It Could Happen Here Weekly 205

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Hey, what's up?

And welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm Andrew Sage.

I'm Andrews.

I'm on YouTube.

And I'm joined by.

James, it's me.

It's nice to be back with you, Andrew.

Once again.

Yeah.

Indeed, indeed.

In a time of polycrisis, unfortunately yeah

the housing crisis people are pretty familiar with the lack of affordability of housing the way that housing has been speculated upon you know the way that more and more people are finding it difficult to get something as simple as shelter yeah and it's particularly generational right

yeah yeah like i don't generally love generational discourse but it is uh a marked difference for our generation compared to the previous generation in terms of

housing security.

The data bears it out in terms of the age at which people of previous generations were able to get housing versus

what millennials and our Gen Z are dealing with, where housing is concerned.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then on top of that, we're also lacking a lot of public spaces.

places to gather, places to reflect, to socialize, to game, to explore, to interact, to discuss.

Land and housing and social spaces are really what are at the heart of human survival.

You know, we speak of the hearth as in that space where, you know, humans would gather in.

But unfortunately, that ownership of that space has been concentrated in the hands of a few people, you know, rich elites and corporations, the state, and in some cases, still literal aristocracies.

And I'm sure you're very much familiar with that.

Oh, yeah.

Like,

just thinking about the land I grew up on, for people who are not privy to Andrew and I talking before the show, I just spent some time with the Gwichin people, uh, like in the very north of Alaska, there, just in the sub-Arctic.

And uh, someone was asking me, like, about like how I related to my ancestral land.

I was thinking about it, like, uh, the village I grew up in was entirely owned by one family.

They owned our house and every other house, and my dad worked for them, and so did almost everyone else who lived there.

Like, wow, an extremely feudal

relationship.

Yeah, that's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people through human history or the experience of landlessness

or homelessness.

Well, homelessness is relatively recent,

all things considered, but or paying extortionate rents, which a lot of people unfortunately would have experienced throughout that feudal period into capitalism.

Yeah, definitely.

But the thing is, for as long as humans have been humans,

long before the states existed and long after the states existed, people are going to stay where they want to stay.

They're going to be where they want to be, right?

And although the state could come up with all these laws and restrictions and property rights and all these things and criminalize a very natural human inclination, people are still going to do it.

Right.

And that thing that people do is now known as squatting.

Yeah.

Right.

But it wasn't always so chastised and criminalized with that terminology.

Before it was just, you know, you find a piece of land, nobody else is living there.

You go and you use that piece of land to survive.

Yeah.

So today we'll be talking about issues with land ownership, looking into its history as a resistance practice in England

and seeing where a politicized approach to squatting could take us in the future.

Oh, cool.

Crime Thinks article on squatting was really helpful for this, so I'll link it in the show notes.

Land ownership and governance are inextricably linked.

Private property and land didn't emerge out of peaceful agreements, but violence.

Wars of conquest, colonialism, slavery and state repression have been the true foundation of these now considered noble and official property titles.

What we call ownership today is just violence legitimized by law.

And it follows a very similar structure, whether you're talking about feudalism, an empire, land inclusion, colonization, it starts the violence, it becomes officialized, and then rent is extracted.

This is not something that people took lying down, of course.

People have long resisted it, you know, but this is why the government responds with the police and the armies to protect the landlords.

And the people have criticized and have called out these practices.

Thinkers like Ricardo Flores Margon and Alexander Bergman, Peter Kopotkin, Bakunin, all of these hammered home the point of the absurdity at the heart of land ownership.

The idea that someone could just pull up somewhere, claim an area of land as theirs, and back it by soldiers and pieces of paper.

Now, anarchists are not in the business of fixating on just one system of domination or the other because they're very connected.

You know, landlords and governments and all the other authorities contribute to the system of domination that we all live under.

As Anders Coe writes in Anarchist Squatting and Land Use in the West, land ownership and government use exploitation and manipulation in a similar manner.

Where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects a boundary.

Where a landowner charges rent, a government levies taxes.

Where a landowner advertises a vacant house so as not to waste it as an income-producing property, a government encourages migration to those of its territories which are not producing adequate revenue.

Where a landowner evicts a tenant, a government wages war against the population.

Right now in the United States, as we can see, the government is waging war not only against its indigenous population, its black population, but also its migrant population and a few other populations.

The list, unfortunately, goes on.

Yeah, like the two are so tied, right?

That like

in many parts of the United Kingdom, like as it was moving towards, like, before we had a universal franchise, right, where people could vote if they were citizens and over a certain age, they had a property owner franchise, right?

Like, if you owned land, you could vote, and if you didn't, then you couldn't.

Landed voting, yes, yeah.

And in a sense, that is still reflected in the way that the government operates today.

You know, the landowners, the capitalists, they still have far outsized influence over anyone else, considering the laws and the policies that our governments carry out.

Yeah, absolutely.

And this is really getting to the heart of it because, you know, we may have had the abolition of slavery and the abolition of serfdom, but in no way did the formal abolition of those things end exploitation at all.

It just continued in new and old forms.

You know, without the police and armies and laws propping them up, private property would collapse.

But those things still exist.

And it is through those things that the power to exclude, extract and dominate continues throughout our society and continues to uphold violence throughout our society.

You know, slavery may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system.

Serfdom may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in slightly different forms with debt and the way that people are tied on by debt.

And as long as that principle of extraction and exploitation and rent is not dealt with we will continue to see new forms and old forms springing up yeah

i want to play the devil's advocate for a moment right and say that maybe you know the problem is just the violence of its origins the problem of land ownership and property if it just came from violent origins and no other violence continued, maybe it could be excused.

Maybe we could say, okay, well, that's in the past and we can do stuff about that, but we could leave the system as it is.

But the violence didn't stop with the way that the system originated.

The violence continues.

You know, as Anders Core notes, quote, ownership is enforced through eviction.

You know, families are thrown out of homes, squatters beaten back by police, villages raised to expand mining operations, etc.

Yeah.

And then there's economic theft and cultural destruction involved as well.

You know, because communities are uprooted, indigenous traditions are severed, neighborhood cultures get erased by gentrification.

And then all this dispossession drives unemployment because without access to land, people are forced into wage labor on the terms of capitalists.

This is really how that rapid period of industrialization got started, you know, with the inclusion of the commons.

Yeah.

I was just thinking about that with the folks I was with, right?

Their lifestyle is to hunt caribou.

That is how they've lived for 20,000 years.

They also fish for salmon, but there are still salmon.

There are fewer salmon due to climate change and

the downstream effects of that.

But they have their own land, a large portion of land, but it's the fact that someone, in this case, the Trump administration could lease oil rights in other land, which would directly impact their land, because in this case, the caribou can't carve if there are oil wells where they want to have their carves, right?

Yeah.

And so, like, it's not just that them having some land of their own does not provide a solution to the issue, which is that people can,

under our current system, own, exploit, and destroy a resource that should be common.

I mean, it really highlights the absurd notion that you can just cut up land.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But you can separate it by boundaries and that it's self-contained in that way.

All the land and water on the earth is connected.

yeah through all the cycles and systems it's one big biosphere right the damage done in one place will have an impact on another place and it's i mean that's so very obvious to most of us now but that our system of land ownership ignores that or pretends it doesn't happen right

yeah yeah instead we're upholding this ridiculous notion that you can maintain exclusive lordship literal land lordship over a couple acres of property and just do whatever you want with it because it's under your name.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's that's your problem because it's your land.

It's ludicrous.

It's completely ridiculous to make that claim.

Yeah.

And on top of all of these consequences, you know, we're also dealing with poverty and hunger because while people are producing lots of food,

rent and mortgages continue to keep people in a permanent state of pain just to exist.

Yeah.

Right.

And then this concentrated ownership of land and of property produces inefficient production and environmental degradation because property ends up sitting idle or is used to speculate, even though millions of people are in need of that land or could are starving as a result of lack of access to that land.

Yeah.

Also, because so much land gets traded around as assets, as property, rather than it being what it is, which is our commonwealth, there's no need for the owner at the point in time to really care about, you know, the quality of the soil, the impact on its ecosystems.

They don't have to.

All their concern is, their only need is to concern themselves with profit.

Right.

Like, it's an asset to be traded,

not a thing that has inherent value and should be protected, not just because of its economic value, but because it's all that we can leave for future generations, right?

Exactly.

And I mean, with all these issues with land in mind, I think we can talk now about how people have resisted, particularly in England.

Yeah.

Which is really why I want to talk to you in particular with this episode.

Yeah, okay.

I'm excited to hear which, which particular movement you want to talk about.

I mean, the story can begin in the first century.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, with the British tribes resisting the expansion of the Roman Empire.

Yeah.

We could also speak about the diggers of the 17th century in England

being massacred for trying to reclaim common land.

England has a very long history of land struggles.

Yeah, definitely.

And it's completely, oh, it's not lost to us now.

People have reclaimed, especially the diggers, right?

But there are still commons to an extent, but they're nothing like what they were, right?

Like you couldn't, you couldn't go out to Clapham Common and just go graze your sheep if you wanted to.

And it's really sad that we've lost that.

We've completely, as a nation, like accepted that land is the thing that people can own.

It shouldn't just be for everyone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I mean,

I kind of see how that would get to the extent that it did because, you know, it was the capital of the British Empire.

And in many ways, the British Isles was the laboratory

where that sort of experimentation with the control of people and land got started and was then able to expand elsewhere.

Yeah, very much so.

Yeah.

So, I mean, there's a long timeline that we could go through, but I really want to focus on the, all the ways that people have been squatting in England over the 20th century.

You know, after the Second World War, it's no surprise to anyone that Britain was going through it, right?

Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins.

And for the six years while the bombs were falling, not a single new home was built.

So people took matters into their own hands.

You know, across the country, families and veterans began to squat because they came home from the war and they had nowhere to live.

In Brighton, a group of ex-servicemen calling themselves Vigilantes, led by the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families.

The spirit of it eventually spread like wildfire.

Yeah.

And abandoned army camps, which were once meant for demolition, soon became makeshift neighborhoods.

By 1946, over 45,000 people were squatted in more than a thousand locations.

And I mean, the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy.

But faced with tens of thousands of people who had self-rehoused, the state didn't really have any choice but to step back.

Right.

You know, direct action solved an issue that their bureaucracy couldn't solve.

And the PR of kicking out a bunch of veterans from homes was not a line they seemed willing to cross at that point in time.

Of course, times change.

Yeah, they wouldn't have any fear of doing that now.

It is only the English that were squatting in the UK.

You know, you also had Bangladeshi immigrants that end up coming into the UK, particularly around the 1970s.

And the issue was that single men couldn't get council housing unless they had a family.

But they couldn't bring their families over into the UK without housing.

So it's like a cash 22.

You had all these rows of council flats sitting empty, rotten, and

young men who wanted to bring their families over, can't bring their families over, can't get housing.

What are they going to do?

They end up squatting, right?

Organizers like Terry Fitzpatrick, working with groups like Race Today and later the Bengali Housing Action Group, opened up direct blocks to Bengali families.

Pelham House, for instance, which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for 300 people by the end of 1976.

Over a thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End squats during that period.

And eventually, through that taking that first step of direct action, they won.

By the early 1980s, the council caved, rehoused the squatters locally, and they ended up getting to live right where they wanted to live.

But unfortunately, as you might expect, this came with racist violence.

In 1978, Al-Tub Ali was stabbed to death.

by three skinheads in Whitechapel.

And there's now a park that was renamed in his memory, where the history of his people can be remembered and live on.

Beyond the English and the Bangladeshi immigrants, you also had another marginalized group that took on the tactic of squatter.

In Brixton, the Gay Liberation Front took over houses along Realton Road and Miles Road, creating a network of communal homes with shared gardens.

And as you can imagine, in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you know, this was

really a refuge, you know, for queer people dealing with isolation and hostility from their families, from their communities.

These squats ended up becoming places where they can find love and solidarity and theater and radical politics.

Railton Road was also home to black radicalism and black radicals squatting in that territory.

Olive Morris and Liz Obie squatted there in the 1970s and resisted multiple eviction attempts.

And their their space evolved into Sabah Bookshop and later the Anarchist 121 Center, which lasted until 1999.

Now this intersection of black, queer, and anarchist squatting created Brixton's reputation as a frontline of resistance.

Police harassment, racist violence, and neglect would boil over into days of rioting in Brixton in 1981.

And amidst that chaos, the gay squats of Realton threw open their doors, even dragging tables and chairs into the streets for a a kind of riot party.

A mix of drag and defiance.

And through all this, these squats allowed people to survive.

They became places where people could experiment with alternative living.

Even had some people declaring independence.

There's a space in West London called Frestonia, which issued its own stamps and had a two-year-old as Minister of Education.

Yeah.

And then you had other squats ending up becoming seeds for future cooperatives and social centers and even some businesses.

But this golden age of squatting kind of came into decline by the 90s and 2000s.

Gentrification and new laws had to tighten the screws.

You know, streets like Barlington Square or St.

Agnes' Place, which were once thriving squatted communities, were cleared up.

You know, the law was changed to make quote-unquote adverse possession harder.

so long-term squatters could no longer as easily claim ownership.

And then city councils like Lambeth Council began selling off properties that it had ignored for decades evicting people who had been living there for decades raising families yeah i guess post thatcher like when they could sell off the council houses like that massively contributed to the decline of of working class communities right and then uh britain went through this extreme neoliberal turn yeah in the late 90s it with like new labor and uh labor's entire thing came to be punching down on on the on young people and the working class so like it lines up with our general political

like that was that was I was a teenager at that time right I remember how bleak it felt to be like all the time getting this like oh cool Britannia you know like Britain is having its like renaissance as this like uh

like like outside of empire right like as a cultural capital or whatever meanwhile people are struggling to get by and people are

finding it hard to put food on their table and it was just such a I mean looking back it was the way things were going to be for the rest of my life at least up till now i guess but at the time i remember it being such a jarring experience

yeah that's it's quite an interesting quote-unquote end of history right

yeah right yeah it's just the uh

the end of caring like it was just such a

yeah to be to be told that we'd like perfected human existence meanwhile racialized violence was on the increase right like people were struggling and we We like had become more connected and aware of each other's struggles.

Like we could see people around the world, not just in the UK,

struggling, right?

We saw the communities that like my parents grew up in just gutted by the

withdrawal or the failure of the industries that were there before.

The whole towns with like no reason for existing anymore.

And then to come on top of that and have like, oh yeah, but it will cost you more just to exist in this town, which is shit now.

And there's there's nothing to do, but we're going to use all the power of the state to try and extract every penny that you have.

Let's just squeeze everything out of you.

Yeah, like just

a bleak vision.

Going home now, I just see the continuation of that decline of like some of those towns, you know, where there's no particular reason for people to live there other than it's where they're from and it's where their community is, but it's getting harder and harder for them to live there.

