It Could Happen Here Weekly 195

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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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hello and welcome to it could happen here and it could

my name is andrew sage i'm also antraissum on youtube and i'm here once again with james james stout people have said i'd never say my last name and they can't work out who i am so uh i guess i'll do that more

welcome james stout thank you So lately, and I mean, this is an unfortunately common pattern of thought for me, but I've been thinking about just how totalizing this system feels.

And it's like everywhere you turn, you know, walking down the street,

looking at the city, at pollution, at every inch of land that's been claimed by the system, every

bit of, you know, the way that you live and operate just feels like it's been manipulated and controlled in some way.

And so that's really what I want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of this system

and how it's used to control, you know, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives.

So, I suppose to start off, I'd ask, when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shaping your choices?

That's interesting.

I mean,

a lot in certain ways, right?

Like, like the infrastructure of labor shapes a lot of my choices.

Like, I have to work a lot

to make ends meet, right?

Like, which means that I can't do sometimes things I want to do.

Like,

there are mutual aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that I'm not able to because I have this obligation to capital.

I guess that's one of them.

Or just like the physical infrastructure limiting the people I get to see, right?

Like, there are places I love to go out.

There are some really nice vegan places in Tijuana that I don't go to as much as I'd like because someone has built a giant wall and then another giant wall next to it and then stationed a bunch of people with guns to check if I have the right piece of paper to go back and forth to somewhere that otherwise I could ride my bike to.

Yeah.

Borders are a very unfortunate and big one.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's really frustrating.

And I think that's one of the most obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that

sort of manipulates our lives today.

I think on the digital level, there's things like just the way that social media is laid out.

I think it really controls how much time you spend on it, how much energy you invest into it.

And

of course, even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities, the way they're laid out, it tends to affect, you know, just how often we go out, where we go, what means of transportation we use.

And I mean, where physical infrastructure is concerned and how it's been used to control people, that goes way back into history.

You know, colonial powers often built transport infrastructure, you know, like roads and railways and ports, with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from the colonized territories to get to the imperial core.

You know, the systems were not designed to serve the mobility needs of the local populations.

They usually created direct lines from the mines and the plantations and the resource-rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.

Yeah, yeah.

And so for the British imperialists and lovers of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports and we built bridges and we built roads and we built railways.

Well, it's the same pattern everywhere.

You know, in India, it was used to move cotton, tea, and other resources from the interior to the shipment ports.

In Ghana, it was used to move gold and cocoa.

But in any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city.

You know, the actual economic self-determination of the people in that area didn't matter.

Yeah, very much so.

I think about this like I cycled around Rwanda in 2020, which is an interesting time to be traveling.

But I remember riding around, and the Kenya Rwanda word for dirt road is ikitaka, right?

And so that's what mostly we so we cycled on these dirt roads.

And it was lovely.

You know, we'd go through the village and everyone would come out and wave at you.

And like the little kids would come out and be like, what the fuck is this bicycle?

And it was kind of fun, you know, and then we'd find someone.

It's not really set up for like restaurants, so you just find someone and pay them an amount upon which you agreed, and they would give you some food.

And that was a beautiful experience.

And then there are these roads that they call Chinese roads that just go directly from the mine to the place where the raw material can be extracted because

China was doing a lot of

what you could generously call foreign direct investment or like neocolonialism in lots of places in Africa, right?

And

it was just the contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound.

Like obviously you travel faster on the smooth roads, but like you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of

meeting and sharing that travel with people, which is why I do these things in the first place.

It was just like such a profound contrast.

I remember it really striking me at the time.

Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers in general have been doing, right?

They wield their control over labor to

set things up in a way that fulfills their interests.

Yeah.

And then, you know, even when people gain some sort of nominal independence and they inherit these colonial infrastructure grids or, you know, they have investments coming in and they have set up, they have these companies, these multinational companies setting up infrastructure.

It still continues, you know, this sort of extractivist and top-down nature of the way the infrastructure is set up.

You know, it doesn't reimagine, a lot of them don't reimagine the logic of what came before, you know, in part for lack of funding and in part for lack of imagination.

And so, in a lot of places, the peripheral regions in these countries are still lacking in connectivity.

They're still lagging behind the rest of the country.

They still don't have access to some of the basic social services and resources that the urban core has because

the urban-rural divide in many ways mimics the core-periphery divide on the international stage.

And then you have these neo-colonial development aid programs coming in with the IMF, the World Bank, and you have even more infrastructure projects that just repeat this extractive pattern under the banner of development.

Of course, real development would be connecting people, encouraging people to participate in society and distribute opportunities.

But the infrastructure that tends to be set up is more so for consolidating state power and channeling the movement of people in predictable, surveillable ways, and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others.

So, of course, infrastructure development has the capacity to help people.

You know, it can increase accessibility, can make people's lives easier, and it can also just manage and contain them and their resources.

And we see a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure for control when you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies.

Those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications, they of course manifest physically.

You know, in the U.S., you had literal segregation, areas that were designated for black people designated for white people, water fountains and neighborhoods and all these different things.

You also had redlining policies and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment and thus were neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and economic inequality.

Those spaces are now ripe for development in the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap, so undervalued.

And so the people who made something out of that lack are now being pushed out.

And in South Africa, I mean, up until recently, these apartheid era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from wide urban centers.

They were lacking in services and transit options that physically reinforced the racial division of that society.

And even today around the world, you have urban zoning laws and transit access limitations and public housing policies that recreate historical class divisions and racial divisions, ethnic divisions.

And I'm I'm sure you and your, with all the, I mean, every time I talk to you, you have like a new travel story to tell.

I'm sure you've witnessed something like this.

Yeah.

I was just thinking of how, like, I was thinking of like, if we think about the Syrian state as a

contiguous colony, right?

Like, it's called the Syrian Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly on violence are Arab people.

So we think of the parts of North and East Syria, majority Kurdish areas as colonized.

We can see that reflected in the infrastructure, right?

Part of that is, as you say, this sort of lack of investment.

But then also part of it is every government-funded building, right?

Schools, hospitals, the buildings you go in to do the paperwork you have to do to exist under the state, they're set up like strong points.

Like they're designed with a big kind of wall and then a big courtyard and then thick exteriors.

Like they're designed to be militarily defensible against the people they're supposed to serve right like like the school is designed to be used as a fucking machine gun position wow and once you see it you see it everywhere and you think about the nature of the state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind right it's fascinating the other example i think of is like um Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona.

And you have like the unregulated working class Raval, like this area just next to the Rambla, where the streets are just fucking small and winding and crazy.

And there's never not laundry kind of over, you know, over your head.

And it's a very, I like to go there.

It's a place I enjoy.

And then you have the Ayemple, which means extension, where the infrastructure is extremely, like it's probably one of the earlier grid cities.

that you would see right and the idea was that like these these overcrowded kind of what were in the 1920s and 30s slums would be like where the working class would be kept and the working class to be clear were like seen as

there was a colonial relationship between the bourgeois and the working class in Barcelona because most of the working class were not Catalan they would actually put signs at the top of these working class areas saying like Murcia begins here right these are the murcianos the people from murcia the people from outside of Catalonia and Catalonia stops here where the working class exist that later reflected in the working class self-identity.

Like they came to refer to the Raval as Chinatown, not specifically because of a high concentration of people from the Chinese diaspora, but because they'd seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were.

And they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster.

Like we're going to call it Chinatown.

You want to come in here?

We'll fucking shoot you.

Like, I thought that was this really fascinating response to the way that they had been alienated by infrastructure.

Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you look at these sort of claims that,

oh, you know, it's just, it's just roads, it's just zoning, it's just a city grid.

Yeah.

It's just an embassy, it's just a government office.

It's like, no, these sorts of spaces, these buildings, this infrastructure could never be neutral.

Yeah.

And once you see that, you can't unsee it.

Because you look at the amount of decisions that would have had to have gone into, you know, some of the examples you you mentioned or the examples I mentioned,

you know, the design decisions to say, okay, we're going to put this road here instead of here.

Yeah.

We're going to use this material instead of this material.

Who you employ to build those structures, that infrastructure also has an impact in the surrounding area.

Are you employing people within the community?

Are you employing people outside?

What's happening there?

Who's funding?

this infrastructure who's maintaining the infrastructure yeah

what level of surveillance has been implemented Where are the public transportation routes and why are they here and not there, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Like there's people whose opinions and views matter in that process and there are people who are excluded from it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

One of the authors that I tend to go back to often is Ivan Ilich

because he critiques a lot of this stuff, particularly infrastructures, control.

In tools for conviviality, he spoke about how modern transport and urban design have been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.

So he called out the usual suspects: suburbanization, car-centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles.

And he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all the other choices have effectively been eliminated.

Technically, you could walk along the highway, but you're not going to.

You're going to get a car.

Yeah.

Right?

You can't choose to walk or cycle in that sort of scenario.

Yeah.

Or someone's going to to call the cops if you try that in America, right?

Yeah.

So as Illich saw it, it's really a cultural imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting, moving, and it's frustrating.

And on the global stage, you also see how infrastructure has the capacity to control the whole geopolitical board.

You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal,

the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, all these places have

a lot of

power, militarily, trade-wise, diplomatically,

because they control the flow of oil or of goods or of data.

Yeah.

Particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run.

Oh, yeah.

And so speaking of data, actually, the realm of digital infrastructure is also very insidious when it comes to control.

We tend to think of the internet as that sort of ephemeral cloud, right?

But the cloud is hosted physically.

You know, there are servers, there are fiber optic cables, there are data centers, all these things.

They're not as obvious as roads and railways and, you know, neighborhoods, but they are just as, if not in some ways, even more powerful in terms of controlling what people access, how fast they access it, under what terms they access it.

Or because it's so intangible, so hard to pin down, it can often escape scrutiny.

But

there are companies that own these things there's a small group of very powerful corporations that pretty much dictate how things are running you know most people they know about china's great firewall and how it's used to

cordon off china from the rest of the internet in some ways you know it censors websites and search results it monitors people's activity and it usually has these state-monitored alternatives to some of the popular global platforms like google and facebook right but google and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft, it's not like they're any better.

You know, they're not running things through public good.

So if you will call out what China is doing with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I don't think that any government should have any control over what people access.

But, you know, it's not like censorship, data harvested, and surveillance are unique to China.

You know, a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies, deploy soft censorship.

You know, they derank things in the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things.

Yeah.

Yeah, things that may be automatically flagged or moderated.

And that often affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where, you know, that's that's a big no-no.

Or you have even the manipulation of language, the words people use.

as people try to get around censors, hence the proliferation of terms like grape and essay and self-delete and unalive and all these other euphemisms,

which, I mean, honestly, I don't use any of them.

I despise them.

Yeah, me too.

The thing is, a lot of people assume that these words are censored on all platforms.

Yeah.

But they're not.

You know, they may be censored on one platform.

Usually it's TikTok.

or limited in one platform.

And then people take that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and spread it across the rest of the internet or worse yet, bring it into real life and end up saying things like unalive in real life.

Yeah, yeah, then you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm to determine the way you can express yourself.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And I mean, TikTok gets a lot of heat these days because, you know, rightfully so, it's very popular.

It has a lot of influence and it's, you know, very blatantly interventionist with its content

in some, you know, damaging ways.

But again, the other big corporations are not immune either.

I mean, Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right?

Yeah.

They played a major role in the sort of

attitudes that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of targeting Rohingya community and the subsequent genocide.

Yeah.

So I was on a panel with some Rohingya people the other day.

And they are still both physical and technical infrastructure being marginalized.

So

something myself and my union friends are trying to do is help the Rohingya Podcast Initiative start podcasting, right, such that they can share their own voices with the world and their positions and their opinions.

This is very important at a time when they're facing marginalization even from revolutionary forces within Myanmar.

And we cannot sustain an internet connection.

to allow them to do that.

Like we tried to do a live panel and it was very hard for, you know, these guys are running around Cox's Bazaar where tens of thousands of Rohingya people live in refugee camps trying to find connectivity.

And like just another example of how they continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to be genocided.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Because the private corporations alone are not responsible for this.

It's the governments too.

You know, when the corporations still tell the government to do something, the governments comply.

And then when the governments tell the corporations to do stuff, a lot of the time it's also like they comply.

It's collaboration, you know, especially since the government has the power in a lot of cases to shut down the internet when things are not going their way.

Yeah.

You know, they've they used the, I'm all over recently, you know, the suppression of dissent during protests, you know, to influence elections or to restrict information, to obstruct journalism and communication during crises.

When you look at all over the world, Iran, India, Sudan, Myanmar, Uganda, even in Gaza.

In all these cases, these governments step in and they limit or they shut down the internet entirely to prevent the news from getting out.

You know, they could target either the entire internet or they target certain platforms, they target WhatsApp, they target Twitter.

They justify by saying, oh, they're going after fake news or there's a security threat.

Yeah, it's bullshit.

But, you know, we could see through that.

Yeah.

And it's tough because, I mean, this is where these are, these are the places where people have gathered.

These are the online town squares, you know?

And

this infrastructure is very much centralized.

Google controls most of the search on the internet.

Amazon dominates e-commerce and cloud computer and logistics.

And Meta controls a lot of people's social interactions.

And I could brag and say, oh, well, I'm not on Facebook, but, you know, I still use WhatsApp because everybody else uses WhatsApp yeah

and it's it's so easy for them because we're so concentrated on these platforms it's so easy for them to cop at us to to flex their their muscles and control the direction of public discourse yeah and I mean it's amplifying certain things suppressing other things

uh maximizing our engagement exploiting our cognitive vulnerabilities you know polarizing discourse distorting reality

it's like what the hell do we do?

Yeah.

And so for the hopium segment of

the podcast, I just want to point out that, you know, infrastructure can be used to consolidate power and control people, but it can also be used to resist and to reclaim our collective agency.

You know, even infrastructure that was originally designed to control can be taken under our control.

You know, around the world, communities have been able to challenge these extractive logics to build their own infrastructures on their own terms.

You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form of community-built mesh networks or alternative internet, local servers.

You know, you have projects like GuiFi.net in Catalonia or you have the NYC mesh in New York.

And these are efforts to engage in pay-to-peer and decentralized communications without the reliance on the telecom giants.

And then you also, of course, physically have examples of infrastructure resisting central control, participatory urban planning movements.

You have guerrilla urbanism.

You have, of course, the long and storied history of squatting, otherwise known as informal settlement.

And these informal settlements are hubs of innovation in a lot of cases.

In places like Nairobi or in Rio de Janeiro, you know, these

slums and fazellas, they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up their own water supply

because they recognize that this is within their hands, this is within their capacity.

You know, we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on to us from on high.

You know, we can, you know, sort of reclaim our own voices and design our own spaces.

If you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity to control and truly just how states sort of see things, I have to, of course, recommend the classic James C.

