

Speaker 54 This is like a completely absurd and like blatantly fascist to use the now overused word, frankly, but this is like this is this is what that is.

Speaker 54 If this was happening in China, this was happening in Russia, in other countries, people would be very, very quick to call out.

Speaker 26 I mean, this does happen in Russia, right? People

Speaker 26 just quick to call it out. Yeah, yeah.
And the State Department of this country has called it out, right? Like,

Speaker 26 rightly, like, I don't agree with everything the State Department does, but I do agree with them on that. Like,

Speaker 26 yeah, and I think this is like, I don't know, if you find yourself having a discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can find something that they disagree with the government on or have disagreed with the government on.

Speaker 26 And like, this hurts every single one of us, right? Like, everyone's right to freedom of speech is challenged when someone's right to freedom of speech is challenged.

Speaker 26 And like, I think that is the way to approach this.

Speaker 26 It doesn't really matter if the people whose speech is being challenged right now, their speech is if it's odious to us, if it's something that we don't agree with, like that isn't what's at stake.

Speaker 26 What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without government consequences.

Speaker 54 Well, I think that does it for us today. At it could happen here.

Speaker 54 We will continue to report on the targeting of students, scholars, and professors and immigrants in general as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts.

Speaker 54 If you would like to contact us about these topics, we have an encrypted email address at coolzone tips at proton.me. It is end-to-end encrypted.

Speaker 54 So if you use another encrypted email service or another Proton mail account to send the email, only then is it encrypted.

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Speaker 16 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 17 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 18 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 19 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 20 We got clear facts.

Speaker 21 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 23 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 24 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 25 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 23 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 55 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 54 This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling economic world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 54 I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong. It is Liberation Day in America, everyone.

Speaker 26 How do you feel? I feel liberated. Free at last.
Free at last. Thank God Almighty.
We are free at last for being able to afford things. I am so,

Speaker 54 so liberated right now.

Speaker 26 Unchained from the burden of having money. Yes, yes.
Well, as the Buddhists say, you know, freeing yourself from attachment is really the path to nirvana.

Speaker 54 Trump really is our first Buddhist president.

Speaker 26 He is. He is.

Speaker 26 One thing they say about him. Yeah, that's right.
He may be the new Dalai Lama. Who can say? The Dalai Lama.
And he hasn't. But yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 And the priests who look for him after he dies when he comes back.

Speaker 26 This guy's. Unfortunately, they're probably on a fucking travel ban list now.
Oh my God. There's, I mean, pretty good chance they're in ICE custody at the moment.

Speaker 26 If I understand Buddhism.

Speaker 54 Well, I think we should just get right to the most pressing news, which is line go down.

Speaker 26 Line is on its way down.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 Line in free fold currently. Yeah.

Speaker 26 It's funny because they chose, they were supposed to initially, I think it was like going to be 3 p.m.

Speaker 26 or something, EST, 2 or 3 was the initial time they wanted to announce this, which would have given... the stock market a couple of hours.

Speaker 54 On April 2nd, right? Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah, on April 2nd. It would have given it.
On Liberation on Liberation Day. There would have been a couple hours for it to

Speaker 26 take effect. And they attempted to mitigate this, I guess, in the hope that we would all get over it overnight.
We would forget

Speaker 26 some other shit before.

Speaker 26 Before the new prices even came in, we'd be like, ah, no, I'm on to the next thing.

Speaker 26 But the Dow and the NASDAQ all plunged because it's clear if the president is like... deliberately shifting an event to not hurt the stock market, that's going to hurt the stock market.
You know?

Speaker 26 Yeah. yeah.
It's good when you see a 90-degree angle on the old stock market graph. That's when you know someone's really crushing it in the economic department.

Speaker 26 And so far, we're recording this a little afternoon on Thursday, April the 3rd.

Speaker 26 So just in the course of today, major stock indexes have dropped by about 5.6%, which means about $2.7 trillion in market value, which will be the largest decline since March of 2020. Sick.

Speaker 26 So we are, it is looking like this is going to be at the very least a stock market decline in line with the one that came as a result of the global pandemic.

Speaker 26 With the noted caveat that there's really no reason to believe it will get better at any point. Yeah, you can already vaccinate against stupid.

Speaker 54 I'm not qualified to give financial advice, but I think everyone should pull out your 401k right now. Go to the bank, withdraw all your money, all of it.

Speaker 26 Empty your accounts, every bit of it. Put it into the worst-tasting survival foods.
And you're going to want to buy Keltex, lots of Keltex, in a caliber no one else has

Speaker 26 5'7. Yeah, get the one that doesn't take migration.

Speaker 26 32 ACP. I want the 32 ACP.
That's it. That's it.
James, everyone buy 32 ACP handgun. Yeah, it has succeeded in ending one world war, and it won't let us down.

Speaker 26 We call that doing a Hitler, but in a good way. Someone here has to be vaguely responsible and say, don't fucking do that.
Do none of those things. Zero.
Zero of those things. To your accounts.

Speaker 26 Get hard cash. Yeah, yeah.
Mark Cuban told people to do that. Absolutely not.
Mia endorses Reagan coin as the exclusive safe source of diamond savings.

Speaker 26 You're going to want to put every dime you've got in pressed Latinum. Now, I know that that's the currency from Star Trek and does not exist.
Nevertheless, cancel your accounts. Put it all in Latinum.

Speaker 54 I mean, it's going to exist in like, what, like 40 years per timeline?

Speaker 26 It's not already a meme coin 10 minutes after this calendar. It's more stable than your 401k right now.
You can be rich just in time for money to stop being a thing. There you go.
There you go.

Speaker 26 This is why we're launching CoolZone Coin, guys.

Speaker 54 I've been saying this for years.

