It Could Happen Here Weekly 171

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Speaker 50 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 50 So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

Speaker 50 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 48 Welcome to ACAT and here, a podcast that has been really, really fucking bleak basically since Trump took office. So

Speaker 48 instead of doing another episode about how doomed the U.S. is, we are taking a, I don't know, a field trip to Argentina to talk about something extremely funny.

Speaker 48 And that extremely funny thing is the Argentinian president Javier Malai promoting a meme coin and maybe going down for it.

Speaker 48 And with me to talk about this is really the only person I could have on to talk about a crypto thing who is Molly White.

Speaker 48 And to try to explain who Molly White is, my explanation of this is in the same way that the great, the great 20th century Marxist theorist C. L.
R.

Speaker 48 James's book, Beyond a Boundary, is both universally considered to be the best book ever written about cricket, and also literally calling it the thing that it is the best book ever written about cricket is like a damning insult to to how good the actual book is.

Speaker 48 Molly is like probably the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter citation needed. Also does Web3 is going great, which is amazing.
Everyone should go listen to it.

Speaker 48 And Molly, welcome to the show.

Speaker 51 Thanks for having me. What an intro.

Speaker 48 I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one for such a long time.

Speaker 48 Great book, by the way, which everyone should both go subscribe to citation needed and also go read Beyond the Boundary because it's great.

Speaker 48 So, God, we were talking about this before the show. I had planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at CPAC with Javier, Malay, like with Malay's signature chainsaw,

Speaker 48 doing an even weirder version of Malay's thing about like cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ.
Yeah, what a spectacle that was.

Speaker 48 Oh my God.

Speaker 48 Like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there.

Speaker 48 That was only like day one.

Speaker 51 Well, that's overdone now. You know, everyone's doing it.
You have to do something new.

Speaker 48 Yeah. You have to wander around the stage with a chainsaw.
Like

Speaker 48 he didn't even do the Malay thing, which is you have like a book of regulations or whatever, and you cut it with a chainsaw.

Speaker 51 You just saw it in half. Yeah.

Speaker 48 Oh, God.

Speaker 48 So I am very excited to talk about the crypto scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and I am deeply sorry.
I already, I apologize before this recording started.

Speaker 48 I am deeply sorry. In order to explain who Javier Malay is, I have to do

Speaker 48 the single most difficult thing I've ever attempted in my, like, not just in my, like, my history as a podcaster.

Speaker 48 Like, that's obviously trivially true, but like my entire history doing theoretical work in general, which is I'm about to attempt to explain Peronism in under 10 minutes on four hours of sleep.

Speaker 48 Let's see it.

Speaker 48 So

Speaker 48 here we fucking go because to get a sense of why, you know, why we have to do this, right?

Speaker 48 Like Malay is able to take power

Speaker 48 like basically because he's like one of the first candidates in a long time to in Argentina to run as an anti-Peronist.

Speaker 48 And that may seem weird because hold on, wait, shouldn't there always be like, okay, if you have an ideology, shouldn't the, shouldn't the person from like either the left or right side of the political spectrum, you know, be running against that ideology?

Speaker 48 And no, no.

Speaker 48 up until basically now, both the left and the right in Argentina were both Peronists.

Speaker 48 So to get an understanding of what Peronism is, we need to go back not just to who Juan Peron is, and we'll, we'll, we'll get to who Juan Peron, who's like the guy this ideology is named after.

Speaker 48 And, you know, the ideology is based on like this guy returning from exile from the military coups. But we have to

Speaker 48 go back to one of the sort of foundational parts of the modern Argentinian state.

Speaker 48 And that element is the fact that Argentina has one of the most militant workers' movements in the entire world and has had it for about a century. I was on Margaret's show, it could happen here.

Speaker 48 Jesus Christ, not even happening here. Good lord.
You can tell them on four hours.

Speaker 48 You're doing great. Thank you.
Thank you. I haven't even gotten.

Speaker 48 We have not gotten to my final analysis of Peronism, where the closest thing I can compare it to is post-short cultural revolutions, 1970s-era China.

Speaker 48 So this is about to get so much much more unhitched. But a while back, I was on Margaret's show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, to talk about

Speaker 48 the second Argentinian giant anarcho-syndicalist uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in 1921, 1922.

Speaker 48 And this is the second one because the first one was

Speaker 48 the 1919 general strike, which ends in an event called the Tragic Week, where everyone sort of gets killed by the military.

Speaker 48 But, you know, the fact that there's two in different parts of the country, enormous anarcho-syndicalist uprisings in a span of about four years is a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most militant working classes in the world.

Speaker 48 And any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment can, you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it.

Speaker 48 And the sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is even still relevant today, is that like the last of what you would, I guess you could call like the classical 20th century revolutions, a line of uprising started with like the original formation of the workers' councils in Russia in 1905, you know, and that continues to like the occupations of the factories in Italy during the two red years and like 1918, 1919, like the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, like the revolutions in Hungaria and Algeria, like, you know, all like through 68, like the factory occupations in France and Italy, and like all this whole, this whole lineage of like the thing that happens when you do a revolution is workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country the last one of those ever was in argentina in 2001 like everywhere else in the world this shit was gone and then randomly in argentina in 2001 like there's a there's a giant one of these uprisings that is you know only really put down

Speaker 48 by a sort of left coronist government agreeing to like tell the imf to fuck off which was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in the political landscape.

Speaker 48 But all of this is to say that, that, okay, if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like, what do you do?

Speaker 48 And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the single banner of Argentinian nationalist class collaboration, which is the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand like Peronism is...

Speaker 48 Oh God, Peronism is simply the weirdest ideology ever.

Speaker 48 I promise we are going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to unfortunately do this. We have to do our homework first.
And part of this is

Speaker 48 so Juan Perrone, the actual guy who his ideology is based off of, is an enormously popular president in like the late 40s and 50s until he gets overthrown by a military coup.

Speaker 48 And to get a sense of, again, like how weird this guy is, like, this is a guy who, when he comes into power, a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not just, you know, obviously like the famous Nazis flee to Argentina.

Speaker 48 There's a whole meme about that, right? But I mean, we're talking like guys from the Ustazi, like guys, guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina during his administration.

Speaker 48 and when a military coup overthrows him they flee the country so again like the us-backed military junta is less pro-nazi than this guy is he is also personal friends with che govara and considers like the cuban revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project so a deeply deeply weird

Speaker 48 deeply weird guy and the result of this is that okay so you have a military dictatorship through like the 50s and the 60s right and like the entire time this dictatorship not the entire time, but most of the time this dictatorship is happening, right?

Speaker 48 The entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political energy onto we want Perrone back because Perrone is remembered as like the guy who like brought workers' rights to the country and also like gave women the right to vote and also is remembered as like a stable nationalist right-wing government by the right.

Speaker 48 So like everyone on like both sides of political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of Perron, which works because he's not in the country. He's not there.

Speaker 48 So, you know,

Speaker 48 because he's gone, you can project anything you want onto him. And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right?

Speaker 48 Like the, you know, like modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that guy come in, take power, do constant sort of semi-political mobilization to like fix your issues.

Speaker 48 And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism.

Speaker 48 is very specifically Peronism because one of the theoreticians of like modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher Ernesto LeClough and his wife, Chantel Mouf, who were like, they were like, you know, these, these people were like the theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left in the sort of Euro communism era and even up until like Podeimos in Spain, 2011.

Speaker 48 Like these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much like left electoral stuff in the last like 50 years. And it's all from LeClau, who was a was a left Peronist.
So

Speaker 48 all of all the dots are going on the pinboard.

Speaker 48 And while he's gone, he's this guy that, like, from an American perspective, it's like, imagine that, like, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from 2016 were both the same guy

Speaker 48 and both sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina and like fix everything.

Speaker 48 So this creates like the left and right Peronists.

Speaker 48 And when Perron comes back in the 70s and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Peronists just, I mean, she literally starts slaughtering the left Peronists in the streets.

Speaker 48 And Perrone like backs the right Peronists against the left and you would think this would destroy left peronism but no no left peronism was in power in argentina until like malai's election like a few years ago it's

Speaker 48 oh so okay so like why would you still be a left peronist after peron like had all your boys machine gunned uh in the 70s part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup.

Speaker 48 So, you know, he doesn't, he's not like in power long enough, kind of, for like the disenchantment to really set in.

Speaker 48 He's just, he's in power just long enough for people to remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And at this point, I can finally attempt to go, what is Peronists?

Speaker 48 After like, how many minutes of like, oh, God, I think I've gotten over my 10 minute limit of what is Peronis.

Speaker 48 But okay, Perron's deal is this, right? Like, so, okay, like, if you're a Peronist, right, in a Peronist state, everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of the Argentinian state.

Speaker 48 And so if you're a leftist, you focus on the everyone is going to be equal part.

Speaker 48 And this means on the one hand, hand, you know, there are, there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working class that they didn't get under the, you know, the sort of previous administrations and under the junta, right?

Speaker 48 You know, you have like massive expansions of workers' rights, nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy.

Speaker 48 You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution.

Speaker 48 There's, there's like a long strand of like feminist Peronism from, you know, his like.

Speaker 48 him being the administration where women got the right to vote.

Speaker 48 On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the the like before the power of the Argentinian state part, which means like permanent class collaboration.

Speaker 48 And this, this is the part of the deal that brings the right in is like the deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all this stuff and you set up these really complicated patriarchage networks.

Speaker 48 And, you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety net, at least in theory.

Speaker 48 And the trade-off is you will never ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or like drive these parasites who run your entire life out of power.

Speaker 48 And the second part of that is this, like, this hardline, unhinged right-wing, like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against, for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups.

Speaker 48 And so I promise the comparison to the to the long culture, 70s long cultural revolution, we've reached that point of it. So to understand like really what this is, right?

Speaker 48 It's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of that is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like parts of the social sector to enfold this really dynamic and militant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics, kind of, but it won't actually be a threat to the ruling class.

Speaker 48 And my sort of like closest thing to this is this very, very weird period in Chinese history between like the end of the short cultural revolution in like 1969 and the death of Mao in 76,

Speaker 48 where like the most unhinged parts of the cultural revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off, you know, so 1967, like Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai.

Speaker 48 He does this deliberately as part of his like strategy to gain power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Speaker 48 The workers take the city. And this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris Commune.
And the thing about the Paris Commune is that they had direct elections of people.

Speaker 48 And there's a moment, I actually like, I found this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to Zhou Enlai.

Speaker 48 And Zhou Enlai is like, if we let these people do direct elections, it's going to lead to anarchism.

Speaker 48 And Mao is like, oh, shit, we have to stop this so what what what happens is that he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student red guards and the sort of some of some some like loyal like rebel workers factions

Speaker 48 along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the cultural revolution right like normally the cultural revolution is broken down into very roughly there are rebel factions and there are like government factions right and he's he's pulled together a coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of we are going to end the revolution.

Speaker 48 And in the short run, what this does is it leads to the back half of the cultural revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of like everyone dying because there are rebels running around, everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to like bring everyone back under control.

Speaker 48 And that's what like most of the people who die in the cultural revolution are killed, putting the whole thing down. If you want to try to understand like what Peronism is, right?

Speaker 48 It's this ideology of bringing together all of the different sort of disparate political factions in a moment, right?

Speaker 48 You're bringing together everyone from like the fascists on the right to like the socialists on the left, and you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy.

Speaker 48 And the reason Mao is able to do this is because like he's Mao, right?

Speaker 48 Every single like faction on every side of the cultural revolution,

Speaker 48 whatever they're trying to do, is justifying it in the name of like, oh, this is what Mao wants. This is what Peron is doing, right?

Speaker 48 He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from like the junta, and forge this permanent political coalition.

Speaker 48 And this results in like the sort of total dominance that this ideology has of Roger Tean politics means that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malai takes power is an election between the left and the right Peronists.

Speaker 48 And okay, okay, I am so sorry. This finally is the end of my attempt to explain Peronism, but we're going to go to ads.

Speaker 48 When we come back, I'm going to actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am so sorry.

Speaker 48 Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for surviving

Speaker 48 this.

Speaker 48 This sort of brings us to like

Speaker 48 how he kind of takes power and how,

Speaker 48 you know, there's an economic crisis. There's like all this inflation.

Speaker 48 And so he comes in on like,

Speaker 48 I don't know, we were talking about this beforehand. I want to talk to you about this.

Speaker 48 Like, there's all these really weird parallels between this and the American election where it's like, except, except the inflation in Argentina is like real.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 51 We just have the sort of like boogeyman version of it. They actually have hyperinflation.

Speaker 48 Yeah. Yeah.
Hold on. Let me check the current inflation rate.
Yeah. I think, I mean, it's, it's like several hundred percent right now.

Speaker 48 I think, I think it's like 300 something percent, which is actually, Malay's entire thing was he was going to stop inflation.

Speaker 48 It's actually, it's way worse under him than it was under the previous like Pironis administration.

Speaker 48 Oh, there's one last thing I forgot to mention, which is like, you know, why if you're on the left, would you take this deal?

Speaker 48 And this also ties into like how this politics, how his politics like took over the state, which is that like, you know, there were people in Argentina, like under these Pironis governments got things that are like unimaginable here.

Speaker 48 Like there's one that's important to me. And like, obviously, like, it's still, you're still living under capitalism.
A lot of it still sucks.

Speaker 48 But like one of the the things that people won under these governments was this mandate that one percent of all government employees had to be trans which is like unimaginable here like like

Speaker 48 like even at the height of like you know like sort of trans acceptance or whatever like that's there's what like that's that's not that's not a thing that's even like no one even like thinks to ask about that and like yeah like i don't know like yeah like i i might sell my soul to juan peron if it meant that like none of my trans friends ever had to sleep in an alley again like i

Speaker 48 you know, but the wheels fall off of this, and they put the self-described anarcho-capitalists in power,

Speaker 48 which is, which is great. And, oh, God.

Speaker 48 Okay. And this finally gets us to the fun part of this.
I said at the top of this episode that, like, he did a meme coin, right? Can you explain what that is?

Speaker 48 Because like.

Speaker 48 Oh, God. Yeah.

Speaker 51 So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that this is a token that has no inherent value, which I mean, you know, skeptics would argue that that's true of all cryptocurrency, but meme coins very actively embrace that fact.

Speaker 51 And they're often themed around a meme. So a lot of people know of Dogecoin, which is themed about the, you know, around the Shiba Inu dog.

Speaker 51 They're also sometimes just themed around sort of an idea or a person or,

Speaker 51 you know, just sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any given moment. And the idea is that you buy in and all of the attention causes more people to buy in.

Speaker 51 And if you're really good at it or really lucky, you're one of the first people to buy in.

Speaker 51 And so you buy in at a low price and then you sell after everyone else has bought in and pump the price up higher. That's the idea.
In reality, it doesn't really work that way.

Speaker 51 It's full of insider trading and market manipulation. And it's not sort of a fair game where anyone has a chance to be one of those early people, but that's sort of the shape of it, at least.

Speaker 51 And so I guess that brings us to Libra, which is the meme coin that Millet

Speaker 51 was

Speaker 51 convinced, I guess, to endorse. Yeah.

Speaker 48 I mean, I think there's this interesting thing here, too, where it's like, our government is just like a fucking meme coin now.

Speaker 48 Like the thing that isn't controlled, the American state is Doge, the prior to government efficiency, which is just the Dogecoin meme.

Speaker 50 Like, I.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 51 We're in sort of a post-ironic world at this point where crypto and the U.S. government are somehow completely intertwined.

Speaker 51 And I guess we should probably mention that just before Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin, which was the Trump token, followed very shortly after by his wife launching the Melania token.

Speaker 51 And they did what all good meme coins do, which is that they spiked in price based on the original interest. And then they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price came back down.

Speaker 51 Because with meme coins, people lose interest and move on to the next one. And, you know, the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value.

Speaker 48 So. Yeah.
And like, and that's this interesting thing about it, which is like, okay, this is just a pump-em-dump scheme. Yes.
Like, it's just securities fraud. Like,

Speaker 48 we have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing securities fraud and everyone knows that securities fraud.

Speaker 48 I don't know.

Speaker 51 I mean, it's, it's really cynical.

Speaker 51 Like, if you actually talk to people who are deep into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's this broad acceptance that like, oh yeah, yeah, it's, it's totally a scam.

Speaker 51 People are trying to run off with the money after they launch these tokens. Like there's all of this market manipulation happening.

Speaker 51 Average, everyday people who are, you know, seeing these stories about people buying in super early and then making a million dollars out of thin air, like that never happens.

Speaker 51 Those aren't average people. Those are like deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge.
Like everyone knows this and openly discusses it.