Scott scene like a state.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just a foundational framework for understanding how infrastructure is used for social engineering.

It's really readable as well.

So, definitely give that a read.

And, you know, think about ways that you can contribute to shaping the infrastructure around you.

And I don't know, James, if you have any stories along this vein you can leave us off with.

Yeah, I mean, I think of a ton, right?

Like, even I think about like when I was a lot younger, I lived in a,

I guess what you could call a slum of Vavela, like a pretty economically disadvantaged part of Caracas for a little while.

And like at the time, and I've seen this when I lived in Barcelona too.

I guess the English word would be info shop.

They normally call them social centers would be the Spanish word or social spaces.

And like, it was cool to see

this is a city which is established through colonialism.

Right.

And there was a brief time before things were terrible.

in Venezuela where people were trying to make, and largely it was people trying to make things better.

And like the state for a time allowed a space for that to exist before it stopped allowing a space for that to exist which is where i'm at right now right and like very clearly the state right now is very repressive in venezuela to be clear like i don't want to give uh put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever but it was virtually a really beautiful thing um and it facilitated right i was like 19 my spanish was dog

i was hungry all the time i didn't have any food you know but it facilitated that community taking care of me because the spaces were public and people could see if people were falling through the cracks, right?

And like, I think a lot about refugee camps.

Obviously, the somewhere I've spent a decent amount of time, right?

Both within the US and outside of the US.

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is how so many of the people I met on the way to the United States in the Dadien had horrific experiences in the Daddy N.

and afterwards, but they also miss the community that they had.

Like they also miss the profound solidarity.

I was just talking to people the other day who were telling me, like,

when they were hungry in the jungle,

strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give them food.

Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too.

This sort of explosion and mutual aid.

Yeah.

And like.

A refugee camp is a place where you do not have privacy for the most part, and that's not always great.

But it facilitates caring for one another and like I don't know I have this recollection from seven or eight years ago now where I'm walking through a

refugee camp in Mexico and there's a very little girl from maybe six seven something like that and you know I have long hair people can't see me but um she likes to like mess with my hair and braid it and shit and I'm carrying this little girl and like I've been coming for some time and like the sense of community that you felt there amongst like a really terrible situation but like because everyone can see you walking down this little walkway, everyone's like, oh, hi, how are you?

Like, you know, like, and I'm trying to work out what they, what they need and how we can best help.

Like, I just remember thinking, like, what the fuck is wrong with, and then going back to the United States, right, and sitting

in my little house and like, you know, you know, like, like, I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be close to them, but not many people are.

And like, for most people, you know, they get out of the house, they go to their car, they drive to their work, they don't say hi to anyone.

Like,

it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in those refugee camps, we're closer to the beautiful life that we want than we are in these million-dollar homes in America.

My house does not cost a million dollars.

I don't own a house, but

there's the profound alienation that we feel in part because of the physical infrastructure.

the ability of humanity to fall back into caring for one another.

That's what we

do when we are not like physically and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures, both physical and digital, and even emotional,

that divide us from one another.

And I've kind of thought about that ever since.

Like, how do I build a place where people have more stability, people have privacy, people have their material needs met?

Yeah, does you want to strike a balance?

infrastructure i don't want um there's some cohorts and sort of plans that i've seen for example that don't even really factor in much privacy, which

I'm not for at all.

You know, people don't want to have to recreate their

dorm room experience, or in my case, their share in a bedroom, their entire childhood experience.

So.

Yeah, no, this says we need to have space for people to have privacy.

But at the same time, space for people to have community.

cities can exist like that, communities can exist like that.

There's a theory of the Mediterranean public sphere that sometimes comes up where like, again, in working-class Barcelona, right, people don't generally have air conditioning and it can get very hot.

So, you just spend a lot of time outside, balcony, whatever,

you know, front porch if you've got one.

That creates community, right?

That creates a public sphere, like a place that is not quite a home, but it's not controlled by someone else either.

It's like a community space, yeah.

And uh, that doesn't exist in like suburbs, I don't live in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know, where everyone has these like literal fences around all the shit that they own.

Yeah,

that exists to vary an extent in Trinidad.

Yeah.

You know, some areas are very much communal and other areas like are trying desperately to be America.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, it's kind of a mix of both wheels there.

At the very least, from what I'm aware of, what I can tell, people at least say hi to their neighbors, though.

Yeah.

That's still like a horrifying, you know,

nightmarish sort of specter of not knowing your neighbors.

Thing that I've heard of of American life that you don't even say hi.

Yeah.

You know, you don't even wave at people like us.

Yeah, no, I'm always in my neighbors' houses and they're always at my house.

And like, I'm a person who owns a lot of tools, you know, like different spanners and stuff.

So like, I'm, like, I will go out of my way to make sure that my neighbors know they can borrow my shit.

And

that does seem to be quite

a new experience for people who are new in the neighborhood or whatever.

But yeah, we should all do that.

It's such an easy way to fight that alienation and that infrastructure.

That, you know, like, yeah, there's a wall between where I live and where the person next door lives.

But

I can knock on the door and say, hey, it looks like you're having some trouble with your truck.

Do you need a hand or what have you?

Yeah.

So, I mean, what you're saying is

it could happen here.

Yeah.

Yeah, you gotta make the good things happen here, too, because enough of the fucking bad shit is.

Indeed.

That's it for me, guys.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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This is it could happen here.

The show about things falling apart.

One thing falling apart last year.

I guess the president's mental health, seemingly so.

And we're going to talk about that today and some possible ramifications that the current president may be trying to exploit to help him out.

Robert Evans, hello, how are you?

I'm fine.

Is something wrong with the president?

The current one or the old one?

Any president ever.

Has a president ever done wrong?

I heard some nasty things about Mr.

Clinton.

Interesting.

I woke up today for the first time, so this is all new to me.

Yeah, just don't look on the news or the internet or anything, and it should be okay.

That's good.

I'm just going to start reading Wikipedia at the A section and see if I get to anything bad about a president.

So since taking office, Trump has actually sort of been going soft on old sleepy Joe, not out of the goodness of his own heart, right?

But to possibly explore legal options to get around some of the roadblocks Trump's been facing in the judicial branch.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Trump's been arguing that Biden himself was mostly absent, especially during the later half of his presidency.

And a sort of like secret cabal of cabinet members, DNC consultants, White House staff and aides were running a shadow presidency.

Yeah, and one of my constant takes is there are no secret cabals.

There's a lot of cabals.

They're all very obvious.

Very public.

Very public cabals.

But

this secret cabal of like DNC interns were using Biden's signature via autopen to set policy, make judicial appointments, and sign orders, all with little to zero awareness from poor old sick, sleepy Joe.

In fact, people around Biden intentionally covered up his declining health to continue using his presidential power for their own progressive agenda.

If only they'd used it for that and not just to keep getting paychecks.

Or sending bombs to Israel or

many of the other things that Biden seemed preoccupied with.

I'm going to play a clip from a month and a half ago.

Donald Trump, current president, explaining this conspiracy of the secret Joe Biden cabal.

I'm sure that he didn't know many of the things.

Look, he was never for open borders.

He was never for transgender for everybody.

He was never for men playing in women's sports.

I mean, he changed.

I mean, all of these things that changed so radically.

I don't think he had any idea that what was...

Frankly, I said it during the debate, and I say it now.

He didn't have much of an idea what was going on.

You shouldn't be.

I mean, essentially, whoever used the auto pen was the president.

And that is wrong.

it's illegal it's so bad and it's so disrespectful to our country

transgender for everybody the defining legacy of the biden era sure it's his core policy platform yeah

okay

i i don't know like what do you even say at this point right like honestly He's sending troops into the second major city, this one, the capital, and taking over control of the police force.

How much is it worth just being like, oh, and he said another thing that's not true.

Like, I know it's important to cover all this, but also like, man, I'm tired.

Oh, yeah.

No, it's, it's, it's incredibly frustrating because they get to deploy these these absurd little lines every once in a while and it captures media attention and the physical things that they're doing do not get as much like awareness.

And there's this constant, I think, misinterpretation as to like, this is all a distraction from this and this and this.

And it does sometimes function that way, but this isn't, they're not doing this because it's a distraction.

They're doing this because they also hate this group of people.

They also want to hurt this group of people.

There's a lot of people they want to hurt, and they want to do it in different ways.

And they're kind of playing a longer game with the focus on this quote-unquote auto pen.

And it remains to be seen if it's going to be successful or, you know, pay off for them.

But I do want to talk about it now since this is on like, you know, month like four of them slowly seeding this into popular discourse.

It's like a new thing.

Because every once in a while, they have to decide what the new thing is, right?

A few years ago, they decided it was trans people, they decided it was DEI, they decided it was how the 2020 election was stolen.

They just decide that there's like some major problem, and then they repeat it often enough that it becomes like something that seemingly a share of voters actually care about.

And they're trying to make Auto Pen be a thing.

And there is actual possible results of them focusing on this,

as we will see.

But the Auto Pen fixation started this past March when Trump posted a truth on Truth Social claiming that Biden's preemptive pardons of members of the January 6th Investigation House Committee are, quote, hereby declared void, vacant, and of no further force of effect because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.

Unquote.

Great.

This is not real.

This is not like a real thing that he can just claim on Truth Social.

But what's real?

You know?

There is no requirement that pardons even be signed, only that they're accepted by a subject.

In 1929, the U.S.

Solicitor General concluded in a memo that, quote, neither the Constitution nor any statute prescribes the method by which executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced.

So he can't just do this here, but this was kind of the opening of the door for the rest of what we're going to talk about this episode.

And I guess before we get into that, I should talk about what an auto-pen is.

An autopen is a tool to automate the signing of documents by replicating a signature.

And this is a machine or a type of machine that's long been used in the White House.

Like Thomas Jefferson bought and used an early iteration of such a device shortly after it was patented in 1803.

Lyndon B.

Johnson's auto pen was photographed in the White House for a National Inquire Recover story titled The Robot That Sits In for the President.

And it's funny that now you get Fox News headlines that are basically written very similarly, talking about how actually a robot or the auto pen itself was acting as president.

And that's like a controversy

versus it was just like a fun news story back in the 50s.

How many of the guys angry about this literally want an LLM to be the president?

Yes, exactly.

That's my question.

No,

at least half, at least half.

The other half don't know what an LLM is.

No.

Now, Obama was the first president to openly sign legislation with an auto pen, including the extension of the Patriot Act in 2011 while at the G8 summit in France.

And though the constitutionality of the Autopen has never been tested or explicitly determined in court, in 2005, President George W.

Bush asked the Justice Department for its opinion on the validity of the Autopen for signing legislation and other official policy documents.

The Office of Legal Counsel found that, quote, the president need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law.

Rather, the president may sign a bill by directing a subordinate to affix the president's signature to such a bill, for example, by autopen, unquote.

Though there still is debate whether the president needs to be physically present during this process or simply authorize the signing.

And, you know, you have people like Stephen Miller in this administration who try to find niche little laws or statutes to then apply in a way that was probably never designed, or we have, since these laws' inceptions have decided not to use the laws in that way because that doesn't make sense of our current context.

But someone like Miller, very willing to do such a thing.

And there could be, for instance, some obscure aspect or interpretation of like proxy signature laws that they could try to like force through into their interpretation of like Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, which might make some auto-penned signatures invalid.

But this is something that's like kind of dismissed in a lot of legal circles because as like a practical matter, it would be disastrous to start rescinding executive actions based on this interpretation because like decades and decades of laws and regulations would then fall into question and possibly become void.

So, lots of people just like kind of don't think this is like a real question or a real concern.

And part of me thinks that as well.

But, as like someone like Miller has demonstrated, they're absolutely willing to use like niche arguments or

precedents to do some pretty like crazy stuff.

Do you know what is not very crazy, Robert?

Paying money to the sponsors of this show?

It's an extremely reasonable act.

It's the only sane thing you can do.

If you do anything else, you are being 5150, then you'll be on an involuntary 72-hour hold.

That's the way the law works.

All right, we are back.

So,

with this Biden autopen thing, it's not really about the auto pen.

The auto pen actually is not the problem here, kind of at all.

That's not what they're really focusing on.

In early June, the Justice Department launched an investigation into Biden's alleged use of the auto pen, with the DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin writing in an email that this investigation is to determine whether Joe Biden was, quote, competent and whether others were taking advantage of him through the use of the auto pen or other means, unquote, with a specific focus on the preemptive pardons for members of Biden's family and clemency for 37 death row inmates whose sentences were converted to life in prison.

So, this is the real crux, whether Biden was competent and whether people were using the auto pen without his knowledge.

And I think the reason why they're starting by focusing on these pardons, whether for January 6th investigation committee members or for those close to Biden, like this all relates to Trump's campaign promise of like retribution, right?

You can think of Cache Patel's list of deep state actors that he wants to investigate.

Like, that was such a core part of what Trump campaigned on, and he does still seem keen on fulfilling like parts of that promise.

Now, Ed Martin, the DOJ pardon attorney investigating this auto pen debacle, himself has said that the president's pardon power is absolute and that using the auto pen is, quote, not necessarily a problem.

But I think that the core part here is that it's not about the auto pen itself.

It's about this secret cabal who are using the auto pen without Biden's knowledge.

So a few days after this investigation was announced, the White House released a public memo from Trump entitled, Reviewing Certain Presidential Actions, which ordered the Attorney General and the White House counsel to investigate, quote, whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president.

And this document reads like something I would read on a conspiracy theory website five years ago.

It's written in a very similar style: quote: President Biden's aides abused the power of presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden's cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.

This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.

The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.

Unquote.

The memo states that Biden's advisors, quote unquote, tried to hide the true extent of his mental decline, to quote, cover up his inability to discharge his duties, unquote.

The investigation specifically wants to look into which policy documents were signed via AutoPenn and who ordered the president's signature to be affixed to said documents.

One other quote from the memo: quote, the White House issued over 1,200 presidential documents, appointed 235 judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and commutations than any administration in United States history.

Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the president, there are serious doubts as to the decision-making process and even the degree of Biden's awareness of these actions being taken in his name.

Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name.

Unquote.

So though the 2005 Bush DOJ memo does support the use of the Autopen to affix the president's signature, obviously it still must be the president who decides to sign a document.

Right.

With the Office of Legal Counsel memo stating, quote, we do not question the substantial authority supporting the view that the president must personally decide whether to approve and sign bills.

This is pretty obvious.

And that's why so much of the Autopen investigations are around Biden's deteriorating mental state and not the Auto Pen itself.

It's about trying to prove whether Biden was either not mentally capable of sufficiently authorizing a signature to be affixed to certain documents or was just completely unaware that the Auto Pen was signing certain documents with White House advisors specifically covering up Biden's mental decline to take advantage of his compromised state to personally direct policy.

And that's what the investigations are going to try to prove.

The White House is already making repeated assertions that this was the case, and this question may be finally settled in a Trump-sympathetic court.