And, you know, the industries that used to at least give people a chance to like have a

dignified life there are now gone.

Yet, the ability of

landlords to extract or mega landlords now, right?

These giant corporations building these generic homes all over the UK

is still very much there.

And the state has doubled down on supporting them and completely refused to support its own people.

Yep.

In London, as and elsewhere, the state and the capitalist market have worked hand in hand to really erase our autonomy, our independence, our ability to live and survive.

Yeah, you know, even as places like Berlin and Amsterdam and Copenhagen had some leaps forward where squatting was concerned, you know, legalized housing cooperatives and that sort of thing.

Particularly in London, London, that was the opposite of the case.

You know, things got harder.

Yeah, like Britain led the charge in like this kind of particularly cruel and callous neoliberalism, right?

From the, from the 90s to today, like

with absolutely no concern for the well-being of its people.

Even yeah, you would see it

going to continental Europe, you know, compared to living in Barcelona, which I did later, like the squat still existed.

People,

economically, things were equally dire, right?

If not worse, Spain had a really rough time, especially after 2008.

But like

the communities hadn't been quite so destroyed by the state as they were in many areas of the UK.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, I don't want to paint a completely dark picture of London, right?

Because there is still anarchist struggle.

There's still radical social centers.

There's still

squatting.

I mean, some squats end up being temporary, you know short-lived social spaces and centers uh spaces to help organize or to protest or to you know create counterculture but

yeah like it's not uh yeah i mean i've made london sound like some kind of like blade run thing which is not by any means i have not spent a great deal of my life in london it's too much city for me that's fair but i do like i i enjoy visiting friends and their projects there and that kind of thing and i think

even even post-COVID, there's been some resurgence.

It's difficult.

I don't want to suggest that things are not still extremely difficult for people trying to make ends meet because they are.

But like, people are aware of the concept of mutual aid who may not have been before, and that has been good.

Yeah, there still are squads.

There's still this struggle.

There are still people fighting very hard to live a dignified life and secure that for other people as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's that's really what I want to highlight.

You know, that what squatting represents really

is,

you know, you know, both a struggle for necessity,

but also an example of where our imagination can take us.

You know, our resistance does not have to take on the same old forms of protest and to the void, per se,

right?

There are things that we can do as ordinary people,

whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangladeshi immigrant, a veteran, just an ordinary person.

You can also,

take on direct action to create homes, resist racism, build communities, and fight the state.

Yeah.

Like I think about a lot in Greece, right, where anarchists have squatted places that were built for like the era when people could come from northern Europe to southern Europe to spend their money and avoid the winter.

And since you know, general economic decline, that doesn't happen as much.

And now people have squatted those hotels to allow migrants a dignified place to live, right?

Yeah.

That's a really beautiful project.

It's envisioning another world, like literally in the ruins of the old world.

Exactly.

I think it's a really beautiful thing that people do to,

you know, take that action to address, not just to protest something, but to say, like, the system which deprives people of even a safe place to live, even the dignity of being able to sleep in it under a roof at night.

Like, we are going to take action that strikes at the roots of that to ensure that we give others the dignity that they deserve.

I think that's really special.

Agreed.

Agreed.

And I mean, I don't want to

romanticize squatting as, you know, just an easy way of life.

It certainly is not.

But to quote crime thing,

the lesson of history is that in times of hours and deprivation, people squat the empties.

The fact that this has been made illegal does not blind people to the empty buildings or to the use of squatting as a tactic.

The Krakspeaker in Amsterdam East promotes the slogan, Wat Niet Magkan Nogstiets.

What is not allowed is still possible.

Forgive my terrible Dutch.

Yeah, mine's not much better.

Yeah, I like that slogan a lot.

Like, I think the issue of homelessness in the United States in particular is something that I think about a lot because I travel a lot.

I remember sitting sitting in a cafe in Kurdistan and I'd just been, I was outside, I was just walking around and some people invited me to join their dominoes game.

So I was playing dominoes and you know like practicing my terrible Kurdish and

these guys were asking me like is it true that that like people and like they were especially interested in like the veterans who had been US soldiers like sleep on the street.

in America.

And I was like, yeah, that's the thing.

And they were like, why?

What's the deal with that?

And

the answer is that we have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them as a commodity to exchange, right?

We've been told that people can't live there even though there's space for them to live and even though it's actively hurting them living on the street, right?

It's such a condemnation of the situation we're in as a society.

Indeed, it says,

what does the future look like?

You know,

none of us can really know.

Yeah.

But maybe we can sketch some outlines of how we can approach land use differently.

We could look to the past and at common traditions of the past as inspiration for what might return.

And we could look to our own imagination of what the future can look like as we refuse domination.

You know, we can squat, of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property.

You know, we can collectivize and collectively organize spaces for farming or production, you know, we can really be really good with any number of things.

I think the guiding thread though has to be equity.

You know, it has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land they don't use.

That absentee landlordism is something utterly absurd and can be rejected outright.

I think we can also consider the non-human in our approach to land in the future, you know, considering the rights and responsibilities we have toward animals and plants that live in spaces that, you know, should have their own existence beyond human utility.

There will always be conflicts about how we can use these spaces and also how we might resolve these disputes.

But I think it is clear that wherever there is somebody who attempts to monopolize land by force, we can respond adequately.

I think the tactic of squatting is one

small,

unfinished, but necessary step towards a future where we reject

property, where land is shared, where domination is abolished, where we as a human community and as

a living community can freely decide together how we live on this earth.

We'll just have to see.

That's it from me.

All power to all the people.

This has been it could happen here.

I'm Andrew Siege.

That is James Stout.

And peace.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

My name is Dana Al-Kurd, and I'm a writer, analyst, and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics.

I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington.

I'm recording this on October 19, 2025.

Negotiators from a number of countries and Israel were in Cairo recently discussing the next phase of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.

Hamas has since released all remaining Israeli hostages as well as the bodies of those who were killed.

And Israel has withdrawn from certain parts of the Gaza Strip and started to release political prisoners, as well as the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed after they were detained since October 7th.

Some of the testimonies from these prisoners is just incredibly hard to stomach.

The degree of dehumanization that's been allowed to take place in these Israeli prisons, the torture and abuse that they faced, is truly, truly harrowing.

Some of the Palestinian bodies that have been released are mutilated with extreme signs of torture.

Some were released blindfolded and cuffed, returned with a noose around their neck.

Greta Thunberg, who was on the flotilla recently trying to break the siege of Gaza, just also returned from Israeli prison, where she was also abused and stripped and mistreated.

She said in a recent interview, if they do this to a white person with a Swedish passport, we can only imagine what they do to Palestinians.

And of course, we are seeing this play out before our eyes.

In a fair and just world where international law meant something, there would be consequences for this.

Instead, today I want to talk about this plan that's been proposed by the Trump administration, the 20-point peace plan for Gaza.

Reportedly, ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has been consulting with Trump and his son-in-law/slash-advisor Jared Kushner for some time, hashing this plan out.

We'll get back to him in a bit, as he's quite the character.

This plan, as the name suggests, has 20 points, but it's a little light on details.

It outlines the return of remaining Israeli hostages very quickly within 72 hours.

It says the Gaza Strip needs to be, quote, demilitarized.

It talks about the creation of an international stabilization force, an international security force, to operate on the ground in Gaza.

with the eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops, but within a buffer zone.

And this force would consist of soldiers from other countries.

It also talks about the formation of a, quote, technocratic, apolitical Palestinian temporary government to run the Gaza Strip territory until the peace process is concluded.

But this temporary Palestinian government would only be allowed to engage in service provision, nothing more.

That government would also be overseen by a quote board of peace run by Trump himself, his pal, Tony Blair, and other yet unspecified members.

There is some language on the economic development of a quote new Gaza and some discussion of initiatives to promote tolerance, essentially to de-radicalize Palestinians.

Notably, the plan does not endorse ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, which was wildly a serious thing on the table for a few months that Trump endorsed.

But what it does say is still pretty insidious.

Essentially, the plan says that a possible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood is conditioned on advances in, quote, Gaza's redevelopment and a, quote, Palestinian authority reform program that is faithfully carried out.

Only then, the plan says, quote, conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

Basically, if the Palestinians do good, if they comply with the International Security Force, if they take orders from the Board of Peace, and quote, reform the PA in some way, and what that means is a really big open question,

then maybe their demands for self-determination and statehood will eventually be discussed.

As I've said before on previous episodes, that statehood part is a bit tricky because statehood means different things to different people, apparently.

Jared Kushner talked about maybe giving Palestinians a state without the annoying little detail of actual sovereignty.

The Israeli prime minister that signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin, which was the first time Palestinians and Israelis agreed to anything directly, said, after signing, that Israel would only ever give Palestinians something, quote, less than a state.

The international community keeps recognizing a Palestinian state when the Palestinians don't really have control of any territory.

It's like, is the state in the room with us now?

It's also important to note here that the plan that Trump is proposing doesn't really include any Palestinian input, at least meaningfully.

The goal from Israel and the US's perspective is for Hamas to be removed from the equation altogether.

There's some discussion, actually still, of whether they will actually disarm or not.

because Hamas has said to the media that it's not considering this.

And as I mentioned, there is this throwaway line about reforming the Palestinian Authority.

But what that means and how the Palestinian people actually factor in isn't addressed.

Here's my educated guess.

When Trump and Israel and the international community say they want to reform the PA, we have to look at what they've been doing and pushing for in the past couple of months.

to understand what that actually means.

So for them, if we look at their track record, reforming the PA means figuring out an acceptable alternative from their perspective to replace the octogenarian Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, so that the PA can seem, on paper, more legitimate and better positioned to sign away Palestinian rights during future negotiations.

They've already been pushing behind the scenes to set that up.

They pressured Abbas to convene the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council, change the bylaws, create a vice president position, and appoint a guy that's acceptable to the US and Israel to that role.

That man was Hzena Sheikh, Palestinian businessman and former security guy, who polls at 2% with Palestinians.

What reforming the PA does not mean, it looks like, is actual democratic reform, where Palestinians can choose not only their president, but also on their legislative representatives and on the PLO legislative body, the National Council.

It looks like reforming the PA doesn't mean all Palestinians will be allowed to participate if limited elections are held.

And it seems it doesn't mean responding to what Palestinian civil society has been asking for, which is reforming the PA by reforming the PLO altogether so that all Palestinians can participate in the discussion of national liberation.

We can guess that the U.S., Israel, and the international community, quote unquote, are unlikely to offer any of this because they've propped up the PA in the past and seem intent on propping up some puppet government of the PA in the future.

But they need the PA as some acceptable Palestinian entity to be even tangentially involved in future negotiations so that they can say, look, the Palestinians agreed too.

This is legitimate.

Even if that PA doesn't represent people, even if most Palestinians, 85% in the latest poll, are dissatisfied with the PA's conduct, and 42% support the dissolution of the PA altogether.

This is a dangerous game to play.

Any sort of peace process in the future, as impossible as it seems at this current moment, that isn't predicated on the complete annihilation of one side of the conflict will need some degree of public support.

It will need societies involved in this conflict to buy into the process.

Otherwise, you get spoilers.

You get political actors engaging in violence to disrupt the peace process.

Or you don't really resolve the underlying issues in an even compromised satisfactory way, and people get upset and the conflict continues.

So if you don't include people's buy-in, what you're banking on is being able to suppress people.

And what you want isn't really peace, it's authoritarian conflict management.

It's illiberal.

It maintains structural violence in the name of preserving peace.

It means Palestinians wouldn't get the rights they have under international law, the right to self-determination.

And it means the occupation in some form doesn't end.

Thing is, this is well understood.

And it's well understood by the people involved in this 20-point peace plan for Gaza.

Tony Blair, for example, was Prime Minister of the UK when the Northern Ireland conflict was being negotiated and settled.

He understood then that public buy-in was important.

The Good Friday Agreement, which ended the conflict in Northern Ireland for the past 27 years, had not one but two referendums, one for the people of Northern Ireland and one for the people of the Republic of Ireland.

The process of getting to the Good Friday Agreement also included all groups, militant groups, from both sides of the conflict.

This is what it takes for a conflict to be contained in some shape or form.

But for some reason, when international leaders or ex-leaders, in the case of Tony Blair, think about conflicts in the Middle East involving Arabs, then public buy-in, democratic processes, sustainable peace no longer factor into decision-making.

The buy-in and opinion of the public matters, but apparently only certain publics.

In other conflicts also, like the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the perpetrators of genocidal violence were held accountable by international law.

They were taken to The Hague, they faced repercussions.

Of course, not perfectly, not entirely, not everyone.

Some parties of the conflict that emerged in Bosnia after were rewarded for their violence.

The vision of the Serbian leadership that committed war crimes in Bosnia came to fruition to some degree in the form of Republika Srpska today, which is a semi-autonomous region that divides Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But nevertheless, the international community at least understood the necessity of holding perpetrators accountable for violence and war crimes, even if the execution was incomplete.

In this case, there is no such discussion.

A number of human rights organizations and the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory have found Israeli leaders, President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then Defense Minister Yoav Galant personally responsible for the decisions made in Gaza, the decision to engage in genocide in Gaza.

But the ceasefire plan, which they are billing as a, quote, peace plan for a new Gaza, and they're trying to make the basis of future negotiations, says nothing about accountability for crimes committed.

Trump, in fact, went in front of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and insisted on his support for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He even got involved in Netanyahu's corruption case that he has domestically in Israel, addressing President Isaac Herzog as Knesset members clapped and jeered.

Hey, I have an idea.

Mr.

President, why don't you give him a pardon?

Give him a pardon.

Come on.

That's what we're dealing with here.

Just an audacious, outrageous display of corruption on so many levels.

The fact that these guys are the guys putting together the so-called peace plan bodes poorly for the sustainability of this ceasefire agreement beyond the first phase.

Beyond Israel getting what it wants, the hostages, a huge buffer zone that leaves Israel in control of Gaza's former urban areas, and possibly they might get the neutralization of Hamas, it's not clear that this ceasefire agreement can actually advance into a sustainable negotiation that maintains peace in the the long run.

It's why scholar Marika Sosnowski at the University of Melbourne, who studies ceasefire agreements in particular, calls this a strangle contract.

She notes that Israeli withdrawal, release of hostages, and full aid being led into Gaza is the, quote, bare minimum you would expect both sides to acquiesce to as part of a ceasefire deal.

She expresses concern that this agreement is highly coercive and that it, quote, enables the more powerful party to force the weaker party into agreeing to anything in order for them to survive.

This is in direct contrast to a bargain between two equal parties that can sustain peace.

She also very rightly notes that Israel could at any time claim the Palestinians are not abiding by the terms of the agreement and end the ceasefire, justifying restarting the war.

The Palestinians have no leverage at all in this agreement.

And obviously, they can't rely on on unbiased international mediation, with the Trump and Kushner and Blairs of the world at the helm of this.

