It Could Happen Here Weekly 180

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Speaker 3 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Welcome to Ichadappin Here, a podcast where the ancient leftist adage there is power in logistics, has finally been realized by one Donald Trump. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Gare.

Speaker 3 How are you doing, Gare?

Speaker 25 Just another great day in America.

Speaker 3 It's great. It's great.
They're arresting judges.

Speaker 25 It's a good time.

Speaker 3 It's great.

Speaker 25 Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under different circumstances.

Speaker 3 Hey, look. Have I ever publicly called for the arrest of a judge? I'm not sure I have.

Speaker 25 Maybe probably not, because like arresting power itself is a little bit problem. Hashtag problematic.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 this is a carceral solution to this

Speaker 3 garrison. Like, we kind of use incarceralism to solve the problems of the carceral system.

Speaker 25 Sure.

Speaker 3 Speaking of carceral systems, there is the economy that we're all living under, which is also quite literally a carceral system because so much of it is based on prison and slave labor of various kinds across the world.

Speaker 3 Now, I have good news and I have bad news about this. I don't remember what the good news was.

Speaker 3 So we're only getting the bad news, which is that, well, the good news and the bad news is that this the system that we all grew up on the economic system that has you know

Speaker 3 supported us our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives the thing you know the system that encompasses everything we have ever known is dead it is dead as the economic system that existed literally at the end of last year does not exist anymore it is right now in the process of dying And the thing that is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get to go to the Gromsey quote where he says, this is the the time of monsters the chinese century my favorite gromsky gramsy whatever gromsky how do we say this guy's name gromsky gromsy gromsy gromsky gromshi see you fucked up too yeah my favorite gramshi quote we're entering the chinese century Look, I, okay, so like, here's the thing.

Speaker 3 I, I, on a fundamental level, think that Gromsky is like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the 20th century left. So I hate him, and therefore I refuse to say his name properly.

Speaker 3 Also, we're going to get into a little bit about why the Chinese century is going to also be a complete shit show for them too. But, you know, the Canadian century, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Finally, the Yugoslavian century.

Speaker 25 With God Emperor Mark Carney in charge, he will usher in a new era of Canadian progress and global supremacy. As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy will suck up all of

Speaker 25 the dependency and resources from the U.S. in the late 20th century.
And finally, we will have a Tim Hortons in every country in the planet.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited for us to finally get our first war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it.

Speaker 25 That will be exciting.

Speaker 3 So there is a story that we have told on this show many, many, many, many, many, many times.

Speaker 3 And it is the story of the structure of the modern world economy, the birth of neoliberalism, the ascendancy of free trade, the decline of the U.S.

Speaker 3 as the world's great manufacturing power, the collapse of the power of the global working class, and the generalized ascension of capitalism and this specific form of capitalism as the structuring force of the world system.

Speaker 3 It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class wars, domestic politics, and grand international maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure that ruled the world for half a century of American hegemony.

Speaker 3 And we are going to tell a very, very abbreviated version of that story for one final time. Because that world, the world.

Speaker 25 I won't say final, because you'll probably do this again in two years, but okay.

Speaker 3 The world that we were all born into,

Speaker 3 that world is fucking dead. And Donald Trump has killed it.

Speaker 3 And this is how it died.

Speaker 3 Garrison. Yes.
In the beginning,

Speaker 3 there was war.

Speaker 25 Sure.

Speaker 3 In the ashes of a a continent rent by the flames of fascism, two armies stood triumphant over a new world.

Speaker 3 One of them, unfortunately, was the United States, and the second one, unfortunately, was the USSR.

Speaker 3 Now, it's also worth mentioning that very briefly, both the French and the British assumed they would also be like superpowers, and

Speaker 3 no, jokes washed, failed, failed powers, zero out of ten, absolute dipshits,

Speaker 3 destroyed.

Speaker 25 Now, oddly enough, Japan walked away with more power than either of those countries.

Speaker 3 Which is

Speaker 25 a little bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here, though, and this is, you know, like this actually is a lot of what this episode is about, is that the thing that World War I, or World War II did was, was, and World War I also did this, but was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Because the world had been ruled for several hundred years by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans, and, you know, to some extent, like Spain, but Spain was sort of gone, right?

Speaker 3 But like those old world empires had been what had structured everything in the world.

Speaker 3 And at the end of World War II, that suddenly wasn't the case anymore.

Speaker 3 And the product of this was that if you look at the places in the world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right?

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America, particularly Argentina. There was some

Speaker 3 like Chinese manufacturing belts that were were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States.

Speaker 3 And this meant that alone among countries, right, the U.S. was in the most dominant position,

Speaker 3 like one of the most dominant positions great power has ever been in, even though there technically was a second great power, right?

Speaker 3 They had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power. We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves.
We had,

Speaker 3 I guess, like the second largest army in the world, but know, we like we were significantly more technologically advanced than the USSR.

Speaker 3 And this had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial power the US had to go but down.

Speaker 3 Because we controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the world would catch up.

Speaker 3 And this was the thing that was actually necessary. And this is something that was spurred on by the American industrial class, right?

Speaker 3 Because they suddenly had all of these like Jeep factories you're trying to make cars out of and they needed people to buy the cars.

Speaker 3 And the only way to do that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in order to sort of rebuild these places as markets.

Speaker 3 And so for like a very brief time, and this is the sort of like golden age that all of these Trump people and all of these like weird dipshits like harkened back to was this like hard time of like unmatched American power.

Speaker 3 But also

Speaker 3 it was a time in the world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero sum. And that

Speaker 3 just was not going to last.

Speaker 3 Because at a certain point, and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what were called the non-aligned movement or sort of the G77, you know, also like the third world movement, a bunch of these countries that were not aligned, like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, which you could immediately tell how this alliance is going to shit because these two countries are like in the same alliance, right?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, this is like Tito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 3 These countries' sort of like economic strategy was to create something that actually is in a lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying to do, which is like using their control of resources, although again, the resource the U.S.

Speaker 3 has now is like money. basically took all of the fucking world's resources, right?

Speaker 3 And but using that to develop your own local industrial basis so you can you can have your own local manufacturing economy.

Speaker 3 and this is something that like a lot of countries pursued this like venezuela pursues this like bolivia pursues it this is this is something that like everyone like kind of across the political spectrum is trying to do in like the 60s and 70s and through the 80s but the thing is it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of a model for what what what what these people are trying to do which is what reagen was able to do to the american economy in in the sort of 1980s And what Reagan is able to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really bizarre now,

Speaker 3 but he was actually successfully able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American

Speaker 3 industrial production and was able to do the whole sort of like, we're bringing the jobs back to the U.S.

Speaker 3 But the thing is, the way he did this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it, right? What he did was on the one hand, he blew a smoking crater in the entire world economy.

Speaker 3 And that, Garrison, will sound familiar to you because these people are trying to blow a hole in the American economy, right? Like you have seen this.

Speaker 25 Yes, I have seen the stonks and the trade and the shipments. Yes, I am.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but even like Elon Musk would like deliberately post about this, right?

Speaker 3 Like very deliberately about how he wants to destroy the economy so that there could be like a brief economic hardship and then a golden age, right?

Speaker 25 Like necessary hardship will have to endure for a short period of time to then reach the utopia, which is surely around the corner.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's interesting because when serious people have to defend this, like Fox, okay, I say serious people, I'm saying, and I'm saying Fox News because like

Speaker 25 serious.

Speaker 3 Look, look, here's it.

Speaker 26 Serious clown.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I have to defend this, right?

Speaker 3 Like, okay, you know, we're not dealing with like, you know, we're not dealing with like intellectual titans here, but like when someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has to defend this, it is Reagan they point to because Reagan, and Carter was also had a hand in this, but Reagan does this thing called the Volcker shock, right?

Speaker 3 Like working, working hand in hand with Paul Volcker as the head of the Federal Reserve, which notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and then had to back off on that because all of the markets were like, this is our fucking Rubicon.

Speaker 3 Like, we don't give a fuck about any of the other things. Well, I mean, we kind of give a fuck about the other things you've been doing.

Speaker 3 But, like, if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve, like, we're going ape shit.

Speaker 3 But, like, you know, the Fed and Reagan work together in order to do this thing, which is to jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels, causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay.

Speaker 3 This like annihilates most of the world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession where the US has like almost 20% unemployment.

Speaker 3 But he's able to ride this out specifically because like this thing actually benefits a bunch of sections of the American capitalist class. Like if you are someone who holds debt, right?

Speaker 3 This is fucking great for you. And this is something very different from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the trade war.

Speaker 3 Like everyone is just having the very worst time they've ever had.

Speaker 25 It does seem like a globe of losers.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of American manufacturing, and there is still a lot of American manufacturing.

Speaker 3 We'll get to that in a bit. But the thing he was able to do was the thing that Garrison, I was threatening at the beginning of the show,

Speaker 3 by the time I am done doing this podcast, like maybe not this podcast, but by the time I finish doing it, it could happen here when I like die on the battlefield in 15 years, everyone will be able to fucking explain the plaza accords and the reverse plaza accords because they are they are the central thing that got us to this all to this fucking place, which is that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to like West Germany.

Speaker 3 And the subtext of what he's saying is like, you are American military protectorates. And because you are American military, Japan, by the way, is like the great industrial power of the 1980s, right?

Speaker 3 And through the 90s, like they are like the defining, like they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today.

Speaker 3 Like if you want to find every argument people make about China from the entire political spectrum, like all the way from like people on the one hand going like, this is, they're going to destroy American hegemony to people on the other hand being like, this is what socialism is, you can find all of those same arguments people made about Japan in like the 80s.

Speaker 3 But, you know, what Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar. Right.
So the dollar is suddenly worth less.

Speaker 3 And because the dollar is like worth less relative to other international currencies, it makes U.S. manufacturing more competitive.

Speaker 3 And this, like, temporarily restores American technological production. But then they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire Japanese economy.

Speaker 3 And the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing of real estate speculation.

Speaker 3 Which, you know, I guarantee I know you may be too young to remember what happened the last time that we based the entire economy on real estate speculation, but it didn't make it. That's not true.

Speaker 25 Also, you're like a few days older than me.

Speaker 3 Come on. That's unbelievably not true.
I am over half a decade older than you. Wait, is that real? No, it's not real.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 We'll talk about this afterwards.

Speaker 25 I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my Mia Wong dox file to check once a

Speaker 3 while while Garrison checks the Mia Wong dox file.

Speaker 3 The economy that is built up from all of this, though, right, is an economy based on a few different things. One, it's based on an entire network of global supply chains with, you know, like

Speaker 3 very, very minimal tariff barriers between them, right?

Speaker 3 It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade, which is, you know, not really free, but obviously like the ways that these were written structurally benefited the U.S., right? Where like the U.S.

Speaker 3 is allowed to do all of this shit for like its corn production that no other country is allowed to do. Like all of the market tampering that all these people scream about is just what the U.S.

Speaker 3 does with corn.

Speaker 3 But, you know, the entire economic system was based on being able to cheaply produce different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and then move them across the world cheaply in order to sort of avoid the localized power of workers' movements.

Speaker 3 It is based on the U.S. running a series of bubble economies, so the tech bubble, the housing bubble, et cetera, et cetera.
And it is based on the U.S.

Speaker 3 dollar and the bond as like the fundamental aspects of the, like, as the world reserve currencies, like the fundamental thing that drives the system.

Speaker 3 And when we come back, we will talk about this literally all exploding and what it's going to do for all of you, which is not good. Yay.

Speaker 3 Okay, we are back. Now,

Speaker 3 one of the things that had, in a lot of ways, locked this system in place was that

Speaker 3 because of the way that these manufacturing networks are set up, right?

Speaker 3 Because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs in different countries.

Speaker 3 They are all so interconnected that if you try to pull one thread out of it and do a major change to the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately.

Speaker 3 And this meant that there has always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the way they were, even if everyone could also already like realize that they're kind of fucked up.

Speaker 3 And this dates all the way back to like things that most people largely have forgotten about. But like Obama, for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA.
And he never like intended to do that.

Speaker 3 But like even if he had, the moment he got into power, you know, like Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right? But he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just like the same trade deal.

Speaker 3 Because for a long time, right, if you were going to run the capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you could possibly do was run it the way it had already been set up because there were so many structural factors about how the system of production worked that this is the only way you could run it and still like have the economy not explode.

Speaker 3 But now we have finally produced a group of men so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy.

Speaker 3 And this is where we get into the LeBron of turf tariffs that we're on right now.

Speaker 3 And we get into something that is very important to understand about this, which is that this shit is not about economics, right? In the sense that you or I would understand them.

Speaker 3 This is none of this stuff

Speaker 3 is about like we want the economy to grow.

Speaker 3 This is not something that like

Speaker 3 really any of the major sectors of capital want because it is just nuking this whole thing.

Speaker 3 And this is why you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy, even if he's been sort of hedging it.

Speaker 3 What we've been seeing is this widening rift.

Speaker 3 And we talked about this in the last executive disorder where like different factions of the Trump administration were literally trying to like isolate Trump from like Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all of the all of the tariff bullshit.

Speaker 3 They've been, you know, like literally try to get them alone in a room so that they can they can implement their trade policy but the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological right it is it is this idea that like

Speaker 3 if you run a trade deficit with a country or if you're if you are buying things from a country they are ripping you off and you always need to be selling more things than you're buying

Speaker 3 which is just like

Speaker 3 So, okay, on one level, like this is just so fucking nonsense that like attempting to explain why is bullshit is kind of pointless.

Speaker 3 But we're going to do it anyways because someone fucking has to somewhere. And this actually does also reveal something about the way that money has always worked under these systems.

Speaker 3 Okay. So before we get to like what this is going to do to the entire world economy, we need to talk about

Speaker 3 Garrison, do you know what balance of payments is?

Speaker 25 That sounds like something I would ask my accountant about.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So this is a...
technically an accounting thing, right? But the balance of payments of a country, it is like a ledger thing, right?

Speaker 3 But it's the measure of like their accounts right in terms of all of the money coming out of the country and all of the money coming into the country that's you know that's like that's like trade balance stuff right

Speaker 3 and the balance of payments is actually very important for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in the world need to buy things in a currency they can't print and this has always been the structural limit of things like modern monetary theory which talks about how like

Speaker 3 your country's ability to like

Speaker 3 have things isn't constrained by just the pure money supply of your country as long as you're buying things in your own currency, right? Like the purpose of money is the thing to move assets around.

Speaker 3 But inflation isn't a product. I mean, like, yeah, okay, if you just like hammer the fucking printer button, right? Like, yeah, you can cause hyperinflation.
But substantively,

Speaker 3 because money is something that is a production of the government, because it is literally government debt, right?

Speaker 3 It's not a commodity in the conventional sense where you have to like figure out how much of it there is and there's like a limited supply of it and you have to like manage limited supply to make sure the economy doesn't explode you can just use the money that you have and you can use debt like deficit spending effectively to continue to circulate goods around the economy the problem is if you have to buy something that is not in your currency that's where you need trade because you need to find a way so you know i'm going to take an example that we're going to come back to later which is bolivia right if you are bolivia you need to get american dollars so you can buy like gas right so people can like

Speaker 3 fuel their cars

Speaker 3 and the problem is you can only only buy oil in American dollars. So you have to find something to export to a place where you can get American dollars for it.

Speaker 3 And in this sense, balance of payments actually matters enormously, right?

Speaker 3 And balance of payments is also just like a function of all of your trade deficits and all of your trade surpluses sort of combined, right? But think about the US. This is a notable thing.

Speaker 3 Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar.
So for the United States, none of this shit matters at all. None of the balance of payment stuff.

Speaker 3 It is completely irrelevant. Like literally, completely, totally and utterly irrelevant, right?

Speaker 3 Now, if you are like Bolivia and you run out of dollars, then what you have is a spiraling economic crisis where like people fucking suddenly can't buy food because no one can buy oil.

Speaker 3 So no one can move things around. So like the entire economy literally collapses.
This is a very, very, very common mode of economic collapse. But,

Speaker 3 you know, none of the, none of the things that the right is talking about, like in terms of like, oh, you have, like, the United States has like a trade deficit with China. It's like, yeah, great.

Speaker 3 That means that we're buying things from them

Speaker 3 like the the one good rand paul quote ever was like yes i i have a trade deficit with my grocery store

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 and that's fine

Speaker 3 mia goes full rand paul on the podcast today yeah i know well but thing is but thing is it is very very funny that rand paul is now complaining about this because it's like well yeah i don't know if all of you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time like fucking powling around with like alex jones and the clan like we probably wouldn't be here right now so this is your fault This is definitely

Speaker 25 like the tea party does have a sizable chunk of the blame here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like, like, that's the thing. Like, this is this is your all of your fucking fault.
Lock them up quick. Zero to 10, 0 to 10.
Get them out, get them out, get them out.

Speaker 3 Now, do you know what else we need to get out? Get out of stock. Oh, it's these products and services.
Yeah, get them out of stock, get them out of stock while you still can.

Speaker 25 Well, we still have an economy.

Speaker 27 We are back.

Speaker 3 Now, again, as I was saying, like, this attempt to make the American economy function in a way that it has trade surpluses with every other country.

Speaker 3 And also, and this is also important, these people don't think that like services are real. And a lot of what the U.S.
exports is services.

Speaker 3 But because they're all these really weird, like, because they're all fascists, right?

Speaker 3 They all have this. all of this weird ideological shit about masculinity and about the favoring of the concrete over the abstract because the concrete is like masculine.

Speaker 3 It is like, it is the nation, right? Like this like steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out. Like this is, this is what masculinity is.
This is what nationalism is.

Speaker 3 This is what men are supposed to do.

Speaker 25 Yeah, you, you have the materialists on the evil side and you have the post-materialists on the evil.

Speaker 3 Well, no, okay. So this is

Speaker 3 a long time ago, I did a bunch of episodes. called Class and the Culture War.

Speaker 3 And one of the points that I make on that episode is that one of the arguments that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pastone makes about what the Holocaust was was this attempt to pit the concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital, right?

Speaker 3 Where the concrete part of capital is like the nation and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right? And all of these like concrete.

Speaker 3 things were pitted against the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital, which is to say like quote unquote like Jewish financiers and all of the sort of like weird collection of like modifiers that gets associated with like like you know the rootless cosmopolitanism like the globalism like all of this

Speaker 3 right

Speaker 3 and what the nazis did was embody all of that stuff into just the figure of of the jewish person and his argument and this is argument about like sort of structural anti-semitism and what the holocaust was was that the like that was what the nazi revolution was that's what the liquidation of like and this is how baseone describes like liquidation of the jews this is what this is what the holocaust is what the genocide was was was their attempt to destroy the like abstract part of, part of this thing by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing.

Speaker 3 And this is what these fucking people are also are also doing in their own way, right?

Speaker 25 Like, yeah, they're just doing it with like the price of eggs or like the availability of housing.

Speaker 3 Right. And, you know, and it's also worth noting, like, these people are like unhinged anti-Semitic, right? Because this is all part of the same ideology.
They just sort of like...

Speaker 3 They're doing the shit in different ways and they haven't like,

Speaker 3 I don't know, like, if these people are in power for like a decade, we might just get this, right?

Speaker 3 Whether they're literally doing the holocaust again but like we're not at that point yet what we're at the point is where like this this kind of like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract and like these figures can be like embodied in into these things and this is also what like what the uh like this is what the administration is doing with immigrants right is like casting them in that role of like the abstract like the foreigner the yeah the national the like the anti-national those things are what are what is causing our economic problems, our housing problems.

Speaker 25 And then you have other instances like with like Mexico and Canada where they tie in the trade war with this like fentanyl thing being like, you know, like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop fentanyl.

Speaker 25 So like they're they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like immigration and tying it directly to

Speaker 25 like our trade wars with these with these you know massive massive countries some of our most important trading partners.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And this is causing an interesting split because Trump's like political coalition, right,

Speaker 3 has a bunch of kind of different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're like Trump and Navarro.
And like, I mean, Trump is instinctually pro-tariff.

Speaker 3 And like, he can be talked out of it because, again, this guy's brain, like, we saw this in the last administration. Like, the last person in the room with him can convince him of basically anything.

Speaker 3 But, you know, those people are structurally committed to like this specific version of masculinity.

Speaker 3 And there's a lot of portions of the right that are and that are committed to like this trade policy is like the America-first American nationalist thing.

Speaker 3 But like someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this. And like even a lot of the people who are like the inner circle sort of like Yarvin like tech fascist, right?

Speaker 3 Are like, okay, but hold on. Like we make all of our shit in China.
So like, you know, and this is why like Elon is coming against a terrorist because like. Yeah, they're going to fuck him.

Speaker 3 Like, because he has to import stuff and export stuff from China because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are. Right.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and if once you get out of the circle of like that kind of like tech fascist, right? And the tech people are the people who are the most closely aligned with this administration. Right.

Speaker 3 Like in terms of like all the sectors of capital, tech is the most closely aligned one. But, you know, you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens and Walmart.
Right.

Speaker 3 And these are also like the Waltons as a family are like. traditional backers of the right for ages and ages and ages, right? They've been backers of far-right causes.

Speaker 3 They also don't want this because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around.

Speaker 3 And the further out you go, when you start getting into like actual finance capital, these people are fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit, we're about to lose all of our goddamn money.

