It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

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

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

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

Recording in progress.

Okay, check this out.

Now,

I have always been amazed by when I take a second to actually tap into like my actual network of just friends.

You know how you have friends in categories?

You know what I'm saying?

Like, you just don't, and it's just like this.

You can call me, work homie.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

Like,

you just don't really.

picture those things colliding or when like your friends like meet each other and it turns out they know each other it's the weirdest thing but anyway for me and my like podcast act activists you know activism world

you know a lot of times overlaps with the hip-hop world because you know we believe in a lot of the same stuff but like this one like really happened yeah where i was just like in my own network somebody i've known for a while who i'm just now learning your name is tristan

yeah

yeah i didn't know your name was jason yeah exactly you know what i'm saying that's how rap works so um introduce yourself however you want to be introduced.

Yeah, you know, and then let's get into it.

Hey, everybody.

I'm a Tangent Wiggy, a.k.a.

Tristan Hacker.

I got a lot of other names, too, but I'll keep it to those for now.

And I'm from San Bernardino, and I'm an artist in the community with propaganda,

as well as a state employee.

I pay disability claims for the state of California.

And in my role as a state employee, I am a union rep

and I'm an elected member of my union's executive board.

So I represent state employees from Ontario region to San Martino region and in between.

And I'm on the bargaining team.

So I go up to Sacramento and help prepare for bargaining against Governor Newsom and his team as well.

Word.

So this is like, this is frontline energy.

Okay.

Yeah.

Which I love about it because it's like, like you said, like your day job

is

in some ways, it's so crazy because it's like.

as far away as that is from

the actual like worker per se, like you have just this parasocial, like intimate relationship with everybody that works for the state.

Cause like you seeing, you know what I'm saying, what they're going through

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

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Words.

So first of all, tell them what the union is, which union are we talking about?

Yeah.

S is in Sam, E is in everybody.

I is an incredible U as in union, service employees, international union, but 1,000, right?

So, S SEIU is one of the biggest international unions in the world.

And, and, and everyone out there has probably seen the purple, purple SCIU stuff on all kinds of stuff, from nurses to state workers, yeah, to uh, in in-home support services workers, and home care nurses.

And there's a lot of different people that are under SCIU more broadly.

State employees in California are SEIU 1000.

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

All the Cali, okay, you know, all 100,000 state employees that are represented.

Damn, Okay.

And, but, uh, I am elected to the executive board of DLC 704, which is the Inland Empire.

Well, the Ontario San Bernardino part of the Inland Empire's chapter.

Where Ontario, San Bernardino.

Okay.

This is going to be very Cali specific.

Like, obviously, this everybody here who listens ain't from here.

So, like, I've, I've cracked many LA and IE jokes and just like, you know, throughout, throughout our time, you know what I'm saying?

I like to say that I have an IE passport stamped.

Like, I have my.

Pomona guy.

I worked in Pomona.

See, I didn't,

I never lived there.

Okay, but I see what I'm saying.

So, I have a strong connection to Pomona as far as I've seen.

I've seen you.

You absolutely.

That's what I mean.

Like, I'm a naturalized citizen.

I got a green card.

I got an IE green card.

Because, like, I worked in Pomona.

You know, Foundation was in Pomona.

Mike and Dem Lights was in Pomona.

For y'all listeners, these are like the hip-hop and poetry spots that I kind of grew up in.

Because since I'm, you know, born in South Central, but I'm from the 626.

So, so you come, me coming from La Puente, Valinda, Pomono is just so much more closer than

Lemert Park.

You know what I'm saying?

So

I ended up just kind of like spending a lot of time there.

And then for high school, I got, I got bused to the Inland Empire.

So I got bussed.

I went to school out of district because my parents split up.

It's a long story.

But anyway.

Sure, it happens a lot.

Yeah.

So that being said, like I have a lot of love for the Inland Empire and.

spent a lot of time there.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

So that's why I was like, I got a visa.

I got an IE visa.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

But that being said what would you say i mean it's kind of like i'm kind of springing this one on you but like what would you say would be something that's like unique a unique thing that someone from where you guys are at like a service worker where you guys are at there might be a unique issue that's specific to them that wouldn't be somewhere else i'll do two because I feel like I need two to kind of to answer it well.

One is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is a city kind of a little connected city to san bernardino highland has patent state hospital yeah which is basically arkham asylum you know it's basically arkham asylum from the batman comics which is it's a hospital for the criminally insane okay you know you know it's like like in other words like you've committed crimes but you have mental health issues yeah so you're not in the regular prison but you're not in the regular mental hospital you are in the prison for the mental patients.

Okay.

And it's a it's a massive 24-hour facility.

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

And then the second thing I would say would be the fact that where we are, we have a lot of, we service a lot, maybe more of my job, right?

We service a lot of undocumented people.

Like a lot of the disability claims I pay for the state,

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

And also people may not realize that California doesn't regulate about documented status the way that the federal government does, right?

So as long as you could prove your wages to the state of California in a legit straight paperwork kind of way, we don't care that you're undocumented.

We're going to pay you because you're a worker and you need our services.

Facts.

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

Yes, they do.

Yes, they do.

Yes, they do.

They pay a lot.

Yeah.

If you can think of just off the head, like, obviously over the years, the negotiations and different things that have come up have varied over time.

We'll get to the ice raids because that's obviously where everything got super ratcheted up, ratcheted up.

But like, what were some of the most like.

I don't like, I don't know, how would I phrase this?

Where you were like, this is the most reasonable request we can ask for.

Like, this is just like, I don't, this is so, I don't understand

why this is so hard for y'all.

Like, this is incredibly, I just want to like calibrate because a lot of times people hear, they hear the word union, they got all these pictures about what the things are and what this, you know what I'm saying?

They got all these pictures, but I'm just like, fam, you ever heard of a five-day week?

Yeah.

Like work week?

That's unions, my G.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

So like that seems very reasonable.

You know what I mean?

So, so if you could think of like some of the things you've had to negotiate, what was some of the most like, this is, I don't understand why this is so hard for y'all.

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

Yes.

You've heard people say that, right?

So So my union and other unions have been pushing for telework, you know, my entire 20 years with the state.

I'll be 17 years veteran with the state as of December, right?

Wow.

The entire time we wanted telework, it took the quarantine crisis of 2020, 2021 to actually get the state to agree to mass implement telework.

And so that was like.

That's a crisis that we made an opportunity.

That's like, hey, we needed, we needed telework.

So many people are also caring for their kids or also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring for a a new baby or, you know, taking, you know, just at the house so that contractors could come fix their plumbing.

You know, it's like

telework has been something that we thought was very reasonable for a long time that it took, it took until the COVID crisis for us to get telework.

And we feel like we're pioneers in that in a workforce way, because now there's lots of places that have telework, partly because I think the work that unions like us have done.

That's dope, man.

You know, obviously coming out of the pandemic and recently, like a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys can come back to the office.

And people are like, absolutely not.

Why?

Like, why would we do that?

How do you take it away?

How do you take it away once you got it?

Yeah, yeah.

Why would we do that?

I know my own, like, my wife, you know, she pre-pandemic at the spot she was working at.

She was working at a nonprofit.

You know, she was like,

okay, I was touring so much that she was just like, dude, like, you want me in this office at a certain time.

It's stress on the whole family.

I had to get my daughter to school.

It's, you know, just breaking her neck to figure stuff out.

She's like, I'm done with the stuff that can be done at a desk within an hour.

She's like, I'm just, I'm just scrolling the internet.

Yeah.

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

You're paying for AC.

You're paying for lights.

You're paying for

all this.

There's no reason.

Like, I don't have to be here.

You know?

Right.

And

so she pushed.

She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights, you know, figured it out.

And,

you know, without telling her business, she

actually helped the staff unionize there.

You You know what I mean?

You know what I'm saying?

She was like, look, man, this is ridiculous.

You know what I'm saying?

You got a real one.

Yeah,

don't Google it.

Anyway.

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

Sure.

We have our opinions on Mr.

Newsome.

Sure.

You know, and like, how allied are you as an ally?

Like, you know what I'm saying?

And, you know, people are complicated.

We can't always agree on the same things.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, but like, that's correct.

There's been, there have been times where it's been like, hey, you know what?

Salute.

He's doing something dope.

And then other times when he's not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Doing something dope.

The other times it's like, bro, who are you?

Yeah.

Right.

Like, what is happening right now?

So.

So obviously, you know, when you go up there, you're not interacting with him.

You're interacting with his team, right?

Yeah.

The one time I actually met him, um, I went to the California Democratic Party convention in 2012

in San Diego.

And I just went with a friend, just showed up.

I was not a delegate.

Yeah, I was a union rep already, but I had no official role.

I just showed up and walked around the San Diego Hilton, which is also where they founded San Diego Comic-Con.

And I got to meet a lot of officials, including some inland ones, including some really famous people like Nancy Pelosi's daughter.

But I went up to

at the time, Lieutenant Governor Newsom, and basically thanked him because he had just voted against a tuition hike for the Cal States and UCs.

And I went to Cal State Seminar, you know, I have my master's in poetry, my MFA in poetry from Cal State Seminarino.

And so I was still a student at the time and he had just voted against the tuition increase.

So there's a picture of me meeting him from that, from that time.

That's the only thing.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

So that, and he had just done something good.

And he said humble things about it when I thanked him for it.

So my one.

personal interaction with him was good.

But since then,

in the capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team.

Like my, our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team in Sacramento.

Where, okay, so give me one, something that's been like opposite.

Where what they were asking for, yeah, was like, this is completely unreasonable, guys.

Like, what are you talking about?

So every three years, every three years, our state employee contract goes up.

Right.

And so around the two-year mark, we start gearing up negotiations, you know, and the state Newsom has the power to summon us for negotiation and we have the power to summon his team for negotiation.

Right.

So at that two-year mark, we start negotiating.

So in 2022, we started negotiating about the 2023 expiring, you know, so that we, by the end of 23, we could have a new contract.

When you're a state employee, it's difficult.

It's hard to strike.

Right.

Like, you have to have an extremely high threshold to strike.

Like, if you're a private company and you're in a union, it's a lot easier to strike.

You guys all want to strike.

You strike.

Like that episode of the Simpsons.

Yeah.

Homework became the union.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just like, damn, I'll plan, you know, and they started striking.

Right.

Right.

With the state, because we provide essential services to Californians in need, it is an extremely high threshold in terms of what it would take for us to legally be allowed to strike.

Right.

And Newsom and his team know that.

So they could kind of like really slow walk negotiations and stop negotiating in good faith.

But as long as there's like, you know, what is it?

There's signs of life on the hospital ticker of the negotiations, then

we're still obligated to not strike.

Damn.

Right.

So in 2023, our contract expired.

Newsom was offering us one or 2% raise for the next three years.

And meanwhile, he was going on TV saying, I'll debate Ron DeSantis.

Oh, it was during that time.

I want to help

the screen actors guild finish their contract and the screenwriters guild.

And I want to, so it's like, whoa, whoa, bro.

Where are your kids?

Why are you trying to go help their kids?

It was like, why aren't you not negotiating with us, but you're on TV talking about, I want to help Harrison Ford and I want to help, you know, I want to help the actors get their contract.

And it's like, so I something

I made a TikTok recently about how I think my.

my lefty friends, and I'm lefty as hell, of course, but like artist friends, anti-establishment friends, you know, leftist friends, I hate Democrats in stupid ways, whereas there are smart ways to hate Democrats.

Okay.

Right.

Like to me, the stupid, the, the, the, the stupid way to hate Democrats is to be like, oh, both parties are the same.

I'm going to sit out and let Republicans win and hurt us worse.

Yeah.

Right.

To me, the smart way to hate on Democrats is to realize when they're doing a good thing here, they're distracting you from a bad thing here.

And then they're doing a bad thing here.

They're distracting you.

You know, it's like a good thing.

Okay.

Right.

So like Newsom at times might be capitulating to Trump on something federally, but then he does something good state domestically in the state to kind of keep his rep up or the reverse.

Maybe he's fighting with Trump on something and that's good, but he's doing some whack shit like slow walking our contract negotiations.

We're not Hollywood actors, right?

So when our contract goes up, you didn't get the news about it.

Like with the Screen Actors Guild, because that's slopping your Hulu, that's stopping your Disney Plus.

You know, you hear all about that.

When our contract expires, you don't hear about it unless you're on disability, unless you're on one of our programs.

And then you can't go to the office because we're understaffed or because something's going wrong with us, right?

Damn.

So 2023 was a pissed off time for us because he's offering us peanuts.

He was offering to help everybody else.

Let me help the actors.

Let me help the screenwriters.

Let me fight Ron DeSantis.

Let me go and go to Washington and have federal fights.

Meanwhile, our contract expired.

And when our contract expired, there's things we lose.

There's stipends we lose.

There's benefits we lose.

And he just, so he had us, had us in a bind.

So I organized a work site picket at my office in San Bernardino.

That's good.

In 102-degree weather.

We can't strike, but we can picket.

Wow.

Okay.

See, I didn't know that.

Right.

You know, so that's part of being a union rep.

It's like, what are my tools yeah you know like what are my tools like know your know your arsenal know your weaponry right and so i organized a picket we had signs me and i'm just i tear up when i think about this because i had co-workers that i didn't think were going to march in the heat with me i thought it might have been me by myself You know, I was one of only one or two union reps in my office at the time.

Now we have four because I've been recruiting, you know, and I have good people in my office, you know.

But at the time, I was one of the only union reps.

There was people who I knew had legit skepticism about the union.

I didn't expect it, but every single lunch, not just my lunch, at every lunch, we had people picketing in front of my office with signs.

People were honking in support of us.

Within a month or two, we got an 8% raise on that next negotiation.

Let's go.

You know, and so, you know, when we fight, we win.

When we unite, we win.

You know, like, you don't, we're not fighting for nothing.

And, and, and that was a do-or-die moment for me as a union organizer because I hadn't had many real fights yet.

And I had, I couldn't really point to my coworkers and say, hey, we did this and got this.

We did this and got this.

So the fact that I got my coworkers to march in 102-degree weather with me instead of just sitting in the air condition, having lunch, and that we won that a few weeks later they said you're going to get an eight percent raise that's hard you know like that i was like yes like proof of concept i have proof of concept i'm not just wasting my coworkers time i could tell you there's a tangible result to when we organize together see that's these are the type of like wins we need to hear because we've been we've been taking some l's like yes sir speaking of l's so y'all's y'all's SEIU 1000, you know, David Huerta, right?

That's his name?

David Werta is from one of the California SCIU branches.

He's tightly connected to our union, but he's not 1,000.

He's not 1,000.

Okay, words.

But he is SCIU.

So he is part of us.

Yeah.

So when ICE, you know, invaded our streets, he was outside, you know, doing what he had to do.

I know SCIU set up the thing at Alvera Street.

Yeah, they set up a location there for like to educate.

It was just such a beautiful thing.

But the first thing that got me out the house was the rally for when he was detained.

So like,

man, tell me what was going on and as much as you can behind closed doors yes so yes most of the listeners here know this story because this show is like pretty tapped in but yeah right

so what what i would say is this to me is an opportunity to talk about like the cultural differences with with inland and la right because yeah the union is very progressive right but the inland is a much more conservative area right and uh compared to los angeles compared to san francisco compared to you know it's not as big of a city it's more impoverished yeah you know that there's a lot of re you know even just the geography of it, right?

People may grew up in the city.

Like

my mom grew up around where you're talking about, La Cuente and El Monte.

I was born in El Monte, right?

But there was a suburban exodus in the late 80s of like people who wanted to go from that East LA 626 area to raise their kids in the inland because that was the more conservative suburb.

Right.

So for me, every time something like that happens with something like a David Huerta or something in one of the bigger cities happens and we're fighting with the right wing about things, it's a matter of me educating my inland people about why we care and why we're all connected.

And then there's there's always some people, and I got to respect this as a union organizer, I really have to be able to talk with my more conservative members because there are people in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me.

They're just workers who want to be represented, right?

I was going to say, that's actually a good point to hammer down because like last year, one of the shows on our network covered a union strike at a, I want to say it was like a metal plant in Alabama.

Like in the sticks of Alabama, these are good old boys from the south, but

one thing we can agree on me is like, pay me what I'm worth.

Like, you know what I'm saying?

Like, it just seemed pretty simple to me.

I don't understand how you got to be a progressive to want to be paid what you worth, you know.

So

I think that that's a good point to say that like, even in a rather conservative place, all of us want to go home and eat, you know, and earn the wages that I should be.

Yes.

Pay me what I'm worth.

It just, it seemed that simple.

Exactly.

And so, so that's a tension that happens, right?

And this is kind of, this is probably a discussion that happens among a lot of progressive groups in general that like there's people who want you to focus on your, on your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're part of an interconnected society where it's like, if the immigrants are being harmed, then the laborers are being harmed.

And if the artists are being harmed, then the nurses are being harmed.

If the teachers are being, you know, so there's always that divide, but in the inland, which is a more conservative area, there's especially that divide between people who are like, I don't want my union fighting about immigration and ICE.

I don't want my union fighting about the environment.

Wow.

I don't want the union fighting about LGBT.

I just want the union to fight for my raise.

I want the union to fight for my telework.

And that's all I want them to do.

Right.

So that's a big thing

for me is to kind of explain to people how, no, David Wuerta fighting for immigrant rights is him fighting for you as a worker.

Okay.

You know, because if they came for them, they could come for you.

So that's kind of how I see that.

Yeah.

Did you feel like it landed well?

It always does with some and it doesn't with some.

You know, I'll be honest with you.

There are people who just left the union.

After the Charlie Kirk killing.

Oh, wow.

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

So Kamala is in the union.

And I'm like,

so you don't want that raise?

You really red stringing that joint.

That is definitely the always sunny in Philadelphia meme of just you like tying these strings together.

Like, bro, I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

Right.

And so to be honest, there's been some of that.

You know, I'll say this, the Charlie Kirk gave us more of that than the immigration stuff, but there's always those few whispers from a few people who are like, they're just not down with the broader cause.

Those of us who are in the leadership of the union, I think we have solidarity.

You know, we have solidarity, not just with other state workers, but with anyone who's in any SAIU, but with Teamsters, with anyone who's in any union, and with Californians, anyone who is somebody who is in a vulnerable group.

And so there's just always that difference of opinion.

I would say overall, let's say 60% hits in a good way.

And in my area, because it's so conservative, let's say 40% it doesn't.

And it's something we work on.

That's interesting.

Okay, my last two questions would be this.

Like, I'll give them both.

Like, so what are y'all currently kind of like pushing for?

I'm assuming it has a lot to do with immigration and ice rates and stuff, but also in what ways can we as just a broader community help?

Well, how do I put this?

So I work in downtown San Bernardino.

Okay.

And my disability office is next to the Mexican consulate.

Let's go.

First of all, we need to paint a picture of San Bernardino.

I really feel like for those that don't know California, the nature of what San Bernardino is is a part of this story that you might be missing.

First of all, like, okay, all that you picture, everything that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was in the 90s, all the pictures that you think, you know what I'm saying, that you go, oh,

it's really San Bernardino.

Like, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm trying to say this in a way that's descriptive and not derogatory, because obviously, like, it's always Callie Love for me.

And I, you know, I'll, of course, but there is a certain,

there's a certain part of San Bernardino that feels like, like, just a spirit of like, we just gave up.

The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead.

That's exactly it.

It feels like a zombie land, like just this dark.

I remember the Carousel Mall.

Like, you walk by that mall.

It's eerie.

It just feels like when people talk about the forgotten man, the the forgotten American, I'm like San Bernardino.

Yeah.

Like, yes.

We didn't gave up on that city.

Yeah.

It had recently gone from 230,000 people to only 200,000 people.

But also, probably because a lot of the people that left were the most impoverished people, our poverty rate went from, let's say, in the post-Bush II recession, like 2010, we had a 30% poverty rate.

We were the most impoverished city in the state.

We've gotten down to like 17% poverty, which is still bad.

Yeah.

You know, that's still almost one, one out of five people.

What was it?

It's very diverse.

I mean, as someone who pays attention to politics, it has all the problems, exactly like you said, all the problems that people talk about when they say the important problems.

It's post-industrial.

There's gun violence.

It's diverse.

There's poverty.

You know, there's environmental issues because it's such a warehouse empire.

Yeah.

Because it's such a

area of freight and warehouses.

It's like the air quality is some of the worst in the state.

Yeah.

You know, we have real problems.

You know, we got real problems.

And in downtown, downtown San Merdino is a lot of where the problems are.

We want to get it like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and some of the other nicer downtowns, but it's just not there yet.

And there are people absolutely working on that.

And like there are a couple alleyways in the city.

It sounds so

humble, but we have a couple alleyways in the city that got $500,000 grants recently to kind of make them an ARCS alleyway to kind of look like something more like the Claremont Village.

Let's go.

And so, yeah, you know, and so we are always working on it.

And I will always, you know, as somebody who founded, co-founded the Inland Empire Music Award Show and other platforms that I put on, not just my art, but I help put on other artists in the Inland.

I will always tell you about the amazing tacos you could get in my city, the amazing small businesses you could support in my city, the amazing art community put on by my OGs like Judah One of Pomona, like Noah James of the Inland and Lisa J and many others, you know, who've helped build a really beautiful ecosystem.

Like there's,

please come, come to San Marino and hit me up and I'll take you to safe, beautiful parts of it, you know?