Soznowski quotes a Palestinian leader from Yermouk camp in Syria who said to her, quote, if there is a ceasefire, people know the devil is coming.

I think that captures exactly everyone's fears in this moment.

The Palestinian Civil Defense Agency says 40 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza today, October 19th.

Children have been shot and killed in the West Bank after the ceasefire agreement.

Israel raided raided the family homes of Palestinian prisoners in five districts across the West Bank before releasing them.

Netanyahu has said he won't open the Rafah crossing.

These all seem like Israeli violations to the ceasefire to me, but that's not how it'll be reported.

And because the Trump administration has twisted the meaning of words, where domination equals peace and injustice equals stability.

Once this happens, I fear very few will question the premise of this agreement and the entire peace process to begin with.

A peace process where Palestinians aren't even allowed to participate.

No one can be surprised when this doesn't last.

And no one can be surprised that this cannot be the basis for sustainable peace.

But hey, I hope I'm wrong.

Thank you for listening to this episode of It Could Happen Here.

Here's hoping for justice and peace.

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Listen to High Key on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

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Welcome to Akitappen Here, a podcast that has increasingly become about tariffs.

In the second Trump regime, I am your host, Meal Wong.

And

oh boy, it has been a big few weeks for tariff news.

We have tariff numbers on China that I'm not even going to bother to actually record right now because by the time this goes out, the numbers will probably be different.

There are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump and the Chinese government.

to attempt to come to yet another trade agreement and stave off yet another round of 100% tariffs.

Now, if you want to follow the sort of blow by blow of what exactly is going on, I'm going to just sort of refer you to my section tariff talk on executive disorder.

However, comma,

we need to take a deeper look at what structurally is going on in the global economy that is resulting in

the demand for tariffs in the first place.

And I think the place to go, if that's the thing that you're trying to figure out, and we've talked about the sort of ideological aspects of this in other episodes, we've talked about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism, the politics of anti-Semitism, the politics of masculinity lead people towards these

extremely ultra-nationalist policies that are specifically supposed to sort of protect the like domestic blood and soil national industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services.

But there are things that are happening structurally in the economy that make it such that people would consider things like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime as a solution to things that are kind of structural problems of the economy.

Specifically, and this is what we're going to be focusing on today,

overcapacity in steel.

Now, some of you may be asking Mia, why are we talking about steel overcapacity?

And I think there's a few important notes here.

One, steel is in some ways emblematic of American tariff policy.

It is, I guess you would call it the most material of the tariffs in the sense that it's the one where there's the most actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups asking for these specific tariffs.

The American American steel industry has been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of like this.

Steel is also one of the industries where as tariff rates have fluctuated and got up and down and whole waves of like the Liberation Day tariffs got put into place and then removed and some of them got put back into place a little bit.

The steel tariffs were set at 50% and they've stayed at 50%.

since they were set, basically.

There's been a little bit of variation sort of before the final 50% number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs have been one of the most stable tariffs.

And the reason why it's been this stable, if people can think back all the way to 2018, which I know that was a long time ago, but there was a miniature trade war between the US and China in 2018, and significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel production specifically.

And, you know, this is one of the sort of fights that was had out.

Nothing really structurally changed much from those.

There was kind of a back and forth, and then both sides kind of pulled back.

But, comma, that's not happening this time.

And what's interesting, and the reason that I'm specifically talking about steel here is that it's now not just Trump that is attempting to institute large-scale tariffs on steel.

The European Commission.

for the EU has released a proposal to double tariffs on imported steel up to 50%, which is matching the US, and also reduce the amount of steel that could be imported into the EU without paying any tariffs at all.

And this is actually massive because this is an example of the EU effectively following US trade policy for very, very similar reasons as the US.

And if we can get to the bottom of what is going on here, and I promise we will, and I promise this will go towards something that is explaining really, truly the macrodynamics of the entire global economy and why it's fucked.

If we can actually trace out what's going on with these steel tariffs, we can do that.

So let's talk about steel overcapacity.

Overcapacity as a concept is sort of convoluted.

You know, you have to sort of ask the question, what is the quote unquote correct amount of steel?

Because overcapacity, you know, implies that there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should be produced.

So, okay, how do you figure out how much steel should be produced?

Eh,

very nebulous.

It's also very difficult to measure because, okay, we're going to try to measure steel over capacity.

There's a lot of ways to do it that rely on things like utilization rates, right?

So you look at the steel facilities, you see how much they're being used at, you see how much you know, excess capacity there is, how many, how many factories are sitting empty, what percentage of the factories, you know, total outputs being used.

This doesn't work because the utilization rates of these factories, of this fixed capital, varies seasonally, for example.

And it varies due to not just the season, but a whole bunch of other factors.

Things like labor supply, weather, demand pulls, and a whole bunch of other factors.

Utilization rates of steel producing facilities are very rarely at 100%, even in markets where demand outstrips supply.

And this makes it very, very very difficult to measure China's actual quote-unquote overcapacity.

I am not going to even really try to give numbers because it's extremely subjective.

How do I say this?

Based on the research that I have done, I think the numbers you normally see in the West are inflated because they are not accounting for things like the weather.

because it is in the interest of sort of Western research institutions, but for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies, and their sort of like allied China hawk,

you know, sort of like academics to have the number be as high as possible.

You will also see numbers from people who are tied to the Chinese government.

And when I say tied to, I mean kind of in a loose ideological sense in the same way that the Chinahawks are, or the China hawks tend to actually be more directly connected to the U.S.

government.

Their numbers are probably also too low, but I don't want to give you the impression that I have an extremely certain understanding of what the exact number of billions of tons of XSTO production is happening.

What we can sort of

agree on

is that there does seem to be some kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right?

And this is something that the Chinese Communist Party also agrees on.

If you go back to a document that really, really few people in the U.S.

have ever seen to have heard of, which is the wonderfully wonderfully titled Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Further Promoting the Development of Ecological Civilization, which was one of the founding documents of Chinese environmental policy and the ideological sort of underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which is the basis of Chinese environmental policy.

One of the things that they mention a lot is specifically

overcapacity, right?

They are actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steel from an ecological perspective.

And this is sort of fascinating because we'll be looking at some scholars later who are favorably quoted in Chinese state media sources describing how there isn't actually overcapacity because states say different things in different places and this is in fact extremely common.

But there does seem to be some kind of overcapacity and the Chinese government was to some extent making attempts to reduce it during this sort of period of trade war.

Now, the other issue with talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is an extremely political issue now, right?

It's extremely weird because Chinese steel overcapacity is like my most niche thing that I've studied.

I've had like a paper on this sitting.

in a drive on my computer for over half a decade.

I have never brought it out until now.

But it's become an extremely political topic because the different theories of steel overcapacity have become a basis for a lot of genuine trade policy.

Now, I think of a very, very interesting look at Chinese steel overcapacity is from the book Understanding China's Overcapacity, which is written by two Chinese economists, that I think is a really interesting literature survey.

This is from about 2018, but I think what's interesting about it, it's from before

the period where everyone in the West had sort of decided what they think caused Chinese steel overcapacity.

And so you can go back, you know, it's not just useful to sort of go back in time and look at the other theories that were sort of floating around academia before a few of them got specifically selected for ideological purposes.

Now, I mentioned earlier we'd be talking about some economists who don't think that Chinese steel overcapacity is real.

That's these people.

I think that part of their thesis is not very good.

I think their survey of the literature on overcapacity though is very good

and

one of the very interesting arguments they make this is an argument that's made by a couple other economists that has has sort of disappeared from the literature is an argument about

okay so there's there's steel production that's happening that doesn't need to happen i think it's pretty fair to say that something is overcapacity if it's producing a bunch of steel that sits there and rots because no one can sell it, which is a thing that happens with Chinese steel.

And one of the most interesting theses that has really been abandoned, even though I think it is actually to a decent extent explanatory of a lot of very, very weird stuff that happens in Chinese policy circles and a lot of just very baffling investment decisions is specifically something about local cadres and their performance incentives.

So, okay, something that's very important to understand about the structure of the CCP is that Chinese government institutions are sort of run by these cadres, right?

And so if you are, for example, I don't know, you are the mayor of a mid-sized city, right?

You get performance evaluations.

And those sort of yearly performance evaluations, sometimes they're less frequent than that.

But those performance evaluations rank you at sort of how good you're doing your job.

And obviously there's political maneuvering here too.

but if you do a good job of hitting your targets, this is your path to advance upwards in the party and be moved from, you know, like sort of running a small city to like being brought into cadre in larger cities and, you know, moving your way off the party, moving to national positions.

These evaluations are extremely important.

You can also get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck.

Again, there's also like politics here too, but these evaluations actually do matter.

And one of the issues with these evaluations, and these are also policy-making implementation tools, right?

You know, the central government can decide what kinds of policies they want to pursue, and then they can use these cadre evaluations to make people at the sort of local level who are usually semi-autonomous in ways that I think is not very well understood in the West.

These cadre evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with national party policy.

And the weighting on these examinations is such that it has very, very weird effects.

And what I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are very, very important to these cadres evaluations.

And it matters that it's specifically gross domestic product, because GDP is a very, very weird number.

And there's a lot of stuff you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that aren't really necessarily

beneficial to an economy.

So you can have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful.

And that can still boost GDP numbers.

And one of the things that happens with this is that you can boost GDP numbers by making a shit ton of steel that nobody actually really wants or uses.

And because of the priority that's set on GDP numbers specifically, and there's also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial games that you can play that's also played a major role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played out

and the way that the government has been unwilling to sort of, you know, and when I say the government here, I mean both the national government and also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers and the incentive on the local level is to keep these numbers up.

This used to actually be one of the things that people would talk about when they talked about Chinese steel over capacity, but it's complicated.

Like you can't very, very easily explain this to, you know, like a right-wing congressperson and have them go, oh yeah, right, this is unfair to the American market.

And so it kind of has like fallen out of favor in sort of like the explanation to steal over capacity you see in places like the New York Times.

But I actually think this is one of the things that does to some extent cause Chinese steel overcapacity.

Now, do you know what doesn't cause Chinese steel overcapacity?

That's right, it is the products and services that support this podcast.

So I wanted to talk about the local cadre explanations because I actually think

these are

kind of important.

And I want to talk about one other argument that's also not really used much that

used to be a lot more common, which is an argument that a Chinese economist makes that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower levels of consumption and thus overcapacity.

And so

what this basically means, and this is something that I think is actually also a thing that's been a structural problem in the Chinese economy, is that the Chinese economy is extremely highly unequal.

And wages, you know, like they have risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere near, you know, like everyone in the U.S.

has seen that famous chart of productivity versus like labor gains, right?

Of like wage gains versus productivity increases.

Wages in China have gone up.

They have absolutely not kept pace with sort of productivity growth.

And they also absolutely like have not kept pace with the amount of the profit being produced that is going to a very, very small number of capital owners.

And this actually creates a structural problem.

And this is, we're seeing a very similar structural problem to this in the US,

where there is a lot of consumption that if that money wasn't just all going to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be spending it on things.

And particularly in Chinese context, the argument was that if there was a better distribution of wealth, people would buy more houses.

And this would actually reduce overcapacity because suddenly a bunch of the slack capacity would be being used to like build houses, except people can't afford the houses.

And this is a structural problem that economists have sort of known about for decades and decades, which is that China has been for a very long time.

The whole thing was that they were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is to say they were trying to transition into an economy that was fueled by its own internal consumption.

The U.S.

is to a large extent sort of kind of works like this, where you want to increase the level of consumption, the amount of stuff that people in your country are buying.

And this is a way to sort of like create a middle-income country, right?

And China has historically not been able to do this, and they haven't been able to do this because they won't raise wages.

But, you know, if they won't actually raise wages enough to increase people's consumption levels, then you're left with structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people don't have any fucking money.

Now, this is another argument, again, that I think is also probably correct, that is very much not talked about anymore because the argument that is used

in sort of understanding what's going on with Chinese steel capacity is about

the Chinese subsidization of state-owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms.

And the argument here basically is that the state is propping up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're they're holding sectors of the economy that should be

taken over by more efficient private firms, but they can't because they're being subsidized by the government.

And

this is sort of true, but this became a massive geopolitical argument because the argument from the American side, and when you hear anyone talking about steel capacity, now this is the argument that you hear, right?

Which that China is flooding the world with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch of like Chinese state-owned industries or just like Chinese businesses are just getting money from the Chinese government to produce steel and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest of the world.

And this is

not

really, I mean, like kind of this is happening, but it's also not the reason why

there's large-scale steel overcapacity.

And of course, the argument is that.

China isn't competing fairly in the market.

Like, this is very silly.

Markets have never worked without large-scale state, quote-unquote, interference.

Like, American companies also get extremely high-level subsidization, et cetera, et cetera.

See all of U.S.

corn policy.

But, you know, this is the political imperative that's behind a lot of

the rhetoric coming out of steel producers and out of the American right about why there should be tariffs on steel.

Now,

there's a problem, though, which is that all of these arguments are

very specific to China, right?

The argument is that there is specifically steel overcapacity in China because there's something structurally specifically wrong with the Chinese economy.

That's like makes it not a free market.

And because of that, China is like unfairly competing in global market.

And this is why there's so much overcapacity of Chinese steel.

This is wrong.

There are individual parts of this where, yeah, like there are things where there is excess capacity being produced by cadre valuations and by, to some extent, like SOE subsidization.

However,

comma,

there's a problem.

And the problem here

is that overcapacity and overcapacity in steel is not just a Chinese phenomenon.

It is a global phenomenon.

It has been a global phenomenon for a long time.

And it is largely a product of the fact that we do not live in a global economy that can actually

support the amount of production capacity that exists in the world.

This has been a problem really since the 70s and arguably even since the 60s, where as countries rebuilt from World War II and as some sort of developments in global capital that we're going to be sort of like talking about soon

happens,

the product of all of this is that production has, and this is kind of the thing that the sort of fascist right kind of intuitively understands, production has become zero-sum, right?

It's very difficult to increase production in one country without having it, you know, affect production in other countries.

There isn't enough demand in the market to sort of like fuel all of these things.

So why is there not enough demand to fuel the amount of supply that would be that would be necessary to make there not be overcapacity?

The answer to this, in sort of Marxian theory, is that, as they sort of put it, overproduction and underconsumption are doubly constructed.

I'm going to read a quote from EndNotes Volume 2, and then we're going to explain a little bit what that means.

The wage allocates workers to production and at the same time allocates the product to workers.

So, what that means is that underconsumption and overproduction are in effect the same thing, right?

Because

the way that we allocate workers to what thing they're going to do and at the same time allocate products to those workers is the wage, which is one thing.

So overproduction and underconsumption are the same thing, right?

And they're caused by the same structural elements of the wage relation.

Now, this means that

the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part

of a larger crisis, right?

You know, the thing about the double construction, you know, of overcapacity and underconsumption, right?