Speaker 51 And yet there's still this active participation in it because the idea is that like, okay sure it's a scam but if you get in on the scam early enough you can be the scammer and you can be the one who profits and you know screw everybody else so it's like this really deeply rotten like cynical world yeah like i remember you talked about this on jamie's show about like how just deeply nihilistic it all is yeah and i think you know i mean it's not even It used to be you had to do metaphors to draw a direct line between this sort of like the nihilism of this shit and and like the nihilism of putting like Malai or like putting Trump and Elon like in office but now it's just I mean they just do the meme coin right like there's no yeah the mask is like fully off of crypto in the meme coin era I think like yeah it's kind of amazing how during the the previous crypto boom in like 2020 and 2021 there was this phrase that everyone was saying which was wag me which was like we're all gonna make it and the idea was like we're all gonna get rich together everyone's going to succeed.

Speaker 51 And now it's like, they've totally, like, you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh, I will punch you in the face and steal your wallet if I get the moment opportunity.

Speaker 51 And that is like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.

Speaker 48 Yeah. You know, and like that, that is also like what Malai has been doing to like everyone in Argentina, right?

Speaker 48 Like his, his thing as it came in is he, I mean, God, one of the things I remember from like the very first days he was in office is he was talking about all the stuff about how they were going to take away welfare benefits from anyone who was arrested at protest.

Speaker 48 Yep. And like that didn't stop.
There's been massive protests like basically since the moment he took power. But,

Speaker 48 you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical, very explicit thing of like pitting like everyone in society against each other.

Speaker 48 Like, you know, like making this argument to, there's like a crime theory article about this where it's like they, you know, like he's very explicitly making this argument that like, well, okay, if you're, if you're like.

Speaker 48 a private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason you're making no money is because wages are too high in the public sector. It's because taxes are too high.

Speaker 48 And if taxes and corporations were lower, lower, they would pay you more. It's like, yeah.
No.

Speaker 48 But it fits into this sort of like pure nihilism of like, yeah, of everyone trying to grift each other.

Speaker 51 And it's, I mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States, too, where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not making enough money because, you know, people are stealing your tax money and it's going to, you know, people who don't deserve it or it's going to these programs to fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States.

Speaker 51 Or, you know, it's like very much trying to pit everyone against one another so that you don't notice that the person who's actually taking the money is the guy who launched the meme coin or the people who have the insider information you know it's like this very direct mirror of what is happening in society and yet it's like so obvious

Speaker 48 the the problem that we have is like i think people do broadly recognize that like everyone who is rich got rich by robbing people

Speaker 48 but instead of trying to do anything about that the the solution that's being posited by these people is like well instead of you just being scammed all the time like you could be the scam artist.

Speaker 51 You could be the robbery.

Speaker 48 Yeah, like that's like the new scam. Instead of like, you know, because like organizing is fucking hard, right? And like attempting to fight these people is really hard.
They have all the money.

Speaker 48 They have all the power. They have the police.
They have the military.

Speaker 48 And so you get like this shit. On the other hand, sometimes it backfires because these people are like all in enough on this.
fucking meme coin shit to like run it.

Speaker 48 So yeah, let's talk about this specific meme coin Libra.

Speaker 51 Yeah, so it's kind of a weird example of a meme coin because, you know, most meme coins, the idea is like, this has no intrinsic value. This has no purpose.

Speaker 51 You just gamble on the token price and hope for the best. Libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of point to it,

Speaker 51 making it much unlike most of the meme coins, but it was still, you know, basically a meme coin under the hood.

Speaker 51 But the idea was that like somehow some of the profits from this Libra token were going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something like that.

Speaker 51 There was a sort of like social benefit side to it where, which was all very vague and like there was very little detail.

Speaker 51 Like you, you know, you never really know with these things what is actually supposed to happen.

Speaker 51 But that was the story is that like this is going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel money to their projects and all this.

Speaker 48 It almost feels like an older kind of scam.

Speaker 48 Like it reminds me of like an NFT scam where like, yeah, they'll be like, ah, somewhere in the future, we're going to make a game and you're all going to buy it. It's like that thing, but

Speaker 48 they brought it back for one last ride. Right.

Speaker 51 It's like the historical like 2020 era crypto scam where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap of all these things we're going to do and we're going to give you gifts and rewards.

Speaker 51 And then it's like, okay, but how is it going to work?

Speaker 48 And they're like, oh, don't worry about it.

Speaker 51 We'll, we'll tell you later. Just give us your money now.
And that was kind of the idea with the Libra coin.

Speaker 51 But basically, the team behind it had some folks who were involved in something called Tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle to it who had access to Malay via this sort of project that was happening in Argentina where you could like pay to come to this conference and Malay was going to be there and all this.

Speaker 51 And so they joined forces with some meme coin guys who had a lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the Melania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched by someone who purchased the like trademark rights to the Enron company.

Speaker 48 I forgot about that. Oh, no.

Speaker 51 Yeah, yeah, that came back to haunt us. And so they all joined forces and launched this meme coin.

Speaker 51 And they were able to get President Millet to promote the meme coin on his Twitter account by saying, like, here's this Libra project. It's going to support Argentinian entrepreneurs.

Speaker 51 Here's the contract address. Buy-in.

Speaker 51 And so everyone got super excited because a president had just endorsed a meme coin, and he unfortunately was too slow to be the first president to do such a thing with Trump beating him to that particular record.

Speaker 51 But

Speaker 48 I actually can't believe, oh, I'm like blanking on his name. The guy in El Salvador hadn't pulled one yet.

Speaker 51 Oh, yeah, Bukele.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet.

Speaker 51 Yeah, it's probably because he's a real Bitcoiner and Bitcoin maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies. That would be my guess.
But yeah, it is a little surprising. Yeah.

Speaker 48 Oh, also, okay, there's another unhinged angle here, which I want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny.

Speaker 48 One of my good friends, Julie, pointed me to, which is part of the thing that's like originally that originally made me want to do this, is that, so one of the people who was like involved in like this hookup process with like the crypto people was this guy named Augustine LeHay, who's like this very, very famous conservative writer.

Speaker 48 And he's the guy who like introduced the concept of gender ideology to Argentina. So he's, you know, like one of, and one of Leigh's like big things is like being a turf all the time, right?

Speaker 48 And the guy who like got all of these people into turf shit is like the guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scam.

Speaker 48 And he might have to sell him out in order to get out of the crypto scam bullshit.

Speaker 48 Which is just, oh, God.

Speaker 48 Trans people getting our revenge.

Speaker 48 You love to see it. Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad break before we get into all of the rest of this bullshit.

Speaker 48 All right, we are back to the main story of the really unprecedented access this administration has given the crypto people.

Speaker 48 Can you talk a bit about like who the like who the people involved in this are? Because it's a lot of like very, very large like players in this world.

Speaker 51 Yeah, so I mean, it's still sort of coming out, like who exactly was involved and to what degree they were involved. But it's really starting to look like the

Speaker 51 creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch of guys at a group called Kelsey or Ventures that has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch of these tokens.

Speaker 51 And that's sort of a family-run operation. There's a guy named Dr.
Tom and then his two sons, Hayden and Gideon, I believe.

Speaker 48 Kiddie, Jesus Christ. Like, oh no, they're making these guys in a lab.

Speaker 51 And, um, you know, they're kind of young guys. Like, Hayden is like 28 or something like that, which is, you know, typical for the crypto world, I guess.
But yeah.

Speaker 51 And so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind much of the launch. But they're working very closely with a bunch of other people in the crypto world.

Speaker 51 And that's something that they sort of have to do with these big, splashy token launches.

Speaker 51 You know, the Trump token had to do this as well, where you can't just show up as like a president and launch a meme coin and expect everything will just work.

Speaker 51 Because when that many people all try to buy a token at once, you know, you need someone on the other end to actually be selling the tokens.

Speaker 51 And, you know, there's all of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches.

Speaker 51 And so you need people to do the market making and there's the liquidity providers and there's all these, you know, projects under the hood that are that are involved.

Speaker 51 And it's beginning to look like a lot of those people were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that was perhaps not entirely proper.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 51 I know propriety around meme coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but you know, we're, there's sort of talks about how one of the co-founders of a project called Meteora, which is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a place where people are actually buying these tokens.

Speaker 48 Can you explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners?

Speaker 51 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 51 So it's, it's basically sort of what I, what I suggested, which is that like, if you go out and launch a token and you don't do any prep, when someone goes to buy that token or sell that token, there's, there's no one on the other side of that trade.

Speaker 51 You need some amount of liquidity in the markets when you start off. Yeah.

Speaker 48 So

Speaker 48 there have to be like, there have to be like actual tokens that you can sell to people.

Speaker 51 Yeah. And if someone, you know, if someone buys one of your tokens, they want to be able to sell it to someone as well.

Speaker 51 And so you need to be able to sort of absorb that kind of trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air, these people will exist on both sides of the trade.

Speaker 51 And so there are these projects called liquidity providers where, you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity and they'll step in in that role.

Speaker 51 And that's sort of the market maker end of things.

Speaker 51 Meteora is a little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision, which I'm not going to go into too much detail about because it's very mind-numbing.

Speaker 48 But it's also so funny that like the terms that have taken hold for these things like are are financial terms. And it's like, yeah, it's like, this is not liquidity in the sense of like, does the U.S.

Speaker 48 government have cash on hand to pay something? This is like, are there these like stupid little weird program things to like move other programs around? Yeah.

Speaker 51 And it's not even dollars. You know, we're not, we're not talking about real dollars here.
We're talking about like people providing you one fake token in exchange for another fake token.

Speaker 51 But I think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it and cover up the fact that, like, oh, and if you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all the liquidity out of there, you've just made a ton of money and a total scam.

Speaker 51 But it sounds legit because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists in like traditional finance. But yeah, so there's this Meteora project where that liquidity operation all happens.

Speaker 51 And Meteora was deeply sort of involved in some of these big token launches. Like Trump token was starting out on Meteora.
Melania started out there, this Libra token started out there.

Speaker 51 And now it seems like the co-founder was like very closely connected to this Hayden guy.

Speaker 51 He even supposedly introduced the Melania team to Hayden Davis, the Kelsier guy.

Speaker 51 It sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations out there, he was personally involved in a lot of this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into when it comes to Libra token and why everything went so wrong.

Speaker 51 And it seems like there is this sort of network of people throughout this meme coin world who are running these big platforms and who are making connections and all of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of these big token launches.

Speaker 51 So that when those people who are buying it up early and making all this money, it's like, oh yeah, that's the guy who runs Meteora.

Speaker 51 This happens so much in the crypto world and I should stop being surprised every time it happens.

Speaker 51 But what happened is when the co-founder of Meteora stepped down, the other co-founder who was like previously not really known stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co-founder.

Speaker 51 And he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow, the co-founder who stepped down, was, you know, he thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing shady was happening at Meteora, et cetera.

Speaker 51 The other co-founder who just like came out of the woodwork, he runs Jupiter, which is the other, it's like the ostensible Meteora competitor.

Speaker 51 It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the same people, you know, behind the scenes. Yeah.

Speaker 51 And, you know, some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on this were saying, oh, yeah, the Jupiter guys were all insider trading too. The Meteora guys are insider trading.

Speaker 51 Like they're all trading against you.

Speaker 51 So it's really exposed a lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world, in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like, oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins, like you are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly also to Malays as well.

Speaker 48 Yes, let's get into like Millay's involvement in this. Can you lay up to the timeline of this? Because it's so funny.

Speaker 51 Yeah, it's a little wild. So unlike the Trump token, Millay did not launch this token.
He was not the mastermind behind it.

Speaker 51 It's not clear how much he really knew about the team behind it or what they were doing, but he was certainly convinced

Speaker 51 to endorse this token and, you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this. And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme coins to do.
I mean, it's unusual for them to find a president, but

Speaker 48 apparently not now.

Speaker 48 Which is true,

Speaker 48 which it was unusual for them to find a president.

Speaker 51 But there's this whole process with meme coins where they try to find influential people to talk about them to drive the interest in the token.

Speaker 51 And so they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in the crypto world or, you know, anyone with some degree of a platform to promote a token.

Speaker 51 And ostensibly, they're supposed to disclose that they are being paid to promote the token. They rarely do.

Speaker 51 It is technically illegal, but like rarely, rarely enforced for someone to promote a token without disclosure.

Speaker 51 One of the very few cases where it was enforced was against Kim Kardashian of all children.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 48 Although

Speaker 48 that shit's all gone now. Yeah.

Speaker 51 And that was years ago before the SEC was bought by the crypto companies and so yeah and like i mean like literally like i think like yesterday was that this was yeah was it yesterday as we're recording this recording this on friday uh was it was it yesterday that the the the is it the sec that sec that dropped the case against coinbase sec that was today yeah this morning today oh my god yeah Yeah, and I mean, we're seeing this everywhere, but the SEC has paused a case against Binance, which had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort of like minor securities law violations.

Speaker 51 Fraud is also actually a securities law violation.

Speaker 48 Yeah, those are all, by the way, a bunch of like very, very like Binance and like Coinbase are like the biggest players in like the regular crypto market.

Speaker 51 Yeah, Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.
Coinbase.

Speaker 51 spent over $75 million on the most recent political cycle in the U.S. and now is reaping the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped.

Speaker 51 So I would not expect much in the way of SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies,

Speaker 51 especially given that they have also installed crypto-friendly people at the SEC, at the CFTC. The CFTC nominee for chair is an Andreessen Horowitz guy who is advising them on crypto policy.

Speaker 51 Like it's totally rotten now.

Speaker 48 Yeah. Well, and also like the actual guy running the government right now is Elon Musk, who is, you know, like

Speaker 48 one of their fucking boys. Yeah.

Speaker 51 And the guy who's ostensibly running the project has his own meme coin project. So I suspect he's not going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against meme coin operations either.

Speaker 48 Yeah. Good God.

Speaker 48 It's such a mess. Yeah.
All right. Back to Argentina.
Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair. Oh, God.

Speaker 51 Yeah. So basically, you know, the coin launches, Millais, you know, fires off a tweet about how this is such a great meme coin.

Speaker 51 And, you know, he gives the token address so you can all go buy it and then very early on it becomes clear that there is some degree of insider trading happening so you know the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's all recorded on a public blockchain people can look at who is doing the early trades in these tokens and it it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that are that were involved in launching the token and so the ones that are being controlled by the people who you know actually created this token and are promoting it are also involved in this early sniping of the token.

Speaker 51 And sniping is when

Speaker 51 you use crypto trading bots,

Speaker 51 like automated programs to buy up the tokens very early on at. low, low, low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably be expected to go hit the buy button.

Speaker 48 Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do.

Speaker 51 Or like the reason why you can't buy a PS5 is that all these trading bots get in like immediately exactly it's 100 analogous to that but in the case of these trading bots you know often they have insider information they have the contract address before it's public so that they can be like split second on it to buy these tokens early and then they usually dump them really early too so you know if if melee tweets about a meme coin the price shoots up within minutes of this thing launching and within minutes these snipers sell off and they make millions of dollars often in profits and it is that selling that often causes the price to crash right back down again causing those average people who thought that they were early to be the ones basically subsidizing the the folks who make millions of dollars off these launches yeah like it's pump and dump it's it's literally just a pump and dump like i it's just fraud like i just right i i don't know like i i just this is my my like old like 2010 sense of ethics emerging here which apparently doesn't exist in the sort of bold new world of like nihilism.

Speaker 48 But like, this is just fraud. Yeah.

Speaker 51 No, no, and like people talk about, you know, oh, we need crypto regulations. Like, you don't need any new regulations.
Fraud is still fraud.

Speaker 48 Like, stealing from people is illegal.

Speaker 51 But that's like a whole separate point.

Speaker 48 This entire thing, when everyone was doing this on Wall Street, it like crashed the economy a bunch of times. We were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do this.
But

Speaker 48 I don't know. Capitalism is such that you could just buy the government and now all your all your like fraud schemes are legal.

Speaker 51 Right. If you do it on the blockchain, crime is legal, apparently.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 51 But yeah, so you know, there's this, there's this really early scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are trading this token.

Speaker 51 Everyone's calling it a rug pull because that's like the colloquial term for when someone launches a project and then steals all the money. And it certainly looks like that's what's happening.

Speaker 51 And so Millet very quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet that he made and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically, I didn't know anything about these guys.

Speaker 51 I don't really know what their project is. I just thought it was this, you know, cool thing that was going to support Argentinian businesses.

Speaker 51 I, you know, I renounce all affiliation with it, basically. And then he, of course, like blames his political opponents for trying to weaponize this against him.

Speaker 51 And, you know, he goes very much out swinging on people being like, I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to come after my reputation.

Speaker 48 Oh, the Pironists made me do it.

Speaker 48 Yeah, right.

Speaker 51 Exactly. He's like, this is all your fault somehow.

Speaker 51 So anyway, you know, that all happens and it sort of launches the project into chaos because the way that the people on the inside are talking about it and huge grain of salt here because, you know, these are people who are potentially admitting to their crimes.