Speaker 26 It's redeemable for whatever money the Ferengi use when they exist.

Speaker 54 We should probably talk about why the stock market is doing poorly. So I think, Robert, you can handle this segue.

Speaker 26 Well, you know,

Speaker 26 wait, what is that? Oh my god, is that Mia Wong's theme music? By God, Tyree don't like it.

Speaker 26 Rocky Caspar. Rocky Caspa.
Tyre don't like it.

Speaker 26 Rocky Caspar. Rocky Caspa.

Speaker 26 Oh,

Speaker 26 God. That was a great purchase, you guys.
I mean, can we all agree? Worth every penny. It really was.
The best financial purchase we've made

Speaker 54 is the Tariff Talk theme song.

Speaker 26 We're going to get so much mileage out of that thing. It's an unbelievable song.

Speaker 26 We're going to be using this fucker for years.

Speaker 26 At least something good came of this.

Speaker 26 When you're struggling to get by with your family, just remember the song.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, this will keep you warm as you huddle around a barrel waiting for the new police, which are just called murder police, to reach your shanty town.

Speaker 26 Anyway, yeah.

Speaker 26 Let us talk tariffs. Power, sections of the left have long argued, is in logistics.

Speaker 26 It was logistics that allowed the capitalists of the 1970s and 80s to crush the labor movement by enacting the so-called spatial fix to the crisis of capitalism.

Speaker 26 By shifting production from countries where workers' movements were strong to countries where violence against workers was easier and workers were thus poorer and more exploited, CEOs could pit workers against each other in an endless race to the bottom.

Speaker 26 These practices became known as offshoring, infused with the international attack on unions and the power of workers heralded in the U.S. by Reagan.

Speaker 26 Together, they crushed the the workers' movement and implemented neoliberal austerity throughout the globe through a regime that is colloquially known as free trade.

Speaker 26 Now, there was, of course, resistance to this. Maybe most famously the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas in 1994 on the day the NAFTA went into effect.

Speaker 26 But for all of the victories and all of the spaces that were carved out, it is still the CEOs, the bosses, and the capitalists who rule the world.

Speaker 26 However, in the wake of their defeat, sections of the working class came to see their own power as a product of the nation, of masculinity, of American jobs for American workers.

Speaker 26 In this view, you didn't need to form a union, you didn't need to organize, you didn't need to fight the bosses who exploit you.

Speaker 26 All you needed to do for the high-paying blue-collar jobs of the 1960s to return was getting rid of the immigrants and bring jobs back home.

Speaker 26 This American nationalist ideology was extremely useful to the ruling class.

Speaker 26 It allowed them to turn the rhetoric of the old base of the workers' movement into a fascist movement, which they could then use to smash any genuine worker struggle and then ride to power to impose more brutal austerity and more pro-capitalist reforms to, in their view, make it impossible for their power ever to be challenged again.

Speaker 26 But a strange thing happened.

Speaker 26 In the nationalism bred by the defeat of the workers' movement, the human personifications of the capitalist bubble economy in Donald Trump and Elon Musk have come to see their own victory as defeat.

Speaker 26 They became convinced that the trade deficits, which from a capitalist perspective simply do not matter as long as companies are making money. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yes, they don't matter for shit.

Speaker 26 Who gives a fuck? What you are calling a trade deficit is us getting things we want from people. Like, yeah, it's buying stuff.
Like,

Speaker 26 I saw a good post. It was like, you don't have a trade deficit with your dentist.
You just pay them to fix your teeth. Like, yeah,

Speaker 26 I was told at one point in this nation's greatest living previous moment of crisis that what we needed to do was go buy things to make it better.

Speaker 26 Not anymore, buddy. Nope.

Speaker 26 Because because these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the cadre of weird white nationalist fanatics that surround them have absolutely convinced themselves that if you have a trade deficit, you are being ripped off by foreigners.

Speaker 26 Yep. Yep.
And so they concluded that we needed to put tariffs on fucking all of the rest of the world in order to bring American jobs back to Americans.

Speaker 26 A new national autarky for a fascist world.

Speaker 26 Now, the ruling class, all the capitalists, all these fucking goddamn Goldman Sachs motherfucker financial analysts, all of these CMBC dipshits, all of these fucking, all these motherfuckers at BlackRock and all of the global hedge funds and all of these, all these motherfuckers, all of the tech dipshits, all of the people who backed Trump to a hilt simply assumed that none of these tariffs would ever happen, that it was all campaign bluster, that he was lying out of his ass.

Speaker 26 And, you know, Obama, again, I've said this before, ran on abolishing NAFTA. So there was, you know, and what the fuck ever came from that, right?

Speaker 26 We, of course, fucking tried to tell them otherwise. We tried to tell them that they could not fucking control the fascist beast, that one day it would rise to consume them all along with us.

Speaker 26 They didn't care. They backed Trump anyways because they thought they would get fucking tax breaks.
And now, Liberation Day is here. Don't forget crypto.
They were really bullish on that.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 All of these motherfuckers, they really thought that Trump was going to fucking, that literally all Trump was going to do was punish the transgenders, get rid of woke, and give them tax cuts.

Speaker 26 Yep.

Speaker 26 And now the tariff walls have gone up. The old world is dead.
The new world struggles to be born.

Speaker 54 Now is the time of monsters. Now we're in what I'm referring to as the Chinese century.
I came up with this this week on my own. Oh, wow.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Good.
Now, that's of, that's, of course, named after Chinatown in San Francisco, which Garrison is very bullish about.

Speaker 26 Positive real estate developments there. You're big into real estate.
People don't know that. Chinese real estate, absolutely where you want to be right now,

Speaker 26 both in Chinatown and in actual China. You put all your money into Chinese real estate.
The bubble can't pop a second time. It can only go back up.