Speaker 3 And the consequence of this is that all of this stuff is shaping out in a sort of political battle in the administration over who can get Trump in the room last to try to figure out how the economy is going to work.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the problem is, and I have been vindicated in this in the very brief amount of time between when the episode on Friday came out and when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China.

Speaker 3 Like, they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.

Speaker 25 Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations. Yeah, he's just lying about this.

Speaker 25 Chinese government says, no, we have not started negotiations.

Speaker 3 It's like, no, there's no negotiations. Yeah.
And there, and again, like, structurally, there can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the U.S.

Speaker 3 to like not have a trade deficit with China. Like, there's no way you can do that.
And that's the thing that'll satisfy these people. So all of this means that the economy is fucking dead, right?

Speaker 3 This sort of like free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions off of like, you know, like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production to a bunch of other countries and, you know, like assemblies of a bunch of different like goods in different places.

Speaker 3 And the U.S. is like the economic center of the world is just fucking gone.

Speaker 3 Now, one of the reasons I started writing this episode in the first place is that I have read so much fucking analyses of these goddamn turf tariffs.

Speaker 3 And do you know how many of them for a single fucking second considered what this was going to be like for anyone who doesn't live in the United States? What the fuck is wrong with people?

Speaker 3 Why does nobody fucking care about a single goddamn person who lives outside the United States?

Speaker 3 I have read so many fucking analyses of this fucking shit.

Speaker 3 I have read these things from, I have read these things from the business papers, I have read these things from fascists, I have read these things from the center left, I have read these things from leftists.

Speaker 3 Do you know how many of these things have said anything about actual fucking people who do not live in the goddamn United States? Fucking none of them.

Speaker 3 Every once in a while, you'll get like, this will be bad for the economy of China.

Speaker 3 And this is, this is a catastrophe because the people who aren't going to be most affected by this,

Speaker 3 when the fucking turf tariffs from Liberation Day come back into effect over the summer, are the working class of Sri Lanka?

Speaker 3 This is going to be the fucking apocalypse for a bunch of people who have been going through hell for years and years and years and years.

Speaker 3 It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia, who is already facing a dollar crisis and just struggling to import fuel. It is going to be places like Bangladesh.

Speaker 3 It is going to be places like Vietnam, which is, you know, structurally in a better position than a lot of the rest of these countries, but like fucking won't be in a structurally better, like that one for a structurally better position, but it has like 90% goddamn tariffs on it.

Speaker 3 And yes, the US is going to be real fucking bad, right? Everything is going to cost a lot more money. All of us are going to have a lot less jobs.

Speaker 3 The people who are in jobs are going to make a lot less money. There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless.
There is going to be a lot of people who can't get fucking food.

Speaker 3 It is going to be a catastrophe.

Speaker 3 And also, at the same time, the US is going to look like fucking fully automated luxury gay space communism compared to fucking Sri Lanka.

Speaker 3 This kind of sort of rote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it like is the reason why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the first place.

Speaker 3 And this is why like in like four fucking months, literally no one in the entire country social security is actually going to show up because a 19 year old grow up who doesn't understand SQL because nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going to affect everyone.

Speaker 3 Because the death of the global economy will be felt here It is going to be felt so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn earth and I am like I am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this completely

Speaker 3 This has been me being unbelievably fucking angry because like I don't know a bunch of my family doesn't live in this country which means I have to deal with the fact that like Everyone else who lives in another country is a human being who's exactly the same as fucking we are.

Speaker 3 And this is a thing that nobody else appears to want to fuck deal with i am losing my shit please god stop talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the united states and aren't mostly going to be borne by everyone else

Speaker 3 i didn't write a transition for this but you know i i will transition out of this by again going back to the fact that all of the the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based on

Speaker 3 you know a combination of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that all rely on there not being 100% tariffs on goods imported to the US.

Speaker 3 And when this shit goes through and when the rest of the tariffs go through and make it, the thing that's happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff is everyone, and it's something like Nintendo has been talking about, right?

Speaker 3 Where they were like, okay, our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to move a bunch of our production into Vietnam.

Speaker 3 And that was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of rising labor costs in China and, you know, a whole bunch of sort of factors like that.

Speaker 3 But none of that shit, none of that stuff to sort of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline

Speaker 3 is going to be able to function once the tariffs on basically every country on earth go into effect.

Speaker 3 And there's a second problem here, which is that, okay, so what is the new economy going to look like? These people, like

Speaker 3 the people running like the administration, right? Like people like Navarro and people like Trump and a lot of the sort of like

Speaker 3 right who is driving the policy thing here think that this, that the production that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced by the U.S.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 there was a trap that people fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this too sometimes because it's, you know, it's a fast and easy way to think about the Chinese economy.
And it's not accurate.

Speaker 3 Well, it's not like, it doesn't capture the whole picture of what's going on.

Speaker 3 But the way that people think about the Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things are made in China is because labor is cheap there, because either because a culmination of exploitation and poverty.

Speaker 3 And that's true to an extent, right?

Speaker 3 But the actual sort of genius from capital's perspective of capital's return to China was that,

Speaker 3 you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and this continues to be true 30 or 40 years into the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled.

Speaker 3 And the education was paid for not by capitalism, right? It was paid for by the sort of socialist system.

Speaker 3 Like this combination of things of a highly educated and an increasingly highly skilled as they've been working these jobs means that there is an extremely high skill migrant labor population that knows how to do a bunch of shit like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right?

Speaker 3 That is vital to making electronics. And the U.S.

Speaker 3 does not have a couple of hundred thousand migrant workers that you can just have and like exploit and not pay healthcare costs to who know how all of the chip manufacturing shit works.

Speaker 3 There are people in the US who know how to do some of these kinds of things, but we're talking,

Speaker 3 even though the US does have a manufacturing economy and it is very high tech, it is not on the scale of these things, right?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the second big reason why things are produced in China, and this is the reason why production didn't all shift out of China after 2011.

Speaker 3 when there were huge protests there and huge riots there over sort of labor conditions is that there is an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet like this physical factory infrastructure that is in china that you can't easily just move out to another country and this is this is the basic things like the power grid functions

Speaker 3 right

Speaker 3 and you can't really easily replicate that and you can't just have this thing that all these people want to do where like the us will just suddenly you know have all of these factories right and will suddenly like all these things will just like come back and miraculously like

Speaker 3 there will be all of these jobs because like who the fuck is going, like we don't, we literally, we don't have the technology for this.

Speaker 3 Well, not so much technology, but it's like who is going to build all of the factories, right? Like the factories don't exist here. The

Speaker 3 like the interlinked technical systems for them just don't exist here.

Speaker 25 You don't want to switch to costing $50,000 available in 10 years pre-order now? Sorry, no, available in 20 years. I forgot about the environmental impact surveys.

Speaker 3 Yeah, iPhone, iPhone, 20 years.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but like, you know, and like, and like a lot of this is because, and like, you know, you're hearing a lot of reports now of like small business owners who are talking about like, yeah, it's so much easier to work with Chinese manufacturers.

Speaker 3 It's like impossible to work with American manufacturers. And part of that is just exploitation, right?

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, there's a lot of things that like, there are like labor conditions that are very common in China that do happen in the U.S., but are much easier to do there.

Speaker 3 But also like, I don't know, like China has like an entire network of like...

Speaker 3 the ability to basically do this sort of like pop-up light and medium manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly. And the U.S.
doesn't fucking have that, right?

Speaker 3 Like we do have a bunch of manufacturing in the U.S., right? Like that is the thing that we have.

Speaker 3 But it was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid of sort of like the masses of workers that arose in cities like Detroit to like atomize them. Right.

Speaker 3 And this is actually like also happening in China right now, weirdly.

Speaker 3 Like China has been pivoting to a surface economy for a long time, but the thing that this thing is a surface economy is a lot of that shit is like also like drop shipping production, right?

Speaker 25 But like, you know,

Speaker 3 there's no actual way for, you know, for like capital atlay costs and things like that like there's no actual way to replicate the conditions in china that make it it like an effective like source of global production in the us or even in like a country like india like there's just not the infrastructure there to do it and there's not the sort of like migrant labor populations not the sort of things that you need and what this means right now right is that like there is not a future lined up to replace the one that we're in right now.

Speaker 3 We literally don't know what this is going to do because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out. Because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything.

Speaker 3 Like they are trying to extract the copper wires from the house.

Speaker 3 And in order to do this, they like, you know, A, because they think they think that's how the economy works, is they extract the copper wires.

Speaker 3 And B, their plan to extract the copper wire is to blow the house up with dynamite.

Speaker 3 And no, no one's ever done an environmental impact statement on what if you blow the house up with dynamite because why the fuck would you do that?

Speaker 25 Right. Sometimes the police do that.

Speaker 3 It's true. It's true.
But

Speaker 3 I guess the U.S. is the world's police force.
There There you go.

Speaker 3 No one has planned for this. But the second thing is there isn't another model of capital waiting in the wings in the way that there was

Speaker 3 when the sort of Reaganites did this for the economy, because the Reaganites had an entire ideological apparatus.

Speaker 6 They had

Speaker 3 a functional way for the economy to work and be worse and be more exploitative. But there's nothing behind this, right? There's just a vision that literally cannot work.

Speaker 3 And so the place that I want to end as we head into the end of the economy and as, you know, like I've been trying to grapple with what is it going to look like after this

Speaker 3 is that we just don't know things in the supply chain are going to break that we have never thought about before.

Speaker 3 Like medical systems are going to start breaking down, right? The supply chains for like

Speaker 3 really, really basic

Speaker 3 goods that we don't even think about the production process of is going to start breaking down because it relies on being able to cheaply import one very, very specific kind of like,

Speaker 3 I don't know, like ball bearing that's made in one factory and suddenly costs like 400 times as much as it did before.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we don't know what that's going to do.

Speaker 3 And this is on the one hand, absolutely horrifying, right? Like this is going to mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world. But on the other hand, there is no plan, right?

Speaker 3 They don't have a fucking strategy.

Speaker 3 and that means that the future of the global economy is is up in the air and it's up to us to make it a fucking better one right it's we either drive these people from power and we and we destroy the bases of their power on such a fundamental level they can never return to power right like we just we just fucking kneecap them we've we've we physically seize all of the fucking assets and all of the things of the productive capacity that they have that has been allowing them to do this and we make sure they can never get it again and we make sure that we fucking control it and we either do that or we all get crushed for a generation and we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering the likes of which only a few people in the most hideously war-torn parts of the world have experienced today

Speaker 3 yay

Speaker 25 i for one am very excited to see the the anarchist liberal re-globalization alliance finally fighting in the streets of Seattle to to regain globalization globalization full circle.

Speaker 3 You know, I will point out the reason they all called it alter globalization and not anti-globalization was that like one of the one of the original...

Speaker 25 A lot of them did say anti-globalization. A lot of them did, right?

Speaker 3 But like

Speaker 3 a lot of their argument was like...

Speaker 25 The West Coast team certainly did.

Speaker 3 Which is true. But

Speaker 3 it's also true that

Speaker 3 one of the arguments they were making was that like neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places, but capital could.

Speaker 3 And the thing that they want was a world where people can move between things and like, fuck capital, what the fuck? Like eat shit, right? And that's a world that we can build, right?

Speaker 3 We can build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the immigration Gestapo, where like there isn't a fucking line on the ground that dictates whether people can disappear you to a concentration camp.

Speaker 3 And that is also globalization, right?

Speaker 3 We just have to fucking do it.

Speaker 25 Anarcho-Clintonism. One day we can look at a beautiful world.

Speaker 3 Look, if Bill Crystal could admit the radicals were right, all of these other motherfuckers could come around. We've been right all, but we've been right the whole fucking time.
Fuck you assholes.

Speaker 3 This is strange. All of you broke this world, and it is now our job to put it back together, and you fuckers are going to back us, or we are all going to be killed by fascism.
Those are the terms.

Speaker 3 Deal with it.

Speaker 25 It's a strange world we live in.

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Speaker 5 Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 5 And I'm here to ask you if you can imagine a world where national borders don't define our identities.

Speaker 5 This internationalist idea has historically been known as cosmopolitanism, and it has some deep roots, including, interestingly, some connection to anarchism.

Speaker 5 And of course, that's what we're seeking to explore here today. I'm joined once again by the one and only.

Speaker 3 It's James.

Speaker 6 James Stout. Thanks for having me, Andrew.
I'm excited about this one.

Speaker 5 Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation.
Are you familiar with cosmopolitanism?

Speaker 6 Yeah. And like...

Speaker 6 Look at, I guess, the more broad sphere of like anarchist internationalism is something I'm very interested in, right?

Speaker 6 Like we had an interview on the show maybe two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, and people hear this with

Speaker 6 people explicitly calling themselves internationalists fighting in Myanmar. Of course, I've spent time in Rojava and with internationalists there.

Speaker 6 So like internationalism is something I'm really interested in.

Speaker 5 For sure, for sure. I think it's a very compelling and inspiring idea, especially in a world that lacks many of those ideas.

Speaker 5 At its core, cosmopolitanism is just the belief that all human beings belong to the same shared moral and political community that transcends national, cultural, and political boundaries.

Speaker 5 In the book Cosmopolitanism, Ethics and the Will of Strangers, philosopher Kwame Anthony Apir describes cosmopolitanism as, quote, two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism.

Speaker 5 One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship.

Speaker 5 The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.

Speaker 5 People are different. The cosmopolitan knows and there is much to learn from our differences.

Speaker 5 Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.

Speaker 5 Whatever our obligations are to others or theirs to us, they often have the right to go their own way.

Speaker 5 So basically, we have obligations to others beyond just our immediate affiliations and that human diversity is something to be valued, not just tolerated. So it's not the idea of

Speaker 5 assimilating all of humanity into one singular culture or society or government. It's the idea of recognizing and embracing the diversity of humans, but recognizing our shared affinity all the same.

Speaker 5 There are a couple different versions of cosmopolitanism. There's the moral cosmopolitanism, or the idea that all humans have equal moral worth.

Speaker 5 There's political cosmopolitanism, the idea that global governance or international institutions should supersede national borders.

Speaker 5 And then there's cultural cosmopolitanism, which is the blending and exchange of cultures through migration, trade, and shared histories.

Speaker 5 But cosmopolitanism, fully embraced, has, I would say, an inherent tension with power, especially nationalism, the state, and capitalism.

Speaker 5 And while it's true that liberal cosmopolitanism relies on global institutions like the United Nations and reinforces hierarchies, anarchist cosmopolitanism envisions a world where solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid emerge from below through free association rather than being imposed from above.

Speaker 5 So today we'll be unpacking the history of cosmopolitanism, how anarchists have engaged with the topic, and why it remains somewhat of a battleground today.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 5 The term itself comes from the Greek cosmopolitis, which means citizen of the world.

Speaker 5 The earliest articulation of this idea is often attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, who was a cynic philosopher who, when asked where he came from, simply replied, I am a citizen of the world.

Speaker 5 According to Martha Neussbaum, Greek Stoics like Zeno of Citium, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius expanded on this idea, arguing that humanity shares a universal reason and should live in accordance with nature, not artificial divisions of state or tribe.

Speaker 5 Of course, many of these philosophers didn't have any issue with patriarchy or slavery in Greece, so there is some inconsistency in their concept of a shared humanity.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's who counts as human, I guess, isn't it? Like, which is pretty bleak.

Speaker 5 Indeed.

Speaker 5 But let's fast forward a bit. During the Enlightenment, we see a more structured political philosophy of cosmopolitanism emerging.
Immanuel Kant was one of its most famous proponents.

Speaker 5 In the book Perpetual Peace, Kant imagined a cosmopolitan condition where individuals, not just states, had universal rights and where a global federation of free republics would ensure peace and cooperation.

Speaker 5 However, his version of cosmopolitanism still relied on legal structures and state-based governance.

Speaker 5 Another Enlightenment thinker associated with cosmopolitanism was Denis Diderot, who criticized colonialism and argued for a cultural exchange free from that kind of domination.

Speaker 5 He also argued against monarchy, the church and aristocratic privileges, as they were obstacles to a truly free and universal human community.

Speaker 5 Which then brings us to the French Revolution, which brought these ideas into the real world.

Speaker 5 Revolutionaries declared the rights of man and of the citizen, which proclaimed universal rights beyond national or social status.

Speaker 5 But the revolution soon became entangled with nationalism, particularly under the Jacobins, who suppressed dissent and waged wars in the name of France.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, the Haitian Revolution provided a different example of liberation in practice.

Speaker 5 Enslaved Africans, inspired by the French Revolution's rhetoric of liberty and equality, revolted against French colonial rule and established the first free black republic.

Speaker 5 The revolutionaries, led by Toussaint Louveture, argued that liberty was a universal human right, not one limited to European citizens, and declared Haiti a refuge to all enslaved persons.

Speaker 5 But despite its radical implications, the Haitian Revolution was largely ignored or outright opposed by European powers.

Speaker 5 Their so-called enlightenment only extended to Europe, ignoring our racial and colonial realities.

Speaker 5 We also see in this time the emergence of nationalism, which on the one hand promoted self-determination for all oppressed nations, but on the other hand saw the nation-state as a superior form of political organization.

Speaker 5 So anarchists were among the earliest critics of nationalism.

Speaker 5 Peter Joseph Proudhon, for instance, rejected both the nation-state and centralized cosmopolitan governance, instead advocating for federation.

Speaker 5 a frequently misunderstood concept that refers in anarchist literature to a decentralized network of freely associated individuals and groups working in solidarity.

Speaker 5 Similarly, Mikhail Bakunin attacked nationalism as a tool of ruling elites, arguing that states use national identity to suppress class struggle and international solidarity.

Speaker 5 Bakunin did back national liberation movements, but he understood the danger of nationalism as a force that often replaces foreign rulers with homegrown oppressors.

Speaker 5 Instead, Bakunin promoted anarchist internationalism, where workers and oppressed peoples across borders would unite against both capitalist and state powers.

Speaker 5 By contrast, the Bolsheviks would eventually develop the idea of socialism in one country, and the ever-paranoid Stalin would famously deride Jewish intellectuals as, quote, rootless cosmopolitans.

Speaker 5 This of course aligned him with the rest of Europe's nationalists in their anti-Semitism, inaccurate cricketerization of cosmopolitanism as opposed to cultural identity or sovereignty, and ramid defense of national borders.

Speaker 5 Honestly, I would not be surprised if Trump or Putin used some equivalent to ruthless cosmopolitanism today.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. I did see,

Speaker 6 it was like a pro-Trump account, I guess. Consciously or unconsciously paraphrasing Stalin this week.

Speaker 25 So that was great.

Speaker 5 Really? What did they say?

Speaker 6 It was like, how many divisions does the judge command? Which is a, I think, there might be a quote from Stalin. If it's not a quote, it's a paraphrase, right? But in this case, it's a reference to

Speaker 6 the attempts by a district court judge in GC to block the rendition of people to El Salvador who are accused of being members of various gangs.

Speaker 6 Trendi Aragua and Mara Salvador Rucha being the two main ones.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so just being expelled. What's the connection to Stalin, though?

Speaker 6 The quote, how many divisions does the judge command?

Speaker 6 Let me pretty sure. How many divisions does the Pope command? Was the Stalin quote? That's right.
So like it's referencing this idea that like might makes right.

Speaker 6 And like that, you know, if you have the power of the state, then you're not accountable to morally or even within the confines of the state like separation of powers that was supposed to happen in the US, right?

Speaker 6 Like if you have the monopoly on coercive violence and you're no longer constrained by those things.

Speaker 5 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I see.

Speaker 5 I see.

Speaker 5 So, of course, anarchists oppose all those things. They oppose what is happening now and they oppose what was happening then.

Speaker 5 You know, from its inception, anarchism has been an internationalist movement, rejecting the artificial borders imposed by states and championing global solidarity.

Speaker 5 Unlike Marxist internationalism, which has often relied on the centralized structures of the first, second or third internationales, Anarchists emphasized decentralized horizontal networks of struggle that connected workers, revolutionaries, and stateless peoples across continents.

Speaker 5 The Anarchist Saint-Emière Internationale, which ran from 1872 to 1877,

Speaker 5 was one such network as discussed by Lucien van der Waalt and Schmidt in Black Flame. That group explicitly rejected nationalism and state power.

Speaker 5 And throughout history, anarchists worked to bridge linguistic, cultural, and national divides, from multilingual anarchist newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as La Protesta in Argentina, Der Kampf in Germany, and Le Libertaire in France, through transnational syndicalist movements like the Industrial Workers of the World, which organized workers across race, nationality, and language in the early 20th century, and including contemporary mutual aid networks where anarchists coordinate across borders to support refugees, disaster relief, and indigenous land struggles.

Speaker 5 Anarchist networks, contrary to popular belief, often extended beyond Europe into North Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where anti-colonial and labor struggles intertwined with anarchist thought.

Speaker 5 If you're curious, by the way, about the anarchist histories of Egypt or the rest of Latin America, you can check out my series on it right here on the Ekadhapania podcast.

Speaker 5 And if you've listened to that series, you'll know that because anarchists were constantly persecuted, exile became a defining experience, which further reinforced their internationalism.

Speaker 5 Folks like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Erico Maratesta moved across continents, spreading anarchist ideas and connecting struggles. Maratesta in particular was basically a common San Diego.

Speaker 5 You know, he touched multiple continents over the course of his life.

