It Could Happen Here Weekly 185

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Call Zone Media.

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

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show about Things Falling Apart.

This week, the thing falling apart is the U.S.

healthcare system, science in general, but specifically the healthcare system.

I'm Garrison Davis, and today I'm joined by a very special returning guest, Dr.

Cafajote.

Hello.

Hey, yes, the thing falling apart is you, the listener.

So it's very important that you listen up.

You are are going to, anyways, but in particular, you should be paying attention here because this is important stuff.

So in mid-May, we got some news in the FDA, CDC, Human Health and Services front, as there's been.

There's been a lot of news in the health front.

But specifically, we're going to be talking about the new guidelines for COVID vaccines that the FDA is trying to push through in the United States.

So the new FDA commissioner, Marty McCarre,

and

the top vaccine regulator of Ray Prasad have published a quote-unquote study.

You pushed back on the use of the word study in the New England Journal of Medicine about the COVID vaccine booster shots

and are going to be changing the guidelines for how these are going to be administered and who has access to them.

Particularly those under the age of 65 might have a harder time getting the COVID booster that they have like the past few years, requiring certain pre-existing conditions to qualify.

And they have a whole bunch of arguments for this.

They say they're trying to make this more in line with the vaccine guidelines in other countries.

They're proposing further studies on the necessity of COVID vaccines for those under 65.

Yeah.

And for someone like me who tries to keep up with COVID boosters and, you know, doesn't like getting infected with COVID, some of this can seem a little bit both confusing and worrying and considering like the anti-vaccine takeover of the FDA and like the federal health services in general, it's a frightening move, I guess.

Yeah, I think you're right to feel concerned.

It is something I am a little concerned about for a couple of reasons.

One, I mean, I just don't flatly agree with limiting the use of the vaccines to the people they're planning to limit it to.

I mean, this is coming from the medical freedom crowd.

I feel like people should at least have the bodily autonomy to have the vaccine if they want it.

That's a part of it.

But I'm actually even more concerned about the bigger sense of what this represents.

You know, on the surface, making some changes is not totally unreasonable to our vaccine policy.

And we generally reassess our COVID vaccine policy annually.

So that's not too abnormal.

But the thing is, we have this whole system set in place to do it in an efficient, smart way that is public and there's a process to it.

If I can give you a little bit of a sense of how it normally runs and what's going to happen now, I think it'll explain why I might have my concerns.

Yeah, that would be very useful to hear.

So normally there are some clinical trials, there's some studies that happen, some real-world data, some points that can be looked at.

And then the FDA uses this advisory committee.

Again, these advisory committees are not career politicians.

They're scientists.

They're public health officials.

They're doctors, people volunteering their time.

I don't think they get paid other than maybe food and their expenses.

But other than that, they're not paid for just this job.

And what that, this group, the first group is called the VRBPAC, and they determine if it's a safe and effective vaccine.

If it is determined that way, then the FDA grants a license and approval.

From there, there's another group.

the ACIP, and that's an advisory committee on immunization practices.

And it's it's the same sort of thing.

It's a group made up of scientists, healthcare professionals, public health professionals, and people will come together.

They'll determine who should get it.

And then the CDC director signs off, and then it gets out there to the world.

Now, basically, what we have is two political appointees, both of which have these massive axes to grind on the subject, have...

some severe chips on their shoulder about what's happened so far to them in this in this conversation in this dialogue who are going to bypass this whole scientific system who aren't going to be looking at these questions like what is our growing immunity is annual booster still warranted and they're going to take this outside of that and basically make the decision and i find that to be very concerning even past like this this basic premise of like you know does this mean that my friends or myself, I won't be able to get the vaccine that I want to get.

So I find it to be very concerning.

And you alluded to that article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It did not alleviate my concerns.

One of the guys here, the guy who's heading up the vaccine regulations, has compared the U.S.

COVID response to Nazi Germany.

He has boosted anti-vax claims from Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

And he blocked me on Twitter.

Come on.

And truly his most heinous offense.

How could you block me?

I'm lovable.

No,

me and this guy, Robert Evans, joking yesterday

about

how some of your like personal nemeses have been have been put into positions of like government power and how you're upset about that.

And I remarked, oh,

first time?

Because

this has unfortunately been the trend of our work the past few years.

These weird online figures who we've developed personal grievances against for being bad people suddenly now are like in the upper echelons of power the US government hey I like them they just don't like me

I don't know if that's true but uh regardless do you have any other like notes on Makari and Prasad like specifically

you know what I'll say so well a big thing about this article that they put in there and what they talk about a lot is trying to get more farm companies to do large studies which you know on the surface totally reasonable But the thing about it is not every problem can be solved with what's considered the quote-unquote golden standard of studies, the double-blind randomized control study.

Some studies just can't.

They want to see that these companies are doing these studies to say that it's good and safe and beneficial for younger people.

But there's a couple of problems with this.

Okay, one, I'm not entirely sure that's ethical.

Like if we have something that works, if we know this vaccine helps, and we do, do, CDC studies have shown that these boosters help for at least four to six months.

Possibly life-saving medication.

Exactly.

Is it ethical to deny somebody that?

Like, would I want to be a part of that study?

I wouldn't.

I wouldn't want to get potentially the placebo.

So that's part of it.

But even beyond that, to do these studies, it's lengthy.

They're long studies.

If you want to do it and you want to do it right, it takes a while.

So by the time they do this, by the time they do the study, even if I'm being very generous in how long it takes them, by the time we get the results, we'll be onto a different mutation.

We know that this thing mutates.

We know it's going to change into a different virus.

And we won't even know if that study that we just spent all the time doing works on it.

So we have other options for studying these things.

They're not double blind, randomized, controlled studies, but we have other studies that work.

And there are plenty of epidemiologists out there, vaccineologists, people who know way more about this than me.

And to be fair, know more about this than Prasad and Makari.

They're the ones saying this is not a good idea.

So I'm like saying, let's listen to them.

Let's listen.

They know what they're talking about.

They're smart people.

I've met some of them.

They're great.

And it doesn't make sense to me on an ethical or practical level to do it that way.

Do you know what doesn't make sense to me, Jave?

I know.

I do.

I do.

I do.

I do.

Can I say?

Can I guess?

You can guess.

I'm guessing that commercials don't make sense to you, but really at this point in your career, they should make sense.

I should know by now, but still the concept is a little bizarre.

Here they are.

Okay, we are back.

I guess let's get into more how this will affect the average listener.

Like what these things could mean, like both in, I guess, the short term and then like the long term.

If you're trying to plan out your, you know, your health journey, what kind of like risks you have, if you're immunocompromised, what that means for you, versus if you're magical, perfectly healthy, you know, 25-year-olds

prancing around with no issues.

Prancing as the kids do.

Kids love to prance.

So in the short term, it's not clear.

In a month, that advisory committee I mentioned, the ACIP, is going to meet, or they're supposed to meet.

I don't know if it's still going to happen.

And they're supposed to determine who should get this.

So, first things first,

they could disagree.

It would be the first time I've seen it.

I've never seen the FDA and the ACIP not be in lockstep in this regard.

And maybe it's happened, but I can't think of it.

And, like, I don't know.

I don't know what will happen.

That'll be a little bit of chaos.

And it'll be interesting to see what happens at that point.

But if it goes as the FDA now plans, it will limit who can potentially get these vaccines if you're not over 65, if you don't have what's considered a risk for serious disease like asthma, cancer, kidney disease, certain types of liver, lung disease, diabetes.

If you don't have any of these things, then it's not clear to me.

Will the pharmacist not give it to you?

Will the pharmacist check if you tell them you have one of these things?

Will insurance cover it?

I don't know.

And that's really concerning.

I think the price is going to go up.

And that does relate to the bigger concern, the long-term problem problem in this, which is, I mean, Kennedy has said he's not taking away vaccines.

Great.

He doesn't actually need to take away vaccines.

He just needs to do things like this so that nobody wants to pay for it.

Nobody wants to go through the process of studying it.

Nobody's going to make them.

Insurance companies aren't going to pay for it.

People aren't going to end up being able to afford it.

There are going to be lesser and fewer of them.

And they will go away naturally on their own because of this.

That's really the long-term concern that I have with this.

The short-term concern, I mean, I don't know.

It's going to be interesting, you know?

Like,

there's certain things on this list that the CDC has.

Like, for example, physical inactivity is on this list.

I mean, how, who could argue with you on that?

Like, you know, if you tell the pharmacist you're having physical inactivity, like, will they, I don't know, will they check that?

How will they check that?

So I don't know what will happen in the short term.

In the long term, definitely big concerns.

It seems like part of their strategy here is just putting as many roadblocks in between you and vaccines that could save your life as possible to further whatever like conspiracy-driven worldview that the people at the top have and just like the inhumane side effects that's going to have across the entire population.

Absolutely.

I mean, to also put this into context, COVID, we're in a better situation than we were years ago.

That's certainly true.

But at least from the CDC records alone, 47,000 Americans died from COVID-related diseases last year.

At least two-thirds of that number were directly due to COVID.

And amongst that, there are about 230 deaths from kids.

That is a significant number.

And at least you can say at least 130 of those kids were directly related to COVID and not from some other problem.

So this is significant stuff that we're still dealing with.

And long COVID can affect people.

Long COVID can affect all groups.

It can affect young and old.

So it is concerning and it bothers me in particular that the group doing this, as I said in the beginning, is the medical freedom group.

And

this is sort of the exact opposite of this.

I think this demonstrates how much medical freedom has actually just been a dog whistle for like this conspiracy theory driven belief this entire time.

Like the people clamoring for medical freedom don't actually believe in it.

They're against trans healthcare.

They're against vaccines in general.

They want to put autistic kids into like behavioral therapy programs to try to make them not autistic.

It's not actually about medical freedom.

It's about advancing a very specific conservative and conspiratorial worldview that actually controls what other people are allowed to do with their bodies.

This is

a massive part of their project.

And I don't know how else you can interpret moves like this, which are just going to jeopardize people and put them even in more danger.

Yeah.

And it's going to get worse.

We can see the effects already.

Just today, Moderna withdrew their application for a COVID flu combo vaccine, a one-shot vaccine that would have both.

And the studies on that so far were really good.

Actually, they showed they looked really promising.

And they're just doing this because, you know, okay, now do we have to have these double-blind control studies for this?

And they know it's going to be a hostile environment.

Now it's withdrawn.

And there's going to be more and more of that.

Like way, way before your time or my time, there used to be more pharmaceutical companies making vaccines.

There used to be a lot more than there are now.

There's only like a handful now, but there used to be a lot.

And then there was like this CBS show about the pertussis vaccine, and it was called like Russian roulette.

This could give you like, this could end your life.

And there's like one like made-for-TV like show about it.

It wasn't a movie, but it was like a special they did.

And it raised such concerns that letters started pouring in in to the network.

And they then started pouring into Congress.

And there was a whole hearing.

And after that, we had a significant drop off in regards to the companies that make these vaccines.

And we have a few now.

And I am worried that this could be another sort of inflection point in that.

in that history, in that arc of vaccines.

And we're going to get even fewer now.

I mean, it's been devastating watching the advancement of the HIV vaccine, which seemed like it was nearing completion,

get stalled for a number of reasons, including DEI policies getting pushed across these health departments

because the HIV vaccine research uses

terms like gay and trans and it mentions gender.

Yeah, you know,

all that kind of stuff, which is which people focused on in the first few months.

I'm super nervous about the COVID nasal vaccine getting basically shelved.

Yeah.

And every like new thing we see come out out of the FDA just makes those fears heightened.

Yeah, it's pretty rad.

Not to be too depressing, but that is kind of the that is that is the mood of the show

in some ways.

Yeah.

Like people, people can still wash hands, mask up.

At this point, people can still get the vaccine, but

the way that we've been treating the widespread health of this country

has already been pretty bad the past few years.

And this is like trying to intentionally make it worse.

Yeah, it does feel like that sometimes.

Yeah.

I am concerned about it all, but you are right.

We still have, as of now, I mean, there's still some options going forward in terms of vaccines, and hopefully we'll continue to have them.

Totally.

And we'll see how this plays out.

I am really curious.

The next month will be very telling when we have that.

ACIP advisory committee again, if it's allowed to happen.

And they allow people like Paul Offit, people who are real vaccinologists, people who know about vaccines, not just appointed political people, but people who actually study this and know it.

If they come on and they can provide enough pressure, if people can support them, then I do think that

there is some hope that the pushback will

help us alleviate some of this restriction.

I hope.

Would the people on the ACIP panel be political appointees?

Do they have the same like risk of all these other people put in under RFK Jr., where they're very clearly politically there versus like careerists who are actually actual experts in the field?

Well, unless they change it, the ACIP is not set up like that.

The ACIP is just these really great group of independent doctors and scientists, public health experts that are using real world data.

They're looking at how the the immunity shifts over time.

They're looking at the virus and seeing if it's changing, but really volunteers that come from the world of science to do so.

So as of now, they're not, that's not how the group works.

I don't know if that'll hold.

I mean, I don't see any reason why they couldn't, if they wanted to, scrap the ACIP, get rid of the people on it, you know, people who are vaccinologists who are of great significance to the community, like, you know, Peter Hotez or your Paul Offitz, these scientists who really study and look at these things, and put in just people who are already in line.

I mean, unless I'm missing something about it, I don't see why they couldn't do that.

I hope they don't.

I think there's enough scientific background in Prasad and Macari that they would recognize the importance of an independent council, but

I'm not sure.

Well, that's good to know.

We don't need to be fully doomer-pilled on that, but it's a good thing to watch out for.

Do you know what I'm going to be watching out for, Kaba?

I do.

I certainly do.

You're going to be listening more than watching, but you're going to be listening for some really great ads.

Okay, Kabe, I guess I'd also like to touch on this actual piece

in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yeah.

Their unquote evidence-based approach to covid 19 vaccination which

is more of a blog post right it is not a study it is it is a blog post and specifically they talk about how the united states has a much more like

severe vaccine strategy than other countries in europe and they try to use this to justify their own beliefs saying that they're trying to bring things in line uh with the vaccine policies in other countries is this real?

Is this true?

I don't live in Europe.

I'm not super familiar with the European

vaccine guidelines.

I don't expect you to be an expert either.

No, it's really funny, though, that you mention it because it's so funny what they decide to endorse about

European policy.

Like, we'll socialize medicine.

Most of these European countries that socialize medicine, they will have nothing to do with that.

And then they'll nitpick certain things.

So there is some truth to the fact that we are doing things differently.

And again, I'm not opposed to looking at that and being like, okay, what are other countries doing?

Does it work?

And could we do that?

So there is a difference.

Currently, until now, in the U.S., it was generally recommended for anyone over six months.

People weren't being made to have this, by the way.

Again, medical freedom, you know?

No, I was pretty sure that Joe Biden will send a SWAT team to your house and shoot you unless you get the COVID vaccine.

That's what I was told on the RFK Jr.

podcast.

I mean, he is somehow simultaneously a decrepit old man who's certainly confused, but somehow able to orchestrate incredible from the depths, darkness, deep state espionage.

So I guess it's possible.