And Republicans are currently trying every angle of attack on this.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has started a Senate investigation, and a House Oversight Committee investigation is already up and running.

The past month, Kentucky Republican James Comer has been subpoenaing Biden admin officials to testify on the use of the AutoPen and Biden's mental faculties while in office.

Comer's own letters and subpoenas for this investigation have been signed with a digital signature because this is such a common practice in Washington and like all over the country now.

Right.

Try to think of all the official documents you sign on your computer, right?

Yeah.

Now, metadata from a subpoena cover letter sent to former senior advisor to the First Lady, Anthony Brunal, show the document was authored and signed by someone named Benzine, an oversight committee staffer, not James Comer.

Because again, this is pretty regular.

So even the investigators are doing this process themselves while doing the investigation.

Part of the reason why the Republicans are trying to make this a continuing story and not just about, you know, the pardons, is because as like Biden appointee judges began blocking Trump's executive orders, the focus on the auto pen turned from just pardons towards use of the auto AutoPen to nominate federal judges.

And this is where things get a lot more slippery.

Last month, Fox News asked House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer if not just pardons may be found to be null and void because of the results of this investigation, but possibly also judicial appointments.

Biden made 228 judicial appointments, including 45 appeals court and 187 district court judges.

And most importantly, Biden appointed Justice Kachanji Brown Jackson, the court's most long-winded justice who couldn't even define what a woman is.

Mr.

Chairman, you mentioned that you're looking at some of the pardons that were done under President Biden and the use of the AutoPen, Dr.

Fauci being one of them, talking about whether they were legitimate or not.

Are you also looking into Biden's judicial appointments as well?

Absolutely.

Everything that was signed with the AutoPen, especially in the last year of the Biden presidency, this is when all the books that are being written, all the tell-all interviews that are being recorded from his former disgruntled staffers and staffers who are trying to preserve their reputation for future employment, they're all saying that Joe Biden was in a deep mental decline and that

he was protected by a very small inner circle.

We brought a few of those people in the inner circle and asked them simple questions like, were you ever told to lie about the president's health?

And they couldn't answer that question.

They had to plead the fifth to avoid self-incrimination.

This raises an issue whether these pardons, whether these judicial appointments, and whether these executive orders are legal.

I believe that if this investigation keeps going in the way that it's going, that's going to raise serious concerns about whether or not Joe Biden, even knew, what was going on around him, much less whether he authorized the use of his signature on all of this stuff.

I think all of these are in jeopardy of being declared null and void in a court of law.

And that's a big deal for the Trump administration because so much of what Trump is up against in court now with these liberal, biased, Biden-appointed judges is the fact that they're using and citing some of these executive orders as reason to

throw out President Trump's agenda and President Trump's executive orders.

So they tried to Trump proof

the administration on the way out the door.

And the problem they've got now is the American people realize that joe biden wasn't the one calling the shots and he may very well have not even been mentally fit to make decisions to authorize the use of his autopin if he even authorized it so this is going to play out in a court of law i think our investigation is going to be a substantial part of evidence in it and that's why we're doing the investigation

Yeah, that's the rub right there.

That's exactly what they want, right?

Is to completely peel back the last administration or two of judges and make make it just be all their people, a whole justice system that they completely control.

If they could recall like 230 federal judges

and fill in 230 more like Trump-appointed judges, that would clear out so much of the like legal roadblocks that they're currently facing.

Yep.

And that is the real crux of their focus on this issue.

That's why they're trying to insert this into reality.

And they're throwing this auto-pen story like everywhere.

Even the Epstein files, which don't exist, were concocted by the ever-suspicious Autopen.

It's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion.

I can say this.

Those files were run by the worst scum on earth.

They were run by

Comey.

They were run by Garland.

They were run by Biden and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the Autopen.

Whatever the current big news story is, they're they're going to try to shove the auto pen in there because that's how they operate.

That's how they craft reality.

Okay, we are back.

So, needless to say, Biden and his advisors have denied all of this, and it's a little tricky because part of what makes this story slightly compelling for Trump's team is that obviously Biden's mental health was in decline for the past few years of his presidency.

We all saw that happen.

That is like an accepted part of our country's history now.

We all saw the debate, and so much of their argument for this is resting on how much everyone understands that.

You have a whole bunch of former White House staff writing books on this topic now.

So with that aspect in mind, they still have to defend the use of the Autopen and Biden's competency and awareness of all of the decisions being made.

To do this, last month had his first interview with the New York Times since like 2021, where he discussed how he gave oral authorization for all of the pardons, with the AutoPen operation specifically being managed by the staff secretary, Stephen Feldman.

He said, quote, I made every decision.

Biden said that the White House used the AutoPen specifically for the last batch of pardons.

Biden said that they used the AutoPen because of the high number of pardon warrants issued, totaling around 4,000, which affected three categories of federal convicts, people serving home confinement, nonviolent drug offenders, and people on death row.

He did not choose or approve like every single name on that list, but claims to have determined the criteria and categories, saying, quote, I was deeply involved.

I laid out a strategy how I want to go about these, dealing with pardons and commutations.

I pulled the team in to say, this is how I want to get it done, generically and then specifically, unquote.

In preparation for the final months of the Biden presidency, his White House counsel wrote an email to staff in like November of 2024, laying out the process for reviewing pardons, the last step being, quote, the president makes the final decision on the final pardon and or the commutation slate, unquote.

At this point, around a dozen people have been subpoenaed and are giving testimony, and the investigation is looking through emails from the time, specifically starting with these pardons, because I think that's the only way they have to like investigate this right now.

It's easier to investigate the pardons from the last three months of the presidency than just all of the documents assigned over the course of like four years or even just two years if you look at like the past two years of his presidency.

So specifically, they're focusing on the final pardons as like a way in to figure out the process for how the auto-pen was functioning and who was using it.

And they may try to extend that process out to things like judicial appointments over time.

I think trying to rescind the appointment of someone like a Supreme Court justice, very unlikely, because obviously Biden had awareness that that was going on.

But they might try to pull more fucky shit with the, you know, circuit court appointments or that kind of stuff.

I don't think this is like the most important story facing the country right now.

Obviously, the stuff going on in Washington, D.C., and many other aspects of how the Trump administration is operating with ICE and with trans people affects people more immediately.

But I've been specifically trying to pull information on how they're crafting this narrative around the Autopen ever since he made that first truth back in March, because I saw this as an ongoing reality crafting project, which might accumulate in something actually meaningful over time.

And none of these investigations have released their findings yet, and they're not expected to for at least a few more weeks to months.

But it's something that I think is worth keeping an eye on right now, especially considering Miller and others and like the Heritage Foundation's focus on trying to find niche loopholes in which executive power can be really exercised.

And if one of the ways to remove some of the roadblocks towards this president's executive power is to undermine the executive power of a previous administration, it would be the first time we see that strategy actually enacted.

And it sounds like kind of cartoonish, but that's so much of what they're currently doing is pushing everything to that extreme, trying trying to test all of these more niche theories that you see people talking about in the past.

Like around 2011, when Obama first signed legislation with the Auto Pen, you had a whole bunch of libertarians complaining that this is unconstitutional because he wasn't physically present when the document was being signed.

And so you have like think pieces on that at the time that then kind of get memory hold.

And now you're going to see some of those justifications back again and actually try to test them out in court, court, especially if you have a Justice Department investigation, you have an Attorney General investigation, you have a Senate investigation, and a House investigation.

If one of those can stumble onto or develop or invent some compelling argument, we will actually see versions of this complaint be tested in a way that we never have before, because it would be like disastrous to the functional aspect of the state if you determined that all presidential documents signed via auto-pen are not valid unless the president's in the room.

That would be a massive domino tipping over, which, you know, most reasonable people who work in government, like elder statesmen, are not going to want to do that because that sounds like a fucking nightmare, like legally speaking.

And it would be like disastrous.

Like it would destroy some fundamental aspects of the government.

But right now, destroying aspects of government is kind of the point.

That's what we saw with Doge.

That's what we saw during the first few months of the presidency using this kind of tech startup thought process behind running a government.

You have to break things first so that you can rebuild it in a way that suits you better.

And if that means stripping away 200 federal judges to put in 200 of your own, that would have massive benefits for them.

And I think that's part of why they're having this focus right now.

Oh, yeah.

That's kind of all I have on that.

So unless you have some

closing thoughts.

No, I mean, of course, this is the game as laid out in not just Project 2025, but what the right has been talking about my entire life.

Like, none of this should be surprising if you've been paying attention.

The only reason why some people are surprised is that there's folks in the democratic hierarchy who have been saying for years, this isn't really what conservatives want.

This is just a fringe, right?

There is no fringe anymore.

They'll never actually do this.

They can't do this.

The system doesn't work that way.

There's just been this belief that this can't happen, right?

It can't happen.

Or that, like, if it did, obviously, you know, the cops will stop them.

The FBI will stop them.

The army will stop them.

And there's a reason why they've went out of their way to gain control of all of those organizations before doing this.

So, yeah, I mean,

we can either pretend that someone's going to stop them and you don't have to worry about it, or just accept that we are where we are, and

there may be some unprecedented things that need to be done.

Yep.

That's all I'll say.

Legally.

That's all I should say.

That's the episode.

Bye-bye, everyone.

Okay, cool.

Hello, and welcome to the show.

It's me, James, today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined by a friend of the show, Carl Casada.

How are you doing, Carl?

Oh, I'm doing great.

And when I hear friend of the show with any of you all or you, James, it's a real honor to me.

So I'm honored to be your friend and a friend of the show.

So I'm glad to be here.

No, thank you.

We always appreciate you being here and everything you do within range.

Carl, we're not here to talk about gun stuff today, actually, which is nice in a way, because we're here to talk about something which is also very important, right, in terms of keeping people safe.

And that is activism against like corporate destruction of our environment.

We're here to talk about something called Project Blue specifically.

Can you explain to listeners who are not familiar, folks who maybe haven't heard about it, what Project Blue was proposed to be?

Yeah, and it's not dead either.

We'll talk about that more.

But Project Blue was a, is, was, we'll see, a 290 acre data center project.

Put that in scope.

290 acres

data center south of Tucson through a company called Beale Infrastructure that through people's hard work came to find out it was for Amazon, but a 290 290-acre AI data center south of Tucson.

Yeah, that is vast.

I'm trying to think of a like,

I can't think of a comparison for 290 acres, but that is a huge amount of like computing power, right?

I guess it's hard to fathom that kind of space when you think about it.

Yeah, there are maps of what this proposed data center's footprint is.

And if you take the rough rectangle of it and place it over Tucson proper, the city of Tucson that is, they propose propose it to be just south of, it pretty much envelops and it consumes the entire downtown of Tucson in multiple neighborhoods.

That's how big this is.

And it's one data center.

Yeah.

What was a data center supposed to do?

Like what, if people aren't familiar, right?

Like what does a data center do?

What do they do with a big computer?

Well, okay, so for people that aren't really into the tech sector of things, a data center is essentially...

Think of something the size of a bigger than a mall that has nothing but giant computer data banks in it.

So it's a giant place where you would think of your old mainframes in the old days.

It's not mainframes anymore, but like it's racks and racks and racks of computing power and connectivity to the internet for the purposes of whatever Amazon would want to do with this.

So if you go to use Amazon's infrastructure or use their AI, that buzz phrase that now is everywhere, the computers that do those things or those requests or decide what products they want to market to through their algorithm, that's what these data centers do.

So it's essentially an entire city of just machines.

Yeah.

A techropolis is an interesting way to put it.

Like you're not a necropolis, a techropolis.

So imagine a few people maintaining an entire city of machines.

Right.

And actively participating and like undermining the value of labor for everyone else with this AI shit.

Well, that's part of this project we're going to get into a minute is one of the things they like to propose is that it's going to bring jobs, but only at the beginning.

And we'll talk about that more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about like people in Tucson did not want this data center, right?

Like there was a broad-based and well-organized opposition to it.

So perhaps we should explain like why, why, why, I mean, I guess people listen to this podcast are inclined to think data center bad, but can you explain the impact that this would have had on the city and the surrounding area?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So it's very interesting to me to think about, so these data centers of this accord are, if you're interested in this topic and start Googling, you're going to find that this is, of course, not the first large or mega data center that's been implemented across this country.

There's a number that are in Texas, and they are belching large amounts of pollution into the environment.

Cities nearby get absolutely destroyed by it.

Typically, they're brought in through some sort of tax incentives by the local city council or local county.

And so that's exactly what was happening here with Tucson.

So the local city council was pretty friendly to the idea.

They were talking to this Beale infrastructure to bring in Project Blue.

They were giving tax cuts.

They were giving all these incentives to bring this gigantic megalithic thing into the, into just south of town.

And part of the insidiousness of this is that this was going to go forward until someone noticed it.

Yeah.

It was just going to happen.

All of a sudden, one day, this thing is there, right?

But it was noticed.

And I don't honestly know exactly how it got noticed, but it got noticed.

And one of the things I really find interesting historically speaking is how certain places and cultures resonate over time with historical events from the past.

Tucson historically is an interesting place in terms of its environmental activism.

There's a number of things that happened in Tucson.

In the 1960s, there were groups that were actively fighting the spread of highways and highway infrastructure.

So they were anti-freeway.

And their reasoning and rationale was that freeways were the arterial infrastructure that allowed for the destructive spread of tracked home developments.

So the way to help one way as to prevent the destruction of the local environment and the spread of a city was to diminish its freeway footprint.

And I think you can see this is true.

If you look at any big city now, like Phoenix is essentially a hive city, and all of the growth comes because of freeways.

Right, because people can get to work or whatever quickly.

And so, you get commuter suburbs.

One thing that's always interesting when I was doing more work in Infosec, when people talk, and this does make sense, by the way, this is going to sound off topic.

I was talking to the information security architect for McDonald's.

Wow.

And we were working with them on putting together a, this is why this is interesting to me as a data center thing.

I used to do a lot of this work.

They were talking about putting in a very secure and encrypted data center for the purposes of protecting their intellectual property.

And I was talking to this guy.

I was like, what?

Is this like your recipes or what?

What is it?

It's a McDonald's protects.

And this was wild.

No, they don't care about the recipes.

They were protecting their software that determines where they should buy the next piece of real estate to put a McDonald's.

McDonald's is actually a real estate company.

And this, I have seen this in real time with my life because I've lived in a very remote part of the Arizona desert, the frontier, for lack of a better term of Arizona for a long time.

And the first thing that popped up in this one little area in the middle of nowhere was a McDonald's.

And now, everywhere you see a McDonald's show up someplace that seems a little weird, give it a few years and it's suddenly the epicenter of a new tractome development.

Oh, so they're like they have some unique algorithm to determine.

They figure that out.