Speaker 5 So by the late 19th century, anarchists like Rudolph Rocker developed an alternative to both statist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism, which sought to balance cultural diversity with global solidarity from below.

Speaker 5 Rocker argued that people should be free to maintain their cultural traditions without being bound to the state or nationalist identity.

Speaker 5 So liberal cosmopolitanism was pushing a global order through state-led interventions, international institutions, and legal frameworks.

Speaker 5 And while this form of cosmopolitanism has led to some games on people in human rights, international refugee protections and anti-genocide treaties, well, for one, we see the failures of these institutions in practice daily.

Speaker 5 And for two, they ultimately reinforce the state power that creates so much harm rather than dismantling it.

Speaker 5 The UN and the WTO often uphold the interests of powerful states above and before their international laws and obligations while sidelining grassroots movements.

Speaker 5 While liberal cosmopolitanism sits on its hands waiting for elite-driven reforms to the system, anarchists engage in direct action to support migrants and other marginalized folks without waiting for such reform.

Speaker 5 I have to give a shout out here, of course, to the No Borders Network. And also a shout-out to the work that you do, James, on the side.
Thank you.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. There's I've seen a lot more people than me doing it.

Speaker 5 Of course.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 the sad part is, even if it started with some noble ideal,

Speaker 5 the concept of liberal cosmopolitanism today

Speaker 5 doesn't so much manifest in the freedom of people,

Speaker 5 but more so in the freedom of markets and money. The globalization of markets and money.
So we will bring McDonald's and Netflix to your country, but you can't come to our country or we'll kill you.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 25 that's about it.

Speaker 6 It was really interesting to like the moment I sort of became aware of libertarian left politics was in the early 2000s in the context of the movement against like the G8,

Speaker 6 as it was then. And like at the time, it would be referred to in the legacy media as like anti-globalization, right? Which I don't think it ever was, right? By definition, I think it was very global.

Speaker 6 Like, you had people from all around the world attending these protests at rallies and speeches and such. Like, it was a very global movement.

Speaker 6 The problem was not with globalization, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, it was with the nature of neoliberal capitalist globalization, which let capital move and stop people from moving.

Speaker 5 Exactly. It's about opposition, such as

Speaker 5 the free reign of exploiters across the globe.

Speaker 6 Yeah, exactly. We let people

Speaker 6 take their money and employ people at lower wages, but God forbid those people ever want better for themselves or attempt to come somewhere where they can materially benefit themselves doing the same labor in a different nation, for instance.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And to be honest with you, I've never really been a respecter of borders. I think they're just.

Speaker 5 I think they're really, really

Speaker 5 blatantly foolish in position. I don't even think you need to be a radical to see the issue with this idea that

Speaker 5 your spawn point has to determine your entire future.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 That

Speaker 5 some people in the past could cut up the earth and then decide where you can roam freely.

Speaker 6 I think like anyone, I see a lot more from people who are not by any means radical or even on the left, like this, like within Europe, right?

Speaker 6 Within the Schengen area, which the UK has decided to remove itself from for reasons that are largely racism. Like we could move freely.

Speaker 6 When I grew up, my identity and experience was much more European than necessarily British, right? I could go for the weekend to Spain if I wanted to or France and flights were cheap then. So it did.

Speaker 6 Like I used to get on Friday night, take a train to Belgium, race my bike in Belgium and come back on Sunday night like very, very often.

Speaker 6 And like you see it here too in San Diego where like The border is just a line and a delay. But for most people, like we're a very binational community.

Speaker 6 And unfortunately, the one way that that manifests itself is that the cost of living in San Diego compared to the average wage is vastly disparate because we have this over-pressure valve where, like, if people can't afford it here, they can live across the border where the cost of living is cheaper.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 that allows people to exploit working-class people in both contexts, sadly.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 5 Yeah, as you mentioned, the UK, by the way. I'm not sure if you've heard the news, but Trinidad has recently been

Speaker 5 imposed visa requirements by the uk for sake yeah really

Speaker 5 yeah so i mean thankfully we still have shengen area access yeah but just recently the uk was like due to yeah the usual excuse people abusing the asylum seeking

Speaker 5 system that they've now removed our visa exemption so our colonizers have now decided that

Speaker 5 you know we we don't want you to move free in our country we want you to pay and visas are not cheap. They're never cheap.
Especially when there's no guarantee of them being accepted.

Speaker 5 It makes it all the more frustrating.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And like, this comes after the British government attempting to deport Afro-Caribbean migrants who came as part of what we call the Windrush generation,

Speaker 6 which is just one of the most disgusting and like, yeah, it just

Speaker 6 one of the most venal and pathetic things I've ever seen a government do. These people who the UK asked to come so that it could rebuild this economy after the Second World War.

Speaker 6 And then taking advantage of the fact that at that time there was no process for regularization and trying to deport these people who have lived their whole lives in the UK. It's just horrific.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it is. It's horrific.
It's frustrating.

Speaker 5 It's infuriating, really.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, it makes me really angry.

Speaker 6 Like, if we didn't have the Windrush generation, not that, like, you need like popular music to justify their existence as part of our community and they should be able to stay, but we wouldn't have punk music if we wouldn't have ska music.

Speaker 6 Like, so much of what is like integral to even like quote-unquote british culture it actually came from these people because they are british and and they belong there just as much as anyone else yeah

Speaker 5 i used to teach a class about music and colonial culture and colonialism which is why that comes to mind i actually missed an opportunity to go to the uk earlier this year i didn't want to pay the cost to fly to go at that point in time

Speaker 5 and now i deeply regret it because I'm like, I could have gone.

Speaker 5 Honestly, I think if you're the UK and your country has stolen so much, like I think the UK has the least

Speaker 5 right or justification out of any country. If you had to concede that a country should be lost, I don't give any country that concession.

Speaker 5 But if you had to give that concession, you could be last to receive that concession as far as I'm concerned. You don't get to go and roam across the entire planet and then shut yourself off.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 You don't get to go and steal and pilfer from across the world, shuffle it all into your national museum and then block people from accessing it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it is just like, it's just the most clear and pathetic, like two-level standard or whatever. You know, like it, it's, I mean, the UK has a very, I'm sorry you didn't get to visit.
in one sense.

Speaker 6 And I'm sure we have lots of listeners who are in the UK.

Speaker 6 Every time I'm home, I feel this like profound sense of like post-colonial melancholy that the UK, it's just sort of, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And

Speaker 6 the way that Britain is responding is with our government blaming everyone else and

Speaker 3 like trying to strip state for public.

Speaker 5 Austerity.

Speaker 6 Yeah, like stealing everything they can. Just mess.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think another frustration for me as well is that it's not so much the country itself, although I would have loved to have visited like Scotland and, you know, Wales and that kind of thing, but

Speaker 5 and all the stuff there is to see in London. But the biggest frustration for me is that it's a connection point.

Speaker 5 You know, when you impose a visa like that, you block people's connections to other areas.

Speaker 5 One of the few direct flights outside of this hemisphere, you know, to the European and African hemisphere, is through a flight to the UK. And so by adding that imposition, it's like...

Speaker 5 It's like the world feels like it's being closed.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, you can see that. One more.

Speaker 5 Where there was almost a time in the recent past where it felt like the world was opening up to people,

Speaker 5 you know, with the internet, the rise of the internet, and then you had you know the introduction of things like like the Schengen Agreement. Our access to the Schengen area was fairly recent.

Speaker 5 I think it was 2015, we got that access.

Speaker 3 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 5 But to go from that point to like just how quickly, you know, the tide shifts to now this extremely hostile

Speaker 5 global order towards something as fundamental as the movement of people.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's it definitely we definitely are entering like an era where things are becoming more closed off again

Speaker 3 than

Speaker 6 many of us grew up with, right?

Speaker 6 Many of us, you know, I suppose most of my experience that I can remember was being able to move freely through Europe, and that's not the case anymore for British citizens.

Speaker 6 So, yeah, like it's getting visas and everything else, it's getting harder and harder to move around the world.

Speaker 6 And despite the internet somewhat connecting us, like our physical mobility is certainly much more limited.

Speaker 5 Indeed.

Speaker 5 I think the idea of cosmopolitanism,

Speaker 5 getting back to it, I think it's valuable.

Speaker 5 I think, you know, the idea that we have obligations to others beyond just our immediate affiliations is important, you know, that human diversity is going to be valued, not just tolerated.

Speaker 5 That's fantastic.

Speaker 5 Carl Levy, an anarchist scholar, who wrote two pieces on cosmopolitanism that I'll link in the show notes, has argued that anarchism's history offers a third way between the hierarchical globalism of liberal cosmopolitanism which relies on state-driven global governance and exclusionary nationalism which weaponizes identity and borders often in suvis to the far right and that third way that anarchism presents not third way in the sense of fascism but third way in the sense of of anarchist possibilities is a kind of federated pluralism.

Speaker 5 It's a web of self-organized groups that interact freely without a central authority. This vision isn't just theoretical.

Speaker 5 We've seen it in recent history through anti-globalization protests, the Occupy movement, the square movements in Egypt, Spain and beyond.

Speaker 5 And though flawed, they show the potential not yet fully realized for diverse place-based struggles that remain connected through mutuality and transnational solidarity.

Speaker 5 We have to avoid the sort of abstract universalism that can be found in cosmopolitan thought.

Speaker 5 We must incorporate decolonial struggles and crown cosmopolitan practice in the voluntary cooperation of people acting in solidarity across differences.

Speaker 5 Ultimately, the question isn't whether anarchists should engage with cosmopolitanism, because they always have.

Speaker 5 The real question is how anarchists can cultivate a cosmopolitanism that is truly liberatory.

Speaker 5 One that connects struggles without erasing difference, fosters solidarity without enforcing uniformity, and builds a world where cooperation and not domination defines our relationships.

Speaker 5 That's all I have for today. All power to all the people.
Peace.

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Speaker 25 Dark Woke is back. 10 more years of liberal supremacy, bankers in control in the great nation of Canada.
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
I'm joined by James Stout.

Speaker 25 We are discussing the 2025 Canadian election, which I may be slightly exaggerated in the opening there. But the election did happen yesterday or two days ago, whenever you're listening to this.

Speaker 25 I was up all day on CBC and on elections.ca, checking in on all the charts and all the stats to see how this how this kind of upset election went. And oh boy, did it go.

Speaker 25 James, how much do you know about Canada and elections?

Speaker 6 Both of those things are things that I have some knowledge about. I've been to Canada twice.
Oh, that's good.

Speaker 6 Fellow Commonwealth member.

Speaker 25 I guess, yeah, we are both citizens of the Commonwealth. So there we go.

Speaker 6 Does Canada have the Queen on the money? Queen is dead.

Speaker 3 Dead queen.

Speaker 25 Queen is dead. But yes, we do have Queen on money.

Speaker 6 We have a queen on money, so that's another thing I understand.

Speaker 25 We have a parliamentary system like

Speaker 25 do I say England or like Britain or UK?

Speaker 6 It's the United Kingdom, I think, would be the institution.

Speaker 6 Sure.

Speaker 3 The parliament. Have fun with that.

Speaker 6 Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Speaker 25 Well, we have one of those two, but it's less confusing because it's just one country. We don't try to be three countries like you in the UK, Britain and England do.

Speaker 6 We're a continent lit, a mini-continent. That's what we're going for.
We've left Europe.

Speaker 6 We're on our way to the Caribbean slowly.

Speaker 3 Oops.

Speaker 25 Yeah, luckily, Canada's doing just fine.

Speaker 25 Debatable, but certainly this election has gone probably slightly better for global stability and stopping the advance of far-right populism than certainly what it looked a few months ago.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 25 For people who don't know, yes, Canada has a parliamentary system. People do not elect the prime minister directly.
They elect the MP in their district, which is called a riding.

Speaker 25 It's a first-past-the-post system. So whoever gets the most votes in each riding, they get their representatives sent to parliament.

Speaker 25 The party with the most representatives, they take control of the government, and that is who the prime minister is.

Speaker 25 And the next prime minister of Canada will be Mark Carney, who assumed the prime minister role like last month, winning the liberal election after Justin Trudeau resigned in January.

Speaker 25 And before we get into some of the results, first a little bit of an election kind of background.

Speaker 25 So Liberals have been in power for nearly a decade, slowly getting less and less popular as the cost of living has risen.

Speaker 25 Last election in 2021, the Liberals kept their minority government, but the leader of their party, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, continued to decline in popularity.

Speaker 25 By the end of 2024, his approval rating was just 22%, or net negative 52.

Speaker 25 Conservatives were up 25 points in the polls. It was a near certainty that they would sweep the next election.

Speaker 25 Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6th, kind of the January 6th of Canada, if you think about it. Former banker Mark Carney won the party election in March of 2025.

Speaker 25 Carney quickly called for an election to write off the peak of anti-Trump sentiment sweeping across Canada.

Speaker 25 This was following Trump's talk of annexing Canada and the global trade war and tariffs directed at the American neighbor upstairs. Next door, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Yeah, downstairs?

Speaker 25 South? No, from America, it's up. Oh, I I see.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Okay. Yeah.
From, yeah, got it.

Speaker 25 Understood. Which is maybe a northern standpoint, but who cares? Now, this election

Speaker 25 or an election would have happened by October 2025, regardless. But calling it early was a smart move by liberals, as this was the first time in three years that they had led in the polls.

Speaker 25 Support for other third parties like the Quebecois Bloc and the National Democratic Party, the NDP, had slowly been shifting towards the liberals. And we saw this in the results Monday night.

Speaker 25 At this point, the Liberals are projected to win 168 seats, falling barely short of the 172 majority.

Speaker 25 There's still, as of time of recording, still a possible path for them gaining a majority government, but it's fairly unlikely. It'll probably be a minority government.

Speaker 25 The Conservatives have won 144 seats, the Blacé Biqua, 23, and the NDP a measly seven, with the Green Party snagging one.

Speaker 25 Liberals also secured the largest vote share, 43.6% of the vote, compared to the Conservatives, 41.4%.

Speaker 25 Though, because of a vote efficiency, basically how spread apart certain votes are, this has still led to much more seats for the Liberals than the Conservatives, right?

Speaker 25 If you have more Conservatives voting in a district that's going to go conservative anyway, those extra votes don't necessarily mean there's going to be more representation in parliament.

Speaker 25 That's the vote efficiency idea.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 6 First-class supposed is a very bad system as electoral systems go. It leads to an awful lot of votes not counting for any representation.

Speaker 6 Like, for instance, the Garrison Davis Party could have 51% of votes in all ridings. And the James Duncan car,

Speaker 6 I could be there at 49 and I would get zero MPs.

Speaker 3 Based.

Speaker 25 Hey, sounds fine. Sounds fine by me.

Speaker 6 Garrison Davis in control.

Speaker 25 Well, this is kind of what happens in Canada.

Speaker 25 The election system in Canada is pretty swayed towards the Liberals because of how much more dispersed they are versus, you know, most conservative supporters in the Western provinces, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Bitten, B.C., and a growing presence in Ontario.

Speaker 25 But yeah, the Liberals kind of always get a bit of a boost in the election. Now, we did have record high early turnout in Canada, 7.3 million people cast their vote early during Easter week.

Speaker 25 The full turnout is higher than it was the past few elections, but it matches pretty much to the 2015 election. So to get a majority government, you need 172 seats.

Speaker 25 This allows you to not have to worry about like no confidence votes, which trigger new elections, and you don't need to work with other parties to pass legislation.

Speaker 25 Now, this will probably be a minority government, with the libs having to work with a small number of remaining NDP and bloc seats to run the government, which one could consider a good thing in terms of being pushed maybe towards some better policies rather than just like liberal supremacy.

Speaker 25 But it also means government will be more unstable and it kind of gives the Conservatives more room to wiggle. So it's definitely a mixed bag.

Speaker 25 As reporting first came in for Atlantic Canada, it showed that this would be a tighter race than what the liberals were hoping for.

Speaker 25 During election night, it seemed Conservatives were on track to pick up two seats in Newfoundland, though in the end, the Liberal incumbent barely kept their seat, beating the Conservative challenger by 12 votes in Terranova, the Peninsulas.

Speaker 25 The Libs did fare much better in Quebec, though. They flipped 11 seats.
This was the best performance by Liberals in Quebec in years.

Speaker 25 Now, Conservatives gained some seats from the Liberals in Ontario under Doug Ford, with Conservatives flipping seats around the Toronto suburbs.

Speaker 25 One of the biggest stories of this election was just the complete NDP collapse, the progressive kind of democratic socialist new democratic party.

Speaker 25 They're currently projected to lose 17 of their 24 previously held seats. The NDP basically gave Kearney this election.
Jagmet Singh lost his seat. That's the leader of the NDP.

Speaker 25 He lost his seat to Wade Chung, a liberal, and stepped down as leader on Monday night.

Speaker 25 Part of what makes this such a big setback for the NDP is that because they failed to win at least 12 seats, they actually lose official party status in parliament.

Speaker 25 Parties have to win at least 12 seats to be recognized as an official party in the House of Commons. Official parties get to have offices in parliament, extra staff.

Speaker 25 They get to ask questions in legislative sessions and can sit on committees.

Speaker 25 Now, the NDP did previously lose party status in 1993, winning only nine seats in that election, but this performance was slightly worse, getting only seven. So this is going to be a big shake-up.

Speaker 25 The NDP is going to have to be forced to rebuild, which is maybe necessary based on kind of a degree of NDP stagnation the past decade. They're kind of caught in like 2017 politics,

Speaker 25 in my opinion, though Singh did lead them to pass some significant legislation. And progressive policies do have a degree of popularity in Canada.

Speaker 25 The NDP was polling about the same as the Liberals just three months ago.

Speaker 25 The movement that we're seeing is from NDP voters scared of Polyev and Trump, so they moved to Kearney to avoid splitting the left vote, as Kearney was seen as more capable of beating Polyev than the NDP leader Singh and certainly Justin Trudeau.

Speaker 25 Now, funnily enough, some of this quote-unquote strategic voting actually did end up splitting the vote in a place like BC and specifically Vancouver, which recently has gone strongly NDP, but this year the conservatives were able to snag three seats because enough previous NDP voters ended up going liberal in an attempt to gain a liberal majority.

Speaker 25 But that resulted in neither the NDP nor the liberal candidate actually individually getting enough votes to win the riding. Let's talk about vote share compared to the last 2021 election.

Speaker 25 So liberals did fairly well this election, especially compared to previous ones. They gained over 10 points compared to the last election in 2021.
The conservatives also didn't do badly, actually.

Speaker 25 Like they actually did okay.

Speaker 25 This certainly wasn't the result they were wanting, but they did not do bad. They gained over seven and a half points this race.

Speaker 25 Reliable conservative voters still voted conservative, and they were able to siphon off some support from other parties, with conservatives doing slightly better than what polling predicted.

Speaker 25 but a lot of very close races across key districts. Now, where all those extra votes or vote movement is coming from is all of the third parties.

Speaker 25 The Green Party and the Black Épiquis both dropped over a point. The Far-Right People's Party dropped four points.
And the NDP dropped 11.6.

Speaker 25 Huge, huge losses for the NDP. Most of those voters probably going liberal, although some may just not have voted.

Speaker 25 One of the more interesting parts about this election is that the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Polyev, lost his parliamentary seat. He lost to liberal Bruce Fanjoy by about 4,000 votes.
Oh, damn.

Speaker 25 4.6% of the vote. So this is going to probably cause a bit of an upset in the Conservative Party.

Speaker 25 There might be some internal conflict over whether Polyev should continue as party leader, though he did not step down from that position during his concession speech Monday night.

Speaker 25 James, do you have any thoughts here before we pivot to ads?

Speaker 6 It wouldn't be such a like seen as such a humiliation for the conservatives if it wasn't for all the polling until maybe like a couple of months ago, right?

Speaker 25 Yes. The reason why it's such an upset is because they were like destined to win as almost like divinely written into fate

Speaker 25 like three months ago. And the fact that they fumbled this is going to be like a massive like historical footnote.
Not even a footnote.

Speaker 25 This is like a historical topic is how the conservatives fumbled this election.

Speaker 6 Yeah, like people, the thing is that the liberals won, despite people having been pissed off with them for a long time and wanting something different.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, because people were just like mad at Trump.

Speaker 25 And we will talk more about the background of the lead-up to this race and those dynamics that James mentioned in the next segment after these ads.

Speaker 25 Okay, to talk more about the lead-up to this race and Trump's influence on this election, I talked with Lance from The Surfs, a fellow Canadian who talks about politics just as much as I do.

Speaker 25 So here is that interview that I recorded just a few hours before the polls closed in Canada.

Speaker 58 Hey, my name is Lance. I run a number of different channels, usually under the banner of The Surfs.
There's youtube.com slash the surf Times and at theSurfs TV on most other social media.

Speaker 58 I cover news, politics, internet slop, usually from a dumpster fire-like perspective.

Speaker 25 And you're Canadian, importantly.

Speaker 58 I am as well.

Speaker 25 Yes. Yeah,

Speaker 25 I am Canadian, but I have been resigned to living in the States for quite a while. I actually just had some Canadian family visit me, and they kept making fun of me.
for living in the States,

Speaker 25 specifically because the States are trying to, you know, take Canadian territory, seemingly.

Speaker 25 So now I'm getting a lot of hate from my Canadian family members for living in America, which is interesting.