And that's how we do it.

It's how Canada does it.

The UK, they do do it a little differently.

They do it for people greater than 65.

They They do it for residents and care homes.

They do it for people greater than six months and high risk and people who are greater than 12 years of age, but are in a house where someone's immunocompromised.

They do it for anyone who's over 16 who helps care for someone who's vulnerable.

And they do it for all social and health care workers.

I mean, they have a different system in place.

They have, as I mentioned, socialized healthcare in general.

They're very good about their vaccines.

So it's hard to tell.

It's It's a little bit of apples and oranges, but it's funny what they decided to pick and not pick about that.

And it's also funny why some groups are missing under our care.

Like a lot of places will vaccinate anyone who's overweight.

Here, they don't consider being overweight a risk for COVID.

So

it is funny how they're choosing, they're nitpicking certain things that are recommendations, common recommendations in other countries and not using them here.

So they do it a little differently in Europe.

That is true.

And again, this is the kind of stuff that they're going to evaluate every year.

The ACIP will evaluate.

They'll look at the emerging data.

They'll look at the other countries.

They'll look at what's being done and they'll discuss it.

So

it is true.

And it does seem reasonable on the surface when they say it like that.

Hey, we're just trying to get, and they mentioned this in the New England Journal of Medicine article.

We're just trying to get more in line with the rest of the world.

And that's not really true.

It's like they're just picking certain things that they want to agree with and ignoring all the other stuff about their healthcare system that we could benefit from.

One of the more wild aspects of this, again, glorified blog post is talking about how the COVID vaccine booster program has actually undermined public trust in vaccinations.

Which is like, again, this is like, we're all looking for the guy who did this moment,

wearing the hot dog costume.

Quote, even healthcare workers remain hesitant with less than one-third participating in 2023 to 2024 fall booster program.

There may even be a ripple effect.

Public trust in vaccination in general has declined, resulting in reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital immunization programs, such as that for measles, mumps, and rubella.

Oh,

so weird.

I wonder if it's the people that have been talking about how corrupt and terrible the FDA and CDC are for like the last five, six years.

It's insane that they're like able to do this.

Like, it's

yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it is an ongoing inside joke amongst people in the medical community that the hot dog meme guy that's a very common like attribute to to these to these characters who talk about you know how how they're clearly sowing the seeds of mistrust and then capitalizing off of it i don't know if they even mean to or not and people ask me a lot they're like you know why why are they why why do they do this and i that's a tough one for me that's your friend robert evans i i ask ask him that every time I'm on his podcast.

There's a point in the podcast where I earnestly, I don't do this on purpose, where I just don't understand.

And I need to understand why it's being done.

And in these cases, it's hard.

You know, previously, Vinay Prasad had a podcast that people really like called the Plenary Podcast in the medical community.

I never listened to it because I don't listen to medical podcasts.

Why would I?

And

what it did basically was it would break down like studies and go over them in a very sort of skeptical way.

And I think it's it's good as a doctor to be skeptical.

I think that's a good attribute for us to have.

And it was useful in many ways.

But then I don't know if it's audience capture.

I don't know if it's true belief.

I don't know what shifted, but it does seem that it was a steady growth into this contrarian perspective from the medical community that doesn't totally make sense to me.

Like they all kind of feel like they're Galileo or Samuel Weiss, that they had this rare contrarian opinion that made them special and they were attacked for.

But in my mind, it's not so much that as it is, you know, there is a scientific process that we have.

Galileo followed a scientific process and that's how he came to those conclusions.

These people, I don't feel, are following that.

And they're strict to their method, idolatry.

to what they feel needs to be done.

And I don't feel like they're listening to the experts in the field explain to them why that's not the case.

That's how every hero probably feels in every situation, but they have somehow become the victims in this story.

And I am very curious to see now that they're in power, how that shifts and if they maintain this sort of victim mentality.

Well, how can you be a victim when we have beef tallow back at steak and shake, everyone?

We did it.

Beef tallow.

We did it, Joe.

We're back.

We sure did.

MAGA-coated coconut oil.

Now I'll be completely healthy again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is so funny to me.

I mean, like, we could talk about seed oils.

We could talk about the quote-unquote hateful eight.

We could talk about all that stuff, but it's, it's pretty clear that

oils are better than tallow for your health.

And beef tallow, there's very little, like, there's a little proof to prove that it's good for you and a lot of proof to say that animal products are bad for your heart.

Yeah.

So it's absurd that that's an argument that we're still having in 2025.

No, instead of frying in beef tablo oil, instead I just drink a full eight ounces of grapeseed oil every morning to wake up.

It does wonders for me.

It just gets the whole body up and running.

Lubricates the whole system.

That's right.

I know you can't give medical advice, but do you have any advice to give listeners before we close?

At least people who are like, you know, afraid of what these changes from RFK's FDA will mean for like them and their community.

Yeah, I think it's okay to be concerned about it, but I do think there is some time to go.

There's going to be a lot of people from the medical community fighting to try and fight these restrictions on the vaccine.

So we'll see how that goes.

You will probably be able to find ways to do it.

You should talk to your doctor about it because your doctor probably can see a risk factor that you don't if you don't see one that automatically fits that list from the CDC.

Your doctor might be able to find one that is.

And I'm not talking about fraud.

I'm talking about like real things.

Your doctor may be able to look through your chart, look through your history, talk to you, and find a risk factor that you didn't think was a risk factor.

Like, for example, physical inactivity or, you know, smoking.

So there are things that we can look for.

And as they shift those goalposts, which I'm sure they will, we'll also be trying to find ways around that as well.

And, you know, when the ACIP comes out, there's going to be a lot of pressure on them.

And I think we can pressure our Congress and we can pressure our representatives to support them,

at least nominally to discuss it, if nothing else.

Because I don't think this is getting talked about that much.

So I think if we can bring it to the public attention, I think we can shift the narrative on vaccines.

I do believe that the narrative has shifted on COVID and vaccines in this terrible way, this revisionist way where everyone pretends it's not, it wasn't a big deal and that we didn't lose millions of people.

And I think if we can keep that in the public discourse, I think that alone will help.

I think that's important for us to do.

And that's what people, you know, on Reddit and people on the internet and Facebook and all that stuff can do is they can help keep this in the public eye and fight that incipient.

I don't know if that's the right word, insidious is probably the right word.

It's this really subtle sort of reconstructing of the narrative of what COVID was and how important these vaccines are.

So that's how people can help in

the immediate future.

And then, you know, stay tuned, talk to your doctor about the vaccines and when you can get them and get them as soon as you can.

I do think that's a good idea for both flu and for COVID boosters when available.

Kave, lovely talking with you.

As always, where can people hear you talk more on the internet?

I am on a podcast called The House of Pod,

and it is a humor-adjacent, fun-ish medical podcast.

I would say it's not adjacent to humor.

I would say it is on target.

We're next door to humor.

Next door to humor.

We speak a little humor, not a ton, but you will like the show if you like this.

I think you're going to recognize a lot of the same people.

Gare, for example, has just recently been on an episode.

And, you know, we'll get Gare on again, I hope.

And you'll find people that you like there, a lot of the same sorts of people.

We take a skeptical look at medical grifters and the wellness community.

So a lot of the same stuff you love from these shows in the extended behind the bastard universe.

You'll also get into, I think, our podcast, The House of Pod, and find it anywhere.

The House of Pod.

The House of Pod.

The first time I met you online, I was invited onto the show.

And, you know, it was a pretty busy year, 2020.

There was a lot going on for me with the, you know, riots and such.

And, you know, whatever damage was done to my brain via all that tear gas.

And for some reason, and I don't quite know why, I wonder if I was just conflating two messages, but I thought I agreed to go onto a medieval history podcast, not a medical podcast.

So as things started, I was a little bit confused.

And then I went back to reread the message.

I'm like, oh no, it definitely says medical.

And I still don't quite know how I did that.

Like I said, a lot going on there.

You did great, whatever it was.

Whatever you thought you were doing, you did it well.

But whenever I think of your podcast, I now also think about medieval history.

So there you go.

Yeah.

Hey, okay, that's cool.

I'll take it.

I'll take it.

We did do an episode.

I mean, not every episode is strictly like medical stuff.

Like, I did an episode with these

guys who wrote this book on Sparta

and

the battle with the Persians and how this story has been sort of turned into something grossly that's not partially because of 300 and partially because of other reasons.

And so there is a little bit of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

You would like that episode.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

I don't.

I think about how the Persians killed a lot of them over thermophiles.

That brings me a little spark of joy.

Okay, good to know.

Just kidding, listeners.

I don't approve of people being murdered.

I don't.

I don't, even if they're jerks.

Good to say in this day and age.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Cafe.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm your host, Mia Wong.

Today is the day before the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

We're doing something a little bit different.

Three years ago, I wrote a pair of episodes about Tiananmen, democracy, and the international workers' movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for Laosan a year before that.

That

was a long time ago.

The world is a fundamentally different place than it was in 2021.

Europe has been consumed by war.

Whole revolutions rose and fell.

The fascist threat we defeated in the streets returned to power in a new and more terrifying form.

In this new, uglier, and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tiananmen.

to return to one of the great horrors of another age,

to see if we can take anything new from the wreckage of the death of hope.

I'm no longer the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today and tomorrow are Tiananmen remastered.

There were really three Tiananmen's.

The first and most famous Tiananmen was the student protest inside Tiananmen Square itself.

If you've heard the word Tiananmen before, this is a story you know.

The second Tiananmen was the Tiananmen of the blocks of Beijing around the square.

Blocks seized and transformed by Beijing's working class.

If you've heard about this Tiananmen

at all, it's probably in the context of the tanks rolling through them on their way to the square.

And then there was the third Tiananmen, the protests in other cities, of which we still...

years after I wrote the original piece, know distressingly little about.

Our focus today is on the first two.

The students of the student protests were a weird ideological grabbag that cannot simply be reduced down to the simplistic pro-democracy label they've been saddled with in the three and a half decades since Tiananmen.

The short version is this.

The students were pissed off about what's called reform and opening.

not going fast enough.

And we should talk about what reform and opening actually was.

On the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and other people with so-called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse.

This was paired with market reforms that started to bring capitalism back to China.

This was a shit show in a lot of ways.

If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt PNA, about five years into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastards episode about the poisoned milk scandal.

But reform and opening is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed like they could be different.

This

is not entirely accurate.

Reform and opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns on the social sphere.

There was the one-child policy, a hideous expansion of the state into the sphere of social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the re-imposition of patriarchal power.

It saw the tightening of one-man rule in the factory, the destruction of any form of workers' decision-making, and control over the process of their own labor.

In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the fragmentation of Tiananmen, and Chinese politics more broadly, already forming.

The students wanted market reform to go faster.

They wanted more freedom of speech.

They sort of wanted democracy, but mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market reforms back.

It's worth noting, of course, that many of these students were involved in what became known as neo-authoritarianism, which holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy.

It was an ideology that survived the death of the protests and went on to become a major faction of the CCP itself in the 90s and 2000s.

And this is where some of the truly weird shit at Tiananmen comes from.

The students were in many ways an incredibly hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones.

And these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual.

The guy they were trying to defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded failed to occur.

But Tianmen, as I mentioned earlier, was also the workers.

And for most of the protests, the students absolutely hated them.

Students barred workers from entering the square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and relations were, in general, extremely bad.

This raises the question, what were the workers doing there in the first place?

There's a few answers.

The simplest and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed off at how badly the party was treating students in the square.

But there were other things going on too.

The late 1980s in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation.

The rapid price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers.

Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes and spending a year's salary gambling at the racetrack.

And this pissed people off.

So they started organizing.

I'm going to read a section from a piece by Yuron Zhang about what the workers were doing.

During the struggle to obstruct the military, workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action.

This was self-liberation on an unprecedented level.

A huge wave of self-organization ensued.

The Workers' Autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations, both within and across the workplace, mushroomed.

The development of organization led to a radicalization of action.

Workers started organizing self-armed quasi-militias, such as quote picket corps and, quote, dare-to-die brigades, to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts.

These quasi-militias were also responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention.

In a sense, Peijing became a city self-managed by workers.

It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self-armed workers organized in the months between Russia's February and October revolutions.

At the same time, Peikin workers built many more barricades and fortifications on the street.

In many factories, they organized strikes and slowdowns.

A possible general strike was put on the table as well.

Many workers started to build connections between factories to prepare for a general strike.

This was unacceptable to the party.

And so, for the third time in 70 years, the CCP fed its own working class to the machine guns.

On the night of June 3rd, the army began to slaughter its way through the workers defending the square.

It was the workers who bore the brunt of the massacre.

Most of the casualty and later political repression were against members of the workers' faction.

The army soon reached the square itself, where the Western Press Corps bore witness to what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

This is where you get Tankman and the most famous accounts of the massacre.

But by that point, it was almost all over.

The protests were crushed, and the Chinese working class died with it.

But before the last bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened.

The most common narrative is that Tiananmen was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism.

And to some extent, it's not exactly wrong.

There were a lot of other pro-democracy movements in this period.

You see them in Taiwan and Korea.

They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually spread to places like the Philippines.

But the real question of the pro-democracy movements was what kind of democracy?

The students at Tiananmen, to the extent that their democratic principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed in a narrow conception of political democracy.

This political democracy operates at the level of the state.

It's based on free citizens, equal before the law, participating in elections to choose representatives, who pass laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy.

This model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does not extend.

The capitalist firm, or its state-owned equivalent, remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies.

Even the progressive wings of the pro-democracy movements in Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship.

Workers would be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict.

But no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute.

To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace.

The workers of Tiananmen alone disagreed.

They stood against not only the rest of the world's pro-democracy movements, but the tide of history itself.

By applying the principles of the pro-democracy movement to their own concerns, skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten tradition of democracy in the factory, democratic workers' self-management.

This is, to a large extent, what Tiananmen was actually about.

It was the culmination of a century and a half-long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement on earth.

The workers' movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies.

And at Tiananmen, they would lose one final time.

That defeat is the origin of the modern world.

One man rule in the factory in its thousand, thousand forms is the author.

of the hell of the 21st century.

And when we come back, we're going to look at the the international part of the struggle that ended at Tiananmen.

To fully understand the magnitude of Tiananmen, we need to go back to the revolutions of 1848.

If you want a detailed accounting of 1848, go listen to the Revolutions podcast.

It's great.

It's also many, many, many, many, many, many episodes.

The short version is that there were a bunch of revolutions across Europe in 1848, collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples.

It was the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction.

Frederick Engels, yeah, that Engels of Marx and Engels' fame, was on the barricades with a rifle fighting in Prussia.

There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed the king.

And the question of how far democracy was going to go came for the first time to the forefront.

Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations and the question of class itself, and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere and directly into economics.

This prefigures a split inside the socialist movement itself.

For the most radical factions, control over the means of production meant that workers would control the production process directly through free associations of workers.

Direct democratic unions, a position later known as syndicalism, were workers' councils.

But more conservative factions of the socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state.