But yes, it's, it's rough.

To your point, I know I want you to get to the next thing, but to your point, that was the same as that picture of content to where it's like, yes, like in the sense that like, we know it's dangerous, we know there's poverty, we know there's that, but there's beauty here.

There's dope stuff, you know, and let me come like and again like just the hood rules where it's like well you and me like so you're good you know what i'm saying like

you know and some of the yeah like we can we can definitely shine lights like i said like you know i've talked about noah james on this show you know i'm saying i've talked about judo one you know that i talked about sincere c4 like the people that like i came i came up with you know i'm saying yeah the inland empire a lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to la

is really IE, you know what I'm saying?

Yes, sir.

And we know, like, we know, because they're not lying about it.

We know that.

Matter of fact, nobody has pride about IE got pride, boy.

Like, they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

We are the inland.

And I love that about y'all.

Anyway, I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels.

Check it out.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

You know, yeah, because the IE got a high zone.

IE got a high zone.

So, yeah.

Okay.

So, anyway, so your office is next to the Mexican consulate.

Mexican Consulate, right?

And so, I've actually spent my, you know, I've been at this office in San Marardino since 2014.

And for five years before that, I worked in the Riverside office.

But I've been in my office in San Marino 2014.

And I have gone to so many, I've infiltrated so many right-wing protests that are in front of the Mexican consulate.

Yes.

And like, and like, so I'll go hang out with them.

They're like, oh, what are you guys, what are you guys doing?

And then I'll like take their markers, I'll take their posters and I'll just kind of be like, oh, yeah, maybe you have a point there.

And then I'm like, I'm in my office.

And then my, my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office is like, oh, where'd we get these markers?

Like, I got you some markers.

You know, and so I'll infiltrate right-wing protests.

But on the flip side, lately, ICE knows they could come to my corner.

And my corner in downtown has the Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican Consulate, the Disability Office, the old City Hall building.

It's like the hub.

It's one of the downtown hubs of the city.

And ICE has been coming and snatching people up in front of my office.

It's happened twice at least in the last month.

And one of the days that it happened, I was in the office.

I called my congressman.

I called

the mayor.

I got all the local authorities involved.

By the end of the day, the horse-mounted horse-mounted unit of my city's police was like patrolling to make sure ICE wasn't messing with us.

Wow.

And I tell you, homie, what a weird place this is.

I've never been so happy to see the regular cops.

Right, right, right.

You know,

what is this timeline?

What are you doing to me?

Yeah.

What are you doing to me?

We're like,

I'm in 7-Eleven at 6 in the morning getting my coffee.

And I see regular cops.

I'm like, thank you, sir, for at least showing a warrant.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Are you

know, because ICE is doing none of that?

None of it.

None of that.

They're not doing warrants to do it.

They took, I I don't want to cry.

They pushed a wife out of the way.

She's like, what are you doing?

They took the husband, tossed him in the van, and drove off.

It all happened so fast that no one was able to film it.

Damn.

In this era, no one was able to film it.

And they know that they're doing it that fast.

That's the trick.

Yeah.

That's the trick.

That's what we've been telling.

Like, a lot of people have asked me, just friends from out of town, like, dude,

has it toned down?

And I was like, no, it just went underground.

It's like they just, they're a lot more sneaky now.

Like, it's not this big display of power.

It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where, like you said, you just getting your gas.

Like you just out here pumping gas and then somebody just, and it's so fast, I can't film it.

You know what I'm saying?

Yes.

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

And that's a thing that happened, man.

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

Yeah.

You know, and

it's arguable that the Trump administration is empowering people like that.

Man.

Yeah.

So, so, yeah, it absolutely is happening.

To be honest, my union,

we're going to always support the actions that are fighting back against it, but the only things that we really have jurisdiction to actually fight

is the labor-related story.

And so,

we actually just got telework extended in exchange for delaying our raise.

Because the state's really broke right now for a lot of reasons.

We delayed for two years a raise that we were about to get in July.

So, they're already a couple months past not having that raise.

But in exchange, we got our telework agreement extended for two years.

So what I would tell people who want to get involved is like, if you are in a workplace that has a union, get involved, you know, and or if you had someone in your life like me who does union stuff outside of work, next time they invite you to a phone bank or next time they invite you to an event, go go support because we're absolutely, we were at the No Kings protests.

We were at the anti-ice protests.

Like

we're in the unofficial capacity.

We're going to we're going to do all those kinds of things to support the broader community.

and and even though it's my union like for example on wednesdays we have a lot of our meetings we're doing uh phone banking for prop 50 right which is the whole redistricting which gives us the power to take some seats away from the republicans i know there's a lot of there's a debate to be had there but ultimately it's it's us trying to take keep some power away from the right wing and you don't have to be in my union to go to those phone banks if you want a phone bank to help prop 50 pass so we could take some republican seats away from the federal house of representatives hit me up hit up anybody in in you know in the inland empire chapter of seiu and we can bring you to a phone bank in ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever, and we could phone bank against these dang Republicans.

Yeah, man, man, tangent.

I appreciate this, man.

I appreciate you, man.

I've been wanting to have, wanted you to have me on.

I love your show.

And I love you, man.

I think you're such a cool dude.

I think you're wise.

I think that you're engaging the community in a cool way.

You're an artist.

I respect a lot.

And not just me.

I mean, friends like Sincere.

Explain to me why you're significant to them and why you're an influence and stuff like that.

So I appreciate even being on your radar, brother.

Man, stop it.

Stop it some more.

I'm just kidding.

My wife says that.

Okay, so perfect.

Well, then tell us how people need to hear your music, how they can get in touch with you, how they can follow you.

Give me all the links.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So T-A-N-J-I-N-T,

it's tangent.

You know, you can find me on everything, Twitter, Instagram, you know, Facebook.

What was it?

The Inland Empire Music Award Show that I'm a co-director and co-founder of is at it'sonlyempire.com.

That's

I-T-SONLENEEMPIRE.com.

And also, I want to encourage Inland Empire artists: you know, you still have from now till the end of September to submit to the award show.

And we've been doing it for three years.

We partner with nonprofits and businesses.

We throw a dope-ass

gala, yeah, you know, award show at a little arts center in downtown San Merdino at the Garcia Center for the Arts, where we give away real trophies and real awards, and we have red carpet media and performances.

It's like the Grammys for the Inland Empire.

So, you know, please get involved in it's onlyempire.com.

That's Only Empire Now.

Fam Likely is my group with Diesel.

We got a new album out.

That's like, scam likely on your phone, but fam likely because it's likely that your fam is hitting you up.

Uh, fam likely, West Coast Avengers is my first group, the more nerdcore inland empire stuff.

And we got an album that came out just under a year ago now, The Harvest.

So,

I'm everywhere.

You can catch everything, all over the place.

Yeah,

tangent wiggle.

Thank you so much, my brother.

Hey, thank you, man.

Much love.

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There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town.

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Dig into the deep earth and cut it out.

The village is ravaged.

Entire families have been consumed.

You know how, waking up from a dream, a familiar place can look completely alien?

Get back, everyone.

And if you see the devil walking around around inside of another man you must cut out the very heart of him burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning from iHeart podcasts and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey this is Havoc Town a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe starring Jules State and Ray Wise Listen to Havoc Town on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

The devil walks in Abbastown.

Welcome to It Could Happened Here, a podcast about why everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged.

I am your host, Via Wong.

And oh boy, things feel bad?

I don't know.

This is my most, this is my most Robert S.

Kitcher in a while.

With me to talk about why everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump and

the

way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that you interact with is Vicki Osterweil, who is a writer and editor at the Collective Journal Call,

doer of many things,

agitator.

Busy.

I'm very busy.

I think it says bricklayer.

That's right.

Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended Universe out April 14th of next year that is about the way that Disney sort of took over the world through the deployment expansion and usage of the violence of the copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours.

So we'll be talking some more about that and about Disney's long history of fascist bullshit

towards the end of the show.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, here, Mia.

Thanks.

And yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel, you know, in this moment, I think.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

Jimmy's Kimmel.

Oh, that's the one I posted that.

I love you.

Okay.

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

Yeah.

And I think part of the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval rating is really low.

Like people don't actually like him.

It's like 41%.

His approval rating is 41%.

It's down like a point in September, even with all the Charlie Kirk stuff.

It's still down.

Yep.

His most popular policy is immigration policy, which is terrifying, but his most popular policy is pulling at 42%.

So no one actually likes him or anything that he does, right?

And like, 41% is still like a lot of people, but it's not the majority of the country.

Yeah.

Notably, like by how math works.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

There's been a few things I think are interesting about this.

There are signs that this is actually really,

really, there's something substantive happening here.

One of them was a special election that I think people paid attention to for about two days and then forgot about, which was a special election in Iowa, which like prevented the GOP from getting a two-thirds supermajority in

the state legislature.

And the Democrats, somehow, miraculously, even though the Democrats are hideously unpopular, they won a special election in a district in Western Iowa that was plus 11 for Trump this year.

And this is not like a like, this is a district that is like just Sioux City or something or like, you know, this is a, this is a gerrymandered ass district that is like a little bit of Sioux City and then stretched out all the way into a bunch of rural areas to like defuse the vote.

They won this district by 11 like last year.

They lost this election by 11 points in Western Iowa.

Yeah.

Unhinged.

They're doing like all the elections like is like that.

It's it's ridiculous.

Like, and again, this, this is like, this is again, like voting for people who are like not popular, but it's like literally any alternative.

People are like, holy shit, Western Iowa is like, nah, fuck this.

This fucking sucks ass.

Like,

it's, yeah.

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

Yeah.

Soybean, soybean crops and corn crops are going to be rotting in the fields.

You know, I think soybean, soy in particular, something like 50% of the U.S.

soy crop is traditionally exported.

And by traditionally, I mean every year exported to China.

This year, China is not buying any American soybeans.

Yep.

So literally half of the market is going to die.

And I don't know, you know,

sometimes these numbers don't.

don't really do justice.

If half of an economy collapses, that's the whole economy collapsing.

That's not, that's not like, oh, yeah, they just like took a haircut.

Like that's massive.

Yeah.

American farmers are like the most bailed out class of people who are not like major corporations in the entire world.

And it's not working.

Like they, they keep, they keep being like, oh, it's okay.

We'll just like give you a bunch of money.

And it's not enough because China has decided not to buy any of the soybean crop.

And it's like, okay.

And this is something we talked about like.

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

Yeah.

They're pissing off like the farmers.

They're pissing off like the major pharmaceutical companies.

They're pissing off the military.

They're pissing off a whole bunch of the parts of the government bureaucracy.

Like they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones over like Comey's stuff that they're still mad about.

And then the guy they put in charge of it is just like completely incompetent.

And it's like, okay.

There's only so long you can sort of go like systematically alienating every part of your coalition, just like basically attempting to drop a bomb on the economy every single week.

And sometimes it drops and sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah, exactly.

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

You know, of different sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while.

Now it's really bad.

No one can get a job.

Yep.

Right.

Like things are really like prices are going up, up, up.

Everyone feels bad.

And yet the stock market is still achieving highs.

And I think there's sort of a a generalized equivalent strategy of like make it look like things are normal and good and like that will actually support things materially and like yep i mean maybe it will forever maybe the bottom will never fall out i don't know i don't think that's i think that's a bad bet but like okay

Yeah, well, but I think the interesting part of this too is if you look at what's going on with the economy, and it's also worth noting, right?

Like the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms, looks fine, or not fine, but it looks sort of okay,

right?

The stock market's still growing.

There's technically like economic growth.

But comma,

we both saw this chart a couple of weeks ago that is the most unhinged thing I've ever seen in my entire life, which is there is a GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst, which shows that tech in the last like year roughly, and like in the last

sort of like short term window, it's been 35 to 45% of all US GDP growth.

Yeah.

And when I say tech, by the way, like to be clear about this, it is technically a composite of like all the sector, right?

But like it's basically just the like the top, like the five big tech companies, right?

Yep.

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

Yep.

Yep.

And this is all, because this is all of this GDP growth, quote unquote, is AI boom stuff, right?

It's like massive fixed capital investments.

Sure.

It's like, yeah, there's like incredible fixed capital investments, but the fixed capital investments are just

we're building a diesel-powered AI data center somewhere in Tennessee that is going to poison the entire population for no benefit.

Yeah.

And it's like all these companies like have gone just completely, totally all in on AI, a thing that doesn't make any money, can't make any money, and structurally will not make any money.

And this is like a third of the growth of the economy.

We are actually living through the famous old tweet, the drill.

Is it drill about the candles?

Someone helped fix my economy.

We're living in the candles tweet.

The whole economy is candles.

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

Yeah.

Like there just isn't, right?

The cash flow of these companies is like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is just unbelievable.

And I think this is one of the disconnect things, right?

Because like it's interesting, you're starting to see a little bit of stuff crop up from like local level politicians where every once in a while you get them be like, oh, yeah, no, it is like a recession economy like on the ground in like Wisconsin.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, no, and I think, you know, you went exactly where, you know, I mean, we had talked about going, but we were going to go, which is that like part of what is so crazy making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between sort of the on-the-ground experience that everyone's been having for years now, but is like especially intense, and like the fact that like

AI is very obviously not

interesting or good and no one likes it.

And like, even the people who sort of are, I think mostly in good faith, like trying to take it seriously, and who are like, Yeah, it's going to change everything.

Like, you know, like normie people at in work stuff, like they don't really use it very much.

Or if they do use it, like, it's not effective.

There wasn't a campaign to force everyone to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened.

Everyone wanted one because it was like obvious what it did for you.

No, you know, they're obviously whatever.

This is not a defense of the smartphone, but like there is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right?

That like the AI economy is nonsense, that like the economy that everyone says is doing fine feels bad.

And this has been going on since, you know, Biden campaigned on, you know, oh, it's just a vibe session.

The, the, you know, the, the economy is fine.

And like the economy wasn't fine.

No.

One of the charts I really am obsessed with is a chart from like Bloomberg, which is like small business owner confidence from like 2010 to 2025.

And like, if you look like from 2016 to 2020, which is the first Trump term, it goes up like 500%, right?

Jesus Christ.

It just goes up.

It just is huge.

It's the highest it's been by huge margin and it just drops again in 2020.

So it finally made me understand why so many libs were like so committed to the vibe session analysis because there was a massive vibe inflation under the first Trump administration.

So the reason people felt like the economy was good was because small business owners, and this is the classic analysis of fascists, right?

Is it like the petty bourgeois, the small business owners?

They were like, this is the best times you've ever lived through based on no evidence.

And if you work for a business and your boss is like, things are booming.

We're doing great.

You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely to believe it.

You know, like if everyone around you is saying that, like, there's no reason to doubt it unless, I mean, you know, you don't really believe your boss a lot of the time, but you know what I'm saying.

Like, it's just, it hasn't, it has an effect of making everyone feel like things are better.

That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election, November 2024.

Before Liberation Day, but on the announcement of the Liberation Day tariffs, tanks.

So that's gone.

Yeah.

It's gone.

Yep.

Yep.

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

Yes, yes.

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

Right.

And if you're, and if you are in this sort of like world, which is again, enormous portions of all of the economic growth, right, that is happening is coming out of these places.

And it's like, oh, this really does look like the future is here if you suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you.

And it's like, well, maybe coding just wasn't that hard to begin with, maybe.

But like, you know,

I say this as someone who learned to code and hated it.

But like,

you know, but like it creates these sort of like self-reinforced like reality tunnels.

But every thing about the reality tunnels is like every once in a while, like the actual world comes in like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it.

And that's what happened to the small business people was they were like, oh shit, what do you mean they got rid of the de minimistic section?

What do you mean they're putting all these tariffs up?

What do you mean they're like just straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistics system that had been moved like that's the basis of like most American small businesses are like our shipping businesses, right?

Like or they're either either directly shipping businesses or they rely on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries.

And this even goes into like the grift economy, right?

Like massive portions of the grift economy are just

drop shipping grift bulbs.

Supplements, stacks.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Like

you know, it's another reality tunnel.

Mia.

Oh, these products and services.

Damn it.

That was a better one than I was going to do.

I was going to do, if you know what else is a scam, but

these products and services that support this podcast.

We are so back.

We have never been more back.

I want to kind of also talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as this has been going on, which is that Trump and his party have staged a pretty successful takeover of a lot of it.

You know, you had, I mean, Elon Musk, obviously buying X, but like they're in the process of taking over CBS.

Basically, by using the fact that quote-unquote free media is actually capitalist media and you can just buy them out and bully them by threatening them with losing money.

You can, in fact, just completely get them to fall in line or have your own rich backers just buy it.

And I think this, this is sort of fueling the disconnect, right?

Where there was also this, this post-2020, all of like this, the senior management level of all of the newspapers kind of lost their minds in 2020 because their staff was like, no, we don't want to print Tom Cotton calling for the U.S.

Army to be deployed against protesters.

And these people were like, okay, fuck it.

We're just like, you know, you see it was like the Washington Post.

They were like, yeah, we will literally rather burn the post than have that happen again.

And the post obviously is like under the control of Jeff Bezos, who is a Stalward Trump ally.

And I think this has been contributing to it because they've been able to take over social media platforms and they've been able to take over the sort of corporate like bourgeois media.

And it's created this incredible unreality of this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular leader and that the things he do is are popular and that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff.

And it's like, well, I mean, there kind of has been a cultural shift in terms of like,

you know, elite liberals are allowed to be racist again.

Fuck.

Which,

you know,

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

It's like, and they, you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed up under COVID, right?

Like this is, this is also contagious in a way.

And yeah.

But yeah, no, I think that that's exactly right.

And I think part of what we saw in the last week, I mean, I know we were going to talk about this a bit, that like the last week when we're recording this, which was the week of the Charlie Kirk memorializing, when everyone pretended that ventilating a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had befallen American heroes.

And I saw a lot of people who had been up until then, relatively level-headed, suddenly really start to panic that week and feel like things were really.

And I think part of that was because

With a man as absolutely risless and as obviously malicious and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk, getting that treatment like he was, you know, Robert Redford or whatever he was at past.

I think that happening in unison across all the media, I think people finally realized, like, oh, everything is totally captured.

And the people who hadn't really thought that felt like that there was sort of this unanimity, the unanimity you're talking about, because they're able to project this unanimity through this one sort of media voice.

And like the fact that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel getting fired and there being like a a genuine upswell of popular attention about the man show guy, like like who hasn't been funny like probably since he was 14 or whatever.

I think a lot of people have focused on that as being extremely embarrassing and cringe, which like, yeah, accurate.

But I think like also like they couldn't even hold it together for a week.

right like they couldn't even hold this full court press together for a week they had that charlie kirk documentary they were like we're gonna film it on you know on sinclair all the places where we would be showing jimmy kimmel they just canceled it they put it on youtube yeah 26 000 views.

This means, and I am very, very proud of this.

More people listen to me complaining about the way that everything everywhere all at once was spreading the bourgeois patriarchal ideology of the family.

More people listen to me talk about that on this show than watch the stupid fucking Charlie Gart Memorial.

Yeah, sorry to that man, but people do not care.

Like people don't care about that guy.

And it didn't.

And also, as you said at the opening, his polls have gone down.

People are like shut up about this like they don't care it doesn't work and like

polls aren't everything but like you know I think that this disconnect that's so hard is that if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment which all of us do like that's how most of us get all of our information that's this is not a judgment it feels like Everyone is like, you know, is at like half mast you know for their for their beautiful their beautiful boy.

Look what they did to my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and caught bullets.

Like, a Fox News article said that he was like particularly strong-bodied and

he saved other people.

Okay, I need to talk about this for a second because this is so fucking unhinged.

What?

Okay, so his like surgeon or whatever was like, oh yeah, he was, he started, his surgeon wrote a thing about like this bone that doesn't exist in your deck.

That he was like, oh yeah, he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet.

And this got like picked up by like Fox News, who's now running a story about this magical iron bone in Charlie Kirk's neck that like God put there or something to save.

I just, it's, it's so weird.

Yeah, I can read the headline for you.

Hang on, I've got it here.

Oh, God.

This is Fox News on X.

There's a picture of Charlie Kirk.

It says, surgeon says Charlie Kirk's body stopped bullet in, quote, absolute miracle that saved others, TPUSA says.

And then, quote, man of steel, Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet that would typically, quote, just go through everything.

And it was, quote, an absolute miracle.

nobody else was killed his surgeon told turning point usa so that's weird behavior that people don't like that's not yeah no so i think like basically they have this capacity to do this like really really intense unified message across the entire spectrum of the media.

And we're seeing it again right now with like NPR publishing basically, does Tylenol actually cause autism?

The science isn't out yet, you know, or whatever, like as their headline, you know?

Yeah.

So like, obviously, like that's scary if you're used to a reality which is shaped largely by the media.

And, and Trump has gotten into office twice based on a media reality shaping effect.

Um, the media has been the main tool, both social and mainstream, um, for putting him into power.

So, it's understandable to take it seriously because it does need to be taken seriously.

But there's other stuff going on.

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

Yes.

Which was like sub one week.

Yeah, no, it was sub one week.

And, and, you know, to me, that says that actually the boycott spread real fast and real far.

Yeah.

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

People were really mad.