Speaker 58 I was going to say, it's got to be a scary time to be living in the United States as a Canadian citizen right now.

Speaker 3 A little bit.

Speaker 25 I am dual, but we'll see how long that matters.

Speaker 25 So I would like to talk a little bit about kind of the background of this election, because I think this is maybe the most interesting Canadian election in the past 10 years, specifically because of how much the results have always felt inevitable, but the actual results have like flip-flopped.

Speaker 25 Three months ago, four months ago, I'm sure that me and you may have predicted

Speaker 25 probably something resembling a conservative sweep, not to put words in your mouth.

Speaker 58 Well, minority or majority government led by the conservatives, no question that that was where all the major polling was trending.

Speaker 58 And then the exact opposite on this roller coaster election in both directions.

Speaker 58 I think it's pretty easily explainable, especially to your American listeners who might have been wondering what was happening. Essentially, the country had a combination of burnout on Justin Trudeau.

Speaker 58 And the person who replaced Justin Trudeau, Mark Carney, effectively took the number one campaign.

Speaker 58 It was the actual campaign slogan of the conservatives away from him immediately after being crowned the new leader of the Liberal Party, which was axe the tax, which is what, you know, fascist mill house, who we call Pierre Polievo over here.

Speaker 58 That was his big campaign promise. The conservatives were going to axe the carbon tax.
And that had a lot of people excited. A lot of people didn't like Justin Trudeau.

Speaker 58 And then along comes Mark Carney and he takes both of those things away from the Conservatives. He's not Justin Trudeau and he axe the tax.
And so they had to kind of completely reset.

Speaker 58 And this was before the wild card of Trump shows up, which of course now is scary not only Canada, but the world, I would say.

Speaker 58 Like most countries now are kind of having to completely reset how they think. and want to do geopolitics into the future because of his policies.

Speaker 25 Well, and I know like a decent chunk of the Alberta economy is now in great jeopardy because they can't sell fuck Trudeau merchandise.

Speaker 58 Which was propping up their entire economy outside of the oil.

Speaker 25 Yeah. Well, you know, if you ignore the oil, which will probably be fine.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 25 I guess could we talk a little bit about kind of what led to this universal hatred of Justin Trudeau in like the past like like five years, just like ever so briefly?

Speaker 27 Yeah,

Speaker 58 for conservatives, a lot of it really became increasingly more intense with COVID. And I think internationally, there was an association with very basic safety protocols and tyranny.

Speaker 58 So I guess some people, the United States and Canada, both saw the idea of wearing a mask or having to wash their hands as some form of dictatorship akin to some of the worst war crimes ever committed on any population.

Speaker 58 That made a schism happen where the sentiment kind of really started accelerating towards less of, you know, blaming Trudeau for everything, kind of like Obama, that used to be the joke, like, ah, Trudeau, to actual fuck Trudeau Trudeau merchandise and the idea of, you know, Trudeau being an enemy of the state and a communist dictator.

Speaker 58 That was on the right side of things. On the left side of things, everyone got burned out from Trudeau because of the performative progressive politics of his entire character.

Speaker 58 He was very vocal about standing up for a lot of issues that on one end he would pretend to care about, such as indigenous rights, land back, stuff like that.

Speaker 58 And then he would be suing the survivors of residential schools in federal court to try and prevent them from getting too much money from the federal government.

Speaker 58 So there was a a lot of Trudeau seems to performatively enjoy being perceived as someone who's enlightened and progressive and trying to steer the society in a good direction, where his policies are effectively exacerbating wealth inequality very rapidly, because that's effectively what you get with neoliberal centrists, right?

Speaker 25 Yeah, I mean, like, to go back to that COVID thing, like, I was, I was in Calgary in like spring of 2022, and I was getting like made fun of in like bars and clubs for like, for like wearing a mask

Speaker 25 at that that point in time like and that is that is alberta but yeah no that was definitely like strong we certainly saw degrees of that here in the states as well but yeah you know it's a little bit of that like general anti-incumbent sentiment was growing so much last year which which you saw levied against the democrats in the states and certainly against the liberals and the way that the liberals in canada have kind of been able to maneuver away from that in the way that like the democrats haven't is super interesting it's it's not necessarily like replicable especially for us politics, but it still is interesting.

Speaker 25 I guess like on the conservative side, their leadership changed in 2022, right?

Speaker 58 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 58 It was 22 or 23, but I believe it was around then.

Speaker 25 That's when Paul Iver

Speaker 25 became leader of the Conservative Party, which is like, you know, closed ranks and like coalesced the past 10 to five years or so.

Speaker 25 And they've been gaining a large, or had been gaining, you know, a large degree of popularity the past two three years not necessarily because of who their party leader is but because they are simply not the liberal party at least that's kind of what it seemed like to me because like approval ratings for polavera has never been like great yeah but the conservative party has still been gaining popularity at least previous to the past few months Yeah, I don't want to play, you know, give the far right any kind of kudos or points, but I think from an analytical standpoint, something that people should realize is that within the last, I'd say, year and a half or or so, Pierre was really, really effective at doing faux populism in a way that a lot of people were starting to get very worried about.

Speaker 58 And that he was starting to speak a lot about the working class, you know, the housing crisis in the country, and the fact that the liberals are out of touch elites who only care about enriching themselves.

Speaker 58 And, you know, a lot, obviously, you'd have a lot of the right-wing kind of nebulous terms like woke ideology being tied into that kind of stuff.

Speaker 58 But he was for a long time kind of starting to gain a lot of ground and traction as more of a moderate style conservative who was concerned with helping the working class, which is astonishing considering the man is a lifelong politician.

Speaker 58 Like that, that is who he is. He was making fun of people like the leader of the social democrats here, Jugmin Singh.

Speaker 58 He was making fun of him for just working for a pension and not even caring about the people or the working class. The man has never marched with a union.
I'm talking about Pierre.

Speaker 58 He's never marched with a union. He is a, you know, his voting track record is decidedly anti-worker.
It's decidedly exacerbating wealth inequality.

Speaker 58 He's worked his entire life to make houses more expensive.

Speaker 58 But marketing and branding really work, especially like, you know, there's compilation clips of him saying things that are JK rallying tier in terms of both their nonsensicalness, like talking about how electricity is crafted by harnessing the power of the lightning bolts into the wire that the electrician holds up.

Speaker 3 Very cool. Yeah, very cool.

Speaker 58 Thor-like powers. I'm on board, but like, unfortunately, that's just not how we usually generate power in this country.

Speaker 3 But like, it works on some people.

Speaker 58 They like to see a man who fakes owning like different kinds of wood and tools. You know, like a Tucker Carlson-esque, yeah, I've got a wood shop in my back.

Speaker 58 And it's like that, well, no, I think this is the first time you've ever seen that lumber, sir.

Speaker 58 But as you know, again, some voters, they really started his rebranding in that respect actually worked pretty successful for the last year and a half against Trudeau.

Speaker 25 Yeah, he had a pretty substantial makeover the past few years to make himself like

Speaker 25 presentable in this way. Yeah, very like Carlson-esque, very like Ben Shapiro goes to Home Depot and gets some wood.
Yes.

Speaker 25 It's definitely pulling from that vein, although maybe a bit more successfully.

Speaker 25 And like, at least from my perspective, it feels like the degree to which Pierre kind of hitched himself to like the Trump populist wagon the past few years, especially like with like sentiments like growing in like the Western provinces that kind of mirrors some of the Trumpian rhetoric.

Speaker 25 That type of stuff was getting popularity.

Speaker 25 And now, because he put, if not all his eggs, but some of his eggs in the Trump basket, this has like backfired in like popular opinion when it comes to his ability to succeed as like a politician and like gaining support because we've seen so much anti-Trump polarization based on like the 51st state stuff, based on the tariffs.

Speaker 25 And like Kearney has been able to weaponize that pretty effectively

Speaker 25 against Pierre. Absolutely.

Speaker 58 And like initially, the way popularity points shifted was by 20 points, which was huge those have gotten closer but i think it's one of the biggest reversals or if not the biggest reversal in canadian political history was was the dominating lead they had from having an almost an assured majority to now perhaps losing to a liberal majority which again is unheard of yeah one thing that people are also kind of missing is that he also really closely started associating himself with elon musk prior to elon musk kind of being the de facto leader of uh you know the us or whatever you want to call him the the the real president of the united states but he's at a number of rallies and on the record praising elon musk prior to elon musk this was pre uh elon musk overt nazi era kind of more just like nazi light era nazi era

Speaker 58 yeah yeah exactly but around that time pierre was asked like what do you think about being endorsed and praised by elon musk and uh you know he started making jokes about how his kids want to go to mars so that's pretty cute and uh started talking about how he wants elon musk to build more factories and plants in canada well that's all really coming back to hurt him now because the very idea of there being a stronger Tesla presence in the country is decidedly rejected by the populace.

Speaker 58 Like,

Speaker 58 the protests that are going on in the United States against Teslas are going on here as well. Maybe not as large scale or perhaps as fire-based, but a lot of them are occurring here.

Speaker 58 And so, like, that I think is also really hurting him.

Speaker 58 So, there's been this really funny, strange political dance that's kind of happened in the last couple of months where everyone is trying to say Trump loves you more.

Speaker 58 It's like a circular firing firing squad. Like at one point, the conservatives were trying to market themselves as saying Trump was making fun of Pierre in this clip.
So look, he hates Pierre more.

Speaker 58 And then another one, it was like, oh, no, no, no, look, he's talking a lot of smack about Mark Carney. He hates Mark Carney more.

Speaker 58 So that has actually become a very strong dynamic of the Canadian election is who exactly does Trump like more? And that's not going to be good for you if it turns out you're the one.

Speaker 25 I guess I'd like to talk a little bit now at the end here about Mark Carney himself and kind of what this means for like the Liberal Party.

Speaker 25 He was the governor of the Bank of Canada starting in 2008, then he became governor of the Bank of England and managed them through the Brexit fiasco. Brexit was not his idea.

Speaker 25 He was not pro-Brexit, but he just happened to be holding the reins of the Bank of England during that time period. Returned to Canada,

Speaker 25 has served as an informal advisor to Trudeau, and now is the leader of the Liberal Party.

Speaker 25 He's a very, I don't know, he tries to like project this sense of like, he's like a like a reasonable man, which, which, which he, you know, in some ways is. Like he's like, he's like kind of boring.

Speaker 25 He works in banking, right? Like he's, he's not like overtly charismatic, but he doesn't have like the like youthful, like bumbling presence of like Trudeau.

Speaker 25 Like he just, he seems, he seems kind of basic.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 58 Yeah, I mean, that's a good way of putting it.

Speaker 28 Yeah, you're totally right.

Speaker 58 I mean, we're talking about a lifelong banker. I mean, he's even worked for Goldman Sachs.
He has a, yes, a very long and sordid, well, I mean, in some view, it depends on your worldview, right?

Speaker 58 If you were a person who thinks that the solution going forward, especially in the face of actual manifesting fascism,

Speaker 58 is more neoliberal policies, austerity, and measures, then you might be very, very excited to perhaps get your own, like honestly, Joe Biden style election here, where we are once again going to be choosing center to center right uh economic policies that are going to undoubtedly exacerbate wealth inequality more uh they are not going to solve the housing crisis the housing crisis of canada while it is portrayed constantly as complex really goes down to fundamentally there are a lot of houses but there are also a lot of houses being built in luxury markets that most people can't afford uh speculation is not addressed uh and so speculation usually gets blamed on foreign investors uh which in turn kind of brings up the whole immigration fears which are very successful But with Carney, I mean, I don't see anything dramatic.

Speaker 58 Not only did he axe the carbon tax when he was in power initially, and that was, again, I think strategically to remove the power the Conservatives had on that policy.

Speaker 58 He also is getting rid of the capital gains tax, which again is just going to be funneling more money towards the ultra-wealthy in Canada.

Speaker 58 So, the problem for me is that, if anything, I'm happy that Pierre, it looks like he might not win.

Speaker 58 I don't know what by the time people are listening to this what the results are, but I also recognize that this does not solve these crises.

Speaker 58 We're simply putting band-aids on a pause before, you know, finally a Trump of our own gets elected.

Speaker 58 And then, yes, people after the fact start realizing, oh my God, he's doing a lot of the horrifying things that he promised he would do. He's actually trying to enact Project 2025.

Speaker 58 All these terrible things are happening.

Speaker 58 Well, I mean, if this was an election where it looked like Pierre was going to win, I would say he is going to follow through on all of the aggressive measures and more that he is promising right now, which include, you know, suspending the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to people that he deems should be worthy of receiving freedoms, specifically because, like Donald Trump, he wants to begin silencing people for their speech in relation to protesting against Israel and their genocide of Palestinians, especially if you are an immigrant or someone on a student visa.

Speaker 58 And these policies, you can see they're a disaster after the fact. And people, I think, wake up to them like Americans are right now when they realize Trump's actually doing it.

Speaker 58 But, you know, make no mistake, it doesn't

Speaker 58 require, you know, too long of the increase in wealth and inequality for people to look for an answer because they're not being listened to by the libs or the liberals here.

Speaker 25 No, it is interesting that how much this election has almost mirrored the American two-party system with the bloc Quebucois as well as the NDP.

Speaker 25 Like, probably most likely, right, this is before the results, but probably going to be losing seats to both the liberals and the conservatives.

Speaker 25 And I think like a big part of this election, I think, is similarly looking back at the past 10 years, is how much I think the NDP has frankly fumbled and probably needs to do a major overhaul to really regain trust in the voters.

Speaker 25 And yeah, it's going to be tough because I think, like, for the progressives in Canada, it's kind of been convenient for the liberals to have a minority government because then they need to work with NDP.

Speaker 58 And they've gotten a lot accomplished, to be to be fair to Chugmeet Singh and you know,

Speaker 58 for American listeners, the Social Democratic Party of Canada, they accomplished some great things working in a minority government setting, including a pharmacare program, including a federal feeding program for children, a school lunch program,

Speaker 58 working on paid family sick leave and extending it.

Speaker 58 So they've done a lot of good in sort of enacting progressive policies, but it's the liberals who are also equally as good at taking credit for all the things that people have come to really like, such as having dental care for the first time and having cheaper pharmacare and stuff like that.

Speaker 25 Thanks to Lance again for talking with me about the Canadian election.

Speaker 25 It's time for one more ad break and we'll come back to discuss the future of the Canadian government.

Speaker 25 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 25 Let's talk a little bit more about Trump's undue influence in the 2025 Canadian election, because it is a little bit odd for a foreign leader to be exerting this much influence in the votes of, you know, a separate country.

Speaker 25 Now, this was an election that was previously about liberal stagnation and wanting change in economic policy.

Speaker 25 This was kind of leading the conservative popular support the past two, three years.

Speaker 25 And very suddenly, this whole election changed and it became about who Canada trusted to oppose Trump and who Canadians wanted to be like the face of Canada in this new like global trade war and this fight against a hostile neighbor.

Speaker 25 And Trump did not help this.

Speaker 25 On election morning, Trump released a statement basically endorsing himself as the leader of Canada.

Speaker 3 Oh, great.

Speaker 25 Saying, quote, good luck to the great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power for free.

Speaker 25 to the highest level in the world. Have your car, steel, aluminum, lumber, energy, and all their businesses quadruple in size with zero tariffs or taxes.

Speaker 25 If Canada becomes the cherished 51st state of the United States of America,

Speaker 25 no more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this landmass would be.
Free access with no border. All positives with no negatives.

Speaker 3 It was meant to be.

Speaker 25 America can no longer subsidize Canada with hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we've been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a state.

Speaker 6 Man, Trump, the border abolitionist.

Speaker 25 This is the rhetoric that really produced a liberal victory. And Trump did kind of back off this stuff in the past few weeks.

Speaker 25 And it's very funny to see him go like full throttle the morning of the election in case anyone was like on the fence about whether they really was worrying about like Trump. This just

Speaker 25 is like such a crazy Hail Mary.

Speaker 25 And we can see this in some polling stats. On Trump's inauguration day, the Conservatives in Canada were leading 44.8% in the polls compared to the Liberals' 21.9% and the the NDP's 17.6%.

Speaker 25 But as Liberals searched for a new leader, and as Trump took office, the Conservative lead slowly started to slip.

Speaker 25 The president began referring to Canada as the 51st state, called the Prime Minister quote-unquote governor, and threatened to impose huge tariffs to stop a non-existent fentanyl smuggling crisis through the Canadian-U.S.

Speaker 25 border. By April, the Conservative lead had fully flipped over to the Liberals, who rose rose to 44% in the polls, Conservatives falling to 37%, and the NDP around 8.5.

Speaker 25 And these are pretty close to the final results. This number is very accurate for liberal support.

Speaker 25 Conservatives got a little bit more than 36% of the vote, and NDP got a little bit less than this 8.5.

Speaker 25 This is according to data from CBC and Abacus.

Speaker 25 This was very much a leader's election, meaning that one of the biggest factors driving votes was who people wanted the prime minister to be.

Speaker 25 And Mark Carney is much more popular, despite being kind of an unknown figure, which kind of actually helps in popularity.

Speaker 25 Carney was so much more popular than Polyev. The past three months, Carney has steadily gained in popularity, getting 46% approval, whereas Polyev has slowly declined in popularity.

Speaker 25 I talked about this a little bit with Lance, but the degree to which he's aligned himself with this like anti-woke, like far-right populism rhetoric really bit him in the ass these past few months.

Speaker 25 He would have done fine against Trudeau, certainly. He was really riding off that like anti-incumbent wave.
But he is not like a loved figure across Canadian politics, even among some conservatives.

Speaker 25 The two most important factors driving Canadians' vote, according to Abacus, was reducing cost of living and dealing with Donald Trump.

Speaker 25 Younger voters seem to be more focused on cost of living and changing policy, around 57% of voters 18 to 29, while older voters, around 56% of boomers, were more concerned about stopping Trump.

Speaker 25 The very first topic in the Canadian prime minister debate was tariffs and U.S. threats to Canadian sovereignty.
This is seen as like a very real issue up there. And like hatred against the U.S.
is...

Speaker 25 genuinely growing. Like people are very upset.
Canadians are very upset about what Trump and the U.S. has been doing.
It's being seen as like a genuine, like, like intense betrayal.

Speaker 25 The Buy Canada movement's been gaining a lot of support with people trying to only purchase Canadian products.

Speaker 25 And this has resulted in a real cultural moment in Canada united against the United States.

Speaker 6 It's genuinely remarkable.

Speaker 6 Canada and the U.S. have always had pretty good relations.
Well, not always.

Speaker 3 They have.

Speaker 25 Well, ever since that one.

Speaker 3 That one time.

Speaker 6 Yeah. That one time ever.

Speaker 3 For the White House.

Speaker 6 But things have improved since then. And like, what's also remarkable is that this seems to be having an effect on Australia as well.

Speaker 6 I don't know if you've seen that, but like, I think I saw an ad the other day that just said Dutton wants to make Australia like America.

Speaker 6 Like, straight up, you know, this is our Trump and he will align with Trump. Like, it's incredible.

Speaker 25 The degree in which Trump doing this global trade war has catalyzed negative sentiments around this like far-right populism

Speaker 25 global wave that we've been seeing has really been a boon to neoliberal hegemony the past few years.

Speaker 6 You'll see, like, I mean, obviously, like, I take voter interviews in like legacy media with a huge pinch of salt, right? Because

Speaker 6 it's pretty easy to find someone who wants to say what you want them to say. And often, you know, certainly some of their U.S.
voter interviews have just been ridiculous.

Speaker 6 But like people saying, oh, I just want to go back to how it was. Like, I want to go back to the, you know, the things that we're used to.

Speaker 6 And obviously Trump is threatening that for a lot of people and like in a very negative way.

Speaker 25 And so you're, and as garrison said like the politics of personality is becoming more important like voting specifically for individuals who they think will have like the negotiating ability or just bravery or like whatever it is to to stand up to trump right yeah and like in canada i think it's less personality driven like actually canadians are very against personality politics yeah i guess it's more like competency driven and this is where carney was really able to succeed is because he's not a compelling personality, but he's like a professional.

Speaker 25 And that is why he was elected. Like Carney helped Canada weather the 2008 financial collapse better than almost any other Western nation.

Speaker 25 He is genuinely good at his job of being like a neoliberal like bank economy guy.

Speaker 25 And specifically with these tariffs, this is the guy that you want to handle this global trade crisis because this is like what he has done his entire life. He's never been elected to office before.

Speaker 25 He is just an economy guy. And we saw this in like head-to-head matchups with Carney versus Polyer

Speaker 25 rating certain things like finding common ground to solve a dispute, where Carney was 12 points ahead. Standing up to a bully, Carney's eight points ahead.

Speaker 25 Managing household expenses, Carney's six points ahead. Sitting beside you on a long airplane flight, Carney's six points ahead.

Speaker 25 Captaining a ship through a rough storm, Carney, five points ahead.

Speaker 6 That's what you need.

Speaker 6 You need a seafarer. Only five points ahead on seafaring.

Speaker 25 Hosting the best party, Carney, one point ahead. And we'll see.

Speaker 6 This is reminiscent of that, like, was it like Tim the Plumber shit from like the

Speaker 6 Bush Palien election? Like, the people I would want to have a beer with.

Speaker 25 Well, the funny thing is, is the conservatives are still better in those types of physical things. Like, putting out a kitchen fire,

Speaker 25 Polyev is up two.