They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the 1860s and 1870s engaged in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, first of roads, canals, and railroads, then of entire cities with complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began to believe that centralized state planning, not the Democratic Association of Workers, could bring about the long-sought after cooperative commonwealth of socialism.

and that planning-obsessed faction began to encompass more and more of the left.

In Germany, home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided between two camps, the revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who renounced Marxism and Revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism and the state from within, and Karl Wakotsky's Orthodox Marxists.

Basically, the only two things these factions, who otherwise despised each other, agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over workplace democracy.

This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its own workers.

But worse still, the person who became most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Lenin's obsession with the German Postal Service was such that he included this passage about the future socialist state in his famous State and Revolution, a text written between the February and October revolutions of 1917.

Quote, a witty German social democrat of the 70s of the last century called the Postal Service an example of the socialist economic system.

This is very true.

At present, the Postal Service is a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.

Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type.

To organize the whole national economy on the lines of the Postal Service, so that the technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials shall receive salaries no higher than a, quote, workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of the armed proletariat, this is our immediate aim.

Lenin's idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy.

This would set off a massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers' movement who wanted workers' control over the means of production to mean workers making decisions over work themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats.

The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers' movement mirrored the struggle between the workers' movement and the capitalist state.

By the 1880s, the workers' movement had created variable states within a state in countries like Germany and Italy.

These quote-unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, ranging from, as Graeber described, free schools, workers' associations, friendly societies, libraries, and theaters, end quote, to unions, co-ops, neighborhood associations, tenants unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to workers and their families and served, so the workers hoped, as the basis for a new socialist society.

Fearing the popularity of these democratic workers' institutions, Otto von Bismarck created bureaucratic, state-run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare services to replace them, telling an American observer, quote, my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.

And this works.

It was enormously successful.

Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself.

And when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely.

But where their leaders had forgotten the democratic core of their own ideology, workers themselves never did.

As the 19th century drew to a close and the 20th century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions.

particularly workers' councils.

The most famous of these councils, of course, were formed during the the spontaneous Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

These councils, called Soviets, were originally formed in 1905 out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike.

The revolution of 1905 was crushed by the Tsar.

But in 1917, the Russian working class would once again form workers' councils as another revolution commenced.

This time, the councils councils would take control of production directly, coordinating between various factories and industries as well as serving as a workers' counterpower to the new revolutionary government.

The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed anti-democratic alliance of Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, and Capitalists.

Between 1917 and 1920, workers' councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland, and were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina.

These uprisings were all crushed.

In Italy, which saw some of the most intense conflict between syndicalists and the Italian state, the famous occupation of the factories was ended not by the Italian government, but by the Italian Socialist Party and their union, the General Confederation of Labor.

This, in large part, was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany.

Faced with workers' movements on the verge of seizing power, social democrats turned on the working class and slaughtered their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake.

Ironically, the worst defeat of the democratic workers' movements would come not at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party that the workers' councils had put in power.

Lenin began to undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately.

Published mere days after the October Revolution, his his draft decrees on workers' control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik-dominated trade unions.

In the face of massive and unexpected resistance from the workers' councils, the decreas needed to be modified before they could be implemented.

But while publicly declaring his support for the workers' councils, the Bolshevik slogan was, after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to chip away at their power until he finally admitted his real position of democracy in the factory in 1918 in the horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government.

Quote, unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large-scale machine industry.

Today, the revolution demands, in the interest of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.

This is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what one-man rule in the factory actually entails, the system he's describing isn't actually different from one-man rule in any other political system.

Bolshevik rule in the factory would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even fascist rule.

The movement for democracy in the factory now faced four implacable enemies, willing to put aside their ideological differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly.

And as the 1920s bled into the 1930s, the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a hail of bullets and blood.

But they didn't.

In next episode, our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will be back.

They will do many, many more revolutions.

And we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what the ruling class did to stop them, and then return to the lead-up to Tiananmen Square to see the final stand of the Chinese working class.

Welcome to to Kid Happen here.

I'm your host, Mia Wong.

When we last left the story of Tiananmen, one Vladimir Ilya Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction of the workers' movement that actually wanted democracy to extend into the factories.

Unfortunately for the Leninists, no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the factory simply refused to die.

For over a hundred years, the development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation.

Ideologically, as the journal end notes pointed out, This manifested in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers' councils to manifest themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis.

In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the second and third industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the new world.

This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers' movement.

The producers of this new world should also be its inheritors.

Thus, the goal of the workers' movement was to take control of production itself and manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves.

These two beliefs, in and of themselves, were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers' movement.

They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole.

And by this point, the workers' movement was extremely broad, stretching from social democratic trade unionists to the intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties.

What made the democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools.

For the Leninists and Social Democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution.

The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity and creativity.

But for the democratic wing of the workers' movement, this solved nothing.

As long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one-man rule in the factory persisted, changes in ownership structure and health benefits missed the entire point.

That degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class, by giving the class itself control over the production process that for so long had controlled them.

In 1936, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seize control over their workplaces en masse.

The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic worker self-management before or since.

Everything from public utilities to bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions.

And once their former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pooling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically for the benefit of everyone.

For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in democratic self-management delivered on its promises.

Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self-organization, developed a universal healthcare system that dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was previously inaccessible.

But the revolution had begun amidst a violent civil war in Spain, and under the guise of an anti-fascist alliance, liberal, socialist, and Stalinist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self-management and returned the factories to their owners before losing the war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco.

Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of pro-managerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers' councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in 1956, and then again in Italy, France, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Hungary in particular is an interesting revolution, because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tiananmen, but this time even worse.

The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution.

But if you talk to the actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian workers' council, quote, the time when the boss decided our fate is over.

In reality, far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their factories and workplaces, formed workers' councils, and overthrew the government before Russian tanks slaughtered them.

This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all.

Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well, in Italy, in France, in Chile.

Communes broke out in colonized Vietnam.

They spread everywhere.

And to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike, the development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places without established workers' movements and their political education effects.

Typical of such movements was the course of the revolution in Algeria.

The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front, FLN, which had prosecuted the war against the French colonizers.

The FLN's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development.

Upon taking power, however, Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him.

Production would be managed by democratic workers' councils built on the property seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the country following independence left much of their property uninhabited.

Ben Bella's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them.

But the whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and re-imposed one-man rule in the factory.

Still, even by the late 70s, it was by no means clear that one-man rule in the factory would triumph as a political system.

Workers and students almost took Italy in 1977, and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco.

For a brief, fleeting moment in the late 1970s, it really looked like they were going to do it.

The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managerial elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power.

As author and friend of the show Vicki Osterwild points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter.

A kind of dark agora that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify with each other as a class.

and find and produce collective meaning.

Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self-management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in any way as liberatory.

This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned into homeowners, bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets.

The quote-unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory as the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market, thus tying what remained of organized labor to the fate of capitalism itself.

Corporations began to turn the workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself, and not the working class as a whole.

Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere.

As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option and left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional workforce entirely.

These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers' movement, but in order for the anti-democratic counter-revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production to, somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply.

The capitalist class found that answer in China.

In the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world.

Chinese state-owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers.

People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food, to often their entertainment.

The CCP also eliminated the peace rate system.

a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked.

This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had very little leverage.

They were thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything.

Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic, semi-democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that, while raked by the party, ensured that managers would at least be somewhat popular.

Though the process was strictly managed, workers had the ability to criticize the cadre who governed them and combine the work unit's system of folding home and social life into the factory system.

The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers' participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace.

And it meant that the system, at least in the cities, worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution.

This means that it is time for me to do the Cultural Revolution rant.

Everyone gets the Cultural Revolution completely wrong.

The initial targets of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote-unquote black blood, the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds.

These people were heavily persecuted.

And you can make arguments about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch who collaborates with the Japanese imperialists, but this extends to the children of people from quote-unquote bad class backgrounds.

And that term is extremely loose.

I know people whose families were declared of black class background who had quote-unquote black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family had made bird feeders before the revolution.

It was, as a system, absolutely nonsense.

So what the early phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in the new system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff that was literally not their fault at all.

They had no way to control who their parents were.

Now, the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party.

But as things became more and more chaotic and the attacks on CCP Beer, Kratz, and Kadra escalated, it spiraled nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called the January storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out the CCP.

And this caused what I would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually deal with a worker-controlled city.

And I found this incredible line from Zhou Enlai in a meeting with Mao, where they were attempting to figure out what to do with, you know, this new revolutionary Shanghai.

Quote, when asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Zhou Enlai bluntly replied that, quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election at the Paris Commune style.

And this was obviously a problem for Mao because there was no way for the party to maintain its long-term control if,

you know, you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of the Paris Commune.

And so instead, we saw a full-on counter-revolution.

By about 1968, rebel workers and students were getting slaughtered everywhere.

The initial uprisings, the stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards, was, staggeringly, by far the least violent part of the Cultural Revolution.

Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a significant amount of time studying the actual death records city by city and province by province in the Chinese archives.

Quote, more than three-fourths of all documented deaths in local annals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase, and more than 90% of those persecuted for alleged political crimes.

This third phase, 1968 onward, is where most of the people in the cultural revolution gets killed.

And this is the opposite of the way that the cultural revolution is understood.

Most of the killing wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control.

It was the state slaughtering its way to the various rebel factions that did most of the killing and the political persecution.

And this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history.

It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state.

And by the late 1970s, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face of state repression.

In their wake, politics moved towards more intellectual-driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the working class entirely.

As Deng Xiaoping unleashed the horrific one-child policy and a draconian and ultimately successful attempt to reestablish the state's patriarchal control over the household and strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution.

But the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg.

By 1989, the classical workers' movement globally was on its last legs.

Unable to spark its own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social and political movements, most notably the pro-democracy movement in China.

But democratic self-management and its critique of one-man rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro-democracy movement, which meant that its development by the workers of Tiananmen was a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of democracy to their own situation.

This led to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations of the workers' movement.

One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in the factory.

Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom?

In the workshop, does what the workers say count, or what the leader says?

We later talked about it.

In the factory, the director is a dictator.

What one man says goes.

If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same.

One man rule.

Our objective was not very high.

We just wanted workers to have their own independent organization.

In work units, it's personal rule.

For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go.

I ought to go home at five, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonuses.

This is personal rule.

A factory should have a system.

If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules to decide how to do it.

Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone, and then afterwards, anyone who violates them will be punished according to the rules.

This is rule by law.

Now, we don't have this kind of legal system.

Now, this is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical critique of one-man rule in the factory, couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law.

But any attempt to actually implement a system by which workers controlled the factories they work in, how long they work, and what the bonus rate was democratically through an independent organization could only end in democratic self-managed workplaces.

As Walder and Jiang have pointed out, the workers of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated and had little or no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles.

This was as pure a workers' movement as any in Chinese history.

And for one final time, the instinct of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory.

This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable.

When the army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class they wiped out.

Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the factory would be scrubbed from the records of the CCP and the pro-democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning of the events would be lost.

What then was Tiananmen?

In some sense, it was the transition point between two different Chinese working classes.

The protests were the high watermark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tiananmen, mounted the final attack of the classical workers' movement.

Their defeat ended the old working class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructuring of the 1990s, which crushed the last vestiges of workers' autonomy in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state.

They were replaced by a new working class, drawn from the rural and semi-urban underclasses of the the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks of the 277 million migrant workers that today comprise the backbone of China's working class.

This new working class, with rural household registration and no way into the remaining state-owned factories, would have none of the benefits of the previous one.

It would instead face a full-wrapped capitalist ideology, baked into every aspect of workplace culture and a massive attempt to encourage homeownership.

While the previous working class could at least posit a democratic form of the factory through which life could be improved, this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become a business owner.

In this sense, it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed petite bourgeoisie.

Such ideological self-conceptions are inimical to the formation of the classical workers' movement, and indeed, the new Chinese working class has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace.

The situation is not unique.

The death of the classical workers' movement has seen the collapse of their demands for democratic self-management everywhere in the face of a working class that refuses to cohere itself in the factory.

China was just late to the game.

The fact remains, however, that the global economic system has lurged from crisis to crisis for the better part of my lifetime, setting off in its wake an increasing number of revolutions even as the darker gore of the factory ceased to function as a place to form identities.

For this new working class, if a collective identity could not be forged in the factory, it would be forged in the street instead.

Lacking a positive identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens it on a cross-sectoral basis.

The state, with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant fights against the police became the sole basis for new collective identity formation.

Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form of mass street movements and almost continuous confrontations with the states.

Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced by running fights with the police.

But this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind.

Without the leverage against the state the classical workers' movement's control over the workplace provided, they lacked the ability to bring down a government firmly committed to fighting it out.

Even the attempts over the last five or six years to carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong, and Sudan were, as Melatesta predicted in the early 20s, easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations.

But with current labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations, the way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce democracy into the economic sphere is unclear.

Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of Tiananmen.

The workers who assembled outside Tiananmen Square had already abandoned their factories, for all that they spoke the language of the old workers' movement.

They stood and fought and died like we do, in the streets.

They were the bridge between the world of the workers' movement and the world we live in today, and thus faced the same revolutionary crisis we face today.

The crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Colombia and Iran, of Myanmar and Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped.

The workers of Tiananmen, I suspect, have no answers to give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those, past and present.

who died fighting for liberation.

All we can do now is find our own way, and with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for.

Welcome to It Could Happen here, the only podcast where anti-British discrimination is a way of life.

James, are we allowed to say that?

Do you remember the training I haven't done yet?

I was giving that training my full attention throughout the duration of the video, every single time I've watched it

at various employers for the last half decade or so.

There was no section on anti-British discrimination.

Yet again, another example.

Fancy that.

Imagine victimized.

Last time I took that training, there was just straight up anti-Asian racism in it that they didn't address at all.

So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti-British racism is fine.

Like some shit in those videos, which is wild.

Okay.

There you go.

I think there's a lady who's literally called Karen, and they do her wrong

in the video.

See, I am definitely pro-British discrimination, but you do get a point for having Peter O'Toole.

So at least...

So it's it's it's not all the way because the O'Toole factor keeps you from the full might of my wrath, frankly.

Fairies Dave, the greatest.

There we go.

Yeah, I'm sure that's the case.

I'm Garrison Davis.

I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stone, and Robert Evans.

This episode, we are talking about babies.

Should there be more?

Yeah.

We're on a pro-natalist kick.

We're going to have that off-putting couple who look like vampires, but like not any of the good kinds of sexy vampires on the show.

Very excited to have those people on.

They seem nice.

But before we do that, we all decided maybe we should talk about other pro-natalist policies in world history and how well they've worked generally.

We're going to start by talking about what the U.S.

policy might be or the people proposing U.S.

policy.

And then we will discuss how those policies went historically.

Yeah.

So like to start with Trump's, besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to tackle pro-natalist concerns on the policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth.

The pro-natalists certainly think that the new administration is, at the very least, ideologically sympathetic, if not in cahoots with their agenda.

The main ins on the pro-natalist front have come from the Peter Thiel Thiel tech right wing of the White House, right?