And, you know, yeah, it's again, it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel, but it's not really about jimmy kimmel right it's because everyone hates this man they hate this yeah and people don't actually want this dip to just literally and you know and he's trying to do this again right he's apparently trying to sue disney like they don't want the

orange guy to be able to just straight up say what is legal to say on tv yeah which is the thing that he is attempting to do right now And the other thing about it that I think is really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't go to the press and fire this man.

They pull strings behind the scenes.

They get him to retract like on his show in a way that causes no attention.

And the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they probably don't really think much about it, right?

That is how like real, really smooth.

smooth repression of a free press into a bot press involves a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes.

And in fact, it has been happening for 20 years in america there has been a lot of that going on yeah part of what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain way is that trump just needs to do less things have been set up for fascism for a while he just needs to do less and he can't help himself they can't help themselves because they're you know because they need it to be in this sort of public mode and also he's lost his you know his juice but yeah yeah well and it's also just like i mean this is also partially trump is just like pathologically obsessed with late night comedy

because he's a TV guy.

And so he's just mad on, red and mad, and nude online, except like the previous version of it, where like you were just like throwing shit at your television set in like 1955,

which is a really, really terrifying thing to have in the presidency.

But you know, speaking of, speaking of having things in the presidency, these products and services,

look, if they paid me more, you'd get better transitions.

But they don't.

So vote for them.

We are back.

So, you know, I think it's worth noting that, like, yeah, I know, like, like the immediate financial pressure of, you know, just the collision of wait, hold on, like.

the people who buy things, which is most people.

Admittedly, like, Disney adults are a very narrow subset of people, but like

the speed and rapidity of which reality, which is people don't like this guy, hit the like sort of, you know, just like just like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of the Charlie Kirk stuff was just unbelievable.

You know, and like part of this, this is something that Marissa Cabas from The Handbasket reported, which is that part of what was going on was Disney was about to roll out a price increase.

Yeah.

And so they had to bring it back so they could do their price increase, which, well, brother, just delay the price increase.

If you're trying to to do authoritarian whatever okay yo

i am happy these people suck at doing this oh it's great we like it we like that they're bad at it right yeah you know like disney is being pressured here but i think it's worth talking about something that you have been spending a ungodly amount of time in the minds of yeah which is disney and fascism

oh boy yay um

yeah i mean part of what's been so funny about this week for me um personally, and that's what really matters, obviously, is that

like, you know, when we went into this administration, we started seeing what they were doing.

I was like, I can't believe I'm writing a book about free trade and lawfare, right?

Like warfare by law, like, you know, like sort of this, this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart.

right like that like yeah like farm the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow to the ip regime sorry the intellectual property regime the ip regime is what i analyze in the book I've just written and is coming out in April.

And it's about how Disney really was like a sort of pioneer in understanding the value of intellectual property and manipulating it, and how you can see that through the entire corporate and artistic history of Disney studios.

So it's about like Disney movies and how they're all connected.

They actually all sort of tell stories about IP in certain ways and how we sort of miss that angle on them very often, very frequently, and misunderstand how much IP functions in the broader society.

Because, for example, fast fashion companies, now I I know you said, talk about Disney.

I'm talking about something else, but fast fashion companies, they actually own very, very little materially.

So their offices are leased mostly.

Their factories are contracted.

You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted.

They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores, right?

They like have very few direct employees other than like store level, if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise.

They might not even employ the store level people, but they probably do.

Store level people, corporate employees, and then they own their IP.

And maybe they own a headquarters building somewhere, right?

Like that's a fancy building.

And everything else is quote unquote owned by them controlling the designs, the logos, the images.

And they can guarantee that they can make almost infinite money off of that

because

the global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that would make people who would like to see any human rights thing enacted blush with shame.

And it is incredibly effective.

It is the one thing that international law does quite well is

enforce copyright and trademark and patent.

So when you have stuff like the, you know, you can no longer ship under $800 without tariffs, like those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because they don't own ships.

They don't own factories.

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

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

Exactly.

And they're so close.

They're so close.

They're extremely close.

And all this stuff is destroying it.

So I was like, well, great.

Now I've written this whole book about how Disney, you know, is actually really like a state actor.

And like they have.

They have like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District,

which you may or may not know about.

People talked about Celebration Florida a bit when that happened in the 2000s, which is like a weird, creepy company town that they run.

They actually own a huge section of, it's like two counties.

It's larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida.

Jesus Christ.

What?

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

Um, so basically, Jesus Christ, Disney made the first networks, they did it, they actually did it, and they've been doing it for 30 years.

They are no, no, that's

69 is when they get the deal for Rita Creek.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've had it for a long time for a long time.

People don't love to talk about this for some reason.

I think it's really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting.

But the reason that that's all really, really connected to intellectual property is because one of the things that Disney did, despite, you know, having literally their own statelet in the middle of Florida,

is maintain themselves as the magic kingdom.

They are associated with childhood, nostalgia, magic, even as they've grown and grown and grown into this behemoth, like they've managed to largely stay connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood.

And there have been moments in the 90s, they overreached a bit.

There have been like, you know, there have been problems, and you can read all about that.

But basically,

they did image management on all these different levels.

So they managed Mickey Mouse, they managed the law around copyright.

Like copyright extensions famously were largely driven by Disney lobbying in 1976 and then again in 1998.

Yep.

Anyway, so all of these things,

I'm trying to reduce a very big argument to a very small package here, but basically Disney designed and

the other IP businesses that work around it have figured out that if you can control the way your product appears in the market and you can control the like images and the

feelings people have about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you can really do whatever you want materially.

behind the scenes, right?

That like that like that like controlling an image is so powerful.

And part of why like what's happening with Disney, why it's falling apart so fast is because if they give in to Trump at all, it requires shattering that image that has been a century in the making, right?

Like part of what was so brutal about the thing with Jimmy Kimmel was like, it's just obvious that Disney did that, that the corporate people did that, and they did it because Trump did it publicly.

Trump is humiliating these corporations publicly, right?

He's humiliating them.

He's forcing them to come to heal.

It's not working popularly.

He's not capturing anti-corporate sentiment, really.

People are like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel?

Like, that's weird.

You're a creep.

Yeah.

But then also, he's also destroying the legitimacy of everyone.

It's, it's pulling everything down around him.

It's a family annihilation, right?

He's so angry about 2020 and like being tried that he's just going to rip everything down around him.

Wow, that was a, I just said a lot of different things, but, but all of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about like.

the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship to Disney is that Disney has for so long built this image of America that has managed to persist like across and against, you know, a century of increasingly violent, ineffective, and visible imperialism, like in Korea and Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was so crucial to the image of what American capitalism was.

And then Trump, a man who is just as built by images as the Disney Corporation, comes and is just like.

just is ripping it all down because he's sort of you know one gaping narcissistic wound right like running running a country right yeah so if you if you look at the history of like Disney in general, Hollywood, and intellectual property management in general, what you can see is the way that we have, that this, this media apparatus has been built.

When I say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know, when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever, they just think about stuff on TV.

But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate through society.

And it's like,

the way that you get paid for your job with, you know, like the idea of clout is like actually part of that.

Like it does function as a form of payment, right?

Like it's not like people make fun of that, like, oh, good, but like then everyone acts as though it's real, right?

And when everyone acts as though it's real, it's real.

It's a social relation.

So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on images that rely only on being forced through a sort of massive groupthink from the top of the economy and the political class, was built by these corporations, but it was built explicitly to, you know, reap as much wealth as possible for their shareholders.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, to make money.

Yeah.

Trump is too perfect a product of that.

And this regime is too perfect a product of that.

And now it's all, it's all, you know, it is its own gravedigger, you know?

Yeah.

Report has a line about like the way that the spectacle sort of like intrudes into and like becomes reality.

And like if Disney is sort of like the stage manager of this, right?

Like Trump just is the thing.

like come to life and powering through it and he doesn't because he is the image and not the thing that creates the image he has different interests

than the people who create the image, who are, you know, trying to make money.

Trump is trying to like

satisfy all of his like

vindictive sort of narcissistic rage.

Exactly.

It's worth remembering that although the damage he's doing is extremely real,

he genuinely is fighting over the election and over like Comey.

Like he is like, he really believes these things.

This is a regime that believes the things that, for example, Karl Rove would teach people to say to get away with doing what they wanted to do, right?

These are, these are, as you said, they are the image itself.

They are true believers in the spectacle.

And as such, break the fourth wall, right?

If we're going to use a theater metaphor here.

As such, they end up like just destroying it.

And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture the spectacle, right?

And then there were all the people, as you described, and the people who make the spectacle, maintain the image, make the image.

They were around him.

So they would just, they would just close up the puncture.

They would close up the suture.

They would work really, really hard, right?

So, what I mean by that is like Trump would say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would be like the controversial statement from President Trump, right?

Which like completely normalizes it, and like everyone would sort of pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatic shit.

And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right?

Like people would just pretend that it was normal.

Yeah, that he was speaking at four seasons total landscape.

Yeah, right.

Like, it would just like shit would happen.

Exactly.

And everyone would sort of try to normalize it.

And that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle.

And it made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch august institutions such as the Washington Post going over backwards to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim.

Right.

So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him as he punctured it.

Right.

But he

He has actually too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair.

He actually thought they were his enemies.

The rhinos, right?

The Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media, they have been purged.

They have all been purged and controlled.

And now they all just repeat what he says.

And what ends up happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people see through it.

Like it's just not working anymore.

And I think what's scary is that.

It still feels like they're repairing the spectacle around his claims because the entire media is speaking as one and the Democrats are speaking as one and the Republicans are speaking as one and they're all agreeing.

You know, we imagine someone else, John Q.

Public, sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay, it's all pretty normal.

Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a good guy.

You know, we sort of project that that person is there.

But actually, more and more people who would have been like that in the first regime are like, well, I don't believe any of this shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it's also worth saying, like, the way that we're talking about this in terms of his unpopularity and reality, you know, in terms of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that it's, there's not just horrible shit happening constantly, right?

And that's the other part of his ability to sort of eliminate the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that it was to some extent restraining him, right?

Like that's the reason why there wasn't just like there were a bunch of deportations under Trump.

There were a bunch of deportations under Biden.

The thing that's happening now

is not the thing that was happening before, right?

Yeah.

The Secretary of the Interior wasn't showing up at like 5.30 in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American citizens out of their house.

Like that was like not happening.

Yeah.

Before, and that stuff is just, you know, it's unbelievably horrifying.

And it's also not popular.

Right.

Like even those approval rating numbers, right?

Like.

you know, like his immigration policy in theory is the most popular thing he's doing.

And also, ICE can't do mass large-scale raids raids because if they stay in one place for too long, so many people will show up.

They can't do it.

And, you know, and the lightning raids that they've been doing have been really brutal and really effective.

But, like, those are not the tactics a stormtrooper force that broadly has the popular, has popular consent.

Yeah.

Right.

They don't move like that.

And, you know, I talked about this,

I guess it'll be like two weeks ago on executive order, but like people are like stopping these raids in like Wheaton.

Yeah.

Like Wheaton used to be literally the center of the base of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit for like 40 years.

This was like the center of the Christian right.

And they have lost Wheaton.

Yeah.

It's been like electing Democrats.

And it's not just electing Democrats.

Like the speed at which it's moved from electing Democrats to like a bunch of people showed up and are stopping like lightning ice raids.

Which is really impressive, genuinely very, very impressive organizing.

It's very hard to do.

Most times it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough.

And somehow, again, like the place that used to be the capital of the moral majority, it's like Jerry Farwell's fucking like home domain, right?

Like the epicenter of like, of the Christian right

is doing the anti-ice raid shit.

Like,

what?

Like, and this is something that's been going on for like, you know, probably like four or five years.

We're like, them doing like really serious, very good direct action.

The entire terrain of the world is shifting beneath us while all of these people constantly try to like paint over this like little tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like no no the ground's still there there's all these holes in the middle of it but like you know we're gonna put on some tarp that like looks like the sky beneath it's like wait why is the sky down yeah don't ask questions just keep walking Exactly.

And I think that's like, I think that's really important.

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

Like they very clearly do yeah my analysis has been like since february i mean part of what's happened is like in february when the doe stuff was going on i was like well the american republic is over like we'll never be able to go back like now what do we do um so i think like a lot of a lot of the disjuncture and the confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines because it's really hard to accept it's a hard and complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually like this is dying like this is a dying regime and a dying empire yeah and like that does not mean it's less dangerous in fact historically it's often more dangerous in its death throes and it does not mean when i when we when you and i talk about him being ineffective it does not mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying yeah we're both trans women who organize with other trans women like we know about it okay y'all like we are dealing with the fallout all the time but like the situations that we could be going through,

the situations that they could be achieving that with the public that they were handed by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID, that had created an effective red scare around Gaza, that had like, you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten liberals to like say that that was normal and good, right?

Like that was a very, very scary public

to hand to Nazis to now with nukes, right?

And like, I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when the only fascist regimes we think about are Nazism and we think that like it's inevitably like going to be just like the Nazis.

Or even if we just say, well, it could be more like Italy.

Like there are dozens of different dictatorships across the history.

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

Learn a third one.

Pick one.

Literally pick one.

Fucking anyone that's not the main two.

There are so many.

Like you have, you are spoiled for exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can do, you could do, if you, you know, pick a decade.

You know, you like the 70s, go for Swarto in Indonesia.

You like the 80s, Brazilian military dictatorship.

No problem.

Like, or you could do Korea in the 80s.

You got lots of choices.

Oh, the 50s, go for Greece.

No problem.

Don't worry about it.

The reason that I bring all that up is just to say that, like, things are really bad.

And if we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia of the power that they have available and the time that they can wait.

But as you're saying.

And as I've been sort of seeing also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance.

It is completely uncovered.

It is not being seen.

But because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made, they also don't see and understand their level of resistance.

Like they've disorganized the FBI, right?

They've fired about like, what is it, like a fifth of FBI agents, like HEDA agents, and then like a bunch more are now doing like street crime and are like being put into ICE raids.

And people talk about that as being terrifying.

And it is terrifying.

The desire they have to do really brutal ICE raids and to use every resource available to them is scary.

Yeah.

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

No, like if you look at the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, right?

This is like Charlie Kirk is like their guy, right?

The FBI is so stripped down right now that with a full court press, the only reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand that Discord wasn't private.

And he like dropped his gun and didn't pick it up again.

Yeah, and his dad recognized it, right?

And if he had done those two things, they wouldn't have found him.

like yeah they didn't catch him he turned himself in right and that's again someone assassinated like their guy and they couldn't find him like this repressive apparatus it is really really scary and very good at doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors down and like dragging them away to a prison right it's not good at anything else yeah And the thing, right, that is a very, very good way to create an engine of, you know, like immense human misery that whose spectacle they can sell, but it's not actually a good way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship.

We have seen very, very successful sort of dictatorships in the last like 20, 30 years, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, like they take a bunch of forms.

I think like the most classically like 1930s Nazi Party one is Modi in India.

Yep.

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

That hasn't happened here.

Right.

You know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which is his brown shirts, like has 4 million people in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, I mean, you know, it has millions.

They have millions of brown shirts, right?

Like, ICE is having trouble hiring 12,000 extra agents

in a continent of 400 million people.

Again, this doesn't mean everything's fine, but yeah, like if you look at that, if you look at Erdogan and Turkey, or you look at Putin in Russia, or even Orban,

to a different degree in Hungary, like they slow rolled it, right?

They went through a few elections that were like slightly sketchy, but basically normal.

And they just slowly built power.

And it took them a decade to get to the point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that Trump is trying to do.

Yeah.

And, like, again, there's no rules.

It might work what Trump is doing, but like, compare it to Millet in Argentina, right?

Who they all loved so much, who came into power similarly to Trump, started throwing truth bombs everywhere, you know, just like ripped apart and has now had to come hat in hand begging for a bailout to the United States.

Yep.

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

Yep.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And that's, that's the thing, right?

If, if it was possible to just speak reality into existence, we would all be living under neoconservatism.

Right.

Right.

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

Yep.

And I don't know what the fuck they would have done with Afghanistan, but like if

you could just do the thing, and I talked about this on the show, I talked about this on the show all the time, right?

The thing the neoconservatives thought they could do with evidence-based reality thing, right?

Where like they thought that what they could do was just, instead of observing reality and creating your positions from it, they thought they could just purely influence and manipulate reality to become whatever they wanted it to be.

And they couldn't, right?

Like where the is George Bush right now?

Yeah.

Right.

Like where is Dick Cheney?

Like I, like the Trump administration somehow, staggeringly has managed to like.

They finally found a war crime so bad that John Wu, the architect, like the guy who wrote the torture manuals, was like, wait, hold on.

You can't just blow up random like boats of people in Venezuela.

Like what, What?

Like,

I literally, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible for you to commit a war crime so bad that the guy who wrote the torture memos was like, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Why are we?

I didn't sign up for this shit.

Like, it was.

Yeah, they're absolutely like unhinged.

They're horrible.

And thank.

God, they are so unpopular and so bad at this.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, we're,

screwed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Like Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right?

Like Trump could have just used, you know, like basically like the way that every other thing, like the way literally the Nazis did, right?

Like until like literally until they were forced to break it off during like World War II, right?

Which is like use Disney as a propaganda apparatus for you.

And Disney was gun shy because of the fight with the fight with DeSantis.

Didn't go that well for them, surprisingly.

You know, like they, they had some trouble with that.

And so they were gun shy, like going into the administration, like they were very quiet.

Like they were not rocking the boat.

They were making lots of statements about how like, you know, we support it.

Like he didn't have to goad them into taking a position.

in the culture war.

Like they were just very glad that they weren't fighting off DeSantis anymore and that they weren't fighting off, you know, know the daily wire you know claiming that they were you know whatever the woke mind virus or whatever the hell you know yeah like they were just they were just putting their keeping their heads down trying to rebuild after the disaster of the pandemic right like trying to like get their cruise line back up and like as profitable as it could be you know like they were they were working on like they were just doing their thing and they were like no reason trump should stop that there's no reason trump should stop that they is what they thought no like it's like they they they were implementing like a lot of the culture war stuff that they wanted in terms of like okay we're going back to white people we're never having another non-white character again, like eat shit.

Yeah, like they canceled, they're canceling TV shows with just like queer characters.

Like they're just, they're just doing stuff like that.

They're doing, they're doing everything that the regime wants.

But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there watching TV and like, like, throwing his remote around.

And like, unfortunately, his remote dictates U.S.

policy.

I think that's an important note to close on because like his remote dictates U.S.

policy to the extent that everyone pretends that it does.

And one of the things that can start happening in the end stages of these kind of regimes is that like the levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state.

Yeah.

Right?

So he just like declared that Antifa is like a domestic terrorist organization, right?

We're going to be talking about that later this week, possibly earlier this week.

I don't know when this episode's coming out.

But that doesn't do anything.

in and of itself.

He's just like waving a magic wand around.

But if he doesn't have the repressive apparatus to make that matter, then,

okay, then him throwing the remote around isn't like

gesturally controlling the arm of like one of the most sophisticated, what's supposed to be one of the most sophisticated repressive apparatuses ever.

Yeah.

Right.

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

That's right.

And you don't have to comply with them.

That's, that's, that's the, that's the fun thing about about existence is that they can't.

Yeah.

yeah just they can't just make it real unless you help them and as we saw as we've already talked about the the charlie kirk special doesn't go up right they say like the yeah the covet vaccines are like we're going to restrict them and most of the pharmacies are just like just check a box saying you need it like you know like not in every state but again like these massive institutions they can't really get them in line so why are you letting them get you in line yeah and remember you know like they they had better control of their institutional apparatuses in 2020 and the outcome of that was there was a giant uprising and they put the president in a bunker, a thing that he's still mad about to this day, right?

Even when it looks like they have total control, they don't.

And I don't know if he's going to like end up in a Hitler bunker, but look, as of right now, as it stands, the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in a bunker is 100%.

So, you know, if the past is to be a prediction of the future, we could see it again

when all of this shit goes to hell and the economy collapses and everyone's like, oh, this was all a lie the whole time.

Wow, damn.

Hey, look.

Like,

you know.

Oh, God.

I don't know if we can.

We're just gonna, we're just gonna, we're just gonna put a really long bleep over that entire sentence and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader.

You too.

Um,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Okay,

this has been it could happen here.

Vicki, where can people pre-order your book?

Oh, you can go to Haymarket.

That's who's putting it out, and they have a list of links.

You can also go to my Blue Sky account, vickyacab.bsky.social, and you can find a link there.

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

CawShinyThings.com.

It's the Collective Anarchist Writers or any other acronym you like, C-A-W.

That's where I'm working most regularly now.

Good crow theming.

That's great.

That's great.

It's Corvid based.

Yeah.

We love a Corvid-based economy.

Thanks so much for having me, Mia.

Yeah, thanks for coming on.

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Hello and welcome to the podcast.

It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by a couple of people who I'm about to introduce to discuss the very important topic of, does Tylenol give your baby autism?

I think we probably already know the answer, but nonetheless, we have half an hour to talk about it.

So

you will hear Dr.

Cave Hoda laughing.

That's me.

That's Cave.

Yep.

Many of you will know him, but he's a medical doctor and host of the House of Pod podcast.

And I'm also joined by Tyler Black, who's a psychologist in British Columbia.

Welcome, Tyler.