Speaker 3 And putting up a shelf, Polyev's up six.

Speaker 25 Those are the only two ones measured where

Speaker 25 the conservative candidate edged out the liberals is putting out a kitchen fire and putting up a shelf.

Speaker 25 But all other things like solving disputes, standing up to bullies, managing like expenses, like household expenses,

Speaker 25 Carney came out.

Speaker 25 I'm going to read a few lines from Carney's celebration acceptance speech here.

Speaker 25 And I'm just going to read them and not play clips because he blends English and French, and that's going to be annoying. No offense to our French speakers out there.

Speaker 6 Garrison.

Speaker 25 It's going to be annoying to play for a podcast. It's not going to happen.

Speaker 25 Quote, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats.
President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never happen.

Speaker 25 We are once again at one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over.

Speaker 25 The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.

Speaker 25 But it is also our new reality. We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons.

Speaker 25 We have to look out for ourselves and above all, we have to take care of each other.

Speaker 25 When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations, and it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians.

Speaker 25 We will strengthen our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. And if the United States no longer wants to be in the forefront of the global economy, Canada will.
Unquote.

Speaker 25 And yeah, this is the type of rhetoric that's going to be, I think, successful in Canada right now and probably in the next few decades is Canada's going to try to take the spot that America

Speaker 25 used to hold as like the center of like global power, especially with climate change, with

Speaker 25 crops slowly needing to be moved north. I think as global warming progresses, Canada is in a spot to be a new emerging world power.

Speaker 25 And with the degree to which America is just kind of giving up that role under Trump,

Speaker 25 someone like Carney is very interested in gaining that degree of superiority. Now,

Speaker 25 I'm going to read a few comments from our listeners who I asked to send over their thoughts on the Canadian election. And yes, this is a limited sample size.

Speaker 25 It's based on the politics of people who listen to this show. But I still think there's some interesting points here outlining what's happened in this election.

Speaker 25 Quote: Mark Carney might not be far enough left for my tastes, but he immediately made gas cheaper, a tangible improvement for my broke ass.

Speaker 25 And with the way he's been polling, I'm settling on voting for him to keep the Conservatives out with their stated anti-woke agenda, parenthesis, bigoted.

Speaker 25 Not like I have much choice. I would have loved to be picky about my vote, but I don't feel confident in the NDP or the Greens to come out on top of the cons.

Speaker 25 Another person said, quote, I can't believe the country seems to be rallying around a neoliberal central banker in the face of American fascism. But our resentment to the U.S.

Speaker 25 seems to kind of override all other political considerations. So much of the way this election is panning out is a display of our culture's profound inability to take necessary risks.

Speaker 25 We're running scared to the serious administrator man in the blind hope things will be safe and normal again. When he fails, we'll take a late and stupid risk again, unquote.

Speaker 25 And this is something I've seen other people express is like, with this kind of Obama-esque, you know, serious man in charge, this like return of neoliberalism, will this just set the stage for like the material conditions for someone like Trump to emerge in the next 10 years?

Speaker 25 This is a fear that I've seen people express. I don't think it is an inevitability because this is not America in 2012 or 2016.
This is Canada in 2025.

Speaker 25 The world is different, but I can understand this fear.

Speaker 25 Lastly, I'll read from one other commenter from Blue Sky: quote: I understand the drive to keep the Conservative Party out of office, but I'm also terrified of what the Liberal Party will do to this country if they can keep campaigning on that very basis in perpetuity.

Speaker 25 It's good that we will probably avoid the worst. It's terrible that progress is on hold until the Conservative Party is no longer a contender, which could take decades.

Speaker 25 I also do not expect the Liberal Party to meaningfully change the conditions that are pushing voters towards reactionary politics to begin with. Unquote.
So, kind of a similar sentiment there.

Speaker 25 I think the role for progressives in Canada right now is either to rebuild the NDP or infiltrate the Liberals, probably rebuilding NDP

Speaker 25 in most cases, because they are going to have to have new leadership and seriously re-evaluate their strategies going forward.

Speaker 25 James, any notes here, I guess?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think like, I guess kind of to echo what a lot of those people said, like in the U.S., we had Biden for four years, right? Essentially, because he was elected on not being Trump.

Speaker 6 And he was able to get away. Well, he thought he could get away with more than he actually was able to get away with, as it turns out, electorally.

Speaker 6 But like, we were admonished to vote for the person who wasn't Trump, right? And what we got is open-air detention for migrants. What we got is inflation.
What we got is a genocide in Gaza. Right.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 6 this fear that a lot of other nations in the global north, right, like these neoliberal economies are feeling, is going to lead to lots of that. Like, yes, we need a serious man.
Like,

Speaker 6 we need a statesman to stand up to Trump. And that's going to reinforce a lot of that neoliberal orthodoxy.
And that's going to make it very hard.

Speaker 6 to make any meaningful progress to electoral politics in those countries for the next few years, which sucks.

Speaker 25 I think think this is why some people are excited about the minority government, although it is less stable.

Speaker 25 They could be swayed by some more of the progressive agendas from the NDP because they'll need NDP or bloc cooperation to run the government.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they can't do what Biden did, which, like, I mean, also, like, Kearney isn't Biden, like, and the Canadian Liberal Party is not necessarily the like American Democratic Party. Like,

Speaker 3 they're different gaze of them.

Speaker 25 Histefan Gaza is different.

Speaker 25 Like, the Canadian Liberals have restricted arms yeah arms trades and arms deals to Israel the past year Kearney is not throwing trans people under the bus the same way some Democrats have the past year like these are these these are different people I think you know Canada is a different country than the United States for now garrison and I think what what we can see here is that this Canadian election although it was close it still was a rejection of Trump-style politics.

Speaker 25 Most Canadians do not want Canada to go the way of America.

Speaker 25 There's been a subset of Canadians, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan, who have been trying to push for this mega-style, like Canada-first rhetoric. And

Speaker 25 this was denied. I think you are seeing more support for conservatives under Doug Ford with this more like moderate conservatism.
I think that's something to watch out for more.

Speaker 25 But this Trump-style politics was

Speaker 25 rejected across the country.

Speaker 25 And Kearney was able to figure out a way to make people trust him to be a genuine combatant against Trump and usher in

Speaker 25 a new golden age of neoliberal trade in the face of

Speaker 25 Trump's chaotic and anti-market sentiments.

Speaker 6 Hopefully it does put an end to

Speaker 6 this tendency among liberals, especially in the US, but also in the UK, to feel that they need to engage on right-wing culture war talking points and I guess quote-unquote give some ground.

Speaker 6 Like we've seen that in the UK, right? With like like really transphobic shit coming out of the Labour Party.

Speaker 6 And like, I would hope that like people can see where this leads to and that they're not going to vote for liberal politicians who are going to throw trans people under the bus.

Speaker 6 And like that that will be like a deciding factor in their support. But I guess that's just my hope right now.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Well, and frankly, you know, a better liberal party or a liberal NDP coalition would would be would be willing to engage with the idea of of taking trans refugees from these extremely hostile countries,

Speaker 25 which is something they've not

Speaker 25 publicly talked about. But as things get worse in the States, we will see.

Speaker 25 So yeah, that is what I have to say as a Canadian who lives in the United States. My thoughts on the Canadian election.

Speaker 25 It could have been worse.

Speaker 25 It is odd to see Canada almost accidentally replicate America's two-party system. So

Speaker 25 even if this was a rejection of Trump's style politics,

Speaker 25 this climate of fear did result in replicating America's two-party system, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 25 The amount in which the third parties lost support, with support going just towards conservatives and liberals. That is one of the big stories of this election.

Speaker 25 The NDP blowout, one of the big stories, and Polyev losing his seat,

Speaker 25 I think, is

Speaker 25 at least at the very least a nice cherry on top for this election.

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Speaker 3 Whoa! Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, you know, it, the happening here,

Speaker 3 which is what we all,

Speaker 3 what we all, you know, we know what's happening. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Well, and the it being Rebellion and the here being a galaxy far, far away.

Speaker 3 And the now being long, long ago.

Speaker 25 For this episode.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we are. These are our May Day episodes, and nothing could make more sense on May Day than talking about Andor, the new season of the show Andor.

Speaker 3 If you're not familiar with Andor, it is a Star Wars show.

Speaker 3 And if you don't like Star Wars, or you just don't like the Disney Star Wars, if you've not enjoyed a Star Wars since you were six, this is not that kind of thing. This is a treatise

Speaker 3 on how revolutions do, can and should work, written by people who have a deep bed of knowledge, including a degree of on-the-ground knowledge of what some of this looks like.

Speaker 3 And it is an immensely important piece of media to be getting out right now. And we'll start by saying, Disney, evil, bad corporation.
I'm not saying pay them for Disney Plus. Torrents exist.

Speaker 3 Yeah, raise the black flag.

Speaker 3 Raise the black flag once again. I don't care how you get this.
And you know what? I'll say this.

Speaker 3 I suspect the people making Andor don't really care how you get this this has been the most financially successful show in generations

Speaker 3 it get it like don't don't pay disney money if you don't want to i have no issue with that i don't know whose login i'm using and i haven't for years garrison can vouch for that just just watch it be like cassie and andor and liberate and or season two from from disney and and and watch it however however you feel comfortable doing so yeah yeah use your f movies use your use use your whatever Yeah.

Speaker 3 This is a podcast about the current season of Andor, which is coming out in three episode blocks every Tuesday.

Speaker 3 The second three episodes, so we're now up to six episodes, came out yesterday as we record this Tuesday of this week. And there's two more weeks of Andor coming.

Speaker 3 So this episode, we're going to be talking about episodes one through three. We should probably start with a little.

Speaker 3 If you haven't watched it, go watch it. Just watch season one, and then

Speaker 3 you can watch season two and listen along with us.

Speaker 3 If you're not, if you're a crazy person who's not going to do that, we'll summarize season one for you, which is that there's this guy who grew up on a planet that was destroyed by the Empire.

Speaker 3 He essentially like lived as a hunter-gatherer until the war came to him and he was forced out of his home.

Speaker 3 and grows up very angry, is taken in by some people who are kind of like petty criminals and petty almost petty rebels you know but not in the rebel alliance sense just in the well we're gonna commit some crimes around the edges and try to get by and the show is about this guy getting inducted into a revolutionary organization run by a man named Luthan that is very that is simultaneously very centralized around him and also very decentralized and that it's primarily him arming and getting information and attempting to direct cells that are themselves autonomous and often in conflict with each other, which is very realistic to how things like this start.

Speaker 3 On a historical level, everything that's happening in Andorr is based in real history.

Speaker 3 Tony Gilroy, who is the showrunner, has stated that the kind of bank robbing years of Joseph Stalin were one influence behind this. But there are a lot you can see.

Speaker 3 And in fact, there's a little bit of Portland at the end of season one. Yeah.
There's a number of things that have influenced this show, a lot of moments in history.

Speaker 25 The IRA, some of the IRA, like post-Al-Qaeda, like prison, resistance, rebellion

Speaker 25 for how terrorist cells form underneath.

Speaker 3 And also very explicitly, he talks about this in an interview, like the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. It's an influence on how this one is.
Yes, was an influence on this. Yes.

Speaker 3 So that's all to set this up. We're now going to talk about what happens in episodes one, two, and three of season two.
You want to summarize them, Gare?

Speaker 25 Yeah, let's start with the first episode.

Speaker 25 So undercover, rebel agent Cassian Andor steals an experimental Thai Avenger, crashes it on a jungle planet, and then finds himself in a sectarian split between this other rebel cell who just had like a disastrous operation.

Speaker 3 Their leader got killed, so no one's really sure who should be running things.

Speaker 25 They capture Cassian because they think he's an Imperial pilot, and he tries to negotiate with them as their infighting continues.

Speaker 25 Meanwhile, Imperial intelligence agents converge to develop a plan on how to squash potential resistance on the planet Gorman as they plan to extract calcite minerals from the planet's core, potentially endangering the stability of the planet.

Speaker 3 To build the Death Star, by the way. Yes, to build the Death Star.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so what's happening is these minerals are necessary to collect the system that makes the Death Star's big planet destroying gun work. But at this point, basically no one knows that

Speaker 3 in the Imperial intelligence. Yeah.
And they're being told that it's part of of

Speaker 3 an energy independence project.

Speaker 25 Mon Mothma, the senator from Chandrilla, who eventually becomes a rebel leader in the Star Wars movies, is helping to plan the Tradcath wedding for her daughter against Mon Mathma's own wishes.

Speaker 25 And she runs into some difficulties with someone who helped her clean up some of her financial blemishes to help finance the rebellion. So this is most of what happens in this first episode.

Speaker 25 We have some of Andor's previous comrades from Planet Ferrix are on this farming planet, and they're nervous about a potential inspection.

Speaker 25 So I guess specifically, do we have anything we want to talk about on this first episode? Yes.

Speaker 3 I want to talk about the scene where they talk about clearing out Gourmand because

Speaker 3 when they talk about mining it for this mineral that's necessary to make the Death Star, they're talking about basically doing deep fracking at the core of the planet that is going to

Speaker 3 make it uninhabitable, right? Like they're basically tearing out the core of this world that produces high quality textiles, right? Like it's

Speaker 3 kind of a luxury goods exporter. That's really all they make.
There's these spiders there that make a nice kind of silk. That's what the planet does.

Speaker 3 And it's got this population of people who are used to being given a lot of autonomy because they make this very, this nice, this like luxury product that all of the rich people like, right?

Speaker 3 So that the folks running the Republic and in the early years when there was still more,

Speaker 3 the Empire was still more on the Republican side. Still, people didn't want to fuck with them too much because they make a luxury good, right?

Speaker 3 There was a massacre there kind of early on in the Empire when Tarkin

Speaker 3 landed a cruiser on a bunch of protesters, killing them. But other than that, it's been pretty quiet for a while.
There is like a small and not super competent or armed rebel cell starting up.

Speaker 3 on the planet.

Speaker 3 And they have this big meeting the Empire does, where everybody gathers at a castle with the guy guy who's in charge of building the Death Star to talk about how to clear off this planet.

Speaker 3 The meeting itself and this part of the episode is based off of the Von Say Conference, which was a conference held in 1942 by Reinhard Heydrich and kind of managed by Adolf Eichmann to plan the Holocaust.

Speaker 3 This is where they actually sat down and talked about how are we going to build death camps, how are the death camps going to operate, how will we evacuate people to the death camps, all of that, right?

Speaker 3 There was a meeting. A bunch of guys showed up.
There are minutes of the meeting. Tony has stated, if you've watched, there's a great TV movie.
It's like 20 years old at this point called Conspiracy.

Speaker 3 It stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, who was the architect, who was like the guy running the Holocaust initially.

Speaker 3 It stars Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, an incredible Eichmann, by the way. And this scene is deeply influenced by that movie, right?

Speaker 3 There was another German movie also that like the movie with Branagh was based off of, but Tony Gilroy has said that that movie was an influence and this is based on the Vonsei conference.

Speaker 3 And there's a couple of lines that are almost word for word. One of the big differences is there's a point at which they bring in a couple of PR agents who are outside of the Empire.

Speaker 3 That's like an outside PR corporation.

Speaker 25 Propaganda arm.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, I think they're an outside contractor who does marketing normally and is doing propaganda, if I'm remembering right.

Speaker 25 I think they're part of the Ministry of Enlightenment is what they call it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Incredible name.

Speaker 25 They have some of the best bits from this meeting.

Speaker 3 Their job is to put out propaganda that makes the Gormans look arrogant and unloyal and bad to everyone else so that when they're massacred, no one will care. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Quote, hasn't there always been something a little arrogant about the Gourn?

Speaker 3 It's very good. It's very good.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they're talking about how they create false news stories and influence public opinion to be weaponized in favor of the Imperial project. The Ministry of Enlightenment stuff is very good.

Speaker 25 The other line I really like is from Dedra, one of the main characters from the previous season, who is this like female ISB agent.

Speaker 3 And she's sort of being made the Eichmann of the Gorman project.

Speaker 25 And like she talks with Krennic, Ben Mendelson's character, like about how propaganda really only gets you so far. And instead, what they will need to need to work on is actually controlling...

Speaker 25 the Gorman resistance from the inside. You need to count on rebels to do the wrong thing at the right time.

Speaker 25 So about AstroTurfing some kind of insurgency that can actually, in the end, service the empire's interests.

Speaker 25 And like this is what she's talking about for her project being is actually like helping to influence the way that the resistance operates on the planet instead of just focusing on like public opinion and propaganda and like military might.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 What I really appreciate about this scene is the degree to which it shows, number one,

Speaker 3 how information is siloed in a situation like this, how people are on a need, like this room is informed at the start. Whoever your boss is, if they're not in the room, they don't know about this.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And you don't tell them.
Like, we do not want...

Speaker 25 It's the tightest of closed circles.

Speaker 3 We are doing a genocide and we're not talking about it to other people.

Speaker 25 They report directly to the emperor.

Speaker 25 No other people beneath the emperor knows what's happening. Yeah.
And even the emperor doesn't really know all of the details at this point.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And this is like, like, the people are cutting out, like, they're cutting out like the director of Imperial of the ISB.

Speaker 3 Like they're cutting out the director of Imperial Intelligence, cutting out like Grammov Tarkin. Like they're cutting out like the most important people in Star Wars who have no idea.

Speaker 3 Like it's not even clear to me that Vader, I mean, Vader probably knows, but there's no fucking mention of him at all either. Yeah, he can read mine.

Speaker 3 So I assume he's been able to like glean some things, but

Speaker 3 yes,

Speaker 3 he's not a part of this. I'm not involved in any of this shit because he's not a Death Star guy.
Yeah. And again, this isn't like a massive population.

Speaker 3 So they're viewing this primarily as like a PR problem.

Speaker 3 So both you need to get out messaging that these people are arrogant and bad so that nobody supports them when we start killing them.

Speaker 3 And we need a terror cell that can be trusted to carry out attacks against the Empire that will justify what we need to do. Right.
So that's the point of this meeting. It's very well shot.

Speaker 3 It's very well done. There's a lot of understanding of like just history in it that I appreciated as a Holocaust nerd.
That's a bad way to frame it.

Speaker 25 Yep, that is a bad way to frame it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, nope, nope, nope. Anyway, nope.
If you've watched these episodes and you loved them and you found that scene chilling, go watch Conspiracy with Kenneth Branaugh and Stanley Tucci.

Speaker 3 Oh, the tooch. The tooch, the tooch playing Eichmann Garrison.
Damn.

Speaker 25 All right, cool. Let's go on a break and then come back to talk about episode two.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 We're back. Did you guys know

Speaker 2 Stanley Touchy?

Speaker 3 Super Pro Palestine? That's cool. Oh, nice.
With an actor like that that I've really enjoyed, I always am like white-knuckling it when I decide to Google that.

Speaker 3 And I was pleasantly surprised with the Tooch.

Speaker 3 All right, that's what I got here.

Speaker 25 Let's do episode two. The Empire arrives on this farming planet to complete inspections on Coruscant.

Speaker 25 Our little slimy weasel, Sarah Karn, keeps rising through the Imperial ladder at the Bureau of Standards.

Speaker 25 Monmothma's financial schemes to help secretly fund the rebellion start coming undone as one of her backers or like...

Speaker 3 The guy who's moving the money around for her. Yeah, he's helping her wash her money.

Speaker 25 One of her collaborators, Tay Coma, starts to kind of back out or

Speaker 3 ask for

Speaker 25 some assistance and is

Speaker 25 getting erratic in his behavior as he's going through a divorce.

Speaker 3 And is making kind of vague threats about, well, maybe I'll talk to someone about what I know, right?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 If I don't get something out of this relationship, I might be forced to do something else to ensure my safety and financial security. Meanwhile, Cassian is still on this jungle planet held captive by

Speaker 25 these sectarian leftists who start firing at each other and

Speaker 25 totally break down.

Speaker 3 Literal circular firing squad. It's beautiful.

Speaker 3 They go full Red Army.

Speaker 3 Japanese Red Army. Thank you very much.
Japanese Red Army.

Speaker 25 And Cassian barely escapes over the course of this multi-day conflict with

Speaker 25 the remnants of this rebellion cell. Let's talk a little bit about this leftist infighting plot point.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this is something, it's something I've never actually really seen depicted in any kind of like mainstream media thing, which is something that happens in real movements, which is that when movements suffer serious setbacks or when, you know, and we see this more commonly in real life when sort of like, you know, the tide of a movement falls and everything starts falling apart.

Speaker 25 And these are people who just got absolutely obliterated in a battle. Their leader's dead.

Speaker 3 A bunch of their comrades died. One of the things that happens is this is that

Speaker 3 this is when social movements devolve into infighting.

Speaker 3 You know, and this is what was happening inside of like the American left roughly from 2021 to 2024 was you got this giant, really vicious cycle of infighting because this is what happens when there's no longer a threat to hold everyone together.

Speaker 3 And people have this tendency to,

Speaker 3 because they've just lost, right? Everyone's trying to process the emotions of their defeat, of like the really serious psychological damage that they've suffered, like in these battles.

Speaker 3 People lash out at each other because it's easier than trying to fight an enemy that has just defeated you.

Speaker 3 And you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that like, you know, these are also the periods when like rapists tend to get ran out, right?

Speaker 3 And when like abusers in in the scene tend to get ran out. But on the other hand, it turns into these really, really nasty sort of sometimes they're sectarian.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they're just sort of like, you know, they're...