This is like J.D.

Vance and previously Elon Musk.

Musk has been doomposting for years about how a drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large-scale population collapse.

And at an anti-abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying, quote, I want more babies in the United States of America.

I want more happy children in our country.

And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.

Yeah, and you got to like, whenever you're listening to one of these things, you got to like have a little parentheses anytime.

Anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses there that says white

because this is

this is real Nazi shit.

A lot of this stuff is certainly like based on like great replacement rhetoric that the alt-right, like Trojan horsed and like pushed forward in like 2018, which is now so widely normalized.

Thanks to, I mean, really Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff.

Yeah.

Tucker Carlson, too.

And Carlson, of course.

Well, and Musk, Musk's family goes into this, right?

Like, this is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in.

Like, it was a little bit less of like the standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused on like we need to be breeding high IQ white people together.

Yeah, you genetic.

Like that, that is, that is what he inherits.

He comes by it honestly, I guess you could say.

Well, and oftentimes pernatalist rhetoric is is also tied in with like the trad wife and like loss of traditional family structure type stuff, right?

Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred to our quote-unquote broken culture that attacks masculinity and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.

Hey, shout out.

Yeah, I've also started referring to women with kids as catless child ladies as a result of this, which is not giving me some good reactions, actually.

Yeah, I don't even know.

People have reacted very negatively.

Tell it that stuff, you rubbed it up.

A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women in the workplace who are not getting married and raising kids at home from an early enough age.

Yeah.

And some of this rhetoric has rubbed off on Trump, right?

In Trump at CPAC in 2023, he said, quote, we will support baby booms and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.

I want a baby boom.

Cool.

Trump has floated a $5,000 cash, quote-unquote, baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling this proposal a good idea.

Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.

Yeah, I'm sure that's enough.

Not quite three months at a lot of preschools.

Like, not even great preschools.

It's very preschool is unbelievably expensive.

The actual cause of like of a declining birth rate is due to skyrocketing cost of living.

So people aren't financially stable enough to have kids in their early 20s anymore.

So instead they're waiting until their 30s.

That's part of it, at least.

Yes.

If you want people to have kids more, you should make the world more affordable.

And a $5,000 baby bonus does not actually solve the key issues that would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying to get married and have kids at a young age in a world where that seems kind of like unfathomably expensive.

Now, luckily, Trump does have a few other ways of

sorting out this problem.

The new big, beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House will create quote-unquote mega savings accounts for new kids.

And here, mega stands for money accounts for growth and in

for growth and advancement.

Just fucking stop.

Stop it.

So when parents or guardians open a new mega savings account for their kids, the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between January 1st, 2024 and December 31st, 2028.

That'll help.

Great.

Great.

I believe California also does it.

Yeah.

California has something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives children like up to $1,000.

And I think it's like a college savings account from what I understand.

Yeah, that's pretty much what this is.

Although, specifically

for the MAGA accounts, it also lists home ownership.

Oh, cool.

Because this is like a big, this is, this is a big part of this pronatalist thing is you need to like own a home,

get in a straight marriage, start having kids in your early 20s.

Yeah, sure.

Make Instagram videos of yourself chopping wood badly.

Like we, we, we understand that.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

The Big Beautiful Budget Bill also prohibits Medicare funds from going to Planned Parenthood.

Great.

Yeah.

Let me tell you, $1,000 American dollars, even with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy you a home anywhere in the United States.

Now, the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.

This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed in 2023 by Republican Representative Brian Slayton of Texas, who proposed increasing property tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage.

So there's a lot of caveats there.

Jesus Christ, yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

Yeah.

No, this, I don't, is, are we taking issue with this?

That is some.

Yeah, look, this is part of my British heritage, right?

We developed our own religion so that dudes could get divorced.

It is the bill of rights for British guys.

Obviously, a lot of caveats in there so that you can have your little trad Christian family.

But four kids would equal a 40% cut.

Ten kids would equal no property taxes at all.

Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with.

This is property tax.

You also have to own the property to begin with, to be paying property taxes.

Yeah, all of these.

Yeah, all these people want you to be like homeowners with a stay-at-home wife.

This is what they want.

But they don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make homeownership accessible.

No, this is just like self-selecting for like well-off white Christians, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Slayton said in a statement, quote, with this bill, Texas will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply, unquote.

For fuck's sake.

It's a disaster.

And I mean, like, and like a lot of this stuff is too, is, it's, this is their sort of flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually drives like declining birth rates, which is not having teen pregnancies,

like significantly decreases birth rates because it turns out that like, oh yeah, right.

It turns out a huge part of like why birth rates are so high is just direct social coercion.

And if you stop having that or like, you know, the amount of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birth rates are going to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies.

Like, and and you know, and so they're trying to do all this like, you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort of like deal with the fact that if you don't force people to have children as teenagers, they won't.

Yeah.

Because life, they quickly realize there's things in life like, you know, drugs and stuff.

Yeah.

Go back to the club.

Yeah, they'll go back to the club.

In March, Trump called himself the quote-unquote fertilization president.

Oh, my God.

He's fucking gross.

Oh, no.

And the White House is expected to soon release a report on how to expand access and affordability of IVF.

Now, this is where things get sticky.

Insert pun.

There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on the religious ethics of IVF, right?

There's no real consensus among the pro-natalist voices who are lobbying Trump.

Yeah.

This sort of breaks down into like the new tech right versus the more religious Christian family sector of conservatism.

And Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this.

But these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance.

Now, Heritage, the Heritage Foundation, recommends a program to use government funds for education that promotes quote-unquote natural fertility, teaching women how to track their menstrual cycles, using charting courses to both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control.

They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote-unquote natural conception instead of using assisted reproductive technologies.

Heritage proposes something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote-unquote hormone balancing, dieting, and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery, unquote.

Yeah, you just need some fucking

baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.

That's what you got to take.

It's a holistic approach to your heritage.

Get some raw milk and put a bunch of random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company.

Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying causes of infertility, as well as, you know, out of concern for embryo personhood rights.

For fuck's sake.

So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make the production of embryo spares illegal.

Embryo adoption

because they believe that these are like full like people.

Yeah.

Fucking damn it.

Now, on the other side of the you know, pronatalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned,

Simone Collins, a pro-natalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate.

She could still pull it off.

Stay in line if your vote hasn't been counted, people.

Her and her husband are self-described, quote-unquote, techno-puritans.

And she is the

bit of shit.

Like, fuck my

God.

Oh, my God.

Can we put these people on a boat and send it across the Atlantic?

Like, can they get scurvy?

Have they already got?

it?

They look a little bit like they may already have scurvy, to be fair.

They do look like they have scurvy constantly.

Can they deprive them of lime juice and save the world from a fucking crime?

Put them on the next starship and see how far up it gets.

Sunset smars.

No, they won't get that.

Let them try.

I support the human spirit.

Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive Peter Thiel-founded social club called Dialogue.

Now, she has called the new administration, quote-unquote, inherently pronatalist and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the White House, one of which would award a quote-unquote National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.

This is some Trotchescu shit.

I know we're going to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.

She herself wants at least seven kids.

And she claims to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs, which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier.

So

they use IVF to specifically select embryos that they think are naturally predisposed to have more desirable traits, including high IQs.

They have not discussed the exact method.

That's why it's called special technology.

They're looking for the one with the big head or something.

So you don't know.

I guess they're not even that far along, are they?

When they're IVF.

So that's obviously pretty fucked up.

And then I guess finally, one of the few things that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was way back in February, Trump's transportation secretary Sean Duffy, who is a father of nine and has ten siblings, sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation funds to quote, give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, unquote, which would in effect mean less money for urban public transit and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.

Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at least than

like the national average.

Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that, though.

No, no, neither am I.

That's kind of that's what I'm that's what I'm uh that's what I'm wondering for.

Yeah, Samuel Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right?

Like that's his whole shtick.

If if you look at the full memo, I think this is this is just like a dog whistle for like white Christians.

Like

that is that is really what he's saying.

Sick.

Anyway, that is what I have for

the current pro natalist policies.

We should go on an ad break and then return to learn the historical implications of pro-natalist policies.

All right, we are back and we are spinning our globe, our big ball of pronatalism, and it is slowing down and has landed on Japan, where Mira is going to explain pro-natalist policy.

Yeah, Yeah, and I guess I want to open on a kind of global thing, which is that concern over like birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing.

I mean, it predates fascism.

Like, this is like, if you go to like the 1870s, every single person is complaining about like, oh my God, the birth rate of the right, well, the white race keeps declining and we're going to get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic hordes.

And then you go to like the Asiatic hordes, and it's like Japan has been having the same fucking panic for literally so long.

Like, I I cannot emphasize enough.

You can just go back through newspaper archives and you just, you're literally reading the same article over and over and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades.

So like the first big modern freak out about birth rates is in like 1987.

Yeah.

They have the first big

like Japan birth rate declining freak out.

This has been happening longer than like most of the people here have been alive.

I can remember this from like my child.

It's just being like, oh, they're panicking about their birth rates again.

Yeah.

So like the running thing with Japanese politics, so we're roughly doing these in order of like most to least hinged

in terms of like in terms of these like natalist policies.

Japan, I think, has an interesting series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of pro-natalist politics.

Well, if they have, they have political contradictions in their pro-natalist politics and political contradictions in their conservative faction, because Japan is basically like a one-party liberal democratic state liberal democratic party is the one party This is a party established by a world war two Nazi But but that means that they run all of politics So like every political faction effectively runs through them their early attempts in like the 90s are focused on the deregulation of daycare jobs So basically their plan is like in the 90s 2000s.

They're like okay We're gonna like deregulate the child care industry so that we can have more affordable child.

There'll be more childcare jobs so people can pay for child care.

This is how we're going to promote this.

And this is sort of one of the first places you see this huge intra intra-class conflict between the pure social conservatives who want to just like send every woman back to the household to raise children and the business people who are like, no, you can't do that.

We need to exploit these women's labor to like make money.

And so

the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying for child care leave versus like paying for daycare.

So

originally their plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the daycare stuff.

That That doesn't work.

Like none of these things they're going to do does jack shit, right?

I think that's going to be a through line here.

Yeah, yeah, like none of this stuff works.

And so like Shinzo Abe, I think, is the most famous person who spends a bunch of time trying to deal with this.

And like, again, so they have started worrying about this in 1987.

It is now 2013.

The birth rate keeps declining precipitously.

Shinzo Abe, rest in piss, you fascist bastard, is still trying to like cook something, right?

I'm going to read this quote from the archives of Clinical Pediatrics.

Shortly after the formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote, task force for overcoming population decline was established in 2013, introducing three key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth.

So you can, these are going to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pro-natalist policy, right?

A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to like promote the traditional family and promote marriage.

And this hasn't ever really worked for this.

Supporting child rearing is one that is going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.

There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce the cost of child rearing.

We're going to see them try like 35,000 different like proposals to do this.

The one that's actually

interesting is reforming work style.

So like part of the problem here is that, you know, know, everyone in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount, unbelievably staggering overwork, right?

I mean, it's one of these things that's like a persistent social crisis.

There's a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working all the time.

So Shinzo Abe's plan for this was to put into place a soft cap of you can only work 100 hours a month of overtime.

Now, this doesn't do shit, right?

Like 100 hours a month of overtime is enough to to kill you, right?

Like, you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.

But this is, this is, again, this problem that he's having, which is that, like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe like people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just like being worked to death, but that's really bad for Japanese business.

And like quote unquote, Abe Inomics, which is like Abe sort of, you know, economic plan, like relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population.

And it's also based on putting more women into the workforce to expand the size of the workforce to, you know, extract more hours so they can, all these people can make more money.

Right.

They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children.

And this just like didn't happen, which over and over again, they're like, we're going to do these kind of like, these, these kind of like, okay, we'll give, we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in order to like have kids.

And it just doesn't happen.

And so, you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives but by the time he's like assassinated in 2022 he what

he was uh by by the time his political coalition was finally detonated by by one by one guy with with an electric blunder bus

my favorite politics

oh god it's so good it's so good we we have covered this extensively on the show if you want to hear the happiest i've ever been during an episode including the day after kissinger died go find the episode I did right after Shinzuabe was assassinated.

The holy trinity of great days on the internet is that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all those billionaires.

Oh, it was amazing.

Yeah, people say Biden gave us nothing.

There's some bangers on the timeline.

There you go.

So, all right, Shinzuabe's successor is a guy named Fumio Kishida, who lasts for a little bit.

And Kishida, every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like somewhere between 20 and like 15 and 20 billion dollars on pro natalist policies, and mostly it doesn't happen.

But Kishida promises that he is going to spend $24.5 billion.

A lot of this money is going to be just straight up like child allowance.

So Japan has the system that they've been, you know, they've been sort of implementing over the course of like all of these fucking reforms, which is just like, all right, we're just going to like hand you cash.

It's still not enough money to like substantively change stuff, but there's a lot of different kinds of cash policies.

They have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like, okay, here you had a baby.

We're going to give you this amount per month.

I think it's like 10 to 15,000 yen, which hold on.

Yeah, so it's like $70 a month, which is like not.

Yeah, they are trying to expand state research on this.

They're supposed to have these like counselors that like come check in on you and like like give you education and stuff.

They're also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care.

And that's supposed to come up to about like $700-ish roughly.

You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing.

And then in 2024, Kishida is replaced by like some other dipshit who, you know, if he lasts more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you his name.

But

he's, you know, attempting to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right?

Which is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare subsidies and very importantly, like tuition-free high school.

So one of the continuous plans, like if you go back to like what I was talking about with, they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right?

That never got implemented except in like the last two years, like Tokyo has started doing it just like as a city.

Um, because Tokyo is one of the places where like, you know, the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever sure I imagine cost of living is also really high so like yeah cost of living is really high and it's also just like you know if if you're working in an urban like in an extremely urban city

you're working a just hideous number of hours right yeah um there's also this these supposed to be these massive like investments in providing child care and nursing and you can see these kind of like this this this point where they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the sort of pro-business, like, okay, fuck it, we'll pay for your childcare and also we will raise taxes to like hand you money and also nursing stuff.

And also they're trying to, there's like giant carve outs for this, but they're trying to set up a system where you can get full pay for couples who both take parental leave at the same time.

So they're trying everything, right?

They're trying like paid childcare.

They're trying, fuck it, we'll just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.

They're trying just straight up cash transfers.

They're trying paying for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids.

And none of this shit has done anything at all, right?

Like, just absolutely jack shit, right?

And if you want to look at like, okay, so like what's sort of actually happening here, right?

A lot, some of it is just like overwork.

Some of it is just, if people who can have children have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide not to.

And so part of this is also just like, like, and then this has been one of the social pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is they've been trying to get people to marry younger because people are marrying later and thus they are like, you know, they're having kids later because they're marrying later.

So,

and this is not working at all, right?