Psychiatrist.

psychiatrist it up

them fighting words james them's fighting words yeah no i know yeah this is uh yeah it's like when people call me a sociologist i understand or even worse an anthropologist it's a pleasure to be here and and no worries tyler is canadian so to see him correct somebody on something makes me happy no i'm very sorry yeah but that's why we get him off he's very sorry he's very sorry about that i love tyler very much he comes on my show not infrequently and one really pleasant thing that's happened one little bright spot in the last I don't know five years of terror that have been happening medically is seeing Tyler gradually over time become grumpier and more willing to fight

yeah aren't we all that's the only bright spot I've had thank you Tyler for that yeah you're bad I imagine that's a side effect of your uh consumption of acetametophytes of maybe all sending you yeah gotta cut back bro gotta cut back yeah all right for those not familiar why are we talking about Tylenol?

Might be the name you're familiar with, especially if you're American people, like to use brand names a little more.

I still find that very confusing, and I've lived here for the better part of two decades.

But why are we talking about Tylenol?

Tyler, do you want to introduce this concept?

Sure.

So, yeah, Tylenol goes by paracetamol in the UK and other

places in the world.

It's acetaminophen here.

So it really is not talking about Tylenol, though the shorthand that the political people who've been talking about it have specifically called out the brand Tylenol, which is bizarre.

But this stems from both a mission that RFK Jr., when he took over as the HHS, sort of had, which was to find the cause of autism, which is, you know, his political quest to find some environmental cause.

I mean, he started as an environmental lawyer.

I don't think he's doing this disingenuously.

I think he truly believes there is an environmental cause to autism.

But of course, RFK wields science, probably driven by the brainworm.

And so he has this way of having a conclusion and then finding the science to support it.

And it was very clear that he was going to point towards vaccine vaccine schedule.

And at some point, this is definitely coming.

I think this might be a roundabout way to do it through fevers and Tylenol.

But the Tylenol link is something that has been a question mark.

So a really quick aside will be that when drugs are regulated, the drug companies have very little natural interest to study it in pregnant people.

It only brings them risk.

There's no reason to do it.

You are required to submit what studies you have on animal toxicity and utero and these types of things, but not really that much for humans.

And so the drug companies usually put their hands up and go, talk to your doctor about using this.

And then the rest of us in medicine have to take that information that's been generated about this medication and try and interpret it on pregnant people.

And it creates this system where we create the evidence over the next 20 years in what we call pharmacilides or post-marketing studies, where we basically, has there been a problem?

Did we find any birth defects?

You know, and we kind of do it backwards.

It kind of makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCT on pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any reason for the drug.

So it's one of those...

sort of loopholes.

And so this natural conversation has resulted in science that points in a number of directions.

Does acetaminophen cause autism?

Can't be answered by the current science because it's all cohort data.

It's looking backwards.

It's looking at populations.

It's confounded.

However, the best study was published in 2024, which makes the timing of this announcement really awkward.

There was 2.5 million people.

It was a, I believe it's a Danish study.

Swedish.

Swedish study.

Okay.

And in that study, there was a small link found.

But because they had 2.5 million people, they could check that link by looking at sibling pairs within that 2.5 million.

So in that group, they had 16,000 sibling pairs both exposed to and not exposed to acetaminophen.

And lo and behold, they found that there was no relationship there.

So this really is one of the more definitive correlational studies that says pretty much any effect we're seeing is probably confounded.

It probably isn't due to the acetaminophen, though there are some animal studies that might hint at it.

It appears to be minor.

And Keve, I see you're about to say something.

Yeah.

First of all, that's exactly right.

I think that there are a lot of things that maha and rfk jr talk about that are just insane and you can dismiss out of hand this is a topic that is not complete rubbish it is something that has a little bit of nuance and we can talk about as tyler was just mentioning there is some evidence that there might be a small relationship but the real key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative.

Are they just related for some reason or another, or are they caused by each other?

And that study that he talked about, that Swedish study, looked at about 180,000 infants that had parents that were exposed to acetaminophen.

What's really elegant about that is that it looked at the siblings.

That's why it's such an important study.

And that's, would I say it closes the door on the matter?

No, I agree with Tyler.

I think the preponderance of evidence now is that there is no connection between Tylenol and autism.

But I don't know if this study totally closes the door.

It is really well done, though.

So they showed that if you look at siblings, if you look at a family, there's no connection.

You take out some of the variables, you take out some of the confounders there that can obfuscate or confuse an issue.

You take those out of the picture and you see that there's no relationship between Tylenol and acetaminophen.

What's interesting in that same study, that Swedish study, if they then put those back in, if they didn't account for the siblings, then yeah, it showed that there is a little bit of evidence, a small basic relationship between, you know, acetaminophen and developing autism.

But once you start accounting for some of these, these really tough to account for variables, then you start to see that that falls apart.

And that implies that most of these other studies are not causal, but correlative relationships.

The sort of 2025 update is, and I think this might, I think as that we learn more about it, this might have been something that was either solicited or developed in tandem with rfk and and his goals but there was a publication in 2025 by i think the harvard dean of medicine yeah who has been a plaintiff's witness for um attorneys battling tylenol in developing autism so there is a bit of a financial conflict of interest there right yeah baccarelli yeah dr baccarelli who published a study called a navigation review and it's basically a science-y version of let me tell a story and here's the evidence that supports it.

Basically, what they did is they took the number of studies, they counted the number that pointed towards Tylenol as a factor and they counted against it.

And they found about 20 something in total.

The majority of them found a link to Tylenol and autism.

And then a minority found no link.

But of course, that's not really how we do science in 2025.

If we had two studies and you can actually look at his his studies and some of these studies are 200 people, 300 people, 500 people.

And then you have this other study that's 2.5 million people.

You know, in the real world, that larger study would dwarf the significance of the other ones.

But in the way that this navigation study was set up, they're all kind of equal.

In fact, he treats the non-confounded sample that Kevé was mentioning as its own study.

And then he treats the controlled sample with siblings as its own study.

So the same study from Sweden was cited twice, one for and one against.

You can see how you could shape a narrative, which is what a narrative review is.

It's when you shape a narrative.

It's not a very science-y way to do things.

We like to do systematic reviews.

And this did provide a bit of cover because now everyone in HHS can point towards this study by the Harvard Indeed of Medicine published in BMC Environmental Studies, peer-reviewed, showing that a navigational study shows that there could be a link.

But it really, if you read the study, any scientist reading it would be like, yeah, there could be a link.

But the largest study in that group suggests there is no link.

Right.

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

Yeah.

Let's talk about this fascination with autism that

exists in the Maha, right?

Make America Healthy Again, for those who are not familiar.

What's happening here?

People are probably diagnosed with autism at a higher rate now than they were when these people were young, right?

That is not, however, well, I will let you guys explain that.

Explain how that doesn't mean that we're giving children autism, if that is my understanding is correct.

Sure.

I'll jump in first.

So there's a number of ways to test whether or not the rate is truly increasing.

So the first thing to say is over the world, we've seen a gradual increase in the global population that has autism from about 0.8% of the population to about 2% of the population.

That's what's happened over the past 25 years of studies across the world.

Now, that's not exactly the exponential rise that you often hear about in the United States.

The United States has a lot of unique features.

So you have a ton of people working in this area.

You have a ton of researchers.

Lots of people have access to healthcare.

There's many reasons why global numbers might not look like American numbers.

But the general idea behind this increased rate of autism, most of that increase is due to our change in diagnostics and the way that we label things.

So when RFK was a kid, there were kids that were excluded from school because they were literally called retarded.

They were not allowed to come to school.

They were known as spazzes and goofs, and they were the ones that, you know, were made fun of.

And they struggled throughout life.

Now, were they called autistic?

No.

Did they have the same symptoms that the kids today that are being diagnosed with autism have?

Probably.

And the way that we can control for that, there's some really elegant studies.

One is we take diagnostic criteria from children and then we ask adults currently living today to go through a structured interview looking for those things.

And guess what?

We find the same rate in adults that we see in kids.

This idea that it's an exponential rate.

Now, I think the rate is also increasing, but I think it's increasing gradually.

And this is because the extreme of ages are having kids more often, especially at the older end.

And we do know that older age is related to autism, especially older age of the father.

And we also know that premature babies and babies with significant developmental disabilities are surviving

their postnatal period.

As soon as they're born, instead of instantly dying or dying during childbirth or not being able to be resuscitated, they're kept alive and survive.

And this is good, but this does mean that there's more neurodiversity in the world because, of course, these children have encountered significant harm.

Yeah, I'll agree with that.

I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded, and that's part of why we see more.

But yeah, I think

the two things we know that are related are some genetic predisposition, if there's people in the family that have it, and the older age of patients.

And as we get older, I'm an older father myself, you know, you see more with older patients.

And that's more common now than it's ever been before.

So these are all a part of it.

And once you take a look, for example, going back to that Swedish study in 2024 that was so good.

That sibling study looks at the genetics of it.

And once you account for the genetics of it, you start to be able to say, okay, maybe this other stuff like Tylenol isn't important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is there a gender element to this as well?

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

So not only is there a gender component, but I do think that the biological sex of the child has an impact on the genetic expression because it seems like the transmission from to males is higher than the transmission to females.

So there might be something buffering about that extra X chromosome.

You know, we have this shrimpy little Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates.

You only have one Y chromosome?

I'm sorry.

Are you a super male?

I have two Ys.

God, that's why Y.

You know how hairy my ears are.

So there are a number of disorders that

the extra X chromosome is protective for.

And I do wonder if that's the case for autism.

But what's also true is we have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys should be.

And that leads to boys being diagnosed with autism more more frequently than than girls so the girl that's quiet and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid a lot more quickly than when you see that in a boy that the parents think autism or the clinician thinks autism so there could be some social reasons for that discrepancy as well and then the last thing i i really wanted to say is that the really tragic thing about all of this is profound autism, which autism is the spectrum, profound autism is extremely disabling for people around the person.

Generally, autistic people enjoy their lives, especially if the world is set up in a way so that they can live safely and without impediment.

Autistic people are perfectly content to be autistic.

And this whole idea of autism being this travesty, this epidemic, this blight on society is really doing a disservice to the wide variety of people that we're now calling Autistic.

Because when our criteria expanded, we created a whole space of autistic people who are very what we would call non-profound autism.

These are people that have difficulties in social communication or do the same thing over and over, despite it being at an abnormal level, but it's what they need to soothe themselves.

You know, that will be called autism now.

Now, would a parent want a child who's in a home constantly rocking back and forth and just soothing themselves by licking their fingers or whatever, you know, some very severe autistic behavior?

No, that probably wouldn't be the parent's ideal.

But I've worked with so much autism in my life.

I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

I've seen so many autistic kids.

They can live happy, happy, happy lives autistic.

So I'm not a fan of the blight sort of messaging of it either.

Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because that's one of the worst things about, in a sense, one of the most damaging things about this, where people who are living happy, healthy, and fulfilled lives are being like

slandered or pathologized, derided by the government of this country.

And that's fucked.

Yeah.

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

Suddenly suggested there's some kind of massively disabling and terrible travesty.

And that the person who gave birth to you is to blame for this, right?

Right.

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

This is, yeah, this is, this is a manel.

And I apologize for that, listener.

Please don't at me for that.

Yeah.

But part of what this is, is like control over women.

And, you know, while that Swedish study I mentioned may not completely close the issue, I think it's pretty clear that the evidence pretty strong against there being a connection between Tao and all.

And to make a wholesale governmental recommendation that as a country for us to move this way, to make such strong claims, to have have a president come out and just say, grit your teeth and bear it to women in regards to the one medicine that we've told them they can use during a pregnancy is insane to me.

So, there's the autism issue and the insult essentially to that community, but also to women in general.

It's insane to me that this is happening right now.

Again, there is a bit of nuance to this issue, as I mentioned.

It's not like totally insane to ask about it and question it, but to make a wholesale directional change in, in how we recommend managing patients with our pregnant is, is nuts.

It's just nuts.

Yeah.

And to piggyback on that, you know, like it's really normal.

It was normal advice in 2024 for us to say, yeah, you can use Tylenol, but try to use it sparingly.

We're not really sure.

Use it when you need it, though, because we do know that pain and fever and these types of things are bad for the baby.

Right.

You know, so this kind of way in which it's now been massaged.

So I saw a letter from Dr.

Marty Mackery, who's another grifter who's now in the, in the American political system there, has written a letter basically saying at the bottom, use it judiciously.

And it is the only one that's approved.

So, but that's exactly where we were before.

There was no need for a pest coverage.

Every doctor was saying, use Tylenol sparingly, but you can use it.

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

Yeah, please.

This administration has done something.

Trump in general has done something that has

blown my mind, which is somehow time and time again, I find myself defending people and things that I would never want to defend.

Like,

first of all, I'm watching Jimmy Kimmel.

I don't know how that happened.

I blame Trump for that.

Second, like Tylenol is a dangerous medication.

I'm a liver doctor.

Yes.

Suicidal.

I feel like Tylenol overdoses causing acute liver injury and acute liver failure is a massive real issue across the world.

And it is, it's, it's a real thing.

So there are reasons that we should be watchful of Tylenol, but this is not one of them.

Right.

Yeah.

Personally, I'm a champion of all Tylenol should be like the UK.

It should be in individually wrapped pieces because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of intentional overdose and even IC overdoses that cause liver failure.

So take away freedoms.

Right.

This is the medical freedom crowd.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

We should take an advertising break and then come back.

So we'll do that.

Oh, God.

That would be fantastic.

If I could take an advertising, I could use an ad right now.

So bad.

Amazing.

Yep.

It's going to be for

fucking lemon pepper water, which is the only pain treatment you should be taking.

Bark to put between your teeth, bits, people rubbing.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Just go get some leaves and fucking eat them.

What can go wrong?

All right, we are back.

Thank you for that message from leaf pain relief.

Hit the spot.

It's good.

Don't eat leaves.

I saw someone posing with a,

they were taking their graduation pictures, very nice setting.

I'm not going to say the flower, I guess, just in case.

It can cause quite remarkable hallucinations, and it is not a good idea to be like huffing it.

Yeah.

It's a nice-looking flower.

If you didn't know, you might huff in it.

Well, now I want to know what the hell you're talking about.

You're going to tell me later, I'm assuming.

You've lived in California your whole life.

How do you not know this?

Yeah, I'll text you after we're done.

Dandelions?

Is it dandelions?

I've been told not to strike.

Roses.

Yeah.

It reminds me, though, there was a TikTok video of there's been a few of women proudly being pregnant and ingesting Tylenol.

And to be clear, that's an insane response to this problem.

Like, please don't take Tylenol as a point.

As Kevin was saying before the break, Tylenol does deplete the glutathione in your body and it is toxic to your liver.

If your deliver doesn't have the glutathione necessary it directly injures the liver yeah and this is what happens when you take an overdose is it overwhelms the amount of of glutathione that your liver has and it causes liver damage so and most pregnant women who want to keep the baby are very judicious to begin with and not just like downing shit willy-nilly you know what i mean like they're like oh god this is really bad i better take something and tylenol by the way sucks i did you know as a pain medicine you know it's not gonna it's like the thing you take when they won't give you anything else.

It's not a great one.

So to take it from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism, if you're going to make extraordinary claims, you have to have, if not extraordinary evidence, preponderance of it.

So this is really bothering me, as you can tell, because it does not exist.

Yeah, I think something you mentioned earlier, like when, like you said, you're back to a corner where you're defending like Big Pharma and Tylenol specifically, like is that one thing that they've tried to do is like inhabit nuance and then disingenuously use it absolutely yes yes that's the entire anti-vaccines move yeah yeah right and then it leads to people responding in a way that erases nuance entirely yeah i understand where we get that response but like it's it's not the correct response right yeah people want you to be like this is 100 safe right they want you to say this is actually the perfect medication and it's fine and you should have it for breakfast yeah and the HHS tweeted out a statement that Tylenol did in 2017, basically saying we don't recommend Tylenol in pregnancy.

But no drug maker recommends any medication.

They all say specifically, talk to your doctor about this medication.

They're not allowed to recommend the medication.

Only doctors can.

So

when they're using that language and then HHS tweets it out, HHS is tweeting it out specifically to give the illusion that we don't want pregnant people to be taking this medication.

They specifically said said we don't recommend it.

And that's a nuance.

And that's how they use it.

And it just sucks.

Right.

That's exactly right.

And Tylenol, the makers of it, by the way, I am curious about the fact that Johnson Johnson spun off Kenview.

I wonder if they knew this was coming and that's why they did it the same way that DuPont spun off.

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

You know, like DuPont spun off the company in charge of all their PFAS, their forever chemicals, because they knew shit was coming down the pipeline.

I wonder if that was the same reason here, Tylenol did this.

Well, they put Band-Aid and Neutrogena in the same group.

So I think it was more just to consolidate home stuff.

Interesting.

Yeah.

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

It's cancer.

Cause anxiety.

Yeah.

Anyways, it's very interesting to me that

this is happening at all, really.

I mean, what I thought was interesting about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys picked up on this too.

was, you know, I was wondering, why is this pivot happening?

How can RFK Jr.

be happy about this?

He can't be be happy about leaving his crusade against vaccines the maha community behind him clearly doesn't love that aspect and i wonder why they were pivoting to that and i wonder what you guys think about that i did feel that during that press conference trump really went out of his way to sort of give lip service and we could we should talk about this too about vaccines he talked about vaccines a lot even though there's no new evidence about vaccines causing problems and trump gave this terrible advice about breaking up the vaccines which which we know is a terrible idea because that's going to lead to decreased uptake overall.

The more visits you have to go back to, the less likely you're going to do it.

So the more likely you're not going to get vaccinated.

But it made me wonder why this is happening now, why they decided to make this pivot.

And I wonder what you both think about that.

My theory is the link with fevers.

If I'm being really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try and link vaccine-induced fever to autism.

And they're going to say, oh, we thought it was the Tylenol, but it turns out to be the vaccines.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

My theory is gender, I think, that telling pregnant people to suck it up is when you've got, you know, your dudes all standing on the podium there, right?

Like the majority of pregnant people are going to be women.

It's something that men have been doing to women for millennia.

Like it's a safer bet than, yeah, your kid might die, but you know, you never know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah which actually is you know that brings up another thing that i think we should talk about which is what trump kept saying yeah trump kept saying don't take it but he was like

what's the worst that happens nothing bad will come of it yeah so it invokes this precautionary principle which is like you know why not avoid the tylenol yeah what's the worst that can happen and that doesn't work here no because we know that people are taking this for a fever Tylenol is not good for inflammation.

It doesn't work on inflammation the way Advil ibuprofen does it, but it can work on a fever.

And we know that fever can have some risk, at least as much, if not more, than Tylenol

in harm to the baby and harm to the

pregnancy.

So to me, the precautionary principle just doesn't apply here.

And to hear the president, I never heard a president give medical advice before like that.

It blew my mind.

I felt like I was disassociating while I was watching this.

I'm like, this cannot be real life.

He said it so unequivocally.

Don't take Tylenol.

Just suck it up.

And I tweeted something that I read from Dr.

Glockenflocken, who's one of my favorite medical comedians.

But he said, this will kill people.

And I do agree.

I think people were very incredulous when I said this will kill people.

And they were like, what do you mean, people dying of a fever?

I'm like, yeah, kind of.

Fevers can be really bad for you.

And if you're not going to hospital and the only thing you have is Tylenol, it's a really good idea to take the Tylenol.

And there's some people that don't go to hospital for lots of reasons.

And fevers can kill you.

They just can't.

Yeah.

So I disapprove of the Canadian and Englishman referring to the hospital as hospital.

They need you guys to refer to it as a hospital.

I've forgotten about that.

Yeah.

Always for the definite article.

Yeah.

Taking it to a hospital.

Thank you guys.

But yeah, I think you're right.

Like there is no like no harm option here, right?

Like that is a damage is done when people don't take this.

Right.

I just imagine this poor mom, you know, at home, you know, doesn't have great health care, but does have a bottle of Tylenol and is battling a sorry i'll americanize this like 104 degree fever thank you don't make me do mad yeah you're welcome don't make me do mad

you know and and you know it's it's around that 103 104 mark where we actually get really worried about the person's brain we get really worried about their health and and what's going to happen and and what would happen to that person in hospital they would absolutely get tylenol right away prescribed by a doctor right that moment and so i worry about this i i worry about this mom presenting to hospital with her fever She's pregnant.

And the doctors say, okay, we're going to give you Tylenol.

And she says, no.

You're right.

Why?

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

Because people are listening to this guy.

First of all, again, the hospital.

Second, they're going to listen to this guy.

It's insane.

People are really going to take this advice.

And I could see, you know, especially the more.

Trump following people saying, you will never give me Tylenol, not in this hospital.

Right.

And so it does sound silly that not taking Tylenol could kill you.

But if you're so scared of Tylenol because it causes autism that you don't take it when it's recommended to you by a doctor, or it's prescribed to you by a doctor, you could die.

And

I won't be surprised when there are more fever-induced deaths in 2025 and 2026 in the United States.

I already have the CDC Wonder data search ready to go because I study mortality all the time.

And I am absolutely sure we're going to see a few more fever-induced deaths than we would have previously.

Geez, yeah.

Maybe, like, we can finish up by explaining to people, like, you know, if you're talking to someone in your family, right?

Someone who maybe isn't a listener, sadly, to either of our podcasts.