Speaker 3 I never liked this guy. People are getting in trouble for being bad.
I'm going to just accuse this guy of some shit.

Speaker 25 Personality conflict stuff. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And this is something that happens like every time there's a cycle. I mean, I remember this.
God, like, I mean, you see this shit in scenes.

Speaker 3 I was like from like 2013, 2014, there was like a huge cycle of this. There were kind of cycles of this in like 2019 2019 when things were kind of falling apart with Occupy ISIS.
This is just like

Speaker 3 something that's a reality of social movements that you don't ever really see depicted. And the other thing I think is fascinating about it is because Andor is the person who's watching it, right?

Speaker 3 Andor has no idea what the fuck is going on with the internal dynamics of this group. No, no.

Speaker 3 My pay is famous. Yeah.

Speaker 25 He knows who like the leader is because Luthen's team has been like supplying them with weapons. Yeah.

Speaker 25 But they don't know about like the internal structures of each of those groups for like offsec reasons.

Speaker 3 No, and the leader's dead. Like the leader got killed in this ambush, right?

Speaker 3 You hear about her. She's named in the first season, Maipei.

Speaker 3 She's one of when Forrest Whitaker in season one gives that very famous rant where he's talking about all, because he's the anarchist militant leader, and he's talking about all the different groups, separate

Speaker 3 human cultists, cultists, galaxies, they're lost, all of them. Only human fronts have clarity of purpose.
He talks, he names Maipei, along with the other different.

Speaker 3 So she's clearly a fairly well-known, I think she's a republic restorationist kind of person.

Speaker 3 So basically a social democrat militant leader. And her group's just gotten fucked and she is dead.
So he knows of them, but he doesn't know them. Yeah.
And because of that,

Speaker 3 you get two things at the same time that I think are both really important. One is that you get to see what this kind of like infighting looks like, right?

Speaker 3 Like actually depicting television, you get to see what happens when movements fail and when people start to infight.

Speaker 3 and two you get to see what it looks like from the outside from Andor's perspective where he's looking at these people and he's like what the fuck is wrong with you people all of you guys are clowns.

Speaker 25 Yeah, these are fucking children like I'm doing a serious job.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and this is also a thing that you get this is this is a real movement dynamic where it's like you know you're watching people who after 2020 or something you know you've been through your first movement and you're in your first movement cycle collapse right and like if you've been doing this and like you know if you've been doing this for like a fucking decade and you're watching all of these people do this shit again and it's just like oh god fucking damn it like the kids are like you know they haven't been through this before.

Speaker 3 It's really traumatic.

Speaker 3 And they're doing all this like completely incomprehensible bullshit, which is also like, on the outside, if you look into this as someone who's not part of one of these scenes and you're seeing all this drama, it's just like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Speaker 3 Like, why are you doing this?

Speaker 3 And the fact that you're getting all of this like in a fucking Disney show is fascinating.

Speaker 3 It's, it's, it's why, I mean, and it shows the depth of knowledge and the, yeah, the, the sheer amount of understanding that the people writing this have of how movements go again it's granular and it's to a degree like based in some real experiences that some people on this team have had like you you don't you don't understand stuff like this otherwise and as this group is like interrogating cassian trying to figure out who he is like they keep trying to dig into like what rebel group cassian is like a part of and like who he's working with and he's like refusing to give them this information because That's good security culture.

Speaker 25 And they're like, but you know who we work with. And he's like, yeah, you shouldn't have told me that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I shouldn't have said that. That was bad.

Speaker 25 Very, very good stuff.

Speaker 3 And it's, oh, God, it starts. You know, we didn't say this with episode one.

Speaker 3 Episode one starts with another beautiful Cassian speech when he's, because he's, he's infiltrating as a Thai fighter pilot, this base where he's stealing an experimental craft.

Speaker 3 And there's a, a young woman there who's like a technician who is his in, right? And who has clearly just made her break with the Empire. And she like meets him briefly.

Speaker 3 She's like, sorry, I know I'm not supposed to look at you. I'm not supposed to talk to you.

Speaker 3 And he like grabs her and he's like, no, this is what it's all about is this moment of connection between us where we both, after all of like this being frightened and alone in the dark, we're together and we know that we're doing something.

Speaker 3 This is what every, this is, this is everything.

Speaker 25 And this is the moment you find yourself.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you become yourself. And this is another thing that that was the moment in this season where I was like, oh, okay.
So the people are, it's still the same people.

Speaker 3 And it's like, these are people who are just of the left in a way that you don't really ever see.

Speaker 3 Even with like old communists who are writing stuff it's like i have given this speech to people yeah like dozens and dozens of times like this is a thing that if you do this work like you have literally given this speech to a new person about like yeah yeah like this is the reason why and like it's i've just fucking i'm just like my mind is blown that this shit is just like appearing in mass media where people who aren't from these movements are just like encountering this And the reason why, again, when I say Andor is like historically profitable, after the first season, every year afterwards for a couple of years, the number of people watching it increased, by which I mean each year after it came out, more people watched it than had watched it in the year it came out.

Speaker 3 And that doesn't happen to TV. Yeah.
It simply is not how television works. Which is why Disney was like, here is a quarter of a billion dollars.
Make Andor season two.

Speaker 25 Yeah, this is the first time Star Wars has like visually looked good in like a decade.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Oh my God.
And it looks incredible. It looks beautiful.
It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous.

Speaker 25 There's so many super long like tracking shots this season where they're going through like massive sets with all like singular like one takes.

Speaker 25 And like, you know, all the previous Star Wars shows are filmed on these like digital soundstages with like, you know, LED screen backgrounds.

Speaker 25 But like you cannot achieve this level of like in real life like fidelity on like a digital background screen.

Speaker 3 Like these are huge sets.

Speaker 25 Like specifically the Chandrilla set.

Speaker 25 It's like massive as you walk around, like, Mod Mothma's, like, Senate Estate or whatever for this, for this Tradcath wedding that we'll talk more about in the next episode. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Just like really, really like excellent craftsmanship going into this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just beautiful. Okay, speaking of beautiful set design.

Speaker 3 All right, we're back.

Speaker 25 Let's talk about the finale of this little three-episode arc.

Speaker 25 Cassian's trying to contact Luthan and learns that his friends on the farming planet are actually being subject to some kind of imperial inspection.

Speaker 25 He's advised to not go there, but of course he does anyway to check on his friends, as is Star Wars tradition, a la Luke Skywalker, in episode five.

Speaker 25 People on this planet are trying to evade this inspection by forging emergency work orders, but their scheme falls apart.

Speaker 25 They might have been ratted out by one of the top guys running this silo, and imperial officers arrest and interrogate people for not having proper work visas.

Speaker 3 And the people on this planet are Cassian's friends from season one, who he lived with, like the guy who is effectively his big brother. Brasso,

Speaker 3 Brasso.

Speaker 25 The guy who hits the cop with the brick in the finale of season one.

Speaker 3 You're goddamn right, he bricks a cop. And then Bix, who is his girlfriend, partner-type person, kind of off and on, and then because of her connections to him, gets horribly tortured in season one.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and as well as young terrorist Willem, who throws a pipe bomb into a crowd of stormtroopers in the finale of season one.

Speaker 25 So these three are in hiding on this farm planet and are now in trouble because these imperial inspections and immigration officers are on their tail.

Speaker 25 On Trendrilla, Monmothma talks to Luthen, who's there for work because

Speaker 25 he's like an artifact, like dealer. But she tells Luthan that the guy that they were working with to help Monmothma secretly fund the rebellion is showing some erratic behavior

Speaker 25 and may need to be

Speaker 25 bribed to keep quiet. Luthan, being smart and serious, knows that, no, no, no, no, no.
You cannot simply bribe this man into silence. This man needs to get taken out right now.
You need to close this.

Speaker 3 Look, he brought in the cops. Like,

Speaker 3 he brought in the fucking cops. Like, he brought

Speaker 3 them. He has to die.
That's the way they do.

Speaker 25 He's threatening to snitch.

Speaker 25 This guy needs to get dealt with immediately. The other plot point that I don't think we'll have much to talk about, but is very excellent.

Speaker 25 Our slimy weasel, Cyril Karn, and his new abusive girlfriend, Dejra,

Speaker 3 have...

Speaker 25 Have Cyril's wonderful mother over for dinner in just a fantastic, fantastically uncomfortable scene.

Speaker 25 In less happy occurrences, as the Imperial officers investigate and search this farming planet, one of them tries to sexually assault Bix

Speaker 25 inside their little RV home. Bix kills him, and eventually, Andor arrives with a Thai Avenger, takes out this Imperial battalion, and Bix and Andor and the kid are able to escape.

Speaker 25 And Brasso, unfortunately, dies

Speaker 25 in a high-speed speeder chase.

Speaker 3 He dies, but

Speaker 3 it's like a believable move someone would make under fire. But like, man, there's tall fucking grass.
Just drop. Go to the ground.
Don't get on a motorbike while you're above the fucking crops.

Speaker 3 Like get on the ground high.

Speaker 25 It's a stressful environment.

Speaker 3 It's a realistic fuck up, right?

Speaker 25 It sucks, but it's realistic.

Speaker 3 People do stuff like that all the time in gunfights. Yes.
So it's one of those where I was like, no, but also like, yep, yep, that's what happens.

Speaker 3 yeah one of the things that isn't really being talked about with this show but i think is actually is very important

Speaker 3 is that it is absolutely unflinching in its depiction of patriarchy like i mean there's you know there's the sort of obvious horrifying scene of like this ice guy i mean increasingly over over the course of this thing like just

Speaker 3 going from like, hey, if you like date me, you can not get deported because we have to maintain the I know you're illegal. And that's fine.

Speaker 3 We know we need a bunch of you we're not here to arrest everyone right because we need the crops from this planet but I am going to arrest some people and I can make sure it's not you if you go on a quote-unquote date with me right yeah and then you know and it just escalates from there into just straight up like sexual assault right and this is really really I mean obviously it's jarring because it's you know like it's an on-screen depiction of an attempted sexual assault and then she like there's a fight and she kills them right but this was also very very jarring to a lot of people because people are very and this is a star wars thing too They are very used to seeing fascism depicted through its own self-perception, right?

Speaker 3 People are very, very used to seeing fascism as something that is strong, that is ordered, that is disciplined, that is dangerous. And

Speaker 3 the problem is, the reality of fascism is that like a lot of it is just a bunch of dipshit rapists who are like pretending to be those guys. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and this is one of the things Andrew's always been very, very good at is. You saw this last season, right?

Speaker 3 With Wededra, who is her thing is that she is, you know, of the very common American archetype of the cop who breaks all the rules to get the job done.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, and then like that, that's how she is first introduced.

Speaker 3 And then you see what that actually looks like in public, which is, you know, she is just straight up torturing Bix with like the screams of an entire, the death scream of an entire species.

Speaker 25 And that's in season one.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 That's in season one. And what's powerful about this is something Andor also does in sort of the prison break episodes.
He's like,

Speaker 3 this fascist self-perception, right, of this sort of strong, ordered, disciplined, disciplined, unified thing, that is just propaganda. They are not actually like that behind the scenes, right?

Speaker 3 It's just these fucking incredibly violent, like petty losers doing this fucking shit.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, I mean, the other thing about the sort of patriarchy side is that you see this on the other side with Mon Mothma's, like, you know, her sort of like money cleaner, who's who's what her old friend, Tay Coleman, like, like, literally is demanding that, like, Mon Mothma, have sex with him in order for him to keep keep doing this money washing shit.

Speaker 3 And this is also something something you see in movements all the time which is like guys with resources using their access to resources to force themselves on women like in the movement and this and you know and and there's there's like a third dynamic here with with take homa which is like another thing you see all the time in movements is guy going through a divorce who goes completely off the fucking rails and starts doing shit that endangers everyone and you know starts doing sort of like weird predatory shit and i and i think i don't know that there just hasn't been much analysis of like yeah this is these are all ways, things that, like, if you have been in movements, you have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways.

Speaker 3 You have experienced cops doing shit to you. You have experienced stuff from inside the movement.
Fuck,

Speaker 3 a big part of how the major greens organizations that were dismantling the green scare were taken down was through members of these different groups who had been doing direct action who were misogynists, right?

Speaker 3 That is always an easy, easy way to break into and shatter a movement is find the guy who's got that going on about him and turn him. Yeah, and you know, and you have that on one hand.

Speaker 3 On the other hand, with like the cops, this is like a very, very common, like cops just like sexually assaulting people for fun is like a thing that they do all the fucking time.

Speaker 3 And same thing with ice, because I mean, this is obviously like, I don't think it's said to draw, like this, this is just literally one-to-one. They're doing ice raids in Star Wars.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And the heroes are the people who, like, and or coming back with the TIE fighter blowing them up. Right.
Like, you know.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Also, I do want to, on someone's lighting note, I do want to point out that, like, this show also quietly has had, like, the most realistic lesbian relationship in all of Star Wars.

Speaker 3 This season, it's like, oh, someone on this crew is a lesbian because they have depicted my culture perfectly, which is

Speaker 3 the, you know, okay, so like the rich girl lesbian and the like broke non-white

Speaker 3 like gorilla lesbian who came from nothing, whose family was killed by the Empire get together as an intense item, dread an operation.

Speaker 3 And then the moment the operation is over, their broke girl was like, fuck, this was a bad idea.

Speaker 3 And now they keep running into each other in movement things and are like, uh, and they're sort of avoiding each other. And one of them is still the perfect depiction of lesbian culture.
Incredible.

Speaker 3 No notes. Love to lesbian rebels.
I'm happy for them.

Speaker 3 Oh, incredible.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it's beautiful stuff. The quality of the writing, like everyone was worried who loved Andor Season 1.
Like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 3 How could they possibly, how could they possibly compare with season one?

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 3 it's just getting better. It's just

Speaker 3 somehow. You crazy bastards.
You did it again.

Speaker 3 The thing I want to close on was with this wedding, which is... There's a bunch of really fascinating things about it.

Speaker 3 One is that, okay, so on the very non-subtle level, like they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing to this like sort of tech upbeat techno thing.

Speaker 3 Like they're cutting back and forth between like Mon Mothma dancing at this wedding and like the ice raid that's happening, which which is like, you know, this is the level of political subtlety that you need to be working on with the American people.

Speaker 3 You'd have to just be like, I'm hammering you over the head with the point, which is like all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch and like,

Speaker 3 the ice raids are happening.

Speaker 25 Well, that is an aspect. I think it also proves there you can operate in that zone because Mon Mothma is still a very important figure starting the rebellion.

Speaker 3 She is not just a useless lib, right? She's critical.

Speaker 25 And you have someone like Lucy who can put on nice clothes,

Speaker 25 can do this persona and extract intel at this party in one in one of the previous episodes he's like talking with this guy who introduces his son who is in the imperial navy and he was talking about like like like a like a recent operation on on a planet and luthin was like oh really tell me more and like it's like you can you can you can still extract information at these like places where power is like flaunted and exchanged.

Speaker 25 Yes, they are still bad, but if you are like an aspiring rebel,

Speaker 25 you can use these places to your advantage.

Speaker 25 But no, there absolutely still is this, is this juxtaposition of yeah this like you know riotous party with with like this horrific ice raid and yeah like you the the the material conditions in these people's lives is very different even even if mon mothma is doing good stuff still as like an imperial senator uh her everyday life is very different to complete someone who's having to hide from like ice agents now the other thing though that is going on in this scene it's not purely these are the wealthy partying as these nightmare raids go down.

Speaker 3 The other thing that's going on is Mon Mothma is emotionally emotionally accepting this guy who was my lover for a long time and who is a dear friend of mine is going to be killed.

Speaker 3 And I have accepted the necessity. And the only thing for me to do right now is to get so drunk that I can't feel it.
Yep. Yep.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 To do drugs, wreck, drink, and like dance.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 25 that's how you exist under like the horrific conditions that the empire forces you to live under.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And there's this fascinating thing. And I noticed this especially watching back season one.

Speaker 3 If you look at, if you go back and watch those scenes and you look at the way it's lit, you look at the way that there's just the stark, like white light coming through the windows.

Speaker 3 This is not how it's lit in season one, right? This is a very deliberate choice.

Speaker 3 Almost everyone else who does this scene would do this sort of like warm, rich, like golden lighting because that's like, that's how you do these sort of like fancy wedding things. And this.

Speaker 3 The way that it is lit is the same way that they're lighting all of the like the stark white imperial corridors.

Speaker 3 And there's this very, you know, and so like like, it's working on like all of these sort of like levels of like

Speaker 3 visual metaphor of, of all of this, just like, oh yeah, this is also imperial space, right?

Speaker 3 And everyone here is operating either like regardless of what side they're on, they're operating like in imperial terrain in this sort of like thing.

Speaker 3 As Esmond Montha also was just dealing with like her kid becoming a tradcath and like trying to talk her kid out of being a tradcath and her kid financially

Speaker 3 at her for being like, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this like weird marriage thing when you're like a trading.

Speaker 25 The entire like 12-year-old year old marriage yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 3 i think i think the place i want to end on is there was a really interesting thing where like the disney account like just posted a video on like i think it was on twitter that was just one the like one hour of moth med dancing yeah and there was like a fascinating reaction to this of like like because on the one hand there's like all these people like who i know uh victoria zeller who's a trans writer who i follow who i probably talking to on the show at some point soon uh had this thing about like oh yeah like there are also there's just gonna be weddings that are like based off of Shandrillin wedding thing in like two or three years, we're going to be seeing this.

Speaker 3 And there's this interesting dynamic where like on the one hand, you have the people who are just completely focused on the aesthetic.

Speaker 3 And then on the other hand, you have the people who are like, oh yeah, I like, this is, this is fucking me getting just absolutely fucked up as like all of the fucking horrors play out around us and having to like deal with and fight all the fucking horrors while like all of the people around me are just like

Speaker 3 kind of just completely checked out. And I thought it was just like fascinating watching that sort of play out on social media and on like in real life.

Speaker 3 Like this, you know, they're being very, very literal about how it works. And it's working.
I'm seeing people do it. Yep.

Speaker 25 The last thing I do want to mention is just a big shout out to Cyril, to Cyril Karn's Italian Jewish mother.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 The best villain in Star Wars. Darth Vader.
Ain't got shit. Not nearly as scary as Cyril Karn's mother.

Speaker 6 No, I would take him in a fight over her any day.

Speaker 25 However,

Speaker 25 one of the interesting parts about this little dinner party is how Cyril Karn's FBI agent abusive girlfriend, the moment Cyril is out of the room, she like takes control of this mother using like all of her like imperial interrogation and like intimidation tactics.

Speaker 25 And it's like, no, no, no, you don't understand how this relationship is going to go. I am in charge here.
I will dictate when Cyril can see you.

Speaker 25 How, how, I will dictate how your relationship with your son is going to go. Because like Cyril is like my like pet.
Like I run everything and things will go according to my wishes.

Speaker 3 See, I had a very different interpretation of that. Really? Because number one, she is not on board.
She's going to be doing part of the Gorman genocide. She doesn't like the plan.

Speaker 3 She doesn't like that she's involved. This is not what she wants to be doing.
She wants to be hunting Luther. Yes, agreed.

Speaker 3 And I think part of it is that she doesn't like, and I think this will become increasingly clear. She's not thrilled that Cyril's going to get involved in this shit because it's dangerous.

Speaker 3 What I thought they were kind of showing, we haven't seen her like abuse him.

Speaker 3 I don't think we've seen her be mean to him other than like initially when before they were dating, she didn't take him seriously until he saved her life.

Speaker 6 Well, I know.

Speaker 25 He's like a weird stalker beforehand.

Speaker 3 He is a little bit of a stalker.

Speaker 25 And she is like, I think you can absolutely interpret some of her behavior as like a degree of like emotionally abusive.

Speaker 3 As a fascist couple.

Speaker 25 like before they're dating yeah maybe i don't know fascist for a fascist couple i i absolutely i think there's elements and including like the earlier scene of them in the apartment where like like both of them are like very uncomfortable around each other they're awkward people but like they're

Speaker 3 i one of the things i appreciated about this is that like she is a monster we see her doing exclusively evil things and then Cyril, because his mom is so cruel to him, does the most relatable thing anyone does in this show show and goes and lies down on his bed and has a panic attack in the middle of their dinner.

Speaker 3 And that's when she, and that's when she says, look, bitch, this is how shit's in it. She's being a good girlfriend in that moment.
She's getting his mom off his bed.

Speaker 25 I definitely interpret this scene differently.

Speaker 3 She did also threaten to arrest his uncle.

Speaker 3 His uncle did.

Speaker 25 She does threaten to send his uncle to forever jail.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 25 No, I can see how you would read it that way. I think I definitely do interpret this scene a little bit differently.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 And I think the beauty of good writing is this ability to look at this relationship in multiple ways.

Speaker 3 What I like about the way the Empire is written is that they're not caricatures, but not in a way where they're being like, well, the Empire's got a point, but in the way that like, yeah, these are people.

Speaker 3 And I understand how folks, why folks would want to be a part of this system outside of just... like the cruelty that it does.

Speaker 3 Like Pardagas, who is like the leader of the ISB section that we're watching, is a really good boss. He listens to his subordinates.
He tells them when their ideas suck.