But you can look at the series of structural contradictions in their political coalition, and then you can look at the fact that like, again, one of the important ideological things here is that these people hate immigrants, right?

and they don't they don't want immigrants they want they want like japanese babies and so this is kind of like if you look at like okay why is none of this working right they're trying all these things to just avoid having more immigrants in the country and none of it is working at all but you know like insofar as it's failing it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff and it is going to get so much worse when every other country tries this yeah

Cool.

Well, you know what else is going to get worse?

Probably the products and services that support this show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

We're back.

It's me.

And predictably, I suppose, I am talking about Franco is Spain.

So Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain after civil war, both through explicit eugenics and through the nationalization of women's bodies, right?

Abortion and contraception were banned, so abortion had been legal.

Spain was one of the first countries to do that, right?

When Federico Montseni, anarchist minister, made that legal, minister of, I guess, public health.

That was made illegal.

I think it didn't become legal again until about 2010 in Spain.

Abortion, unless there was like a serious health issue, elective abortion, I guess.

Franco's military in the civil war consistently used sexual violence as a weapon, and we can see this as a kind of

prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies, right?

Kibo de Lano, who is a Francoist general, right, makes a speech in July 1936: quote, our valiant legionnaires and regulares have shown the red cowards what true men are, and they're women as well.

This is totally justified, because these communists and anarchists annookate free love.

At least now they will know what real men are, not the militia gays.

This is a translation that I'm reading just so people can go to the original document, but gaze is not the word he used.

A better translation would be a word that begins with F.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

They will not escape, however much they kick their legs and scream.

Like this is a general in their army making explicit rape threats, right?

They weren't subtle about this.

Yes.

The Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a Seción Feminina, a women's section.

My PhD supervisor, Pamela Radcliffe, has written extensively about this.

The group very much served as kind of the propaganda arm of state natalist policy.

It taught women from a young age they were inferior and subjugate to men.

They had to go through the organization's programs to do anything, any engagement with the state, they had to first go through the women's section, right?

If they wanted to get a passport, if they wanted to get a driving license, if they wanted to engage with the world outside of their homes in any way, they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them that their highest calling and only value was to have children.

Women's role in the Francoist project then was childbearing and child rearing.

Francoists, I'm going to use intellectuals here in like quotation scare quotes, right?

Frequently turned to phrenology to justify women's domestic role.

They fucking loved a phrenology, right?

It's great to go to like antiques markets in Spain because you can always buy like a phrenology head.

Jesus Christ.

You can acquire like an OG one, you know.

Like, I bet if you know the right place to look, you can find some, uh, find the calipers.

That's the dream.

There's actually a lot of those at secondhand stores in Portland.

Yeah.

Shocking.

The hands-clasping meme was francoism.

I found a lot of uses for those calipers, let me tell you.

No, I mean the phrenology skulls.

Oh, okay.

I've seen them all over town.

Yeah, but I bet those are replicas.

I bet they're not like OG phrenology skulls.

There's a market in France I went to that just had a bunch of monks skulls like real

monks.

Seems fine.

There was one that had been turned into a holder for a Bible.

Like they'd cut like an L-shaped cut in the skull.

It was pretty cool.

It was like three grand.

Like you make a kurti for the Quran, but like this was a while ago, but seemed like a good price.

Welcome to Skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums.

Yeah.

Using the discount code, it could happen here.

You can get 10% off your skull Bible holder.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

So one of the things they did was to increasingly marginalize midwives and instead like have male doctors taking control of the childbirthing process because midwives would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't feel that women belonged in work outside the home.

Right.

A big part of Franco's pronatalism was the repudiation of anarcho-feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution.

Right.

The anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love.

Their follow-through on those beliefs varied wildly, right?

So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance, the unions took on the role, they would assign women, I guess,

I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right?

So like they wanted,

for instance, the CNT Transport Union, once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers or bus drivers could could apprentice to men in that position so that in order to achieve like more gender equality within that sphere, right?

This is something that the Francoist state hated.

It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that manifested in its pronatalism.

Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics, right?

Like

that doesn't really work with Spanish history, but instead they saw leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something of a pathogen that spread within society.

Woke mind virus.

Yeah, yeah, God.

Fuck it.

No, it's pulling from the same type of fascist thought.

So you're 100% right.

It also practiced something called anti-Semitism without Jews at this time.

So there was a very, very small Jewish population in Spain.

But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about Judeo-Bolshevism.

He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, etc., as completely antithetical to Spanishness.

And of course, they blame this for their national decline, right?

Something that all fascists like to talk about.

This anti-leftist eugenics and pro-natalism extended to something called niños robalos, nensfostats in Catalan.

These children were abducted from their parents.

Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail.

Sometimes it was when the parents had been killed.

Sometimes it was when the mother had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's Protection Board.

This theoretically run by Franco's wife, was a way of institutionalizing quote-unquote fallen women or women who were, quote, at risk of falling.

It provides a way to force any woman you want to into an institution, right?

These children who were taken from their mothers were often trafficked and some cases sold to approved families by nuns and priests.

I'm going to quote one example from a BBC article.

In 1971, Manoli, who was 23 at the time and not long long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy.

But he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests.

Nine interminable hours passed.

Then a nun, who was a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died, she said.

They would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be.

Some of these clinics went as far as to keep the body of a dead baby in a freezer, and they would bring it out to show mothers.

They even dug graves for babies, but many of those graves just contained stones or the remains of adults.

These babies were then given or sold to other families and raised.

And in some cases, they lived their whole lives and died without ever knowing who their parents were, right?

I remember, like, I was doing my PhD when the initial research into this was being done.

And it is fucking horrible for people to find this out, right?

Like, because the people who were stolen from their families, in many cases, are like still alive, Right.

And in most cases, their birth certificate, if it exists, will say mother unknown.

And that was a process that existed to protect women who have had children outside of marriage, but it was also used to steal babies and leave no paper trail.

Yes.

Yes.

At least in 2011, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this.

It's kind of a wild BBC.

I've linked it.

There's an article.

There was also like a, I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary, where one of their reporters had recently had a baby.

So was able to

make an appointment with the OBGYN who was stealing these babies.

And when she confronted him, he grasped a crucifix and started brandishing it at her.

Jesus.

Incredible country.

The reason that they did this, right, was because

their fascism was of a unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist.

He was something worse.

They had what's called national Catholicism, right?

Which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion.

So instead, they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen.

I do love, just I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now.

I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to do fascism just, but like, we're going to put some spins on it.

Like how the Portuguese were like, we're going to do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the fact that like that makes us the good colonizers because of all of the sex assaults.

We're not racist, guys.

It's fine.

We're communing.

Oh, God.

Oh, Iberia, baby.

Spain is different, as the slogan used to go.

That was a Franco-ist tourism slogan back in the day.

Yeah.

So the discourse of, quote, true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women.

They were raised to serve the Patria, right, the fatherland, with their bodies, not their minds.

In the Republic, Spain had used secular education to fight its perceived and real backwardness compared to the rest of Europe.

The French project did the opposite.

It returned for its inspiration to 16th-century Catholic texts, and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood.

In terms of, I guess, birth rates, like they did have, you have a post-war baby boom rate, you have that everywhere that is affected by a large war.

Like we, you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this.

And then birth rates do go up until like the 1970s, 1980s, and then they start declining rapidly.

And Spain is once again in like a sort of not so much a birth rate panic, I didn't think, but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since the 1980s.

But nonetheless, Spanish birth rates never were particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe because Francoism absolutely rat fucked the economy, right?

Which made it harder for people to have more children.

But yeah, that's what I've got.

If you want to read more on Niños Robados, I think there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children.

I'm sure you can find it with subtitles.

But someone made a documentary on this that was presented at an academic conference I did.

And if I find the link, I will put it in the show notes.

Hell yeah.

Well,

I think it's time to talk about Romania.

Now,

when it comes to who is the worst at doing pro-natalism, there's a lot of contenders,

but I feel like we got the Usane bolt of natalism right here, and it's the Jejescu regime.

So we got to peel back a little bit here and talk about, you know, when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind of the end of 47, early 1948.

And in the first years of the communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all tended to bring in the post-war period, obviously a little earlier for the USSR.

And a lot of these are good, actually, right?

Not to deny all the horrible things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for a lot of women.

This is true in Russia as well.

Literacy for women rises.

The employment rate for women rises.

And this happens across society, right?

A lot of the poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right?

And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically.

Rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically.

And literacy increases.

And again, it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant for women, right?

And this is all lovely.

These are good things, right?

However, it comes with a problem for a lot of the leaders, and this is not just true in Romania, but we're talking about Romania here.

It comes with a problem for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party, which is that one of the things we see in every society when people have more and are doing better and live longer is that they start having less kids.

Because among other things, all their kids aren't dying.

One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well, like, but three of them might live, right?

You know, I gotta, I gotta really pump these numbers up.

I'm gonna have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right?

And when that stops happening, women are like, well, maybe I don't need to have 11 kids, right?

Like, if they're all going to live to adulthood, I don't need 11 children to be adults, right?

So birth rates start to fall.

This freaks out, though, a lot of these communists, because the kind of communists who are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right?

And Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right?

Which is a term that I found for the first time in a Journal of Family History article, but it's a term you can find other places.

And the basic idea is that, and this is an idea that, then it goes back to the original Marx, more people equals better economy, right?

Equals more productivity.

So falling fertility is seen as a potential calamity for the state, you know?

Obviously, this isn't how it works.

Like the U.S.

has had fertility rates falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period of time.

But this is like a thing that they think right then, that like if we don't bump up these birth rates, we're going to deal with like an actual economic disaster.

So by the time Nikolai Ceachescu takes over as party leader on June 23rd, 1966, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis.

And the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously.

In 1955, there were about 25.6 life births per thousand people in Romania.

And by the time Ceachescu takes over, there's about 14 life births per thousand people, right?

Now, for reference, both of those are still higher than the U.S.

birth rate right now.

We're at about 11, a little less than 11 live births per thousand people in the country.

The only reason why the U.S.

population continues to grow is immigration.

But that's a topic for another day.

Tchechescu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family.

And per that article in the Journal of Family History, Tchescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the family must be combated with determination because they result in an increase in the number of divorces, in the disintegration of the family, and in the neglect of the children's education and training for life.

And this is something that had come alongside the revolution, right?

That there's a lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the family in the society that had existed before.

And a lot of people are like, well, but, you know, we're becoming more scientific.

We have like women have jobs now.

Maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family should be are kind of outdated.

And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not.

They're not.

You need to go back to having a shitload of kids, right?

And he announces a new initiative to increase the population of Romania by 30% by 1990.

So,

which I don't know if the idea that that would ever be possible is a long shot, right?

That's so unhinged.

That's a massive change in society.

But Ceachescu isn't a logic thinker guy, right?

He's not like running the numbers hardcore here.

He's just sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good.

And so to encourage this shift, he unleashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards like pro-natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate.

The first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all women in the country.

There are some exceptions.

For example, you can qualify for an abortion if you already have five children under 18 in the house concurrently,

which is nuts.

There's one or two other exceptions based on your age, but there aren't many exceptions.

Per an article in PubMed, in addition, employed women under age 45 years are required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces, and any pregnancies detected are monitored to term.

Unmarried persons over 25 years of age and childless married couples without a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed a 30% tax on income.

Jesus.

Women who refuse to have children have been termed deserters.

Despite official pronatalist policies, it has been estimated that 40% of the 700,000 Romanian women pregnant in 1985 had illegal abortions.

A special unit has been established within the state security police to combat this practice.

So we're so close to this.

We are not, they really want to do all of this.

We're like knocking on the door.

They are like, that is the thing that I really want to drive home is that the closest that I have found in all of my rings, the closest direct graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting for U.S.

policy is Romania.

And it's also the worst this has ever worked.

When I was a lot younger, like when I was 16, I volunteered in an orphanage for neurodivergent kids in Romania.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Well, I mean, they created a culture of child abandonment, right?

Like, yes, yeah, we'll be talking about that.

That shit fucked me up.

And like, you shouldn't send your 16-year-old children to do that, to be clear.

No, and you're encountering it after the worst of it, too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at its worst.

Yeah.

So it's worth noting that while women did start working at a higher rate after communist takeover, that started to plateau by the time that Cchechescu, because obviously, like, there was still a lot of communism doesn't get rid of men being shitty to women, right?

It does, it does tend to things do get a lot better, right?

Yeah, sometimes it empowers shitty men.

And at the start, like kind of right around when he announces these set of fertility laws, he does try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing the number of women working at high positions in different state departments, right?

There is an initial, like, we're going to break the glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long.

He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on the policy after his wife, Elena, is made a member of the party executive committee.

He's like, women have gone far enough.

Look at my wife.

Classic Juchescu.

Yeah.

Sample size of one.

Classic guy who's going to die with his wife in a basement.

So, as is always the case with shit like this, women were not equally impacted by the abortion ban.

Largely, the impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level of wealth and social class.

And I'm going to quote from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a deep investigation into all of this immediately after the regime fell.

Women were not equally affected by the pronatalist policies.

Members of the urban middle class managed somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market.

Oh, I should also note contraceptives were basically made illegal, with the exception of like condoms.

They could also obtain medical abortions.

A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago, when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him 5,000 lei, or about $50 on the black market.

And several women with professional degrees reported matter-of-factly that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals.

Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected.

The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion, and others, like the Roma, had not practiced it.

The brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women, urban Roma, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations.

Their options were as limited as they were life-threatening.

Some used a variety of would-be abortifacients.

Others availed themselves of the services of a back alley abortionist.

Still others carried to term.

And the number of like deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did rise.

Like there's a lot of hideous stuff there.

We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, but I don't mean to.

paper over that.

A lot of women died and suffered lasting injury, infertility, and a number of other things because of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they were given.

But it's important to note that women who had money and a position in the social class could still gain access to this shit.

Like, and that's how it will work here, too, right?

Like these Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff.

They'll be restricting poor people, right?

Yeah.

Now, the first thing I should know about this whole raft of policies Juchescu introduced is that they did not work.

That Journal of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple of times here ran the numbers to try to analyze how well did this, like, how did these policies correspond to birth rates in Romania?

And it is true that after the first major laws were pushed in 67 and 68, there was a brief surge in birth rates, but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared by the 1970s.

Things were back to baseline.

So in 1974, Ceausescu launches another push to increase birth rates.

And again, they briefly increase and then fall a year or two later.

This process plays out a couple times throughout the administration.

And one of the things that's important to note is that the increase that happens after every new sort of like focus on birth rates is less each time, right?

It gets less effective every time.

Now, the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population.

Otherwise, it dropped, right?

Because this just doesn't work.

Like, you're not fundamentally changing anything.

And none of these incentives, because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right?

But they never are going to work.

Like, as we went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch of fucking kids.

And none of the people in charge of the Republican Party have any interest in making life affordable for people who are not rich.

Now, the situation that this led to by the time the Cheachesky regime fell in 89 was also pretty catastrophic because there had been surges in births, right?

In births of kids to parents who, because the people who can't get away from this tend to be the poor, could not take care of these kids, right?

And there was also a surge in kids as a result of the general surge in birth rate, but also as a result of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot in Romania.

A lot of kids who had different physical and mental disabilities, right?