The fact that they are really the two thing that's unified in the fact that like your wage allocates what kind of production you're doing and what you can consume.

The fact that both those things combined are realized in this sort of secular crisis in what's called Marxist absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

So what the fuck is that?

The short version is over time in capitalist economies, there's supposed to be an increase of what's called the organic composition of capital.

Basically, the organic composition of capital is a way to measure how much in the labor process is like fixed capital, variable capital.

So it's like how much factory is there relative to the amount of worker there is.

And Marx's thesis, which has generally been borne out, although we'll talk a little bit about that more later, is that this composition is going to increase.

And as it increases, accumulation also needs to increase in order to maintain employment levels.

This is sort of accomplished by things like automation, which reduces the size of the labor force.

And thus, to quote end notes again, as accumulation proceeds, a growing superabundance of goods lowers the rate of profit and heightens competition across lines, compelling all capitalists to, as Marx said, economize on labor.

So basically what this means is like, as capital gets turned into more capital and larger amounts of capital, this is the accumulation process, as this continues, right, you get this massive sort of increase in the amount of goods that are being produced.

Eventually that lowers the rate of profit in a sector.

And eventually what that does is, you know, in order to sort of economize on labor, capital increases the amount of automation, reduces the amount of people that they need in the labor process.

You know, this is what's generally known as automation and the sort of crisis of people getting kicked out of their jobs because of it.

As this process is sort of generalized across sectoral lines, across different parts of the economy, the relative demand for labor decreases and workers are spit out of the wage relation, which is the fancy Marxist way to say they become structurally unemployed.

And, you know, the thing that happens when you get kicked out of the capitalist wage relation is you get kicked into informal labor and slums, which, you know, decreases demand and increases overproduction.

At the same time, overcapacity is skyrocketing, right?

Because you have increasing numbers of people who have been spat out of the formal economy, who no longer have access to regular wages.

The wages they get in the informal economy are less than the ones they would get in the formal economy.

And as we were saying, right, access to like the wage both determines production and consumption.

So if you lose access to the wage, right?

and there's still more stuff being produced because of automation levels, what you get is a massive skyrocketing double increase of overproduction and underconsumption, right?

Because there's just not enough money to fucking buy the stuff.

And the result of this is emiseration.

Everything gets fucking worse.

This sort of used to be an academic argument.

It is no longer an academic argument.

It is just the terrain on which economic policy unfolds.

Now, The imiseration thesis, as this, as, you know, as a sort of like general law of capitalist accumulation is called, has been argued about constantly.

There have been ways that it's been avoided.

One of the biggest ways traditionally has been by capitalism sort of transforming goods into services.

So, for example, like the operative example of this is the transition in the US from rail lines to cars, something that EndNotes points out.

So, you know, you get these new industries that are both labor and capital intensive by replacing train with car, you know, you can absorb huge populations of workers as well as incorporate the peasantry into the industrial economy by sort of like converting these things into services.

This has sort of been what the economy has been increasingly converted into a service-based economy of various kinds.

That's kind of what's happening now, you know, and you can see this process at work in the Chinese economy back when it was, you know, really growing in the 90s and 2000s.

But, you know, once the peasantry had been absorbed as sort of both a new market and a new labor force with lower cost of reproduction because wages are cheaper for a bunch of structural reasons, the old tendencies of capital set in.

And so what happens inside of China was what was happening everywhere else in the world, which is that as labor-saving technology begins to be implemented and a bunch of services refuse to be turned into new goods to like bolster the ranks of the industrial working class, you get what's happened in the US, which is this full transition to service economy shit that doesn't actually really grow.

And if you look at Chinese growth rates, they've been slowing for a decade, actually a little bit longer than a decade.

And so as China was integrated to the the global economy, it too became caught in this cycle of industrial booms

where, you know, you get an industrial boom where you have a country with favorable exchange rates, the US dollar, that inevitably sets off, you know, the economies on the bad end of the exchange rate to collapse as they're forced to bear the weight of global overcapacity.

As I have mentioned 100 billion times on this show, it is the one thing I will make sure every Ichadapatir listener will be able to explain the plaza accords and the reverse plaza accords.

You know, but this is sort of, this is sort of what the reverse plaza accords and the plaza accords were about was the U.S., this is the last time the U.S.

tried to, you know, use its just sort of like pure political power and military might to be like, eat shit.

I'm going to force all of your countries to fuck with your currency so that our manufacturing economy will come back.

And again, the U.S.

did that successfully and the Japanese economy collapsed because we'd kneecapped Japanese economy to do it.

Right.

And to some extent, Trump is attempting the farce as farce version of this with these steel tariffs, right?

To some extent, these tariffs are his attempt to pull the Reagan maneuver of, okay, we can just like force other countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity at their expense.

The problem is that, again, this production is zero sum.

And if you do this, it will annihilate the rest of the global economy.

And this is the sort of context behind all of the stuff that we've been seeing for the last like 30 years, which is that actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages.

And right now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably hideously, staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of last like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and billions and billions of dollars have been sunk into all of this AI bullshit.

And it's, you know, like tech-driven AI is a significant, specifically, specifically the AI stuff is a significant portion of total U.S.

economic growth.

If you want to listen to why that's all going to go to shit, turn on effectively literally any episode of Coolstone Media's own Ed Zitron's podcast, Better Offline, and you will, you will hear a lot about this.

But, you know, this has been the, like, tech has been sort of the escape strategy of the United States.

Traditionally, it's going to implode.

It's going to do tremendous damage to everyone.

But in the remains of that, and in this world in which profit rates are declining, and in this world in which increasing portions of the population are being spat out of the capitalist production cycle, in which increasing percentages of the world population are being kicked into an informal economy.

And in this world of generalized overproduction and underconsumption, what's happening is that there is an enormous effort to get everyone to think that this is because of very specific tendencies of like the bad government over there, right?

That, you know, overcapacity in steel, oh, it's just because the like the evil communist government in China is cheating at capitalism by giving their companies money.

And so we're going to do tariffs on them instead of that.

And again, like it's easier for these academics to make this argument because there is kind of stuff going on.

right because there is this sort of cadre evaluation stuff because there is to some extent stay subsidization of steel production, they can present this boogeyman to sort of pin what is really a global overproduction and under consumption crisis onto just, you know, it's just this government we don't like.

And then you can sort of implement these ultra-nationalist tariff policies.

It's, it's a way of deflecting

the blame from capitalism onto another country and using nationalism to paper over the actual economic contradictions of capital.

And if you want to escape that, it's not enough to sort of just get rid of Trump and go back to the previous free trade regime.

You have to actually structurally change the thing at the center of all of this, which is the wage relation, right?

You have to fundamentally change the fact that this economy, the entire economy is based on there being classes of people who make money from owning things and that there's an entire class of people whose labor is stolen every single day so that those other people can make money by owning things who do all of the actual work.

And that's what's actually fundamentally at stake here.

It is this question of,

are we going to continue to do tariff bullshit or are we going to take power from the people who caused all of this from Trump, from Elon Musk, from all of the billionaires, from Thiel, from all of the tech billionaires that funded them, from all of the Republican Party Koch Brother networks.

Are we going to destroy these people completely by getting rid of the social relations of capital that make this all possible?

Or are we going to sit here and let them continue to produce AI videos of them shitting all over us while they take all of our money and commit an ethnic cleansing and continue to fund genocides abroad?

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Hi everyone, and welcome to the show.

It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined again by Eric Mesa, who's the Borderlands Coordinator for the Sierra Club.

Hey, Eric, how are you doing?

I'm doing okay, James.

Thanks so much for the invitation.

Yeah, thank you for joining us.

Sadly, we don't have a lot of good stuff to talk about right now.

It's a

pretty difficult time in the Borderlands.

But maybe we could start off with something that I've reported on briefly in our weekly news show.

The

Border Patrol is currently soliciting comment for its plans to build border wall through the Otai Mountain wilderness and other areas west of Tikate, right?

Could you explain a little bit about what they're proposing and what the consequences of that will be?

Yeah, well, hi, everybody.

So happy to be here and not so happy to be sharing this news.

But

so, what the announcement was recently by the Border Patrol, especially on the San Diego area, is the announcement of the approximately 9.7 miles of new border barrier system.

And on top of that,

over 51 miles of what they call now system attributes.

And this is going to have a huge impact on the area.

This is going to be about 2.9 miles west of the Tecaten port of entry, going through an area that it is very remote, mountain region.

Some of people here in this are more familiar than I am.

I've actually never been, but I've been talking to some of the local organizations that do humanitarian aid in the region.

And I know that Tecate Peak is in that area.

And then you start going west into these beautiful mountains that are also the birthplace of the Tijuana River.

That's exactly the area where it's going to go.

So right now, CBP is accepting comments and asking people in the community what kind of concerns do they have?

Concerns in regards of the environmental impacts of a project like this,

what kind of social and economical impacts.

So they open up this section on their website with an email address where people can share some of these concerns.

As you mentioned, I'm part of an environmental organization, but we also have all kinds of concerns for a project like this.

including the border barrier and the system attributes, which are very poorly described of what they mean.

Some of the things that they mention as system attributes is the increase of lighting infrastructure, surveillance equipment, and new roads for access for border patrol vehicles.

So one of the things that we're going to expect that we have seen in other areas is more blasting through the mountain, especially on areas where the mountain is so uneven, the terrain, there is a lot of heavy machinery it has to come into those places to start bulldozing uh to level the terrain so they can start building this border wall so we can expect some of that and with that come a lot of issues because there's going to be the need to start drilling wells at the border to extract this water for mixing the concrete for the foundation if there was any road out there they're going to probably widen the road two or three times to allow this having machinery to access these remote areas.

And this is just going to be the beginning,

just setting up the panels.

But whenever you go to these places and start disturbing the native soil, you can expect all kinds of consequences in regards to invasive species of plants.

You can also expect some flooding.

and removal of native vegetation.

In some cases, there is some species that are rare on the area.

Having these impacts, you know, can be long lasting for them to be able to recover if they're able to do so.

The area on the south side of the border is also an area where animals need to be moving back and forth.

So species like the native mule deer, a colony that lives there.

uh there is a mountain lion and other species of mammals and pretty much everything that is four inches wide that it's not going to be able to make it to that border wall yeah so yeah we're just raising these concerns and sharing with the community so they're able to also as well send an email to cvp cos homes of border patrol and express these concerns and also to remember that these areas have been sacred sites for the indigenous communities since time immemorial so uh we might lose some uh some very sacred sites for the tribes uh forever yeah like i know the topic takate mountain has been sacred to the kumiyai people uh believe it's kuchuma in kumiyai but it's been sacred to them for as you say much longer than this has been the united states that's correct you and i have both seen it in different places right the the damage that the border wall does not just to people i've seen mule deer running along it like trying they're clearly trying to find a way through right like this is their habitual pathway there are some areas near very very near the border, like within 100 yards of the border, where there are naturally occurring creeks and little ponds which will hold water at a time when water can be very hard to come across here.

And so, I've seen deer kind of distraught almost trying to get to this place where they've obviously learned that they can get water, but now they can't.

It's really heartbreaking on top of all the other cruelty that it does.

I suppose we should address it.

I'm not sure how much we can accomplish by the comment period, right?

But it has value nonetheless, like trying to do something, I think, has value.

It shows that we didn't let this just happen.

Yeah, that's right.

I honestly am not very hopeful from these comment periods because this is not the first time they're asking the community to provide input.

And with past experiences that we have organized in other areas, other segments of the world, even in other states, we haven't got a response even or an acknowledgement of these concerns.

So that by itself is really concerning, but I think it is important that the communities around these areas are aware about this and they get involved.

And that there is this community sentiment against this abuse of power that the administration continues to do in the borderlands, and using them as this sacrifice zone, as these testing grounds for what can potentially continue to happen or expand to not only on the border, but in other cities like we are seeing with the expand of militarization nowadays.

Yeah, definitely.

Like all the stuff that is really bad in America right now.

Like it started at the border.

That's right.

People are seeing it in their communities now, but like we've been seeing it where we live for a long time.

Can we talk a little bit about there's been some other construction, right?

San Diego is not the only place right now.

There's a significant budget reallocation to construction of border barrier and that there's more construction east of San Diego, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Most of the construction that is happening right now, it was with old funding.

It was from the 2021 funds that were available since the first Trump administration.

So we were hoping that that was going to be like the end of the funding.

But since the proposal and passing of the quote-unquote big beautiful bill, we got to remind ourselves that now the administration has allocated $46.5 billion

for border security.

And that includes border barriers and system attributes.

So pretty much anything related to border security right now, they have the funding to do it.

They pretty much have the funding to put the double wall.

across the whole U.S.-Mexico border.

That's huge.

In recent days, we got a new wave of contracts that were awarded.

In October 10, we got this announcement that out of this funding, the 46.5 billion, they allocated

a little bit over 4 billion.

And this will fund them 230 miles of new physical barriers.

and 400 miles of surveillance technology across the US-Mexico border from California to Texas.

And they put up a new section on their website where there is a map that you can navigate.

It's an interactive map that shows every single section of the border and what they're planning to do with it.

And as surreal as it sounds, they are planning to double up the wall.

So, in some places, in remote areas in the desert, like in Oregon Pipe National Monument or Cabeza Prieta in in Arizona.

In those areas, there is plans to build a secondary wall.

So on top of the 30-foot barrier that they have, they're planning to do a second one.

Yeah, we have that in San Isidro, right?

We have a double 30-foot barrier.

The Biden administration used it to corral people seeking asylum, right?

They kept them in between the two walls.

and then denied that they were in detention.

I don't know if we'll see that again.

But like, I guess just from my own experience, you know, participating in mutual aid along the border, like those remote desert areas are where people go when we build wall in Otai, right?

When we continue to detain and turn people back in less remote areas, they will take the risk of going to a more remote area and forcing people into those remote areas and then constructing barriers there too.

It's just going to cause more deaths.

It's not going to stop people trying to come because there are things that they are leaving which are terrible but it will mean that they get stuck out there in the heat without water for longer right that's correct game so exactly what you said uh people in san diego in like the border in hotai you already have that double wall so you know like having this hyper militarized area and how that just is going to expand and the consequences of that is as you mentioned you push people out further uh more remote areas and two things happen by doing that.

First, the most important, more people die.

But also remember that these areas, like these remote areas, were also like semi-pristine wildlife environments that you never had humans moving through before.

Now, as people have been pushed to these remote areas, you have this human traffic and not only migrants moving through, but you also have the border patrol chasing these migrants.

And now you have border patrol wanting to build new roads to these wilderness areas.

And all of this just keeps building up into what's already a very fragmented landscape.

So by adding all these quote-unquote system attributes, because you're pushing and pushing people further and building these double walls, it's just going to end

the last of the remaining.

wildlife remote migration corridors as well.

So the impacts that this is going to have are huge.

Yeah, yeah.

For like all living creatures, as you said.