And the McDonald's is the first thing that comes, usually a gas station, then a McDonald's.

and it ostensibly just looks like oh this is a place to stop take a leak and buy a bourbon

but no they buy all the land around it and then they start selling or leasing that to other businesses as the growth happens that's a big part of how the mcdonald's corporation makes its main money fascinating yeah and so aligned with you put a freeway when you see a freeway suddenly they show up in the middle of nowhere someone has a goal to put a giant tract home development out there and sprawl that city a little more right so anyways going back to the original topic these people in tucson in the 60s were anti-freeway and they actively changed the way tucson grew and i think it's one of the major reasons tucson if you've ever been to tucson versus phoenix is a very different culturally different vibe of phoenix one it doesn't sprawl the same yeah and it still has stuff that isn't strip malls.

It actually has locally owned businesses.

It actually has some community resources.

Not all of its tract home and strip malls.

And I think a lot of that is because of that freeway activism.

Yeah.

Also, you look back in Tucson's past, Love Him or Hate Him or somewhere in between.

The somewhat infamous author Edward Abbey lived in Tucson and wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang and wrote a lot of environmental activism.

He had a lot of views that were kind of deplorable, but when it came to climate and

when it came to the environment, He was pretty on point.

And his work spawned an organization called Earth First, which was one of the, not the first, but one of the most famous direct, we're talking direct action climate activists, or climate, you know, they were the ones that were destroying bulldozers, driving them off cliffs,

you know, burning down ski chalets, like pretty wild stuff, because they believed there was no retreat in defense of Mother Earth.

He's a quote.

But anyways, he was Tucson.

Earth First birthed in Tucson.

And then Earth First was a victim.

of the green scare and many of them are still in prison for their work but they did have an effect that whether you agree with that sort of direct activism or not they had an effect.

But here we are, it's been many years after those big main activities, and all that stuff sort of became quiet.

You don't really think of like direct action activism when it comes to the environment like you did back in the 80s and 90s.

But when this data center popped up, groups started showing up in Tucson that really felt very Earth-first E.

I'm not talking direct action like firebombs, but their speech, the way they were organizing, coming to city council meetings and not just showing up to speak, but disrupting the meetings, like causing a scene.

And their work so far, and I will mention some of them later in this topic, have actually sort of forced the hand of the city council to deny the project.

And so looking back, you're like, it's interesting to see the resonance of things like those old freeway activists and Edward Abbey and Earth First, it's still there.

Tucson still has that.

And you see that coming up now in regards to this data center project and other things that are starting to happen.

Yeah, I love Tucson.

I spent a lot of time in Tucson for years and years and years, and

there is a feeling of like, it's got this like DIY community feeling that you do not experience.

People think Tucson and Phoenix are the just smaller version of the same, but they're incredibly different.

Oh, no, yeah.

It's hard to describe the difference.

You have to go to both.

Yeah, yeah.

Or you can not go to Phoenix.

You can go almost anywhere else in the U.S.

and experience the same thing as Phoenix, right?

It's incredibly generic as a city.

Yeah, you know, Phoenix is an old place too, not as old as Tucson, but the very core, the downtown of Phoenix, still has something.

However, Phoenix was never good about preserving any of its historicity or historical content.

And so they never saw a building old enough or cool enough that they didn't care about bulldozing it and putting up a Walgreens.

And so Phoenix is as I forgot what documentary it was, but it was like what you just described.

So many American cities.

You drive through it and it's just like this

constantly looping, revolving piece of film of Walgreens, McDonald's, nail salon,

super cuts, chilies, rinse and repeat.

Yeah.

And it just every 10 miles, it's the same thing: Dutch Brothers coffee.

It just never ends.

And Tucson is not yet like that.

It still has

a soul.

Yeah.

There are special places in Phoenix, you say, like Guadalupe is cool, where my Yagi friends live.

That's a nice area.

I like going there.

Let's take a little break and talk about how Tucson imposes this data center.

So, there are a number of groups that came together.

If you can't track everything all at once, because it's not possible as a human being, but the one I've been keeping an eye on and communicating with is called No Desert Data Center.

They have a presence on the web, they're all over social media, Facebook, Instagram.

And for me, at least, and this is not to exclude anyone.

If you're one of the primary people or groups that were working against this and you heard this, please do not feel like I'm excluding you.

This is just the group that I landed up connecting with and following.

So you, but they are also doing a good job of aggregating others too.

So almost all of their posts have like a bunch of other groups tagged in it.

So if you were to look up the no desert data center folks, you're going to find a lot of them.

But they had some amazing artwork.

You know, one of the things that I think is really important in activism is getting the attention of the local community.

Artwork will do that.

So they did this incredible poster that's like says no drop for data.

And it's a water drop with a rattlesnake and a javelina and a saguaro and they had a rattlesnake wrapped around a raindrop it's cool really good stuff that catches your eye yeah yeah so they were doing that but they were also getting people together they were having meetings planning sessions before city council meetings getting people together doing the artwork there rallying the troops for lack of a better term building morale you don't have activism without morale yeah and then they were showing up and showing up in numbers there's videos on instagram on their feed alone where one of these city council meetings had over a thousand Tucsonians in it with signs and posters.

And they weren't just sitting there quietly waiting for their 30 seconds to speak.

They were disruptive.

They were loud and they were not going to not be heard.

So that type of activism in this instance very clearly is the reason that this happened.

Because if you read...

the writings of a number of the city council members, they were very sympathetic to the data center.

One of them was talking about like, this is the wrong thing to do.

If we block the data center, they're just going to build it anyway.

And it's better for us to be involved because then we can help tune it to be better for the community.

No, no, no, no, no.

You're just whitewashing a horrible thing.

And so this group and other groups called them out on that immediately.

Nice.

They're like, no, that's not it.

So.

I think I'm answering your question, but it's groups like this

showing up in large numbers, being loud, not only online, but in person, that force their hand.

That's crucial, yeah.

Yeah.

It's people actually being willing to get out of the tweets and into the streets, so to speak, to like actually show up in this case at these meetings, but it doesn't have to just be meetings, right?

It could be anywhere.

I guess we should just talk about like Tucson is from an odd hum word.

It means dark corner, but it is not a cool place.

It is cooler than Phoenix, actually, less hot.

But like this data center would have consumed a massive amount of energy, I presume, like just keeping the computers cooled, right?

And a massive amount of water to do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

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

Heat islands are where you build so much metropolitan infrastructure, including asphalt and concrete, with no thought towards heat or cooling.

you really don't like phoenix was built without thinking about that they're thinking about it now but it wasn't built thinking about it when it sprawled and it was continuing to sprawl.

Phoenix was always a little hotter than Tucson just because of like, you know, geographical reasons.

But now Phoenix is measurably and demonstrably hotter because it never cools off.

And that's a heat island.

So what happens is during the day, all of that concrete, all that asphalt, all those things heat up.

And it'll get to, at moments like just this last week, 118, 120 degree in the middle of the day.

But because the heat island hasn't been architected well well and has no green space to deal with this, at night, it's still 105.

Jesus, yeah.

It never gets below 100.

And so the problem with heat, like obviously 120 degrees can kill you, but the problem with the heat is that as you never get a chance to cool off, heat over time is more dangerous to human, to all living organisms.

If you get a break, that's what keeps you alive.

So it can be 120 during the day, but if it's 75 at night, that gives you a moment to heal and recuperate for the next day's heat.

Yeah.

Phoenix is one of a not the worst, believe it or not, but one of the worst versions of a heat island.

And they are actively working to make that better, but

it's kind of hard to undo what's been done.

Tucson, once again, because the sprawl is diminished by activism of the past, did not become the heat island Phoenix does.

So while it might be 113 during the day, it might get down to 80 at night.

And that really is a big difference for not only sustainability, but for the health and safety of everyone that lives there.

One of the things that I find is interesting is the justification for these data centers is because Arizona is seen as a place that doesn't have significant natural disaster risk.

But one of the things that's being left out of the conversation, I don't know why this is the case, is that heat and heat islands are a natural disaster.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they kill people.

If the power were to go out in Phoenix at the wrong time of year, the death toll is hard to fathom.

Yeah, yeah.

People, yeah, without air conditioning, it's unsurvivable in those temperatures, especially for older people, people medically conditioned or what have you.

Anyone at risk, the unhoused is one example, of course, which they don't even do proper metrics and measuring of because our society doesn't care like it should.

However, outside of that, you said people that are at risk, anyone that has any sort of illness, the young, the elderly,

anyone like that, they have to live in their air-conditioned spaceship to survive.

Yeah, yeah.

And it would have taken, like you say, a huge amount of cooling just to keep this data center.

Well, that's where this gets so fascinating when they start proposing these, because like, oh, let's be realistic, right?

Arizona is probably low risk for a traumatic earthquake or a hurricane.

That's fair.

Yeah.

However, it is not at low risk for a heat casualty event, which is going on every year and getting worse with climate change.

And so these data centers, the one in Tucson that was proposed, would have consumed, and the numbers fluctuate.

and of course the numbers you get from the amazon crew versus others will be a little different but as best as i can tell the power consumption of this one data center was essentially the equivalent of that of metropolitan tucson jesus yeah so you double the power load of the entire city yeah for this data center and the cooling system there's two different ways to cool there's quote unquote air cooled and water cooled they can tell you whatever they want the reality is they're probably not going to be affected with air-cooled in this environment.

So it's going to be water-cooled.

And the data on that also seems to be the water consumption of this was not only equal, maybe worse than that of Tucson itself.

Looking at this site right now, water positivity claimed for the initial two years, but the initial estimate was 622 million gallons.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With a 700-milliwatt expected demand.

It's crazy.

And so what happens is not only only does the city council just see dollar signs in their eyes, local electrical infrastructure like TEP, the Tucson Electrical, or other data center places where data centers are located, suddenly do things like stop worrying about any form of carbon positivity or they get rid of all their carbon goals so that they can build.

and work with people like this.

Because if you double the power consumption of a region overnight for a data center,

think of the waste that you're going to produce produce to do that.

Right.

Yes.

And suddenly, how do you produce that power?

You're not going to have a nuclear plant pop up tomorrow.

So you're going to do other things like burn more coal.

Yeah.

And so your carbon and carbon positivity are an attempt to move away from carbon waste.

They just throw that out the door so they can have these lucrative, juicy contracts with these data centers.

Yeah, yeah, that is.

I mean, it just on the face of it, when I heard of it, I was just like, why are they doing this in one of the hottest places places in, you know, in the region?

But I guess, yeah, they just don't see heat as a threat.

Having spent a lot of time in the desert there, I can tell you it is a threat to human life.

So as of last week, right, the council has refused it permission to be built in Tucson.

Due to intense external pressure.

They did vote against it, yes.

Yeah.

So that's like, it's a victory.

I guess it's a victory in a battle, but it's not the end of the war.

Oh, no, that's the problem with all this is that these companies and these folks will never stop.

So I just saw an article, in fact, that

two days ago, yes, this project was voted down.

However, they're coming back with just another proposal to do it a slightly different way.

And so each time they just reiterate and change it, it's just a new battle.

Right.

So they will change the words.

however they want to make it sound until these people will vote yes for it.

So like Nikki Lee, which is the ward for councilwoman, was the one that was arguing against essentially saying that we should approve this project so we can have better control of it.

And the activists said against that.

But it's just, they're just going to keep changing the tune until the activists get essentially worn out.

On top of that, this is not the only data center being proposed in Arizona.

There are currently three of them under proposal.

There's this one in Tucson and two of them in Pinal County.

The one in Pinal County starts off at the small size of 300 acres, but it's proposed to go to 3,000 acres.

Jesus.

They want to build ultimately a 3,000 acre data center that sprawls essentially from southern Phoenix across the entire north-south breadth of Penal County on the west side of the I-10.

southwest of Eloy, extending through significant what are indigenous or what were indigenous lands, destroying whatever cultural remains are there.

But imagine if this 290 acre data center was going to equal the power consumption and water consumption of Tucson.

What is a 3,000 acre data center going to do?

Yeah, yeah, that's insane.

That's this vast.

And that one is currently still in its early phases.

That one is called the Laosa Project.

The CEO of this company is named Koldeep Verma.

Okay.

Verma, V-E-R-M-A.

I'm not if that's sure that's the right pronunciation, but in another example of tech bro narcissism, he's calling this Vermaland and his company's called Vermaland.

It's like the most awful version of Disneyland.

We're not even bringing you rides.

We're just going to drink your water, belch heat into the sky, destroy your desert so you can have a disturbing psychological parasocial relationship with an AI avatar, and we're going to do it at your expense.

Vermaland.

Isn't that lovely?

Yeah.

And I've seen, that's weird.

They already own a lot of land off the I-10, I think.

Yeah, no, they've been purchasing land throughout Arizona and sitting on it.

But this is where the 3,000 acres come from is Vermaland.

Jesus.

Yeah, that is

a mind-bogglingly vast data center.

So I guess, like, this is one, you know, as you say, this will either move someone else or there will be other struggles, right?

Like,

for instance, the United States is waiving many of the waivers, including ones that protect indigenous human remains to build its border infrastructure right now.

Actually, a lot of the border infrastructure is coming out of the U of A tech park in Tucson, right?

That's where a lot of these companies have their headquarters, right?

The people who make the border surveillance infrastructure.

What can we learn from this struggle in Tucson if we're not in Tucson?

We might not even be in the U.S.

Because there are some unique things about Tucson, right?

It has this history of activism and it's always been, I don't want to use weird in a derogatory way, but it just hasn't conformed to like the neoliberal capital model of a city.

But I don't think it's unique.

There are things I think that anyone can take from this victory and the continued opposition, right?

So what can we learn from it?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, no, I think that that's a fair way to put it.

And I think that like, speaking of like the reverberance of the history of the area and the types of movements that came out of there, as we mentioned already earlier, make Tucson unique in regards to it being at least culturally more ready than some places to have this struggle.

However, if they do succeed and completely stop Project Blue and the 290 acre data center near Tucson is stopped,

it's not going to stop there.

We see three more data centers being proposed in Arizona proper, this 3,000 acre

dream site that I've mentioned already, is they're just going to keep changing and moving and trying to do it somewhere else.

The reality of this is that when we look back at the workers' rights movement, right,

there was the IWW, the industrial workers of the world.

The thing is, Tucson winning one fight against this data center only is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm of the consumption of these tech bros and tech industry people who do not care about the climate, do not care about you, do not care about the community, do not care about the water they consume, and they will destroy everything in their path for profit we know that that is what this form of data capitalism is and so tucson's lesson is everyone has to be this and i agree with you that tucson isn't unique in that there are other places that will have the fight but this is truthfully everyone's fight because the amount of pollution that would be belched out of this data center or the ones being proposed in arizona affects everyone.

The reality of climate change is, in my opinion, indisputable.

We're seeing it every year.

It's worse.

And it is human-induced, at least to a large degree, unlike some people want to deny.

And having your AI avatar on the internet is not in the interests of humanity as a whole.