Speaker 48 Well, and also. Like, these are professional liars.
Like, their job is to lie to people for a living. Like, it's.

Speaker 51 And yeah, and several of the things that they've said have already been proven to be untrue. So like huge, huge, huge grain of salt here.

Speaker 51 But their story is that, oh, we were sniping the token, yes, but it's not bad because we were doing it to try to protect people from the other token snipers who show up on launches like this.

Speaker 48 Like we did it. No, no, you don't understand.

Speaker 48 We had to do the scam to save you from the other people who were trying to do the same scam.

Speaker 51 You're not even exaggerating.

Speaker 48 That's literally what they said.

Speaker 48 That's so good.

Speaker 51 And so they come up with this like harebrain theory where they're like, okay, if we snipe the tokens early, we can stop other token snipers from accumulating these huge piles of the tokens and then dumping them and causing the whole thing to crash.

Speaker 51 And so, you know, they will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally wreck the whole, you know, chart basically and cause it to go to zero.

Speaker 51 And then we'll take our accumulated pile of tokens and like slowly seed it back in to try to stabilize the chart.

Speaker 51 I mean, it's like blatant manipulate, market manipulation that they're describing, like in defending themselves against allegations that they're committing crimes. They're admitting to new crimes.

Speaker 51 It's like this whole thing. But that's the story is that they were like, we had to do this to protect the chart.

Speaker 51 And the idea was that like Millay was going to make this video. promoting the token even more.
And at that point, they were going to put all this money that they had taken back into the project.

Speaker 51 But of course, that video never came because Millay had already cut his losses and was like, I don't want anything to do with this.

Speaker 51 And so now the guys who launched this token are sitting on like ostensibly $100 million worth of tokens. I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the numbers aren't real.

Speaker 51 And, you know, there's really not $100 million floating around in there.

Speaker 51 People, again, people talk about how this is like a $4.5 billion crypto scam. There was never $4.5 billion in this.
It's all fake money. But like,

Speaker 51 it is true that there were people who put real money into this.

Speaker 51 They got totally scammed, basically, taken for a ride because they thought that they might be able to make money on it, because the president endorsed it because they thought there was this, you know, somewhat legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses.

Speaker 51 They lost their money and it all went to this guy, Hayden Williams, who is, you know, connected to Millay, who has some degree of influence with Millay, who claimed in text messages that he controls Millay.

Speaker 48 Oh my God. Yeah.
By the the way, use the N-word, by the way, in these two.

Speaker 48 You have to, like, who these people are. Like,

Speaker 48 this is a white guy using the N-word.

Speaker 51 Yeah, this guy is like whiter than I am and using the N-word to say that he controls Christ. Millay.
Not great.

Speaker 51 He said in this text message that was leaked that he was sending money to Millay's sister, who is very influential and who sort of is Millay's right-hand.

Speaker 51 sister, you know, sent money to her and that as a result of that, Millay will do anything that I want. He'll say what I want.
He'll tweet what I want. He'll, you know, he's my puppet, basically.

Speaker 51 Of course, Millay was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like there's money trading hands behind the scenes, even though Millais was not, you know, behind the token directly.

Speaker 51 And, you know, this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal for Millay, which is both surprising that like of all things that could have caused a political scandal for Millais, there are so many things to choose from.

Speaker 48 And this is what it was.

Speaker 51 But,

Speaker 51 you know, he's now facing these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud, that he should be impeached even.

Speaker 51 You know, there's some rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some sort of impeachment proceedings against him. And it's all gone very south very quickly for him, I think.

Speaker 48 God, it really would be so incredibly funny if this is the thing that brings him down. I don't know if it will,

Speaker 48 but also, like, I don't know. This is one of these, like,

Speaker 48 in an even bigger way than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political fucking godsend, like handed down to the opposition. And the Democrats just aren't, don't use it, right?

Speaker 48 Because, you know, they're the Democrats, right? Instead of just like doing, instead of doing the thing I would do, which is starting literally every speech with fucking no cops, no kings, no crashes,

Speaker 48 they're like, they're like, no, right.

Speaker 48 But like, this is like, if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration, like, this is like fucking God, like reaching a giant hand down and going, hey, have this thing to beat him, like, have this stick to beat him over the head

Speaker 51 Yeah. And, you know, to their credit, I feel like Argentinian politicians are taking better advantage of this than U.S.

Speaker 51 politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are calling for impeachment. There have been, you know, many lawsuits filed against Millet.

Speaker 51 And, you know, there is a judge looking into his degree of connections here. Obviously, there is, you know, some amount of corruption over in the Argentinian government.

Speaker 51 And so, you know, the degree to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat questionable, let's just say. Yeah.

Speaker 51 And, you know, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually, you know, getting the votes to go to trial is certainly questionable.

Speaker 51 But this has been used, you know, in a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of Millet, which is, you know, worth doing, I think.

Speaker 48 And, you know, I'll say this about pironism, right? Like,

Speaker 48 the thing about Peronism is that it's like the engine that devours social movements, right? Like anytime a social movement comes in, the pironists pironists sort of like consume it from the inside.

Speaker 48 But the thing about the way that like pronism functions is like, okay, so they've eaten all these social movements, but it's not quite like the US where you can just like disband it and make it go away.

Speaker 48 Like you actually have to still have to have the thing the social movement does. And that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest.
Like

Speaker 48 whatever else you say about the pironists, they aren't capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets.

Speaker 48 And I'm really interested to see what's going to happen like this weekend and over the coming weeks to see if we see another 17th giant round of protests, like also specifically about this.

Speaker 51 Yeah. Yeah, I'll be curious too.
It's really interesting to me, like to what degree this resonates with everyday people, I guess, in Argentina.

Speaker 51 Cause, you know, there's, there's a lot to complain about with the Millay government. And so, you know, it's sort of fascinating to me that people are latching on to this.

Speaker 51 And, you know, it's sort of interesting just to compare with the United States, where there's a lot to complain about with the Trump administration.

Speaker 51 And, you know, people were complaining about the meme coin, but by the time that was, you know, partly because it was pre-inauguration, and so Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders.

Speaker 51 And so it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration. And so it didn't get that much traction in sort of the longer term.

Speaker 51 So it's interesting to me to watch this play out in a different country where, you know, Millet has been in office for some time now. And, you know, this has gained at least some degree of a foothold.

Speaker 51 And I'll be curious to see, you know, if that endures or not. He's, he's sort of trying to play it off as like, you know, oh, everyone knows crypto is risky.

Speaker 51 He said something, he tried to do this like damage control interview on TV where he said that basically like the people who bought this token knew they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet, which is a wild thing to say.

Speaker 48 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 51 Yeah, that's just a nutty thing to say, but also very in character for him.

Speaker 51 And, you know, he said something in that interview to the effect of like, you know, only a couple thousand people lost money. What's the chances that those people were even Argentinian?

Speaker 51 Like, we shouldn't even care if they were, you know, not Argentinian.

Speaker 51 And so, you know, it's, it's sort of interesting to watch him try to downplay this as like, well, yeah, of course people lost money. It's a scam.
You know, like, yeah, I guess.

Speaker 48 I think part of the reason this is like a real issue for him is that like

Speaker 48 he really truly, you know, and this is something that like Trump is also doing this, like he, but he, he, like, really, truly went out to like his main base of supporters. Yeah.

Speaker 48 And was like, I'm just going to take you up behind a woodshead and shoot you and like take the money out of your pocket.

Speaker 48 And like the way he's like systematically fucking all of the people who are supposed to be his political base.

Speaker 48 and like like trump was also doing this but like people sort of like haven't isn't set in that this is what's happening whereas like this rug pull thing it's like this is like the only thing that the fucking unhinged right-wing crypto bro people care about like this is like the one thing you could possibly do to like fix them all yeah It's really interesting to see like what causes crypto people to turn on you because it did happen in a much more limited way with Trump where, you know, the U.S.

Speaker 51 crypto movement, I guess that's not the right word for it, but the industry or the crypto world had really supported Trump very heavily.

Speaker 51 And, you know, they had donated to him, but there was also this widespread belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going to be good for crypto.

Speaker 51 He was going to cause crypto prices to go up. He was going to.
fix all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry back and all this stuff.

Speaker 51 And then when Trump came out and launched a meme coin, some of his most devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it.

Speaker 51 And they really responded in a way that I think a lot of people didn't expect, which was was like, I can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin.

Speaker 51 He's supposed to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal money from his supporters. And so like, there was actually this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto world in the U.S.

Speaker 51 as well. And so I think that's, you know, sort of interesting to see is that like, okay, you're allowed to do scams and, you know, run your.

Speaker 51 government in a way that personally benefits you as long as it's not reflecting poorly on us and it's not taking money from us.

Speaker 51 But as soon as it starts to make people, you know, look askance at meme coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I wonder, I don't know, I'm interested in your take on this. Like, how much of that is people who

Speaker 48 are in less meme coin-y things who are worried about like their assets because they at some point like have to be able to cash out?

Speaker 51 Yeah. I think that's a big part of it.

Speaker 51 Like there are factions in crypto where I sort of referred to this earlier when we were talking about Bukele, but you know, there are Bitcoiners who believe that Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam.

Speaker 51 And so they are really upset when these meme coins come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together.

Speaker 51 There's sort of a step down from that, which is people who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, but meme coins are not them.

Speaker 51 And so there's been all this talk recently where they're like, look at all these meme coin scams that are getting in the news.

Speaker 51 You know, there was like the Hoctua meme coin that totally like stole a news cycle for a minute there.

Speaker 51 And they're terrified that, you know, people are starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know, it's just one and the same.

Speaker 51 And they're like, people are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking about Hoctua coin and how they ripped off a bunch of people, which like, personally, I think that the reputation is perhaps somewhat deserved.

Speaker 51 But,

Speaker 51 you know, there is this belief among some people that, like, oh, this is not real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a bad reputation.

Speaker 51 And we're actually starting to see talk of that in some of the higher places where, you know, I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the Hoctua coin on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 51 You know, like when they're talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds, the opposition is like, well, do we want Hawktua coin everywhere?

Speaker 51 Like, is this really what we want? And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception and the perception in

Speaker 51 Congress to some extent, which I think is what's really scaring people because they've just made these huge inroads with all of these now crypto-friendly politicians and friendly regulators.

Speaker 51 And now crypto is out here making a fool of itself right as new legislation or regulation might be installed.

Speaker 48 Yeah. And this gets me to, I think, the thing I want to close on, which is, you know, like we actually did successfully as a society kill the NFT.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 48 Like we took that motherfucker out back and stabbed it to death.

Speaker 50 Yep.

Speaker 48 And I'm wondering whether you think that like this is, this is a moment where we can like use this as a wedge thing to try to like fucking kill this entire industry and how vulnerable they are to like the negative PR rattlings from all of this.

Speaker 51 Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point that like the NFT, even as crypto has had a resurgence, you know, Bitcoin cost $100,000, dollars nfts are like nowhere to be found you know like the nft platforms are struggling they're a couple of them just went out of business and i think it is largely thanks to the fact that nfts became really cringe you know like everyone was like oh those stupid monkey pictures and that had like a really devastating impact on this entire industry that was supposed to be like the future of art or whatever and so i think there is that potential throughout other portions of the crypto world i would not be shocked to see that happen to these meme coin platforms where they sort of lose their novelty value and people just see them as big scams and there's really no point.

Speaker 51 But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or, you know, sort of societal distaste for it.

Speaker 51 Because, I mean, there are people who have bought Bitcoin early, who have billions of dollars in crypto, in Bitcoin. They are now working in the US government.

Speaker 51 You know, they have like very strong control over very powerful institutions. And so there is this countervailing force to keep crypto alive at basically any cost.

Speaker 51 And I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate to do that as we're seeing calls for, say, a Bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up. The idea that like the U.S.

Speaker 51 government should should personally stockpile Bitcoin, which, you know, they make a couple of arguments as to why they should do that, which are not very convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world.

Speaker 51 But the sort of underlying thread through it is that if the US government holds a substantial amount of Bitcoin, they won't be able to afford to let the Bitcoin price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the cryptocurrency industry.

Speaker 51 And so I think that's why we're seeing the attempts to, you know, sort of work crypto into government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance,

Speaker 51 people trying to get Bitcoin EPTFs into your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like that is really to make it so endemic and so contagious, I guess, to the rest of the financial world that it's almost like this

Speaker 51 threat that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right, if you kill us, we'll kill you.

Speaker 48 Yeah. And I think it's this interesting thing of like, sorry, I know I said we were going to close out, but like, no, this is fun.

Speaker 48 There's this interesting way in which like, this seems like the end game for the entire like tech bubble economy is like,

Speaker 48 you know, like none of these fucking companies have ever been able to make money, right?

Speaker 48 None of these fucking companies, like they all, they all, every like fucking, like everything from like fucking Uber to like.

Speaker 48 fucking like Google and Amazon like hemorrhaged money. Uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops and it dies.
Right.

Speaker 48 But like Amazon only really started making money, you know, Google was kind of making money, but like Amazon only started making money when they started getting government contracts for like their cloud computing shit.

Speaker 48 Yeah. And like that like looks like the end game.
Like, you know, this is this is the thing with like Elon's like fucking electric armored vehicle contract.

Speaker 48 It's like the only thing that can keep the bubble going is just pure state intervention. But that also gives me a little bit of hope because I think.

Speaker 48 The thing that's kept this giant bubble economy going for like over like a decade and a half now has been really, really, even under the original Trump administration.

Speaker 48 I mean, the original Trump administration kind of got bailed out by COVID to some extent.

Speaker 48 Like, you know, I mean, like the original Argentinian economic crisis was this, there was this, there was this huge wave of currency collapses in 2018 where it was sort of contained.

Speaker 48 Like the IMF did a bailout in, well, it was trying to do a bailout in Argentina and it like it kind of got contained, but it set off like a wave of uprisings.

Speaker 48 But like there's been this like really, it's taken this really careful financial management and like all of these like, I mean, like a trillion dollars of like overnight repo purchases like every day from the treasury to like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking like industry to like prevent like the kind of like 2008 style collapses.

Speaker 48 And I think it takes, it's taken a really delicate hand.

Speaker 48 And, you know, like, I don't think it's a good thing. But on the other hand, like these guys just fired the nuke police like while they were moving a nuke.

Speaker 48 And I wonder if they can actually keep the dance going or if they're just going to, or if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy, just blow it all up, which might maybe nuke all of these people in the process.

Speaker 48 Maybe.

Speaker 51 I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism, I think that one of the most interesting things that we're going to be seeing now is that the crypto industry has long argued that they have all this potential.

Speaker 51 You know, they are just around the corner from reinventing the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the only reason that they haven't, you know, actually

Speaker 51 made true on that is because of those pesky regulators that are stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want.

Speaker 51 And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators.

Speaker 51 They're in a world where they basically own the regulators.

Speaker 51 All of the enforcement cases against them are going to go away. The friendliest possible regulations are going to be introduced.
And now crypto doesn't have that excuse anymore, right?

Speaker 51 They can't just say that the reason we don't do anything useful is because these stupid regulators won't won't let us lend you Bitcoin or whatever.

Speaker 51 And so I think, you know, there is going to be this moment where people are like, okay, so

Speaker 51 do it now, you know, like do the innovation now.

Speaker 51 And it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks and bubblegum that's holding up this crypto industry because they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will be interesting.

Speaker 51 I just hope it doesn't take like, you know, the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.

Speaker 48 Well,

Speaker 48 my line on this is that, like, accelerationism as an ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's not, there's nothing you can do to do the acceleration. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 48 Like, or sorry, like, left accelerationism. Like, Trump and Elon Musk, like, just have their fucking foot hammering the pedal all the way down.
We are accelerating as fast as we could possibly go.

Speaker 48 And all we have left is to, like, make sure that the fucking acceleration goes our way and not theirs. Yeah.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 51 But I, yeah, I guess, like, you know, it's me trying to find a light in the darkness. You know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at least we might see the crypto industry fall apart.

Speaker 48 Yeah. Well, and look, look, they, they might bring down the first anarcho-capitalist president.
So yeah, that's true.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I don't know. Today, Argentina, tomorrow, the world.

Speaker 51 Yeah.

Speaker 51 Well, and I think also just like, you know, it's interesting to see this uprising and sort of broad distaste for Millet and everything that he's doing when everything that he's doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his affection for Elon Musk.

Speaker 51 And so,

Speaker 51 you know, to see people sort of turn on that is perhaps a little bit instructive. Yeah.

Speaker 48 And I think this is interesting kind of like bounce back thing too, because he's like, you know, somebody said he's modeling himself on Trump one.

Speaker 48 like the first Trump administration, but he got even weirder with it than like Trump one did. And now Trump two is like modeling itself back rather than like slingshotting.