I know this isn't directly the area either of you specialize in, but from what I understand, pregnant people, like the way that drugs are categorized, as we spoke about earlier on, there's there's not like, yeah, go ahead and take all of these, right?

There's like probably fine if you have to, probably a bad idea unless you really need to.

And like maybe some straight up don't.

Yeah.

Can you explain that for people?

Sure.

So there's a classification system and it's technical, but it's exactly like that.

There are very few medications that are like totally fine.

And these are medications

that are given during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy.

But for the most part, pretty much everything else in my world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodiazepines and whatnot, they all have the same classification, which is basically contraindicated, don't take it unless your doctor prescribes it for you.

Now, we still get pregnant people with depression and psychosis and who need all these medications.

And so we do have to interpret it based off of the data that we have.

And the data that we have always comes late.

So if we find a problem, it's found too late.

And generally it's precautionary.

So typically, I don't know, Keve, if there's a similar thing in GI work, but like for me, I'll get a call all the time.

Oh, we have this woman.

She's 32.

She's really worried.

She normally takes antidepressants, but she's thinking about stopping them because she's really worried about passing into her baby or whatever.

And I'm like, how bad is the depression?

Well, it was really bad.

She was hospitalized three times and nearly died.

I was like, probably want to keep antidepressant treatment going and just let her know that there could be some harm to the fetus, but depression is way worse.

And we just go with God, you know, do your best.

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

And you should discuss that with your obstetrician, you should talk that over with your gynecologist and your primary care doctor.

You should talk it over with your medical team.

That's great.

But every medication has some small amount of risk, some larger than others.

But it's really about the risk versus the benefit.

And this has been well studied by the experts.

And what you've heard, what those people have heard from Trump and RFK Jr.

is well outside of the normal recommendations from the experts like the ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The people who have been keeping our pregnant patients alive and relatively well for many, many years.

This is well outside of those recommendations.

And while it's an interesting topic, and I think maybe, you know, sure, I'd like to see more studies on it.

I'm never going to say don't study this more.

I would say that the preponderance of evidence and scientific belief and medical belief in this one goes against what they're saying.

And I would say at least talk it over with your doctor.

If you have a question, talk it over with your doctor.

And that's, you mentioned it before, town law has sort of like, you know, tried to hedge its bets by saying talk it over with your your doctor.

But the reason they do that is they know most doctors are going to be reasonable about this and follow the scientific evidence that's there.

So I would say if they really have a question, they should talk about with their doctor because Trump, whether or not they love him or not, this is well out of his range of understanding.

And he is getting, it's like a game of telephone.

He's getting a version of the medical information transmitted to him by RFK Jr., who is getting a weird version of it from his belief system.

And it's being supported by people who are there solely just

there to do the

beck and call of Trump at this point.

And that's super dangerous.

And so if they can keep an open mind about it, talk it over with their doctor, continue to do what their parents did, I think they're going to be okay.

Yeah.

Real quick, because like

for reasons that are largely related to the way that we do healthcare in the United States, people sometimes are reticent to talk to their doctor, unable to talk to a doctor.

Reliable sources of medical information versus the shit that you find on Google.

Give us like a five-minute primer.

Yeah.

So, you know, in almost every jurisdiction, there is an official health agency that you can go to their website and get good health data.

So in BC, we have Healthlink BC.

And there's a number that you can call to speak to a nurse.

In America, you have great.

I would say it used to be great, like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they got a little hokey.

I would still say, you know, there are some really good American places that you can go.

Mayo Clinic has a lot of public-facing information that has pretty good general descriptions.

But just make sure it's from a place that is official because there is a whole space now that's going to be opened up.

Because the second part of this presentation that RFK gave was about a generic medication that might help some people with a very specific form of autism.

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

And that's really worrisome.

Yeah.

Be wary of anyone that has something in their

Instagram, their TikTok, their wellness post that uses the words detox.

Be wary about ancient remedies.

Be wary about anyone that is selling something like Dr.

Oz, who, by the way, sells a version of the folinic acid or the leukovorin that they're talking about here.

So be wary about that.

We don't sell shit.

Be wary about people like Dr.

Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a good doctor from the friends I have in Harvard.

They say he's not a bad guy.

But be wary about the fact anytime you see someone's making $150,000 off a court trial to sue Tylenol and has has a vested interest in these things.

So

you should be wary about those things.

That's definitely something to look for.

And if you're looking for a trusted source, speaking of hucksters, you could listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, anywhere you find podcasts where we're going to talk about medical stuff just like this.

And I will bring you trusted sources.

Beautiful.

That was all a long play to get you to listen to Karve's podcast.

I'm in it for the long con.

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

Thank you for helping us clear that up a bit.

I think it's, it's a real rough time for healthcare in general and especially people with autism, like or neurodivergent people.

It really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government bad mouthing people.

So yeah, we are thinking of you.

Very similar to the issue with trans kids.

Like I'm a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the route of Florida and other things with respect to trans policies.

And it's just got to suck to be a trans kid in Florida right now.

It's got to suck to be a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing what's coming down the pipeline.

And it'll be the same for people with autism and families with autistic kids.

Yep.

I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We didn't even talk about hepatitis B, by the way.

We didn't even talk about hepatitis B, but we can talk about that some other point.

Okay.

There's just so much.

There's so much and it's so terrible.

And you're absolutely right.

It's really like for that community right now.

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

Yeah, yeah, get it.

RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I didn't know anybody Autistic when I was, you know, my, when I was a kid or whatever.

I've never met someone Autistic my age.

Donald Triplett was the very first person diagnosed with autism in 1943, I believe, 1943.

He just died last year.

I think he was something like 80, 90 years old.

Okay.

Yeah.

Autistic people are old too.

This idea that there aren't old Autistic people is so ass backwards.

It was just not diagnosed.

Yes.

And

it's such a shame because when

he, when Donald Triplett passed, you know, like people in psychiatry notice, that's not the type of thing that people in the world notice, but he was the very first autistic person.

He lived a full life.

He was an engineer.

He had autism.

It was diagnosed.

He was the first ever case diagnosed.

And he also also lived a life.

And so for RFK to just erase him completely and say, I've never known an old person to have autism is just ridiculous.

Yeah.

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

Because

you're being a turd to them and like you're being unkind.

Yeah.

Like, what do you expect?

Yeah.

I mean,

yeah, Tyler Grandin is like, like, how old is she now?

Like in her 70s?

I mean, it's absurd to think that this is a totally new thing.

I mean, it, it, it also tells me that he was probably a bit sheltered and probably didn't meet enough people.

Wow, a kennedy sheltered?

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

He's had a different experience of life than any of us.

It's fair to say.

I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler and all pun.

I'm very proud of that.

I usually do pretty much every time, and it pisses my wife off so much.

I'm really proud of you, man.

You've shown a lot of growth.

Yeah, that's great.

I was going to make one, but I thought I'd leave it.

I didn't want to offend.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Where can people find both of you on the internet if they'd like to?

Or, you know, in person.

Don't find me in person.

Do not do that.

You can listen to my podcast, The House of Pod.

Anywhere you listen to the podcast, you'll hear people like James.

You'll hear people like Tyler.

Last time Tyler was on was actually for episode 284.

We did an episode on adult ADHD with author Rax King.

She's Brad, so that's a good episode to listen to.

And you can find me on Blue Sky at Cave AMD.

I still have a Twitter account and Instagram account, but I don't really use those that much.

So find me on Blue Sky.

Blue Sky, by the way, as a shout out, as a plug, I think it's good for science.

If you're interested in science-based stuff.

it may not be that much fun for everything else but at least in terms of like if you want to follow doctors scientists that's a good place to go that's that's where a lot of us have gone so okay um i'll be there at uh blue sky yeah and i'm uh i am still on twitter tatterblack32.

i'm slugging it out um it is a lot of hate and a lot of death threats now especially as i've i've been on a few trans podcasts i've been on um quite a few medical anti-vax and vaccine podcasts so um i you know i'll pop up from time to time on a podcast or something, but I'm not really have anything to plug anymore.

I'm just really hoping that we can continue to fight this sort of

it's a really disgusting reality in this decade that misinformation has won the day, and literally misinformers are the political leaders now.

And misinformation has just eroded science to the point where I don't know if America's ever going to get it back.

Yeah.

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

This has set us back many, many years.

Yeah.

It's pretty bleak.

Well, that was fun.

Yay.

Let's end on that hopeful note.

Yeah.

All right.

Hey everyone, it's James here.

We promised that we would get you something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's series of executive orders targeting certain groups.

And we reached out to a lawyer, Mo, who is a fantastic lawyer, and we asked to interview them.

They said they had just done an interview with Finals Trail Radio, which is an excellent show.

And they suggested that I take a listen to that.

I took a listen to that, and I think it's a fantastic interview.

And I don't think there's much that we can add to it.

So we're going to re-air that interview.

in full.

The one thing I would add to it is that there have been a number of cases recently where grand juries have not returned an indictment.

That's relatively rare, but we are seeing that more frequently.

And that just enforces everything that Mo says here, which is that at this time, we still have separation of powers.

And at this time, the executive cannot simply make law.

One still has to be prosecuted according to a statute by a district attorney or a USA attorney.

right the president cannot just make law in this instance pertaining to the first Amendment by executive order.

That doesn't mean that there will not be harassment.

And as you'll hear here, those two are distinct things.

And I think Mo gives an excellent outline on how we should think about and conceive this moment in American history.

So, without any more of me taking your time, this is an excellent interview that Burst did with Mo.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

And if you would like to check out Final Straw Radio, you can do so using the link that I will put below this episode.

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

Good morning.

I'm Maura Meltzer-Cohen.

Everybody calls me Mo.

My pronouns are they or Mo.

I'm an abolitionist, an educator, and an attorney in New York.

Primarily, I represent people who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements.

So we're here to talk about the recent White House statements following the assassin, I mean, I mean, following the re-election of Trump, but more recently, the assassination of Charles Kirk, that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.

Can you talk about what legally changed with the executive order of September 22nd of this year or yesterday's when we're recording this national presidential security memo number seven titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence?

Again, it came out on September September 25th.

What changed with those?

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

This is information.

If you want legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged conversation with a human attorney who is admitted to practice in your jurisdiction.

As to your overall question, what changed legally is essentially nothing.

I think the top level takeaway here is that these executive orders are frightening.

They are a frightening contribution to an already dangerous political discourse, and they may very well end up being quite disruptive to left movements, including, I think, primarily centrist liberal movements.

But nothing that was legal last week is illegal this week, certainly not because of those statements.

And the state cannot prosecute you for things that were legal when you did them.

So, yeah, I mean, I can't see the future, but as of right now, the law and the Constitution have not changed.

So, if this administration wants to, in any meaningful legal way, designate anyone, any group as domestic terrorists, they can change the law, which is not going to be quick or easy, or they can can dispense with the law.

But under the current legal regime, there is no mechanism that would make it illegal to be

antifa, whatever that means, or to hold anti-fascist values, or to assemble, or to petition the government.

And, you know, to be clear,

not that doing any of those things or being any of those things are necessarily effective at creating social change right now, But my point really is they're not illegal.

Just to sort of throw this back your way, so there was, when you were responding to that, it made me think of there's a veteran who lost a bunch of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know, about a year ago hit this region.

He was recorded, like he went pretty viral calling out and shouting down a state politician who had a like public meeting here in the area, just saying there's been like total lack of support after the storm, and here are all the needs, and you're just a lying politician.

This sort of thing, the same man,

right after the executive order that Trump made about burning U.S.

flags, went out and burned one across from the White House, and then he got arrested for it.

Like, I thought that there was a Supreme Court decision back in the 80s that said it's not actually illegal to burn a flag.

So, does that make his executive orders now law?

No,

there is a Supreme Court decision.

It's called Texas v.

Johnson, and it is still law.

And in fact, after Texas v.

Johnson, Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning the American flag, and it was found unconstitutional.

It is astonishing and illuminating that that man was arrested for burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct.

I will say, I'm not sure what he was actually charged with.

Right.

If he was charged with, you know, creating a fire hazard, I suppose that apart from the fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation, I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating a fire hazard in a public place or something like that.

But no, flag burning remains protected regardless of what the president or congress says about it um it would take either an amendment to the constitution

or a very serious change in supreme court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal okay yeah so this is a distinction um i'd love for us to to get back to in a moment between like legality versus what you know the the sort of like box that that powers decide to put a thing into like i know i've i've definitely been detained not for being an annoyance to the cops but within my legal rights but they'll say ah but your shoes untied on a tuesday

you know whatever and then like right waste my time

Let's talk about that.

And because I do want to talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements, and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are and can be and have

long been used to surveil and disrupt and target the left.

But actually,

before we do that, why don't we talk about sort of some of the categories that are in play here and be really clear about definitions, or at least understand that there are differences between these categories, right?

Because there is a difference between the law and political discourse.

And there is a difference, importantly, between law and power.

And there is certainly at least some daylight between the legal constraints on state power and the state's power to ignore those constraints.

And then I think what will be significant to this discussion is there is a significant difference between Antifa, which is a set of practices or beliefs that are not necessarily even all that well defined, and what this administration refers to when it uses or deploys the word antifa.

And there is yet more difference between the boogeyman that is being invoked by that word and the individuals and organizations that the administration actually intends to target.

There's a difference between political targeting, surveillance, disruption, and prosecution.

right those things are all different and there's a difference between prosecution and conviction.

And there is an important difference between someone's political beliefs and associations, which are and remain protected by the First Amendment, and politically motivated conduct that is illegal.

So, you know, executive orders and these kinds of statements on national security are policy statements.

They don't in and of themselves make things happen.

They don't in and of themselves change the law.

And an executive order that is inconsistent with the Constitution or existing law at least ought to be unenforceable.

Okay.

But yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know, cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate.

And those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting.

They can affect your job prospects.

They can affect your housing stability.

They can affect whether or not some unhinged person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy theory about you.

But so that distinction of like, well, you might get exonerated by a court after you've been held in pre-trial for a year.

I guess that is an important distinction, right?

Because it means you're not spending

an extra 30 years or 20 years or whatever behind bars with the terrorism enhancement.

Well, I mean, that is also cold comfort.

I'm really not trying to be dismissive.

I think it's important to recognize what these distinctions are and the primarily because I want people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared for and what we need to be worried about and what tools we have and what tools are effective at resisting what's coming down the pike.

And in order to do that, we need to know what's coming down the pike.

We need to know who actually has power in this situation.

The fact that an executive order doesn't change the law does not mean an executive order will not result in a lot more state repression or that it won't disrupt movements or even ruin lives.

It doesn't mean that Trump is not going to accomplish the thing that I think he's actually trying to accomplish here in the immediate short term, which is broadcasting to his base that non-state action against people identified as or perceived to be part of the despised group, you know, is desirable by this administration, will be condoned by this administration.

I think that is important to recognize.

Saying that it doesn't change the law does not mean it isn't dangerous.

I just want to be very precise about, I think, the ways in which it is likely to be dangerous and some of the ways that it might not, might not be.

And again, I'm not trying to be dismissive, but state repression exists all the time.

State repression against leftists and anarchists in particular has been ongoing the whole time.

This is not a Trump thing.

And in fact, I think it's important to note that the executive who's probably most responsible for having laid laid this groundwork is Biden, who set forth a policy strategy that focused on funding the federal targeting of what at that point he was calling political extremists, which was a label that was being applied to groups on the left as well as neo-Nazis and alt-right groups.

So this administration has already been engaged, and not just this administration, right?

We have centuries at this point of targeted disruption of left movements.

The way that it's currently being rationalized is a little bit different.

The way that it's being broadcast, normalized is a little bit different.

But

I will say, I don't think this is actually anything all that new or different.

And the difference in how dangerous it is is one of scale, maybe, rather than.

It's a difference in scope rather than nature.

I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction.

I think that like sometimes people in the center and even sometimes people on the left will look at, in particular, things that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory.

They're like confusing and they're bombastic.

And there's a part of us that, that will say like, no, but that's, that's not what's actually happening.

That's not what actually was the motivation for that person.

Or like, that person voted.

you know, Republican in the last election, whatever.

And so I think that that distinction that you're making of, you know, this, this this may not, this may be like an approach to motivate the base.

It may prove not to be legally like standing, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on people.

Yeah.

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

This is the narrative and this is the story that they're going to be going with, right?

Absolutely.

And I think it is important to point out right now we're seeing a lot of people pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality.

And I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful.

I mean, i think it's part of the point right manipulating the facts making narrative claims that are totally unsupportable and muddying the waters in this really fundamental way is part of the project there was a a german jurist i guess who

became the highest jurist during the nazi regime in germany but continued writing theory like was writing it before as a member of the conservative revolution as they called it And then afterwards, he survived the war and continued living in Germany, writing Carl Schmidt, who talks a lot about the limits of liberal approaches towards legality

and liberal governance with a belief that it makes sense to push it to its limits and beyond, break it and recognize that governance is about the imposition of power and the sheltering of those who are under the control or in the protected community of the state with a consideration of war through the state's power against internal enemies as well as external enemies.

And this is the devil's bargain that we make.

It's like Hobbes on steroids.

And it feels like a lot of the stuff that the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 has been pushing was that they have this.

I know that there are some theocrats.

in that movement.

There's the unitary executive theory that a lot of them have been pushing.

And they'll play with this idea, like the Trump administration will play with this identity of the king, King Trump or whatever, the dawn, as it were, like making these executive decisions and being unbeholden to anything else.

And they've actually been like, you know, saying to courts, you can't stop us from deporting these people to an unsafe third country, whatever, stop us.

I wonder if, like, I wonder if you have any comments on this, if I'm coming out of left field or what.

Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt, as opposed to the Heritage Foundation.

He was at least intellectually honest.

Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where they're trying to normalize what Schmidt would have called like a state of exception, where there's sort of unbridled executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints on state power.

Right.

And it's funny because I've been in conversations.

over the last months where I'm talking with a bunch of my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the current legal regime.

And we're talking about how dangerous it is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law.

You know, and it's sort of amusing for a bunch of anarchists to be like, oh, no, the rule of law is collapsing.

But when I'm talking about the rule of law in this way, I'm really talking about constraints on state power.

And those are what's collapsing.

And that's exactly what Schmidt envisioned and.

argued for.

Correctly.

And I do think we're seeing that.

I think one of the things that I've noticed in some of these EOs, especially the couple of statements from the last few days, is he keeps talking about things like love of God and Christian, anti-Christian sentiment, which is, I mean, you know, this is entirely incompatible with the First Amendment, which provides that no state shall establish a religion, right?

I mean, we really are outside the contours of recognized, you know, legal norms, constitutional norms.

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

Kind of shifting a bit, like let's get into some of the implications of this.

So if it hasn't changed law, but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted.

I've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and getting doxing attention.

There's a website now, I think, called like Who Killed Charlie Kirk or the People Who Killed Charlie Kirk or something like that, maybe an app.

It's kind of like the post-Charlie Kirk assassination version of Canary Mission.

Does this mean that police are coming after people for sharing memes?

Is that happening?

Is that what's happening in these cases?

I mean, police have always been coming after people for sharing memes.

I would say I get calls at least every month from people who have been visited by federal agents because they said something on the internet that was upsetting to somebody else and then they reported it and the FBI is just following up on a tip.

But that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment.

Let me say that in human language.

Thank you.

This does not undermine the First Amendment.

The First Amendment still exists and all of the legal framework around having the right to say things as long as those things are not true threats, that still exists.

So it is not unusual for people to be targeted.

or monitored or visited by law enforcement, but typically that stuff doesn't actually really go anywhere.

I am concerned about people being subject to doxing and having negative social consequences and fallout from this kind of stuff.

And it certainly is, you know, can be life-ruining.

Again,

I don't mean to trivialize the effects of this kind of retaliation, social retaliation, but it is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution or a criminal conviction.

It's a different set of mechanisms.

Now, one thing that I do think is interesting is that these EOs and the statement that came out on the 22nd and yesterday particularly identify certain modes of that kind of social conduct that you're talking about, like doxing, swatting, right, which is making a false report of like an ongoing violent crime so that a SWAT team shows up and raids somebody's home.

Which could be deadly.

Right.

This is very dangerous.

And interestingly to me, anyway, there are these specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements.

And those specific behaviors are largely tools of the right.

People on the left are not notably interested in sending law enforcement to someone's house.

So there is a perverse way in which this may end up being sort of protective, I suppose, because I think it would be very difficult for the government to go after the people who are exposing ICE agents, which again is not illegal right now, even if it were to become illegal.

It isn't isn't right now.

And it would be very hard for them to go after those folks and not also

go after the folks who are running that silly website about people who say something mean about Charlie Kirk.

Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, and this is the speculation outside of like legal advice or any, not that we're giving legal advice, but outside of like the legal framework.

Definitely not giving legal advice.

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

I mean, it feels like it's a part of the creation of a differentiated subjectivity.

Like there's the subject of the state that falls under the values that are being attacked, Christianity, whiteness, heteronormativity, these like patriotism in these certain ways versus the people that are doing these same things but are corrupt are dirtied are outside or internal enemies are Soros funded however we want to like yeah that but um yeah I guess that's not I mean that's this is nothing new it's just an amplification of that same right yeah very much and you know what What is changing a little bit, although all of these threads have been present, is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of targeting with respect to, in particular, Palestine solidarity movements, gender non-conforming people, and what they're calling anti-FUS.