Speaker 26 It does. There were so many enemies on the verge of defeat in the traditional U.S.
geopolitical sense. China's economy was doing great.
Russia could have been easily pushed to collapse.

Speaker 26 And we were just like, no, no, no, you know what's better? We're going to shoot ourselves right in the dick.

Speaker 26 We've snatched defeat from the jaws of shoot ourselves in a dick with a bullet that Venmos both of you guys.

Speaker 26 It's great. We dug up the Cold War, resurrected it, and then lost.
Yeah, just to lose. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 It's beautiful. You can't.
Yeah, it's sort of like Michael Jackson coming back for Space Jam.

Speaker 26 If he had immediately like, fucking thrown a basketball so hard into Bugs Bunny's skull that it put him at traction. I'm sorry.
Wait, did you just say Michael Jackson? No, Jordan. Didn't I say Jordan?

Speaker 26 You just said Jackson. You definitely did.
Yes, okay. You know, leave it in.
Different, different movie, maybe better. You know, he always, he always performed well around kids.
So,

Speaker 26 good God.

Speaker 54 I love Space Jam.

Speaker 26 It's a good movie.

Speaker 26 Oh, Garrison, it's forever tainted now. So let's talk about the nature of what's actually going down with these tariffs.
Yeah, let's get to the tariffs. Terrible.
Terrifable. Terrifable.

Speaker 26 That's right, Garrison. Nope.
Yeah, so, okay, so

Speaker 26 let me just read off some of the ones that are going to fuck everyone. Great.
54% tariff on all goods from China. This is a 34% tariff that is being added on to the 20% tariff that was already on.

Speaker 26 There is a 20% tariff on all goods from the EU, 46% on Vietnam, which is... Fucking devastating because there's a huge amount of capital from China.

Speaker 26 Also, speaking of the China panic, our strongest geopolitical ally in the region,

Speaker 26 In terms of having a military, right?

Speaker 26 Yeah, a country that we've been discussing going to war for quite recently.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Like we, we just, we, we have literally, and this is, this is the funny thing about all of these.
Vicki Osawa pointed this out.

Speaker 26 The more closely allied with the U.S., the more fucked you got by these.

Speaker 26 It's such a weird move. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
24% tariff on Japan. What is it? Like 80 or 90% on fucking Cambodia? Why? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 So

Speaker 26 we'll get to why in a second. I want to also cover, so there's, there's a 37% tariff on Bangladesh, which is going to be devastating for, I mean, a lot of the textile imports.

Speaker 26 25% on South Korea. So fucking rip you ever getting a phone again.
32% on Taiwan. So rip the entire tech industry.

Speaker 26 Fucking rip Taiwan too.

Speaker 26 These tariffs are going to devastate the international economy. Okay, I have been angry about this since the fucking election.
People have been calling these tariffs a tax. That is just no

Speaker 26 it is not what's happening here this is like calling it a tax is to completely underplay how serious this is this is not a fucking tax this is the wholesale destruction of entire industries and some of these industries like fast fashion which you know has always been undergirded by the exploitation of workers from china to bangladesh and also like in the us too but like you know fuck those things whatever they never needed to exist fuck them but like you know like you're probably not gonna be able to fucking buy board games anymore because they're gonna be too expensive to produce oh it's gonna shatter games like tabletop gaming.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's done.
Like the economy as we knew it does not exist as of like this morning, right?

Speaker 26 Everything that we've known about how this thing works is fucking done. And some of these are just, you know, like unbelievably hideously cruel.
So there's, for example, a 44% tariff on Myanmar,

Speaker 26 which, you know, is a country, yeah, devastated by a horrific war, waged by a brutal dictatorship, and also fucking suffering from a catastrophic earthquake.

Speaker 26 And we're like, fuck you, eat shit, 44% tariff. Also embargoed, no, like we've we've seized their government assets in the United States.

Speaker 26 Yep. Yeah, there's one on like Diego Garcia, for instance.
Yes, there's one, it's on the British Indian Ocean territory, which collective population is primarily U.S. soldiers.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Like Christmas Island is on there. Like, yeah.
You know, and there's one more that I want to talk about, which is that.

Speaker 26 So Sri Lanka has been suffering from an unbelievably devastating series of economic crises, and they're getting hit with a 44% fucking tariff in a moment when like they already haven't had enough dollars to fucking import fuel for their economy to function.

Speaker 26 So this is going to be devastating, not just for us, but for a whole bunch of people across the world.

Speaker 26 So this is the other aspect of this too that's really fucking brutal is that for the U.S., right, we don't need other countries' money.

Speaker 26 We don't need to have piles of any other country's money around, right? We can just buy things in American dollars. But if you are Sri Lanka, you need American dollars to buy oil.
Yes.

Speaker 26 There are so many fucking things that you could only buy in American dollars.

Speaker 26 And when these tariffs go up, when the prices increase, and when they can't fucking sell their stuff, that means that they don't have dollars.

Speaker 26 And that means that they can't get access to a whole bunch of the vital commodities that they need to survive. And this is just going to fucking devastate them.

Speaker 26 And I think that's been an angle that I really wanted to make sure we talked about because.

Speaker 26 It's been, I haven't seen any fucking mention of it at all, even though those are the people who are going to suffer the most from this are people who are already completely on the fucking edge, whose economies have already been collapsed, who've already been so brutally exploited by these same fucking people, and they're just fucked.

Speaker 26 Yep. You know, we always say we know like tarifs, but we do like these ads.

Speaker 26 We're back. I don't feel great about that, but

Speaker 26 now there is a funny part of all of this.

Speaker 26 There is some fun here. Oh, good.
Which is, okay, so what if the big questions about the tariffs was, how are they going to calculate the tariffs on all of these countries, right?