So we have to work on this on a much larger, it's a global issue.

Yeah, yeah.

It is not, it is not a local issue.

That's what I'm trying to say.

And these data companies like Amazon, like Google, like Apple, although this isn't Apple in this instance, but all of them, They have the power, if not more, of power than that of a nation state.

Oh, yeah.

Like, I think of my friends in the Marshall Islands, right?

The small nation state, but one nonetheless, right?

They will have maybe 30 or 40 years before the islands are uninhabitable due to the rise of the sea level.

And like their response has been, A, to double down on community and supporting each other, right?

They also did things like if you go in between the islands on an atoll and the marshall islands, you generally use like a Higgins boat, like a landing craft from World War II, right?

But they also have these solar-powered canoes now to reduce their footprint.

They are a tiny, tiny fraction of a single percent of the world's CO2 footprint.

And so, what happens in Tucson will affect them, right?

And what they do cannot alone help them survive, right?

And they've appealed to the world's solidarity and made a whole podcast about this, and the world has not shown up for them, right?

So, like, I think people, you're right, like this is a global struggle.

It's one that, you know, it doesn't stop in Tucson, doesn't stop in Eloy, doesn't stop in Phoenix.

Like it stops when

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

This is touching on a point that always, that frustrates me frequently when we talk to people who are at least on the right side minded in terms of being concerned about our future.

And they do the thing, right?

They'll do their recycling or they'll put up a solar panel and all those things.

Sure.

But and this isn't to say that the individual shouldn't do the ethical and moral thing that they can do when they can do it absolutely can you recycle sure do it can you put up a solar panel absolutely do that but the real truth and reality of climate change and the destruction of our environment and this planet that we all inhabit it's not the individual it's these corporations yeah it is at a nation state level and a corporate level that is going to destroy our small biosphere one yeah ironically biosphere is uh we'll talk about biosphere two the experiment is near tucson actually yeah biosphere two was a little experiment that was a self-contained 1980s thing where these scientists essentially encapsulated themselves in airtight bubbles to see if they could live with the CO2 production that they were creating within it.

The truth was they couldn't.

The ocean turned to algae and they would have died.

So they learned Biosphere 2 wasn't going to work.

But we have Biosphere 1 and the individual doing the solar panels or recycling, that's a good thing.

And that's moral, but that's great.

It's something we should do if we can.

But it's us.

We have to act against the truly destructive forces.

And it's the corporations and the nation states that are belching destruction into our planet, not the individual recycling or not recycling a soda can.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think it's one of the greatest like

frauds or

canards that these, these corporations have managed to pull off is to have people attribute blame for climate change to the person not recycling their can, not the corporation.

Yeah, you know, the political spectrum is always challenging.

And I'm not trying to like point at any one thing, but this is where I think

we all have our failings, right?

And I think this is where like progressive space fails often, which is you'll see tone policing and you'll see recycling and you'll see solar panels.

But the reality is that isn't really doing shit.

It just isn't.

In the grand scheme of the numbers, it isn't it.

That data center, stopping that data center is an actual victory.

That's something that needs to happen.

And those things need to stop that kind of stuff across the board, not just in Tucson, not just in Arizona, but everywhere.

It needs to be a thing where everyone comes together and realizes that these people are consuming the very planet that we need to live on.

You see Elon Musk talking about going to Mars.

The human race has to go to Mars because a meteor might hit the Earth.

No, your company is what hit the Earth, my friend.

You're the one destroying the Earth, not that meteor.

Yeah, yeah, it's not external.

It's coming from within.

Right.

And it is, as you you say, like it's a species level threat to us.

The call is literally coming from inside the house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we should also celebrate these victories and learn from them, right?

So if people are interested in learning more about the struggle in Tucson, perhaps they're living in Phoenix and they're just now learning about Vermaland, right?

Or these other AI projects, like where can they find out more about this?

How can they involve themselves?

Yeah, so I want to, first of all,

I hope that I didn't come across as saying like, this is hopeless.

I don't think it is.

Like when we see the actions of like what made Tucson unique now, and we saw the actions of what Earthhurst was able to achieve through their decades of work, which they did achieve a lot, it resonates still to this day.

The planet is a better place because those people paid a price to do what they did.

And that's just something that never stops is what it boils down to.

These companies, these people will never stop trying to destroy.

our home for their profit.

So that's the point I was trying to make.

And so this was a success and we should celebrate that, like you said.

The one I want to reference is no desertdatacenter.com.

Again, I want to very much point out they are not the only ones.

Many people came together.

They're the one I have really been paying attention to.

If you go to no desertdata center.com, they have links to all their socials, Instagram, Blue Sky, Facebook.

And if you go to any of those, their Instagram is particularly active and has some great motivational art on it.

I will tell you that.

They will also link you to a number of other organizations at the same time.

So, if you're interested in this particular issue of these data centers in Arizona, I would reference you to that.

You can go to their link tree, which is also linked from their Instagram, and that'll connect you to a number of other organizations that are working on this right now.

And to their merit, the Project Blue, they succeeded at least delaying Project Blue, hopefully stopping it.

And the next post they put up was about the data center in Eloy.

So, they understand that this is broader in scope than just one desert data center.

That's good.

It's like it was in this movie, There Will Be Blood, if you ever saw that.

There's an amazing line, of course, I drank your milkshake.

If you drink the water south of Tucson or don't, but then put a data center just north of Tucson, it doesn't matter.

It's the same watershed.

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

It's the same.

Same problem.

So.

No desertdatacenter.com.

And that'll get you to a bunch of different links and a bunch of updates about what's going on with this.

Perfect.

And Carla, people want to follow your work.

I mean, you have a presence on the internet.

Where can people find you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My project is not necessarily about the Desert Data Center, but I'm definitely obviously very sympathetic and part of that too, just not on my project.

I'm Inrange TV.

So if you want to find all my work, you can find it by just easily going to inrange.tv.

And there's a link on there called watch.

And that'll get you to all my socials.

I distribute my video content decentralized.

YouTube is the...

is the line in the room.

Let's be realistic, but I have my content in multiple different places.

Easiest way to find all of them is inrange.tv.

And you'll find my socials there too, which is Facebook and Blue Sky and all that.

And of course, my topic is more about firearms, history, and civil rights and how they intersect.

But if our ability to breathe and drink water isn't human rights, I don't know what is.

Yeah,

I think that's how we should see these things.

Thank you so much for your time, Carl.

That was great.

James, thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

It's always a real treat to be on any of the shows here.

And I love all the work you all are doing.

And together, hopefully we can, I don't know how to put it, stop these corporate maggots from eating our not yet corpse of an earth.

Yeah, man.

I think it's like, I guess I'll finish you up by saying, like, it doesn't matter if we're confronting fascism.

It doesn't matter if we're confronting this destruction of our planet, right?

The only way through this is together.

And the only way that we defeat this is through building stronger communities that show up for one another.

And like, that's something that you have documented extensively in the historical parts of your channel.

So I think there is a connection.

that I hope people can see there.

Yeah, community defense is also protecting our planet so we can live on on it.

Yeah, I agree with that.

And we have to do that together.

Thousands of people showing up to city council meeting in Tucson is a glimmer of light in this moment.

And hopefully, we can see more of them.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks, Kyle.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.

This week featuring an entire three sentences about putting it back together again.

I am your host, Bio Wong,

and today we are gathered here to talk about tariffs.

Oh boy, it has been a massive two weeks of tariff news, the most important aspect of which has been

Finally getting a resolution to to what was going on with the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose at the beginning of his time in office.

On July 31st, we finally actually found out what those tariffs were going to look like.

And what those tariffs are going to look like is,

Percy NN, effectively what happened is that roughly if the U.S.

runs a trade deficit with you, you get a 15% tariff.

and you get a 10% tariff if we run a trade surplus with you.

Now, there's a bunch of other individual rates.

We'll get to some of them in a second.

But it's worth emphasizing that this doesn't make any sense.

So, okay, before we get into the structural effects of this, I want to sort of look at what the nominal stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're at odds with each other.

And this is a point we're returned to later.

Part of the justification for the tariffs is that, okay, they're trying to use tariffs to replace the income tax.

That's nonsense.

It's gibberish.

You literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the income tax.

But, okay, that's the thing that they want to do.

The other nominal justification, and this is what's being used in negotiations and is the thing that is causing individual tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up, is that Trump is pissed off that the U.S.

runs trade deficits with countries.

And again, like, this is basically nonsense.

The U.S.

pays for things in its own currency.

We don't actually need other places' currency.

It doesn't matter if we run trade deficits.

I really hate that Rand Paul is right when he said, I run a trade deficit with my grocery store.

But like, that's how the American Empire is supposed to work.

These people do not care that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work.

They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that has ever existed in the entirety of human history and they see numbers on a chart which says we pay them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it.

But again, okay, if that's a stated justification, right?

Then why are you imposing a tariff on countries we have a trade surplus to?

That doesn't make any sense.

And the difference between them is only 5%.

So what are we doing here?

It's nonsense.

Like our trade policy is being run by people who don't understand how any of this works and are operating off of, you know, effectively just pure anger and rage.

So I'm going to talk about a few of the really, really high rates.

We're not going to focus that much on the 30% South Africa, for example, but

oh boy.

So Syria is at 41%, which is absolutely fucking hideous.

Syria is a country that I, I don't know, anyone who listens to this show is aware of the extent to which Syria has been devastated by the civil war.

And this is an incredible blow to their economy.

Laos and Myanmar are also being tariffed at 40%.

And we promised in the executive disorder to explain how Trump recognizing the junta.

So Joe Biden had refused to recognize Myanmar's like military coup government.

And as long-time listeners of this show are aware, there is a military coup in Myanmar.

There is a large-scale revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government.

My co-hosts, James Stout, and Robert Evans have done a lot of very good reporting on this that you can go find.

You should find it.

It's some of the best journalism that I've ever encountered.

But the US's official position has been that we don't recognize the coup government because it is, and this is true, a coup government.

But Trump just sent the junta a letter that says you're tariffed at 40%.

And the thing about this is the junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah.

Like, that means you recognize us, right?

Because you're sending us official fucking notices of shit.

So you're recognizing us as the legitimate government of Myanmar.

And so the Junta is like thrilled by this.

There's some evidence of like the U.S.

lifting sanctions on them after.

It's kind of messy, but yeah, great.

Somehow, in the attempts to sort of just like squeeze every last drop out of all of these countries, we have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship.

Hate that, hate that.

Back to the more direct tariff stuff.

The tariffs on Laos is also going to be devastating for Laotian economy, which is a lot of the economies in Southeast Asia are pretty heavily export driven, and it's one of the places where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place after the sort of increase in labor prices and increase in resistance from the labor movement in China kind of pushed all of that capital down the Mekong River Delta.

This is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos.

And, you know, this is something I want to keep emphasizing over and over again, that these turf tariffs, the people they hurt the most are workers in places like Laos and places like Syria, Syria, right?

Who are going to just be absolutely fucking devastated by it.

Now, let's also talk Switzerland, which was the other country that had a tariff at like 40%.

This one is genuinely really funny, which is that it seems to largely be driven by Trump being pissed off at the trade deficit, which is like...

Compared to like the scale of the U.S.

economy, the trade deficit is like $0.

But the funniest part of this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by gold imports.

Now, this is extremely funny because if you know anything about the American right, you know that a lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially when they were sort of building their operations, a huge source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold.

This was the original Alex Jones grift, right?

I think he still does it a little bit now.

Before he sort of pivoted into supplements, he would partner with like gold salesmen and like silver salesmen.

And this has always been a huge source of these people's money.

Now,

there's been a little bit of decrease in the prominence of gold as a thing.

There's a very good folding ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Idris Elba

weird gold promotion documentary, which talks about the ways in which gold has been sort of threatened by Bitcoin and, well, mostly Bitcoin, but it's like cryptocurrency in general as like

the scam.

You're trying to sell all of these sort of weird prepper and like hardline.

quote-unquote sound money libertarian-y types.

But it is very funny that this is in effect, a self-reinforcing cycle because the thing about the price of gold is that it is largely determined by how fucked the rest of the economy is.

Gold people who are trying to sell gold are trying to sell you on the fact that the economy is about to fucking explode.

But this is a cyclical effect, right?

Where these tariff rates go up and the economy explodes.

And so people buy more gold from Switzerland.

At which point, our trade balance with Switzerland gets worse and worse and worse.

So,

and you know, like Swiss watches are another sort of major source of export currency stuff, which are, again, all worn by all these fucking MAGA grifters with their like fucking $10,000 watches or whatever.

So that one is just funny.

Trump has also announced, and this has not gone into effect yet, who fucking knows when if it goes into effect, but I think it's worth talking about, which is that Trump has been talking about

putting a 100% tariff on semiconductors unless you invest in the U.S.

So Apple, sort of in response to this, pledged $100 million in investment in the U.S.

to build chips.

And I think it's also worth looking at the ideological underpinnings of this because a huge part of this thing, and it's something that you've been seeing increasingly on the right, is this dream of making domestic iPhones.

And if you look at the people in the tech sector, right, the sort of tech billionaires who run all this stuff, they're openly fantasizing about like, oh, these like soft, weak liberals are going to be forced to like work in the factories and put iPhones together or whatever.

And it's worth emphasizing that this is just not possible, right?

And this is true of a significant number of the things that they want these tariffs to do.

They're just not possible results of the policy levers they're pulling.

A couple of months ago, I described a sort of similar policy thing to this as like they're attempting to scream at the moon in order to control the tides.

And it's like, it doesn't work.

It's not the right lever.

It literally can't do what you think it's going to do.

And it's worth going into why, which is that we can't make iPhones here because we don't have the migrant labor force to do it.

And a lot of you may be thinking, oh, well, the U.S.

has a lot of migrant workers.

No, you don't understand.

China, which is where most of these things are built, even with the tariffs, like a lot of, you know, there was some downcycling of plants.

That stuff has mostly been upcycled again.

China has 300 million migrant workers.

That is almost the entire population of the United States, right?

We are talking about individual plants with 200,000 workers.

That is the low-end estimate, by the way, of those numbers.

We don't actually have very good numbers on how big some of these FoxCon facilities are.

The low-end estimate is 200,000, right?

And again, this is just-in-time production.

So, okay, what does it actually mean?

Right?

This means that the production cycles work a lot of, for example, the way that UPS works, right?

We're like...

You have a bunch of people who are effectively seasonal or part-time workers who only come in when demand increases.

So for UPS, right?

And it's actually a relatively similar schedule to the the way it works in China, but it's like there's these massive surges around the holidays.

With Apple, it's more like September, November, roughly, but it's in order to like massively be able to ramp up production in time for, you know, the sort of like massive holiday increase of orders, right?