So, you know, we're seeing, we've been seeing congressional investigations, the allocation of funds to federal law enforcement, purging not just individuals, but whole agencies that the administration feels are insufficiently aligned with its priority, replacing federal law enforcement that, and I mean, ranging from FBI agents on the ground to DOJ

with people who will enthusiastically and blindly pursue these priorities and using a lot of resources to target the nonprofit tax status and funding of groups identified as being aligned with any of the disfavored movements.

And one of the things that they're doing is kind of, it's this real spaghetti, you know, throwing everything at it.

And it's very overwhelming.

It's overwhelming for movement infrastructure.

It's overwhelming for legal, for people on the ground.

And it's all happening at once.

And I think it's all being, it's mutually compounding, it's mutually reinforcing, it's demoralizing.

And in particular, the stuff that's happening with immigration is so devastating.

And because immigration is so wholly under the control of the executive, that is an area where he's able to sort of make a policy and make it so and have it be carried out by Fiat.

And he has made his own private army with ICE.

And I think one of the effects that I, in just in my observation that that has had, is that people see that happening and assume that he has that level of control over everything else.

And I do want to point out, like, again, it's absolutely devastating to see what's happening in the immigration space.

But in fact, he does not have that level of control over the rest of government and over non-immigration law.

And I think that's really important to remember.

Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting.

There's a lot of people that have talked, and not to get too far down the road with this, but like with the

like attempt to normalize sending National Guard or sending active military to different states or federalizing National Guards to be present from different states in these places.

Yeah.

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

Man, I'm in New York.

There's military people in all our subways.

Like that got very normalized post-9-11 in certain places.

And so, you know, again, this is not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new.

So to get back to Antifa.

Sure.

Antifa.

Antifa.

How is the administration identifying Antifa and the left?

And what are they actually dismantling and attacking?

I'm thinking, like, I've heard a lot of talk about bail funds or like LGBTQIA youth advocacy organizations, secularist groups.

yeah what's going on yeah well this is this is where things get really fun most of the groups that are actually being targeted are not not remotely related to Antifa.

George Soros is not Antifa.

The various legal defense funds are not Antifa.

Antifa is the rationale, but not the reality.

So, one of the interesting issues here is that a significant group of the people who really need to be very worried are people who work in the nonprofit sector, in extremely normal and liberal community advocacy organizations and NGOs.

And these are people who have nothing whatsoever to do with Antifa by any stretch of the imagination, who are being attacked, whose funding is being attacked, who are primarily, I would say, at risk, not because they have engaged in anything approaching unlawful conduct.

And frankly, I think the biggest risk for many of those people is the anticipatory compliance of their funders.

We have seen a really similar thing happen with universities, where universities have been targeted by the state, by the federal government, and have been accused in particular of anti-Semitism.

And frankly, I think it would be the work of an afternoon for general counsel at any of these universities to point out that in fact, there is a legally established difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, that criticism of the nation state of Israel is, in fact, entirely legally distinct from criticism of or threats against Jewish people.

And if any of these universities actually bothered to challenge these allegations, I think that they would win in court on the law.

And what we're seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge.

these allegations, settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to the allegedly aggrieved parties, and capitulating in ways that are unnecessary, unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and seed more ground, not just more ground than is legally called for, but more ground than is even being asked for.

in these cases.

And so, you know, this is to me one of the great dangers of normalizing these discourses is that these large institutions are engaged in acts of self-preservation that actually undermine civil society when even a small amount of courage would go a very long way to preserving it.

I think we also sort of saw this in the early days of the administration with legal firms that had brought challenges to the administration in the past backing down or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration.

And we're seeing it now also with some of these large media corporations silencing some of their pundits or whatever.

Or in some cases, I mean, it's clearly quid pro quo because they've got

a merger that's being discussed by the FCC at the moment.

Well, what we've seen though, we have seen a lot of that sort of craven capitulation.

But what we've also seen is when we fight, we win.

Now, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this.

What I'm trying to say is the demands that are being made by this particular administration are actually so far beyond the pale that based on our legal regime as it currently is, when we fight, we win.

And so I think it is very worth reminding people that however imperfect the law is, the current state of the law forbids much of what this administration is doing.

And it is actually worth standing up to it.

There are other groups of people similarly who are not related to Antifa.

And one of those groups is toasters, like including boomers who are on Facebook and Twitter making jokes about how the right is so hypocritical.

And those people are getting targeted.

And I would just gently remind everyone that the First Amendment does still exist.

and that the solution to repression is not self-censorship, but courage.

And also, as I have said many times, including to you on this program, discretion is the better part of fouler and not everything needs to be said on the internet.

So maybe think about it before you post something that you would not like to hear read back to you by a humorless prosecutor.

Then we have these other groups that are engaged in exposing law enforcement, which I referred to a minute ago.

And I think the groups that are, you know, exposing ICE are...

definitely going to be targeted have already been targeted for that activity but it sort of remains to be seen how that can happen while also protecting canary mission, right?

Then we have groups that are being perceived as or identified as antifa, who are the people who are like doing food knot bombs and community gardening and cooperative bookstores and prisoner letter writing, all of which are extremely First Amendment protected activities and all of which are not only likely to be highly surveilled, are already highly surveilled.

And this is the group of people who I think are actually probably most used to this and best prepared for it.

And also might be really hard to prosecute effectively because they're not doing crimes.

And, you know, like the NGOs that we were talking about, the biggest point of exposure for all of these groups is likely to be financial.

We can certainly anticipate that the state is highly interested in looking at all of our bank records to the extent that our bank records exist with all the money we have.

Right?

Like

we're all handing around the same stack of 20 singles to

each other.

But hey, you know, wire fraud.

What I can say is that, you know, something like a bail fund and, you know, community support funds do need to be very cautious.

That has already, always been the case.

And this is a really good time.

to hire a CPA to go over your books and to make sure that you have kept really meticulous records, to make sure that if you have raised money for something, you have only used it for the thing that you said it was going to be used for.

And this is once again

something that largely is a feature of far-right organizing, right?

I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon was actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money to do something.

Build the wall.

Build the wall.

He was raising money to build the wall, but not using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud, right?

So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already know that you have to be very careful about how you raise that money and how you monitor and track and use that money.

So most of the people, I would say the overwhelming majority of people who are sort of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring, A, have already been subject to it, and B, haven't actually done anything unlawful.

And, you know, that doesn't mean this won't be disruptive.

It just means...

Look, I'm not naive enough to say that your innocence will protect you, but it's a good start.

And then we have folks who maybe actually do engage in unlawful conduct or revolutionary action or people about whom that claim could somewhat credibly be made.

And that's actually just

a different group, right?

And those things were illegal last week and they're illegal now.

And they're not more illegal because they're politically motivated, right?

Although, you know, there are terrorism enhancements and sentencing enhancements and things like that.

The fact is, like, you know, it can't be more illegal to spray paint free Gaza on the side of a building than it is to to spray paint I Love Trump on the side of a building, right?

I mean, whether or not this like pans out in the courts, right, is one thing.

But I know that like, say, for the library case that happened here where people were arrested because some people were filming in

this like Palestine-related workshop in a public library.

And they were asked to stop filming.

And then a scuffle broke out and a phone got knocked to the ground and people got apparently dragged outside.

Again, I was not there for this, but like now the people are facing, like people who are in the crowd who are not the people who were filming are facing charges of ethnic intimidation.

And that's a very specific case in a different jurisdiction from where you are practicing law.

But it's not just about like what's being charged against them isn't about assault per se.

It's this enhanced.

politically driven statement based on the rhetoric that's, you know, based on the politics, right?

Absolutely.

And I'm glad you pointed that out because I certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions don't happen.

They absolutely happen.

These recent statements don't change the way in which they happen, right?

And there are ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics.

And those have those are, again, not new.

I think the point that I'm trying to make is that I don't think this has changed substantively.

Yeah, like the fact that the president said Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization just doesn't really change the legal landscape.

This has been the targeted surveillance of the left, whether you call it Antifa, whether it's the Green Scare, whether it's the Black Liberation Army, this has been a priority for decades of administrations.

More and more legislation has been developed to criminalize garden variety protest conduct.

We saw that a lot around Standing Rock and BLM.

More and more resources are allocated to testing creative strategies for monitoring and criminalizing political activities.

You know, again, state repression and the tools that are used in the service of state repression are just not new.

And the fact that you put out these statements is maybe a good reminder that we should be circumspect and aware of repression and prepared to bear up under it.

So is the RICO 61 Atlanta case a model for what we see moving forward at a federal level in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering, the focus on bail funds and other abolitionist infrastructure or civil liberties organizations?

Like Section H of that September 25th statement refers to the Attorney General pursuing, quote, politically motivated terrorist acts such as organizing doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.

Like, I know those are all things that, you know, they've already got charges attached to them.

It's just these are now being framed within the framework of being terrorist acts.

But, you know, you said like these practices of attacking adjacent like supportive movement and civil society organs is not, it's not in and of itself new, but it seems like the framing, especially with the Atlanta case where the prosecutors brought up at the beginning,

like they gave a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of anarchism and then said, all these people fall under this umbrella because they all have this ideology.

Therefore, they are a conspiracy.

Is that what the administration is trying to do?

And is that different from what they've already done at a federal level?

So, first of all, I do think that that's very likely that they will try.

I think this is signaling a real interest in that.

I don't think that's particularly new, but I think that it's clearly being prioritized.

So let's talk about RICO.

RICO,

let's talk about RICO briefly.

RICO is the racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations act.

And it was enacted in, I think, 1970 to go after the mob.

Right.

It was to go after crime families.

But it's been used against so-called gangs and in other politically motivated prosecutions for a long time.

And so RICO is really used to kind of criminalize whole communities, but it requires that an actual crime has happened, right?

Association or ideology in itself is not sufficient.

So it requires an actual crime has happened.

And it also requires an, quote, an enterprise, like a coordinated enterprise.

And because the First Amendment protects association and a large diffuse group of people sharing values is not an enterprise.

You know, I'm not sure.

It's not a straightforward path to say we want to use Rigo in a politically motivated way and to actually be able to capture this group under a net, right?

That's like, you know,

saying we want to go after Antifa is like saying we want to go after people who like cats, right?

There are people who like cats, but they certainly aren't coordinating together.

I suppose that there are actually people who would say, like, yes, I identify strongly with this set of values, but it's not a membership organization.

And it would, I think, be very difficult to mount a prosecution or to mount a successful prosecution on the basis of what are clearly First Amendment protected beliefs and associations.

And there's pretty good law on this point, actually.

And it comes from an effort to prosecute a bunch of anti-abortion protesters under RICO.

And the court said, you can't do that.

The fact that there's a large group of people who happen to believe the same things does not mean that they are an enterprise.

So, look, don't get me wrong, again, this would be hugely disruptive, but it would be very difficult to sustain an effective prosecution or obtain a conviction if there was one competent investigator, prosecutor, judge, or jury member anywhere along the way.

But, yes, hugely disruptive if they manage to do it.

I would like to note something about the Stop Cop City RICO

that's important.

So first of all, yay,

all those charges, those RICOs were dismissed for legal reasons of being utter bull.

And I know that there's some concern that that will be appealed, but I

think it is worth noting and celebrating that when we fight, we win.

But sort of more to the point in this context, I do want to note note that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute.

And it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute.

And it still couldn't be effectively used in this way.

And also federal RICO has often failed, right?

Efforts to use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed.

So if you look up like the Ohio 7, which was a fairly early effort to bring a politically motivated RICO, that did not go great for the government.

So yeah, I think that's important to note about RICO.

So you mentioned this like FBI designation earlier.

It had been for a while, I think, under,

I thought this came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under Biden for the prosecution of January 6th.

But anti-government extremists, which included militia movements and also anarchists, it's been shifted to far-left extremist in the verbiage of the DOJ and who they're pursuing.

Anti-law enforcement and anti-conservative attacks have been framed as know, a concerted effort by

far-left extremists in the media and also like by these institutions as they're moving forward before they actually make any arrests or whatever and through their prosecution, sometimes using terms like, you know, antifa or triantifa or whatever sort of motivations they're giving.

I also wonder if you could say a thing specifically about this sort of framing that is being given.

Again, that is like, like I was thinking about this

before more recent mass shooting events that have happened, or before the hullabaloo around Charlie Kirk's assassination and the shooter, the alleged shooter's relationships to other people, that there seems to be this concerted effort around

clinically framing and politically framing transness as a mental health issue,

but also as a political extension of woke gender ideology that's coming for your children.

And And it's like, it's, it's interesting because, like, in order for people in a lot of cases in the U.S.

to be able to gain access to medical care that they desire or need around maybe gender dysphoria or some other, some other experience, they often have to use these like clinical terms for what they are experiencing and why they need medication for it.

And not faulting people for making that approach because you need the medicine that you need.

But now this is being turned around and reframed as, therefore, if people need this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have some sort of mental deficiency or some sort of issue, which is being used in order to challenge people's right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, or saying that people are like, because of their transness, being motivated towards this attacks.

Like, I don't know if you have anything to,

again, not exactly like.

It's not exactly a legal issue, but I don't know if you have any observations.

Well, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it, just to be very clear, the DSM makes very clear that

being trans is not a mental illness, that gender dysphoria is distress caused by a discrepancy between the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist if any cis person were being treated as a gender that they didn't identify with, right?

That would be a distress that would arise for any person.

I think that there are real problems with the sort of clinicization or medicalization of gender-affirming care.

But I do want to be very clear that that does not have to and does not formally or officially include pathologizing trans identity.

That's something that's being imputed.

and being imposed, but it has no basis in clinical practice.

Not that that necessarily matters to the government, but I do think it's important to point that out.

I think given that previous efforts to restrict gun ownership on the basis of previously diagnosed mental illness have not been super successful,

I don't know that this one will be either.

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

So this term has been coming up a lot of, you know, with Trump Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists.

There's been a lot of pushback from the legal community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are you talking about?

Can you talk about like what it means to be called a domestic terrorist?

What changes that makes in like how the law approaches you or how you can be convicted?

Yeah, gladly.

So at this point, what it means to be called a domestic terrorist is actually nothing.

There is no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or for designating a domestic group a terrorist organization.

And given the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court, I think it would be very, very difficult to change the law in the way it would have to be changed in order to make that designation.

There are ways to freeze the assets of a domestic group.

There are ways to posit or show a connection between a domestic group and a designated foreign terrorist organization, which is a real thing that has legal effect.

There is a way to financially designate a group or an individual as, you know, having this kind of relationship to a foreign terrorist organization or an FTO.

So, but there's no legal mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group.

That's not a thing.

So this is a place where the government could simply dispense with the law, but I do not think this is a place where the government can use the law to create a category of domestic terrorist organizations.

And just to like explain FTOs a little bit, there is a category of organization that are designated by the State Department as quote, foreign terrorist organizations.

FTOs are designated by the State Department and they are listed on on the State Department website, right?

It's not a secret who they are.

You're not going to suddenly find out that, you know, you gave money to, I don't know, the Greek equivalent of the ACLU and now it's, you know, it turns out it's an FTO.

There are certainly cases where the government has successfully claimed that a connection between a domestic group and an FTO exists, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And if you have a connection to an FTO, you can be prosecuted for what's called material support for terrorism.

And it's a very serious charge.

It's a very frightening charge.

And it does criminalize a lot of things that most people understand to be protected by the First Amendment, right?

It criminalizes providing things like medical care.

to certain groups.

It criminalizes providing education or legal support to certain groups that are designated foreign terrorist organizations.

And frankly, this is the idea that underpins material support for terrorism charges is offensive to many people because it does feel very much incompatible with constitutional norms under the First Amendment.

It's an important thing to be aware of, but it would be very surprising to me if the government were able to successfully make broad claims connecting, quote, Antifa

to foreign terrorist organizations.

I was when you were saying that that had me thinking a little bit about the Holy Land 5 case.

I was trying to remember that example.

I guess like to belabor this, can we talk about the distinction between domestic terrorist organization, which is a classification that doesn't exist, versus the charge of committing terrorism?

Because people who get terrorism enhancements, at least,

like the like Marius Mason, the one example that comes to my mind, right?

Who was a member of cells that was associated with the Earth Liberation Front.

Like, so that, that person got over two decades in prison based on, like, being convicted of crimes that existed and then getting enhancements

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

The difference is the difference between criminalizing conduct or defining conduct as being terroristic and criminalizing a group.

The First Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression.

And that means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations, and expression, we cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides our conduct, our actions.

And so there can be terrorist offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct that you are convicted of.

If you engage in certain illegal acts and a judge determines that those acts were motivated by a desire to do terrorism, then the penalty for engaging in those acts can be enhanced.

But you cannot designate a group a belief or an expression as being a crime in itself unless there is conduct associated with it, because we don't criminalize people's identities.

I mean, we do criminalize people's identities, but it's

going to be impermissible to prosecute people for having those identities.

I guess of note, as I understand, the terrorism enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Louis G.

Mangioni case have been dropped is the thing that I heard.

Yes.

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

So

what do the courts know?

Okay.

Thank you for making that distinction more clear.

All right.

So how might those of us on the left or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive of the state's view of us?

How do we rally support for our identities and positions?

What are some good practices understanding, like having had this conversation, the terrain on on which we're operating.

Absolutely.

So, I guess what I would say about best practices is understand whether you are at risk.

Even if you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing that the system works and that this particular administration is like an aberration, I would say, look, this administration is preoccupied with the funding streams for very mainstream liberal causes.

And the fact that it's sort of lumping everything under the banner of Antifa, you know, is probably a big surprise for some of these groups, like, you know, suburban white moms against guns or whatever.

But they are very focused on things like wire fraud and money laundering and stripping nonprofits of their tax status.

If there's even a whisper of the possibility that those nonprofits are pursuing goals that are in any way antagonistic to state interests.

So if you are in a group that has a bank account or raises money, the best practices here haven't changed.

Keep very precise track of your funds.

If you raise money, use it for the thing you said you were going to use it for.

Have an accountant, you know, be very, very careful about your money.

And again,

the best practices for the rest of us also haven't changed.

This is political discourse that reaffirms what we already know about targeted surveillance.

And we have for a long time known how to deal with this.

If you are approached by law enforcement, remember that the Fifth Amendment protects your right not to speak to them.

You have no obligation to speak to law enforcement.

It is a crime to lie to federal agents, and that means that it is safest not to say anything besides, I'm represented by counsel, please leave your name and number, and my lawyer will call you.

There is truly never a compelling reason to speak to federal agents before consulting with an attorney.

The NLG anti-repression hotline can be reached at 212-679-2811.

You can call to have a free, privileged conversation about your rights, risks, and responsibilities, and to be connected with appropriate legal resources in your area.

And at the end of the day, we keep ourselves safe by refusing to submit to this fear, refusing to comply in advance, refusing to second guess whether we actually have rights.

And more importantly, we persist by being confident in the fact that no matter what, our communities are going to rally around and care for each other.

I think that would be a great place to tie up.

Thank you so much for having this conversation and for the insights that you've shared and for the work that you do, Mo.

You're very welcome.

It's always a pleasure.

Happy Groktober, everybody.

Oh, shut the fuck up.

We can't.

This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

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

This episode, we're covering the week of September 21st to October 1st.

And what a week it was.

Does not feel like it should be October, but who cares?

I guess the government's shut down right now.

So all of the dozens of anarchists around the country are rejoicing

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

That's right, everyone.

We did it.

We defeated the state using the power of the state.

Many such cases.

As the government's shut down, Trump is threatening mass layoffs, and Republicans are framing this whole shutdown as being caused by Democrats who are trying to defend health care for quote-unquote illegals, which isn't real.

Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care.

That's not even what the Democrats are fighting for.

Would be cool if they were.

Would be cool if if you're in this country, you could just get health care.

That sounds nice.

Wouldn't that be a cool, almost utopian place to live?

But that's not what's happening.

And the rights confronted with this, but they just do not care.

Here's Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House on CNN having a little debate about this.

If that counterproposal was enacted, illegal aliens would be paid for.

American taxpayers, hard-earned dollars, would be paying for benefits for illegal aliens again.

We're not doing that.

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

Yes, and that's why our reforms are so important to enforce all that.

The important thing to remember is that.

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

No, but because they don't have the level of specification that we had in our bill, it will unwind that, and all those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed.

We can't afford to do that.

But you see my point, but there's no argument that you're making, right?

No, that is a red herring in this debate.

So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is they're trying to extend the current, currently enacted federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people able to access health care.

And Democrats are also trying to reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid, which happened under the one big beautiful bill earlier this year.

That is what they are actually fighting for.

The White House is re-truthing and retweeting proposals from the Democrats that include health care for aliens, but that's legal aliens.

That's like legal documented residents.

And they're framing this as health care for quote-unquote illegals.

It's a bad faith representation, as it always is.

Like people can go all the way back to the episode that I made with Rob and Sophie last year about what Trump might do to learn more about the public charge rule and how that pertains to people who are not U.S.

citizens.

I don't think we really have the time nor is this the place to go over that here.

But there is not, and there has never been a massive federal free healthcare plan for undocumented people.

In fact, people who are undocumented are not going to see the doctor right now because of the persistent and untrue rumor that ICE are taking people from hospitals.

That is not something I'm aware of ever happening.