Speaker 48 And Elon's got the chainsaw. Yeah.
And

Speaker 48 I don't know. Hopefully, hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too, and they also get the backlash to it.

Speaker 48 And we, I don't know, we, we don't all die when they accidentally set a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.

Speaker 51 That would be nice.

Speaker 48 Yeah. Well, Molly, thank you so much for coming on the show and for talking with us about this unhinged bullshit.
And also just genuinely thank you.

Speaker 48 Thank you for reporting on all of this shit because,

Speaker 48 oh my God, it is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane.

Speaker 51 I don't pretend I do. I think that's the secret.

Speaker 48 You just have to give in to the madness. Yeah.

Speaker 51 Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.
Yeah.

Speaker 48 And where can people find your work?

Speaker 51 You can find me at citationneeded.news. I also run Web3IsGoing Just Great, which is web3isgoinggreat.com.
And then I'm on social media everywhere. You'll find me from either of those websites.

Speaker 48 Yeah, we'll put links to all of this in the description. Thank you again.
And yeah, I don't know. Go make crypto so uncool that these people have a terrible day and panic.

Speaker 51 I'll do my best.

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Speaker 32 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 34 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 35 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 36 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 37 We got clear facts.

Speaker 38 Maybe we could calm down a little.

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Speaker 41 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 43 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 39 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 54 Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people putting them back together. And today, Garrison and I are joined by Haley and Dan.

Speaker 54 Both Haley and Dan are gender-affirming care providers in the Northeast, and they both work at federally qualified health centers. Welcome to the show, guys.

Speaker 50 Thank you so much.

Speaker 48 Thank you.

Speaker 54 Okay, so for people who are not familiar, right, maybe they've been fortunate enough to have like really good health care their whole life or fortunate enough to not live in the United States and have

Speaker 54 this bizarre like web of healthcare provision. Can you explain what a federally qualified healthcare center is?

Speaker 50 Sure. You mind if I take this one, Haley?

Speaker 50 So I would start by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care, right? So I got to dismiss with that to start.

Speaker 54 Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess good is

Speaker 54 a relative to, yeah, I've relied on a federally qualified healthcare center for a while and it was great.

Speaker 48 They were very nice.

Speaker 54 Actually, my prescriptions cost a lot less now than they do with my very expensive eye hot insurance. Yeah.

Speaker 50 So around the 1960s, there was the sort of free clinic movement that got started. And what grew out of that became the federally qualified health center system in the United States.
So there are.

Speaker 50 roughly 1600 unique federally qualified health centers all over the country. And we, as in sort of, you know,

Speaker 50 confederated set of health centers all across across the country are responsible for treating those most in need in the United States.

Speaker 50 So the Medicaid population, those without insurance, we cannot turn anybody away if you do not have insurance.

Speaker 50 People in rural areas where healthcare is very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and really everybody in between.

Speaker 50 At the health center that I work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is pretty typical, although you'll find in states with no Medicaid expansion, it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid.

Speaker 50 But we are the nation's safety net healthcare provider. And without us, there are roughly one in 10 Americans would not get their healthcare.

Speaker 48 Jeez.

Speaker 54 For like, I guess, people who are not in the United States, do you want to go and give us like a one-minute speed run of what Medicaid is, Medicare?

Speaker 50 Sure. So America does not have a nationalized insurance program, as we are very frustrated with most of the time.
It's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job.

Speaker 50 But if you are not, fortunate is not the right word.

Speaker 50 But if you're not fortunate enough to get that, Medicaid is the system that gives health insurance to people who are living at or below the federal poverty line.

Speaker 50 With the Affordable Care Act or the ACA, Obamacare, that level raised a little bit. So you could still get Medicaid if you were at above the federal poverty line.

Speaker 50 But this is mostly for the working poor. That's who gets Medicaid.

Speaker 54 Cool. Yeah.
It's a great system.

Speaker 46 Let's talk about how this is funded then.

Speaker 54 Like you said, the U.S. doesn't have like a single-payer healthcare system.
So how are these healthcare centers funded right now? Or maybe how were they funded like six weeks ago?

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 50 So most of the work that we do is fee for service. We're not a lot different than a lot of other places in that regard, right? If you have Medicaid patients, we are a fee-for-service program.

Speaker 50 We give provision of care to them on a per visit basis, same as anywhere else in the country and how that works, and we get reimbursed for it.

Speaker 50 What makes FQs different than everywhere else is two things.

Speaker 50 One, we get a special rate that is designated because of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more complicated patients and to ensure that they are healthy enough to keep out of expensive systems of care, like emergency rooms and things of that nature.

Speaker 50 And two is that we have a grant called the Fed 330.

Speaker 50 And this is a sort of like large sort of use it as you need to grant that depending on the agency is anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of your total annual funds and is meant to cover all of the folks who can't afford care and are uninsured.

Speaker 49 Part of my funding also, I do a lot of work with HIV and HIV prevention. So a lot of my work is done via Ryan White funding.

Speaker 49 And there's some other kind of separate funding streams that's applicable specifically to gender affirming care.

Speaker 49 However, it's all kind of messy and tied up in a lot of those other funding streams that Dan mentioned. And there's some specific limitations because of those funding streams.

Speaker 49 Again, historically, because who knows right now?

Speaker 49 But through something called the Hyde Amendment, it means that our funding would be at jeopardy if if we provided abortion care.

Speaker 49 So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of what we do as an FQHC is providing really comprehensive, expansive care.

Speaker 49 We're kind of some of the few clinics that do everything that we do under one roof.

Speaker 49 But there have been some limitations, specifically abortion to that.

Speaker 57 Yeah, it's more of a like.

Speaker 54 a healthcare experience that I'm used to as someone from Europe, like going to one of these centers than like the American one where you get a referral and then get it approved and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 49 And like, a lot of the ways that I talk to friends who live in other countries, like, I feel like my role is kind of more similar to like a GP as a nurse practitioner.

Speaker 49 There isn't necessarily an equivalent, but I feel like a GP is kind of a very similar, universal way to understand a lot of what I do.

Speaker 54 Yeah, that makes sense. So, can you explain Ryan White funding? Like, where does that come from? Why is it called Ryan White?

Speaker 49 So, basically, Ryan White funding was initiated in, I believe, the early 90s during the AIDS crisis and was a large government initiative.

Speaker 49 It's named after Ryan White, who was a patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion.

Speaker 49 So, Ryan White funding right now is a major source for funding things like PrEP, which is medication for prevention for HIV, as well as direct HIV treatment.

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 54 So, a number of these things, right?

Speaker 54 Gender-affirming care, PrEPs perhaps care for people with HIV or preventing people from getting HIV through pre-exposure, prophylaxis, like you said, like these are things that have been like at the center of the culture war for the current government, right?

Speaker 54 Like they're like

Speaker 54 the things that they point to as,

Speaker 54 you know, whatever their sort of like in Paxton's in Paxton's construction of fascism, he talks about moral decline, right?

Speaker 54 And this is their moral decline, that this is what they use when they're constructing their kind of we will save you narrative.

Speaker 54 What does that mean for funding?

Speaker 54 And like, what does that mean more importantly for your patients, for people who come to you for these different types of care?

Speaker 49 I mean, I think it's terrifying. I think I'm more on the patient-facing side.
So, a lot of the conversations I've been having are just about the uncertainty.

Speaker 49 I'm a prescriber for a lot of trans youth, adolescents, and young adults. And so, moreover,

Speaker 49 the uncertainty of just being able to, you know, get their medication, the stress of being publicly named and targeted in this culture war has just created a climate of fear.

Speaker 49 As my job, I want to be able to reassure patients that I am going to fight for them and do all that I can. But it's really scary.

Speaker 49 As Dan mentioned, a lot of our patients don't have financial safety net. They don't have a medical safety net.
We're really the one option for them.

Speaker 49 And if our clinic does not continue to offer this type of care, these are our kids who are going to go without hormones. I prescribe puberty blockers.

Speaker 49 My work as a gender-affirming care provider isn't just blockers and hormones, but those are medications that we know are life-saving.

Speaker 49 We know that unfortunately kids will suicide if they don't have access to those medications.

Speaker 49 And so I think, you know, talking about funding, talking about kind of these bigger shifts politically, you know, are things that unfortunately a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones if we can't prescribe them.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 50 I think it's worth talking about the fact that like there are there are so many angles of attack on this, right? There is the one that is just very clearly aimed at trans kids, right?

Speaker 50 The EO that specifies like protecting children, it's nonsense, but that is aimed at ending this care everywhere.

Speaker 50 Now, are they going to be able to do it everywhere? I don't know, maybe, but not quickly. But they can end it for FQHCs all across the country by simply making it like the Hyde Amendment.

Speaker 50 If we were to perform abortion services at the place that I work, then we would lose our Fed 330 funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would cut our rate in half.

Speaker 50 And that would devastate the business and put us out and mean that we could not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of other people that we care for besides those kids, right? Right.

Speaker 50 Then there are also the just the doge fuckery that is going to harm all of this and may create a lot of the same outcomes, right? Which is they turned off grants kind of just across the board.

Speaker 50 Yes, some of them were targeted on things like gender affirming care, but most of them were just like, it's a grant, we're turning it off.

Speaker 50 And then there was the TRO, but much of that funding has remained frozen. We have been told that the system is up and running and that they undid what they did and the courts stepped in.

Speaker 50 And oh, don't we have the courts still here in the United States? Isn't that a good thing?

Speaker 50 But they just kept the funding off, whether because they're incompetent or because they're actively defying the law. doesn't really matter.

Speaker 50 And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics and have entirely gone underwater in some cases.

Speaker 50 And then those people are not there to treat the community that needs them so badly. And all of these systems are grounded in their community.

Speaker 50 So when you lose, you know, the clinic that's in LA that had to close its doors for the office that's, you know, on one side of town, the people there knew that place.

Speaker 50 It was part of their community, part of their existence. It was grounded in that community and its community's needs.
And that's just gone.

Speaker 50 And this puts us in the very difficult position and, you know, leadership in the very difficult position of figuring out, well, do I worry about these trans youth and the fact that they might kill themselves?

Speaker 50 Or do I worry about the impact that standing up on principle and saying I won't toss them to the wolves might have on the rest of the system?

Speaker 50 And it becomes a very difficult sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But, you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with, for them too.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 48 That's tough.

Speaker 54 Can you briefly explain, like maybe lay out a timeline? Because we talked about executive orders there. We talked about a TRO.

Speaker 54 Like there was a large number of executive orders, right, in the last three weeks. So like maybe people missed them.

Speaker 54 Can you explain the pertinent executive orders and then what's a tentative restraining order?

Speaker 50 Yeah, so on Trump's first day in office on the day of his inauguration, so January 20th, he signs 100 some odd executive orders.

Speaker 50 The ones that are particularly of interest to us in healthcare were protecting children against chemical and surgical mutilation is the name of it, which is a disgusting and vile name.

Speaker 50 And then protecting women, something, something, something. Defending women.
Yeah, defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals.

Speaker 50 And I think will be used after we are under attack for trans youth to come after trans adults in federally qualified health centers as well. Those EOs led to later that week on Friday, we got.

Speaker 50 emails to every PI, which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had that said, because of

Speaker 50 those two, and there was one about DEI, which is also an executive order. You are not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders.

Speaker 50 So that was the first shot we got, and it came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't specific, right?

Speaker 50 It didn't specifically say we're going to do X, Y, or Z, but it was here's here's threat.

Speaker 50 The following Tuesday, Doge is let loose and announces that they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that is in opposition to those things.

Speaker 50 If you actually looked at the Excel file that they released with the actual grants, it froze everything. Like it was not just the stuff that they felt was in opposition to this.

Speaker 50 It was like everything. We have a ton of grants that were on that list at the agency that I work at.
And boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, was there a lot of panic going around.

Speaker 50 Wednesday rolls around and they get a judge to come in and sort of put a halt on it. And then later that day, the press secretary says, oh, we're just going to send the memo.

Speaker 50 We're still going to freeze everything. And then the judge comes back and puts a temporary restraining order.

Speaker 50 So in theory, what that should have meant is that all of that grant funding once again flows. And it did not.

Speaker 50 Importantly, too, for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take in, Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down. So we could not get any of those dollars in service of what we were doing for.

Speaker 50 uh 12 hours but still it was this like very concerning situation because medicaid was not on their list of things that they were after. And yet we couldn't even access it at the state level.

Speaker 50 A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, hey, you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another judge issued an order saying that like, no, for real, I need it this time.

Speaker 50 Unfreeze everything.

Speaker 50 I know some of the grants that we had that we couldn't access seem to have come back online, but I don't know, you know, I think it would be an impossible thing to do an accounting of like every single one that might have been turned off that might or might not be back on right now.

Speaker 50 But I am doubtful that at this point, every single grant across the federal agency is potentially available for folks. Just seems unlikely to me.

Speaker 41 Yeah,

Speaker 54 we should pivot to advertisements here. So I'm going to do that and then we'll be right back.

Speaker 54 Okay, we are back. So you talked about like these grants being turned off or not coming.
What does that mean? Like, does that mean people don't get care? Does that mean providers don't get paid?

Speaker 54 Does that mean they can't access their prescriptions? Like, what does it look like if I'm trying to access care through one of your clinics?

Speaker 49 So, yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit on the prescriber side, because I think, you know, having direct contact with someone who works under the administration is really the only way that I have really been able to get any updates.

Speaker 49 So as a healthcare provider, it's been utter chaos. Basically, every day we've gotten different messaging around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients can

Speaker 49 schedule intakes, whether or not we're able to prescribe these life-saving medications.

Speaker 49 And no one knows exactly.

Speaker 49 Gender-affirming care is basically healthcare. There's nothing that separates it.

Speaker 49 There's no hard line, there's no clear distinction. It is

Speaker 49 medically indicated, evidence-based care. So saying you can't do gender-affirming care, it literally doesn't make any sense in terms of what we do as prescribers.

Speaker 49 And on my end, I've been faced with intimidation.

Speaker 49 I've been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because they do see this type of care as a liability.

Speaker 49 I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the state that I I am in that prevents my ability to practice to the full extent of my scope.

Speaker 49 There are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing.

Speaker 49 And I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do what I believe is best for my patients, which is to continue to provide them with the care that they need. But it's terrifying.

Speaker 50 I think importantly, Haley and I have the advantage of working for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of health clinics out there that have a week's worth of working capital, right?

Speaker 50 So if all of a sudden they lose access to every grant dollar, they lose access to their Fed 330, they were scheduled to draw down on a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet and then they can't, like in very real ways, that may mean that the doors are closed and the place goes under and that no one can get care there.

Speaker 50 And there is this real challenge of, you know, how do we decide what is the best thing to do?

Speaker 50 But for me, and what sort of started me working within our agency at least to organize around this is that like, this is an anti-fascist practice that is the right medical thing to do.

Speaker 50 It is the right ethical thing to do. But it is also our chance to take an anti-fascist stance against this government.

Speaker 50 Because if we don't stand now for the very first group they're coming for, then the next group, which is without question, trans adults.

Speaker 50 and undocumented people, then those groups will fall just as quickly. And then at some point, we're doing the poem, the first they came for the socialist thing.
And I just refuse to be a part of that.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 54 Let's talk about what that means then. Like, like you said, it's difficult to get any response from administration, right, in terms of what you can do, in terms of what you can't do.

Speaker 54 How are staff and providers organizing to make sure that they're able to keep providing for their patients?

Speaker 49 So just to provide also like a little bit of a peek into kind of the broader landscape of this, our clinic is not alone in their confusion on how they've been handling this.

Speaker 49 Not only FQHCs, but also hospital-affiliated clinics, academic medical clinics have basically clinic by clinic decided on their own plan on how to manage this, which is also incredibly confusing for providers and for patients.

Speaker 49 But something that was really heartening was that NYU Ling Go, this was in the news recently, they canceled appointments for two kids, literally just two kids, which is more than enough.

Speaker 49 And it sparked this enormous outcry and protests. And so I think there's also on my end, a lot of solidarity building with other providers who are doing this work and a lot of inspiration.

Speaker 49 There are clinics out there, some who are FQHCs like us, who have stood firm and they've said, our doors are going to stay open. We're going to keep providing this care.

Speaker 49 And so I think there are models out there. And I think that there are networks of healthcare providers who are committed to continue to advocate and just continue to do this, right?

Speaker 49 Because a lot of what we're facing right now is intimidation. It's not actual legal threats as of yet.

Speaker 50 Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging, but also hugely rewarding, right?

Speaker 50 It became really obvious really early on that both from the federal government's perspective as well as from our organization's perspective, that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to live and die.

Speaker 50 That was the place that served them and their goals the most.

Speaker 50 And so, how does uncertainty sort of foster it? Well, people don't talk to one another, right? Like, this is true kind of in organizational senses across the board, right?

Speaker 50 If you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary, it doesn't benefit you, it benefits the boss.