Who were just abandoned straight away because their parents could not take care of them.

By 1990, there were an estimated 130,000 children in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that had been set up in Romania.

And there were like posters that were going around that were part of the pro-natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have a kid you can't take care of or that's not like working out for you, the Romanian government can handle it better than you.

So like, who cares?

Have another kid and we'll just drop it off with us if you can't take care of them.

Right.

Like that was literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again, like 130,000 kids in orphanages.

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah.

That Helsinki article I found quoted from a different piece of Western news media, like a team of journalists that went to a town called Bedell after Ceachescu fell.

And this is how that article opens.

On the second floor of the state-run institution, here dazed toddlers lie or sit in iron cribs in close, stuffy rooms.

Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on crib rails.

Some cry, but most are silent and appear bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory animals.

Down the hall, other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons suffering from malnutrition and disease.

Despite the heat of the day, several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets.

From one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.

Asked if the child inside is alive, an orderly says, of course, and pulls back the covers.

The tiny skeleton stirs, turned onto its side, and groans.

Yeah.

There's worse.

This is not the worst.

Like this, like Helsinki article goes into like how in the homes for the handicapped, the children are just ignored.

They can go months without any real human contact other than the bare minimum of being fed.

There's no, there's no one watching these kids.

Like this is some of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of children I've ever heard of.

A lot of children die.

AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire.

I really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions.

If you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up from now because we're already going long enough, but there's The Romanian Orphans Are Adults Now, an article in The Atlantic.

That's the title.

You should check that out.

And then Ceachescu's Children and The Guardian.

Both of those articles do a good job of providing additional context and horror on this.

But I think it's important to note that what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst this has ever got.

I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Jr.'s policies.

Yeah.

That is

like, yeah, yeah.

It takes a lot for me to be like.

kind of shocked and horrified these days.

Yeah.

But that stuff is grim.

It's some of the worst shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh boy.

I remember that the time there was like concern if like kids were really non-verbal.

Yeah.

Like, or they just had never been talked to.

Oh my God.

Because right, they've been institutionalized from such a young, like I was there probably about 12 years after the end of the regime.

So like these kids were in their teens, I guess.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had never really been able to play outside very much.

And it was fucking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That shit will fuck you up.

That's a good museum.

I'll see if I can find where it is because they've maintained one of the old orphanages as it was, like with the iron cribs and shit.

And they have like projections on the walls of the kids rocking and banging their heads that someone had filmed.

Yep, that shit is disturbing.

Like,

I wouldn't read any of those articles before going to bed.

Yeah.

Anyway, this has been it could happen here.

All right.

Bye.

This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Coute, and Robert Evans.

Yes.

Taco Trump sweeps the nation.

Musk is out with Stephen Miller's wife.

Liberation Day terrorists are fought in court.

This episode covering the week of May 28th to June 4th.

So much good stuff this week.

Also a terrorist attack.

Not good.

But before we get into that, I want to let you guys know, I watched the movie Mountain Head, and then I had a dream starring all of you in the movie Mountain Head.

What?

And it went a lot better since we were just skiing and enjoying the woods.

I don't know anything about a film Mountain Head.

Nobody launched an AI that destroyed civilization.

Steve Carell wasn't there.

Actually, I wouldn't mind hanging out with Steve Carell, but not the Steve Carell from that movie.

Anyway, interesting movie.

Yeah.

Interesting dream, too, by the sounds of it.

Wow.

Thanks for that quick Robert film review.

Thanks for sharing, bud.

Yeah.

I guess a side piece of news that we aren't focusing on like much today, but we will do a piece on in the future is Trump has cut a deal with Palantir to create an extensive new database that compiles information on everybody in the country.

This covers bank numbers, student debt, medical claims, disability status.

I think this summer, myself or a few other people on this episode, we'll work together on an episode just about surveillance, like Flock, Gideon, Foundry,

these surveillance systems that are getting spread all across the country.

So we will do a whole episode on that in the future.

But let's start with that and then pivot to Robert Evans to discuss terrorism.

I hardly know herism.

Someone else should continue the episode now.

No, this is your

segue.

Am I going back now?

You're out of luck.

Sorry, Robert.

That was a perfect segue.

Nobody's bailing you out of this shit.

Then we're fine.

Then we're fine.

Oh, my God.

All right, let me pull up the proper dock because I did this on my Chechescu dock because we recorded both of those episodes today.

God, what a heartwarming day you've had, Robert.

Oh, yeah.

Ceachescu, a guy firebombing a rally in Denver.

It's all been really good stuff.

Yeah,

mostly chill things.

So on June 2nd, there was a rally in Boulder, Colorado for a group that was protesting for hostages that were taken by Hamas on October 7th.

There's like, I think, 50, somewhere around 50 who are still unaccounted for.

for varying reasons.

And that was what the protest was for.

And there was like a gathering and they were supposed to be doing like a run, right?

In order to raise raise awareness about the hostages, right?

So that's, that's, that's the event that happened on the second.

And a man approached during that gathering, Mohammed Sabri Solomon, and he started throwing Molotov cocktails.

Every story I have gives slightly different numbers for how many Molotovs he had prepared and how many he had when he was taken.

Like an AP News story said that he had 16 unused Molotovs that were recovered by law enforcement after the attack.

but i think cnn said 14 yeah 14 unlit molotovs so it's kind of unclear to me how many they were but he threw a number of these at the the group of demonstrators he also had what's described in most of the articles i find as uh improvised flamethrower

and so you know when i heard that my first question was like a makeshift flamethrower sorry was the exact term the police used yeah and when i first heard that i was like well that could mean a lot of things that could literally just be like he had like a can of like spray that's that's flammable that that he like hooked a lighter up to have links deodorant.

No, it was apparently like a fertilizer or pesticide sprayer type deal that he had fuel in, right?

So it actually was a makeshift flamethrower.

He was attempting to, but he did not use it on the demonstrators.

He did burn himself pretty badly.

He had like body armor on that he took off after he like basically what seems to have happened is he throws something like half a dozen firebombs at this crowd and he he injures a number of people, several of them quite severely.

There's at least last I checked six people who are still in the hospital, one in critical condition, although that may have changed since we recorded this podcast.

The victims who are wounded range in age from 52 to 88.

And yeah, so he hurts a number of people with these molotobs.

And then the way he described it, he like felt like he couldn't continue going through with the attack.

He had been planning this thing for more than a year, we know, or at least that's what he claimed.

And he's, he basically said that, like, yeah, once I actually started it, I found it very difficult to continue.

So it seems like he kind of like didn't go as far with this thing as he could have, because it turns out lighting people on fire, even when you're very angry, is something that most people cannot bring themselves to do past a certain point.

Yeah.

He is on video screaming, Palestine is free.

And he stated to the authorities that when he'd been planning this for a year, his goal was to kill Zionists.

So, you know, this is very, it's very clear, like, what this is motivated by, right?

Like what his motivation was.

His background is interesting, I guess you'd say.

He and his family come from Egypt.

And yeah, he attended like high school in Egypt and later moved to Kuwait.

He has a history of like, it seems like he kind of got politically active during the Arab Spring.

He posted a bunch of pictures of Mohammed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who served as Egypt's president from 2012 to 2013.

He protested against the military coup that removed Morsi from power.

And he and his family entered the United States in August of 2022 as a non-immigrant visitor.

And in 2023, he received a two-year work authorization, which expired in March.

He had tried to come to the U.S.

in 2005.

His primary goal in coming here in 2022 was to get his daughter primarily into a good medical school.

He moved there with his wife and his kids.

His daughter was on the process of graduating.

They had been living in Kuwait, but for a variety of reasons, especially the fact that they were not citizens, she was like, I'm not going to be able to go into medicine in Kuwait.

His daughter seems to be a very gifted medical student.

And so they moved here and she got into a medical school.

And in fact, he seems to have waited to carry out his attack until her graduation.

Like he wanted her to...

be started on her path to becoming a doctor before he carried out this attack.

I think both in the hope that it would protect her and she wouldn't get forced out of the country, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

And I think probably just because he's your dad and he wanted to see her graduate, right?

Yeah.

But then he carries out this attack.

His family does not seem to have known.

He basically left some messages for them as he left to carry it out.

His wife took his phone into the authorities, which I read as her being like, I'm at this point trying to do whatever I can to make the government less likely to prosecute the rest of my family.

Yeah.

Like he's a write off right like like he like i i like i can't be concerned about him right i've got kids you know and like potentially trying to stop anything else happening if he was you know like maybe he had other people who he'd been playing this with who are planning other things right she doesn't know did he build a bomb right she has no idea yeah i should also note here that when he was planning this attack he initially planned to do a shooting he took a concealed carry class or at least he told investigators he took a concealed carry class right he could be lying about some of this this is what the police have reported yeah but he took a concealed carry class, but he was not able to buy a gun.

The AP News article says was denied because he's not a legal U.S.

citizen.

You don't have to be a citizen to buy a gun.

Yeah, that's not correct.

But you do have to be in the country legally, right?

Like, you do not have to be a citizen to purchase guns in this country, but you do have to be legal.

I think you have to be a resident, like certain visa categories.

There's a number of ways to get a gun while not a citizen, but he was not able to.

Yeah.

And thank goodness, right?

Like, it's horrifying.

Like, obviously, burning people is horrifying.

Like, the injuries that these people suffered are pretty, are deeply like, there's no pleasant burn injury, but people would have just died if he'd shot them, right?

Like, yeah, we, that's just the reality of the situation.

That's already happened in Boulder once.

Like, Boulder had a mass shooting at a supermarket, right?

Not so long ago.

Yeah.

So, that's the, that's, that's the bones of what happened here.

Now, I mean, having this, like, less than a week after the embassy shooting is pretty notable.

Not great.

Yeah.

Speaks to the contagion way these kinds of things spread, right?

Exactly.

I mean, last last week we talked about how like this plays into like media that only benefits the actions that Israel is continuing to take and how much of media attention was going towards the shooting and like the immediate aftermath.

And something that I found a little bit interesting is how fast that story kind of went away, which I wasn't really expecting.

I thought

they would be

relevant for a little bit longer.

People try to keep it relevant for a little bit longer.

I think part of the reason why maybe it went away faster than what we thought is so that it would not encourage like copycat attacks.

And that still seems to happen to a degree.

And I mean, it sounds like this guy was planning something for a little bit longer.

But certainly having that other shooting in like a close time proximity is notable.

Yeah.

I mean, the unfortunate reality is that like, I'm sure there's someone else, multiple other people who have been planning for different periods of time, other kinds of attacks, and we will continue to see stuff like this happen, right?

Some of this is when

something as terrible as the genocide happening in Gaza is happening on a small screen in front of your face, and you are consuming hours of the curated worst footage of it every day.

People are going to react, and they're not always going to react in the most thoughtful way.

Sometimes they're going to make a bunch of fucking firebombs and attack a group of people who there's not really any argument that these particular groups of people had any had any influence, any material consequence, any power in the Israeli government.

But yeah, one of them's a Holocaust survivor.

Like, people are going to take irrational, terrible action.

That's just going to happen, you know?

Yeah, it breaks people.

Yeah.

That kind of prolonged vicarious trauma, especially is not good for you.

I think a lot of this lone wolf attack is almost a way that people like cope with themselves after watching this thing unfold on your screen.

Right.

And then, as a response, I have to do something is what he said, right?

Like, I'm never going to be able to live with myself if I don't do something.

And then, as a response, you use the violence of a gun to carve your name into history.

And

as someone who did something, I did something.

Yeah.

This is this is a something.

And, you know, it's,

it's, it's bad.

It just, it's just some number of people, this is how they're, they're going to react.

And to an extent, I, I don't know, I don't know how you seek to stop this.

You know, the authorities have, have, like, confirmed this guy was not on anyone's watch list.

I'm sure neither will the next guy or gal who does something, right?

Like, this is the world, quite frankly, this is in part the world the internet has made, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not that, not that it would be good if horrifying footage of the genocide in Gaza wasn't getting out to people, but like, this isn't the first time we have watched a series of attacks carried out and attacks and copycat attacks like carried out and spread as a result of things that are spreading in digital media, right?

Like, this is a, this is like a thing that's happened over and over again.

This is just kind of how the internet and radical violence works.

Well, I mean, it's one of those things where, like, you know, there is a clear way to end the violence, which is to end the genocide, which is the other benefit of ending the genocide, but these people have no interest in that.

No, these people, and I don't, I don't know how to, right?

Like, like, like, I don't, like, if you're asking, like, well, how do we end the genocide?

We're like, I guess you could get the entire international community to stop trading or selling weapons to Israel and also blockade the country.

But, like, well, then how do we do that?

They're not gonna, right?

Like, I can't, I can't make them.

I can't make the U.S.

shoot down Israeli missiles or aircraft.

Like, I don't have the ability to, like, yell our government into doing that.

Yeah.

And it's how do you, right?

Like, as a person, potentially a person who's isolated.

I don't know, man.

Like, if this person

isn't part of a community, right?

Or hasn't found community, like, processing that trauma and feeling like you have to do something.

Some people's brains will break in a way that leads to violence.

Yeah.

I want to talk about.

state violence now, if that's okay, because I think

what he did was fucked up and wrong.

And no one should obviously be firebombing Holocaust survivor, but I think that's something we can agree on.

What has happened to his family is also wrong, right?

Like, it you shouldn't be punished for being related to someone who did a bad thing, and oh god, and this is, yeah, this is also horrifying, yeah.

Yeah, the whole thing is a story of like collateral damage, yeah.

So, um, the White House on 4:12 p.m.

on the 3rd of June tweeted, uh, zeeted

just in colon, the wife and five children of illegal alien Mohammed Soleiman, the suspect in the anti-Semitic firebombing of Jewish Americans, have been captured,

captured, and are now in ICE custody for expedited removal.

Next part is in block capitals.

They could be deported as early as tonight.

This is heartbreaking, right?

Again,

we've talked about habeas before, but the foundation of everything that legal systems based on English common law hold is you have to have evidence that the person did something wrong, not that they're related to the person who did something wrong.

Right.

You know, but Robert and I are both intimately familiar.

At least, you know, I've received calls from young people in Burma who we've interviewed whose families have been captured because of their participation in the revolution.

And like, this is not a path the US should be going down.

I want to explain very briefly what expedited removal is, because I have seen some shit that suggests maybe folks don't understand it.

That's fine.

It's complicated.

So, expedited removal is supposed to be reserved for people who arrive at a land border port of entry or iwi.

Iwi is an acronym entering without inspection.

That means entering between ports of entry, right?

Over the wall, under the wall, over the beach, what have you, right?

Entering without going through a port of entry.

And they're supposed to have been here for less than two years.

The Trump administration has been massively expanding the use of expedited removal recently.

Why they're doing this is because in an expedited removal proceeding, lower-level immigration officials can remove people without them seeing a judge.

Those people can still make a credible fear claim, which has to be assessed by an asylum officer and then approved by a judge.

But this is a lot harder, right, than going through the asylum process.

And they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt, I guess.

I think it's a reasonable fear frame.