Let's take a break, Eric.

We'll come back and talk about it some more.

All right.

We are back.

Let's talk about like how people are organizing.

right like at this time when it does seem really bleak at the borderlands like the trump administration didn't really construct very much wall in its first iteration, it did construct a bit, but not as much as it wanted to.

And you and I are both very familiar with the consequences that has had, right?

Like, it has caused more people to die.

The Biden administration continued constructing and quote-unquote repairing border barriers.

They also

pioneered outdoor detention.

And like, it just seems like things with whoever gets elected, but more rapidly under Republicans get worse.

What are people able to do we've spoken about this a lot on this show but i i'd love to hear your perspective too it's been hard honestly as a person working on environmental issues and the border because definitely the

like the loses are

much more than the wins sometimes so that can be disheartening yeah but uh there has been some glimpses of hope I think one of the things that we did here in Arizona that was definitely felt really good and gave us some hope is when the governor of Arizona decided to put some chipping containers and make his own makeshift wall.

So a bunch of people really came together on the community outrage because this was just some really dumb idea in one of the most remote, beautiful areas where there is not even people moving through.

And it was just going to destroy the environment.

And the governor went out there and

spent $200 million of taxpayers' money to buy these shipping containers and build this border wall.

So we were actually,

all the community came together, we showed up out there in the desert and stopped the machines.

And we say, no, you're not going to move any further.

And because what they were doing was actually illegal, we were able to get away with it.

And

those shipping containers are gone right now.

Still, Arizona taxpayers paid $200 million to destroy their own environment, just let that sink in.

We can be using that money for much better things.

So I think that president and that movement, that sense of community that was built after that resistance, it is has continued.

After that, like there is a lot of self-organized grassroots efforts going on uh for border resistance you know and that encompasses humanitarian aid groups environmental groups and we are also uh organizing nowadays here in arizona to do some direct action uh try to uh show up to the san rafael valley which is where the border construction is going and start like raising some national attention to this issue, trying to invite our politicians, start invite our native communities to speak out and using different methods such as art, performance, bring up some different strategies together.

You know, now with the technology that we have available, it's like how can we make this more mainstream and tell people across the nation what's going on in these remote areas.

You know, a lot of people have

a lot of connection to this valley and this is the headwaters of the Santa Cruz Cruz River, the lifeblood of many communities across the southern Arizona.

And at the same time, on the other side of the coin, you know, there is all this oppression by the government to anything that is against their will.

So a lot of people feels a little bit afraid of showing up to direct action.

Yeah.

So it is

It's just walking that fine line of how what can we get away with and still be able to make a bold statement and show opposition uh without putting people in danger yeah yeah i think that is something a lot of people are really worried about uh but it is important within the realm of things that we can do to show our opposition to this like to and to stand in solidarity with the animals and the the indigenous people whose sacred spaces are being defiled, right?

And with migrants whose lives are being put in danger by this.

I wonder, like, I find it so strange, I guess, that like we're at a time when reporting on migration is becoming like a major growth industry, I guess.

Editors who I could not get to respond to an email or pick up the phone for the last four years are now commissioning pieces on migration.

But there still seems to be like a blind spot about the border in the American news media.

I don't know why that is.

I don't know if you have ideas about why that is, but the borderlands are such a special place.

For me, anyway, you know, I've spent nearly 20 years of my life here.

Some of my favorite places in the world are near the border.

I think people think of the border as like San Isidro, but it contains some wonderfully remote and special places.

And I wonder if you have thoughts on why, like,

the border isn't something that gets talked about that much on a national level.

I think it does get talked about,

but unfortunately, the narrative that is usually built around it is really negative.

Yeah, that's fair.

And of course, that's with an intention, right?

Of continue to build up this militarized state or sacrifice zone.

And so whenever I talk with people that is here for the first time, you know, I do these group presentations for delegations that come from all over the country to experience the borderlands region and they're like they have all this perspective, you know, for what they hear on the news about how horrible this is.

And then they come here and they're like, wow, people here is like really nice.

And we have had a great experience.

And I'm really inspired.

And it's like coming with this prefabricated narrative on their minds of this.

wasteland sacrifice zone, you know, like, and then going out after experience.

And yes, some of that,

of course, if you go out to the, uh, to the border and experience the wall and the roles and roles of concertina wire to make it look like you're on a war zone, yeah.

Plus, what you already have in your mind, you know, it just keeps building up the intensity.

And then

you hear the stories from people,

the struggle from migrants and stories from back in 2023 when we had the search of migrants coming and all these things, you know, but at the end, people leaves with a glimpse also of like, wow, this place is really beautiful and a lot of wonderful things are happening, a lot of movements of people trying to organize and make it a better place and trying really hard to shift this narrative.

You know, the borderlands provide us a...

a good opportunity, you know, because what we see today, like a friend of mine said, it can get get worse and it's going into that direction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's going into that direction.

But at the same time, it gives us an opportunity as a society, you know, because whatever happens at the border is definitely going to have a ripple effect in the rest of the country.

So we are able to figure out a way to

shift that narrative and look at the border like

people that live and experience the

and the culture of the beautiful things that the border has to offer, then

we hope that that's going to help change a lot of the things that are happening in this country, you know.

But we need to start, I think, organizing from the bottom up.

Yeah.

A lot of grassroots effort need to be happening.

And I think a lot of media needs to cover this.

You know, we usually don't cover the good stories.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Like, it's funny.

The right does cover the border, you're right.

Or the, you know, the Fox News kind of cadre does cover the border.

Like, I don't like the way they cover it, but, like, the only national network guy I will see down there is the Fox guy, for the most part.

I don't know, one thing I like to do with my friends, or like if someone comes to visit, you know, sometimes I'll have other independent journalists come visit, to walk down to the border wall.

And it seems very bleak, right?

Because there's this big wall and it's covered in Constantina Way, as you say, and maybe there are Marines or National Guard or Border Patrol or any other like,

it's people with guns, right, in different uniforms.

But then if you turn around, you're in this really special place where you don't see the people and you just, you can appreciate how beautiful it is.

It's also very beautiful that, like you say, there's so much bottom-up organizing, that there's so much people helping people uh of all different kinds and like that's something

we all saw in 2023 when title 42 ended and and subsequently the biden administration detained people outdoors like we saw an incredible community response of all different kinds of people of different political persuasions different faith groups which was a really beautiful thing like it's a thing that a lot of the rest of America right now could could learn from.

The government was brutalizing people and people made that less bad they kept them safe and there'd have been a lot more people who who didn't make it through outdoor detention if it wasn't for community support so like

i i want people to see that i wonder like if people want to support right let's say they're not in the borderlands can you think of good ways for them to be in solidarity for them to even to experience like i know a lot of people who listen to this have come like i it's it's really wonderful for me to meet people when I'm not working, when I'm just out there in my capacity as someone who cares about other people, right?

Doing water drops, doing mutual aid with migrants or helping people at street release, to hear of people who listened to this and then decided to come from wherever they were and spend some time here and help.

Like that's a really special thing.

But do you have other ideas on how people can be in solidarity and can come and help?

Yeah, definitely.

I get this question very often from different

people that come to BC.

I usually recommend people to start where they are, you know, in their own communities, because there is

reflections of border issues in your own community.

There are people that are migrating, that

might need some help.

There are people that

shelters and all this, or just kind of like get involved with your local.

whatever you're passionate about, you know, it doesn't really have to be an environmental issue.

But we got to remember that uh social justice and environmental justice is the same thing yeah you know we are really like uh whatever you're passionate about just getting involved but i think the the worst thing that we can do right now is just to ignore the fact that We are in a bad spot.

I think a lot of people just wants to continue writing their comfort song wave and

that's going to end.

And I think we need to not only think about ourselves, but we need to think about the generations coming ahead of us.

And I think it's especially for the people that have already had the opportunity to somehow live a life, you know, but there's some that are about to start a journey.

And I think it's our responsibility to make it the best as we can for them as well.

So whatever you're passionate about, and if you really want to, and you're passionate about border-related issues, and you're not able to come try to support you know like financial help is you know uh we like it or not we're in a capitalist society and we move with financial support yeah so a lot of these events that we're creating a lot of this outreach that we're doing a lot of the people like new generations that need jobs that are uh wanting to uh

join like let maybe a non-profit work or create their own movement or doing something related that's going to help the community Yeah, support those if you are able.

Those are really good ways to get involved and make some change.

Yeah, definitely.

Like, there's a lot of things you can do, as you say.

And I think it does help to build up networks of caring for people everywhere.

Like, we want to live in a world where people take care of one another.

And to do that, we have to start it everywhere.

It's not like the border is the only place where bad things are happening.

I know we draw a lot of strength.

as people who live at the border from that solidarity, but also from seeing people do their own things wherever they're at like that is how we build a world where systems of oppression are less able to oppress people so yeah and one of the things we see here most of the decisions taken for the border are not taken by people from the border you know a lot of these big policy decisions Like for example, Senator of Utah right now is putting up a bill for the border to sacrifice a lot of public lands for new roads and like new

uh military installations so it's like people from utah are not directly on the border but yeah they can also uh send letters and comments or both these senators out you know and somebody that really like cares for the environment yeah if you're in you if you're in utah your senator has been advocating to sell off the public lands that you own that are safe i mean they're native land it's all native land and it should be returned to its original custodians But in the meantime, you own it and at least all of us can access it until Mike Lee gets his chance to sell it all off to his buddies in real estate.

And like, you could be an extremely conservative person and we could disagree on a lot of shit.

And I think we could find unity on that.

Like, I do not understand how there is a constituency that wants to take land from the public domain and turn it into...

I don't know, military bases and oil fields and mansions for rich people to have as their second home.

Like, that should be a thing that everyone agrees on.

And like, he didn't stick the landing on it the first time in the

reconciliation, the quote-unquote big beautiful bill.

But I think that's a really good area to engage people, folks who might not be like, yeah, I will show up for migrants.

I think a lot of people, they could be people who enjoy the outdoors, people who just care about the environment, the hook and bullet crowd.

Like there are a lot of people, even if they don't quote unquote use public lands, like we all benefit from them being there and future generations benefit from them remaining undeveloped in a substantial way.

That's right.

Sorry, I just went off on one.

That guy really pissed me off.

Shit makes me so mad coming from a country that is entirely private land just to see someone being like, yeah, that's a good idea.

It's just fucking asinine.

Eric, I wonder if people want to keep up with the Sierra Club, keep up with...

like how they can submit opposition comments if they want to know more about this new border construction and and the impact it would have,

where can they follow along?

Is there a website or social media?

Yes, James, thank you.

Yeah, we do have all of it.

We try to engage people where they are.

And we know social media is a powerful tool.

We have a website, Sierra Club Borderlands.

People can look up some of the work that we do there.

We are also active on social media.

We are at Sierra Club Borderlands.

However you look at it, you're going to find us.

We're based out of Arizona, but we do organize in different states.

So we're in collaboration with other organizations as part of a larger coalition.

So even if you are in Texas or New Mexico, feel free to reach out.

And if you have any concerns, ideas, things that come up to your mind that can make the border a better place,

feel free to reach out and we can collaborate, work together on this, or at least connect you with some of the local people that are part of the network because we're always looking to make this network bigger.

I think the strengthening numbers and get more and more people to join this coalition in the different states.

So

even if you're not on the border states, if you're in BC and you do a lobbying and you're into policy change, like yeah come

reach out and you can find us like a center website or we got an Instagram account.

We also have like a grassroots video effort right now called Rally for the Valley and that's what we're trying to do for the San Rafael Valley.

Over there you're going to be able to find updates and

we created a decentralized website right now that is called border wall resistance.

I invite everybody to take a look at it.

It's full of beautiful pictures of the border.

When James and I were talking about how beautiful this place is, go to that website and you understand what we're talking about because it's so diverse.

You know, the border is so unique on each area.

You know, the border is not defined by Pijuana, San Diego, or Logades.

You know, it is just 2,000 miles of wonderlands.

So unfortunately, separated by, in many cases, by this huge metal 3 foot structure.

Yeah.

Anyways, so that's the website, website, the social media for Cyril of Borderlands and Gradley for the Bal and the border transistance.

Yeah, definitely reach out if you if you recently found out that you live within a border enforcement zone and weren't aware of that because I know a lot of people in Chicago and other places have very recently found out that as far as the state is concerned that they too are in the borderlands.

So it'd be good to build some solidarity there.

That's right.

Two-thirds of the population of this country lives on the borderlands region.

So because that includes coastlines and the Great Lakes.

All the Great Lakes.

So, we're talking about a lot of communities.

Yeah.

Well, thank you very much for your time, Eric.

We really appreciate it.

That was a good discussion.

Thank you, James.

And

hoping that I'll continue to be in touch and continue organizing, I guess, all these things.

And thanks so much for the space, and thanks for all you listen, Eric.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Let's be real.

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High key.

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast.

You better listen.

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

Just one little spicy off-comment.

That's all it takes.

Everyone loves me at the cancer.

And then the Aries comes out and they say, who

is that?

No, you're going to come from me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon.

Get out of here.

I'm a Capricorn Rising, Rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

Okay.

That is your Capricorn talking.

Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome back to Ejectoral Dysfunction.

Wait.

That's the worst one yet.

That's the worst one yet, folks.

We did not think it could get worse.

And yet, here we are.

I knew it could get worse.

Can always get worse.

All quitting our jobs today.

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 Ejaculator-in-Chief.

Jesus Christ.

Wow.

Garrison.

Garrison.

That's much worse.

You made it way worse.

How many of those videos have you not watched, Garrison?

I think we're all pretty behind on the required training.

My labor conditions are intolerable.

Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong.

This episode, we are covering the week of October 15th to October 22nd, and a little bit of the week before, because we were off in honor of the government shutdown.

We ourselves took a week off

because the CIA stopped paying us.

That's right.

That's right.

I've always considered us a branch of the U.S.

government, you know?

Yeah, you and half of the anime people on Twitter, Robert Evans.

We're back.

I don't know.

It feels a little bit weird to be doing this White House weekly episode knowing that there's actually less White House than usual.

There is.

Trump has begun demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a privately funded $250 million ballroom.

And I think we should all have a moment of silence for the East Wing.

Oh, I was going to say a moment of celebration because now James's people can finally shake hands with the United States government in destroying large portions of the White House.

Yeah.

Well, I saw it was a Volvo excavator.

So we also got these Swedes on board, I guess.

Sure.

Couldn't even find an American excavator.

Sad.

We don't make things in this country anymore.

Yeah, that's because we're still waiting for the tariffs to get fully, fully enacted.

Yeah, yeah, once we get that Swedish tariff on.

We are almost four weeks now into the government shutdown, and there's not really a clear end in sight.

And SNAP benefits, food stamps, are set to run out in a little over a week on November 1st.

Mia, did you want to say something on this?

Yeah, so we've been seeing sort of tech start to go out to people who are on food assistance in various states.