ICE do take people who are already in their custody to hospitals and they will wait for those people while those people are treated.

That is not the same as entering the hospital and grabbing people based on their immigration status.

And I'm aware of several cases where people whose life was genuinely in danger were afraid to go and seek medical attention because they were afraid that they would be targeted for their immigration status.

So we'll see how long this government shutdown lasts.

The last one started in 2018 lasted 35 days.

If this shutdown is still happening next week, I'm sure we will include some details about government services being affected, but this could resolve in a few days, a few hours, or in a few weeks.

We do not know.

But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country.

There still is a ray of hope, and that ray of hope is named Jimmy Kimball, who is thankfully back on the air.

I know we've all been watching.

We've all been watching this, certainly.

And Nexstar and Sinclair have ceased preempting his show that's back on air across the country.

Free speech is hashtag soback in America.

Robert, do you want to talk about the Disney Plus boycott?

Yes.

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

Suspended, suspended, Monsieur Kimmel.

Suspended, suspended.

They were definitely going to fire him.

They wanted to fire his account.

They definitely wanted to fire him.

And, you know, there was a lot of posting online about

people canceling their accounts and people being like, wow.

And

it's always very frustrating to me because like people get very excited and it's impossible to tell at the moment, is this actually anything, right?

Yes, 16,000 people shared this thing about how the website for Disney was down, but that doesn't mean anything other than like someone saw the website down and a bunch of people shared and posted it.

So it was very difficult to tell, like, is there actually any follow-through on this?

Is Disney's bottom line being hurt?

And thankfully, I'm very happy to say that it does look like Disney suffered a substantial financial

setback as a result of the boycott campaign.

Something like 1.7 million paid subscribers canceled.

And this was immediately before Disney was looking to announce a price increase.

So like this is this is like a serious,

I'm not surprised they reversed course.

This is like damaging to them.

We're not talking about the amount of money that a company like Disney would just ignore.

Yeah.

And I think the most important thing here for all of us, and this is something I talked about, we did an episode about this.

This is actually before

Kimmel had been reinstated by Sinclair.

But one of the really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government.

They are hideously unpopular.

All of their sort of legitimization stuff.

All of the sort of media complicity they've bought has bought them about a 4% approval rating bump from where they were this time of the administration the first time.

So he's at about a 41% approval rating.

Everything that he's doing is hideously underwater.

Like his most popular thing is his immigration policy, which is horrible, but it's again like 42%.

Everyone hates these people.

Yeah.

You know, and it's, it's very easy because of their control of the media sphere to believe that they have this sort of total hegemonic power over everyone in the U.S.

until the exact moment where it gets challenged and everyone's like, wait, hold on.

No, it turns out most of the country hates this, does not want Jimmy Kimmel acted from Disney.

Like Comrade Kimmel has joined the fight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

No, no, no.

The only two members of a coherent political class.

Mia Kimmel is him.

But that's good news.

The Fourth Estate, which holds me up

and Jimmy Kimmel.

And that's the worst day of my life.

The entirety of the Fourth Estate.

But I don't know.

There's a little bit of good news for you.

A bunch of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti-First Amendment, anti-democratic, massive overreach of the state, thought crime, nonsense.

And the company suffered such dramatic, within like literally in the space of a week, that's $330 million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost.

That even Disney can't ignore that kind of money.

Oh, look at like regular people.

Yeah, yeah, like people who subscribe to Disney Blus.

Yeah.

An army.

of ordinary liberals, the actual like silent majority in this country said, no, Disney.

We're like, well, that's gross and scary.

I'm not paying Disney anymore.

Yeah.

And it's good that they did that.

Currently, the Wright's trying to manufacture a counter-boycott against Netflix for having children's shows with non-binary characters, mostly using clips from children's shows that are like two or three years old.

Clips that Libs of Tuck Talk has already posted years ago.

Now, Chair Raichek and others are recirculating these clips and being like,

look at how Netflix has gone too far.

It's pushing woke nonsense down the throats of your children by using like ancient clips from like the Jurassic Park TV show.

Like, okay, guys, good luck with that.

Have fun.

Yeah.

In other news,

the Department of War.

So this actually happened last month.

On September 5th, Trump signed an executive order approving the name the Department of War as a secondary title for the Department of Defense.

to use in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.

While the administration also works on changing the name officially through Congress.

Hag Seth nearly immediately switched all of his accounts and his office nameplate to read Secretary of War.

Yeah, you know, he pushed hard for this one.

Defense.gov now redirects to war.gov, and they're just referring to this in all public appearances as the War Department.

Something that we've talked about on the show before of them wanting to do, and they're going to continue to push this and using this kind of war framing for domestic operations,

not just international deployments.

This was its historical name, right?

Like way, way before it was a DOD.

Yeah, yeah.

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

Trump truthed last week, quote, at the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Noam, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hagseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.

I'm also authorizing full force, if necessary.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

War-ravaged Portland.

How's it hanging out there for our Portland correspondents?

It's fine.

It's kind of rainy.

I had an ice tapas dinner on Sunday.

It was pretty good.

The crows are really nice.

Does someone want to mention the nature of the anti-ice protests happening in like one square block in like the south waterfront of downtown Portland?

Yeah, it's in the south waterfront.

McAdam is what people here call it, the neighborhood where the ICE auxiliary facility is.

And there have been protests off and on pretty much since Trump took office.

Usually on like a good night, you get maybe 150, 200 people.

There were some nights kind of around where things blew up in LA that there were more like five or 600 people out for a couple of days.

There really hasn't been any of the like what we were seeing in 2020 in terms of like the mass, mass gatherings and and you know there has not really been much in the way of like people getting arrested or generally getting arrested for crossing a line that separates federal property from like state property so to speak and like step over it and then a bunch of guys run out and grab them right that's that's mostly what the arrests are for uh a lot of people have had charges dropped i mean people get fucked up charges when they get charged but a lot of them are not really sticking because they're not very strong like because there's just not much going on right yeah we'll talk more about why Trump thinks there's this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland, but yeah, so far the protests have been relatively mild.

Yes.

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

It's like that, not like Molotov's.

The response has been crazy.

Like there's a video going around that's a bunch of federal agents, I think they're FPS, rolling in up from a van from outside of the ICE facility and arresting somebody who, again, probably crossed a line or threw something.

Generally, is why people have been getting arrested.

So, the response has been nonsense.

That video is from recently, and I'm seeing it attributed to Trump's declaration of war.

But, like, I saw stuff like that three months ago, four months ago.

Like, it's been happening every day.

Like, they do roll up in their vans when they, because they periodically throughout the day, we'll have feds come in to go grab a couple of people.

And this is a thing they've been doing.

So, they've been, it's so far at least, I have not seen either an escalation on on the ground, really, in terms of like what protests, what the protests are doing and the numbers of protesters since Trump's declaration.

And I also really haven't seen an escalation in what's being deployed on the ground.

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

No.

This has just been DHS officers.

I can confirm just.

based on some information that's come my way that there do seem to be an increased number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their transponders off, which There's a couple of reasons they can do that.

Some of them is for if they are transporting like high-value quote-unquote deportees, right?

People who are being deported for some sort of serious crime.

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

They're not generally supposed to fly without their transponders, although, again, you can't really trust anything to work the way it's supposed to work.

But there is some evidence that they have been ramping up and they have been flying more MQ-9s over the city, Reaper drones, for surveillance purposes.

So that I can say, there does seem to have been a degree of escalation.

But in terms of we're not seeing troops marching through the city yet, and I honestly can't, it doesn't seem to me as of the moment that we're recording this, that there has been an escalation in the level of force used on the ground.

Right.

Now, that said, the level of force used on the ground before Trump declared his war on Portland or whatever was still pretty extreme.

That has continued.

It doesn't seem like what's happening right now is a massive increase over where we were two weeks ago.

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

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Trump has continued to talk about deploying quote-unquote troops to U.S.

cities, including at a meeting of top brass on Tuesday, September 30th, where Pete Hagseth basically ranted.

to top generals and admirals about no more wokeness in the military.

But Trump also spoke, telling top military officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal-run cities, calling it a, quote, war from within.

Let's play the clip.

But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out.

It'll be a major part for some of the people in this room.

That's a war, too.

It's a war from within.

Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security.

We can't let these people in.

The two separate issues there that he conflated, right?

Protests in cities and people crossing the border.

Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been talking about this for a while.

I mean, same thing with like DC, right?

Combining this crime issue with...

undocumented immigration and also with protests against ICE operations targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind of bundled together into this, into this war from within.

Yeah.

I mean, the immigration issue, right, is one that gives him a much broader leeway in the powers constitutionally available to him as the executive than policing with the military, which is on the face of it a thing that shouldn't happen in the United States.

It makes sense from a tactical perspective for them to conflate those two things together, I will say, even if it's not particularly real.

During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders, leaders, quote, last month I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances.

This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, talking to the generals, because it's the enemy from within, and we will have to handle it before it gets out of control.

It won't get out of control once you're involved, unquote.

So they're directly addressing admirals and generals about them having having to help form a quick reaction force to quell civil disturbance, which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling it, again, the enemy from within, a line that Trump used a lot during the tail end of his presidential campaign in 2024.

Yeah.

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

I mean,

it's pretty blanket authoritarian stuff.

Like, there's no like sugar coating it here.

No, yeah.

They don't need to like use coded phrases, right?

They just say this stuff.

Yeah, no, like, they're just, yeah, they're just, this is, this is just fascism.

Like, they're just trying to do it.

Yeah, they're just saying the thing.

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

But I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission.

It's really a very important mission.

And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.

Because we're going into Chicago very soon.

That's a big city with an incompetent governor.

Stupid governor.

Stupid.

And I think it's worth noting, both the mayor of Chicago and the governor Pritzker have been very unhappy about this.

Like as much as Pritzker has kind of not been doing anything about like CPD aiding ICE in raids, he is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National Guard troops in.

So if they're very serious about following this through, we're going to see some kind of large-scale confrontation.

And Pritzker is not the the kind of like

knock-kneed

Gavin Newsom type governor.

Yeah, he's not Gavin Newsome.

He's not simply just going to let Trump do this.

And yeah, and that's going to be a major source of confrontation,

assuming this specific, like, we're going to send the National Guard in to Chicago stuff like happens soon.

Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotek, governor of Oregon, about deploying Oregon National Guard and her pushing back against that, but

ostensibly acquiescing in some way, because there's been an announcement from the Oregon National Guard that they will be deploying, and people in Oregon probably aren't going to be happy about it.

They won't, quote, unquote, understand the mission.

But during this meeting, Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor.

Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone.

And I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don't come in.

We don't need you.

I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War ii your place is burning down

i mean you must be kidding sir we have it under control i said you don't have it under control governor but i'll check it and i'll call you back i called it back i said you you this place is a nightmare probably it's certainly not the biggest but it's one of the worst it's brutal they go after our ice people who are great patriots and tough job too but they love it they love it because they're cleaning up our country

They love it because there's a $50,000 sign-up bonus.

Well, unless they're playing false tapes.

So the tapes aren't necessarily false, but if you're watching Fox News 24-7,

what Fox News is doing is they're playing a lot of clips, not from the year of our Lord 2025, but in fact, from 2020, when Trump's last federal invasion of Portland happened, where he deployed Bortak, which looked much more like a war scene.

Do you know why?

Because of the massive amounts of chemical munitions that Bortak

caked downtown Portland in, which made it look very similar to a war scene.

So yeah, those are the clips that are playing non-stop on TV.

I've been watching Fox News clips.

They're just playing clips of Portland 2020 to make this look like a different situation than what the current on-the-ground situation is, which may have some intense moments, but not nearly.

uh the intensity of five years ago which again was stoked by trump's own military police force, which was deployed to the city.

So, yeah.

There's some information that Trump got corrected internally.

I don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything.

But yeah, six-year-old footage, five-year-old footage being used to justify military deployments is about you'd expect, really.

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

Yeah, I remember that Molotov.

And I'm like, I remember that Molotov.

I remember that Molotov getting thrown half a decade ago.

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

Yes.

And that's the type of footage circulating that makes it look like, you know,

once again, Portland's burning down.

Portland's always burning down.

Using like one or two select clips from, yeah, half a decade ago.

And again, no buildings actually burnt down.

Yeah.

They've created a reality around what happened in Portland in 2020 that you will never change with facts or evidence, right?

Like to people who watch Fox News, Portland was burned to the ground in 2020.

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

Yeah.

We got a lot of great Chinese food.

We've got great Chinese food, shawarma, you know?

Yep.

In LA, when the city was whatever, under siege, I went to Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty, pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings at 2 a.m.

on a Wednesday scene.

That's a war zone.

That's a war zone.

I had my plate carrier on.

I was ready to go.

Here's some ads.

We'll be back to talk about Chicago.

Yeah, but enjoy these possibly Buffalo Wild Wing sponsored ads.

I doubt it.

No vegan food.

All right.

We are back.

Sweet, and it's good to be back.

I want to talk very briefly about Pete Hegseth's sec war, as he is calling himself now, right?

And the little speech he gave.

Pete Pegseth.

He's working on his physical fitness for sure.

His bod there.

He

put a big emphasis on physical fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit.

Male standards.

Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the various role of their combat roles.

if they want to do that, right?

So that would mean, you know, the army physical fitness test, right?

Whatever the male standard, quote unquote, was would be everyone's standard.

I don't want to go deep into Hegseth's career.

That would be another episode, possibly of another show.

But I do want to talk about the stuff.

Did you notice he said no more?

He listed a number of generals, but one of them was Millie, right?

He said no more Millies, Chiarelli, and I forget who the other one was.

But I thought that was interesting, given what we saw Trump say about a QRF, right?

Millie had a long career in the military, right?

He saw plenty of combat and all that stuff.

But I think he's most well known to most people for his cooling effect on the use of the U.S.

military against protesters in 2020, I'll say.

I think that that is what that was referring to, right?

That Hegsas was talking about removing that kind of person from command.

Well, and Milley also

said no to Trump when he wanted to deploy for.

And he was also working behind the scenes.

He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to have a plan if he tries to use the nukes after the election.

Yeah.

Milley was doing everything he could to mitigate what he saw as a massive danger of

Trump responding in a completely disproportionate way.

A legitimate national security danger.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, someone whose job is protecting the United States, like that's a reasonable concern, was a reasonable concern at that time.

Obviously, the Trump administration does not want people like that in command anymore.

And that was something that Hegser spoke about at length.

The rest of his speech focused on shit like fitness standards, shit like grooming, visible tattoos, a bunch of stuff that you would expect from a mid-career infantry officer who hasn't had a particularly distinguished career, right?

Like that's the shit that mid-career infantry officers do.

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

Yes.

Fuck me.

Yeah.

Well, because it's gender neutral.

Start that.

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

Yeah, it's on the MREs.

It's been on the MREs for a while.

But yes, hegsef does like the phrase war fighters yeah his his stuff was like i said not something you would expect from someone who i think he was an o4 uh in the national guard right i don't think any of that is particularly new he issued a number of directives one thing i did want to talk about was this change in grooming standards so the war department has issued a new directive on shaving profiles.

What this does in in practice, as we can see from their announcement, which features prominently a black soldier shaving, is it takes away long-term shaving profiles for soldiers with medical conditions such as pseudofolliculitis or eczema or other soldiers who experience skin irritation by shaving, right?

Previously, those soldiers may have had a like a waiver which they could show to their officers.

If their officers said, hey, soldier, why haven't you shaved?

Soldier, sailor, airman space force guardian whatever right why haven't you shaved they could say well i'm on the shaving profile because of this condition that i have now you will only have a year uh and then you will have to somehow rectify that condition they talk about treatments a little bit and it's analysis on which you can read if you want i'm not going to read them out for you but this will very clearly target black service people the most And I don't think that's a coincidence.

And as we see from

the picture of the black soldier shaving in the uh in the release that they sent out there this is happening at the same time as the rest of the stuff right and at the same time as we've seen trans folks removed from the military as hegth seems to be going pretty hard on removing women from combat roles he's previously been more outright in that this time he's in his speech he was talking about how women if they could meet the same standards as men would be welcoming combat roles but they wouldn't quote unquote lower the standards um

The whole thing was pretty remarkable to see Hegthurth lecturing

people who have spent collectively maybe hundreds of years in combat.

Really?

People who spent decades losing wars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Decades of cumulative time.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, centuries between them, right?

But explaining how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience in it than him.

Yes.

And basically telling them, it's not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before, right?

The soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the politicians and the generals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is nothing new,

but it was still kind of remarkable to see Hagtha delivering it to the generals.

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

They should just leave.

I've never walked into a room so silent before.

This is very...

Don't laugh.

Don't laugh.

You're not allowed to do that.

You know what?

Just have a good time.

And if you want to applaud, you applaud.

And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want.

And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room.

Of course, there goes your rank.

There goes your future.

But you just feel nice and loose, okay?

Because we're all on the same team.

Part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists in the upper grass of the military.

Like, that's part of this process.

That's why he doesn't want millies.

He doesn't want people that will deny him.

He wants just a complete loyalist government and that includes the military yeah and if that means that we're going to have a whole bunch of generals and admirals resign because of higseth and trump's anti-woke ranting then that's a desirable outcome for the administration at this point yeah

speaking of war

chicago

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

yet in any city.

This took place in South Shore, which is a 90% black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago where a whole bunch of immigrants who, I don't know if people remember when Texas and a bunch of other states in the south started bussing immigrants up to cities in the north.

Chicago is one of the ones where that happened a lot.

A lot of these people ended ended up in South Shore, and there was a massive raid on an apartment complex in the South Shore.

Agents showed up in a combination of moving vans, sort of unmarked vans and armored vehicles.

It's still unclear exactly how many people were taken.

We still don't know.

Estimates at the time suggested about 40.

It's very unclear.

What we do know about the raid was that it was absolutely brutal.

A bunch of the initial reports thought there had been shooting, but there hadn't been shooting.

What there had been was that they blew into this apartment complex with flashbang grenades.

Yeah.

It's pretty common for people to mistake those two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And these are just, you know, these are just regular people who suddenly at one in the morning, a bunch of explosions start going off.

There's a whole bunch of pictures that you can see in various articles about this of doors torn off their hinges.

The agents did a, I mean, this is a classic Chicago police tactic, but, you know, they just went through and just started grabbing everyone's everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it onto the ground.

There were black op helicopters like constantly circling this just random apartment complex.

There was a massive FBI presence alongside Border Patrol and ICE.

Yeah.

It's also worth mentioning that Independent Outlet Book Club Chicago, which is one of the very sort of prominent independent local media outlets there, obtained a picture from a neighbor who was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police Department on the scene, which they are expressly forbidden, like by state law, from assisting in immigration enforcement.

It is worth reading this article in order to see this quote, quote, we did not participate in or assist with any immigration enforcement, spokesperson Maggie Hyun said in a statement, followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CBD car on the scene of this raid.

Yeah, this raid is a really significant escalation of force in a city that has, I mean, I was already seen ICE literally shoot someone and kill them.

But yeah, I'm going to quote this from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet in collaboration with Unraveled Press.

Veronica Castro of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at a press conference said, quote, this looked like hundreds of masked agents knocking down doors and dragging families out in the middle of the night, holding babies that were unclothed, Castro added.

So they are dragging people from their homes in the middle middle of the night, holding naked babies because people haven't had time.

Like, they're not giving people time to, like, even put clothes on.

Something you see a lot in the accounts of this.

I'm going to read some more from an account from ABC.

As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer.

And I said, what's going on?

What's going on?

He never actually told me.

He said I was being detained, said Alicia Brooks.

Neighbors like Ebony Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flashbangs.

They was terrified.

The kids was crying.

People was screaming.

They looked very distraught.

I was out there when I seen the little girl coming around the corner because they was bringing the kids down too, had them zip-tied to each other, Watson said.

That's all I kept asking.

What is the morality?

Where is the human?

One of them literally laughed.

He was standing right there.

He said, fuck him kids.

So.

That is what these raids are looking like now.

It is again also worth noting that like

this is a very significant escalation of force.

They are zip-tying children to each other as they drag them from their homes at one in the morning and saying, fuck them, kids.

Yeah, and this also marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away from

the areas they've been targeting before, which tend to be the suburbs and the outlying areas, and into very, very

majority black parts of Chicago.

And we're going to talk more about this next week with journalists who've been on the ground.

Yeah, I mean, for example, a couple of hours before we recorded this episode, so there are sparse details, but there is a video that shows the feds just

two hands on neck choking a black man in East Garfield Park.

It's deeply unclear why

this is happening, but they are just doing this now.

And what we have so far, we don't know why they were doing this, but this is also something I think is very alarming.

This is also reported by Tribe.

There's a video from the scene where an agent is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is not an immigration enforcement action.

The agent goes on to say they were responding to a robbery in progress.

All we know about is there was a car crash and they just started choking this guy.

It's unclear exactly what's going on with this.

There probably will be more details by the time this episode is going out, but the feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago.

I mean, just randomly choking black people on the street and this massive, hideous raid in South Shore are pretty significant escalations

in places they haven't been targeting before.

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

there absolutely has been.

And

it's horrible.

Yeah, so talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess, according to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS is going to use the Cultural, Environmental, and Historical Protection Waiver that we reported about that came out this spring to force through wall construction in the San Diego sector.