I think credible fear is a higher standard for another removal proceeding.

that they are likely to be tortured by the government or with the acquiescence of their government if they're sent home, right?

Its use had previously peaked with 197 cases in 2013.

That was under Obama, right?

And surprisingly, you didn't see people writing about it then.

It was used even more extensively by the Biden administration, especially in 2024,

when Biden passed his asylum ban, right, by executive order.

The first Trump administration did use it.

They used it in a more broad range of cases, but they didn't use it in as many cases as either the Obama or the Biden administration, right?

Expedited removal is supposed to be for the most serious cases, for

things where

the person is a threat or a danger or for other reasons needs to be removed quickly.

It was never designed.

It was passed in, I think, in the early 2000s, the first decade of this century.

It was never supposed to be used like this, right?

Robert, you mentioned these people had entered the United States in 2023, I think.

2022, and then he got a visa, a two-year visa to work in 2023.

They entered on a tourist visa, essentially.

Yeah, they're not within that two-year window, right?

To the extent that that matters, I don't know, right?

So they will now,

having done nothing wrong, in the case of his wife having attempted to cooperate with law enforcement to stop her husband or anyone with him hurting anyone else, they will be detained in the nice detention center.

And they will have to make a claim of credible fear, right?

They will have to say, it is dangerous for you to send us back.

I presume their citizenship is Egyptian, so I presume they will be sent there.

That's a very high hurdle for them to clear.

And I mean, I'm sure that there are national immigration nonprofits who are willing to fight their case because the abuse of expeditive removal in the last two years, to be very clear, by the Biden administration as well, has seriously undermined the due process rights of migrants.

But this is still a further step and a significant step.

in removing those.

So I'm going to follow this case.

I'm sure I'll update you on it next week.

I also just want to note that like this has dominated a news cycle.

Yesterday, 27 people were killed in Gaza attempting to obtain humanitarian aid, right?

The IDF is still denying that.

I don't really care.

The Red Cross, as well as health authorities in Gaza, have confirmed that 27 people were killed en route to one of the humanitarian or the humanitarian aid distribution point where they've concentrated it in the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

We will have an episode on Palestine next week.

I don't want one person's kind of stupid action to overshadow the killing of many more people and that tragic loss of life, right?

So I don't think that we won't be covering that.

We will.

What we will also be doing is pivoting to advertisements right now.

That's right, baby.

Let me maybe get out my guacamole.

Come fucking Algeris and stop it.

I'm going to become the Joker.

Is that the pivot to the.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Okay.

Let's let's talk about Taco Trump.

Woo!

Oh, yeah.

I hate the

world.

Finally.

Get out your hot sauce.

Get out your guac.

Let's go.

Taco Trump party.

If you're doing it in full DNC style, pick a slightly racist Mexican costume or something, I guess.

Like, go.

So

many, many years ago,

I was a professional StarCraft II fan.

That makes sense.

And this meant that I was exposed to Gun Gun style a full two weeks before everyone else.

And this was my experience with Taco because I started hearing this from like financial news outlets.

And my friend Vicki was sending me things.

They're like, Yeah, they came up with this thing.

They're calling it Taco.

And then four days later, all of the regular news outlets caught up to it.

And I didn't want to say shit.

It's shaping the nation.

Mia liked it before it was cool.

So taco is this like unbelievable delusion that the finance people have had to like like program into their brains in order to like keep themselves from believing their own eyes about what's happening with the economy.

So taco stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.

And it's these people's belief that Trump will like always inevitably in the end back down from the terrorists.

And I've been seeing this a lot, right?

Like I've been seeing this from people who are like...

whose analysis I respect, who are talking about how like, yeah, the structural conditions of the economy are such that Trump will always be forced forced to like roll the tariffs back.

And then it's like, okay, like the 50% steel tariff went into effect like today,

right?

Like, I don't know.

I'm going to get some Kuman.

I'm going to get some coriander.

We're going to mix that up.

Ah, God.

Yum yum.

This is a financial thing, right?

This is the thing that like all the day traders like have to convince themselves in order to keep the stock market going.

Yeah.

That like, no, no, no, it's going to be fine.

This is a magic spell that's being like waved over the economy to keep it kind of holding together.

Yeah, they're like, ooh, it's gonna be fine.

Ignore the 30% tariffs on all Chinese goods, ignore the tariffs of the

50% steel tariff today.

You might say, Mia, these economists are saying to Rif, we don't like it.

Oh, God.

We had to make up for it.

Garrison wouldn't let us last time.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I know.

The royalties are getting too much.

I took an entire week's pay cut so that we could pay back the royalty.

Now, the good news is, everybody, we did manage to work out a new health care plan for everybody.

It is the next time you need to go to a doctor, there will be an unmarked car with a loaded 38 special in the glove box.

So it is a step up from United Healthcare.

We've actually significantly improved things.

That's true.

And I'm actually taking no pay for a year so we can do a white riot, which is just white genocide.

It's about the genocide of the Boer people.

It's a real.

So, okay, speaking of United Health, what are these tariffs that all these people have convinced themselves is not going to happen is the pharmaceutical tariffs, which are still like coming, right?

But what sort of happened with this taco shit, right, is the Democrats were like, okay, I have found a way to criticize Trump that is racist, and now they're all just calling him like Rosso doesn't actually critique his policies.

Like, they're

calling him Taco Trump in relation to like negotiations with Iran.

Yeah, yeah, shit that he should kick in out of.

It's good if he doesn't do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, like, I'm, I'm watching them do, like, like, fucking Truck Schumer is out here tweeting about how Biden deported more people than Trump did.

And, like, the thing that this reminds me of the most is like the Chavez-era Venezuelan opposition, where every single year they would haul some dipshit out and their platform was like, I'm going to do Trevismo better than Chavez.

And every single year they would lose by 40 points.

And it's like the Democrats are like, those guys.

Those do you fucking winners.

We're going to adopt every single one of his platforms and then we're going to run on he's not doing it well enough.

And then we're going to get fucking annihilated in every single election until like democratic process itself simply ceases to exist.

And this will be good for us somehow.

This is just,

it's pure cope.

Like the entire,

our entire economy is being supported by the just collective delusion that these people have built, but they fucked up, right?

And the thing about Taco, and the thing I got from like the first time I heard about this, it was like, if this gets out, these people are fucked because Trump is going to see this and it is going to piss him off.

And he's going to like, like, now that it's like the Democratic thing is like, no, no, no.

Like, the next series of tariffs that's scheduled to come off is, I'm pretty sure the China one in like the beginning of July could have the math wrong.

I don't know.

I hate math.

But I'm pretty sure that's the next one.

I mean,

this is the thing that I'm still questioning about.

And we've talked about, talked about this before, is like one of those 30-day deadlines for tariffs on Canada and Mexico expired.

Yeah, he just forgot about that one.

And no one was keeping count, or they were like distracted.

I think specifically they were putting in some like European Union like tariffs like that day and then just nothing like happened.

And like I am wondering how much of that is like, he's just going to announce tariffs, put them on hold, and then just forget about them, but still announce new different tariffs in the future that may cover some of the same stuff.

Well, so here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

Some of these he remembers something that doesn't, because so the steel tariff doubled from 25 to 50.

And that was one of the rolling date ones, right?

And so I think it's, it's like, there are some that he like cares about, and there are some that he kind of doesn't.

I mean, I feel the same way when I'm getting tacos.

Like pork tacos, no, thank you.

Fish tacos, maybe.

I don't, I don't endorse Garrison's Garrison's opinion on tacos.

This taco Trump shit is like, I long for the days of Orange Man Bad.

Drump was better than this.

This is the worst it's ever been.

Like,

oh, God,

get the comedian's cutting his head off live on stage again.

Like, sure, yes, that was fine.

This is just like,

what are we doing here?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really tough because cilantro prices are going to spike to these tariffs too.

So, I mean, we can't even call him Taco about it.

It's okay.

You know, Garrison, that's actually just good politics, right?

Because

some people have a disability where they can't taste cilantro.

Not a disability.

No association with previous statements.

I will not be canceled by this.

I do not buy the cilantro gene.

I don't think it's real.

Wait, you don't think the cilantro gene?

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Okay.

I don't think it's a gene.

No, it's just, I don't, I don't think people without the cilantro with the cilantro taste bad gene.

I don't know if we'd call them people, right?

If it tastes like social, I just don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Talks with China have been breaking down.

Both sides have been accusing each other of violating

the agreement they had come to to roll the tariffs back, which they like both have.

I believe both sides on that, actually.

Yeah.

And again, this comes with the actual fundamental structural problem of this, which is that.

And I think this is why a lot of people think that everything will sort of eventually go back to normal and it'll turn into sort of like bluster like it did the first time.

Is that like, okay, again, Trump's actual goal here which is to not have a trade deficit with china is unachievable right there's nothing that can actually be done in order to do that and there's no good way to claim victory either and so what we're sort of escalating towards is is july like the 130 tariff sort of like coming coming back in in into effect so people are building up i think this like

I don't know, the sort of like psychological wall to the fact that this could happen again.

And the fact that like these negotiations are breaking down, I think is just making it increasingly likely that it is just going to explode again.

The steel tariffs also are just a shit show for a whole bunch of different manufacturing sectors.

It's very bad for the U.S.

auto industry.

There's already been reports on the effect 25% steel tariff has had on

like on the construction industry.

This has been tied into sort of like, oh yeah, the U.S.

is like not replenishing its housing stock because, you know, but it's, it's fucked.

it's real bad i don't i don't have a i i don't know i don't have a better thing yeah

to say about it than that and that it's going to continue to get worse and at some points probably

the taco is going to be fucking over and people are going to realize that he's going to do this and especially now that it just pissed him off

oh god

yeah well what will they do then with their giant inflatable chicken

this is

send it to teran this is the biggest limb brain stuff I've ever seen.

I am living in a world where like a group chat that I made on Signal when I was a manic last year has had more policy effect on like preserving trans health care in that fucking budget bill than the entire Democratic Party.

And they are spending their money fucking like hauling out chicken, fucking chicken inflatable.

Now,

don't listen to me, Democrats.

For just $20 million, I will guarantee you the youth vote, not a guarantee.

I propose that we rename this segment from Tariff Talk to Mia Mole

for the next,

I don't know, 20 episodes.

Garrison, as a Canadian, are you allowed to use that word?

Let's go on a net break

before I lose my job.

Okay, we are back.

James Stout.

It's me.

What's been going on?

Hey, everyone, it's James.

It's Thursday night here, and I'm just recording a little pickup to update you that the Trump administration has issued another travel ban.

This travel ban bans travel or bans all new visas for people from 12 countries.

One of those is Myanmar.

And travel is further restricted for seven other countries.

There are exemptions for people who are already in the country with a valid visa.

There are exemptions for Afghan people who have an SIV, a special immigrant visa.

There are other smaller exemptions for the Olympic Games and sporting events, for example.

We will do a whole episode on this because we need longer than we have to explain it.

But I just wanted to make people aware that we are tracking that, planning on getting something out about it, but we don't have enough space in this episode or time to edit to address it in full today.

Well, some things have been happening, Garrison, here in sunny San Diego, with, from what I hear, actually great tacos.

Yes, tacos are actually very good in San Diego.

Yes.

Oh, excellent tacos.

Some of the best tacos in Southern California, which is saying something.

Yeah.

Come and visit us, eat our tacos.

Cross the border, get some extended release Mexican tram it all.

Let me know where you are.

Anyway, continue, James.

Or tacos, whatever you want to get across the border.

So Ice Agents raided Buena Forcheta, which is a pizza place in South Park.

I used to stay like just above here.

I would get late-night pizza there all the time.

Or my job was riding my bike, and my hobby was drinking at Hamilton's RIP, which was a craft beer next door.

In this bungled raid, they entered during the late afternoon, early evening of Friday.

And Ice agents soon found themselves surrounded by an angry crowd of local people, patrons from the vegan small plates cocktail place

across the street, and the brewery.

It's now South Park Brewing, as well as folks from the neighborhood, right?

This is one of those neighborhoods that, like, South Park, as a concept, was kind of invented by real estate agents so that it wouldn't seem like Golden Hill or Bankers Hill, and it would have like a more upmarket branding.

So you have these very nice bars and restaurants, but then you also have like a laundromat on the corner and like a

food market, like a non-chain supermarket that serves a primarily Latino clientele, I would imagine.

It's one of these very sort of like class-diverse neighborhoods, I guess.

And people came out en masse.

They surrounded these vehicles, right?

They were chanting, let them go.

ICE and HSI agents decided to defuse the situation by throwing flashbangs and then leaving with four employees.

I should add here that, as KPBS put it, quote, flashbangs were thrown, which is a cowardly use of the passive voice to obscure culpability.

I think flashbangs spontaneously were deployed.

Right, yeah, right.

Who can say, Garrison?

Maybe the people at the death metal vegan restaurant bought the flashbangs.

Well, and I also do want to say I have gotten word from some exclusive sources that these were actually secret militia members masquerading as I say just yeah, let's just fucking address it because it's very silly.

The understandable degree of it is that like they are dressing like Proud Voice now.

They look exactly like Proud Boys in Portland in 2019, right?

Like they are indistinguishable visually.

Their uniform standards have like kind of gone away.

It seems like they don't have standards anymore.

Yes.

And now they are just dressing like how Proud Boys and 3%ers used to dress.

Yeah.

So, like, I think this kind of conspiracy theory stems from the initial misidentification of the ginger ice agent who smashed someone's window as Michael Meyer, aka Lewis Arthur, who's one of the veterans on patrol leaders.

He was live streaming in Oklahoma at the time that that raid happened.

It's not him.

Yeah.

It's just two people who are ginger.

Yeah.

That is possible.

There are lots of them.

Then I've seen this in multiple other cases, often from the kind of more lip sky people you see on blue sky right who seem unable to comprehend the fact that no they are cops and they are doing evil shit and cops do evil shit cops can do bad things and and now yeah cops are more likely especially immigration officers to not have their names on their kit yeah something that we saw like in portland in 2020 and it was incredibly worrying and now it's spreading all around the entire country to the to the point where most most like people enacting these raids are both hiding their identities and also obscuring what agencies they are actually like from, which is why people are like concerned that you like, what if these guys aren't even from the government?

What if these are just like some kind of right-wing militia?

And yeah, with a little bit of checking, you can usually tell that they are, in fact, from usually DHS.

Yeah, I mean, the California one was somewhat ridiculous, right?

There is not an exemption to the California assault weapons ban for militias.

These guys had guns, which would have been about four felonies each.

Yes.

I'm saying people don't do felony things.

They do, but you'd have to be a bit of a tool to just stand on the street with your felony select fire MPX.

Part of this is a very,

and a lot of leftists fell for this too, but this is fundamentally rooted in a liberal delusion, which is that the danger is unaccountable groups of civilians with guns, not the police.

The danger is the cops.

The danger has always been the cops.

Yes.

We need to push back on this, right?

Like the proud boys are not like the be-all and end-all of evil.

No, are they bad?

Sure, of course.

I've had my hand broken by one.

I don't like them, but I'm not as scared of them as I am of just the cops.

Like, yeah, we need to push back on this because it fundamentally misidentifies the problem.