There's one circulating from Minnesota that is saying that the food part of SNAP benefits are going to shut down in a few days on November 1st when the funding shuts down.

This is a critical lifeline for food for an an extremely large number of people.

And this is also coming in a period where food banks are already being stressed by just the other cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs that have already taken place.

So

yeah, we're coming to a very, very critical moment in terms of wide-scale food insecurity in this country for a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in the country.

And

yeah, this is a good moment for if you have actual access to food,

which is a very, very bleak thing to be saying, but you know,

something is going to have to try to pick up the slack or a bunch of people aren't going to eat.

Right.

And

that's probably going to have to be us because it's sure as fuck not going to be the government.

Yeah.

Well, and yeah, just the people's need to eat is inelastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just to put some numbers on it, like SNAP in 24 was 41.7 million people, which is about 12% of the U.S.

population.

Yeah.

This is a massive cliff.

I mean, it's particularly bad in certain states.

For example, Oregon, you know, where I live is set to lose about three-quarters of a million people's SNAP benefits.

There are like 4 million people in the state.

Yep.

Yep.

And it's also like those people are also disproportionately non-white and disproportionately queer

and very disproportionately trans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is something that if straight up the shutdown continues and we don't see snap benefits pay out, this could also be a major source of instability because,

you know, the thing that happens very quickly when suddenly 40 million people don't have food is bread riots.

What is going to happen with that is deeply unclear.

But yeah, we are heading into an extremely bleak time.

If you're looking at predictors of violent instability in countries,

mass starvation is about top of the list.

Yeah, yeah.

Yep.

Particularly bread riots usually are

in sort of the modern era happens with 200 or 300% increases in food prices, usually as a result of sort of IMF structural adjustments.

But if there was going to be another one, this would be it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's worth sort of being prepared on both ends in terms of feeding people and also, yeah, with whatever was going to happen with this cuts out.

Yeah.

Meanwhile,

during all of this, during the shutdown and during Snap's ticking clock, Trump wants his Justice Department to pay himself $230 million in compensation for damages coming from past investigations into him.

Seems fair.

Trump claims that he will give this money to quote-unquote charity.

Seems fair.

It's unclear what that means, what charity that will be,

how that will really qualify as a charitable donation.

But he is currently seeking $230 million of government money to be paid back to himself.

In the end, it will be him making the final call on this, which he says he feels strange about.

Okay, well, it's good.

He's an honest man, you know?

It's great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've just fully entered the looting the store has part of the regime.

Yeah.

They're taking a very British approach looting is is putting this too mildly yeah did any of you see the the article about the plans to to let ai companies apply to get old weapons grade plutonium to to fuel the nuclear reactors

seems fine that's what i trust sam altman with is weapons grade plutonium i feel like he's gonna use that safely yeah

hopefully the ai bubble collapses before they get weapons grade plutonium complete you know what a great attitude to approach having weapons-grade plutonium is?

Move fast and break things.

Oh, God.

This is great.

It's this week we're announcing the start of Kud's Force AI.

There we go.

Bring it on.

Oh, God.

Breaking news.

U.S.

sanctions have been placed against two of Russia's largest oil companies in an effort to pressure the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which Putin just backed out of negotiations from, as there was plans for him and Trump to meet.

So that just happened.

Sexy.

Not sexy.

So I think one of the first things we want to cover right now, just because this is maybe the number one thing I'm seeing people talk about on social media right now, is there have been articles written about ICE's new weapons budget.

Famously, their budget has increased by something like 700%.

A huge amount of that's being spent on, you know, bonuses in order to get people to join cash payments and whatnot, as well as retention bonuses.

but a lot more of it's being spent on weapons.

And right now, the number one thing I'm seeing people freak out about is the supposed idea from these documents that ICE is purchasing guided missiles and chemical weapons.

I have heard people say this is ICE, which is obviously Trump's SS, you know, making their own Waffen-SS, which were the armed units of the SS.

I'm seeing a lot of shit like this spread.

And as James is going to tell you, none of that's true.

Yeah.

I mean, the fact that ICE has a massive increase in budget and is buying a shitload of of weapons is true, but they're not guided missiles.

ICE does not have weapons.

Guided missiles?

Yeah, we're not getting a death's head ICE unit.

Come on.

At the next Canal Street ICE raid, they're going to be launching heat-seeking missiles into Chinatown.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but it's not what people are saying it is.

Yeah, sorry, James.

All right.

The source of this claim is a substack page called Popular Information, run by a guy called Judd Legum.

And

he has claimed in this piece, I'm just going to quote, that ICE has purchased, quote, chemical weapons and quote, guided missile warheads and explosive components.

I guess the main thrust of the piece was looking at the fact that ICE spent $9 million on Geistly AR pattern rifles.

Border Patrol spent more than twice that.

He appears to have missed that in his reporting.

This reporting is extremely dishonest, to put it mildly.

It's either deliberately misleading or massively incompetent.

The piece in question doesn't link to the individual contracts, which like on the face of it, it's bad form, right?

If you're going to be talking about contracts, your contracts are in the public domain, just link to them.

The piece doesn't do that.

I went on usaspending.gov and I filtered by contracts that have been awarded by ICE.

I gave a date range, the date range that pertained to the things being discussed in the article.

And then I filtered by the product or service code for chemical weapons and guided missile warheads, right?

Two different product or service codes.

Product or service codes are like these four-digit codes that exist in federal procurement, right, to put things into buckets, basically.

And I found the contracts.

The contract very clearly states the guided missile quote-unquote contract, the contract with the guided missile product or service code very clearly states it is for multiple distraction devices.

It's a contract with a company called Quantico Tactical.

I did call them yesterday, something that, again, any competent reporter should do before publishing a piece that does not appear to have been done by the Substack guy.

They gave me an email.

I sent an email more than 24 hours ago requesting comment or clarification.

I didn't receive a response at the time of us going to press.

If I hear back from them before we release this, I will let you all know.

The chemical weapons, it was OC spray.

It was pepper spray.

Right.

And a distraction device, by the way, folks, this is something like

a sonic grenade, which sounds crazy, but it's a grenade that makes a loud noise to distract people.

It's a bang bang bang.

A flashbang is also a distraction device when you use the way that they use in riots.

You know, it's a little bit of a different thing when you're using one to like breech bang and clear a door or something.

But like when you're throwing a flashbang at a riot, it's a distraction device because the goal is you've got a bunch of people moving towards an area you want to stop them from.

You distract them by an explosion, you know?

Yeah, and it's distracting.

Yeah.

It's also, and this is, you know, one of the, one of the frustrating elements about this is that ICE has been using a whole bunch of these to blow down people's doors.

And it's really horrible.

These are problems.

It's problems that they're buying all this.

And no one is talking about it because everyone's focused on this.

When James put up their initial research just on Blue Sky and Twitter, I shared it and people were like, it's still a problem they've got that they're getting all buying all these new weapons.

Do you not care about?

Yes, I care about that.

You're not talking about that.

Yeah, we care about that.

They're talking about a fantasy.

And like, it is bad that ICE has flashbangs and pepper spray, right?

I have personalized broadcasts.

They exist.

Like, you can go back only a few months and hear ICE flashbangs on this podcast, like recorded by me in person.

We know they fucking have them because they were throwing them at me.

Yeah, I've lost count of how many have hit me directly.

Yeah, yeah.

We've got at least 75% fucking federal government flashbang impact.

You know, like.

I want to take a second, I guess, to talk about incentives here because this really pisses me off.

Yeah.

And I think that the way we build trust in the media is through openness.

And I think that we do that better than most.

And I'm going to try and do that here.

Just so you know, none of us make any extra money if more people download this podcast, at least not directly, right?

We do not have a direct incentive to make fantastical claims that will lead to people downloading our podcast and being afraid.

That is not true.

for people who have these substick outlets, right?

Like, like,

I mean, let me clarify.

We do have a direct financial interest in there being traffic, right?

Because that is, that's how we make our money, right?

Like, and that's how we justify getting raises and stuff.

So like everyone in media, if more people listen to our stuff, like we do have a financial interest in that.

We're not checking week to week to see if we're getting, if what we're doing is bringing us in more direct money, right?

Like that's just not the way our thing works.

Yeah.

And when people are on their own, they're doing these subscribers.

There is a very real incentive to do that, right?

We also have a team here.

We fact-check each other.

We do our best.

We fuck up sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah, we fuck up sometimes, but we're honest about it when we do, right?

We acknowledge it.

Yeah, we acknowledge when James makes mistakes.

Thank you, guys.

You're the least mistake person here.

I'm just

extremely careful about that shit.

Well, I've stood on my fucking pedestal enough about this, but

it's bad, right?

The things that ICE are buying, that ICE is really buying are semi-automatic ARs, more clocks, a lot of soft body armor, red dot sites, quote-unquote crowd control munitions, right?

It's the sort of spending you'd see from a special forces unit at a very not special like police agency, right?

Like that's just spending like they have an open checkbook.

Like ICE is continuing to buy the same weapons with which they have been hurting people

the entirety almost of the 21st century.

And they're hurting more people now and will be hurting even more people in the future because they will have even more money.

And that's bad.

And you don't like, what would they even do with a guided missile?

That doesn't make sense on the face of it.

It's 61 grand.

Yeah.

What the fuck do you think you're getting for 61 grand from a company in Quantico?

Have you tried buying guided missiles in this economy, people?

It's just ludicrous, man.

Where the fuck do they think they're going?

Like, like Tomahawk at a...

No, like a strawberry picking facility.

Like, it's ludicrous.

It's fucking ridiculous.

A chemical weapon I mean you can talk about sub stack and there being fucked up things about the company but like I honestly I think that I don't think it's overstated but I think people focus on that to the extent of like well yeah which which which of them aren't yeah what where's the non-Nazi social media company that has any kind of reach you know yeah yeah but that's really not even the point I care to make what I what I will say the problem here is not even just that like when people are working for an audience like that we're week to week, however many people are donating and whatnot kind of can incentivize you to follow certain rabbit holes and push certain things.

I think one of the bigger problems is that what you have is a generation of very of the most talented and successful journalists in terms of their skill at like writing and their ability to build an audience that follows them.

Those people have all moved to a platform where they by default don't have an editor.

And like every journalist worth their salt, I've had my fights and frustrations with editors at a variety of publications.

And sometimes they're annoying and sometimes editors suck and sometimes publications, a big part of what they're doing is just trying to water down your shit.

But that's not the only thing editors do.

A major thing editors do is point out, hey, I get that you're really into this and I get that you find this compelling, but as an objective observer, I'm seeing this hole and this hole and this hole.

And you need to, for example, call these people and make sure that this, because it doesn't look like this is actually a guided missile.

It looks like somebody just fucked up putting in a code.

Yeah.

We need to check on this so we can state it to a point of certainty.

That's what an editor should be doing, right?

Yeah.

Even if they're responsible journalists, like I wouldn't have submitted that piece to an editor without having checked that first.

Like, sure.

It took me five minutes to call them.

I should add that the PSCs in question for grenades and warheads are one digit different, right?

Again, right, which is, which is what happened here.

It certainly looks that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And again,

this is why part of how responsible journalism is supposed to work is that you never have just one eye on a story because every journalist will inevitably miss things if you're doing that, right?

That's why you are supposed to, the idea is to have multiple eyes on a thing so that, oh, hey, it looks like you skipped over this or, hey, it just occurred to me I have this question that is not being answered.

And you make a couple of phone calls, throw in another sentence, and then that's, that's a thing that we're answering, a thing we're accounting for.

And if you don't have that, the work isn't as good.

Yeah, no.

And look, I'm not saying there are not things to be afraid of.

There are.

No one's saying that, yeah.

But I want people to be afraid of the right things.

Like, they're not going to halabja people.

I don't think we're really going to be safe until there's an iron dome over every Home Depot.

Garrison, I've been saying that for years, but that's also because I would like to start a limited missile war against the Home Depot Corporation.

But

I've been taking Lowe's money for years.

Yeah, on behalf of Lowe's.

I'm on Team Ace Hardware, so I'll see you on the battlefield, Robert.

At least we don't have any harbor freight people here.

I'm actually a massive harbor freight guy.

He just does have harbor freight behind literally, literally behind me.

I mean, the nice thing about harbor freight is buying one thing and then returning it exactly 11 months after buying it once you've broken it and just having a perpetual whatever

yeah yeah everything that i've bought from harbor freight has started smoking uh

everything breaks that you buy from harbor freight but the return policy is amazing yeah the question is will it break before or after you've used it enough to justify buying something more expensive and the answer is yes james can you do a uh product and service code uh ad break ad pivot

uh based on your investigation here and adam you can keep this in you can you can show them how the sauce is made here.

Yeah, this just in terms of honesty.

Here we go.

Okay, right.

Give me a give me a second here.

I've got to think of something good.

You fucked it.

I was just going to do talking products and services, and you ruined it, Garrison.

If you are in the market for a distraction advice, guided warhead or chemical weapon,

let's hope that you get an advert for one of those in this commercial break.

That's right, people.

Welcome back to the Iranian regime.

I hope you got what you wanted.

Yes, this podcast is the only podcast entirely supported by the Ayatollah.

And yeah,

praise him.

The CIA and the Ayatollah have finally united.

I think I get a clasping hands memo for Robert Evans.

Legally speaking, that is a joke.

We are not funded by the Iranian regime.

We're all monarchists.

Speak for yourself there, Joe.

Let's talk about the national.

Let's talk about the National Guard.

Yeah, sure.

On Monday, this past Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in favor of the Trump administration, halting a court order denying the federalization and deployment of the Oregon National Guard.

A two-to-one ruling on a three-panel hearing with two Trump-appointed judges, they called called Trump's plan to deploy troops to the ICE building in Portland a quote-unquote measured response.

Now, there is a second TRO preventing out-of-state National Guard from deploying to Portland, and this appears to still be in effect, but its fate is unknown.

The Justice Department has requested the original judge to suspend the order, though the Ninth Circuit itself is considering whether a larger panel should rehear this entire case.

Currently, there is no immediate plans for Oregon National Guard to be deployed, but they do now have the go-ahead.

But this is still a developing situation, but that's an important update there.

Let's talk about the 250 celebration.

Shrewsing, happy birthday.

No.

Happy birthday to the Marines.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Happy birthday to the Marine Corps.

I hope today you guys get to eat a lot of crayons.

They'll have a cake, which is shaped like a giant crayon.

No, it just is made out of giant crayon.

And we all remove our Totenkov tattoos.

That's going gonna be the the marine party get get get rid of those scout sniper tattoos

if you just saw it

uh but no there was the marines 250th celebration with jd vance

last week where they did play helldiver 2 music during the celebration i want to wish you all a happy birthday and separate fidelis

I'm still not clear what Helldiver is.

Helldivers is a satirical video game that satirizes a fascist military that fights for quote-unquote democracy against other so-called fascist sorry, managed democracy, very important.