I am guessing that in part

we...

will see this used to waive that one of the one of the acts that is waives the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

And I'm guessing in part that this will be used to waive that, right?

Because Kumeyai ancestors are in these areas.

And at the end, tail end of the previous Trump administration, I reported on this for Sierra, which is a magazine of the Sierra Club.

Kumeyai people were using ceremony.

So they were participating in ceremony every day.

at construction sites in order to slow down the clock.

And they also filed a lawsuit, right?

But they were trying to basically run out the clock on the Trump administration in 2020.

They successfully, in some areas, prevented some construction, but with the waiver of NAGPRA, it's hard to see how they will be able to do that.

They also waive a bunch of other acts: the Eagle Protection Act, Environmental and Migratory Bird Treaties, a bunch of other acts, right?

This comes on the same week as Secretary of War Pete Hedfess restored Medals of Honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee.

If people are not familiar, this is not the episode where I do a history of things that have happened at Wounded Knee Creek, but this was the largest mass shooting in U.S.

history.

This was just a slaughter.

Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lakota civilians were murdered by the United States military.

This wasn't a battle.

This was just a massacre.

There were significant casualties for the U.S.

military.

Most of them were caused by the U.S.

military, i.e., friendly fire and a completely disorganized slaughter of civilians.

There was a standoff at Wounded Knee later in the 1970s in which two Indigenous people died, one went missing.

You can read Mary Bravebird's book about that if you want a first-hand account of that.

It's a very good book.

But yeah, Hegseth is doing this, I think, because Lloyd Austin had previously ordered a review of those medals because they weren't fighting.

They were just killing people.

Therefore, it makes sense, you know,

to strip these medals of honor in that there was very little honor in what they did.

Hexeth has restored those.

Very amusingly, he said this is final.

Like another SecDef couldn't just order a review in four years and change it again.

CBP has also issued a request for comments here in San Diego about its plans to build 7.6 miles of wall west of Takate, as well as 1.3 miles of wall east of Takate, more secondary barrier east of Otai Mesa, and install or maintain 51 miles of quote barrier system attributes, which may include fiber optic cables, lighting poles, artificial lights, power cables, surveillance cameras, access and patrol roads, and utility shelters.

What this would do, I think most people who haven't spent time at the border are not aware that there are vast gaps in the border wall, right?

And this would close some of those.

There are still gaps east of this area.

Like when a lot of people were entering in 2023, they were coming east of here in a more mountainous area.

But this will close existing gaps gaps in the wall around Takate around Maran Valley.

I imagine that after that they will continue to move east.

The areas where there are gaps, some of the areas where there are gaps further east aren't that hard to access.

Some of them would be very hard to access with construction machinery and therefore they'd have to spend a long time building a road before they could even begin building the wall.

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

Fell for it again award.

Yeah.

I mean,

normally you would see things like racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy charges, right?

But these are down 24% compared to last year.

Even ongoing investigations have stalled as a federal law enforcement apparatus is focusing the vast majority of its people on deporting people who have not been accused of any crime.

I mean, even just like like the regular FBI investigative capacity, it's been shifted

to large extents towards just immigration enforcement.

So they're actually just not going after as much actual crime.

Yeah, I think

some agencies, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosive, for example, I think have the majority of their agents tasked to immigration raids right now.

The FBI, one agent described what he had been tasked with as, quote, photo-op bullshit,

which was taking photos of their teams on and before raids for use by the ATF and the White House in social media posts.

So they do appear to have lost the support of even some federal law enforcement.

Talking of federal law enforcement, we have also learned this week about an FBI operation during the Biden administration during which Tom Homan allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash.

What?

You didn't hear about the Tom Homan bag of cash?

Oh, that's scary.

Oh, yes.

What a joy to be able to share this with you all.

No, this is going to get better.

Just keep it, keep

simmer down.

Simmer down.

Simmer down.

Simmer down.

So Tom Homan, for those who are not familiar, is Trump's border czar and a longtime border security official dating back to the Biden administration.

Let's find out about how they got on to Tom Homan.

No, no, no.

You just said that there was $50,000 in cash, but for what?

Just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Another Obama-era ice staffer, Julian Calderas, who agents, undercover agents had contacted as part of a separate investigation, repeatedly suggested to the agents that they may wish to bribe Homan in order to obtain government contracts.

Calderas repeatedly suggested this to the undercover agents, so much so that they...

diverted their investigation and set up this investigation.

They gave Homan the money, but waited to see what he would do in office in order to see, I guess they felt they would have a stronger case if he came back to them and said, you know, I have these five federal contracts.

Which one would you like?

The Trump DOJ took no further steps to investigate and has closed the investigation, according to NBC.

The Trump administration is claiming this was a setup by the FBI.

But of course, the investigation occurred in September of 24, so before the election.

Again, it was not an investigation that they started on.

It branched off because Calderas repeatedly suggested that they should continue to bribe, or they should try and bribe Homan.

The agents who did this operation were posing as businessmen trying to get government contracts, right?

Okay.

This might explain.

So Homan was a big-time Trump affiliate, right?

Big-time Trump supporter.

People were suggesting that he might be made Secretary of Homeland Security.

This might be why.

We'll never know for sure, right?

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

This is like the level of normalized corruption,

which exists in every level of this administration is like, remember when they just could not stop talking about Hunter Biden

all the time.

And meanwhile, you have like, like, you know, like, all of like Jared Kushner's dealings with like Tutter and the Saudis, Tom Homan, getting $50,000

in cash from like undercover agents posing as businessmen to help obtain like government contracts.

It's like an absurd, comical, cartoon world.

So it's Keystone Cops shit.

We don't know if he's given the cash back.

Oh, he...

No.

That cash is long.

God.

So much cocaine.

Like,

I can either confirm or deny it was spent on cocaine.

Yeah, a wild incidence of corruption.

Oh, God.

Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela.

In Venezuela, it seems that Stephen Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on strikes on alleged drug smugglers.

According to a Guardian piece, the strikes have been authorized by the Homeland Security Council.

That's a body that Miller leads, which has massively grown in influence since the Trump administration.

It seems like most people in the administration were pretty much kept in the dark about this until very shortly before the strikes took place.

They were justified under the Article 2 powers, which give the President authority to use force and limited self-defense engagements.

But it seems like Miller is,

pardon the pun, driving the ship on this increased violence that we're seeing against Venezuela.

All right, we are back.

For our final story this episode, we're going to talk about

the national security Presidential Memorandum Number Seven titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September 25th.

This relates in many ways to the Antifa domestic terrorism executive order from last week, but this memo is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes that will affect law enforcement investigations.

So let's go over the four sections of this very, very long memo.

I've tried to condense it down as much as possible, but there is some good information in here to know.

Section one asserts that there's been an increase in political violence in recent years with assassinations and quote-unquote riots in Los Angeles and Portland, which have resulted in a more than 1,000% increase in attacks against ICE officers since Trump's inauguration 2.0.

The memo states that riots and violence aren't organic events or isolated incidents, but in fact, quote, a culmination of a sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society, unquote.

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

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

Yeah, Latino grandmother.

Yes.

Latina grandmother in that case.

Well, and a lot of this talking about riots as not organized events or asset incidents.

What they describe here is this culmination of the sophisticated campaign.

This is just describing the process of what protesting is, right?

Trying to direct or change policy outcomes, which comes up a lot in these domestic terrorism laws, which when over-applied to just non-violent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard First Amendment activity.

It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment, right?

Like the right to assemble, the right, well, several of them, actually the right to assemble, the right to speak, the right to petition the government.

Like these are fundamental.

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

Yeah, definitely.

That's not a right that I choose to exercise, but I guess it is one that exists.

But you and I have, you were in Portland, I was in Los Angeles.

Like the idea that these cities were fundamentally like damaged by these protests is just not true.

Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots.

They're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens.

This memo describes how these organized campaigns start by, quote, isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action, unquote, claiming that this process happens across quote anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.

These campaigns then escalate to organized doxing with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault targets.

Unquote.

I mean,

this is what the right has done to like,

especially migrants and trans people, right?

For a very long time.

Anonymous chat forums, and do they mean Reddit?

Reddit, Telegram, maybe.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

The memo goes on to list a collection of, quote, common recurrent motivations and indica or indicators that unite this pattern of violence and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.

These movements portray foundational American principles, support for law enforcement and border control, as fascist to justify and encourage acts of a violent revolution.

Common thread animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Unquote.

So, insofar as this memo has been reported, it's mostly been on this specific section here,

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

Yeah, I mean,

the hypocrisy is the point, and it's sometimes not worth it, or it's not a point, but it's not particularly, you know, it doesn't change anything by pointing out, but I will just point out that the idea that border control is a foundational American principle is not true.

That it was not until the Chinese Exclusion Act that the United States began to exclude anyone from coming here, and that was in the 19th century.

History understanders will have noticed that the United States began at some some point before the 19th century.

One thing I will say regarding this section, some reporting around this memo is framing things like, you know, anti-capitalism or anti-Christianity is now that is going to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist.

That is not the explicit way is written about in this memo.

These are indicators, which if some investigator sees on a Twitter account or a blue sky account could then cause them to investigate further into this person or group.

But it's not like just expressing these things will itself deem you a terrorist and be putting you in jail.

This does rely on action.

Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying to prevent crime before it happens.

I think this would be more in the way of how the FBI tries to set up like sting operations or catch people who are planning a violent act before they actually do it.

Yeah.

As we've even seen the past few weeks with people being arrested for planning retaliation attacks following the death of Charlie Kirk.

This has happened.

Yes.

Now, the memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to quote, investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.

Unquote.

So that is the pre-crime aspect of this order, which they could use some of these beliefs like extremism on migration or race or gender or anti-Americanism as justification to start investigating groups,

which then arrests could follow prior to imminent violent act as deemed by federal law enforcement.

Yeah.

I mean, in theory, the role of the especially federal law enforcement has always been to investigate people who were planning violent or terroristic acts.

The difference here is that this is being specifically framed around a certain group.

And this probably will lead to more attempts by them, more surveillance on people within

those groups, right?

No, this is very worrying in terms of like surveillance, suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity, First Amendment protest activity, non-government organizations that support progressive causes or values.

That's the real like concern here.

It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example, a number of grand juries did not return indictments of people who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them for, right?

This is unusual.

Most federal prosecutions do result ultimately in a guilty plea, right?

Because they bring very strong cases when they bring them.

But it's worth noting that

specifically like the U.S.

Attorney's Office in Los Angeles has not stuck the landing on all of its attempts to indict indict people for things that they did during that time of protest in June.

In terms of implementation, the memo says: quote: Law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society, unquote.

Networks, entities, organizations, these refer to like established organizations, like actual

formed groups that have political activity.

Now, Section 2 outlines how the National Joint Terrorism Task Force will quote unquote coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national strategy and orders the local Joint Terrorism Task Force around the country to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation of any citizen's rights.

Unquote.

The GDTF's Joint Terrorism Task Force will also investigate institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations, which are, quote, responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct as previously described.

That's a broad net, right?

There's a lot of this stuff in like the Antifa order also alluded to this.

Trump's statements made in the Oval Office have alluded to this, going after funders, foreign funders, whether that's groups like the ACLU or like bail funds.

They mention George Soros very often.

Yeah.

The Open Society Foundation, right?

Yeah.

I think the right has had a fascination with Soros for a long time, right?

They've been looking for a reason to either exclude Soros from participation in U.S.

politics.

And just to be like...

Obviously, I think most people realize this, but that fascination is rooted deeply in anti-Semitism.

George Soros is a Holocaust survivor, and there has been like an attempt to to find reasons to exclude soros from u.s political activity for for some time and i think it's reasonable to see this in that trend this sort of like big organizations foreign organizations is also mentioned in this memo yeah and saying the investigation will include ngos and american citizens with foreign ties that could be in violation of the foreign agents registration act or quote, money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage in activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism,

The memo states that the Attorney General shall issue guidance which ensures that domestic terrorism priorities include, quote, politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, damage of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.

The guide shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indica common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.

⁇

This is a worrying list of things that are not domestic terrorism that they're going to try to claim aren't domestic terrorism.

Trespass?

Yeah.

Like trespassing is now domestic terrorism.

That's not a great thing for the Attorney General to be issuing guidance on.

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

Like, are they going to call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing doing right now domestic terrorism no of course not right these things are just taking form for explicit like political prosecution for the political lens of the trump administration i think the goal here like some of these there isn't even a statute right like i'm not aware of a a broad federal doxing statute aside from you know certain specific instances where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address violent intimidation of probably like federal law enforcement would be one thing that they go after yeah federal law enforcement people with protective orders,

that kind of thing, right?

And yeah, there are probably ways of doing that, but I think a lot of this is intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing.

Absolutely.

The Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to, quote, identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political activity, and she'll deploy investigative tools, examine financial flows, and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams, unquote.

Again, very obsessed with this idea that there's tons of money that is funding Antifa, which if you know anyone under the Antifa umbrella, you know that they are extremely broke.

Left-wing protesters are not the most financially stable bunch.

There's not this illicit funding stream.

This is a huge idea that the right has latched on.

Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the authoritarian left, actually.

The idea that people can't act independently unless there is a large, well-funded actor motivating them to act.

It's something that, because the authoritarian right and the authoritarian left agree on some things.

And one of them is that like people can't take the initiative to act, right?

That there has to be some kind of vanguard in the case of the authoritarian left or

nefarious funder in the case of the authoritarian right.

And so this lines up with the way that they understand the world.

I mean, yeah.

And this, I'm just talking specifically here in terms of like regular people on the ground attending protests.

There's like big, big groups, like, you know, often like, you know, communist-aligned groups that may be receiving funding, possibly from foreign sources.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For real.

But I do not believe that is what this order is, at least this section is actually wanting to go after.

That might be what they, in the end, actually end up targeting.

End up sweeping up.

Because it's the only thing that actually has foreign funding.

But like, you know, capital A and Tifa, teenagers with like umbrellas showing up in front of an ice building are not receiving money from like Iran, China, or Russia.

Yeah.

As you say, it might be large.

the Sovereign Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, the Open Society Foundation, Bill Gates.

Network for Strong Communities.

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

Or non-profits.

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

It's probably worth noting the context here that there was, this is after a 2010 congressional investigation that found out that the IRS had gone after some Tea Party groups, right?

Do you remember the Tea Party Garrison?

You were seven at that time?

I remember the Tea Party, yeah.

Yeah.

So

the feeling here, Biden, if you remember, Garrison also hired a number of new IRS agents.

There was a conspiracy theory that these were to provide some kind of armed, massive armed element to the IRS that was going around in the Biden administration.

I'm sure the IRS had an armed element, right?

There is not a federal investigative agency that doesn't.

Like the Postal Service has cops and probably a SWAT team.

But there was a feeling on the right that Biden mobilized the IRS against right-wing individuals.

And I can see this being the old pentadum swinging back in the other direction a little bit.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Unquote.

So, could the government use these indicators to then find groups to target to stick some of these crimes onto groups or organizations?

Absolutely.

That's probably what they're going to do.

Yeah.

But these, these, these are the things to like be aware of.

And they're going to try to slap these on.

People who are just arrested at protests, people who work for NGOs, people who work for legal support networks, maybe migrant assistance networks.

That's going to be the...

target for a lot of these things.

And we've seen some of these conspiracy charges in San Diego

with their Antifa prosecution case.

We've seen similar stuff in Atlanta with Stop Cop City, right?

There is precedent for this.

We've seen the state try to, and to a degree of success and failure, actually push these charges forward.

Yeah, the panic that those two cases created, I think, and we were still pre, you know, trial in the Atlanta case, right?

The trial's in progress.

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

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

Yes.

And most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego did not, right?

And most of those people ended up not being convicted of all the things they were accused of.

I do see the major fraud against the United States.

And I think that's probably going to use against NGOs.

I do also wonder, they have spoken before about the payroll protection plan and looking at PPP fraud.

Yeah.

Financial crimes are always really scary, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Like a lot of non-profits, you know, like people undoubtedly, given the scare of the PPP, people abused it i think non-profits would be a lot more buttoned up than almost anyone else in that regard you know these especially these big liberal non-profits but uh like that is an area which i'm sure that the trump irs will be looking at yeah and they might even try to slap these on people making jokes or quote-unquote threats online right solicitation to commit a crime of violence yeah yeah yeah people shouldn't be saying stupid shit on social media right now which which is absolutely like a chilling speech right that is that yes a chilling speech.

That is a bad thing, but you don't want to give these people extra ammunition to use against yourself right now.

Fighting words are not

always

like First Amendment speech right now.

Now, like, I'm no expert in where that starts and where that ends, but

in terms of

not doing stupid things, like this is not a time to do stupid things on your posting website of choice.

Section two closes by calling for investigators and federal police to, quote, adopt strategies similar to those used to address violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle entire networks of criminal activity, unquote.

So, yeah, especially with all this financial stuff, money laundering, RICO, conspiracy charges, they're basically using or they want to use like tactic to take down like organized crime rings, just targeting their political enemies, targeting political organizations and people who attend protests.

Like that is, that is the real gist of this memo.

Yeah.

Section three instructs the Attorney General to designate qualifying groups or entities under investigation as domestic terrorist organizations per the definition of domestic terrorism in 18 USC 23315 and to submit a list of such groups to the President of the United States.

And Section 4 instructs the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to designate domestic terrorism a national priority area and provide extra funding for law enforcement to, quote detect prevent and protect against threats arising from this area that is the bulk of the national security presidential memorandum number seven

promising to chill speech and go after political opponents and organizations entities and individuals and employees of organizations yeah very very undemocratic very very on its face uh authoritarian yeah

You don't even need like allegations of political targeting.

Like they're writing down how they want to do political targeting.

They're bragging about it.

I just really would briefly want to raise the example of the flag burning, right?

So Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier this year.

I can't quite remember when.

Subsequently, someone called Jan Kerry of North Carolina was arrested.

after they burned a flag, an American flag, just to be clear, outside the White House.

I guess the flag burning executive order doesn't apply to like your, you know, like anime flag or whatever.

It's specifically about the flag of the United States.

Something which I think Johnson versus Texas is a Supreme Court case, right?

But there is a considerable amount of legal precedent that that is First Amendment speech.

Kerry was arrested.

What is being missed in the discussion is that Kerry was charged with two misdemeanor crimes.

One was for lighting a fire, not in a designated area and receptacle.

The other was for lighting a fire in a manner that threatened to cause damage to and resulted in the burning of property, real property, and park resources.

These are both offenses, and you can be incarcerated or fined for.

I want people to know that, right?

Like, he was not arrested because of the executive order, although the executive order may very much influence the climate, which led to his arrest and charged with these other things.

But he wasn't charged with violating the executive order because that is not how it works.

They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums.

What they can do is direct how the law will be enforced or policy guidelines, right?

And that's what this is affecting right now.

All of these branches, like the DHS, Justice Department, federal police, are going to be following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo to then try to enforce the laws that we have.

Some of which they will probably find ways to do it, and sometimes they won't.

Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing a very large range of things, and someone will find some way in there to criminalize someone for something that might seem on the face of it to be not nefarious.

But that doesn't mean that we have executive-legislative fusion.

We don't write we have two branches of the government, and that is important to remember, too.

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

Yeah, that is that is an important thing to keep in mind.

That does not mean that this order is not going to chill speech, suppress free speech, or be used to criminally target people.

Yeah.

Criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for years and years, regardless of the actual outcome, right?

Even if they get off on the charges.

And we want to be clear that we're not minimizing the effects of this, but we do want to actually break down what the threat model is, specifically for like NGOs, legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, right?

These are probably going to be the first targets of a lot of the conspiracy fraud sections of this order, besides protesters that get rounded up and get put into

this political war game that they're playing.

Similar to how regular protesters in Atlanta then found themselves suddenly amidst a three-year-long RICO domestic terrorism case, despite not participating in any kind of large organized aspect of Stop Cop City.

They were just regular attendees.

So there'll be stuff similar to that that happens throughout the next few months to years.

And I think that is where we should keep our attention focused on mitigating the harms of government overreach.

Yeah.

So for the fundraiser this week, something slightly different.

I wanted to read off this GoFundMe for the Emergency Circus.

They are traveling south of the U.S.

border.

I believe they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to hold circus acts, circus performances for kids.

I have obviously, not obviously, but I've spent a decent amount of my life in refugee camps and migrant shelters, and they can be pretty hard places for kids.

And it's something that I think about almost every day.

And so, people bringing joy to those children is something that I think is wonderful and very important.

People, you know, get the impression that legal funds are important and then kids having a laugh is not important, but like children have a right to be children, and that's taken away from them by the immigration system.

And so, I would like if you supported this, the website is www.gofundme.com slash f slash E-C-O-F-F hyphen I C E.

It will also be in the show notes.

If you would like to email us, you can do so at our encrypted email address, which is coolzone tips at proton.me.

Your email will only be end-to-end encrypted if you send it from an encrypted email address.

ProtonMail is an example of an encrypted email address.

Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode for next week.

There was a shooting at a Mormon church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity.

And then once information about the shooter became more clear, they quickly dropped the subject.

So on Wednesday, I'll be doing an episode talking about this shooting and a few others and how various outlets on the right and left are only reporting on these big shootings insofar as they can turn them into political weapons against the opposition party.

We reported the news.

We reported the news.

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

It Could Happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

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