But in order to do this, you need to have a production apparatus where you have 200,000 workers there, but you can also get rid of most of them and they can support themselves doing other stuff for the rest of the year.

and then you have to be able to bring them back in during peak season we just do not have the populations to to replicate this right even if you're trying to replace it with prison labor the thing about the american prison system is that it's decentralized right this is actually a key element of how the u.s economy is structured prisons are one of the sort of three major sources of jobs in rural areas the other two are like Walmart style service jobs which replace anything else that was in the economy and then military bases which is part of why you know like like this is part of why rural politics have gone so reactionary, because like, okay, so if you're, if your options in the economy are

soldier prison guard service labor, you're going to generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit.

But again, even though the American prison system has a really high population, these people are really spread out and iPhone production requires sort of like mass centralization, right?

That's the only way to get these things to work.

Plus, the workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled enough to be able to do this shit.

And this is a capacity that's been built up in China over the course of like decades, right?

And we don't really have this.

Now,

people have tried moving this production to other places like Vietnam.

For example, the tariff rates there are also making this extremely difficult, but it's been really, really hard to replace.

And the other issue, and this is a technological issue, not just a sort of issue of the systemic elements of the population of China, the infrastructure infrastructure to build microchips in the US doesn't exist.

And it's not just that the infrastructure to build the chips doesn't exist.

It's actually way worse than that.

And this is why all of the attempts, the Biden administration has put an enormous amount of money into this.

The Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of money, specifically into the microchip angle, and none of them have been able to do it.

And part of it's a technological problem, but part of it is that the machines that you need to make the chips don't exist, right?

But the machines you need to make the machines that make the chips also don't exist.

And the machines you need to make the machines that make the machines that make the chips also don't exist.

We are so far up the supply chain, right?

And this is one of the, you know, one of the things, the thing that they're trying to do through sort of like

pure politics, right?

Through like, just like the pure exertion of state power is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply chain has worked.

And the way the supply chain has worked is by intense specialization in very, very, very small areas, right?

So Taiwan, for example, becomes the only place basically that can manufacture these chips.

And that intense specification means that like the machines that make the machines that are used to build this thing are only made by like one company in Switzerland.

And like machines that make those machines, like who the fuck knows where they're built?

And this is a thing where the technology involves has become so complicated and the labor has become so specialized that you're dealing with machines that like just straight up, not many people in the world know how to use.

And not many people in the world know how to create.

And so we're so far up the supply chain, right?

And this is also, if you want to look at like what the impact of these tariffs are going to be, right?

Because your supply chains are so specialized, you know,

you can think of these supply chains as like incredibly complicated machines, right?

And any sort of like little rock that you throw into the machine, or you know, you throw sand into the machine and suddenly the ball bearing doesn't work at quite the right efficiency.

And so and things just start breaking down across the entire supply chain.

And they think that they can just replicate all of this with just like pure tariffs and like throwing money at it and no you can't these are these are actual structural things of how the economy works now do you know what else is a structural element of how the economy works it is these products and services and the fact that they fund this podcast

We are so back.

Now, one of the other kind of tariffs, this thing I've been calling i guess like defiance tariffs one of the things the trump administration has been doing is threatening to impose a 50 tariff on anyone who buys oil from russia india has been threatened with this india's current tariff rate is 25 they're right now threatening with another 25 against the 50

it's sort of unclear exactly who's going to back down

here more interestingly and we've talked a little bit about this

Brazil.

There is a 50% turf tariff on Brazil, again, for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which is very funny, because this has managed to piss off the entire sort of political sphere in Brazil to the extent that like Bolsonaro has had to come out and denounce this because Bolsonaro was getting fucking torn to shreds by the Brazilian right for being basically a traitor, sort of lapdog of the U.S.

as they're sort of, you know, imposing this direct attack on Brazil through this 50% tariff, right?

It's backfired so spectacularly that like Lula, who was floundering, is now riding this incredible wave of sort of anti-American Brazilian nationalism from both the left and the right.

So Lula, who is again in a pretty strong political position because of this, has refused to do direct talks with the U.S.

because he was like, absolutely not.

Fuck this.

Here's a quote from Reuters.

We had already pardoned the U.S.

intervention in the 1964 coup, said Lula, who got his political start as a union leader protesting against the military government that followed a U.S.-backed ouster of a democratically elected president.

Quote, but this is now not a small intervention.

It's the president of of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil.

It's unacceptable.

Now, again, as I said in the ED, there's a lot of things now that are worth looking at here, right?

We have, on the one hand, this direct connection from Lula from, you know, the sort of subtle CIA backing a military coup stuff, which happens under the table, to, you know, this just like the president of the United States is telling you how to run your country.

And that is a substantive shift.

Even if like the CIA overthrowing your government like has more of a direct political impact on it, right?

The thing about the thing about the way American power worked was that it was mostly supposed to be under the table and it's not now.

It is just, it's just, it's just out there in the open, right?

The premise that the U.S.

government, like the president of the United States, should just be able to tell another country what to do is the fucking premise of American imperialism.

And now they're just saying it out loud.

And it's also worth noting that it's not like Lula is some kind of like anti-American radical, right?

Like Lula worked really well during his first term term in office with george w bush but again because of the way that the political wins have shifted here right to the extent that like bolsonaro has had to condemn an attempt to get him released from prison which is so funny because he's doing this he is he is he is pushing very hard now there hasn't really been a response yet for Lula's like call for organized terror resistance from China and India and BRICS.

I don't know if there's going to be.

It's worth talking a little bit about what BRICS actually is here.

So BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

It was originally like an asset class designed by some guys at Goldman Sachs who were, you know, trying to like classify the assets of this kind of like developing economy thing.

It was like, you know, you can buy bonds and these things and maybe you can classify their asset rates together.

And it has kind of become a political alliance, but you know, there's a lot of people who will attempt to sell you on BRICS being this sort of like leftist anti-imperial alliance, you know, and as a sort of socialist thing.

And like,

I will simply ask, right, who is doing the socialism here, right?

Is it the butcher of Gujarat?

Is it she, quote, we must oppose welfarism, Jinping?

Is it Vladimir, we will show Ukraine true decommunization, Putin?

Is it the African National Congress of selling your country to Bank of America?

Is it the butcher of Haiti?

Like, what are we doing here, right?

Like, this is not actually a substantively anti-American political alliance.

India is a close American ally.

South Africa is a close American ally.

None of this really makes any sense.

It's not a substantive political alliance, really.

People periodically make noise about it trying to be a substantive political alliance.

But, like, I mean, like, India and China are periodically, like, at war or, like, almost at war with each other over the border, right?

These are a bunch of countries that absolutely fucking hate each other.

It's never been a coherent political project.

Lula is trying to turn it into into one, but like, I

fucking, I don't think that's going to work.

So,

you know, that's sort of what's been going on on the front of sort of national resistance, but Lula does have, you know, a kind of very, very large and powerful political force behind him domestically to resist this.

We'll see what happens going forward.

It's also worth noting that China has been negotiating with the US and their tariff increases, which are supposed to go into effect, have been delayed for another 90 days.

So we're stuck in this holding pattern again.

But let's talk about what this means for the economy, right?

And I think the very short-term answer is that I don't think anyone really knows, right?

Like the actual macro effects of this are

things that we've only just started to see.

No one's ever really tried to model this out because there's no reason why it would ever happen, you know, and you're starting to see things

behind the scenes, like medical supplies being incredibly difficult to acquire.

You're starting to see a bunch of very, very weird items and supply chains become increasingly difficult to find.

But again, the supply chains are going to break down in ways that we just don't really understand.

What is going to happen and what has started to happen is inflation is increasing.

I want to sort of again review our kind of inflation theory, right?

Which is

largely derived from our friends at Strange Matter sort of supply chain theory of inflation.

Their thesis of inflation is that like it's not set by just supply and demand.

It's set by cost plus markup because price is not set by like an autonomous thing called the market.

Price is set by like a guy with like a price gun, right?

It's directly set by people.

And the way that those people set the price is

the cost of acquiring the item plus a markup for their profit.

Now, one of their sort of fundamental like insights here is that price is sort of sticky until it isn't, right?

Which is that like, okay, so the actual thing that controls price is sort of like how pissed off consumers get at price increases, but also,

that is also very, very much tied to brands, right?

And if you raise your prices and consumers get pissed at you, even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily mean those people will come back, right?

So, you know, a lot of times when they're, when they're, when there's price increases, companies try to eat it.

And that's, and that's been what's happening with a lot of these things, right?

Where at each point in the supply chain, people are, you know, people are having to sort of pay for the tariff parts, right?

And when someone has to pay for the tariff, they increase their prices that they sell it to the next person in the supply chain.

The next person in the supply chain increases their prices, right?

Now, so the way that these tariffs play out, right, is that each person in the supply chain is doing cost plus markup, but their costs are going up.

So your options are either you sell it at the same price and you reduce the amount of markup you're getting, which is just reducing the raw profit you're taking in, or you raise your prices.

And these things are trying to not raise their prices.

And part of this is from direct political pressure, right?

Like Trump has been threatening companies to not raise their prices from the tariffs.

But comma, prices are starting to increase.

And as this goes on and as more and more tariffs come into effect and it becomes more and more difficult to evade the tariffs, the prices are going to keep increasing because they're driven by these supply chain price increases.

So, you know, cost is going to go up.

It is going to have absolutely devastating impacts on workers across the world, primarily not in the U.S., but the workers who are in these expert-oriented economies are going to have to deal with just the absolute horror of large-scale economic collapse.

You know what?

Who else hopefully doesn't have to deal with the absolute horror of large-scale economic collapse?

It is the products and services that support this podcast.

are back.

Now, the thing I want to close this episode on is not actually a look at the economy, because I think,

you know, we kind of don't know exactly what's going to happen with the economy other than bad.

But there is something that I think we can look at that's been broadly ignored or miscovered, which is what these tariffs say about the nature of the state.

And I think what's happening is that we're seeing a fundamental change in the way that the state functions from the previous sort of neoliberal regime to this like just really openly fascist one.

And I think the most clear example of this isn't necessarily the tariffs, though they are a pretty clear example.

It's this extremely weird like extortion agreement reached between Trump, AMD, and NVIDIA.

I'm going to read this from CBS.

Quote, U.S.

chip makers NVIDIA and AMD will pay the US government 15% of revenue generated by sales of their AI chips in China, a White House official confirmed to CBS News.

This

is just a shakedown, right?

You know, this is part of a negotiating process by which originally AMD and NVIDIA were going to be banned from selling their AI chips to China.

And in order to be allowed to sell these chips to China, Trump was like, okay, if you want to do that, give us like 30% of your revenue.

And they were like, okay, what if we did 15%,

right?

This is just a shakedown.

and you know, it's been described as such all over the press, but they're missing something fundamental here, which is that the state fundamentally is just a shakedown, right?

The analysis of Trumpism from the sort of critical press has been to view it as corruption, and it is absolutely corrupt, right?

Like, no question about this, it is unbelievably corrupt.

Like, we have people just giving the president blocks of fucking gold with an iPhone embedded into them, right?

It's it's hideous, open corruption.

But

analysis that looks at the Trump administration as corruption of an ideal type, right?

That looks at it as the transformation of the state into something that it fundamentally isn't, that kind of analysis is just wrong.

The state has always and has always only been the localized monopoly on the legitimate use of force, right?

That's all it is.

That's all it's ever been.

Everything we know about the state today, right?

From the legal system to education to roads to environmental regulation to the welfare state are all just functions that were tacked on to the core monopoly on violence either as part of a carrot and stick gambit to maintain control of population or simply as a concession to popular force you can just have a state that is a bunch of guys with guns who rule purely by fiat and have control over an area that is a state everything else that we think of as being part of a state is tacked on and Trumpism as a political force has simply reverted the state back to a pure mode of extraction right?

The state is men with guns who take shit from you to pay for those guns.

And it becomes breathtakingly clear that this is, you know, how the state is functioning during the Trump administration, because the Trump administration has been slashing benefits while handing tax breaks and giant government contracts worth billions of dollars to the tech elite.

And they've been spending tens of billions of dollars.

you know, to hand to the men with guns and to recruit new men with guns for the mass deportation regime, right?

This is just a pure pure version of the state as an extraction regime, as a regime that fucking takes money for you at gunpoint to buy more men with guns so it can take more money from you.

Trumpism imagines that you can collect this money to pay for the apparatus of violence and terror from just pure extortion of foreigners and the working class.

You know, and we talked about this a bit at the beginning, right?

This is part of why they want to do tariffs is they think you can replace the income tax.

You know, the income tax is just like absolutely despised by the extra state elements of the ruling class class because rich people hate paying taxes but there just isn't enough capital to run a state like that without employing some kind of like mmtsk money printing which has alienated a huge part of trump's austerity coalition because his like quote-unquote deficit reduction stuff hasn't actually reduced the deficit so the people who like really really care about that ideologically are pissed but also on a fundamental level This is already how most city governments operate, right?

They are enormous police budgets extracted at gunpoint, either from the city council directly or directly from the working class, from fees and fines and tickets, like just leveled at working class people directly.

And this is something that is a little different from how previous regimes of neoliberalism has functioned, because those previous regimes of neoliberalism did a lot of these same things, but they were run through regimes of debt extraction, right?

It was, you know, it was the IMF, right, coming into your country and being like, okay, if you want to pay back these loans that this dictator took out right you're gonna have to like sell your entire fucking working class into peonage so that your entire economy is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back but again it that was debt extraction based and finance based Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight up say give me all your money if you want to live but this is not a particularly smart strategy There's a reason that the state takes on other guises than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet, right?

A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime where the violence is just out in the open, invites more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime or a regime that operates through moral principles.

All regimes of accumulation, of dispossession, of resources taken by violence to produce more violence come to an end.

Brick by brick and stone by stone, Trumpism too will be torn to the ground by the hands of the people who it thought it could exploit forever.

This

has been it could happen here.

Welcome back, everyone, to Electile Dysfunction.

Electile.

That's a new one.

Yes, yes, yes.

The podcast about why president bad.

Also, why world bad?

Also, why America bad.

I'm Robert Evans, introducer extraordinaire.

With me today, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout.

Eventually, special segment from James Stout later in the episode.

Yes.

Later, he is being held in custody by the FTC.

That's not true.

You cannot say that because that is something that actually could happen over time.

So unfortunately.

But he is not.

That's why I made it be the FTC, Garrison.

People will believe us.

I don't know.

People will believe us.

We could get arrested by the FTC any day now.

We could get arrested for the FTC any day now, thanks to the ads that I've been reading for British Petroleum, even though I exclusively use American petroleum.

This episode, we're covering the week of August 7 to August 13.

Yep.

For now.

It's just so wear.

I think it's important to keep up because if people refer back these episodes, it's good to know what week we're talking about.

Yeah, I don't usually remember what day it is.

So, you know, good to do that.

Good to remember what day it is.

Mia, you want to start us off?

Yeah, I need to issue a correction about Sesame Street.