It's true, it's true.

Yes, managed democracy.

You may have heard of it from the news headlines such as Charlie Kirk shot.

But yeah,

it's basically like playing starship troopers music over the Marine Corps celebration party.

That's kind of the caliber we're operating in here.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that to my generational understanding.

There you go.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Talking to the Marine Corps 250th birthday on Saturday, a 155 shell, so 155 millimeter howitzer shell, prematurely detonated over the Phi Freeway

outside of camp pendleton right nut stuff crazy

damaging a cop car that was assigned to jd vance's security detail it was literally as soon as they started talking about how trump wanted to shoot a missile into camp pendleton and like immediately yeah they up and blow up a car attached to yeah the vice president's security detail amazing stuff They did a dress rehearsal on Friday in which they managed not to detonate any shells over the five.

Gavin Newsom decides to shut the Frive on Saturday.

Probably a good call.

Yeah.

Probably

complaining about things shaking.

Just if you're like, if you're, if you're not familiar with the layout there, I would say in most places, as you go, Camp Pembleton is a large area that is used by the Marine Corps for training.

It has artillery ranges within it.

The five is the big highway in California.

It's the highway that goes the whole length of the state.

Yeah, you would call it the I-5 if you weren't from here, and then we would know that you weren't from here.

We call it the five.

There's less than a mile of land to the west of the five, right?

So shooting over the five, like pretty much shooting from the beach or near the beach, as opposed to the whole rest of Camp Pendleton, right?

Where they have artillery ranges, but they wanted to do it over the five.

I think they were doing some kind of simulated landing drill.

Not quite sure

what the landing drill they were doing, but

this, yeah, resulted in the damage done to a CHP car and really fucked up traffic in probably the entirety of Southern California California

from most of last Saturday.

I do just want to mention here that there is historical precedent in the United States for us accidentally killing the Secretary of State because a gun they were firing on a pleasure cruise on a boat, on a Navy boat, blew up.

So, wow.

This was in the 1840s, but we did kill the Secretary of the Navy.

and the Secretary of State.

If any Secretary of War could pull this off, it would be P.A.

I believe in him.

There is a decent chance he will throw one of those axes straight into JD Vance's leg.

Oh, yeah.

I forgot about his axe name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Vance, of course, a former Marine.

Oh, yeah.

Vance is a...

Wait, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I totally forgot.

Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, I believe.

He was a PAO.

Damn.

Public Affairs.

Yeah.

I want to address DHS's claims about deportation numbers.

DHS has been throwing out some really big numbers for deportation, claiming over half a million removed and 1.6 million, quote-unquote, self-deported.

These are inflated numbers.

These include things like people turned away at airports and Coast Guard interdictions, right?

They are not removals of people from the interior of the United States who are residing here.

They're like if someone, maybe if someone came with a visa and was turned around the airport, they're including that as a deportation, right?

DHS has stopped publishing a lot of the data that we previously got under this administration, so we don't have a lot of hard numbers.

But the 1.6 million number, this comes from CIS, right?

The Center Center for Immigration Studies.

We talked about them before.

This is a Tanton-funded quote-unquote think tank, which the SPLC has adjudicated as a hate group.

The CIS data,

DHS has been like sharing this since it came out, but it also seems to be weighing very heavily into whatever algorithm Musk has put into Grok recently.

If you look for mentions on X, the Everything website, of the 1.6 million number, nearly all of them are Grok repeating it.

God.

I don't know if they straight up just said, like, yeah, the CIS is your source for information when they were, you know, programming it to be less woke, but slightly more woke than when it called itself Mecha Hitler.

But it seems to be, the CIS seems to be heavily weighed in the Grok algorithm these days, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah, they did get that Grok contract approved a few months ago.

I think the DHS didn't get the number from Grok.

I think they got it from CIS, but nonetheless, like the reason that that number is still in the site, guys, I think it's partially because Grok keeps repeating it.

Well, you know,

it is Groktober, as I've been saying.

Garrison, we have fucking spoken about this.

It's not Groktober.

Angry.

The other thing I do want to mention on the, I guess, not deportations, but the Department of State has announced a series.

of people who have had their visas revoked for posts surrounding the death of Charlie Kirk.

The State Department Twitter account posted a whole thread on X the Everything app listing various sentences and sentiments that resulted in visas being revoked.

Quote, Charlie Kirk was a son of a bitch and he died by his own rules.

Visa revoked.

When fascists die, Democrats don't complain.

Visa revoked.

It's from a German national, Brazilian national, said that, quote, Charlie Kirk was the reason for a Nazi rally where they marched in homage to him and that Kirk died too late.

Visa revoked.

There's like four other of these people making statements of that nature.

Yeah, yeah, I think people get the idea.

Yeah.

Following Kirk's death, Rubio did announce he would be looking for visa holders who made statements following Kirk's death, and he has followed through on that promise.

In some other Charlie Kirk news, a few weeks ago, Turning Point USA officially announced that they would be producing an alternative halftime show

after it was announced that the Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny would be performing at the 2026 Super Bowl.

The TPUSA show will be called a quote all-American halftime show, celebrating faith, family, and freedom.

The website has a submission form where it asks which genres should be featured during the show.

The options include quote: anything in English, Americana, classic rock, country, hip-hop, pop, and worship.

I love anything in English as a genre.

Yeah, yeah.

When I go to Spotify, that's what I put in.

The crowd's going to riot when someone does Hotel California.

We can really push anything in English, frankly.

We could go to some pretty crazy places.

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't think they've really considered the breadth of that genre.

You know, I will say how they could get me back on board is if, in addition to a separate halftime show, they had a separate Super Bowl in which Ben Shapiro faces off alone against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Oh,

that would be so fun.

Yeah, yeah.

I would let Ben Shapiro bring some friends.

No, no.

I want to see Jalen Hurts physically pick up Ben Shapiro and see how far he can pass him because I'm pretty

sure at least 60 yards.

That guy, like,

that guy benches.

That guy could like bench a small motor vehicle.

Like,

benches Shapiro, yeah.

More details and performers will be announced later, including how this will be broadcast.

Will it be streamed online?

Are they going to try to make a TV deal with someone like Fox?

Unclear how this will be broadcast, but it is something they're going to go through on.

Last thing we should probably talk about before the break, or I don't know,

maybe we could combine this with the section you wanted to talk about, Robert, on the infiltrations.

But right after our executive disorder episode from two weeks ago, literally like hours after, on October 8th, right-wing influencers gathered at the White House to discuss with Trump and cabinet members their theories and harrowing stories of Antifa at this big Antifa roundtable.

Yeah.

I'm going to play a short clip,

like a few seconds from Jack Pesobic.

Noted far-right extremist and poster, Jack Poseobic.

Certainly noted poster.

The Pizzagate guy.

Yeah.

Antifa is real.

Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Huh.

I wonder why it went back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

What else was happening at that time in Germany?

It's very interesting you say that, Jack.

Very interesting, Jack.

What other opinions do you have on the Weimar Republic, Jack?

Yeah.

So this is worrisome, right?

The fact that these idiots

are getting to speak this close to power about their theory, which is basically that everyone they don't like or who has said anything they don't like is part of a terrorist organization and should be put in prison or executed.

Like, that's the gist of what all of the people at that roundtable believe.

A whole bunch of like, you know, post-millennial people, Andy No., that, that whole, that whole

genre of like, you know, right-wing Antifa journalists.

Pseudo-journalistic.

Yes.

Everyone I don't like equals terrorist.

Yes.

So that's really worrisome.

And I just, I kind of wanted to make a note here to people that as a result of stuff like this, in case you somehow have not been aware of this, we're going to be seeing a massive ramp up in, you know, not just attempts at prosecution, but at attempts to like infiltrate and get gotcha footage and audio of different left-wing and anarchist groups that are going to be used as pretexts for like further crackdowns.

I would say it's just a time to be aware of that and be aware of the fact that anytime you are speaking or at a public event where other people are speaking, you should assume that that's being recorded and that people will be pulling out the worst parts they can from it and trying to use that to destroy people's lives.

And I bring that up because there's been a couple of that just really broke today, some potentially pretty high-profile examples of of this.

One of them is that at a panel for Firestorm Books, they had a speaker, a guy named Eric King, who was convicted of a firebombing.

He's a left-wing activist.

He spent almost 10 years in prison, had a horrific time in prison.

I mean, just abused by the system in some of the worst ways possible, and is finally out.

And Eric did a talk at Firestorm Books, and he made basically his statement that activists need to hurt them where it counts, saying we can force them to to shut the fuck up when it hurts their wallet enough, or you can find other ways to hurt them.

Now, that's not saying anything inherently illegal.

Again, he starts it by saying we can force them to shut up when it hurts their wallet enough.

That's talking about like boycotts and stuff.

Yeah.

But the phrase other ways to hurt them is vague enough that it's pretty easy for these guys to cut stuff out.

And I'm looking at a post by quote-unquote investigated analyst for the Manhattan Institute, Stu Smith.

He's framing this as known Antifa firebomber calls for escalation.

And again, that's not necessarily an accurate look at what Eric was saying, but it's easy to pull stuff out like this from something like what appears to have been a fairly open Zoom call that, you know, is not hard for someone to get into and record and pull something out of to try and make the case.

that someone like Eric should be back in prison or that Firestorm Books is a party, you know, providing material support to an extremist organization.

And what I'm not trying to do is say like, and so people should not talk and gather in public because they're going to be doing this, but you need to be aware that anything said at something like this that's in any way open, and even if you try to make it kind of more closed than this, they will try to get people in.

This is something that is increasingly going to happen.

And so people just need to be, you can't, you can't just kind of hope that they're not paying attention.

You have to be aware of the fact that they're out there and they're going to be trying to infiltrate any sort of thing like this they can to get pretexts for further crackdowns.

And another recent example of this, Frontline's TP USA, which is Turning Point USA's, I mean, it's their version of the actual Frontline journalism show, but they

did an investigation where they went undercover to the Oakland and Seattle anarchist book fairs, right?

And again, there's nothing wrong with doing those book fairs.

I'm sure what they're doing here is pulling whatever quotes they could grab from people that sound bad out of context and using them to try to make the case that, again, these are violent extremist events that need to be cracked down on.

And

I will reiterate, I'm not saying don't do book fairs.

I'm not saying don't show up at events like this.

I'm saying if you show up, be aware that stuff like this is going to be happening, that there are going to be people recording, that there are going to be people trying to

find what they can to destroy people who are at these events.

And that that's something that needs to be in your threat model, right?

In terms of how you dress when you go there, how visible you are, and what you're willing to say around people, right?

Among other things, I guess what I'm saying is

there's some jokes you shouldn't be making in public at events like this, unless you want there to be a high risk of it coming back to bite you in the ass.

Yeah, I think that's that's perfectly reasonable.

Yep,

during the Antifa roundtable panel, this guy named Seamus Bruner,

Seamus.

Seamus.

It says Seamus, guys.

Jesus.

It says Seamus.

That is.

It does.

We're going to have to stop you right there.

That's a Seamus.

It says Seamus.

The director of research at the Government Accountability Institute discussed his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding Antifa.

This is a longer clip, but I think it's important to look at how they are approaching this, like how they are approaching Antifa as an organization.

This is not just a story about violence and chaos, as you alluded to, Mr.

President.

This is a money story.

And at the Government Accountability Institute, my colleague and I, Peter Schweitzer and I, and our team, we follow the money and we followed it to the top of what we call the protest industrial complex, Riot Inc.

And we found a network of NGOs.

It's not just the Soros network, the Open Society Network, it's other funding networks, the Arabella Funding Network, the Tides Funding Network, Neville Roy Singham and his network, Foreign Cash.

And it's also big left-wing funders, some of them are not citizens of this country.

Mr.

Hans-Jörg Wies of Switzerland.

They're pouring money into this entire ecosystem.

And so I want to share three money facts with you about what we call Riot Inc.

Number one, like any corporation, Riot Inc.

has many divisions.

It doesn't just have the Antifa Boots on the Ground division.

It has PR divisions.

It has marketing divisions.

It has a very well-funded legal division to get these boots on the ground back on the streets as quickly as possible.

But it does have those investors that I mentioned.

Number two, we have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than $100 million from the Riot Inc.

investors.

These would be the lawyer groups.

These would be the groups that advocate for calling good, honest Americans fascists, et cetera.

And then three, I think the most shocking thing is that we have found that more than $100 million in U.S.

taxpayer funding has

flowed into these funding networks, including at least $4 million to these very groups themselves, not just Antifa types, but

there was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop City.

Over 60 rioters were charged with domestic terrorism.

These groups received money for that from both the billionaire class as well as taxpayer monies.

Unclear what he's talking about in terms of taxpayer money going to the 60 RICO defendants in Atlanta.

But the structure he's talking about, how this riot ink includes not just like Antifa, as in, you know, people wearing black hoodies on the streets at a protest, but like, you know, legal support organizations, even like

research organizations that, you know, advocate calling, you know, good honest Americans fascists, right?

This could refer refer to groups like Media Matters or like Southern Poverty Law Center, who do research into extremist organizations.

They could be framing people like that as a part of this whole ecosystem.

And that's where they could be looking at for sources of money and funding and tracking where that money goes

in groups like that.

Not obviously,

your average black-clad Antifa protester is not receiving payment for their presence at

these events.

This guy went on to claim that quote-unquote Riot Inc., a funding network, also supports decentralized crowdfunding platforms, which fund organizations like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association.

After he went on this like three-minute long speech, Trump asked him and other attendees that if they knew anything about like Antifa members, funders, or the organizational structure to hand over that information to Pam Bondi or Cash Patel.

And Trump reiterated this multiple times during the roundtable, asking these

policy guys or quote-unquote independent journalists to hand over their information to the authorities.

Here's one version of him making this request.

Do you know the name of any of the funders?

Do you know the names?

Because if you do, I'd like you to give them to Cash or Pam.

Absolutely.

Or Christy.

Yeah, we'll do that.

As soon as you can.

That's all of you.

Because you probably know the names after a certain period of time.

You tend to find out.

But these are people that do not have good intention for the country, and that's

treasonous, probably.

So if you could, if you're very important, if you could do that, that would be great.

Nobody would know better than you.

You'll figure it out.

Sure, man.

Cool.

During this roundtable, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, reiterated how Antifa should be treated like an organized criminal gang and that law enforcement are going to, quote

take the same approach as it does handling foreign drug cartels.

It's a side note: the UNIST has

repeatedly launched missiles at what it claims are

boats associated with foreign and drug cartels.

I'll just say we have an episode next week about the ongoing drone campaign in the Caribbean.

Speaking of funders,

here's

some of ours for the Central Intelligence Agency.

All right, we are back.

Great.

So nice to hear from the products and services that support this show.

Brought to you by Safari Land.

Your one-stop job.

God, I wish we had.

No, I don't.

Actually, Safarilight is some post-ironic meme that I I should curtail.