Speaker 26 Because they were saying that their tariffs were going to be a projection of like currency manipulation and like value-added taxes and like all of these

Speaker 26 subsidies to vital industries.

Speaker 26 And, you know, and the question again was like, literally, how can they possibly calculate the tariff rates of hundreds of different countries and taking into account all of these things, right?

Speaker 26 Now, the news that had been leaking a couple of weeks ago was that they were going to do brackets what they actually appear to have done is ask chat gpt

Speaker 26 no it's entirely people have like reverse engineered the prompts it's almost directly just to chat g probably there's a couple different engines that gave almost identical responses but it's probably it's amazing that they're doing the same as like my undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit and everything

Speaker 26 your undergraduate spends a little more time trying to hide it most of them are smart enough to

Speaker 26 pad it a little bit so that you can't put a prompt into chat GPT and find it. Yeah.
So my lowest effort undergrads.

Speaker 26 I want to give a lot of credit to the economist James Surocki, who's the guy who figured out their formula.

Speaker 26 So their formula, and this is drawing of stuff from the front, I mean, I saw it from James first.

Speaker 26 So their formula is literally just you take a country's trade deficit with the U.S. And it's also important to note here that they're not counting services.
They're only counting goods.

Speaker 26 Right. When again,

Speaker 26 if you're missing the products and just getting in services, that's half the economy, as I understand it.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, that's it's and especially for the U.S., which provides an enormous number of services, you know.

Speaker 26 But these people are fucking fascist, and so they don't think that like services are fucking real, right?

Speaker 26 It's the same ideology that undergirds the whole thing about like service workers not being fucking real workers. Literally, the only real job is that one video of a guy wrestling with an oil derrick.

Speaker 26 Yes, that is the only reality. That's the only

Speaker 26 manager, and he he was just doing that for the video and was doing it very wrong you gotta rub some mud on you you gotta get you gotta take some pieces of metal

Speaker 26 and move them around to where they're not supposed to go that's that's when you're a real labor that's labor yeah that's working only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots everything else well and and and that's and that's the thing though because like their image of the world is is the fascist image of the world and the fascist image of the world like labor is just masculinity yeah yeah and that's like that's why they're doing it like this and so you know and so so the the the fascists have asked ChatGPT

Speaker 26 how to do tariffs. And what they got is, again, so they take the country's trade deficit and divide it by their total exports to the U.S.

Speaker 26 Now, this is nothing, right? Like in economic terms. No, that's not how you do anything.
This is, this is not a real thing.

Speaker 26 Like, this is like trying to measure someone's height by like dividing their favorite number by the average radius of an apple. Like, it's literally nothing.

Speaker 26 You know, what are we, what are you coming after me here?

Speaker 26 Look, just because I do math a little differently. Okay.

Speaker 26 There is no scientific basis, Robert, for measuring height by dividing favorite number by apple radius. We simply must accept the truth of science.

Speaker 26 That's what you say, Joe Rogan, and I feel differently.

Speaker 54 The dictatorship of ChatGPT is just.

Speaker 26 It's so bleak. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 54 It's just shit.

Speaker 26 They asked ChatGPT. It's a mix of they don't actually care or think this will affect them.
And also, they legitimately think it's the smartest person in the world. Yeah.
Yeah. It's smarter than them.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 26 Maybe a good thing, but not in this instance.

Speaker 26 Well, and you can, you can, you can tell the extent to which they were relying on this and didn't calculate themselves because so after

Speaker 26 it started to spread that this is just how they were doing it, after James Surocki like calculated it, the White House said, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, no, no, no, no, that's not right.

Speaker 26 We use an actual complex formula. And so they released a fake formula.

Speaker 26 But the thing about the formula, right, is that the formula is just, it is literally just trade deficit divided by total exports, but they threw threw in two random variables as Greek letters.

Speaker 26 But there's one on the top, and there's one in the numerator, one in the denominator, and they're the same, so they cancel each other out. That sounds right to me.

Speaker 54 See, that's how you know they're smart, is because they're using Greek letters.

Speaker 26 Yep.

Speaker 26 Which Greek letters did they use, and which person's fraternity does it represent? I don't even speak Greek letters, so they are. They must be smarter than me.
You know what? I rescind my complaints.

Speaker 26 This is how the economy dies, not through tragedy, but through farce. It's both.

Speaker 26 It's both. It's both.
Yeah, tragy farce, I think, is what Marx called it. A lot of people are going to die.

Speaker 26 No, and I mean, like, my actual serious line on this is that this is the great double bind of capitalism, is that we are all reliant simultaneously, we are reliant for our survival on the same economy that will make us all homeless, right?

Speaker 26 It is the same economy that we need to fucking eat every single day.

Speaker 26 That even in good times, this economy fucking strips from us the value of the labor we produce and hands us back a bunch of fucking scraps that pay for not enough of anything that we need.

Speaker 26 So even as our enemies, you know, tear apart the system that exploits us, we are the fucking ones who's going to suffer. Neoliberalism finally has in Trump produced its own gravedigger.

Speaker 26 And our fucking job and the job of every single one of us and every single person listening to this show is to make sure that we also aren't the ones thrown into this fucking grave.

Speaker 26 And this is going to require a kind of organizing that is in some ways like, but in some ways unlike anything we've done before.

Speaker 26 We're about to experience a level of unbelievable economic chaos that we sort of saw during 2020, but during 2020, there was, you know, as bad as everything got, the state stepped in and decided to do welfare reforms, right?

Speaker 26 Like they gave people a bunch of fucking money. Yeah.
And it wasn't enough, but they did it. Now, none of that shit.
We are the only people who are going to be able to keep each other alive.

Speaker 26 And that's what we have to be doing right now is we have to be keeping each other alive until we are organized enough and we are powerful enough to fucking run these people out so they can't ever fuck us again like this.