I was wrong about Sesame Street's structure.

We got a very sweet message from someone who works on the show about the way I talked about it being stripped for parts.

Sesame Street was never actually ran by PBS.

It was ran by its own independent non-profit entity.

Sesame Workshop, I believe.

Yeah, yes.

Yeah, now called Sesame Workshop.

And so the episodes that were being streamed on HBO Max, I think they've now moved to like Netflix.

Those episodes all did still air on PBS.

However, comma, they only aired nine months later.

But yeah, I want to be clear about that.

And then, Garrison, do you want to talk about PBS kind of not existing anymore?

Well, PBS may still find a way to exist, but specifically the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps facilitate.

the you know the funding and the the structure and the operation of things like PBS and your local npr after being defunded by the trump administration is now going to shut down completely so yeah and that's and that's a lot of the how a lot of the funding for rural networks particularly was able to function if your pbs network is like mostly not funded by that or they can find other funding sources it can survive but

real bad it's pretty disastrous for public media yep and like npr specifically and all of its local affiliates are some of the best like local news journalism across the country.

And this is going to be a big hurdle to get over with the loss of a, of like a giant in the, not just like the like national media space, but like for journalism and as well as children's educational content.

And it's, you know, and it's worth mentioning too, like this is one of the last

as as sort of local media and local radio and local newspapers have been carved out and gone out of business and destroyed to venture capital firms.

NPR was like one of the last local journalism outlets left in a lot of places, especially in rural areas.

And that's just getting worse.

So

we hate that.

Yeah, this has been the Sesame Street Correction.

I deeply apologize to the cast and crew and production staff of Sesame Street.

Yes.

Sorry, particularly to Grover.

Not sorry to Elmo.

No apologies to Elmo.

No, but we saw what Elmo was tweeting.

I'm on Larry David's side of that beef.

For our first main main story this week, let's talk D.C.

On Monday, Trump declared it was liberation day for the District of Columbia to quote unquote take our capital back and officially invoke section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to place the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and ordered the Secretary of Defense to mobilize the DC National Guard to quote, address the epidemic of crime in our nation's capital.

Along with this announcement, Trump released a presidential memorandum reading in part, quote, the local government of the District of Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in the city.

The mobilization and duration of duty shall remain in effect until I determine that conditions of law and order have been restored in the District of Columbia.

Robert, who in the past have you heard talk about federalizing the police?

Oh, gosh.

I mean, just a couple of guys.

There's this dude, Hitler, who

worked with a guy named Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler to do that back in the past.

But that was in Germany,

a country totally different from the United States,

almost three, four countries away from us.

So not really relevant at all to anything happening here.

And we can all rest assured it can't happen here.

Yeah, we're not Germans.

We have a lot of Germans, but we're not Germans.

This is part of Yarvin's writing on how to take over the government, centralizing the police is one of the key steps, nationalizing local law enforcement, putting them under federal control.

And

here is another version of enacting

such a policy,

mainly citing

this crime epidemic in DC.

Though, according to DC Metropolitan Police and their own crime figures, violent offenses, which peaked in 2023, fell to their lowest in 2024, lowest time in over 30 years, and now in 2025 continue to fall even lower than that.

Though Trump claims that these stats,

just like the Bureau of Labor stats, are all made up or all fake.

We'll get to that.

These aren't real stats, and they're assuming that there's been fake statisticians who have been...

covering up the real the real crime wave happening across DC and even across the country.

Trump cited three incidents leading to the federalization of D.C.

police.

One, the assassination of two Israeli embassy staffers in May, a fatal shooting of a congressional intern in June, and most recently, an alleged violent carjacking of the Doge staffer known as Big Balls

and a possible future recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor or Freedom.

One of the medals.

Honors only for military, yeah.

Well, you know, Big Balls, frankly, might have some military credentials based on how he survived this latest, uh, yeah, this, this latest violent encounter.

Who's to say?

This assault from a platoon of Romanians, yeah,

quite, quite frankly, I feel, I feel like we're only about six to eight months out from him getting like commissioned as a lieutenant and then them giving him the actual Medal of Honor

for his courageous service, getting beaten up by two 15-year-olds.

So,

this latest incident with Mr.

Balls, I think is his official title at Doge,

or now the Social Security Administration.

Not related to Ed Balls.

No.

Different balls.

But this latest incident.

This is Mahoney.

Very different guy.

This latest incident with Mr.

Balls seemed to tip Trump over, though this is something that he has lofted for months and months.

He's been wanting to do this.

On Tuesday night, 43 arrests were made in D.C.

in relation to the federal seizure of police.

1,450 officers were part of this operation, half from D.C.

Metro Police, which are now federalized.

So far, only 30 National Guard troops have been deployed, but around 800 are on the way.

On Wednesday, Trump discussed extending his control of D.C.

police past the 30-day limit.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Your federalization of the police has a 30-day limit unless Congress acts to extend it.

Are you talking to Congress about extending it, or do you believe 30 days is sufficient?

Well, if it's a national emergency we can do it without Congress but we expect to be to Congress before Congress very quickly.

And again we think the Democrats will not do anything to stop crime but we think the Republicans will do it almost unanimously.

So we're going to need a crime bill that we're going to be putting in and it's going to pertain initially to DC.

It's almost, we're going to use it as a very positive example and we're going to be asking for extensions on that, long-term extensions, because you can't have 30 days.

30 days is that's by the time you do it.

We're going to have this in good shape.

And don't forget, in the border, everyone said it would take years and you'd have to go back to Congress.

I never went to Congress for anything.

I just said, close the border.

And they closed the border.

And that was the end of it.

I didn't go back to Congress.

We're going to do this very quickly.

But we're going to want extensions.

I don't want to call national emergency.

If I have to, I will.

But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously.

Don't like that.

No, it's pretty dictatorial on like a space level.

Quote, if it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress.

It's very palpatine emergency powers coded.

And I'm not sure if Lucas was pulling any real-world examples for Star Wars, the prequels,

or if he was just pulling all that shit out of his ass.

Who knows?

It seemed pretty fanciful.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his former co-workers on Fox News that it's unknown how long D.C.

will be under this militarized occupation.

He's got the guts to say, I'm going to federalize the police that don't work.

I'm going to bring in the National Guard.

I'm going to bring in federal marshals.

I'm going to bring in the park police.

How long are we?

How long?

How long?

What is the.

Well, it costs money, right?

It costs money.

And the question is, are you there for a year?

Are you there for six months?

And when the troops pull out, what happens?

I would call this conditions-based.

I would say it's a situation where we're here to support law enforcement.

And the more we can free them up to do their job, the more effective they can be, the more we can work.

I mean, this isn't my realm, but the justice system to make sure people who are arrested are actually locked up.

That's why the president's talking about cashless bail in sanctuary cities.

If you're illegal here in D.C., that's going to be a problem.

So all of these things that apply to law and order are front and center for us.

And I don't know, weeks, months, what will it take?

That's the president's call, but we're going to be there for him to execute as swiftly as possible.

Conditions-based.

It's real, like, war in Iraq vibes.

Yeah,

a lot of those these days.

Yeah.

A lot of mission accomplished coming out of the Trump administration, too.

Because they've learned that, like, there's no consequence in just saying, like, yeah, we closed the border and we won.

The border's won.

You know, it's done.

No one's going to get to their base with a counter opinion that matters.

As bad as things are in D.C.

right now, this is just the start of what they want to do.

Trump seeks to make a quote-unquote example of D.C., but soon wants to go further and attempt this in other cities, first naming places like Chicago and Los Angeles, then later New York, Baltimore, and Oakland.

We have other cities that are very bad.

New York has a problem.

And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland.

We don't even mention that anymore.

They're so far gone.

We're not going to let it happen.

We're not going to lose our cities over this.

And this will go further.

We're starting very strongly with DC and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say.

We're not going to lose our cities over this.

That gets into the core part of their framing, this idea that homeless people and criminals, cough, cough, black people,

are making us lose, like lose our cities.

They're so far gone.

And this is necessary for such reasons and like you could look at that pretty clearly when he's naming like oakland baltimore chicago new york like it's it's it's not it's not very masked here yeah i talked with dc resident bridget todd this morning we should have an episode with her perspective coming out early next week i think sunday night i wrote an episode earlier this year laying out you know, some of my predictions for the year.

And this along with Weird Terrorism were two of like my big ones, right?

That DC in particular, he would be attempting to fill with soldiers and probably invoke the Insurrection Act.

Now, one thing that I have been surprised on is that they really do seem kind of hesitant to go full in on the Insurrection Act.

And obviously, I didn't expect LA to get troops deployed in it before DC.

But just based on what they were saying, like after the election, kind of as he was preparing to take office, it was very clear that they were looking at DC as a focus in part because they had, you know, during his last term as well, right?

This is not entirely unprecedented, but his desire to specifically not just take away any sort of autonomy that the city has and put it under direct federal control, but to see troops in the streets and federal agents in the streets is not surprising.

It's, it's something that like, it's not even, should he, I honestly shouldn't even call it a prediction.

It's just something he's been repeatedly saying he's going to do.

So the fact that it's happening now,

you know, the only thing that's surprising to me is that it happened in LA first, right?

And that they really do seem to have, and who knows, you know, this could change by the time the episode airs, but they do seem to have something of,

I don't know, if a block is the right way to phrase it, but they don't seem yet willing to go for the Insurrection Act.

That still seems to be a bridge too far for some reason.

I'm not 100% sure why.

I think they're worried about like massive backlash to it.

Like they're really unpopular.

And

they also just don't need to.

Yeah, that's a fair point, Gare.

They have this like section 740 to call on.

And if Trump's going to try to get Congress to pass a new crime bill, that can allow them to do this kind of stuff without having to use the Insurrection Act.

So I think it's more of like a matter of necessity.

Yeah.

Which is maybe just a risk they don't think they need to take.

Yeah.

And like, who knows what type of weird shit they would try to push into a crime bill, including like exceptions for almost any city to have their police force be federalized.

I think the interesting part of this to me is also though that like, it feels like a lot of what their politics is, is like the spectacle of making it look like there's power there versus like actually

doing the thing.

Cause like you can't actually hold DC with 800 National Guardsmen.

And like, you know, if you, if you look at what happened in LA, they kind of like declared victory, but then the actual thing they came there to do, which was like do this like unprecedented mass deportation wave.

They did some of it and then they got ran out of the city.

And so I think, I don't know, i i think i think there's a kind of apocalyptic framing of this where it's like okay well it's over they can just do this but also it has not been going well for them and like

was it from dc the video of the guy of the guy just like throwing a sandwich at the national guard throwing a subboy sandwich yes yeah right like actual regular people really don't like them and

I think I think we're just going to see escalating resistance as more than like fucking 80 guys get deployed there and I don't know it's unclear to me whether they they can actually just like maintain this or if they're just going to say like we did it joe in like

30 days and pull out right that's kind of what some of the rhetoric looks like is that they're going to try to arrest as many homeless people as they can put them in jails lock them up into hospitals like the executive order that we mentioned a few weeks ago yeah

and like scare teenagers and that's most of what they want out of this.

And they're going to make a big show of it.

And then they'll, yeah, declare that the city is now safe.

And then they'll use the legitimate crime stats showing crime falling and be like, Look, we proved it.

So, that I think that is probably what it will turn out to be.

But if they try to push forward a new crime bill, like Trump is mentioning, or call it a national emergency to help strengthen his own powers, I think that's indications that this could have some longer-lasting results.

Let's go on an ad break and return to talk terrif, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll get to that.

And we're back.

And obviously, the big tariff news this week is we'll get to, well, one of the pieces of big tariff news is that Trump has ordered another extension of the kind of delay before enacting tariffs against China.

You might say Trump looked at his tariffs against China and decided, tariff, he don't like it.

Okay, that was my intro.

Mia, me, talk tariffs.

Honestly, okay, so this is kind of a light tariff news week.

There isn't that much also because if you want to hear me talking about tariffs for like 45 fucking minutes, go listen to the episode on Wednesday.

You just did a tariff episode.

I just really wanted to lead into the tariff thing that way.

Yeah.

No, there is actually a very important piece of tariff news today.

Arizona Ice T is considering raising prices for the first time in over 30 years due to Trump's 50% aluminum tariffs.

All right, everyone, get off the call right now.

It is time to riot.

Find a building, burn it down.

No, this is not a drill.

Not acceptable.

Arizona Iced has been the shining beacon resisting inflation for decades.

The proof, proof that inflation is fake

is on every Arizona iced tea can.

And if Trump's going to take that away from us,

burn the whole system down.

Yeah, that's it.

I want the Arizona Iced CEO handing out cans to throw at your

at your local government building of choice to defend the 99 cent can.

It's one of the most important aspects of American culture.

It's the only thing left of the American dream.

It's the one last piece of the American dream is a 99 cent can of Arizona iced tea.

That's all we have left.

50% aluminium tariffs will not take this away from us.

Aluminium.

Yeah, no, just move past it, man.

Forget it.

It's Canadian.

Where are we going on it?

Okay.

This is actually a good way to pivot into the just complete mess at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So one of the things that Trump has been really harping on is so the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a jobs report and it was bad.

Jobs no good.

And Trump has been absolutely furious about this ever since.

And we will actually come back to, I think, like we will literally come back to the Arizona cans after this.

Thank God.

But

however, good lord, the people, they are trying to put in office right now.

I

so long ago in a galaxy far far away, I made an argument that the Trump regime is built on pure stupidity, that there is no plan at all.

There is only, you know, a ravening maw of the oblivion of reason that obliterates all attempts to comprehend it and leaves only the words, yes, they really are that stupid.

And this argument was about a guy named Stefan Mirin, who was Trump's chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and his plan to like make other countries pay taxes on holding U.S.

bonds, a thing that is just unequivocally good for the United States.

And, you know, this is a plan.

You can go back and listen to that episode from a few months ago.

This is a plan so monumentally stupid that the only way I could think of describing it was like yelling at the moon to stop the tides.

Anyways, Trump is trying to get that guy appointed to be one of the board members of the Federal Reserve.

And the staggering thing about that isn't just that he's doing this.

It's that like

this is not the guy who's in the news right now for being unbelievably stupid and getting appointed to an extremely important

structural agency of the American economy because they are trying to appoint senior economist at the Heritage Foundation E.J.N.

Tony as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after they fired the last head for like releasing the jobs report, right?

This guy, okay, I make fun of economists for being dumb as shit all the time.

He might legitimately be the stupidest economist I have ever seen.

Just on Blue Sky, like the day this was announced, right?

I saw someone dunking on him for drawing a chart where he doesn't seem to understand that people retire and that when they retire, they're not in the labor force anymore.

Where he was doing this trend line that was based on the assumption that like people wouldn't.

retire.

There are so many just incredibly basic economics since he doesn't understand.

There's a post that I saw.

This is the first one.