Speaker 3 He does not spare their feelings, but he rewards initiative and he's willing to

Speaker 3 be proven wrong or argued with. Like when people are forceful against him and make a good point, he's like, all right, well, let's try it.

Speaker 3 And I love showcasing that in the same way that like if you talk to people who worked for like, work for companies like Raytheon, they'll be like, yeah, it was a nightmare evil that we were making and like a very healthy working environment.

Speaker 3 And that is often the case with the most some of the most evil organizations on the planet like people who are very good at managing people often wind up

Speaker 3 like that's what makes fascist systems so dangerous it's not that everyone in them is incompetent it's that there are sometimes people who are very good organizers and very competent leaders who wind up in these systems and that's part of what allows the evil to happen The point of Vander, the point of Star Wars is that also you could out-organize them and beat them.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 3 message of hope. Yes, yes.
I mean, fundamentally, the show is very hopeful because the Empire, number one, we know the Empire falls, but number two,

Speaker 3 we're seeing like why, right? Which is this attempt to control everything that inevitably creates more fires than you can put out.

Speaker 25 Yeah, the tighter they hold their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 25 Which is the line from the theory twink in season one. Yeah.

Speaker 25 And I think what makes the Andorra so special is this this does fill in this gap of like when we jump into like a new hope, you have this fully like complete like rebel alliance, right?

Speaker 25 It is it is an alliance of different rebel cells that have come together to do like a large-scale military action. It takes a lot of buildup to get an alliance of rebel cells.

Speaker 25 A whole bunch of like individual like rebel terrorist cells have a, usually have a very hard time working with each other. Yes.
And it's very hard to get them to coordinate.

Speaker 25 And Andor is the story of watching these like many different cells slowly start to figure out that maybe it would make more sense if we worked together yeah instead of just doing random small crimes and like hits on individual planets or imperial processing plants.

Speaker 25 The ability to see these cells come together is what makes I think Andor so special.

Speaker 25 And for the rest of the season, we're going to move forward a year at a time all the way up to the beginning of Rogue One, where then we do have the completed Rebel Alliance.

Speaker 25 So I'm excited to watch that develop. Yep.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 25 Well, see you next week.

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Speaker 25 This is

Speaker 3 it. Sorry.
Garrison. Wow.

Speaker 3 I interrupted you.

Speaker 3 We have a whole thing that we've been doing. We have been.
We have been.

Speaker 25 This is the first episode that started differently in like 12 years.

Speaker 3 You're right. You're right.

Speaker 3 Why don't you introduce erectile dysfunction or whatever we call this?

Speaker 25 That's not what it's called. This is, it could happen here, executive disorder, the weekly newscast where we cover.

Speaker 25 you know, everything happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.
I'm joined by

Speaker 25 federal, no, no, New Mexico, Mexico, state municipal judge.

Speaker 3 New Mexico municipal judge. Municipal judge, Robert Evans.
That's right.

Speaker 25 Neil Wong and James Stout. We're covering the week of April 24th to April 30th.

Speaker 3 Yes. And we're sponsored by him.
Not yet, but hopefully.

Speaker 6 When they release them,

Speaker 6 we will accept their contract money.

Speaker 58 One day.

Speaker 25 Robert, what's going on with your fellow judges?

Speaker 3 I want to get to that, Garrison. Some very important news just dropped from the Real Raw News Twitter account.

Speaker 3 Oh, Oh, boys. Sharing what you don't want shared, 107,000 followers.

Speaker 3 Special forces that accompanied President Trump to the Pope's funeral arrested Biden for treason afterward, but it turned out to be a body double.

Speaker 59 So

Speaker 3 breaking news. Turns out

Speaker 3 Disney Joe still has a trick or two up his sleeve.

Speaker 6 Patriots not in control.

Speaker 3 What a beautiful world. People must live.

Speaker 3 I desperately want to live in the world where like Joe Biden is a sagera type rebel figure, like, tricking special forces with body doubles hiding in the mountains.

Speaker 6 They call him Joe the Jackal for a reason.

Speaker 25 They have him locked up in a Vatican vault where he's scheming his return.

Speaker 3 He just stole a nuke from Fort Leonardwood.

Speaker 3 Oh, boy.

Speaker 6 He's in a tiny submarine making his way to Cuba right now.

Speaker 25 I guess, you know, speaking of the Pope, Trump himself has announced his running for the Pope ship. Papership.

Speaker 3 Why not? Let him have it. Let him have it.

Speaker 25 We will will keep a close eye on that.

Speaker 3 Let him have it, but make Stanley Tucci do whatever job Stanley Tucci had in conclave.

Speaker 25 Make him the Lib Cuck Cardinal. Why not?

Speaker 3 That's right. That's right.
Speaking of Lib.

Speaker 3 Nope.

Speaker 3 Speaking of judges who actually exercised a great deal of personal courage, there have been two cases in the last week or so of judges being arrested and charged by the Trump administration with crimes that are all related to aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants, right?

Speaker 3 I'm going to start with the case of Hannah Dugan. Hannah Dugan is a Wisconsin, she's a Milwaukee County Circuit judge.
She was sworn in in 2016.

Speaker 3 So she's, I wanted to say, I wanted to say she hasn't been doing this very long, but no, that's literally like nine years, eight or nine years. So she's been doing this a spell.
She's 65 years old.

Speaker 3 And on March 12th, there was a fellow, Flores Ruiz is his last name.

Speaker 3 He's 30 years old, who was arrested after basically there was a confrontation between him and his roommates for him playing loud music.

Speaker 3 He was confronted for this on March 12th, and he allegedly fought with a male roommate in the kitchen. A woman, I'm not sure if she was a roommate or just there, tried to break them up.

Speaker 3 Two women eventually did. One of them got elbowed in the arm, allegedly, by Flores Ruiz.
One of them was struck while trying to break them up. It is unclear to the degree to which

Speaker 3 I'm hearing a lot of people, like I went to the Centrist subreddit to see this and they're like, well, a serial abuser of women, women, that's not really what he's being accused of.

Speaker 3 There was like a fight between him and another guy, and it got chaotic. One person elbowed in the arm.
I'm sorry. I don't consider that serious domestic abuse unless it's part of a pattern.

Speaker 3 If it's literally, he was fighting a guy and other people swarmed in and some of them, one of them got elbowed.

Speaker 3 I don't know about this woman that he's alleged of striking, like to what degree did he haul off and punch her?

Speaker 3 Or was it again, there was this chaotic struggle and several people got struck in the middle of it, right? This isn't like great, but this is certainly not.

Speaker 3 The evidence that has been provided by the state here in this case is not that this is a serial domestic abuser of women.

Speaker 3 It's a guy who was involved in a chaotic fight with a roommate and a couple of other people, right? So he's being charged with misdemeanor, domestic battery as a result of this.

Speaker 3 He faces up to nine months in prison and a $10,000 fine on each count if convicted. And he has not been convicted and is innocent until proven guilty.
So he went up.

Speaker 3 in front of Judge Dugan literally a few days ago when we record this.

Speaker 3 And while she was in the midst of like having this like court meeting, basically, I think this was kind of like a pre-trial deal, right?

Speaker 3 Where they're, where, where they're kind of like setting the ground rules of things, she finds out that ICE is in the courthouse and that they are looking for Flores Ruiz.

Speaker 3 And so she gets really angry because based on what Wisconsin has stated, like the actual like law in the state, they are not supposed to be interfering in actual court proceedings.

Speaker 3 And part of the reason why is that the courts don't want people to be dissuaded from dealing with their state-level court issues by the fact that ice might pick them up right it will stop people it will make people go on the run it makes it very difficult to enforce law and order and i it also like victims right like i've heard at least of some makes it difficult for victims to get any sort of justice yes yeah the fbi affidavit describes her as getting visibly angry when immigration shows up uh and she leaves the bench right and she retreats to her chambers and i think confers with another judge and she and that judge then approach the the arrest team inside the courthouse.

Speaker 3 The affidavit describes her as having a confrontational, angry demeanor. She basically keeps saying, show me your fucking warrant, right? And they don't have a quote unquote real warrant, right?

Speaker 3 They do not have a criminal arrest warrant. They have an administrative warrant, which based on the actual law, they do not, she does not have to let them in, right?

Speaker 3 That is not the way these things fucking work.

Speaker 3 right um into the courtroom to like interrupt the proceedings on the strength of this warrant she tells them to speak with the chief judge and she leads them away from the courtroom, right?

Speaker 3 Once she sends him to the chief judge's office, this is where the thing that may in fact be criminal behavior comes in.

Speaker 3 Dugan goes back into the courtroom and says something along the lines of, wait, come with me, and then takes Flores Ruiz and his lawyer through the jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse, right?

Speaker 3 This is not. normal behavior.
And ICE is alleging that this is interfering with the duties of federal agents, right?

Speaker 3 That she's basically hiding an undocumented immigrant who is being actively tracked by ICE, right? And that that is a federal crime. And so that is the situation, right?

Speaker 3 When it was found out that this was happening, the FBI and ICE arrested her. She has since bailed out.
She is facing several federal charges.

Speaker 3 And it's, you know, kind of unclear where this case is going to go. In terms of her initial behavior, she was absolutely legally in the right.

Speaker 3 That administrative warrant did not give ICE the right to interrupt the court proceedings. She led them them to the chief judge.
That was all entirely within the law.

Speaker 3 We're going to learn how the law adjudicates what she did afterwards, right? Taking these people through, because it's not illegal to lead people through a back door.

Speaker 3 It's not a crime to tell people to leave this way. But what may be adjudicated as a crime is that by doing this, she was helping to aid and abet the escape of a fugitive.

Speaker 3 right and that is the argument that the federal government is making here yeah they didn't leave the building at that point right?

Speaker 6 Like, because there's in the charging documents, then an ICE agent gets in the elevator with them and decides not to detain them at that point for some reason.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
I believe that's what happened. And that part of it is why I think they picked this case because they thought it was close enough, on the edge enough, that they could charge a judge.

Speaker 3 And I think that is the purpose of this more than going after this. And that's why they've been going to these courts is they have been looking, they've been shopping.

Speaker 3 for a situation like this, right? In part because one of the first things that happened is the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Judge Dugan, right? Because she's been charged with two federal counts.

Speaker 3 And this is a normal thing.

Speaker 3 If a judge gets accused of federal crimes, you would, in normal terms, want them to be suspended because those crimes are probably something like they were selling children to a child prison, which is a thing that happened to Trump pardoned the judges responsible, right?

Speaker 3 You would want those people not trying cases. while while this was going on.

Speaker 3 But what's going to be done here, and what's already being done here, is that judges that are friendly to and sympathetic to undocumented people and who are not gigantic pieces of shit.

Speaker 3 And Judge Dugan comes out of a public defense background. This is somebody who defended people like the defendant in this case in her previous life as a lawyer.

Speaker 3 And I think acted with tremendous courage in this situation to try to protect somebody. Very brave.
They are going after her because, number one, they want to chill other judges from doing this.

Speaker 3 And number two, they can keep her off the bench, right? And assume she will be replaced with somebody worse, or that they will just clog up the system, either way of which works in their favor.

Speaker 3 So it will be unclear how things are going to work out in this case i can't tell you legally what's going to happen that could go either way i can tell you and i think this is a very important point it's a point jared yates yates sexton who's a a scholar on fascism made online about this particular case is we shouldn't give a shit if she broke the law she did the right thing These people are doing the wrong thing and they need to be stopped.

Speaker 3 Right. And that is my overall stance.
What she did was heroic and we should support her and fuck these people. I don't know.
Yeah. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 3 I don't have a complicated take on this.

Speaker 25 Solidarity with the Wisconsin judiciary. Or at least one of them.
At least one of them.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I have a friend who knows her and says she's a very nice person and her actions in this case certainly would seem to suggest that she's a very nice, good, courageous person.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 And like just to, there's conceivably like a person listening who thinks that these deportation things are okay. I don't know if you are.

Speaker 3 Fuck you. Why?

Speaker 3 This isn't for you. Go away.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah.
We're not making phone calls for you.

Speaker 3 Put rocks in your pockets. And

Speaker 3 there's bodies of whatever.

Speaker 6 Even if you fucking like the deportations for whatever reason,

Speaker 6 you should be able to understand that doing this in courthouses is bad.

Speaker 3 Like if a

Speaker 6 let's just take an example, right? Like if a woman who is undocumented is subject to domestic violence,

Speaker 6 going to testify in court could lead to her being deported. Like this is fucking bad.

Speaker 25 It could subject her to even more violence from the state, from wherever she's trying to flee from.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah.
To being detained with people. Yeah.
Yes. If you believe in the judicial system, right? Like this stops it functioning.

Speaker 3 Also, I want to say this too.

Speaker 3 If you're purely coming at this from a perspective of like, well, I'm still a law and order guy, this also vastly endangers Wisconsin police because if every undocumented person who gets accused of a crime knows that, well, the instant I'm accused, I'm going to be sent to a fucking concentration camp, might as well start shooting.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 25 Yeah, that's why you don't see very many of these things happening in states where people regularly carry firearms.

Speaker 3 Yes. So again, you know, that's all I'm saying.
That's not my primary concern, but I'm going to make that point.

Speaker 25 Yeah. What about the other like weirder case of the New Mexico case? The judge in New Mexico.
Yes.

Speaker 3 So now back to my fellow New Mexico municipal judge. Actually, I think he was a new magistrate.

Speaker 6 Judge, magistrate.

Speaker 3 Yeah, county magistrate. Yeah.
So he and I, basically the same. So there's this guy, Nancy Kano, who's a former police officer.

Speaker 3 His wife was a cop, and Joel Kano, who was the Donna Ana County Magistrate Judge. These two are

Speaker 3 really, you wouldn't have expected what happened from this group. These two are a cop and a judge couple.
Radical lefty lunatives. Who are wealthy landlords who own at least eight properties?

Speaker 3 And they hire three men to do like, you know, contracting work. And those men included a guy, Cristian Ortega Lopez, 23 years old, right? Who is a Venezuelan migrant.

Speaker 3 And first off, because these are cops or a cop and a judge, they like check his papers, which say do not deport, right? Like he is in the system.

Speaker 6 Subject to removal.

Speaker 3 This person is not subject to removal, right? Those are on his papers. They check his papers.

Speaker 3 They work for these three guys work for them for a while and develop a close relationship with the Katos to the point that they refer to them as the boys.

Speaker 3 And when they get kicked out of their apartment, they let them live with them.

Speaker 3 I think for free, or at least for a nominal fee. And as they describe it, they came to consider them part of the family.

Speaker 3 And there's like photo evidence of that, including photo evidence of them like going to the gun range together as like a family day at the gun range and shooting.

Speaker 3 And like this guy, Ortega Lopez, like posts pictures of these people and these like family outings on his Facebook. Like they really do seem to have all been very close.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Earlier this year, ice comes for these guys, the boys, these three, these three dudes who are living on their property in a small guest house on the Kanos property.

Speaker 3 And they allege Ortega Ortiz to have been a member of Trina Agua. And it's based on, and I hate most of the reporting on this because it's all just like the

Speaker 3 alleged gang member, alleged Trina Agua member.

Speaker 3 And you look at it and say, well, he has tattoos and there's pictures of him with guns, pictures of him with guns that are legally owned by Americans at a gun range. Yeah.

Speaker 6 He's a 23-year-old guy coming to America. Like there's a high correlation with those people and people.

Speaker 3 Going to a gun range. Yeah.
Nothing illegal with that, but they're like a gang member, photos of guns on his Facebook. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 So these guys get arrested, right? And it's initially, and this is like a month or so ago, big scandal. Kanos resigns from his position as a magistrate, right?

Speaker 3 And gets permanently barred from serving as a judge in New Mexico because these guys had been on his property.

Speaker 3 Even though, again, there's not any evidence that I have seen anywhere that he actually did anything illegal at this point. Now, here's where things get problematic.

Speaker 3 At this point, the boys are being, you know, the government is treating them as people who are here illegally and they are trying to kick them out.

Speaker 3 And they are accusing them, these three guys of being involved in Trina Agua.

Speaker 3 At this point, Nancy Kano provides them with legal assistance in complying with the procedures of their pending immigration cases, right?

Speaker 3 Which shouldn't be illegal. She's literally helping them abide by the law, right? But there's some other things.
So Joel Kano, this is where this guy turns from like... fucking married a cop.

Speaker 3 He's a landlord. He smashes Ortega Lopez's phone.
He admits, he's admitted that he's done this. This is not an allegation with a hammer to stop ICE from getting it.
So first off,

Speaker 3 based.

Speaker 3 Illegal. Super illegal.
Super illegal. But not

Speaker 3 a good person act, I would argue.

Speaker 3 Secondly,

Speaker 3 Nancy tries to help, and this is, I think, a grayer area, tries to help Ortega Lopez delete his Facebook account.

Speaker 3 And I don't actually think there's any evidence of him doing anything illegal on there.

Speaker 3 I think it's just they knew the photos he'd posted of him not breaking any laws would be used as an argument that he had.

Speaker 3 I think that that's defensible in court, although they will allege that it's destruction of the evidence and they may win on that.

Speaker 3 Breaking the phone is a, you know, that's going to be a tough one for them. That's just going to be a tough one for them.
Now, the Kanos are currently being charged and they have been released.

Speaker 3 They can't leave the county. There was the prosecutors were attempting to have them separated

Speaker 3 so that they couldn't talk about the case. But thank God the judge ruling was like, they're married.
They have a constitutional right to be together.

Speaker 3 You don't get to do that. But obviously they have to like hand in their passports, any guns they'd had, which they seem to have already done.
The good news is that these are rich people, right?

Speaker 3 Like the judge even makes a comment that like, these are the wealthiest people I've ever had in my courtroom. So they have the resources to fight this.
And

Speaker 3 again, fucking politics making strange bedfellows.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 59 Critical support to the landlord judge cop couple who tried to protect these

Speaker 3 immigrants.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Like,

Speaker 3 whatever. They did the right thing, you know, in my opinion.
Again, Again, not the legal thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I'm not urging you to follow them in breaking the law. I'm making it very clear.

Speaker 3 It is illegal to break the phone of somebody that you know the police are looking for because they've been charged with crimes. That is a crime.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm just saying I think what they did was out of love and brave. Anyway, that's what I got to say.

Speaker 25 Speaking of love, I love these ads.

Speaker 25 All right, we are back. I am now going to discuss a, I believe the word is a flurry of executive orders that happened the past week because there was a ton.

Speaker 25 This was a huge week for actions through through executive order.

Speaker 25 We've tried to summarize a few of these that have like, or a few orders that have come in the past few months, but yeah, definitely the ones that happened last week are much more notable.

Speaker 25 and I will go through them one by one, starting off with an attempt to possibly repeal large sections of the Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 25 Trump signed an order to, quote, eliminate the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.

Speaker 25 Disparate impact is a legal theory that seeks to address discriminatory policies that on their face may appear neutral, but actually continue decades-old, like discrimination and segregation.

Speaker 25 And this order from Trump revokes presidential approval for Title VI anti-discrimination regulations from the 60s and 70s and orders all agencies to, quote, deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent that they include disparate impact liability.

Speaker 25 The order calls for the Attorney General to, quote, initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Speaker 25 Cabinet members were also instructed to review all pending investigations, civil suits, consent judgments, permanent injunctions, and government positions that rely on disparate impact theory.

Speaker 25 That includes Titles VII and VIII of the Civil Rights Act, which protects equal employment and fair housing. And this is kind of part of a larger attack on civil rights in general.

Speaker 25 I mean, like, obviously, the past few months, we've seen this with like DEI stuff.

Speaker 25 But last week, the DOJ essentially closed its existing civil rights office, re-signed a dozen senior career attorneys, curbed investigations into police misconduct and violations of voting and disability rights.

Speaker 25 Plus, the Education Discrimination Division is now being directed to protect women's sports, and the Immigrant and Employee Rights Division was told to investigate companies that, quote, unlawfully discriminate against U.S.

Speaker 25 workers in favor of foreign visa workers, unquote. So that's how they think they're going to be defending civil rights is by keeping trans girls out of sports and going after foreign visa workers.

Speaker 25 Basically, they're trying to turn federal civil rights infrastructure against against those whom they were meant to protect in the first place.

Speaker 25 The next order kind of outlies something I'm calling cop nation.

Speaker 25 It's called, quote, strengthening and unleashing America's law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent civilians. This is kind of like a proto-martial law order.

Speaker 25 It's what you would do beforehand to strengthen police, but not actually like declare martial law.

Speaker 25 It's setting kind of the path towards that or at the very least like strengthening law enforcement to the degree to which it like butts up against what martial law would be.

Speaker 25 The order calls to, quote, unleash high-impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge resources to officers in need, unquote.

Speaker 25 It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense to police officers who, quote, unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law, unquote.

Speaker 25 So this tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm.

Speaker 25 According to Business Insider, quote, Following previous executive orders targeting a number of elite firms, nine law firms have agreed to deals with the president and collectively agreed to provide $940 million in pro bono legal services to support the president's policies,

Speaker 25 This order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to, quote, seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution, and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions, unquote.

Speaker 25 The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on to local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.

Speaker 25 And then finally, quote, Attorney General and Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement, and shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime, unquote.

Speaker 25 So moving more military and national security resources over to state and local law enforcement and directs the AG to go after state and local officials that obstruct criminal law by, quote, prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety or unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil rights violations under the guise of DEI.