Speaker 54 So we We can resurrect neoliberal globalism. We can restore free trade.
That's right.

Speaker 26 That's right.

Speaker 26 Bring it back to the Clinton era. Oh, God.

Speaker 26 One last thing we should mention is that this has already united the entire world against us effectively.

Speaker 26 People, countries who have never worked together before in their entire existence are working together.

Speaker 26 And unfortunately, polls also show Americans can distrust or the tendency to view like Canadians and the EU as enemies is rising both for Republicans and Democrats. Yeah.
So that's great.

Speaker 26 That's great. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 And also, you know, and like the thing, the thing, the other thing that we have to do here, and this is, this is literally our responsibility on this podcast and also the responsibility of like fucking everyone who is having conversations with another person is that this is entirely Trump's fault.

Speaker 26 He fucking did this. Like, oh, yeah.
This is not fucking the EU or whatever the fuck, whoever's doing retaliatory show. Yeah, this is, this is no one else ever wanted this.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Yeah.
No, like the people who put Trump in power didn't want this. This is just him.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 26 so. Yeah.
The

Speaker 26 actual solution to this is all of us running this fucker out and not us getting drawn into his fucking bullshit wars with Canada or Greenland or whatever the fuck country he decides to invade in the next like year.

Speaker 54 Is that all for tariff talk? Yeah, that's all we got on the tariff.

Speaker 26 I don't know what else to say. I mean, I just, I'm just looking at the numbers right now, where the Dow Industrial is down to 1,500 points since the start of the day.
So

Speaker 26 things are looking very good.

Speaker 26 All of the lines, like if you look at the way in which the line went down, there's like

Speaker 26 it's just this direct vertical drop on the third.

Speaker 26 It's shocking. No, it is a 90-degree angle.
It is legitimately, if you set the Google Stock Viewer thing to a one-day view, the drop is so shocking that it looks like it just started down. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 It prompts you to turn your phone in the other direction. I've never seen anything like it, but I guess no one has.
Yeah. No, I mean, some of us, I guess, people are still alive in the 1930s.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 26 Woody Guthrie has. His fucking grandma, I guess.
Like.

Speaker 26 Yeah. It's great.
We did it in the 1930s. It was bad then, and it's bad now.

Speaker 54 Well,

Speaker 54 now that we got those pesky tariffs out of the way, let's talk about the actual most important thing to happen this week in the news.

Speaker 54 New Jersey Senator Corey Booker has broken the record for the longest

Speaker 54 25 hours and five minutes.

Speaker 26 Yeah, that's horrible.

Speaker 54 Beating Strom Thurman's filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill by 46 minutes. We did it, folks.

Speaker 26 Excellent.

Speaker 26 Outstanding. Good.
I'm just checking on our Wall Street bets and they're having a real one today. That's pretty fun.

Speaker 26 I will say, I will say that the thing about the Booker one, so if you were writing a parody of the Democratic Party, you would write that Corey Booker did this and like did this filibuster and then immediately turned around and voted yes for a cloture vote to allow Trump to appoint another nominee.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's exactly what they did.

Speaker 26 Yeah. We can't even parody.
You can't parody them. It's beyond parody.

Speaker 26 It's astounding. It's astonishing.

Speaker 54 It's not even a filibuster. He's not filibustering anything.

Speaker 26 He didn't actively stop anything happening other than people not paying attention to him.

Speaker 26 I got a response from someone being like, well, you know, they didn't get to do anything on Monday. And I was like, yeah, they weren't really planning on it.
And things continued as normal Tuesday.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, and here's the thing about that, right? Like, do you know how many Democrats there are in the Senate?

Speaker 26 Do you know how many hours you could filibuster them for if you were actually determined to fucking do this? And on how many different things?

Speaker 54 If we had a rotating series of Democrats.

Speaker 26 Yeah, sure. If you tag teamed it.
Yeah, but they're not. They're They're not willing to fucking do it.
No, and they'd be stopped eventually.

Speaker 26 The Republicans would do something fucked up to stop it, but at least you'd have tried. Yeah, yeah.
And people would maybe take some fucking energy from that.

Speaker 26 And even if you were going to do this as a fucking show vote thing, you could have voted no on the cloture motion to like fucking do the, to like appoint the next nominee.

Speaker 26 They're just like, no, fuck you.

Speaker 54 I mean, the fact that Chuck Schumer caved on. the Republican budget from a few weeks ago and secretly got a number of Democratic senators to switch their votes to make it pass.

Speaker 54 And no one did this for that, which previously Democrats were talking about this budget bill, like it's the worst thing to ever happen because it is a bad bill.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's really bad.

Speaker 54 And then they just caved last minute, or specifically Schumer and the people he talked to caved.

Speaker 54 And Schumer definitely would not have been in supportive of Booker doing something like this for that bill.

Speaker 54 But now Schumer gets to applaud along as Booker delivers a 25-hour, maybe like well-orated speech.

Speaker 26 No, it was a very well-written speech. Like, technically, it was good, but that didn't matter.

Speaker 54 It's just this pure show of like symbolic theater.

Speaker 26 Yeah, what's the point? It's like if a congressperson got out and conducted like a perfect rendition of

Speaker 26 the Nutcracker symphony of like the ballet portion of that on their own in front of like the Capitol building, like, well, that's impressive. It's spectacle.

Speaker 26 Like, you're clearly very good at what you're doing, but it didn't change anything. Like, it had no impact on the problems, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 Like, you're good. I'll give you that.
Corey Booker can deliver a fucking speech, but that was really not what I was looking for.

Speaker 26 Fiddling impressively while Rome burns. Thanks, Corey.

Speaker 26 Yeah, and every single moment that Trump is in power, the way that they fucking

Speaker 26 just rolled over for him looks worse and worse. He acknowledged it in the speech.