Sparlight is, in fact, back.

I will admit.

They do make

a very nice bulletproof plate, I will say.

Talking of things that are very nice, this is a very nice song that I like to listen to in my free time.

It's Tariff Talk.

We're back, baby.

Yeah, yeah.

So literally within 12 hours, I think, of the release at night of our last episode of this show,

we got the resumption of the trade war.

So specifically, Trump has announced effectively the full-scale resumption of the trade war with China.

This started kind of out of nowhere with the Trump administration doing something that I think they didn't think was very provocative because I don't quite think they understood the magnitude of what they were doing.

This basically started with the Trump administration massively increasing export restrictions to China by changing the rules of what companies are covered by what's called the entity list, which is a list of companies that American companies are not allowed to sell goods and services to.

The administration moved this to include any company that is 50% or more owned by a company on the export list.

We've discussed on the show before that a significant part of the structure of Chinese corporate conglomerates are held together by a bunch of different companies, you know, having partial ownership by the same holding companies, which is what sort of binds companies and conglomerates together and integrates them into the management structure of the conglomerates.

This is how Chinese state-owned enterprises work.

Being state-owned enterprise literally means that you are partly or completely owned by a holding company run by SASAC, which is the state-owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, because every name name of the ccp is like that so this shift to anything that's 50 or more owned by a company on this list is actually a massive uh export restriction and the chinese government took this as okay we're starting the trade war again so very quickly there's a whole bunch of tiff for tat things that we're not going to track the order of because they kind of don't matter but on october 10th trump made a twitter post where he said that he was going to implement a 100 tariff and also a software restriction thing we'll talk about later those are supposed to go into effect on the 1st.

He's also been talking in the last week about bringing tariffs up to 150%.

We don't have any kind of formal executive order on that.

This was to some extent in response to China implementing massive restrictions on the export of rare earth metals.

These are crucial to basically any kind of advanced manufacturing, you know, industrial manufacturing applications, everything from chips to electric cars to jet fighters.

These are set to take effect on December 1st.

I'm going to read this from the New York Times to get an understanding of how large these moves are.

China refines 99% of the world's dysprosium, a kind of rare earth metal that is used in chips to preserve magnetic stability even when they become hot.

In the last few years, NVIDIA and other semiconductor manufacturers have changed the materials used in electric...

electricity management devices called capacitors, which is a really funny way to describe a capacitor, by the way, but on chips to make them more heat resistant.

The capacitors are made from ultra-pure dysprosium, which is extremely difficult to refine.

A single refinery in Wuxi, near Shanghai, produces the entire world's supply.

So per the New York Times, these export restrictions include any good that is produced with these rare earth metals and require foreign companies operating in China, like for example, Samsung, or any of the sort of South Korean or Taiwanese chip manufacturers, to acquire export licenses to, you know, like sell them to any other country that's not China.

That is

an absolutely massive restriction on export goods and also, again, a whole bunch of critical minerals that

both the American military apparatus relies on and the American tech apparatus relies on.

AI chips need a whole bunch of these things.

So You know, in the middle of this process, the U.S.

also started charging Chinese-built ships for docking at U.S.

ports, which China retaliated by imposing docking fees for American ships.

I'm going to again read from the New York Times here.

The new rules are the most stringent for Chinese shipping companies, which for the most part cannot avoid the levies.

HSBC, an investment bank, estimated that Costco, not that Costco,

different one, a large Chinese shipping line, could pay $1.5 billion in fees next year, which the bank said could reduce Costco's operating earnings by nearly three-fourths in 2026.

Again,

it's worth noting that

these shipping companies are the backbone of global trade.

They also, their margins are not very good, and a significant number of them basically only didn't go under

during the lockdowns because

they

effectively lied on their loan applications and were just sort of putting in their revenue as if the lockdowns weren't happening.

So this is all very, very fragile infrastructure that is being

attacked.

And

these port fees are already in effect.

Me doing gay cruising on my European trip.

Yeah, I like global trade.

All right, I continue.

Oh, God.

Okay.

So we also got a report today.

This is Wednesday, the 22nd.

This is being reported.

So who fucking knows what will be happening by the time this episode comes out?

But on Wednesday, we got a report from Reuters about

one of the other options the Trump administration is considering for these massive sort of trade attacks on China.

So I said earlier when I talked about the 100% tariff, Trump also mentioned a software export ban.

So per Reuters,

what's being considered here, and again,

we have very few concrete details about this.

This hasn't been formally announced.

My guess.

is that it's being leaked to Reuters by the administration, but I just don't know.

But what they're considering basically is a version of the sanctions that effectively Biden applied to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, which restricts the export of any product made with U.S.

software.

This would be probably the most significant development of the entire trade war.

And so these are all incredibly significant escalations.

A bunch of this stuff is set to go into effect on November 1st, which is very, very soon.

Now, in theory, Trump and Xi Jinping are supposed to meet at the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in South Korea, but there's been no formal announcements of their meeting.

Trump said he was going to go to China early next year, but that's again next year.

The American 100% tariff again, November 1st.

The Chinese export restrictions on rare earth metals again, December 1st.

Yeah.

And the other issue here is that the actual event starts on October 31st, and the first tariffs are supposed to go into effect the next day.

Very spooky.

Very spooky indeed.

Yeah.

And so Trump is mad also about China refusing to buy American soybeans, a story we've been covering.

Yeah.

And, you know, he's complaining about the rare earth metal stuff, and he's complaining about,

he's still yelling about fentanyl.

But it's also worth mentioning, one of the fascinating things is Trump is continuing to piss off even more parts of his base with this stuff.

So soybean farmers, which is, again, a huge portion of American farmers, are really mad at him.

He's also pissing off cattle ranchers.

So both the soybean farmers and the cattle ranchers are mad at Trump for giving a bunch of money to Argentina and not giving them a bunch of money and cutting off their access to Chinese markets because Argentina, again, is selling a whole bunch of stuff to China.

One of the things that they sell to China is beef because Argentina is a major beef exporter.

So they're all really mad at him for giving Argentina a giant bailout in order to try to save their failing economy under their unhinged anarcho-capitalist president who has annihilated the economy even more than it was before.

And then Trump's response to the cattle ranchers being mad at him was telling them to lower their prices, which means they're even more mad at him.

So he is systematically alienating two of what should be his most important bases of support.

And like the cattle industry has been a base of Republican support for, I mean, since time immemorial, effectively.

The lumber and vanity tariffs that we mentioned last week have taken effect now.

There's been no rollback of them.

And finally, I want to close on a story that we're going to be covering more on Monday, which is the continuing escalation of a sort of conflict between Colombia and the U.S.

after the U.S.

murdered a boat full of what appear to be Colombian fishermen.

Yes, Colombia has recalled its ambassador, and the U.S.

has

said that it is going to eliminate all foreign aid and impose a tariff the size of which they haven't given a consistent number for.

And this is, you know, very much could look like a pretty massive reorientation of American policy around Colombia, which has traditionally been an American ally.

We've ran death squads out of there for a very, very long time.

Yeah, and that has been the lightning round, rapid fire, trade war coverage, because,

oh boy.

Yeah.

Yay, we've tariff-talked.

All right.

Before we close, I do want to talk a little bit about one of the news stories this week about U.S.

political figures being like Nazism.

No, not the

main

candidate.

And no, not that other Republican staffer who had a swastika in his cubicle.

The Politico story that reported leaked messages from the New York Young Republican Telegram chat, which already tells you that it's going to be problematic, the fact that they have a Telegram chat.

But Politico reported that this chat contained messages about putting political opponents in gas chambers, loving Hitler, as well as plenty of anti-Semitism, talking about raping their enemies, and hundreds of uses of homophobic and racist slurs.

The chair of the New York state young Republicans, Bobby Walker, allegedly called rape epic and wrote in the chat, quote, if we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked, unquote.

New York Republican Elise Stefanik first denounced this chat after the report, though later called the politico piece a quote-unquote hit job.

The Matt Walsh side of the online right condemned those who leaked the chats, neglecting to discuss the substance of the chat itself, while Vance largely dismissed the affair, writing on X the Everything app, quote, I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence, unquote.

Vance falsely referred to this as a college group chat when key members were as old as 40 years old.

A day later, while guesting on the Charlie Kirk show, J.D.

Vance continued to push back on the seriousness of this story and played defense by repeatedly referring to the grown men involved, who are in their 20s and 40s, as kids and young boys.

Somehow they got their hands on something like 28,000 messages in some

group chat of, I think, 12 people that nobody's ever heard of, but they decided to just publish every single thing in this chat, whatever they found that they thought was the most salacious.

And

I think 10 years ago, there would have been a very different response to it.

But people are starting to learn from this, and the vice president is one of the reasons why.

I'm sorry, focus on the real issues, don't focus on what kids say in group chats.

But there's another angle to this that I just have to be honest about.

I mean, I'm like an old guy at this point.

I'm 41 years old.

I have three kids.

You know,

I grew up in a different world, right?

Where not most of what I, the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they're not on the internet.

Like, I'm going to tell my kids, especially my boys, don't put things on the internet.

Like, be careful with what you post.

If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.

But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.

They tell edgy, offensive jokes.

Like, that's what kids do.

And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is caused to ruin their lives.

And at some point, we're all going to have to say, enough of this BS.

We're not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the rest of time.

That's just not okay.

Like, we live in a digital world.

This stuff is now etched in stone online.

We're all going to have to say, you you know what?

No, no, no.

We're not doing this.

We're not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat.

And if I have to be the person who carries that message forward, I'm fine with it.

Once again, most of these guys are like in their 30s.

These guys are adults.

The New York Young Republicans is not a whole bunch of kids.

These are young in like political, in political years because everyone who runs the country is quasi-geriatric.

Self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh said, quote, the right doesn't stick together.

That's our biggest problem by far.

Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies.

I said a few weeks ago that we all need to band together in the wake of Charlie's death, and the answer I got back from a lot of people on the right was basically no.

Well, okay then, guys, we'll just lose instead.

The left will keep up the united front and defend their guys no matter what.

Well, we keep throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.

Great plan.

Unquote.

Shapiro did beef a bit with Walsh on one of their Daily Wire group podcasts regarding the substance of these chats.

Shapiro did seem more concerned at the growing anti-Semitic and Nazi fascistic element of the Republican Party, whereas Walsh is...

does not care about that at all.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not a problem for him.

Not a problem for self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh.

So that's, that's one side of this whole political story that I wanted to talk about.

You should just read the political piece.

I'm sure lots of people have.

It got pretty popular a few days ago.

But I find the sort of, I mean, I would have called it like the dissident right reaction, but when you have the vice president as like

the guy leading the charge on this type of stuff, it's not really dissident.

Like there is a large number of Republicans who are condemning the contents of this chat, but you do have the vice president of the country playing defense for it and for the people involved.

And I think this is actually a very important thing about what the structure of the Republican Party is right now, which is these kind of low-level staffers, right?

The young Republican people, and these are a bunch of people who are also making White House policy.

You know, Stephen Miller is, you know, the guy who's doing

a whole bunch of the sort of ethnic cleansing deportation policy right now are just Nazis.

They're just Nazis.

And every time one of these group chats comes out, it looks like this.

And that's a really significant factor in why American politics looks like this, which is that like the people who are entering the Republican Party right now, who are like their sort of youth wing, quote unquote, are these people.

And we're seeing their policies get enacted.

And it fucking sucks.

I mean, it's often baked in this like post-ironic, like, like joking way where, you know, obviously the Nazis,

some people in these circles will say, obviously, the Nazis themselves are bad, but we're using this as like a memetic signifier

for like nationalism and for all of these things.

Now, there is a fair number of people who just will straight up defend the Nazis.

Absolutely.

But I think

it goes beyond, like,

this isn't German national socialism.

Like, it goes, it goes, it goes beyond to like they're using Nazism as a meme for their political project.

Memes get used a lot in these types of safe spaces where people can joke around.

So you see that very clearly here.

But you also see it on like the DHS Twitter account.

You see the same kind of like post-ironic stuff.

Like a few weeks ago, they were fucking moonman posting.

You can Google that one if you want to.

We don't have time to explain it.

But that's a very old, like

internet Nazi dog whistle.

And

I've talked a decent bit about...

my feelings on like focusing a lot on like the DHS Twitter dog whistles.

But yeah, it is it is in invoking of this stuff for this like mimetic like archetypal archetypal context that they surround themselves in yeah and then you know doing the actual thing which is going out and rounding up a whole bunch of yeah doing these ice rates now white people and

yeah right like the ice recruiting ads are like the clearest example of using this type of mimetic imagery for their actual political project and then to enact the thing physically and it's it's very clear there because there's very little disconnect.

It's an immediate transference.

Yeah, there's a very straight line.

Yeah.

James, do you want to close us up on the great state of Alaska?

Yeah, I'm talking about something not so great in Alaska, but we normally do a fundraiser at the end, so I wanted to put this here.

For those of you who are not aware, because this has really got not enough coverage, in my opinion, a massive storm, in fact, the remnants of a typhoon slammed into the west coast of Alaska, leaving more than a thousand people without shelter along the Yukon-Koscoquim River.

These are Alaska native villages, and their inhabitants are now climate refugees at the very start of winter, right, in the coldest place in the United States.

These villages are very remote.

I spent some time earlier this year in Alaska Native Village, not here in the interior, just in the Gwichin territories, but these guys are really only accessible by small planes or by boats, which will make their recovery even harder, right?

They're people who have lived by the ocean or by the river for as long as people have lived in the Americas, tens of thousands of years, right?

A few months ago, the Trump EPA cancelled a $20 million grant for flood protection, which would have covered Kipnuk, one of these villages.

Kipnuk now functionally doesn't exist.

Houses were torn off their foundations, right?

There are multiple videos of people's whole houses.

floating away.

It's not just an instance of neglect or even a single failure here.

It's an example of decades of ignoring the voices of indigenous people, especially Alaska natives, when they tell us that the climate crisis is real and that it's already here, right?

When

the media looks at climate change,

they tend to want to look at data they can measure in terms of numbers, right, according to the model of Western science.

But I would argue that the experience of Indigenous people who have lived on the land for as long as human beings have lived anywhere on this continent, and have watched the changes and seen this disaster unfold should be a warning to all of us that the climate crisis is already here.

I reached out to some Alaska native friends to ask where to donate and they shared a page which will be in the show notes for the show.

So if you're able to help, I think that's a very important thing to do.

Recovery for these people with this federal government with being as remote as they are will be horrifically difficult.

Right now, many of them are living in anchorage, right?

Like I said, they're going into the winter and then they don't have a place to live.

It's an unmitigated disaster.

So if you're able to help, I think it would be very much appreciated.

Before I go, I will say that if you would like to email us, you can use our Proton mail address, coolzone tips at proton.me.

If you send from a Proton mail address, then it's encrypted from one end to the other end.

We reported the news.

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