That was the second one that I saw.

The first one that I saw.

And it's really funny because this is like in the New York Times now, but I just like saw this on Blue Sky was this post by this economist named Joey Politano who said, quote, an economist so dumb I had to explain to him how the price index works will now lead the BLS kill me.

Great.

So he was doing his thing where he was like posting the price index and being like, prices aren't going up.

But the thing about the import price index is that it calculates prices pre-tariffs.

Okay.

So, of course, they wouldn't go up because they're not calculating the tariffs.

And he was posting this as like, no, see, the tariffs don't do inflation.

He is, he's being chosen for this position because he is just like a rigid ideologue of the Trump administration, right?

But he's also,

he's so fucking stupid that things are happening I have never seen with right-wing economists before where other right-wing economists are going like this guy can't be allowed to take office.

He's going to fuck everything up because he's too dumb.

Like, I am watching economists at the Manhattan Institute, which is an organization that was literally founded by Reagan's director of the CIA, William Casey, right?

Like that, the Manhattan Institute is a right-wing institute, right?

Like, again,

this is an organization founded by Ronald fucking Reagan's CIA director.

And I am watching those people go, this guy is too stupid to be put in office.

Please don't put him there.

This is unprecedented.

i've i've never seen right-wing economists break rank on the sort of like affirmative action program they all have for like really really underachieving right-wing shithead economists it's astonishing and so and the reason he's being brought in this is also the reason he was like the chief economist the heritage foundation is that he has been calling for getting rid of the bureau of labor statistics and also thinks that again like like trump does it they've been like cooking the books to make democrats look good and republicans look bad and and so if he gets appointed this also like goes with the senate but him being appointed here effectively signals the end of independent economic data from the federal government hooray

which is a just catastrophic like every single part of the government every policy organization every like every every single element every corporation every element of the entire U.S.

economic system relies on this data being non-partisan and accurate.

And it's obviously like, yeah, like all data is political, but like it being like reasonably accurate is like the defining thing about the U.S.

economy is that this data is there and functions.

This is what everyone based their decisions off of.

And he very much looks like he wants to just end that.

And I want to close by noting that like one of, you know, at the very end of the Soviet Union, right, one of the things that was taken as like the giant signal that things were going to shit there was that like their leadership by like the like the mid-late 80s was deploying satellites specifically so they could use satellite imagery to check the output of their own factories because their their their control of the economic statistics had become so like just annihilated right by just like mass falsification their loss of control over the standards of their measuring regime was seen as like this is the regime falling apart and we are like eight months out from google doing that right like we are not very far out from companies doing a thing you have to do with like remote provinces in China where they're fault where like there's data falsification of like okay we're like using satellite data to like measure freight loads and like measure electrical consumption and like figuring out what factories are open at night to figure out how much that's you know that that is something that is

Very much in our future.

I'm only kind of joking about the satellite shit.

I think we probably will live to see that, assuming this thing goes through.

Assuming they remember how to launch satellites.

Well,

it won't be them.

It'll be like corporations doing this.

Oh, sure, sure, yeah.

Like using their own satellite grids.

I mean,

I can see the

Blue Origin satellites launching to keep track of

Amazon's efficiency.

Yep, yep, yep.

Oh, good Lord.

Yeah, I want to close on like one final brief note, which I've said this before, but I want to say it again.

This is the exact thing that

is one of the big things that brought down the military dictatorship in Brazil was that they were lying about inflation data.

You know, the thing about inflation is that you can just see the price of the Arizona can go up.

Just like you can see Huey Dewey and Louie expand in our favorite inflation fetish pornography.

They don't give me hazard pay for this.

They really should.

Hazard.

I feel like this is a bonus.

Oh, I guess this is also mentioned.

Part of the reason they're trying to put this like absolute clown on the board of the Federal Reserve is that they want to replace the chairman of the Federal Reserve so that Trump can just directly set interest rates.

That's a looming crisis that is coming.

Trump is threatening to sue the head of the Federal Reserve right now.

Oh, yeah.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

He is.

He sure is, which is a facet, going to be amazing precedent.

I am excited.

Oh, it's, it's astonishing.

I don't know.

It's been very funny because a lot of the kind of internal publications from like the banks about this have been like, ah, if you're a booster on Powell, it's not that big of a deal.

Like the banks can autonomously set interest rates technically without the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

And it's like, okay, I don't think you understand how bad this is going to get.

So we're still, we're still in cope.

I don't know.

We'll report to you back on the show when all of that enormous cluster fuck blows up.

And yay.

Before we go on break again, I'd like to have an update for one of the stories we talked about last week, the Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois and then later to California to brickworm to stop or delay a redistricting vote in Texas.

And now, Texas Democrats are set to come back home possibly as soon as this weekend.

Yes.

After Governor Greg Abbott ended the special session to redraw the congressional map, which would add five new Republican House seats, with some Democrats expected to return very soon.

Nothing stops Abbott from just calling another special session once the Democrats return.

In fact, he has said that that's exactly what he's going to do.

He's definitely going to do that, yes.

And add in new legislation to convince some of them to stay.

So we will see.

They can just leave the state again if they want to.

Unclear if they will.

I mean, other states are threatening retaliatory redistricting, specifically the governors of New York and California.

This is going to be a really annoying mess with

different states all redrawing their maps just to create some kind of congressional balance, Florida also threatening to do the same.

So we will see how this develops over time.

But yeah, Texas Dems may be home sooner than expected.

It's so cool that on the one hand, you have the Republicans creating the image of tyranny and then expanding their actual power.

And then you have the Democrats doing the image of resistance and then giving in.

I mean, they're not really giving in yet.

Yeah, we'll see.

We'll see.

They are going home because this session is ended.

Yeah.

What still remains to be seen is if they will flee the state a second time, like a week later.

Yeah, which who knows?

I have little faith in that, but we'll see.

Yeah, I'm not sure at this point.

Yeah.

But I thought we should include that small update there.

And now we should include a secondary ad break.

Okay, we are back

in other news.

last week on Friday, a mass shooting was targeted against the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The 30-year-old shooter broke into his father's safe to retrieve five firearms for then used in the attack.

The shooting started at a CVS across from the CDC main entrance.

The shooter then fired upon six buildings on the CDC campus, with a total of 500 rounds being fired during the incident, with 200 shots hitting CDC buildings.

One DeKalb County Police Officer was killed.

The shooter later shot and killed himself.

Police were contacted several weeks before the shooting by unknown individuals due to, quote, recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, according to the GBI director Chris Hosey.

This was about the soon-to-become shooter.

Police found written documents from the shooter expressing distrust in the COVID-19 vaccine.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Hosey said the shooter, quote, wanted to make the public aware of his discontent with and distrust of the vaccine, unquote.

With sources who knew him telling ABC News, he blamed the vaccine for making him sick and depressed.

The CDC director sent a letter to its 10,000 employees earlier this week saying, quote, the dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led to deadly consequences, unquote.

The Monday after the shooting, RFK Jr.,

who recently defunded mRNA vaccines, visited the CDC campus to express condolences for the family of the officer killed, as well as to, quote, offer support to all of the CDC employees who are a part of a shining star health agency around the world, unquote, to quote from an interview he gave with Scripps News.

When Kennedy was asked what would be done to stop the spread of vaccine misinformation to prevent future incidents like this shooting, Kennedy said, quote, people can ask questions without being penalized.

And quote, we don't know enough about what the motive was of this individual, unquote.

Hate that.

So that's all pretty, pretty disgusting.

Yeah.

Seeing narratives that RFK Jr.

has promoted for his own profit for years

being used to justify a shooting targeting the CDC headquarters.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, it's kind of unclear exactly what, because it seems like he was shooting at the buildings.

I, he fired at least 200 rounds, roughly 200 rounds into the buildings, about 500 rounds fired total.

But I've seen people say that means he was like shot 500.

He did not.

A lot of those rounds are the police.

No, that's the total.

Most of them are the police.

You know, two or three hundred rounds would not at all be odd for how many police would fire in response to a guy like this who is just mag dumping, you know, into a building.

It's unclear to me, did he see people through the windows and was he trying to hit them or was he just shooting at the buildings to make a statement?

The fact that he did shoot and kill a police officer, presumably with intent, makes it more likely that maybe he was trying to hit people inside the building.

I don't know how much it's worth splitting hairs here, but I am like, it is kind of unclear to me.

Was his goal more to make a statement or was he hoping to like rack up a body count of CDC employees?

And this was just as close as he could get.

I don't think we really know.

Maybe we probably never will.

It seems he had trouble accessing or getting close to some buildings on the CDC campus.

This was mostly done from the CVS, which he, at a certain point, according to police reports, he could not get out of.

He was locked inside the CVS

and tried to exit by shooting like the windows and doors and was unable to and then killed himself inside.

Huh.

Jeez.

So it is a kind of odd situation.

We don't have a clear idea yet because this just happened a few days ago.

We don't have a clear idea yet of like the exact on-the-ground situation, just these kind of

general facts about

which buildings were hit and how many shots were fired.

And then the anti-vax like opinions and writing found allegedly in his home.

Yeah.

So we'll see.

More will come out about this in time.

But I mean, the basics are pretty clear, which is that this is the natural extension of decades of anti-vaccine rhetoric and specifically the last several years of RFK relentlessly attacking the CDC.

Another piece of news this week that I should mention, though frankly we don't have much to say on this because it's unclear this will actually turn into anything real or not.

But later this fall, the Supreme Court will consider whether to take a case that could overturn the national ruling on gay marriage.

The specific case that they would be considering has not done very well in all lower federal courts, which is why it's been appealed to this level.

The legal justifications used for the First Amendment have not made much progress in federal appeals courts so far.

If the case does get chosen, it would be primarily for ideological reasons based on specific new Supreme Court justices.

But it is still unclear if this will get accepted.

And

I'm thinking not super likely.

I don't think this is something that we need to have

tons of panic about at the moment.

So something that, I mean, I don't know if panic's the right word, but did actually happen and is very bad is that, so Trump issued an executive order a while back about like getting rid of collective bargaining rights for a bunch of different kinds of government employees, like nominally under the auspices of national security.

There had been a whole bunch of court cases kind of winding their way through the courts, but last week, the VA became the first government agency to actually do it.

They just straight up got rid of the union contracts for 377,000 workers.

Like 377,000 workers is an astonishing number of workers to just straight up, the union doesn't exist the next day.

Yeah.

Right.

Because they just, their contracts aren't being recognized.

This,

in and of itself, is really stunning.

And also the lack of response by the union movement, especially considering the number of people involved, it's just been like...

strongly worded statements and encouragements for the Democrats to pass a bill through Congress to like recognize collective bargaining rights, which speaks really, really ill of the broader labor movement, that like, again, they just, they just took away the unions of almost 400,000 people and organized labor's collective response was just to kind of shrug.

So that's really fucking bleak.

It's probably going to be spreading to more agencies as this plays out.

Yeah,

it's really, I don't know.

And even the language unions abusing it talk about it.

They're like, oh, this is union busting for speaking out against anti-worker policies.

And it's like, no, it's union busting because they literally got rid of the unions of 377,000 people.

What are we doing here?

I don't know.

I'm going to have more on this as I get more word from union sources.

There's a staggering lack of information about this, and people are being slow to respond, but I want to mention it here because it's devastating and hideous.

And yeah,

it's real fucking bad.

Before we close this episode, James Stout has a special report on immigration and information about a fundraiser.

James?

All right.

So immigration report.

With the change of the month, children across the country are returning to schools.

This means that ICE agents are also returning to enforcement at schools.

Not just ICE agents, as we know, other federal agents, Border Patrol, ATF, DEA, etc.,

are all taking part in immigration enforcement now.

They're no longer restrained by the sensitive places doctrine, which previously stopped them from doing enforcement at schools and churches and other places where it's generally considered not worth it because doing so obviously provides a massive disincentive for families to take their children to school in this instance.

In Chula Vista,

second largest city in the county of San Diego, ICE agents detained a parent a block away from a school, leaving two young children in the car.

Like most schools in the area, Chula Vista Elementary School District will not allow ICE on campus without a warrant unless there's an active emergency.

Just to explain the active emergency thing a bit, I guess, for instance, in Uvalde, because all the the local cops were cowards and stood outside, it was actually a border patrol team, Bortak specifically, who killed the shooter there.

So like that would be an example of when immigration agents might enter a campus during an active emergency.

In Los Angeles, a 15-year-old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed and detained by federal agents at gunpoint.

He was accompanying a relative who was roadstering at a school and he was in the car with his grandmother.

The agents, who appear to be Border Patrol from videos I've seen, released the boy after intervention by school staff and left live ammunition on the sidewalk for some reason.

These look like five, five, six rounds from the pictures I've seen.

I'm guessing it's just terrible weapons handling procedures here.

It appears that this boy was not the person they were looking for, but nonetheless, they've obviously horrifically traumatized this young man for no good reason.

In response, LA Unified School District is ramping up safety patrols.

These include volunteers, teachers, and school school cops.

Apparently, obviously, school cops cannot directly prevent immigration enforcement officers from doing immigration enforcement, but they can notify people of their presence.

And they're trying to have safe zones around schools so that people can either safely walk to school or safely drop their kids off.

They're also changing their bus programs.

Buses are part of the school district's property, right?

So just as ICE could not enter a school without a warrant, nor could they enter that bus without a warrant, and it would be within the training of the bus driver to deny them access if they did not have a warrant.

Right.

So the bus would potentially be a much safer way for people to get to school than having their parents drive them.

And so what LA USD is doing is expanding their bus programs.

In LA, I've seen a lot of information on this in the resource guide that was published by the LA Office of Immigration Affairs.

So now is a good time to remind everyone that San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria defunded the San Diego Office of Immigrant Affairs because he refuses to stop giving the cops a fire hose of our money.

This has left migrants in one of America's largest border cities even more vulnerable.

We're also doing a fundraiser this week.

We're going to fundraise for Bhuket again.

I'm going to go see her later this week.

I know she has hearings coming up.

Bouquet, for those who do not remember, is an Alevi Kurdish woman.

Because of her ethnicity and religion, she wasn't safe in Turkey and she came to the USA to ask for refuge.

She's been in San Diego for six months right now and she is trying to raise money for her asylum case.

She can't work because she doesn't have a work permit and she has cancer which is obviously something which is very difficult for her to manage alongside the massive stress of immigration enforcement right now.

She needs to raise $7,000 to pay her lawyer.

I'm looking at the GoFundMe as I record this and it is at $1,941.

If you would like to help, you can go to www.gofundme.com slash F slash urgent hyphen help

hyphen for

hyphen bouquet B-U-K-E-T-S hyphen asylum hyphen case or you can just go down to the show notes and click the link.

We really appreciate all the support you guys have given.

Thank you to James for that.

well i guess that's our week we reported the news we reported the news

hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of coolzone media for more podcasts from coolzone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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