Speaker 26 He said, I failed, and so did we. We didn't rise to the moment and we let this horrible thing happen.

Speaker 26 Which I, even I got a little briefly, oh shit, maybe he actually recognizes like, no, okay.

Speaker 54 Well, because it took him like 20 hours to like break emotionally to the point where he could admit that to himself and now

Speaker 26 his deep, deep, deep failure.

Speaker 54 Yeah, like, but like it took having your brain be shattered by this like pretty impressive physical act that like destroys your body, soul, and spirit.

Speaker 54 Anyway, I think that's all we have to say about that. Let's go on an ad break and come back to discuss more sad

Speaker 54 and actually also possibly good news. Or at least bad for Elon Musk, which is good for us.

Speaker 26 All right, we are back.

Speaker 54 I think let's pivot to James Stout for an update on

Speaker 54 Venezuela.

Speaker 26 No, El Salvador. Well, no.
El Salvador, yeah.

Speaker 54 El Salvador, the torture, labor, prison, James.

Speaker 26 Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying goodoj buna te pirosbe to Abdullah Ojulan, whose birthday it is on the day that you're hearing this. So

Speaker 26 if you want to plant a tree for Apo,

Speaker 26 get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately, that is the only good news we have today.
Border Patrol has spent most of this week touting the, quote, lowest number of border crossings in history.

Speaker 26 It will shock listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Border encounters are way down.

Speaker 26 If there's one thing that I have ever taught you, it is that border encounters are not the same as unique individuals because people are being sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return attempting a different route crossing the border, right?

Speaker 26 Those are way down. And they're the lowest since they began publishing monthly data in 2000.

Speaker 26 Numbers were way lower in the 50s and 60s and before then. It's relatively immaterial.
It's just sort of a nitpicky point, I guess. Today, what I really want to talk about is the case of Mr.

Speaker 26 Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.

Speaker 26 He was removed by the Trump administration to El Salvador, to Sekot,

Speaker 26 in a way that they have admitted was a mistake. So, we have to go back a little bit to understand Mr.
Abrego-Garcia's story and how we got here.

Speaker 26 He was arrested in mid-March due to the United States government claim that he played a, quote, prominent role in MS-13, MS-13 being the Salvadorian gang, right?

Speaker 26 He'd come to the United States in 2011. He was fleeing gang violence.
He was allegedly arrested in 2019 outside a home depot where he was standing with other men looking for work.

Speaker 26 However, the incident report for that particular incident gives other names, but not his.

Speaker 26 At that point, a Prince George's County Police Department detective filled out a, quote, gang worksheet and claimed that Mr. Abrago Garcia was associated with or a member of MS-13.

Speaker 26 The evidence he cited for this was a Chicago Bulls hoodie and the claim of a confidential informant.

Speaker 26 The confidential informant claimed that he was part of a group within this gang that was set up in a state that Mr. Abrego Garcia had never lived in.

Speaker 26 The United States in 2019, ICE argued that he shouldn't be given a bond because of this alleged gang membership, right?

Speaker 26 And so he wasn't given bond, but through an asylum claim, although he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal, right?

Speaker 26 So a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back to El Salvador, where he would presumably face violence. When Mr.

Speaker 26 Abrago-Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective who had filed this report accusing him of gang membership, they found no record of his arrest and that the detective has been suspended since then.

Speaker 26 The department in question also settled a lawsuit with its own cops over racism in the department. JD Vance, who has a law degree, right? The JD is, I guess, before and after his name.

Speaker 26 He has a law degree from Harvard, has claimed that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a convicted member of MS-13.
This is not true. I can't find any evidence that he has any conviction of any kind.

Speaker 26 I'm going to quote here from a filing by the United States government.

Speaker 26 On the 15th of March, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego-Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.

Speaker 26 So the government there has admitted in a court filing that they accidentally sent this guy to the prison labor camp in El Salvador, right?

Speaker 26 According to ICE acting field officer Robert Cerner, quote, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight.

Speaker 26 So it appears that they had a large list of people they wanted to put on this flight. This is interesting, right?

Speaker 26 It's an insight into their process for filling that first flight that they, some people they clearly didn't feel they had enough evidence for, but somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted of having any membership of any gang, they put on this flight, right?

Speaker 26 His wife and child are both U.S. citizens, and they have sued in court.
That's why we're seeing this, right?

Speaker 26 They've sued for the United States government to stop paying El Salvador for his detention and for the United States government to demand he return.

Speaker 26 Vance has advanced a kind of unique legal theory in response, claiming that withholding of removal only prevents someone being deported back to their home state.

Speaker 26 I mean, you could technically, that is what the withholding is, right? Like, it's like he can't go back to El Salvador because he will be at risk in El Salvador.

Speaker 26 So, they can deport him to a third state, but they deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador, right? I want to read J.D. Vance's post here.

Speaker 26 I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with the second paragraph. In 2019, immigration judge, parentheses under the Biden administration.
For those of you who are familiar with dates,

Speaker 26 it's 2019 was under the first Trump administration.

Speaker 26 That was the Trump administration. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Okay, moving on. Determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang.
He also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court. A real winner.

Speaker 26 It is telling that the entire American media is going to run a propaganda operation today, making you think that an innocent, quote, father of three was apprehended by a gulag.

Speaker 54 Father of three is in quotes here, by the way.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Yeah.
And gulags generally are not capable of doing the apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place, it is the police who apprehend the person, send them to the gulag.
Moving on.

Speaker 26 Here are the relevant facts. I'm still quoting.
The man is an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge determined that he was protected from removal.

Speaker 26 Quoting again, an immigration judge during the Biden admin determined he was a member of the MS-13 gang.