Speaker 25 Do you want to discuss anything with this

Speaker 25 anti-ACAB executive order here and what it might actually like do in reality, besides, you know, expanding like legal protections for cops.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think the worrying one to me is that they're very explicitly talking about using military national security assets like in the U.S. against Americans.

Speaker 3 The thing right now they're doing is like to prevent crime, but I think very obviously everyone is looked at this and immediately gone. Like part of this obviously is about like

Speaker 3 trying to defeat any attempt to even moderately reform the police, but a lot of it is also like, yeah,

Speaker 3 they're expecting giant protests this summer. Yeah.
And they want to be able to use military assets here.

Speaker 3 And what they're doing with this, the Secretary of Defense is developing a plan to use military assets, presumably against protesters, either that or, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Like specific thing here is like used to prevent crime, which is just like the deployment of the U.S. military against us.

Speaker 3 Right. That's, I think, a pretty cut and dry.
They are developing the apparatus through which they are going to attempt to deploy the army against U.S. citizens in the U.S.

Speaker 25 Well, and it also specifically empowers like individual police officers against any like perceived restrictions that like local or state officials might be putting on them.

Speaker 25 And I think that's what makes it more super worrying for me. It's like it's like enabling the police state aspect of

Speaker 25 the executive branch saying, hey, individual cops, we support you more so than whatever local jurisdiction you are under. And if the local jurisdictions try to restrict your ability to

Speaker 25 restrict your ability to do your job, we are going to help you to make sure that you have the legal and physical capacity to continue your job as you see fit.

Speaker 3 We will throw the high dollar lawyers that we have threatened into working for us at these states and municipalities.

Speaker 25 Yeah, both to like defend your individual actions and then also go after the people in charge of you. Like

Speaker 25 both of them. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So it's more like CPD black site shit, like

Speaker 3 Nazi gang shit, like, you know, them just like shooting people. Yeah, like that's the kind of shit.
Yeah. The torture.

Speaker 6 The data sharing, I think, is something people should be aware of.

Speaker 6 That seems to be what I would imagine would be funding for more federal fusion centers and then equipping them with like homeland security assets, intelligence assets that are already used outside the U.S.

Speaker 6 Like that

Speaker 6 is concerning, especially in a climate of like migration crackdown, right? Like

Speaker 6 this data sharing will help them further target migrants.

Speaker 25 Well, and this relates to another executive order for protecting American communities from criminal aliens. Basically, it targets sanctuary cities.

Speaker 25 The Attorney General and the DHS Secretary will publish a list of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law, and federal funds to those districts will be suspended or terminated.

Speaker 25 And if those districts remain sanctuary districts after officials have been notified of their status, then necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures shall be pursued to, quote, end these violations.

Speaker 25 Section one of this order lists several federal criminal laws that they say are being violated by the sanctuary districts, including, quote, obstruction of justice, unlawfully harboring or hiring illegal aliens, conspiracy against the United States, and conspiracy to impede federal law enforcement, assisting aliens in violating federal immigration law could also violate the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, unquote.

Speaker 25 So they're even rapping in Rico here for state and local officials who are trying to protect immigrants in their communities.

Speaker 25 There's a few other executive orders I want to mention, including one that requires professional truck drivers speak English.

Speaker 25 I think this is actually just to mask the consequences of like the tariffs with the fact that a lot of truck drivers are losing their jobs.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 25 So this is to like hide those layoffs or try to like force people to get laid off if they don't speak good enough English or to like to create pretext to have these layoffs be justified as we see the shipping industry slowly collapse because of the tariffs.

Speaker 25 Another order that's just more frustrating, I guess, to me and like worrying long-term about the future is quote, advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth.

Speaker 25 And I'm actually going to play a video here of Trump signing this order.

Speaker 60 This next executive order relates to artificial intelligence education, sir. You've obviously done a lot in the artificial intelligence space already.

Speaker 60 The basic idea of this executive order is to ensure that we properly train the workforce of the future by ensuring that school children, young Americans are adequately trained in AI tools so that they can be competitive in the economy years from now into the future as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal.

Speaker 61 That's a big deal. Yes, AI is where it seems to be at.
We have literally trillions of dollars being

Speaker 61 invested in AI.

Speaker 61 And somebody today, a very smart person, said that AI is the way to the future. I don't know if that's right or not, but certainly very smart people are investing in it heavily.

Speaker 25 This clip is super interesting to me because it demonstrates just how little Trump knows what's really going on. Like, this is the first time he's seen this order.

Speaker 25 He has to get explained what it is before he signs his name on it. They're just handing him these things, and he's just signing papers.

Speaker 25 He is not like dictating which things he actually wants to happen. He just gets handed stuff, and there's cameras on.
He's like, hey, this is to help AI with kids. And you're so smart about AI, Mr.

Speaker 25 President. He's like, yes, I am, as he signs his name.
The actual text of this order is really freaky.

Speaker 25 Quote, by fostering AI competency, we will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to adapt and thrive in an increasing digital society.

Speaker 25 Early learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology, but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future.

Speaker 25 To achieve this vision, we must also invest in our educators and equip them with the tools and knowledge to not only train students about AI, but also to utilize AI in their classrooms to improve educational outcomes.

Speaker 25 Unquote. James, how do you feel about that as an educator yourself?

Speaker 3 Probably

Speaker 6 50% of my time in the classroom right now is trying to explain to people why they shouldn't copy paste the assignment into chat GPT.

Speaker 6 And like every year for the past three or four years, we have dealt with like bots, like students in my class who are not real people. Yeah.
I've dealt with more and more and more use of AI.

Speaker 6 It's from people who, I think, like the folks who are coming through my classroom now, like many of their high school years when they should have been getting good, solid like writing tuition were during COVID lockdowns, right?

Speaker 6 And so like I'm not entirely blaming like the folks coming through my class here, but it is.

Speaker 25 It's a fucked situation that's only getting worse. It's fucked.

Speaker 6 It's the like I've been educating people for nearly two decades.

Speaker 6 Like I've never come across anything this bad.

Speaker 6 It is fundamentally damaging people's engagement with education and their ability to learn.

Speaker 3 It's giving them permanent brain damage. It is life-altering their ability to think in a way that may never be recoverable for a lot of people.

Speaker 6 Yeah, like I don't want to be a boomer, like, but

Speaker 3 there's data on this. The AI companies have, Microsoft has data on this.
It damages people.

Speaker 3 It needs to be very finding.

Speaker 6 Good solutions for that, writing assignments that AI can't write. Like, it's not that hard before people come into my mentions, right? Saying like, oh, you can use this to detect AI.

Speaker 6 I can detect it because the assignments it submits are shit.

Speaker 6 The problem is that people keep using it.

Speaker 6 Like, because, as Robert said, that they're running out of other options, right?

Speaker 25 And they're like really committing to this.

Speaker 25 The end of the order directs the Secretary of Education to provide grant funding to, quote, improve educational outcomes using AI, including but not limited to AI-based high-quality instructional resources, high-impact tutoring, and college and career pathway exploration, advising, and navigation.

Speaker 3 Unquote.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, sadly, like these federal and to an extent state level too, like diktats, I guess, do impact what you're supposed to put on your syllabus, right?

Speaker 6 Like, especially for like high school students, these can genuinely impact what high school teachers are supposed to teach. It changes a little bit.

Speaker 6 Like, once you get to the university level, and I guess we'll see how this goes, but like, this genuinely could have a very damaging impact on, and it already has had a damaging impact on the U.S.

Speaker 6 education system.

Speaker 25 Yeah. I have one more thing I want to read here.
This is actually a presidential memorandum,

Speaker 25 not an executive order.

Speaker 25 But this calls to investigate Democrat and grassroots funding platform Act Blue, alleging, quote, schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees, unquote.

Speaker 25 Act Blue has been the target of conspiracy theories for years, starting with James O'Keefe. And Elon Musk has recently targeted Act Blue with

Speaker 25 bizarre conspiracy theories on how ACTBLU functions and is used to funnel money to like Antifa and

Speaker 25 George Soros' money getting moved over to all of these Tesla vandals, crazy stuff.

Speaker 25 But specifically, Trump is calling the Attorney General and Treasury Secretary to, quote, investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make straw or dummy contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees and to take appropriate action to enforce the law, Unquote.

Speaker 25 I think this whole thing, beyond trying to, you know, harm the Democrats' ability to win elections in the future as a form of election meddling, is also just like a big smokescreen away from a CNN investigation last year into deceptive practices used by political fundraising platforms, Win Red and Act Blue, which found that the Republican platform had more than seven times the fraud complaints sent to the FCC than Act Blue during the period of 2022 to 2024, with the fundraising platform targeting aging seniors who thought they were personal friends of the Trump family with propaganda and emails that tricked them into signing up for recurring donations and what they thought was a personal correspondence to President Trump.

Speaker 25 It's a really worrying investigation. It'll be linked below.

Speaker 25 And like, you know, meanwhile, you have Elon Musk literally offering people millions of dollars to like get people to sign up to vote and sign petitions. And yet they're going to try to

Speaker 25 investigate, you know, fraud in Democrat and grassroots fundraising, which I'm sure there is a little bit of.

Speaker 25 But according to this investigation by CNN, so much more fraud

Speaker 25 on the Republican fundraising platform.

Speaker 3 You know, there is actually one Democrat who we can verifiably claim did a bunch of weird fundraising shit and did straw donations from foreign donors, and it is Eric Adams, who is Trump's favorite Democrat.

Speaker 3 He's the one guy who actually tried it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Trump is personally keeping out of prison. Oh, God.

Speaker 25 Fantastic.

Speaker 25 Anyway,

Speaker 25 that is the flurry. We're going to go on one more break and then come back to close out on some immigration and tariff updates.

Speaker 3 Hell yeah.

Speaker 6 We're back.

Speaker 3 And wait, what's that? Do you hear the dulcet tones of an angel?

Speaker 6 We're going to get to the rest of the clash catalog. We got four years.

Speaker 3 Yes, yes. I'm really looking forward to desecrating the temple.
We're working on a cover of Lost in the Supermarket, where there's just nothing in the supermarket because of the tariffs.

Speaker 3 It's actually very easy to find my way around in the supermarket now because there's nothing on sale.

Speaker 3 All right, what's actually happening with the turf tariffs?

Speaker 3 I'm just going to start by reading Trump's

Speaker 3 incredible cope about why everything's going to shit. This is Trump.
This is a truth from True Social. This is Biden's stock market, not Trump.
They didn't take over until January 20th.

Speaker 3 Tariffs will start kicking in, or soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move to the U.S. in record numbers.
Our country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden, quote, overhang.

Speaker 3 This will take a while. It has nothing to do with the tariffs.
All caps. Only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other.
Be patient.

Speaker 25 This is Biden's stock market.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So the reason he's saying this is that, so today we got a report that the U.S. for the first quarter suffered the first like actual economic contraction of the economy since like 2022.

Speaker 3 And that basically there was like one quarter in 2022 where it contracted. And then it like basically since like the lockdowns, it's been expanding.
We are probably already in the recession.

Speaker 3 And the other thing, the other thing that's very important to note here, right, is you're seeing a lot of reporting about this being a contraction.

Speaker 3 And a lot of the reporting will talk about how, like, yeah, this is because people are like rushing to do their, all their imports right now before the tariffs hit.

Speaker 3 The thing is, right, this economic contraction is like before the actual substantive impact of the tariffs hit.

Speaker 3 So this is is just the beginning of like the rolling economic collapse that all of these turf tariffs are going to generate.

Speaker 3 There's been a little bit of movement in the sense that like, okay, so when I last talked about sort of the declines in like shipping from China or just shipping in general, it was mostly like sort of,

Speaker 3 I don't know what you'd call them.

Speaker 3 Shipping industry trade press. This has hit like the mainstream press now that, you know, some of these indicators are showing 60% 60% import drops from China.

Speaker 3 And it looks like China is maybe kind of starting the preliminary things to figure out how

Speaker 3 to figure out negotiations and that they've been, the Chinese government has been going behind the scenes and talking to a bunch of

Speaker 3 like high-profile American companies and has been like quietly repealing some of their 125% retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. on like very specific goods.
We'll see what happens there.

Speaker 3 There hasn't been more movement than that.

Speaker 3 What is also very interesting is that, so, okay, so like, obviously, like a bunch of like prices are just increasing already in places like like Temu and like Shein.

Speaker 3 Um, and Amazon was going to have like a counter that showed how much additional money you were spending because of the tariffs. And they announced they were going to do this.

Speaker 3 And then President Trump like got on the phone with Jeff Bezos and yelled at him. And then Jeff Bezos said he wasn't going to do it.

Speaker 3 But this is also an interesting thing because we're actually starting to see cracks between Trump and like people like Bezos, like the tech people who really have been his like closest base of support, right?

Speaker 3 For this whole entire project in terms of like

Speaker 3 large-scale sectors of capital, it's been these people who have been backing him.

Speaker 3 And I think as the stuff continues, we're going to continue to see rifts between them and the Trump administration over shit like this because

Speaker 3 You know, like people get really, really, it's something we've talked about a lot in episodes we've done on pricing and inflation is that people get really pissed off and prices go up.

Speaker 3 And that's a way to like, you know, this is a problem for these companies because this is a way you lose sort of brand loyalty. And that's like how everything goes to shit.

Speaker 3 And Trump has to, is doing all these deflections to be like, it's not actually the tariffs that are doing this because people are going to be really pissed about this. And

Speaker 3 yeah, I don't know. Welcome, welcome to quarter one of the recession.
This is going to be the best quarter of the economy for a long time. Yay!

Speaker 3 Woo!

Speaker 3 Tariff talk.

Speaker 6 Okay, so let's close out with immigration update. I'm just going to run a few of the speed, run a few of these and we'll get a little deeper into some of them.

Speaker 6 The New York Times is reporting that once again, the Trump administration is separating,

Speaker 6 has separated a child from their parents.

Speaker 3 Jesus fucking Christ. Yep.

Speaker 6 A federal court denied the government's motion to dismiss a First Amendment challenge to its policy of deporting pro-Palestine anti-genocide activists. So that allows the case to go ahead, right?

Speaker 6 So it allows a First Amendment challenge to be mounted, which is a good thing, right?

Speaker 6 Given that this is like their policy right now is a frontal assault on the First Amendment for people who are not citizens.

Speaker 6 In the Brego Garcia case, both sides agreed to a seven-day pause in the discovery process after the passing of sealed motions. Then on Tuesday, Tuesday this week, the DOJ filed another sealed motion.

Speaker 6 We can speculate, and you will see people speculating if you go onto the Blue Sky or Twitter or whatever. I don't think it's beneficial to do that in this case, right?

Speaker 6 What we should be focusing on is that a man is in a prison camp who did nothing wrong.

Speaker 6 It doesn't matter. The justice system is continuing to fail him because he is still there.
And so are hundreds of other people.

Speaker 6 The experimental, quote, national defense area in New Mexico. So we spoke last week about the Roosevelt Reservation, right?

Speaker 6 And they are starting this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation with an area in New Mexico. And we've seen the first charges that are filed against migrants.

Speaker 6 According to Washington Post, at least 28 people have been charged or added to their charges a penalty for violation of security regulations, in addition to them being charged with entry without inspection, right?

Speaker 6 Hegseth visited the area this week and he talked about how they were going to post signage in English and Spanish to indicate that crossing the area would be trespassing on US military property.

Speaker 6 Increasing numbers of migrants over the last few years have not spoken either of those languages. It doesn't seem to be something they've accounted for here.
The U.S.

Speaker 6 Attorney for New Mexico allegedly, according to the post, quote, can't wait to begin charging people who cross. So that's great.

Speaker 6 And so it does seem that they are using this, as we talked about a week or so ago, as a way to quickly charge and then deport people who are entering the United States between ports of entry.

Speaker 6 In other court news, a judge in Colorado placed a tentative restraining order on the use of the Alien Enemies Act there there without 21 days of notice in a language the person understands, advising them of their right to bring a habeas challenge.

Speaker 6 So that means if someone is going to be removed under the AEA, right, they have to get three weeks of notice and that notice has to advise them that they have the right to bring a challenge.

Speaker 6 And then, as opposed to what they're doing right now, which is deporting people extremely quickly, right? And this was upheld by the 10th Circuit. So that's in place there.

Speaker 6 It'll be interesting to see how many of them are able to bring. Still, bringing a habeas challenge is complicated.
it can be expensive, and requires a lot of legal time.

Speaker 6 And I know most lawyers who work in immigration are overwhelmed currently.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 6 In California, a judge has ruled that CBP can't carry out warrantless stops and arrests after the ACLU filed a suit in response to the CBP sector's operation Return to Sender, which happened in late 2024.

Speaker 6 So, people, this is one of the things that people may have already forgotten about, but in December of 2024, CBP started detaining residents, migrants, laborers outside a home depot, a grocery store, and at road checkpoints up into California's Central Valley, right?

Speaker 6 People are thinking, oh, the Central Valley is a very long way from El Centro. What are they doing up there? I've included a map of border patrol sectors in the sources today, so people can see.

Speaker 6 But although the El Centro sector only spans 71 miles of linear border, it goes a lot further north.

Speaker 6 So that's what they were doing up there.

Speaker 6 The judge in this case, who is U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston, said, quote, you just can't walk up to people with brown skin and say, give me your papers.

Speaker 6 There's some very good reporting on this in Cal Matters, which I've also linked in the sources today.

Speaker 6 Notably, I looked through the order today, the court order, and one of the things we get is kind of a vision into how Border Patrol is expediting these deportations, right?

Speaker 6 So I'm going to quote from that order here, quote, once Border Patrol agents transported the people they arrested to the El Centro station, they would, quote, extract voluntary departure agreements from as many people as possible without explaining the consequences.

Speaker 6 This is all

Speaker 6 this is the plaintiff's contention, which is ACLU, right?

Speaker 6 So we've seen this a lot, right? Like we saw it in the case when they detained a citizen in Tucson not so long ago, that they're trying to get people to sign these documents.

Speaker 6 Sometimes you're not actually, in most cases, I believe, you're not actually signing a physical document.

Speaker 6 You're signing one of those little uh like pressure pad screens and and you might be given an ipad to read the document on but you don't get a chance to like look and flick through the document and and then sign it up sign a physical copy of the document right the injunction that uh happened here only applies in the eastern district of california The judge also ordered Border Patrol to record all arrests and stops and report them within 40 days.

Speaker 6 The government argued this would be too burdensome, which is odd because they're already required to do paperwork when they arrest or stop someone, right? But that was overruled by the judge.

Speaker 6 Despite this, though, the El Central sector has still been carrying out operations way north of the land border, including recently outside a Home Depot in Pomona. So this is CBP, not ICE, right?

Speaker 6 People are familiar with that distinction, but at least in the Eastern District, they can't be stopping people now without warrants. So that's

Speaker 6 a good thing from the courts, I guess. Those are, I know we've got a long episode today.
Those are the most important immigration immigration things that I've come up with this week.

Speaker 6 I'm sure something will happen between us recording this coming out. But yeah, that's what I've got for you.

Speaker 25 The last thing that we'll mention is that Mohsen Matawi, the U.S.

Speaker 25 green card holder who was arrested by ICE at his citizenship interview, has been released from ICE custody as of April 30th by order of a Vermont judge.

Speaker 25 This is really the first piece of good news we've had in relation to Trump's crackdown on Palestinian protesters and student protests.

Speaker 25 So yeah, Matawi's case will still continue, but he will not be in ICE custody for the duration of this case.

Speaker 6 And I think we saw in the Mahmoud Khalil case, the judge has ordered that New Jersey is a correct jurisdiction for that case to proceed.

Speaker 6 So that offers a possibility of the same, but it's essentially the same charge that both of them have, right? Or the same reasoning for trying to remove them.

Speaker 6 So hopefully we will see a similar result there.

Speaker 25 We'll be following up on both these stories as they progress, but that does it for us today here at It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 25 We reported the news.

Speaker 3 We reported the news.

Speaker 3 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 62 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 62 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 62 You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 28 The busiest time of the year? It's here.

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Speaker 30 But who has the time?

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Stress?

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Speaker 63 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

Speaker 63 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 63 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 63 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones. I mean, Mac loves them.
You can't go wrong with the little crunchies.

Speaker 63 You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go. Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 49 A Dudley Board certified OBGYN, an endocrinologist doctor, a naturopathic and licensed acupuncture doctor, and a certified health coach walk into a room.

Speaker 47 What do they talk about?

Speaker 51 GLP-1, of course.

Speaker 38 But more specifically, the difference between the synthetic version of your body's own hormone that are prescribed by doctors nationwide versus Metabolism Ignite product, which naturally increases your body's GLP-1 by 55%.

Speaker 33 GLP-1 slows digestion, leading to bloating and discomfort, versus Metabolism Ignite, which supports your digestion and gut health.

Speaker 36 GLP-1 side effects can lead to nausea, fatigue, and muscle loss, whereas Metabolism Ignite is powered by plants and there are no side effects.

Speaker 34 Some long-term results of GLP-1 links to weight gain after stopping the synthetic drug, which has been proven in multiple studies.

Speaker 36 In comparison to Metabolism Ignite, there is no weight regain and this product supports metabolic health.

Speaker 56 The prognosis these three medical practitioners all agree upon?

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Speaker 64 That's PrimalLifeOrganics.com.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.