And until these people wake up and realize that they're not going to respond in the correct manner.

Yeah.

And I mean, like, you know, one of the things that you can point out here is it's like, yeah, there were a bunch of police in Nazi Germany.

And the moment that they started carrying out the orders of the Nazi government, they became Nazis.

Like, that's just how this works, right?

You'll You'll get a polo like, oh, well, I was just a Weimar police guy just enforcing the laws of the Nazi government.

It's like, okay,

you are, you are, sir, you are a Nazi and you are a Nazi because you are an agent of the Nazi state, not because you are like, you know, you were like necessarily in some paramilitary or whatever, like

member of the party.

Yeah, like that, that's what happens when you work for a fascist state.

So you were now a fascist.

So in documents I've reviewed, ICE claimed that 19 employees at a restaurant were using falsified green cards.

They were acting on a tip from November 2020, and then they received a follow-up tip in late January 2025.

The tip claimed that many of the staff of Buonaforchetto were undocumented, that the owner made them work long shifts and verbally abused them.

I have seen no evidence that this is true beyond that claim.

I've been to and past that restaurant hundreds of times.

I've never seen anyone who looks sad to be there, but that doesn't mean that's not happening, but I've seen nothing to lead me to believe that it is beyond this claim, right?

HSI had been in communication with Buena Forchetto's lawyer since February, and they had been cooperating, right?

Buonaforchetto had given them these documents, which they claimed were fake green cards.

They applied for this warrant, which they got an exceedingly broad warrant.

One of the things to allow was for everyone inside to be detained and fingerprinted if necessary, even people who are not accused of any immigration offense, right?

People who are United States citizens.

The warrant also detailed that they had been surveilling the location.

City councilman Sean Ela Riviera called the HSI agent terrorists in a social media post.

Bill Malugan got sad about this.

Stephen Miller quote-tweeted Bill Malugan getting sad about this.

Toc Laurier came out with three paragraphs of total bullshit and continued to unabashedly support stripping our city of all its socially beneficial services in order to direct a fire hose of our money to the cops, one of whom earned $430,000 in 2023.

Jesus, What?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

San Diego's highest paid public officials are cops by.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

We are becoming a police department with a city attached because of Todd Gloria, someone who ran in 2020 on a reform agenda, right?

Who earns himself 250,000, much less.

That's

unhappy.

Unhit a football coach makes.

I thought that the Portland police were paid too much.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This person worked an alleged 3 000 hours of overtime i believe

it's like what scrolling tick scrolling tick tock in your car like come on keeping an eye keeping an eye on kids yeah yeah that's you can't you you can't be uh 3 000 hours i mean i i someone could do 3 000 divided by 50 uh 52 weeks a year or whatever like it's it's it's an unfathomable amount of overtime yeah it's it's 58 hours a week whoa

yeah so so that's full-time plus one and a half full-time jobs.

Hard worker.

There's a KPBS article on it.

I'll link it.

Multiple police officers, I guess, in 2024 are on track to earn over $400,000 with the bulk of it coming from overtime pay.

San Diego never gets enough attention for being

a complete shit show of a city, right?

Like Enron by the Sea is the best way I've heard it described, right?

Like our city

consistently has massive corruption and scandals and nothing happens.

It's a problem when a place is that nice, right?

Like that's really the fundamental issue is like people be like, hey, did you hear about that fucked up thing, the merit did?

Yeah, but like,

look at the beach.

Yeah, I mean, that's literally, yeah, that's literally the thesis of Under the Perfect Sun, which is a book that

should be obligatory.

if you want to move to San Diego.

I think it's one of the earlier Mike Davis books.

But again, San Diego, a place where where the politics are bad.

It's also what happens when everyone votes Dem, no matter what, right?

Also, people in general, if you want to understand why Southern California be like a do, read Mike Davis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm sorry.

In general, Mike Davis.

Just read Mike Davis, actually, wherever you are.

Read some Mike Davis.

Yep.

I seems to have used, I want to get into this because I think this is an important issue that hasn't been raised in any coverage I see.

I seems to have used AB60 drivers' licenses to identify the people in Buena Forcheta or at least use California DMV documents of some kind.

Jesus.

Yeah, so there's this misunderstanding.

People think that if you have a driver's license in California, that information isn't accessible to immigration, and that's not true.

AB60 licenses, so that's Assembly Bill 60, right?

California piece of law, allow people to get a license without having legal immigration status.

This is a good thing.

It means that undocumented people are less likely to drive unlicensed and uninsured, right?

And therefore, it means that people are likely to stay at the scene of car accidents and people who get in car accidents are likely to be covered by insurance, right?

I've been hit by an uninsured driver.

It fucking sucks.

Oh, yeah.

DHS cannot access information on whose license is an AB60 license, but they can access through a variety of databases and mechanisms.

other DMV data, which may include things like photographs, addresses, or thumbprints.

So in this case, they were able to look at the the fake green cards and then look at other data, both in federal and local databases for various things.

And some of these people had overstayed visas, they're claiming, right, be like, okay, well, we found a guy with this name and this date of birth, but the person hasn't been issued a green card.

That's their claim, right?

And the same with the driver's license database.

So obviously, just to finish up on that thought, I guess.

This disincentivizes people from doing the thing, which I've just said is good, which is getting a driver's license, right?

It disincentivizes, I mean, I'm seeing things from students right now being afraid of going to their own graduation

being afraid of having their parents at their own graduation right

this was like two blocks from a school fucking chicken do not she's on top of the fence sorry um

it i'm just gonna go

get out

oh yeah please

take a break

I really, I really truly thought that that was part of the sentence and I was trying to process in my brain what the fuck was going on.

I was like, wait, I also thought that, yeah.

All right, we're back.

Did you non-commercial?

Did you pick up the chicken?

Yep.

Could you say that you were kind of a chicken jockey?

No.

Everyone, no, no.

Just another 30 seconds of silence, everybody.

Let's really give that its due.

Has anyone got a gong that we could twang?

no no

all right

pouring one out for garrison

so to finish up right now both buenofortietta locations are closed a gofund me for the impacted employees and their families has already hit twice its goal 120 000

as i've said there have been un

suggestions which as far as i'm aware are unfounded that a restaurant forced undocumented employees to work long hours That doesn't matter, right?

Even if they did, you shouldn't be punishing the people who are being in theory abused, right?

I don't understand how you get to that logic.

And even if that is the case, like having ICE available on call to deport your employees only plays into the hands of abusive bosses who don't want to pay people, right?

They can just call ICE instead.

This is a tactic that has been used for decades against migrants.

So, yeah, that's all I got.

Good times.

Good times in San Diego.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're going to talk about this more in another episode.

There was also a

rage in Minneapolis that, you know, they sent like 30 agents out, multi-agency raid,

and like 100 people just showed up and got them to fuck off.

And they didn't end up arresting anybody.

Yeah, I think, well, so I think they arrested some of the protesters, but like they didn't end up detaining any of them.

They did not detain the people they were going after.

They stopped them.

Yeah, and there's this great line that fucking every single person from Minneapolis who I know now is quoting where one of the people who got interviewed in Sahan Journal said, that's Minneapolis, baby.

We pull up.

So you too could pull up and stop these fucking raises.

You see four cowards, you can stop them.

Now, speaking of incredible cowardice, one of the things that's been happening on a sort of another immigration front is the U.S.'s attempt to revoke student visas for Chinese international students.

We don't actually know what this means yet and what it's going to look like.

All they've said is that they're working

aggressively to revoke visas.

That's a direct quote from them.

And this was from marco rubio on fucking whatever social media app and he also said quote we will revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the people's republic of china and hong kong so uh fucking rip all of the hong kong liberals who supported trump yeah

bad

uh no one knows exactly what this is going to mean i've seen speculation that this could be a full ban i that's what stephen miller has wanted for a long time i don't know if that's going to happen they've been talking about like quote unquote critical fields like stem stuff um it could also be a you know the the specific language they'll be using is like anyone who's linked to the communist party

that's a lot and what does that mean yeah who the knows right like linked you know like some of these people are the kids of like chinese communist party members but like there are that's like seven percent of the population of china right like that's a lot of people and then linked can be fucking anything right like yeah you know

so no one is entirely sure what this means yet i my guess is that it's going to be combined with the other horrible thing they're doing right now which is that they've suspended visits like consular visits to get student visas while they try to figure out how to like do this like implement this new social media policy where they want to just effectively what it looks like they want to do is just like if you've posted about palestine they deny you student visa that seems like the thing that they're trying to put in place yet they haven't yet my guess is that these two are going to end up being linked and they're gonna and that that's going to be what they're doing.

It could also just be some sort of large-scale rollback of student visas for Chinese international students here.

Chinese international students have been targeted under so many goddamn administrations now.

It's fucking horrible.

These are just like people.

It's interesting because when you read media accounts of this, a lot of them will be like, well, people aren't that.

Like, we're not that scared.

That's okay.

And it's like, well, no, you, you are talking to the people who are stupid enough to talk to an American journalist, right?

Most people just say no because they're genuinely, this is like creating an atmosphere of fucking terror where people don't want to, people don't want to speak out about it.

And this, and this has been something that's been used to like break grad student unions,

you know, like just over the years, this is, this has been a kind of repression that's very useful.

This is also, I think,

part of their, of just the broader war against higher education because a lot of Chinese international students like come in on full tuition.

So they're paying for a large percentage of like a bunch of university budgets.

But yeah,

we will keep you informed as to what this actually looks like.

That's what we know about it.

For now, it fucking sucks.

Let's end with some semi-good news, I guess.

We will return to my horribly named segment, Stinky Musk.

Oh, God.

Hey, this is Gare from the future, just cutting in here at the beginning because, oh boy, in the 24 hours after we recorded this initial segment, there has been substantial developments in the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story.

It is getting quite ugly out there, folks.

The girls are fighting.

Diva down.

JD Vance is hiding in the closet as the parents are screaming down the hallway.

It is getting quite ugly.

Trump's gotten rid of the electric vehicle mandate and is threatening to terminate Elon's government subsidies and contracts.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is talking about how Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.

Like, duh, like, we don't already know this, but for some reason, this is blowing the minds of people like Alex Jones, who are now crashing out on the timeline.

Huge, huge shake-ups in the mega world with some people trying to cope, claiming that this is a 5D chess move and that Elon and Trump are going to come back together in the end, which is completely absurd.

This is a huge, a huge shift in the power balance in the new right.

We will be doing a whole new piece in the near future on the Elon Musk, Donald Trump.

breakup story and how it will affect the Republican Party.

But the following segment, which we recorded on Wednesday, will essentially outline how we got right up to this point, all of the slow microaggressions and fractures that led to this much more explosive breakup.

So enjoy that and keep your ears peeled for a future piece on Elon Musk and Donald Trump's messy situationship.

So Elon Musk and Donald Trump are now officially in their messy breakup phase, where they're both trying to kind of play it cool, but resentment is clearly bubbling.

So after reports surfaced about the growing rift between Musk and Trump, the White House gave Musk one last farewell hurrah on Friday, May 30th, where Musk, sporting a black eye and a t-shirt reading the Doge Father, was gifted a gold key to the White House by Donald Trump.

A day later, Trump withdrew the nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator.

So as Musk's special government employee designation expired, nothing was renewed.

They did not try to push him through as a more permanent advisor.

He is essentially getting the soft boot.

According to Axios, Musk had asked the White House about staying on as an advisor past the 130-day special government employee threshold, but that was denied.

Musk has been reportedly disillusioned by the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through some of his Doge cuts, along with the growing frustration regarding the Liberation Day tariffs, which affect his businesses.

To add to the tension, according to the New York Times, Musk has been upset that Trump has been negotiating deals with Open AI instead of Musk's own competitor, Grok.

In late May, Musk posted on X, the Everything app, quote, back to spending 24-7 at work.

I must be super focused on X/slash XAI and Tesla.

Well, to be fair, Garrison, have you seen ChatGPT ever speaking in the style of Jarjar Binks in such a convincing way?

You know, that is true.

USP right there.

Yeah, not while talking about the plight of the boars.

So as Musk was preparing to exit the White House, he began airing his beef with the new big, beautiful budget bill.

Quote, I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both.

telling CBS News, quote, I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing.

Unquote.

After this, Stephen Miller started sub-tweeting Musk on X, The Everything App, outlining the different types of cuts that Doge can make versus reconciliation bills can make, and defended the big, beautiful bill, calling it, quote, the single largest welfare reform in American history, along with the largest tax cut reform in American history, the most aggressive energy exploration in American history, and the strongest border bill in American history, all while reducing the deficit, unquote, which it does not do.

It does not reduce the deficit.

But now that Musk's White House exit has been more solidified, Musk's animosity towards Trump's main policy bill has just skyrocketed, posting on June 3rd on X the Everything app.

I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore.

This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

Shame on those who voted for it.

You know you did wrong.

You know it.

Similarly, Stephen Miller has also been crashing out on the timeline, attempting to defend the bill and push back on Musk's attacks in a flurry of tweets, one of which reads, quote, The big, beautiful budget bill will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale, and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States for that reason alone.

It's the most essential piece of legislation currently under construction in the entire Western world in generations.

Wow.

Now, Steven seems pretty worked up.

And I think this could actually have to do

not just about Musk's tweets, but also maybe about Steven's own personal life.

Because

Steven's animosity could relate to the fact that Musk seems to be stealing Stephen Miller's own wife.

Yes.

Katie Miller.

Katie Miller was working in a top position at Doge as a special government employee.

And now that her designation has also expired, she is leaving the government to continue working with Musk full-time, including arranging Musk's own interview appearances.

It is not looking great, folks.

The cockchair is getting warmed.

I am not thrilled about Elon Musk possibly having a baby with Stephen Miller's wife.

This is really dark timeline.

I think all of them should be doing better.

Different.

Different.

I certainly can critique the way polyamory functions in

leftist anarchist spaces.

This is the most toxic thrumbo.

This is by far the worst.

This is the night of wrong wives too, and hopefully it ends up for all of these motherfuckers like it did for Heimbach.

So fuck him.

Stephen Miller went on TV last week to talk about how much he cares about his family.

It's such good timing.

It's really dark for him.

Yeah.

If you marry Stephen Miller, it's because

you're both the same kind of evil.

And if that's the kind of person you are, Elon Musk is going to give you more opportunities to be the kind of evil you want to be.

Right?

Like, it's just obvious.

Like, this is.

Like, I can't just tell if Musk is an upgrade or a lateral move from Stephen Miller.

It's really tough to say.

Yeah,

this is very funny.

But yeah, that is his...

This is one of the last bits in the White House Elon Musk saga.

He really tried to push forward

this doge to retire all government employees agenda, and it ran into way more roadblocks than what he was expecting.

And he seems really upset about that.

And now he has to return to the private sector to save his failing businesses, which have only started to fail more now that he damaged an already kind of

a troubling reputation the past few months.

Yeah.

So yeah, that is the update on Elon Musk.

Awesome.

Well, everybody.

We reported the news.

I love reporting reporting the news and that you did it.

Goodbye.

We reported the news.

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

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