Speaker 50 And so, if we're not talking to one another about where our lines are, who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep doing it or listen to them, what we're being told or not being told, that we're consulting lawyers, all these other kinds of things, then we're all just alone in the dark, kind of, you know, trying not to scream and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.

Speaker 50 So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there, folks who before anything was going on internally, you know, made really bold statements about what they would and would not do around this kind of stuff.

Speaker 50 And now all of a sudden there's an internal network that's looking at, well, okay, so individually we can keep. doing this care because it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 50 But as a group, if they start coming after us, we have a lot more power. There's a lot more that we can do.

Speaker 50 And I suspect, and, you know, Haley's getting at this point, that like there are probably a network of us across the entire country in these kind of settings that are not talking amongst ourselves.

Speaker 50 at our workplace, but are really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level. And I think we have some power that could be used there to really make a difference in all of this.

Speaker 50 And I am optimistic that if we talk about this, we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we can work together to prevent this from being the first of many dominoes to fall.

Speaker 49 And one thing that's interesting, I think, is that with trans healthcare, trans healthcare is inherently radical. Like trans healthcare is not something that came from the kind of medical hierarchy.

Speaker 49 This is by and large a field that was communal. Trans people were doing their own trans healthcare before it became kind of institutionalized into a lot of these spaces.

Speaker 49 So I think we also have a lot of providers who are willing to fuck shit up, right? Like the community and the providers are intertwined.

Speaker 49 And I do think there is a real kind of radical bent to this, this type of work, which is why I think a lot of us have been so easily able to collectivize and strategize and kind of come together.

Speaker 49 It's a pretty small world as well.

Speaker 50 we we sat down on a on a call and talked about you know uh what are we going to do and i may mention that like oh through my other organizing work, I've got a DIY connection for estradiol.

Speaker 50 So that's a huge thing that will help us if we can't prescribe this anymore, if Medicaid stops covering it, yada, yada, yada. And I was like, but I don't have a, you know, a DIY solution for tea.

Speaker 50 If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great. And immediately someone's like, oh, yeah, absolutely.
I do. It's tested.
It's 99.9% pure. We're ready to go.
So now, like, I wouldn't have done that.

Speaker 50 There was no way for us to know that that was the kind of radical work that people were doing, if not for coming together on this kind of stuff.

Speaker 54 Yeah. I think maybe we should explain like the inherent risks like legally and then the distinction between those two hormones legally, right? Like if people are unaware.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 49 So, you know, as a medical provider, again, I have to be a little bit careful here, but basically, because testosterone has been used by mostly the cis male community as an anabolic steroid and used, you know, and some would call like anabolic steroid misuse or steroid use disorder, it is a controlled substance.

Speaker 49 Estradiol is not. They're both bio-identical hormones.
Every human on this planet, their body makes estrogen and testosterone, ENT estradiol and testosterone.

Speaker 49 However, in the United States, testosterone is considered a controlled substance, which makes it a little more tricky for folks to access without a prescription and also can put them at legal risk if they do so.

Speaker 54 Right. Like there's a built-in legal consequence for people who are trying to manufacture that or who are trying to obtain it like outside of the sort of prescription system.

Speaker 54 Not that there aren't other probably legal threats coming down the pipeline, I guess.

Speaker 53 Also, testosterone is,

Speaker 53 yes, it is a controlled substance. It does, it does flow in the bodybuilding community.

Speaker 48 Yeah, yeah, it's quite well controlled.

Speaker 48 Yes.

Speaker 53 And that is also like worth stating because, yes, if you go to your average gym,

Speaker 54 oh yeah, you can walk across the border to Tijuana and see like, you know how gas stations have the prices, like unleaded premium.

Speaker 54 Yeah, you can get testosterone prices like displayed in the same fashion.

Speaker 49 I mean, I'm sure you're huge fans of Joe Rogan. So

Speaker 48 many, many

Speaker 49 of my other patients who are not trans have been influenced to purchase testosterone because of our good friend Joe Rogan.

Speaker 54 Yeah, yeah, fascinating stuff.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 50 Which is also gender-affirming care for whatever that's worth, like

Speaker 50 gender-affirming care too.

Speaker 55 Yes, they do.

Speaker 54 It's a lot easier for them right now.

Speaker 54 So let's talk about like what this organizing looks like on the ground, right? Like, A, if someone's working, maybe they're not in a FQHC, right? Maybe they're working in an academic health center.

Speaker 54 Maybe they're working, you know, in one of the many other places where you can access gender affirming care in this country and they are feeling like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any affirmation or help from their management and they don't know who they can talk to among their colleagues.

Speaker 54 Like,

Speaker 54 how are people connecting? Like, what are people

Speaker 55 talking about?

Speaker 54 And like, how can people who are, because, you know, the healthcare system is vast in this country because it duplicates itself. It's the nature of American privatized healthcare.

Speaker 54 Like, how can people who want to continue providing care for patients do that? How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact people who are already organizing?

Speaker 54 Like, let's talk through the nuts and bolts of it.

Speaker 49 I mean, I think there's a lot of national orgs out there that are really doing the work.

Speaker 49 So, if you're a medical provider, I would highly recommend to join Glamma, which is a gay and lesbian medical association, because they have some lawsuits.

Speaker 49 And as a member of Glamma, that could possibly give you some additional protection.

Speaker 49 Following other orgs like Lambda Legal, SAGE, which is an organization for an elder, gay, lesbian, and queer trans folks, trans people have existed and have built organizations.

Speaker 49 A lot of those organizations are fighting this on a national level. And some of those are more geared toward kind of healthcare professionals like Glamma.

Speaker 50 I would say there's two conversations that we all need to be having. Like those external organizations are huge and necessary for direction.

Speaker 50 Within your own space, you have to talk to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk to them about risk taking.

Speaker 50 Talk to them about where you will and will not budge on some of these kinds of things. Talk to them about the value of the work that you all do because there's more of you doing it.

Speaker 50 Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist.
They're out there. Like they have very strong opinions on this, I am sure.

Speaker 50 And then talk to a lawyer, talk to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to protect the company and its bottom line.

Speaker 50 And both they and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone with nonsense.

Speaker 50 Get a lawyer who can tell you what's nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is.

Speaker 50 And then when you start thinking about as an organization, as a group, as a set of employees communicating with, you know, leadership about these kind of things, know that the law is actually not on their side, it's on yours.

Speaker 50 And let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number of other things that they probably don't want to be on the hook for.

Speaker 50 This is the leverage that we've got right now.

Speaker 50 It seems to have slowed things down a little bit internally for us that they've had to confront like a very well-pointed out legal opinion that said that like they were exposing their providers to civil lawsuits if they didn't do this and that the FTCA, the Federal Tort Claims Act didn't protect people under these guides.

Speaker 50 That has been really beneficial to us. The other thing I would say is like there's a real union sort of feel to a lot of this.

Speaker 50 And as we started coming together, a bunch of us realized, well, we all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way.

Speaker 50 But corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of like individual sort of arms of companies like the ones that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics of the work you do.

Speaker 50 They are interested in your benefits. They are interested in you as a worker, but they're not interested in like your relationship to the work.

Speaker 50 And so we are approaching this not necessarily as a union, but from the perspective that if we need to strike on behalf of patients and their access to care, like that's a tool in our toolbox.

Speaker 50 And we don't have to do anything more than declare it a strike to be protected under the NLRB and some of these various different things.

Speaker 50 And we can do it for political reasons instead of for pay reasons, which means we could do it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses, all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and therapists and LCSWs, where they break us apart by discipline instead of by, you know, what sort of managerial status you are.

Speaker 54 Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good point. I read a book recently about how the

Speaker 54 longshoremen in San Francisco stopped weapons going to

Speaker 54 Chile or El Salvador by striking and refusing to load weapons onto ships. And like, that's a union energy we could use right now.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think people would be well advised to like,

Speaker 54 I will say that they'd be well advised to check with federal and local law because like some state legal landscapes can be very different. Right.

Speaker 54 I want to end with like, people are probably afraid of accessing care, right? Like people are probably afraid of going.

Speaker 54 to see their providers like understandably like you said before like especially kids or people under 18 are like right in the center.

Speaker 54 The president of the United States called out a friend of mine personally by name recently.

Speaker 48 She's a trans athlete.

Speaker 54 And like, they're really coming after people. I understand that people are afraid.
Like, what should they know if they're concerned about their hormone supply or they're on puberty blockers right now?

Speaker 54 Like, if people are listening, what would you, maybe they don't know where their provider stands, you know?

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 49 I mean, I tell my patients this, but I'm in awe of them. They're incredible.
And a lot of them are nerdy theater kids who love cats and they want to just exist.

Speaker 49 And some of them are also incredible, outspoken activists. They are just amazing.
And I will fight with everything that I've got for them. And I really hope they know that.

Speaker 50 I think. One of the mantras I've been given to fellow colleagues, as well as to our leadership, to like get their heads on straight is that like fascism is messy, right?

Speaker 50 Like it's it's a scary, messy, there are a lot of throwing stuff at the law and seeing what sticks.

Speaker 50 But the things that in theory are still in place, like when and if they fall, we have different problems than the ones we're facing now, right?

Speaker 50 So we still have in this country protections for your healthcare information.

Speaker 50 So if what you worry about in going to the doctor is that someone will find out that you're trans and put you on a list, like I can't tell you that's never going to happen, but I can tell you that if it happens through your healthcare clinic, like we have significantly changed the threat model that we're all living in because HIPAA doesn't matter anymore and doesn't exist.

Speaker 50 Your providers are spending enormous amounts of time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document, how much of a deal they want to make it, whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing for you and what diagnosis is for.

Speaker 50 We are finding ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade and camouflage over this as we can. But you shouldn't not come get care.
Your life matters.

Speaker 50 You being in the body that you were meant to have matters. Come talk to us.
Come ask for help. We're here to do it.
And we're not going to stop until they make us. And right now, they can't make us.

Speaker 50 And so we're going to keep doing it.

Speaker 49 And I think the mantra of trans people have always existed. Trans people exist.

Speaker 49 And personally, I'm going to do my best to make sure that. for every single one of my patients that they continue to get what they need, however that looks like.

Speaker 53 Then it is good to hear. I know a lot of trans people have essentially trauma with aspects of the medical community establishment, whatever.

Speaker 53 And like, you know, not

Speaker 53 all practitioners may be as much in our camp as maybe you are. And I would encourage people, if they are, if they are still looking for care through like these, these sorts of channels,

Speaker 53 you should try to find out where other trans people in your city are already going.

Speaker 53 There's certainly like clinics will have stuff on their website that indicate that they either specialize in this or they offer this, as opposed to, you know, maybe just a

Speaker 53 general practitioner who may not be the greatest in this vein. And like this, this still happens.

Speaker 53 I've talked to a lot of friends recently who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with nurses or doctors when they're trying out like different clinics or different or different providers, university providers.

Speaker 53 So it is definitely worth doing some research beforehand. So, you know, the place you're going is going to be like

Speaker 53 with you, which is just an unfortunate reality of being trans. But

Speaker 53 that has been the case for a long time and it only continues to be a factor when considering care.

Speaker 49 Absolutely.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 50 It's really important to ask ask your friends that that's really solid advice in part because whether I like it or not, a lot of organizations are taking the stuff that says, hey, we treat trans people down off their website, off their marketing materials.

Speaker 50 We are not trying to draw that attention. It doesn't mean we don't do it.
It doesn't mean we're not skilled and trained and educated and smart and passionate about it.

Speaker 50 It just means we don't really want to totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk to your friends, talk to people in your community.

Speaker 50 They know us. We know them.
I have a lot of activism experience outside of my work. And it's amazing how many of those.

Speaker 50 people end up being the same people that are in this conversation because of the way that this all works. Yeah.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 49 I was just going to say, I think, unfortunately, it is, it is the norm and evidence shows that, like large evidence of studies show that trans people are treated pretty horribly by the healthcare system.

Speaker 49 And most of my patients have experienced that in some way or another.

Speaker 49 But like I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare kind of comes from a DIY community and there's a lot of really good community information about you know, kind of who to trust and who you can go to in terms of finding an allied provider.

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 54 Yeah. I think that's really good.
I think that was really great, guys. Thank you so much for your time and for your words for people.
Is there anything else you want to share?

Speaker 54 Or perhaps if people want to support your efforts somehow or support people's access to care, there's an organization you could direct them to, or maybe like a way people can reach out to you.

Speaker 54 Or I know a lot of people, there are people in my family who are healthcare providers who have substantially changed their outlook on the world and politics by how terribly their trans patients have been treated.

Speaker 54 So, like, if they, you know, like, some of us have been organizing for a minute.

Speaker 54 Some of us have been organizing for like literally a minute. And, like, how do those people access these networks?

Speaker 54 Like, how can people who are not in healthcare support you and what you're doing and reach out?

Speaker 49 The gender liberation movement is incredible. They're doing a lot of work, kind of public facing, to

Speaker 49 really get the point across on why this is so essential and also why everybody should have the right to their own bodily and gender autonomy.

Speaker 49 I think I mentioned earlier, but LAMMA, if you're on the healthcare side.

Speaker 49 And, you know, there are also kind of, if you're in an academic setting, looking to WPAS, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, kind of going to the experts in this field and really following and mirroring what they're doing.

Speaker 50 I think. If you're looking as a

Speaker 50 cis person who gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding but this is the thing that you care about would encourage you to sort of make people get on record about this kind of stuff right it's been the most distasteful piece of all of this is the kind of like weasel the hiding in all of this so force them on the record ask them if they don't tell you send them an email if they don't you know respond to the email send a follow-up email like make people get on the record about this so that we know where their values are.

Speaker 50 And if their values don't align with yours, take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, healthcare is a business because the United States sucks.

Speaker 50 And so we have to use those dollars in the ways that we can. And it matters in a lot of ways.
I don't know that anyone will care to.

Speaker 50 And I certainly don't want to present us as the people with all the answers here because we just like are figuring this out as we go to.

Speaker 50 But you can email us at communityhealthresistance at proton.me and maybe let's have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people in the FQ world.

Speaker 50 who want to do like a Amazon or a Starbucks like DIY union project where we're all working on this together for the politics rather than the pay as the primary sort of reason for it.

Speaker 50 Let's be a red union and get something going. I don't know that we can.
I don't know that it's the right call, but I imagine there's more of us out there feeling this way than not.

Speaker 54 Yeah. And like whatever it is, we're stronger together than we are apart.
So like talking is how we fix this. Thank you so much, guys.
I really appreciate you being so open about this.

Speaker 48 And yeah, I hope that you succeed.

Speaker 54 You're able to keep taking care of people.

Speaker 50 Thank you. We hope so too.

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Speaker 32 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 34 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 35 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 36 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 37 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 40 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 41 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 43 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 39 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 1 A doubly certified OBGYN doctor and a licensed acupuncturist doctor walk into a room. What do they talk about? GLP-1, of course.

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Speaker 57 I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co-authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

Speaker 55 And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism and far-right movements for a variety of publications, including the Texas Observer and The Barbed Wire.

Speaker 57 School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics.

Speaker 57 But beginning in 2020, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have become communist indoctrination centers.

Speaker 57 Ruffo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called critical race theory, or CRT for short.

Speaker 57 Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti-discrimination laws typically fail.

Speaker 57 While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed.

Speaker 55 That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign.

Speaker 55 Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021.

Speaker 55 The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Ruffo wrote.

Speaker 55 We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, end quote.

Speaker 55 On Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets, Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people.

Speaker 55 Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.

Speaker 58 In a foundational paper called Whiteness is Property, the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth from the rich, and redistributing it along racial lines.

Speaker 57 Rufo's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic.

Speaker 57 Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning, and mass mandates.

Speaker 57 Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards.

Speaker 57 Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia. Who pays your salary?

Speaker 56 Shame on you. What had been planned as a typical school board meeting in Virginia's wealthy Loudoun County this week devolved into pandemonium.
Shame on you!

Speaker 56 Shon you!

Speaker 56 With hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the school system of teaching their kids that racism in America is structural and systemic, something the school board denies is part of the curriculum.

Speaker 56 Things got so heated that the board members eventually walked out, leaving the police to deal with the unruly crowd. Two people left in handcuffs.

Speaker 48 This is an unlawful arrest.

Speaker 45 I am a first commandment break.

Speaker 56 Loudoun County School Board has been roiled for months by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in U.S.

Speaker 56 law and institutions, and that legacies of slavery and segregation have created an uneven playing field for black Americans.

Speaker 56 The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives who, like many in Loudoun, say it is being used to indoctrinate children that America is a racist country.

Speaker 43 Critical race theory is anti-white and it's not American.

Speaker 55 Those with an ear for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar.

Speaker 55 Resistance to racial integration and the civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti-American communism.

Speaker 55 And those with experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination.