Speaker 26 Again, that's not the case. It's staggering the extent to which they can say a sentence where every single individual word is a lie.
Like, stunning. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 54 The fact that so many members of the modern Republican Party have, like, memory-holed 2019 and 2020 as being under the Biden administration is just insane.

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is that the initial hearing, right, where he was denied bomb was in 2019, and then he filed his asylum claim and later was protected from removal.

Speaker 26 But that's not what they're saying here.

Speaker 54 But, like, even the way they just they talk about like the COVID response to the 2013 2020, they talk about it as if Joe Biden was the president.

Speaker 26 They're not going to lock us down again, but you locked us down. Yeah, who did that? And then the last one, I think, is most rebellatory.

Speaker 26 Because he's not a citizen, he does not get full jury trial by peers. In other words, whatever due process he was entitled to, he received.

Speaker 26 The immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for jury trial, right? Bunce, again, holds a JDE. He presumably knows this.

Speaker 26 What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United States government in its filing in this lawsuit that the Abrego-Garcia family filed.

Speaker 26 Quote, because plaintiffs concede that Abrego-Garcia is not in the United States custody, this court cannot hear these claims. So they're claiming that no U.S.

Speaker 26 court has jurisdiction over the question of these people who are in El Salvador because they're not in U.S. custody, right? Which...

Speaker 26 Obviously, if they stick the landing on this, it suggests that it is a one-way ticket to the prison labor camp, right? That you cannot challenge that in U.S. court.

Speaker 26 You ain't going to get very far in court in El Salvador, right? So what they're suggesting here is this is a forever detention that there is no habeas, right?

Speaker 26 That was what they were asking for, habeas corpus. Can you explain what habeas corpus actually is for the listeners? Yeah, it means bring me the body, right? In this case, it is.

Speaker 26 Yeah, you'll have to present evidence

Speaker 26 in order to charge, like convict people of things.

Speaker 26 It's like the sine qua non of having a justice system, a criminal justice system, right? Show something.

Speaker 26 Yeah, you can't just be like bad man and then put the guy in jail.

Speaker 26 The most basic thing is that, like, yeah, in literal terms, it means you have to like actually take somebody in front of a court in order to determine if they're like being detained for a reason, right?

Speaker 26 Like, a judge has to see them and say, like, yes, this is, this is not an unlawful imprisonment. There is a charge.
There is some degree of evidence that somebody did something. Right.

Speaker 26 Which they have not provided here, right? Not that, like, you can prove they did it, but like something was done, and you are here for that for a reason. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah. So, in this case, we don't have any of that.
Uh, Mr.

Speaker 26 Abrego Garcia is still the way his family found out he was in Sekot was that his wife identified him by scars on his head when they shaved it and a tattoo they saw.

Speaker 54 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 26 Yeah, they had no idea. It presumably doesn't come up on the ICE detainee locator, you know, that you can look up your family members on.

Speaker 26 If your family members are detained by ICE, it doesn't have El Salvador as an option. So, yeah, this is where we're at.
This is a case I will be following, right? Because I say it's pretty pivotal.

Speaker 26 If they can argue that the court doesn't have jurisdiction, obviously, I'm sure at that point, that ruling will be challenged and it'll run up the courts.

Speaker 26 Currently, it seems like the only court they're going to listen to is the Supreme Court. But evidently, this is what they're going for.

Speaker 26 Like, this is their argument here: that once you're in El Salvador, you're out of their hands and they can't do anything.

Speaker 26 So, sorry, even though it was a mistake, you're stuck there forever, which is pretty disturbing.

Speaker 54 Yesterday, me and James did an episode on ISIS' targeting of students,

Speaker 54 scholars, and professors that they believe are associated with pro-Palestine protests. So we did an update on that story that I did a piece on or a segment on last week on executive disorder.

Speaker 54 So for a follow-up on that, you can look to yesterday's episode. But we are going to close.
with, I guess, kind of a feel-good story because it makes Elon Musk sad.

Speaker 54 He has had a bit of a rough week

Speaker 54 for Mr. Musk's businesses and his political projects, I guess.

Speaker 54 Elon Musk's efforts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court have failed as the Democratic-backed candidate swept the election, maintaining 4-3 liberal control of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I mean, the gist of it is

Speaker 26 like three or four days ago, all of my friends who are Scanis got furious because Elon Musk wore a cheese head, you know, like the ones for the Packers that

Speaker 26 people from Wisconsin wear when they're at games.

Speaker 26 While he got up on stage and gave a million dollars basically immediately before, like about a little less than a week ago, a higher court ruled that it was not bribery for him to offer people a million dollars at random if they like voted or showed up at like, you know, different rallies and stuff, which is like what he's been doing, right?

Speaker 26 Is making these basically fake offers of a million dollars because these two went to members of the local Republican Party. Like it was clearly set up.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 The head of the college Republicans of Wisconsin.

Speaker 54 Must spent $25 million

Speaker 54 on this race.

Speaker 54 He danced around on stage wearing a cheese head and he gave out million-dollar novelty checks to quote-unquote voters who won a contest by signing his petition against activist judges, which has been the new rallying cry on the right, is that everything that's going wrong, everything that's stopping Trump is from these activist judges that we have to unseat.

Speaker 54 He also gave $100 each to every person who signed that petition. And on election day, Musk offered voters $50 if they posted a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside of a polling place.

Speaker 54 How is that allowed? These are the same people who scream about like election interference, rigging elections, buying elections, feeling elections.

Speaker 26 And like,

Speaker 54 this is insane stuff. You can go to jail for giving people a water bottle in line at polling places in multiple states.

Speaker 54 And Musk is allowed to give people $50 for pictures posted outside of polling places. What the fuck is happening?

Speaker 26 But luckily...