Speaker 55 A common joke posted by teachers online is that, quote, if we could indoctrinate students, students would always read the syllabus.

Speaker 55 But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti-LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well-funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents.

Speaker 55 Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Great Vine, Colleyville, from August 2022.

Speaker 59 Embrace simple truths. There's only two genders.
And

Speaker 59 You know what? Keep the winning. They can keep the monkey pox.

Speaker 59 How's that working? In fact, keep winning so much, we'll keep coming. You know what? We're going to keep coming so hard.
The only

Speaker 55 As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality.

Speaker 55 As of 2020, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before.

Speaker 55 And our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's also a deep irony to this reaction.

Speaker 55 Prior to the advances of the civil rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right.

Speaker 55 In fact, it's usually been the opposite. For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism.

Speaker 55 In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools schools over the years, with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live, and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.

Speaker 57 Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists.

Speaker 57 School books in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see in films like Gone with the Wind.

Speaker 57 Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war.

Speaker 57 And this, too, steeped into the public imagination in movies like Santa Fe Trail, starring Van Heflin.

Speaker 50 The time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you and your kind off the face of the earth.

Speaker 57 According to the myths promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave-owning Southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves.

Speaker 57 Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom, as we see in the scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail.

Speaker 57 Here, Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

Speaker 57 Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Arrow Flynn depicts future Confederate general J.E.B. Seward as sweetly rational.

Speaker 50 Half of the people in America believe in your theory. A lot of them even condone your methods.
That'll guarantee you a public trial. Fool.

Speaker 50 I'm not on trial with the nation itself.

Speaker 50 Are you too stupid and blinded by a uniform to see what I see?

Speaker 50 A dark and evil curse laying all over this land.

Speaker 33 A carnal sin against God.

Speaker 50 It can only be wiped out in blood. But why in blood? The people of Virginia have considered a resolution to abolish slavery for a long time.
They sense that it's a moral wrong.

Speaker 50 And the rest of the South will follow Virginia's example. All they ask is time.

Speaker 55 From the 1880s until the 1960s, School books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877, as a time of rampant corruption.

Speaker 55 These books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.

Speaker 57 American schoolchildren furthermore learned from their teachers that so-called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes dictatorship was the better option.

Speaker 57 The 1924 textbook, Our World Today, and Yesterday, A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator.

Speaker 57 The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.

Speaker 62 Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country.

Speaker 62 He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and downing the communists by violence.

Speaker 62 Nevertheless, he has done much to do away with strikes and to re-establish conditions as they were before the economic demoralization of World War I set in.

Speaker 55 Again, school books reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant, but also more anti-democratic.

Speaker 63 All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of a thriving country and a viral leader.

Speaker 63 Iluce stripped down for the camera, worked side by side with the peasants, and wrestled wild animals. Never mind that this one had no teeth.

Speaker 63 Nonetheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide, including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandis Gandhi.
Here he speaks to his many supporters among Italian Americans.

Speaker 55 I tell you the Italians of America

Speaker 48 who are working to make America great.

Speaker 57 Another textbook published in 1935, The Record of America, told students that the so-called founding fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse.

Speaker 62 As The Record of America put it, The founders had little faith in the ability of people as a whole to maintain self-control and wisdom in government.

Speaker 62 They had no confidence in the man without property.

Speaker 62 A man who had failed to accumulate property would be regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a voice in the government of others.

Speaker 62 The Constitution was written to retain power in the hands of those who were least radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical mob action.

Speaker 55 After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African-American abolitionists like Surgeon or Truth and Frederick Douglass, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity.

Speaker 55 But the backlash was swift, particularly after the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, and the rise of the hyper-conservative Tea Party in response.

Speaker 55 In 2010, Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums.

Speaker 55 They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.

Speaker 57 In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son Kobe, who was glancing at a ninth grade geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill assigned him by his high school in Parillin, Texas, near Houston.

Speaker 57 He sent her a video highlighting a map in its shocking caption. Soon, Burin posted her son's video online.
That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.

Speaker 65 A video post on Ronnie D. Buren's Facebook page.

Speaker 53 So I'm going to show you the book, and then there's just an interesting section.

Speaker 65 Went viral. Her video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and has 48,000 shares.

Speaker 65 To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have to turn through the pages of her son's geography textbook.

Speaker 66 Immigration to the United States can be divided into four district periods.

Speaker 65 Kobe, who's in the ninth grade at Perryland High School, was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook, a comment that referenced African slaves as workers.

Speaker 66 As if we worked our way up in America, as if we came here by choice for a better life.

Speaker 55 The offensive caption read in full, quote, The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

Speaker 55 The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography, later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.

Speaker 55 The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.

Speaker 57 The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw-Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted.

Speaker 57 Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State Board of Education 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human-caused climate change, and imposed other right-wing content.

Speaker 57 To be sold in Texas, school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.

Speaker 55 Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four-year terms, while the governor appoints the chair of the board.

Speaker 55 Since the beginning of the 21st century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists, as a 2013 PBS report notes.

Speaker 68 Don McElroy has three jobs and he loves them all.

Speaker 47 Good morning, Dr.

Speaker 68 McLeoy's office is job number one, dentist.

Speaker 68 Job number two, Sunday school teacher.

Speaker 68 And job number three, member of the Texas State Board of Education,

Speaker 68 a seat he's held for the last 12 years.

Speaker 68 But it's that third job which has put this dentist and Sunday school teacher from Bryan, Texas into a national debate over what kids are taught in school.

Speaker 68 Critics have accused McLeoy of injecting his religious conservative beliefs into the curriculum. About every 10 years, the board revises the textbook standards for different subjects.

Speaker 68 Any books bought by the state must conform to these guidelines. The last big battle was over the science standards.

Speaker 68 This year, he's tackling social studies.

Speaker 57 The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago.

Speaker 68 According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit Texas's standards because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks.

Speaker 68 That means the choices made here could determine books that other states will buy. And that's led to a school fight that has the entire country looking on.

Speaker 57 This is how Kobe Burrin ended up with the World Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves.

Speaker 57 Kathy Miller of the anti-censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas.

Speaker 57 have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flawed that it's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those serious about education aren't laughing, however.

Speaker 57 In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures Texas students must learn about, a decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.

Speaker 57 In 2010, the board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that, quote, states' rights and sectionalism were key contributing factors.

Speaker 57 Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era, quote, had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregation.

Speaker 57 One textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.

Speaker 55 Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to, quote, consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution.

Speaker 55 even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels triggering climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous.

Speaker 57 Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools.

Speaker 57 A New York Times comparison of textbooks used in California, Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights.

Speaker 57 In reference to the Second Amendment, however, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership.

Speaker 57 The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space, as the New York Times reported.

Speaker 55 Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African-American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that, quote, some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance.

Speaker 57 As the New York Times reported, the California version of the history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo-suburbs.

Speaker 57 The California textbook said this.

Speaker 62 Some people wished to escape the crime and the congestion of the city.

Speaker 62 Movement of some white people from cities to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away from more culturally diverse neighborhoods.

Speaker 62 Others believed the suburbs offered better and more affordable living.

Speaker 57 The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II.

Speaker 57 The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to the founders.

Speaker 57 These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton.

Speaker 55 Barton, a 70-year-old lifelong resident of Alito, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation.

Speaker 55 While reporting on the Conservative Political Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books.

Speaker 55 He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Speaker 55 A one-time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia.

Speaker 55 He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed, and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community.

Speaker 55 Quote, your sexual choice is not a God-given right, he said on one occasion.

Speaker 57 In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit the organization says dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation.

Speaker 57 Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.

Speaker 57 The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress shouldn't pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith.

Speaker 57 Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with a religion, but that Christians should dominate the government.

Speaker 57 As Barton said in an interview.

Speaker 69 So we've got to get away from being scared to say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do is define it the right way, define it the historical way.

Speaker 69 We can't let the left steal 300 years of heritage. We can't let them wipe out 300 core cases, wipe out what dozens of presidents and governors have said simply because they don't like the term.

Speaker 69 We are a Christian nation. We have been a Christian nation, and that doesn't mean anything they think it does.
We're not theocratic. We're not coercive.
We believe in free choice.

Speaker 69 We don't believe in any of the others. And that's what we've got to get back to doing.
We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we believe we have a Christian nation.

Speaker 55 The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and he gets the most important details wrong.

Speaker 55 Most of the generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed.

Speaker 55 Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786, when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored.

Speaker 55 The First Amendment, adopted in 1789, also banned Congress from, quote, establishing a religion. And most states embraced to varying degrees the doctrine of church-state separation.

Speaker 57 There were some states that objected to this notion.

Speaker 57 The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could.

Speaker 57 Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist church, respectively, until 1818 and 1833.

Speaker 57 For decades, some states had so-called, quote, Jew laws that prohibited non-Christians from holding office or had similar bans on Catholics.

Speaker 57 Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th century.

Speaker 57 The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, placed the same limits on state power that were placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case, Everson v.

Speaker 57 Board of Education.

Speaker 55 Barton has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812.

Speaker 55 Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation.

Speaker 55 and that American law should be based on the Bible.

Speaker 57 Barton believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God.

Speaker 57 He asserts again, with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote, Orthodox or evangelical Christians.

Speaker 57 In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion.

Speaker 57 Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own.

Speaker 57 Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals.

Speaker 57 When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion and a gathering that as many as fifty-five attended on any given day.

Speaker 55 In their letters many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations.

Speaker 50 As John Adams said of the Bible, In an age when fraud, forgery, and perjury were considered as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators, and theologians, what may not be suspected?

Speaker 50 suspected?

Speaker 55 Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the Son of God.

Speaker 55 Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as described in the Gospels could be trusted.

Speaker 50 As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see, but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in England as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.

Speaker 55 And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believed that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about his central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth.

Speaker 50 Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.

Speaker 57 Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find.

Speaker 57 He cherry-picks evidence to bolster his claims about the founders' religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the U.S.

Speaker 57 Capitol. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there is no evidence that he approved them officially.

Speaker 57 What's more, Jefferson was far from an Orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservatism today.

Speaker 57 He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus' teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.

Speaker 57 These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, Exposing the Myths You Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.

Speaker 55 For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia.

Speaker 50 The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no god.

Speaker 50 It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Speaker 55 Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian conservatives. The History News Network website derided the book as, quote, the least credible history book in print.

Speaker 55 Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, quote, lost confidence in the book's details.

Speaker 55 Yet, in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.

Speaker 57 In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S.

Speaker 57 House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol.

Speaker 57 Johnson made a speech at a wall builders event, telling the audience that the theocratic evangelists had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life, and everything I do.

Speaker 55 Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children.

Speaker 55 Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed those lesson plans.

Speaker 57 Huckabee has long produced so-called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a Revolutionary War soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side.

Speaker 48 We will bring the plagues upon our British oppressors, just as Moses did in ancient Egypt.

Speaker 52 And we will win the same freedom.

Speaker 70 We fight for the idea that we can make something great here.

Speaker 52 God's Spirit compels us forward.

Speaker 70 And the time to fight is upon us.

Speaker 55 This video series may not be shown to kindergartners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee Design curriculum clearly favor a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions.

Speaker 55 The scripture-filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product.

Speaker 55 This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.

Speaker 57 Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last last decade.

Speaker 57 One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate.

Speaker 57 He is close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states.

Speaker 57 Patrick said this at a 2022 Conservative Political Action Convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. Constitution.

Speaker 71 We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because

Speaker 57 he wrote the Constitution. He empowered them.

Speaker 71 We were a Christian state, and we've been blessed because of that for so many years.

Speaker 55 In 2010, the Texas State School Board, for the first time, required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary founding father.

Speaker 55 This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the 1956 box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five-term president of the National Rifle Association.

Speaker 57 In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo-Christian scripture as well as the Quran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution.

Speaker 57 Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024, which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus derived from Protestant translations of the Bible.

Speaker 57 This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law.

Speaker 55 With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall.

Speaker 55 And as the law put it, quote, in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.

Speaker 55 The bill passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline.

Speaker 55 As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months.

Speaker 72 Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

Speaker 72 That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session, but missed a key deadline and died in the House. Louisiana just passed a similar law this week.

Speaker 72 The Lieutenant Governor posting on X saying, quote, Texas would have and should have been the first state in the nation to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools, end End quote.

Speaker 72 The lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session.

Speaker 55 Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment.

Speaker 55 Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry ignore the United States Constitution.

Speaker 67 There are three references to religion in the Constitution, and all three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away from the state.

Speaker 67 There is no religious test required for office holders, a remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The First Amendment says there will be no national religion established by the national government.

Speaker 67 It says that we will not interfere with your private right to worship or not worship as you see fit, right? That is what the Constitution says.

Speaker 67 And so Landry says he wanted to put this up because Moses was the first lawgiver.

Speaker 50 He's not.

Speaker 67 The Code of Hammurabi predates Moses by four centuries or something.

Speaker 67 But also, if you want to look at the real law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls.

Speaker 67 Let students read what the real law of this country has to say about the proper role of religion in politics.

Speaker 57 The history of posting Ten Commandment signs or plaques or building such monuments in public spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right-wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism.

Speaker 57 As Cruz points out in his book, One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the three-hour 40-minute epic movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000-member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in 1956.

Speaker 57 The movie grossed more than $85 million.

Speaker 57 The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director, Cecil B.

Speaker 57 DeMille, hated the New Deal and testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood that drove up the cost of filmmaking.

Speaker 55 The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom-loving Hebrews standing in for the United States.

Speaker 55 At the beginning of the movie, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses.

Speaker 55 The movie also captures the racism and ironically, the anti-Semitism of a country that had not yet emerged from McCarthyism.

Speaker 55 The historian Alan Niddell tells a revealing story of two cast members in the Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant.

Speaker 55 DeMille then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses.

Speaker 55 When Heston's wife gave birth to a son, DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part.

Speaker 57 Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles.

Speaker 57 A former NFL star who broke the 13-year informal NFL ban on African-American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Strode played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attendant of Moses' adopted Egyptian mother.

Speaker 57 DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike.

Speaker 57 Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light-skinned cast.

Speaker 57 Even though DeMille's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G.

Speaker 57 Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters, and who won DeMille's favor perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunts.

Speaker 57 Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan, who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.

Speaker 64 We're garbled against you, Moses.

Speaker 64 You take too much upon yourself.

Speaker 64 We will not live by your commandments. We are free.

Speaker 64 There is no freedom without without the law.

Speaker 48 Whose law, Moses? Yours?

Speaker 64 Did you carve those tablets to become a prince over us?

Speaker 55 As Cruz documents, when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille came up with an ingenious marketing strategy.

Speaker 55 He teamed up with a conservative anti-communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, to establish Ten Commandment monuments across the country.

Speaker 55 Around the time that southern states erected new Confederate monuments to protest desegregation, Ten Commandment monuments appeared at the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall, and near the U.S.-Canadian border in North Dakota.

Speaker 55 Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country.

Speaker 55 Momentum stalled during the civil rights era to the extent that an Alabama state justice, Roy Moore, suffered ridicule when he placed, without authorization, a self-funded 5,280-pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court in 2001.

Speaker 55 The monument was ordered removed two years later.

Speaker 55 But once fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and their allies.

Speaker 57 The contemporary obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal.

Speaker 57 Men like anti-CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark-skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide.

Speaker 57 And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.

Speaker 70 The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.

Speaker 70 It's called accreditation for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally.

Speaker 70 When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics.

Speaker 55 On January 29th of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints, quote, anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our nation's children.

Speaker 55 This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia, or transphobia.

Speaker 55 The order also requires public schools to provide, quote-unquote, patriotic education.

Speaker 55 Those like Trump, Barton, and others, who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination, are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the 1920s and the 1930s.

Speaker 55 when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place, and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.

Speaker 57 In the civil rights era, black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws.

Speaker 57 Parents who want their children to receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors and to disrupt the meetings of right-wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT.

Speaker 57 This is Michael Phillips.

Speaker 55 And this is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Frioff for reading passages from textbooks, and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the Founding Fathers.
Of course, thanks to you for listening.

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Speaker 50 Hey, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here.
This is Robert Evans, and I have an episode for you. It's also an article I wrote for our sub stack, Shatterzone.
So I'm just going to get into that.

Speaker 50 Since February 5th, 2025, a document has been circulating among Democratic Party staffers and liberal think tank experts, warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley-led coup to end U.S.

Speaker 50 democracy. The document is titled, The Imminent Neoreactionary Threat to the American Republic.

Speaker 50 It opens with a statement that the brief was, quote, iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan, and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted.

Speaker 50 The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas.
One, the new shape of threats to the American Republic.

Speaker 50 Two, understanding recent events in the context of threats to the American Republic. And three, a list of appendices.

Speaker 50 The title of the actual file when I received it was Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim as, quote, explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public.

Speaker 50 However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document.

Speaker 50 They told me that to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers, people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks.

Speaker 50 One source I interviewed explained, It is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or Congress. See the IPCC reports.

Speaker 50 Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down.

Speaker 50 The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetuated under President Trump and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his Doge team.

Speaker 50 It then notes, the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grab.

Speaker 50 It states that Musk is tied to a, quote, broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen.

Speaker 50 Curtis Yarvin is labeled as a thought leader in this group, quote, called the neoreactionaries.

Speaker 50 And I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it.

Speaker 50 Musk probably would not label himself a neoreactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence.

Speaker 50 It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andreessen find Yarvin useful because of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world.

Speaker 50 Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the neoreactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers.

Speaker 50 Yarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions.

Speaker 50 This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neoreactionaries and Musk to regular people, but I also think it's a mistake to credit Yarvin with more power than he holds.

Speaker 50 The document refers to him as the leader of the neoreactionary movement. And I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works.

Speaker 50 That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat that we face.

Speaker 50 Quote, the neoreactionaries have openly stated their aims, to destroy the nation-state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator.

Speaker 50 Citizens become subjects owned by the state, state slaves, in Yarvin's terms, because everything rots when it has no owner, human beings included. That last quote is also one of Yarvin's.

Speaker 50 From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the, quote, nervous system of the state, another Yarvin quote.

Speaker 50 These would be the data and communication systems that Doge is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action.

Speaker 50 Quote, the most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown, 1977 India, 2022 Brazil, 2023 Poland, have been accomplished by radically large-tent cross-ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order.

Speaker 50 Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad-tent approach focused on Musk and his associates may be required.

Speaker 50 And I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me.

Speaker 50 For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment, a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship.

Speaker 50 I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts the original, which is France from 1934 to 1938.

Speaker 50 So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within DNC policy circles and the people around them.

Speaker 50 The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of, quote, a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high-ranking in the government and policy think tank circles.

Speaker 50 They noted that these are normally, quote, very milquetoast lib spaces, but, quote, they're being radicalized rapidly.

Speaker 50 Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to with gave an explicit reason.

Speaker 50 They stated, quote, I've suspected for a while a lot more things in DNC stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with.

Speaker 50 In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the the DNC, and people they know have made statements to that effect.

Speaker 50 They were worried that these, quote, GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it, with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans.

Speaker 50 I do think this caveat is worthwhile. It's certainly not impossible.
And I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating.

Speaker 50 But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to take issue with.

Speaker 50 I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Yarvin and the neoreactionaries.

Speaker 50 I would not describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here, and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem hysteric or unreasonable.

Speaker 50 So I asked my sources if over the the last month they'd seen more people talking about Yarvin in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again, they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians.

Speaker 50 They said respectively, no, and quote, that's kind of one of the odd things to be frank. This guy, Yarvin, is being brought to big events in D.C.
He's been referenced by ban in advance.

Speaker 50 I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked.

Speaker 50 That concern comports with some of fears that that I had late last year about Yarvin and the neoreactionaries.

Speaker 50 Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him, largely a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money, had become much more influential among Trump and his tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time.

Speaker 50 Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention to the subject.

Speaker 50 I really had kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon, which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's by a pretty good margin the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far.

Speaker 50 And I hope that that would help kind of get we were talking about out to a wider audience. And it did.
The episodes did very well.

Speaker 50 I think between YouTube and our downloads and the podcasts, we're probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. point.

Speaker 50 But our listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals, right? Their interests are not representative of the Democratic Party at large.

Speaker 50 It is noteworthy, and perhaps even important, that influential individuals in the policy space with connections to Democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvin as a threat, and that's what this document represents.

Speaker 50 It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote.

Speaker 50 If non-governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained, and/or unaccountable actors gain access to key digital infrastructure, they can seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse.

Speaker 50 And speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for our sponsors.

Speaker 50 We're back.

Speaker 50 So, to continue from this document, there's a section next titled National Security, and the focus shifts from Yarvin and his neo-reactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote, poses a uniquely significant security risk.

Speaker 50 This, in its argument, is because Musk and Doge espouse, quote, anti-constitutional ideologies and, quote, are under the influence of America's principal foreign adversaries, China and Russia.

Speaker 50 It goes on at some length about Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him.

Speaker 50 Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself.

Speaker 50 I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely, you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space and otherwise largely a lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians.

Speaker 50 I understand why you focus on the China and Russia of it all with them, but when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take.

Speaker 50 I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers, quote, America's principal foreign adversaries, because Most Americans don't really think that way or particularly care about that.

Speaker 50 And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not, in fact, the Russian or Chinese governments. It's himself.

Speaker 50 And he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable.

Speaker 50 And I think, again, it's an error not to frame it that way. The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup.

Speaker 50 Quote, in essence, a coup is a, number one, rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power by two, seizing critical government infrastructure and three, weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them.

Speaker 50 The unelected actors then use this power to four, remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes.

Speaker 50 Now, it argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now.

Speaker 50 One thing I found compelling is the way at which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now and how it can can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system.

Speaker 50 Quote, without canceling elections, for example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence.

Speaker 50 Politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis of their shareholder power, shielded from public view.

Speaker 50 I think that's a real thing to be concerned with, and I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project.

Speaker 50 Now, next we have a summary of the neoreactionary agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy.

Speaker 50 These include David Sachs, Blaji Srinivasan, and J.D. Vance.
Also name-dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land, who is in fact referenced twice in this paper.

Speaker 50 He is quoted directly as having said in his paper, The Dark Enlightenment, quote, for the hardcore neoreactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself.

Speaker 50 Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.

Speaker 50 Land has had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Yarvin-like figure, as in he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as, or I think really wants to be, a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the scenes.

Speaker 50 He's really someone stating what he believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about our present historical moment that happen to comport with a lot of the things that these guys believe.

Speaker 50 Now, the authors next lay out Yarvin's concept of the butterfly revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in 2022 in which he laid out how a full reboot of the U.S.

Speaker 50 government could be accomplished. Quote, Yarvin's seven-part butterfly revolution has been roughly summarized as follows.

Speaker 50 Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees.

Speaker 50 Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency. Number four, co-opt Congress.

Speaker 50 Number five, centralize the police, federalize the National Guard, create a national police force that absorbs local ones.

Speaker 50 Number six, shut down the elites, the media and the universities who make up the cathedral. Number seven, get people on the streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency.

Speaker 50 And obviously, All of that we've seen Trump and his people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right? And that's in fact what the next chunk of the the document is.

Speaker 50 Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and Doge activity, and they show how it comports with the butterfly revolution blueprint.

Speaker 50 Now, we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here. So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to watch.

Speaker 50 Those are listed as, quote, government contracts, which fund many of Musk's companies at present. And the next is Greenland and Mars.

Speaker 50 Quote, a core tenet of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation-states with network states, but states require territory.

Speaker 50 Technocracy Inc., a predecessor to the neoreactionary movement, whose one-time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic superstate.

Speaker 50 There is currently a Peter Thiel-backed network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of a territorial project.

Speaker 50 Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump.

Speaker 50 Now, I think most of this is pretty credible, although I feel differently about Musk's talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about PR than anything.

Speaker 50 I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close-in timeframe, that we start building persistent colonies on Mars.

Speaker 50 I think the science suggests that if that ever happens, it won't be anytime soon. And I think he knows that.
I think he's largely understands hype well and how to use it.

Speaker 50 And Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years.

Speaker 50 Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough in its layout of the neoreactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted to end U.S. democracy.

Speaker 50 It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known Doge employees, and it quotes extensively from Yarvin and somewhat less less extensively from Land.

Speaker 50 The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all-powerful executive that Yarvin longs for.

Speaker 50 This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial.

Speaker 50 After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that, quote, Section 3 articulates what Congress and other actors can do in order to stop this threat however the document in its present form does not include any section three or any comprehensive list of solutions congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy

Speaker 50 and perhaps there's a later version of the document that i don't have access to that includes that perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out i have to say as heartening as i find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing facing and the fact that I think it's overall good that people in positions of influence and around the DNC are talking about this stuff, it's also kind of perfect that at the end, they're like, hey, you know, don't worry, we've included some tips on how to defeat these guys.

Speaker 50 And then they just don't, you know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier. But unfortunately, it is pretty dire.

Speaker 50 Now, if you want to take a look at the full document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've read to you now, but it is really worth reading, especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin guy or the neoreactionaries, and you kind of want to know how this all fits together with what Musk is doing in more detail.

Speaker 50 If you go to my sub stack at Shatterzone, the most recent article is the text of this, and I include a couple of different points links to the full document, which I have uploaded to Scribbed.

Speaker 50 And you can read the whole thing if you want. It has not been altered since I have received it.
And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting out there and spreading to more people.

Speaker 50 So that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow with something else.
Until then, folks,

Speaker 50 I don't know.

Speaker 48 Keep an eye on this shit.

Speaker 54 Bye.

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Speaker 32 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 34 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 35 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 36 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 37 We got clear facts.

Speaker 38 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 39 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 41 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 43 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 39 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 53 This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House. Yes.

Speaker 53 The crumbling world and what it means for me and you. I'm Garrison Davis.
Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes.
This week we're covering the week of February 19 to February 26th.

Speaker 50 And And boy, if you thought we had ED before, do we have ED now?

Speaker 54 We still haven't got that hymn sponsorship, but we'll be trying.

Speaker 50 We're going to keep working at it. I'm also looking to get us a penis pump sponsorship.
Speaking of penis pumps, let's talk about the Germans. So

Speaker 50 Germany had its election very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way their government works is that periodically, governments can't continue being governments.

Speaker 50 And so they have to have a very sudden election. I'm not going to explain it much more than that, but the actual results of the election were pretty interesting, right?

Speaker 50 The primary winner was Offde, AFD, Alternative for Germany, would be kind of the closest English translation of the name of the party. This is a far-right party.

Speaker 50 It is primarily popular in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe.

Speaker 50 One of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists, conservatives, and the left, have had a tacit agreement since the end of World War II called the Cordon Saniter.

Speaker 50 It's not just Germany. This is a thing that used to be present in all of Europe.

Speaker 50 And basically the gist of the Cordon Sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies, right? So usually no one party has 50% or more of the vote.

Speaker 50 So you have a party with 20 and a party with 15 and a party with eight, and they form a coalition government.

Speaker 50 And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is still the norm, but we'll talk about that, is that you don't coalition with AFD, which is a part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept them from being a major force in German politics until, you know, over the last eight or so years, they have grown substantially to the point where in this recent election, they doubled their support from around 10% to a little over 20%.

Speaker 50 Yeah. This makes them, they're not the largest single block in the German, uh, in the Reichstag.

Speaker 53 They're number two, though, right?

Speaker 50 They are number two, I believe, which sucks.

Speaker 54 Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 50 Yeah, the CDU is

Speaker 50 still significantly larger. Yeah.
Although not like overwhelmingly larger,

Speaker 50 to be clear. So basically right now, the CDU, which is the centrist party, and it's kind of like center-right, a little center-right, has 208 seats in the Reichstag.
AFD has 152.

Speaker 50 The Social Democrats have 120. The Greens have 85, and the Left Party has 64.
So AFD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AFD.

Speaker 50 But the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern right now.

Speaker 50 This most recent election had unusually high voter turnout. 2021 election, 76% of the country or so voted.
More than 82% of the country voted in this most recent election.

Speaker 50 So the fact that like, you have record high turnout and AFD doubling its support is deeply chilling.

Speaker 50 Now, it's not 100% bad news because one of the other stories here is the new Left Party, well, not super new, but the Left Party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party, massively increased their support too.

Speaker 50 And they actually, for the first time, like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of 5% threshold before and is now at about 8.8%.

Speaker 50 So they went up by an amount actually, it's not like as much as AFD went up, but like in terms of a percentage of their prior vote, it's a similar increase.

Speaker 50 So there's another party that had significant gains in this, and it's kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is, you could say they do a little bit of like a red-brown alliance kind of thing where there's some like left-wing messaging in what they're saying, but they're also like super anti-immigrant.

Speaker 50 And they're not, you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the AFD is, but when they came onto the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AFD this election.

Speaker 50 And that's really not what happened. And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled were from Social Democrats and the left parties.

Speaker 50 So that was one of the... you know, it's because of the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system.
This didn't like hand the whole election to OFDE.

Speaker 50 Again, this is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder for a right-wing dictator to get in again.

Speaker 50 But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging, I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to try to win over far-right votes by kind of mixing in, well, okay, what if we did some sort of liberal lefty policies, but we also got really racist?

Speaker 50 Yeah. You don't take votes from the far right, but you do wind up pulling the worst people from the left.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 50 And yeah, I guess that's kind of like the broad strokes. Now, like, this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare.

Speaker 50 One of the things that's kind of, I don't know, positive may not be the right way, but interesting to me is if you looked at the 2021 election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the 2021 election, and I found a good article, German election results explained in graphics on dw.com.

Speaker 50 If you just Google that, you'll find it.

Speaker 50 In 2021, AFDE, obviously, like the whole northeast was, you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the northwest parts of the country, right?

Speaker 50 You know, primarily like rural areas and the like. But like there was a, there was a lot of red on that map in the northwest portion of Germany.

Speaker 50 In the new election, that's all black, which is the CDU, right? Yeah.

Speaker 50 Which means while OFDE's representation in the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized, would be a fair way of saying it, which is interesting to me.

Speaker 50 Hard to say too much.

Speaker 50 Like, does that mean, you know, I think some of what has happened here, because it's important both to note that this is bad, it's bad that the Nazis doubled their share of the vote, but also it was expected to be a little worse than it was.

Speaker 50 You know, there's some evidence that after J.D. Vance made his speech introducing AFD, their polling started to like freeze a little bit.
And it may be the fact because a lot of older voters.

Speaker 50 came in and they they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU with this sort of center-right party. So it's

Speaker 50 one story here is you could maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AFD came out and voted for, you know, the center-right party in order to kind of cut off their power.

Speaker 50 The other thing, though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic is that AFD is most popular among people under 30 who widely don't view it as an extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.

Speaker 53 And AFD won the majority of like working-class, unemployed, and

Speaker 53 male votes. Yes.
Yes. Pretty substantially.

Speaker 50 Yes. They did extremely well with young men and unemployed young men in particular.
And that's all deeply concerning.

Speaker 50 So, you know, there's a few things going on here, all of which are very interesting to me, but the power Ofte continues to have with younger, really young Germans is frightening.

Speaker 50 That said, there's also some evidence here that

Speaker 50 the situation in the United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting populace to attempt to stop OFFDE.

Speaker 50 And kind of one of the positive things that came out is prior to this election, there was a lot of talk about whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition.

Speaker 50 with the AFD and thus end the Cordon Sanitaire. And to make a long story short, they're not going to do that.
They're looking to coalition with the Social Democrats, which is a good thing.

Speaker 50 You know, it doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately, a majority of German voters suspect AFD will be in a coalition by 2030.

Speaker 50 But it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now.
And that's what I got to say about Germany.

Speaker 53 Yeah, I mean, and people frame these results as like slightly better than expected. Slightly.
Previous polling showed AFD

Speaker 53 being slightly better in results. And that dipped after Vance and Musk

Speaker 53 started really trying to push AFD both in person and

Speaker 53 digitally. So you saw a slight dip there.

Speaker 50 Yes.

Speaker 50 And this is the other thing that's kind of worth noting, that kind of like red-brown party, in addition to being kind of pro-social programs, anti-immigration, they're also very anti-United States.

Speaker 48 Okay.

Speaker 48 So

Speaker 50 that may may explain some of that too.

Speaker 54 Yeah. It does seem like things are changing a lot.

Speaker 54 And one of the things that we've seen, like as we've spoken about before, like not just in Germany, but in Canada, was that like people hate Musk and Trump so much in the rest of the world that like their endorsement could be something of a kiss of death electorally.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 53 Yeah. Like the Conservative Party in Canada has been growing pretty exponentially.
in terms of like popular support the past few years as the liberals have like tanked.

Speaker 53 And now those trends have actually started to reverse. The Canadian like liberal polling is up 10 points.
The conservative polling is down.

Speaker 53 Conservatives might not even be able to control parliament in the next election as they were like expected to.

Speaker 53 And it'll be interesting to see like if this, if this anti like far-right United States trend continues to more countries beyond like Germany and Canada.

Speaker 53 But I'm still eagerly eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.

Speaker 50 And this is part of the story that is really interesting right now, where we've talked a lot about the transnational fascist coalition, you know, the fact that Trump and his people have had the quasi-dictator of Hungary, you know, over at Mar-a-Lago and have repeatedly cited him as an inspiration for how to take and centralize power, you know, how close Bolsonaro was in the last Trump administration.