Speaker 54 The negative polarization against Musk and Tesla that's been increasing the past few months has resulted in Judge Suven Crawford beating the mega hat Republican judge who last year went as Donald Trump for Halloween,

Speaker 54 beating this guy by 10%.

Speaker 54 This was a massive, a massive reversal of the 2024 presidential election results in Wisconsin.

Speaker 54 There was a record high turnout for this spring election, 40% higher than the last Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which was in 2023.

Speaker 26 Which, which, by the way, that was also a high turnout election, too. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah. Like that previous one.
Then this one just fucking obliterated it.

Speaker 54 Like, this, this was like just under the results of like what you would expect out of like a midterm election.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 54 They shifted every single county in the state blue compared to the 2024 presidential election and on average by about 10 to 12 points.

Speaker 54 Massive, massive shifts.

Speaker 26 And this was before the tariffs, by the way.

Speaker 26 Like,

Speaker 26 this was before the tariff numbers were announced.

Speaker 26 No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon Musk Musk meddling in Wisconsin politics. Well, like and everything else that's happened since January.

Speaker 26 But it does seem like Elon Musk's personal presence was a net negative and all the money he spent.

Speaker 54 Luckily, the next day, there was a Tesla sales report,

Speaker 54 which was one of the worst in the history of their company, with 50% fewer vehicles being delivered in the first three months compared to last year, with Tesla stock continuing to plunge the past week, although with reports that Musk might exit the inner circle of the Trump administration,

Speaker 54 those stocks are kind of flipping back and forth as he's expected to return to his companies.

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. And who knows? Like a lot of that's clearly the tariffs.
Well, yes. And then with the tariffs, this is a whole

Speaker 26 other issue. Real double whammy for Tesla.
The reporting is that people around Trump have largely soured on Musk. Who knows how true that is?

Speaker 26 There's always a lot of reports from the Trump inner circle that are like, I don't know. It's, yeah, he's always had a very leaky.
Yeah.

Speaker 26 And I can see it being multi-causal. Like Musk has failed badly in Wisconsin.
The kind of suspicion right now is that Shkibble or whatever his name is,

Speaker 26 was down about five points relative to other MAGA candidates in the same election, which people are attributing largely to Musk's intervention.

Speaker 54 Well, and like they were testing out if he was like a stable, consistent, reliable political operator, or if what he did in 2024 was kind of like a one-off event, if he's like a one-trick pony there.

Speaker 54 And this complete, like devastating loss demonstrated that maybe this unstable drug addict, no offense to

Speaker 54 drug addicts, but specifically for Elon Musk, who's railing ketamine all the time and trying to run the entire world.

Speaker 54 Luckily, my friends who might indulge in ketamine don't try to run the entire world.

Speaker 26 You say that now, but you'll get older at some point.

Speaker 26 They'll have midlife crises too.

Speaker 54 But he was shown in like a very public way to be to be like an unstable political force. And yeah, that's going to turn some of some of the people in the Trump administrators against him.
Yep.

Speaker 54 Anyway, I think that's all I have to say about this Wisconsin race. Wisconsin race.
Sorry.

Speaker 26 All right. Well, I think that's probably an episode.
Wait, shit. Hold on.
I just

Speaker 26 found the funniest fucking thing about this tariff thing I've seen yet from fucking. Oh, wait, wait, wait.
One sec. One sec.

Speaker 26 rocket caspa rocket caspa tariff don't like it

Speaker 26 rocking caspa rocket caspa

Speaker 26 okay we're back apparently the tariffs are not broken down by country this is this is quote from this guy in vfx on twitter they're not broken down by country they're broken down by top-level internet domains

Speaker 26 it's why the island is populated entirely by penguins the dot hm domain and why the diego Garcia military base are listed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like fucking McDonald's Island. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 And why, why Réunion and Gibraltar are listed so far? I wondered why Gibraltar made it one day. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, what? La Réunion is part of France.
Why are we hitting these guys?

Speaker 26 Yeah, it's because they use it all at the Let's just. Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 26 That is what a 19-year-old who never went to college, my God, but thinks he understands all of reality would do. Okay, great.

Speaker 54 Dictatorship of of Chad GPT. Fucking phenomenal.

Speaker 26 My fucking God. Unbelievable.
Look, look, okay.

Speaker 26 The note I want to close on is that, so podcaster Mike Duncan, the creator of the Revolutions podcast, a man who has spent literally tens of thousands of hours writing about like every revolution that's ever happened.

Speaker 26 At the end of the original run of the series Revolutions, he makes this point, which is that all revolutions work because they encounter, you encounter one of the great idiots of history, a man who is blessed with

Speaker 26 the inalienable ability to make the wrong decision at every single time.

Speaker 26 And my God, if we can't beat these motherfuckers, like if that shit's entirely on us because we have been handed one of the greatest idiots of history that has ever existed in the history of humanity, and our fucking job now is to turn that into fucking a better world.

Speaker 26 Do something. Yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah, we'll see. The problem is that there's a lot of greater idiots out there.
And they all all do still have guns and money.

Speaker 26 One of the great tragedies of the world is that very, very stupid people can still fire guns.

Speaker 26 We made them too easy, folks. Yeah, I've

Speaker 26 seen that happen a couple of times

Speaker 26 in the old conduct of my work. Anyway.
All right.

Speaker 54 Well, we reported the news.

Speaker 26 We reported the news. Now you go out there and you know what? Find someone who lives on the Isle of McDonald near the Arctic and kick their ass today.
Fuck them up. Fuck that island.

Speaker 26 Do trade with a penguin. Pay 10%, Mool.
Yeah, send us a picture of you fighting a penguin, and

Speaker 26 we'll make sure you get a hat or something. Yeah, yeah.
We'll send you some merch. We reported the news.

Speaker 26 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 74 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 74 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 74 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.