Speaker 50 Like, you know, obviously the Republican Party's increasing closeness and embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is

Speaker 50 people, like countries that had been heading in a very

Speaker 50 authoritarian right-wing direction turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right-wing movement, as Poland being the best example, right?

Speaker 50 Where Poland had Polish politics have changed substantially in the last several years. And a big part of that is the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 50 And there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the socially conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro-Russia and we're Poland.

Speaker 48 Like,

Speaker 48 no.

Speaker 53 All right, let's go on a break and return to talk more about the crumbling world and Usade.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 53 All right, we are back. I'm going to throw to James to do a segment on USAID.

Speaker 54 Yeah, we are back. And before I talk about USAID, I do want to talk about something else that has been advertised along with whatever products and services support this show.

Speaker 54 And that is the gold card. So the gold card, if you're not familiar, is something that Trump floated this week to replace the EB5 investor visa.

Speaker 54 Trump suggested that the gold card would require a $5 million investment.

Speaker 54 Well, investment, I think it's just a charge right it's you're just giving the money to the united states government and in return you will receive a green card plus privileges uh and it will be not a green but a gold card so that's great that is uh the eb5 if you're not familiar required you since 2022 it's been one million and fifty thousand dollar investment and the creation of 10 jobs so it had some kind of like

Speaker 54 it trickle-down economics is not a real thing it's a lie that they tell you. But it had some idea that these rich people would create jobs in the U.S., people who are less wealthy.

Speaker 54 The gold card seems to not have that. You just have to be rich, right? So that's an interesting change to the immigration system.

Speaker 54 The other thing I want to talk about today is the United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.

Speaker 54 It's been a target of like the anti-woke right for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph Nye would have called soft power, right?

Speaker 54 Their power to persuade, the power to influence outcomes around the world with things other than tanks and bombs.

Speaker 50 Oh, and again, if your power is soft right now, you might consider trying HIMS or one of our other sponsors.

Speaker 53 HIMS is not a sponsor.

Speaker 48 Sorry, James. We needed to do that.

Speaker 54 I have been diverted, but I'm returning to my topic.

Speaker 54 The agency has been massively impacted by Doge and Trump administration cuts, right?

Speaker 54 The Trump administration suspended all foreign aid in January via executive order on the 20th of January in order to assess if it was, quote, serving U.S. interests.

Speaker 54 The State Department then issued guidance that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut nearly basically all USAID expenses.

Speaker 54 On the 13th of this month, that's February, if you're listening later, a judge issued a temporary restraining order.

Speaker 54 This TRO didn't really stop them from doing what they were doing because it told them to continue with existing contracts.

Speaker 54 And what the State Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are already in the contracts. So the contracts will have some kind of kill clause, right?

Speaker 54 And that they claim that they're implementing that.

Speaker 54 So they think they've found a fun workaround. Rather than talking extensively about court battles, I want to talk about what this means.

Speaker 54 These are cuts made by the richest man in the world that have had a direct, tangible, and devastating impact on the poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, 80% of emergency kitchens have been closed.

Speaker 54 That means that close to 2 million people will go without food. Local groups who organize the kitchens are running out of money.

Speaker 54 The way this works is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means.

Speaker 54 Because in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed to sending them food as an in-kind donation, right?

Speaker 54 Whatever he communicated, these people are not getting food. And as a result, the people who run these mutual aid kitchens, it's a mutual aid coalition of Sudan, are

Speaker 54 facing the horrible decision of having to turn people away or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad.

Speaker 54 On the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place where Robert and I have been to report, I've heard that people are having babies right now outside lock clinics and life support machines have been removed, right?

Speaker 54 So people who were relying on those life support machines, obviously.

Speaker 50 And at least one person has died. Yeah.

Speaker 48 And I'm sure many, many more people than that have died.

Speaker 50 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 50 that's just what's reported. Like, it's a lot of most of what happens there does not get out.

Speaker 54 Yeah, I will try

Speaker 54 in not too long to be there and report on that. But

Speaker 54 it's pretty devastating right now. Look, Robert and I have met the people who run some of these clinics, and they are some of the most incredible people doing amazing work.

Speaker 54 And yeah, they relied on USAID funding, as lots of other places do. and that's not happening now.

Speaker 54 The State Department has exempted, quote, life-saving humanitarian assistance programs from the cuts, but no one really knows what that means, right?

Speaker 54 The order reads, quote, life-saving humanitarian assistance applies to core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.

Speaker 54 As I mentioned before, the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition was receiving financial assistance to help it provision itself, which is much better than the U.S.

Speaker 54 going through all the infrastructure spending of being able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors.

Speaker 54 Other contractors, implementing partners of USAID, are still owed money for work that they completed before January, before the stop work order stopped payment to them.

Speaker 54 For work to begin again on any of these contracts, they need the contract officer to sign off on it.

Speaker 54 And it's a little unclear exactly how many of these contract officers are still employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts. So essentially, USAID has stopped all over the world.

Speaker 54 In addition to this, in this country, $490 million worth of US-grown food, which is in the USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food, is currently at risk of spoilage, according to USAID.

Speaker 54 So it's not just that people are starving, it's that we are allowing food to go bad here while people starve in other places, which is pretty bleak.

Speaker 54 I will just really briefly here plug the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition if you'd like to help. You can direct to them directly, and it's mutualaidsudan.org if you'd like to do that.

Speaker 54 It'll be in the show notes too, if you're driving or whatever.

Speaker 53 And there is like ongoing legal fights over this issue. On Tuesday, February 25th, another judge ordered the Trump administration to resume resume hundreds of million dollars of funding towards USAID.

Speaker 53 And there's no indication Trump's going to follow that order.

Speaker 53 They're already planning to appeal again. They have already appealed before.

Speaker 53 And we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges, fine loopholes, fine workarounds. And Musk and Trump continue to just openly float, like defying the order of the court.

Speaker 53 Representative Andy Ogles introduced articles of impeachment against a specific

Speaker 53 quote-unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere.
They don't have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen. Yeah.

Speaker 54 It's a frontal assault on the separation of powers is what he's proposed, right?

Speaker 54 Like they don't have their numbers yet.

Speaker 53 Yes. Well, and then they have openly floated just like defying orders because

Speaker 53 they're interpreting the actions of the judges as like themselves unlawful. But Musk has himself called to impeach judges who violate the law.
And I believe his most recent

Speaker 53 pinned X post

Speaker 53 reads, quote, if any judge anywhere can block every presidential action everywhere, we do not have a democracy, we have a tyranny of the judiciary.

Speaker 50 So.

Speaker 54 What a great legal mind.

Speaker 50 Shit, we were saying it back in 2023.

Speaker 53 So

Speaker 53 this will continue.

Speaker 53 I mean, I'm really, really waiting for a final showdown between Trump, Elon, and, you know, maybe the Supreme Court and, you know, seeing if they will actively defy a ruling from the Supreme Court if they indeed rule against Trump and Musk.

Speaker 53 But until then, I feel like we're just kind of all chugging along as

Speaker 53 the Trump administration, you know, very, very unconstitutionally defies the authority of the court.

Speaker 53 In some related news, last week, President Trump signed an executive order stating that the president can change laws. Cool.

Speaker 53 Erroneously citing citing Article 2, which only calls for the president to, quote, faithfully execute the law. I'm going to quote from the order.

Speaker 53 The president and the attorney general, subject to the president's supervision and control, will interpret the law for the executive branch instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.

Speaker 53 The next section is titled, Reigning in Independent Agencies.

Speaker 53 It reads: The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the American people without presidential oversight.

Speaker 53 These agencies issue rules and regulations without the review of the democratically elected president. They also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting the president.

Speaker 53 Voters in the president can now hold all federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions as the Constitution demands. Unquote.
This is absurd.

Speaker 53 This is like extremely dangerous. One of the most like blatant like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon, like this is going to get litigated, but this is crazy.

Speaker 53 The fact that

Speaker 53 we have a president saying that he has the ability to interpret the law, something that specifically he cannot do. That's why we have three branches of government.

Speaker 53 Just like openly, openly claiming that power is like very worrying. Again, I feel like every episode on executive disorder, I say that, you know, I'm very worried.

Speaker 53 I'm very concerned, but that does continue to be the case.

Speaker 54 Yeah, it is very concerning. Uh, I don't know what more to say because it's mad.
Like, we're watching a coup happen on the timeline while everyone just continues to go shopping and stuff.

Speaker 54 Like, it's uh, it's it's pretty weird.

Speaker 53 Speaking of shopping, I just got a fantastic Swedish M90 field jacket. It looks great, it fits tight.

Speaker 54 I'm very happy. Incredible, Garrison's becoming a mill serp.

Speaker 53 We will go on break once again, uh, to come back to talk about the Navy and the FBI.

Speaker 53 All right, we are back.

Speaker 53 Let's now talk about the Navy, arguably one of the gayer branches of the military,

Speaker 53 besides the drone operators.

Speaker 50 Oh, you're really missing out on the Marine.

Speaker 48 As multiple Marine veterans have told me, the U.S.

Speaker 50 Marine Corps is the gayest place I've ever been.

Speaker 48 The Marines are like part of the Navy, right?

Speaker 55 Come on. They are.

Speaker 48 They are. They are.

Speaker 50 And they hate it when you say that.

Speaker 54 Oh, well.

Speaker 53 Go cry about it to Danny Trump. I don't care.

Speaker 50 It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 53 So, meanwhile, there is shake-ups in the Navy and the Marines as relating to Trump's anti-trans executive orders.

Speaker 53 And we have obtained an Al-Nav memo directed to all Navy units and Marine Corps from February 25th that outlines the Department of Navy's guidance on how to implement the anti-trans executive orders.

Speaker 53 Now, this includes ending programs and policies related to quote-unquote gender ideology all across the Navy, as well as only using assigned sex at birth on official documentation. I will quote

Speaker 53 from the statement, quote, DON entities will review policies for quote-unquote intimate single-sex spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships, and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy.

Speaker 53 Unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms and barracks with men.
It's in line with the stuff that Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's been signing.

Speaker 53 But we are slowly getting more and more of these implementation guides getting sent around to various departments. James?

Speaker 54 Yeah. And like, just to clarify that for people,

Speaker 54 most of these bases are pretty full, right? These are pretty crowded places. So this will mean women sharing rooms with young Marines, right?

Speaker 54 This will mean them sharing non-stalled bathrooms with young sailors and marines, right? This will force them into very confined spaces together on board ships. Like, this isn't like

Speaker 54 some kind of sort of minor inconvenience or whatever. Like, this, this will put these people at a demonstrable risk for assault, for bullying, which is a serious thing and an issue.

Speaker 54 And lots of militaries, including the US, one. But, like, and many of these people, I should add, like, have had, they're like post-surgery, right?

Speaker 54 And

Speaker 54 not that it matters hugely, but they're people who might pass as women or men and they're now forced to live according to their gender assigned at birth.

Speaker 48 Pretty fucked up.

Speaker 53 It's not great. I'm going to wait before I do reporting on the implementation guides for visas.

Speaker 53 I know there's been a lot of articles in The Guardian and a few trans journalists have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables regarding the issuing of visas to

Speaker 53 people who are trans. Specifically, I think the main cable that we've seen allows the continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what

Speaker 53 case officer or

Speaker 53 whoever is handling the actual visa information, whatever they determine to be the assigned gender at birth to be.

Speaker 53 That's how it would get issued. But I'm going to wait to report on kind of the rest of the nitty-gritty details because there is conflicting

Speaker 53 information from

Speaker 53 these policy wonks, lawyers, and journalists themselves who are trying to figure out kind of what the full implications of those cables are. But we are aware of them.

Speaker 53 We've been talking about them in our chat.

Speaker 53 Yes, they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to like overblow the scope of some of these things just to like induce panic when really this is all kind of very in line with Trump's earlier orders to only have male and female documentation that matches assigned gender at birth.

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 54 I will say also like if you are

Speaker 54 soldier, sailor, airman, air person, marine, whatever, and like these executive orders are affecting you, you can email us at coolzonetips at proton.me.

Speaker 54 I know trans folks tend to serve at a higher rate than cisgender folks. So there's a good number of people who will be affected by this.
And like

Speaker 54 for whatever it's worth, if you want to talk to us, you can reach out to us.

Speaker 53 I'm also going to note, we obtain information on the Department of Defense removing travel coverage for abortion.

Speaker 53 On January 18th, Department of Defense Travel Management Office removed a section from their joint travel regulations that outlined travel allowances for, quote, non-covered reproductive health care, quote, meaning like abortion and assisted reproductive technology like IVF.

Speaker 53 Now, this change was directly in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, which Mia has talked about lots before on the show.

Speaker 53 And then on February 4th, they actually re-established coverage for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion was not re-established.

Speaker 54 So that means that travel cover for

Speaker 54 abortion-related medical care, reproductive health care is no longer there.

Speaker 50 Correct. Correct.

Speaker 53 For our last main story, I'd like to talk a little bit about updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Speaker 53 Trump goon, rap producer, and children's book author Cash Patel has been confirmed as FBI director.

Speaker 53 And Patel is joined by far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan Ponchino, who has been appointed deputy director.

Speaker 50 Oh, God. And look, I got to say it.
I'm just glad there's an adult in the room now.

Speaker 54 You know, this is.

Speaker 48 Thank God.

Speaker 53 Again, I don't want to just be talking about how kooky everything is in this new administration, but this is wild. Yeah, this is bad.

Speaker 50 No, no, no. Garrison, I disagree, and that's because I have professional solidarity.

Speaker 50 Anything that's good for podcasters in general, you know, is is

Speaker 50 good for the country.

Speaker 48 That's

Speaker 53 not

Speaker 53 great.

Speaker 48 Not great.

Speaker 53 Last week, Patel told senior officials he wants to relocate upwards of 1,500 employees from DC to fuel offices around the country.

Speaker 53 And in a statement on last Friday, which is February 21st, Patel said, quote, anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life and our citizens here and abroad will face the full wrath of the DOJ and the FBI.

Speaker 53 If you seek to hide in any corner of this country country or planet, we will put on the world's largest manhunt and we will find you and we will decide your end state. ⁇ Unquote.

Speaker 53 Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the Bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from far-right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous BLM Antifa.

Speaker 53 In related news, on Tuesday, a far-right extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces and CIA operative.

Speaker 53 He's described himself as an American first populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

Speaker 53 Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up to Antifa, and Kent himself employed a Proud Boy to consult on a failed congressional campaign in 2022.

Speaker 53 Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts to target Antifa.

Speaker 53 And this is like all admits, a report from The Guardian suggesting that the Nazi accelerationist group, the base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and recruitment efforts inside the United States.

Speaker 50 That's good.

Speaker 53 So not cool stuff happening, read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I guess I'll close unless we have any other thoughts on Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director.

Speaker 54 I mean, what are you supposed to say?

Speaker 48 All right.

Speaker 50 I mean, I do think it's funny that because of the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have been statements by people in the administration that like there aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're giving them all government jobs.

Speaker 54 Well, that's more him's advertising dollars for us.

Speaker 50 That's right. That's right.
I feel like this is going to be huge for us.

Speaker 53 I would like to close on three more funny

Speaker 53 news moments from the past week.

Speaker 53 Elon Musk danced around with a chainsaw at CPAC while multiple of his ex-wives and baby mamas pleaded for him on Twitter to respond to emergencies regarding his children.

Speaker 53 Including that weird far-right journalist and Babylon B contributor

Speaker 53 who has had an increasing spat with Musk, and I now, I believe, has filed for complete custody of their child.

Speaker 54 Yeah, well, I mean,

Speaker 54 good luck.

Speaker 53 I guess good luck.

Speaker 54 I can't think of a worse situation to be in than Elon Musk being one of your legal parents. So, like, for the sake of that child, I hope that she succeeds.

Speaker 53 Tesla's stock is down nearly 30% this month.

Speaker 53 There's been a real pressure on him because people in Europe are refusing to buy Teslas in a boycott, you know, upset at him for doing the whole Nazi salute and being a Nazi thing.

Speaker 53 And finally, in some very sad news, a crypto trader killed himself live on a Twitter space in order to start a meme coin. Sorry, Sorry, you can't.
Sorry. On an X space in order to start a meme coin.

Speaker 53 How do we feel about this, folks? I know it's a dark time for our community.

Speaker 54 They did start the meme coin.

Speaker 48 Multiple meme coins, actually, were started.

Speaker 54 So, well, well done for the people cashing in on the guy shooting himself in the head and then bleeding out for 30 minutes on stream. You are vampires.

Speaker 53 I don't know. Not the cool kind.
No, yeah.

Speaker 54 Not the

Speaker 54 not the cool kind.

Speaker 54 The evil kind. Vultures.

Speaker 53 vultures can be cool as well i guess it depends yeah well i think that's it for us we reported the news again

Speaker 50 we reported the news

Speaker 50 hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 73 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 73 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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